Summary
Untamed makes good plot progress in Episode 4 but loses sight of its characters a little, feeling a little overstuffed with developments.
As it turns out, Vasquez’s near-death experience in the previous episode is the most major breakthrough of the case thus far. The discovery proves to be a literal and figurative gold mine, and Episode 4 of Untamed begins to sift through its treasures. For the first time as we enter the back half of the season, the mystery doesn’t feel like it’s opening up but instead tightening in, a bit like Vasquez trying to escape that cave and realising the aperture she was wriggling into was much smaller than she initially envisaged.
The only downside here is that the case whipping up steam does force a trade-off in character development. There is a nice character-driven scene in “Gold Rush” that delivers emotional heft from an unlikely source, but Turner and Vasquez spend much of the runtime too busy and too focused to really pay attention to much beyond the clues. Those clues are interesting and suggest some more details that we might not have yet considered, but the fear is that we’re approaching a run of twists that might dislocate the show from its emotional and thematic firmament. Time will tell.
Mine Your Business
The old gold mine Vasquez inadvertently discovered yields a rich bounty of evidence, including a gas mask, more pills marked with the X symbol, and, just outside another entrance, a detached and fleshless mandible with two silver teeth still glinting in the sun. The jawbone belongs to the missing Abuelo, which leads Turner back to the squatter camp.
That surprisingly hefty scene I mentioned at the top involves Glory, who is brought in with several of the other squatters to be interrogated. She doesn’t know anything, not really. But she shares the story of how she came to be in the park in the first place, after being unceremoniously laid off from her job after twenty years of devoted service and then diagnosed with cancer, treatment for which her insurance wouldn’t cover. That was nine years ago. Untamed isn’t making the point that Mother Nature magically healed Glory, since she’s pretty explicit about the fact that she still takes copious amounts of pills to get by – yes, including those dealt by Abuelo – but the change of scenery can’t have hurt.
While this is going on, Vasquez is left behind with an expert named Morris to conduct a ground search for the rest of Abuelo’s remains. Morris has some interesting facts about vultures – they don’t circle dead bodies, but are instead relying on thermal pockets to stay aloft, and they’re the only animal in the natural world that relies on death for their own survival – and does a decent job of navigating the clues back to the rest of Abuelo’s body. He was killed execution-style at close range and left in a shallow grave.
Who’s the Daddy?
Episode 4 of Untamed floats the possibility that Rory Cook wasn’t Lucy’s biological father, which would lend credence to the idea of her being “saved” by a mysterious other man in the flashback sequences. Poor Rory, by the way. He didn’t seem like a nice guy, but he was ultimately beaten to death for murdering his daughter, despite not having murdered the girl who wasn’t even his daughter.
Anyway, thanks to the park putting out an appeal for information (incentivised by a reward), a young man arrives claiming to have known Lucy as Grace McRay, who temporarily lived with a pastor’s family. He’s clearly after the reward money, but the information seems genuine, and he has a photograph to validate the claim.
In the meantime, Vasquez uncovers information about Lucy’s more recent activities through one of the girls in the squatter community. She was friendly with Lucy and claims she became dangerously close to a guy whom she called Terces (which is the word “secret” spelled backwards). He wasn’t a nice guy and got her involved in all kinds of unsavoury stuff, including drugs. She also mentions that another of the squatters, Pakuna, was friendly with Abuelo and potentially involved in the drug operation. Lucy and Abuelo used to meet at a gulch and exchange drugs and cash.
Rosemarie DeWitt as Jill Bodwin in episode 104 of Untamed. Cr. Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix © 2025
The Sting
Using all of this information, Turner and Vasquez devise a neat sting operation. Pakuna, who luckily remains in police custody with Glory and the others, is briefly interrogated and then released back to the remains of the squatter camp, which the park rangers have dismantled. With nowhere else to go, he wanders off to another mine entrance, this one leading directly inside to a comprehensive drug-dealing operation.
After assuring the higher-ups – including the leader and the guy with the mask and the dodgy hand who killed Teddy in Episode 2 – that he can be trusted, Pakuna heads outside with a batch of narcotics and finds Turner and Vasquez waiting for him. It seems like this operation has been thoroughly rumbled, but it’ll be for the next episode to work out the details.
And Another Thing…
Some additional details in Untamed Episode 4 that wouldn’t fit into the main recap:
- When Vasquez gets home with Gael, they discover his father (played by a guest-starring JD Pardo) waiting for them. He’s trying to get his job back by forcing Vasquez to testify on his behalf. She takes the first opportunity to flee and heads straight for Turner’s cabin.
- Turner interacts with Gael briefly at his home, but he stops him from playing with a box of Caleb’s old toys. The next morning, Jill arrives to babysit Gael while Turner and Vasquez go to work.
- Turner fancies Maguire for being involved in Lucy’s death. However, when he’s pressed, he mentions that Avalos has questioned him about the Sean Sanderson investigation, and strongly implies he knows something that he would reveal if pressed. That makes Turner, Jill, and Maguire all involved in this subplot.
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