Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Untamed’ follows the story of a National Parks Services officer named Kyle Turner who leads the investigation into the death of a girl named Lucy Cook. This case is important to him because Lucy went missing fifteen years ago, and he hadn’t been able to solve the case then. Now that her dead body has been found, Kyle is intent on figuring out what happened to Lucy back then and who killed her now. While he is deeply focused on the case, he also has a lot of personal stuff to deal with, and a lot of it has to do with his son, Caleb. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Caleb Met a Tragic End in the Park
When we first meet Kyle, he is seen with his son, who wishes for his father to go with him to the lake. At first, it seems that this is just a hangout session between the father and son, but at the end of the first episode, it is revealed that Caleb passed away a few years back. This also sheds new light on the “going to the lake” part, as it turns out that it is not the boy wanting to spend some time with his father, but it is his ghost calling Kyle to die in the lake. Several years ago, young Caleb was on a field trip with his school group. At one point, he got separated from the group; however, this didn’t worry people because Caleb had spent a lot of time in the forest with his father.
The boy knew parts of the wood that even his teacher wouldn’t know about, so everyone believed that the boy would easily find his way back home. What they didn’t know was that in the forest, Caleb crossed paths with a man named Sean Sanderson. He was a businessman from Stockton who’d come to the park to spend a weekend there. However, he wasn’t an innocent tourist. Sanderson was a pedophile, and when he saw young Caleb wandering in the forest alone, he took his chance. He thought no one would know what he did in the wild. He sexually abused the boy and then killed him, most likely by drowning him in the river.
He left the body and ran away, believing that none would be the wiser. Meanwhile, Caleb’s disappearance was finally noted by his group, and a search party came looking for him. His father, who was an experienced tracker, searched for two days before he found the boy by the side of the river. While it was clear that someone had killed the boy, no one could figure out the identity of the killer because there were no witnesses and no evidence. That is, until Shane Maguire found something.
Caleb’s Death Broke Up Kyle and Jill’s Marriage
When Sean Sanderson attacked and killed Caleb, he thought no one was watching. What he didn’t know was that the Wildlife Management Officer, Shane Maguire, had put up cameras around certain sections of the park to study migration patterns of animals. Sanderson’s crime was captured in one of those cameras, and when Shane came across the footage, he told Kyle about it. Shane himself was so revolted by what happened that he asked Kyle and Jill to let him kill Sanderson. Of course, he would take a little fee for this act because he was known to never give his services for free.
Kyle, however, was the man of the law. The footage was evidence enough to throw Sanderson in prison for the rest of his life, and that’s what Kyle wanted. He wanted justice through proper channels, so he rejected Shane’s idea. Jill, on the other hand, was too enraged to let Sanderson breathe another second after what he did to her son. She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting through the trial, hearing Sanderson talk about all the things he did to Caleb, and for the media to dissect the whole thing in front of the whole world, only to wait with bated breath for the jury’s verdict on whether or not Sanderson was guilty of his crime.
Jill didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so she approached Shane to use the footage to blackmail Sanderson, lure him to the forest, and then kill and dispose of him. Shane happily agreed while Kyle was kept out of the loop. When Sanderson was reported missing, the case fell in Kyle’s lap, and it didn’t take him much time to figure out what had happened. The fact that his wife went behind his back to do the very thing that he was utterly against became the nail in the coffin of their marriage. This was something that Kyle and Jill could not recover from, and it ended their marriage.
If the grief of losing their son didn’t break him, the grief of losing each other worsened Kyle and Jill’s mental state. She found a way to recover when she met Scott and got a chance at having another family, even though she continued to grieve for her son. Kyle, however, cut himself off from people as much as possible and actively considered the idea of drowning himself in the lake so he could be reunited with his son. Caleb’s memory was why he couldn’t leave the park, even when everyone advised him against it. In the end, he finds the courage to move on and gives himself another chance at living.
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