Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Untamed’ follows the twists and turns of the investigation of a woman who falls to her death from the summit of El Capitan in the Yosemite National Park. The responsibility of solving the case falls on Kyle Turner, a National Park Service officer, who is deeply attached to the forest, but not just because he loves nature. While solving the murder case, he also grapples with personal stuff that always keeps him on the edge. The mysteries of the show kept the audience on edge and made the show such a hit that Netflix renewed it for a second season about ten days after its release, even though it had initially been tagged as a miniseries. The production will most likely head back to Vancouver as its primary location, and the timeline of the writing, casting, and filming suggests that Untamed Season 2 should release sometime in early 2027.
Untamed Season 2 Will Bring a New Case to Kyle Turner in a Different Park
‘Untamed’ is created by Mark L. Smith and his daughter, Elle Smith, who came up with the idea for the show after reading about the federal officers who work for the National Park Service. Before this, they did not know about this job and were fascinated by the fact that it mixed the job of a park ranger with that of an FBI agent. This led them to come up with the character of Kyle Turner, who would look into a murder that happens in a national park. Much like Kyle, the national park in itself is a character as it presents all sorts of challenges to the protagonist and offers many twists and turns in his investigation. At the end of the show, the case is resolved, and Kyle is fired from his job, which means that he is open to a new chapter of his life. This prompts him to finally leave the park and move to some other part of the state or the country.
With the second season, the creators of the show want to put Kyle into another national park, one that he is not familiar with at all. It is not unheard of for real-life ISB agents to shift posts from one park to another, and this is the thread that we will find him at the beginning of the next chapter of the show. According to Mark and Elle Smith, Kyle would have taken different cases in several national parks between the seasons, but by the time we catch up with him, he will have found a case that impacts him more than any other.
Apart from serving as a change of scenery, the new park would also put Kyle at a disadvantage because this is not Yosemite. This park, its inhabitants, and its nature are all new to him. In this context, he would need someone else, more familiar with the terrain, to guide him, while he takes a backseat and learns, just like Naya Vasquez did when she joined him in the investigation into Lucy Cook’s murder. Mark Smith told Netflix Tudum that they will make Kyle “very uncomfortable” in the next season. He added: “This time we get to follow Turner into a park and let him lead us, and we stumble along with him as he’s kind of finding his way.”
Untamed Season 2 Will Feature Eric Bana and New Cast Members
‘Untamed’ Season 2 will mark the return of Eric Bana’s Kyle Turner. Since he will be in a new national park, there will be a new set of characters, some of whom will know the park much better than Kyle, which might turn into a disadvantage for him. The creators also mentioned that the new park will serve as a character of its own, just like Yosemite did in Season 1. They intend to make “the case organic to a different kind of park, a different kind of landscape, [and] not have someone just fall off another mountain.” At the same time, they also intend to “populate it with characters that are interesting and help [Turner] in ways both good and bad.”
With Kyle moving to a new park, there is a good chance that we might not see his colleagues again. Since Sam Neill’s Paul Souter and Wilson Bethel’s Shane Maguire die by the end of the season, they are not expected to be a part of the new season, unless their characters appear in flashbacks or as hallucinations for Bana’s character. Rosemarie DeWitt’s Jill might make a return, considering how close Jill and Turner had been, even after their divorce. While Lily Santiago’s Naya Vasquez was a major force in Season 1, the chances of her return remain dicey, especially since she had just started to become comfortable in Yosemite. Despite the low chances of previous characters returning, the show’s creators haven’t entirely scrapped this possibility, and at the end of the day, it will all depend on the direction the story takes.
Untamed Season 2 Will Unearth More Secrets from Kyle’s Past
At the beginning of ‘Untamed,’ we find Kyle still grieving his son and pining for his ex-wife, Jill, with whom he is still deeply connected. He is in such a bad place that he is waiting for the right time to kill himself. By the end of the season, however, he finds his will to live again, or at least, he loses his will to die, for the time being. Having solved the mystery of Lucy Cook’s murder, he bids farewell to his son and moves out of the park for good. This is in radical contrast to how we see him at the beginning, and gives a deserved ending to his character.
In the same vein, Jill also processes her grief, especially after reaching such a low point where she tries to kill herself by downing more than a few pills. She comes clean to Scott about getting Sean Sanderson killed by Shane for killing Caleb, and when she meets Kyle, she promises him that she is going to be fine. This shows that Scott has accepted her, and he is ready to take care of her if she takes care of herself.
The second season will move on from the shadow of this grief and tap into something else, perhaps hidden much deeper, in Kyle’s psyche. Since the show had been conceived as a character-driven story, Kyle’s personal struggles will continue to remain at the center of it. There’s still so much that we don’t know about him, and perhaps, the mystery of the second season might connect on a more personal note to him, which would considerably raise the stakes and make things much more interesting.
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