Eric Bana in Untamed

The woods are vast, dark and deep, and the legends and lore about the things that haunt wild spaces span centuries, languages, and cultures. One of humanity’s most primordial fears is the dark of the forest, is it any wonder we tell stories about the myriad things that go wrong in the vast wilderness that makes up America’s national parks? 

Untamed, the latest Netflix murder mystery, is set in the wilds of Yosemite, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most visited national parks. It also has one of the highest rates of missing persons and fatalities in the national park system.

Eric Bana stars as Kyle Turner, an agent with the Investigative Services Branch. The ISB is responsible for investigating crimes in national parks, and right off the bat Untamed establishes just how hard this job is. A dead girl went over the edge of El Capitan, Yosemite’s famous climbing cliff, and nearly took two climbers with her. Turner has to determine if she jumped, fell, or was pushed, if she was being chased, and if she was by man or beast, and what killed her. He has to do this with almost one million acres to cover, nature erasing the victim’s tracks, and one lone park ranger to help him.

Fortunately, that park ranger is a former LAPD officer. Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago) has relocated to Yosemite with her young son—she obviously has A Troubled Past—and Turner quickly puts her to work doing the grunt work on his investigation. Kyle Turner falls into the Sherlockian mode of brilliant but asshole-ish investigator, and Naya is his grumpy Watson. Bana and Santiago have great chemistry, though, and Turner, a gruff alcoholic of questionable sanity, makes for a compelling lead to follow through a murky case complicated by the park’s difficult terrain, sheer size, and the many oddball characters drawn to the park as place to leave behind the world and live on their own terms.

But there is a nagging issue with Untamed and it’s that for all its great setup, the series never quite becomes as interesting as it should be. The national parks are so inherently interesting as a setting for criminal and unexplained activity that there is an entire wing of true crime dedicated just to wilderness crimes. Untamed, which comes from creators and showrunners Mark L. Smith and Elle Smith, knows this, and at times plays with the lore of the strange things seen and heard in the parks (look out for faces in the rocks and trees). The first episode also introduces a series of outstanding cold cases in Turner’s record as an investigator, which in part demonstrates how hard it is to solve crimes when people just f-cking vanish into the remote vastness of the park. But none of it adds up to anything.

Every plot point in Untamed ties up in a nice bow, as if the series—which moves quickly at just six episodes, honestly Untamed could stand to be at least a couple episodes longer—is afraid to introduce any actual mystery to the proceedings. No question is left unanswered, everything is resolved, which is laughable when you consider how many missing person cases persist in the parks’ logs: Stacy Arras has been missing from Yosemite since 1981, she’s been gone longer than I’ve been alive, never mind Dennis Martin, missing from Great Smoky Mountains National Park since 1969. It is actually hilarious that everything in Untamed ties up, because a huge part of the fascination with wilderness crime is how many of these cases aren’t solved.

Untamed is good enough to hold most of your attention—thanks mostly to Eric Bana and the landscape—but the way it backs down from committing to anything unresolved or even digs deeper into the personal failings plaguing Turner, smacks of Netflix’s rumored “second screen” decree, which purports that the streamer isn’t interested in shows that challenge viewers and require full attention. That’s not true across the board—Department Q is also a murder mystery with a prickly lead detective, and it is unafraid of unresolved issues or unexplained character quirks—but the way Untamed rushes to a conclusion, tying up every loose end, does feel too pat, too simple and easy, given that the first episode is so dedicated to showing how hard Turner’s job is. Apparently not! 

There is an outline here of something deeper and darker and thornier, less simple and less answerable. Something about how such a huge and unknowable landscape shapes people around it, how we grasp at straws when the indifferent maw of nature swallows those we love, the things we cling to in the face of that great unforgiving wilderness, which is both alluring and repellent. Untamed has the makings of a great murder mystery show, a True Detective for the wilderness, but it turns away from every opportunity to plumb those depths. It’s entertaining, but ultimately forgettable. Unlike the wilderness it portrays, Untamed is, in the end, tame.

Untamed is now streaming all episodes exclusively on Netflix.