Outer Range season 2 review: Time travel has never felt so slow

The first surprise in Outer Range’s second season, which kicks off May 16, is that it exists at all. The quietly competent sci-fi western debuted in 2022 without much fanfare, despite some good and intriguing first couple of episodes and a tremendous cast. This could be chalked up to Prime Video’s inability to market any of its shows that aren’t The Boys. (The fact the streamer let a masterpiece like Dead Ringers just come and go is still mind-boggling.) Or maybe it’s just that Outer Range…isn’t very good.

Outer Range had its highlights in the first season—namely a well-paced mystery surrounding a hole in the ground on the Abbott ranch that appears to have time travel capabilities, Josh Brolin and Lili Taylor as the heads of the Abbott family, and Imogen Poots’ mercurial drifter, Autumn. It’s a shame, then, that so much more time was devoted to painfully unoriginal, boring storylines involving land disputes, an accidental murder, and the far less interesting offspring of the warring Abbott and Tillerson clans. And, sadly, season two has learned few lessons in the show’s downtime.

All the more frustrating is how strongly the show finished two years ago, when Amy Abbott disappeared with her mom, who herself vanished years ago. Then, after surviving a herd of stampeding buffalo that burst out of the hole, Royal and Autumn come to a moment of understanding, and the Abbott patriarch discovers Autumn is in fact Amy from the future. Oh, and Sheriff Hawk, the only person in the entire town with any sense, got yanked back in time to the 1800s.

That’s a fairly generous table setting for season two, but things go south fast. Outer Range, for all its potential and bigger ideas it’s obviously leading up to, is in absolutely no hurry to get to them. The majority of Outer Range’s ensemble is so thinly sketched that things grind to a halt any time we leave Autumn or the Abbott ranch. At its worst, it can feel like hubris. Season two only serves a handful of moments teasing its endgame, which seemingly involves Autumn running a yellow-jumpsuit-clad cult, as well as the Abbott ranch being invaded by a shady sci-fi organization (guys in trench-coats and sunglasses, hazmat suits…you get it the idea). Little actual headway is made in getting to these points, or even hinting at how this show might get there. At this pace, it feels like it’ll be decades.

The rest of the cast avail themselves well. One major role is recast (I won’t spoil which here, since Prime Video seems to be keeping it under wraps too), which is a shame but also adds to the tumbledown, B-for-effort vibe Outer Range puts out anyway. Isabel Arraiza as Rhett’s old flame Maria was a season-one highlight and she gets enough to do again, but her diminished role in a symptom of the new season’s over-reliance on exploring the very vague and boring mechanics of the time-travel hole. These forays are very “time travel 101,” and honestly we’d kill for some small town drama instead of an episode and a half focused on basic time loops and paradoxes that would take five minutes to explain and show on a series like Lost.

Outer Range season two is unlikely to thrill all but the most devoted fans of its first outing. And while there’s still a decent framework and a game set of actors, there’s no escaping the reality that things will need to click fast if it has any hope of reaching its planned ending.

Outer Range season 2 premieres May 16 on Prime Video