Summary
Untamed doesn’t get off to the best start in Episode 1, with ropey visuals and a played-out twist, but the bones of a decent mystery.
The first thing you’ll notice about Untamed is that it doesn’t look great. The opening sequence of Episode 1 sees a woman fall to her death from the El Capitan mountain in Yosemite National Park, and a lot of it seems sprung to life from PS2-era computer graphics. Later, a CGI bear cameos as a reminder of the vast wilderness’s innumerable, indifferent dangers. Try not to worry about all this. As much as the marketing has pushed the idea, it isn’t really the point.
But if the landscapes aren’t the point, what is? This is a good question, and not immediately apparent from the premiere, “A Celestial Event”, which introduces the bones of an unremarkable murder-mystery and builds to a silly, played-out twist for good measure. The truth of the matter is that Untamed is more of a character study, a meditation on grief and trauma, and the efforts we go to – or don’t – to heal. Those are the thematic underpinnings, anyway, but we have to chew through a lot of plot to get to them. Shall we?
Jane Doe
All of Untamed revolves around the death of that young woman, who remains unidentified for this entire episode. Jane Doe tumbled from the top of a mountain, which isn’t unheard of in Yosemite, but that’s barely the half of it. She was also barefoot, had been running for a while, was mauled by dogs (or possibly coyotes), and had been shot in the leg, a wound initially obscured by all the others. She also had a tattoo of an “X”, the ink mixed with flecks of real gold.
Needless to say, virtually all of these details provide threads to be tugged on. More emerge as we go – she was wearing one of those homemade arts and crafts bracelets with little letters spelling a name or a word, and during a brief stop at an isolated hunting shack had attempted to make her own tourniquet and scratched several obscure symbols into the wood.
Jane Doe is important, obviously. But she’s dead. Untamed is much more concerned with the living, although it must be said that none of these characters could be said to be living their best lives. Let’s meet them.
Meet the Team
The man of the hour is Kyle Turner, an agent with the Investigative Services Branch (ISB) of the U.S. National Park Service. You’ve met Turner before in a hundred other crime shows. If you were playing Tortured Protagonist Bingo, you’d get a full house from this guy. He doesn’t play well with others. He’s a maverick. Nobody likes him, but everyone quietly respects his abilities, which include tracking people through the woodland and riding horses, which we get a sense of in brief scenes he shares with his young son. He drinks. He’s very reminiscent of DCI Carl Morck from Netflix’s Dept. Q. Among others.
Turner is immediately teamed up with a rookie from L.A., Naya Vasquez, for no real reason other than an odd-couple dynamic is a bit more dramatically pliable (again, just like Dept. Q). She has a kid who just turned four and wants to do everything by the book, whereas Turner only operates as a surly, rule-breaking outdoorsman.
An important detail of how Yosemite National Park hierarchy works is that the Park Rangers are pretty much at the bottom of the pecking order. Turner and Vasquez are answerable to Turner’s friend and father-figure, Captain Paul Souter, who is himself powerless against Lawrence Hamilton, the park’s ill-tempered superintendent. We’re to understand that people dying in mysterious circumstances isn’t great for the park’s tourism appeal, so it’s imperative that the Jane Doe case is solved as expeditiously as possible.
(L to R) Lily Santiago as Naya Vasquez, Eric Bana as Kyle Turner in episode 105 of Untamed. Cr. Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix © 2025
Trauma Response
What comes through quite strongly in Untamed Episode 1 is the fact that something’s amiss with Turner. He calls his ex-wife in the middle of the night to tell her about upcoming celestial events, and her current husband, Scott, seems largely unconcerned by this. He lives out of a woodland cabin with most of his belongings boxed up as if he’s liable to move on at a moment’s notice, and everyone walks on eggshells around him.
At the end of “A Celestial Event”, we learn what that “something” is. Turner’s son, Caleb, died a few years prior; all those scenes of Turner hanging around with him were all in his head. He clearly never got over the loss and has been existing in a kind of stasis ever since, unable to let go of the memories, unable to move on with his life. Souter, who is raising his young granddaughter with his wife because their grown-up daughter, Kate, is an addict in and out of rehab, was Caleb’s godfather.
The fact that this is the premiere’s key twist, instead of anything to do with the case, lays the show’s cards on the table early. This is a crime thriller, sure, one set against a fairly unique backdrop, but it’s much more interested in the interiority of its cast than the ebbs and flows of the case.
And Another Thing…
- The main lead on the Jane Doe case is her bracelet, which Turner recognises from a now-defunct summer camp program.
- Turner’s Native American friend, Jay Stewart, thinks the meteor shower that Turner called his ex-wife Jill about represents death returning to his lands. Given this is a Netflix thriller, he’s almost certainly right.
- A guy named Sean Sanderson went missing in Yosemite National Park six years prior, and an investigator named Avalos is working on behalf of his family to pursue a wrongful death suit. Turner keeps giving her the cold shoulder, so this is something to keep an eye on.
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