I finished watching "Untamed" last night. It's a limited series on Netflix starring Eric Bana, Sam Neil, Lily Santiago, and Rosemarie DeWitt, and a great supporting cast. It's set in Yosemite National Park. Shots of El Capitan and other familiar landmarks are blended into the narrative filmed in British Columbia. We again see a series set in the wild landscapes of the U.S. and filmed elsewhere, usually Canada, Trump's imaginary 51st state. The landscapes are gorgeous to look at and made me miss Wyoming and Colorado. The peaks. the trails winding through forests, the sparkling waters of the creeks. Even the ranger unis made me ache for the West. Rangers were our friends, men and women who welcomed us to the parks, delivered campfire chats, and kept things orderly.
I give high marks to "Untamed," its grim storyline and fine acting. It involved me for some five hours. Child abduction. drug-dealing, missing Native American women, murder, and treachery play roles. That is sometimes offset by sheer grandeur. But one thought I came away with was: is this what we've become? We live harsh lives and are harsh with each other. Was it always this way or is it all grim now?
One more thing. Humans can be more savage than predatory animals. That was brought out in the first episode by fearsome roar of a grizzly at a cabin door. Lions and tigers and bears! But humans remain the deadliest animal. First scene. Climbers scaling El Capitan. It is a long way down, a dangerous business this rock climbing. Just as the top climber bangs a spike into the rocks, he looks up and sees a body falling toward him. The body snags the rope and pulls down the climbers but they don't fall. We see a close-up of the body. It is a young woman, clothes ripped, dead eyes stare up. We know the mystery. Did she jump or was she pushed?
It's worth watching. Some scenes stay with me. One takes place in the morgue where the dead woman's (Lucy Cook) body is being stored while park investigators try to discover her identity. National Park Service Investigative Branch Ranger Kyle Turner (Bana) and his new assistant, former L.A. cop Naya Vasquez, try to solve it. There follows lots of creepiness but the scene that lingers is in the morgue. Turner finds a cellphone hidden in the dead woman's backpack. It needs a photo I.D. to open. He takes it to the morgue and requests a picture of the corpse's face. No dice. The eyes have to be open. The morgue tech puts drops in the eyes to make them open unnaturally. Phone still won't open. The morgue tech says hydrogen peroxide has been known to bring life back to dead skin, warm it so it registers for the camera. He brushes it on the cheeks. Bama takes another photo and it works, the phone is unlocked and we're on the way to a resolution or so we think. I was left with the image of Lucy Cook, dead, again staring up, asking "why did you forsake me?"
The New York Times' Mike Hale reviewed the show. The reviewer's main takeaway was the show's bad timing. So who has time to pursue killers when DOGE cuts leave nobody to clean the bathrooms or break up Yellowstone bear jams? Good point.
An accompanying NYT story tells of the few remaining park employees being tasked by the Trump regime with removing comments that "disparage America" from monuments, trail signs, and printed material. Our sins against black slaves and native peoples are being purged from the public records. If this sounds Orwellian to you, you've read Orwell and you're dead-on. The Know Nothings have won. The South has risen again. And we're all up Shit's Creek, somewhere out in the American wilderness.
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