Easily the best part of Outer Range was that awe-inspiring reveal in episode eight: Autumn is Amy. Royal’s granddaughter Amy is somehow the very same person that comes to stay at their ranch under the guise of Autumn Rivers, a hippy nomad with a wealth of money.
There’s even a scene where the two interact, stood next to each other. How can this be? What existential madness took place to take one innocent girl, living happily in 2022, to then have a future version of herself coexisting in the very same time line as this girl? The mind boggles at this paradox and the many secrets hiding in Autumn’s past. So let’s put our thinking caps on and try to decipher all this insanity.
There’s a great scene in episode two where Autumn and Royal interrogate one another, asking the burning questions they’ve been too afraid to ask before. Royal’s questions all relate to his time travelling future visions, whilst Autumn’s focus on the predicament she finds herself in. She was drawn to this ranch, without the revelatory knowledge that she was an Abbott. She started to learn things about her past by spending time on the land.
It all starts to fall into place for the hippy. Autumn states that she didn’t have any memories before the age of nine, until she got here. Everything is slowly coming back to her. These are precious clues in the overall narrative, working towards decoding the entire twisted plot.
If Autumn’s childhood was completely wiped from her memory, then something drastic must have happened to her around the age of nine. Amy, who we can assume is around this age in 2022, is whisked away by her mother at the end of the finale.
Could this be the defining moment, the cut off point for Autumn’s memories? My theory is that Rebecca came back to take Autumn away specifically in that moment, possibly to go to another timeline, to continue the all-important time loop.
Two Amy’s can only be in one timeline via the magic of the time travelling portals. There has to be a time loop associated with the Amy/Autumn paradox. So, I believe Rebecca is involved somehow, possibly coaxing Amy to step into the hole and leave this timeline only to return as an adult. It doesn’t all add up, but that’s my best guess so far.
The only flaw in this hypothesis is the fact that Autumn doesn’t seem to have time travelled at any point in her life, or she has no memory of doing so. Her interactions with the hole imply that this is all new to her. She didn’t know what would happen to Royal when he entered the hole, she isn’t even aware that she is Amy at first.
Autumn lives in the 2022 timeline as if this is her normal existence. She speaks with people on the phone who are clearly in charge of her income, her trust fund. This isn’t a seasoned time traveller. As she starts to uncover truths from her past, the realisation sinks in. She asks Perry for a photograph of Rebecca and the Abbott emblem reawakens memories from her youth, which further backs up this theory.
Overall this is a complex and ambiguous subplot. Somehow Amy and Autumn exist in the same timeline. The time travelling portal and this notion of a time loop have to be the key to unlocking this mystery, but it might all just be above my pay grade.
