How Does Outer Range's Time Travel Work? I Asked Josh Brolin And The Showrunner About It, And Their Answers Are Super Helpful
Mild spoilers for Season 2 of Outer Range are ahead. If you haven’t seen the show, you can stream it right now with an Amazon Prime subscription.
If time travel is involved, you know the story is going to be really complicated. However, when you don’t know exactly how the time travel system works, that’s where a real mystery begins. Outer Range has intentionally kept its rules of time travel ambiguous, creating a major question for both its characters and viewers. However, when I interviewed Josh Brolin and showrunner Charles Murray ahead of the series release on the 2024 TV schedule, they told me a bit about how the dark hole that sends its characters through time works generally, and it’s so helpful.
For context, in many of the best time travel movies, the rules of traveling through time are typically laid out. In Back to the Future time travel is done by Doc and Marty picking when they want to go in the DeLorean. From time-traveling comedies like Hot Tub Time Machine to superhero time-jumping movies like X-Men: Days of Future Past, there are rules to how it works and what it impacts which are fairly clear.
All of this isn’t obvious in Outer Range, which is the point. All we know is that when a character goes in the time travel hole they come out at a different time with no way of knowing why that time was chosen or if they’ll get back. However, Josh Brolin and Charles Murray gave me the lowdown.
Josh Brolin Explains How The Hole Decides Where A Person Lands
Since Josh Brolin is the star, executive producer and a director of Outer Range, he’s played a big role in developing time travel in the show. The actor behind Royal – the character who has used the portal the most times – started explaining how it works by recalling his character’s experience with it, he told CinemaBlend:
Well, everybody can only go by their own experience. I mean, he's jumped in a hole, you know, consumed by shame, and was spit out at another time. And then luckily, [he] was brought on by these people and raised and all this stuff. So what it represents for him is something where he comes from is this shame.
Royal fell through the hole as a child after accidentally killing his father. He lands on Cecelia’s family farm and he grows up there. For other characters, the hole takes them back into the past. For example, Joy was taken back to the 1880s, where she lived with a Native American tribe.
Unlike some projects about time travel, in Outer Range, you can’t decide when you go. The black hole decides where the person falling ends up. According to Brolin, that time is determined by what the person falling needs to confront. The Dune actor explained this point further, telling me:
I think it was really fun to get more specific with it. And the hole seems to have revealed itself to be this thing that makes you deal with the thing that you least want to deal with. So it puts you in a scenario you think you may want to be in. But it confronts you most with the thing that you're trying to avoid the most. That's what I think it is.
Along with Royal and Joy, Perry, Royal’s oldest son, also went in the hole and ended up in the time when his father was in his late 20s to early 30s. While there he faces the consequences of jumping into the hole, and he learns more about his father’s origins. To this point, Brolin told me that the hole decides where people go, and it helps them re-examine their lives right when they need it:
It's an opportunity for me to look at another aspect of myself and have a different maybe a shift in perception about how I'm going about living this life.
Considering when everyone who has fallen into the hole has ended up, these ideas make a lot of sense. What helps even more is when you mix Brolin’s comments with the showrunner’s which address the emotions and science behind time travel in Outer Range and how they use it to enhance the stories.
Outer Range’s Showrunner Breaks Down How They Use Science To Back Up Emotional Stories
When I asked Charles Murray, the showrunner for Outer Range Season 2, how they developed the time travel in the show, he noted that they consulted a lot of people who work in science as well as folks who deeply understand science fiction. He said:
We had an astrophysicist in the room: Dagny Looper. And we had, you know, sci-fi heads. And then we had historical people who love history, and we just kind of talked about what was ‘fact’ from a science perspective. Then we kind of leapt from there to wherever we wanted to deal with something emotionally, right?
Murray went on to tell me that when you think about time and memories there are moments where “it feels like it’s happening as you’re remembering it.” Then there are other instances where somebody has to remind you about something. No matter what though, emotions are tied to these memories. So, when it came to the stories in Outer Range and the time travel in the show, they wanted it to be a vehicle for the characters to face their feelings and internal struggles. The showrunner said:
So we decided that we would deal with time, kind of based on what Josh said, about the first season about the hole. Metaphorically, it was a man who had to go into this hole to deal with his own issues.
This helps us understand why Perry and Joy ended up when they did. Both of them had to face themselves and their personal fears and demons. Royal has also been doing the same thing in the present. To this point, Murray told me this is possible because they used this sci-fi device to tell an emotional story:
So we took whatever science fact we had, and butted right up against where we needed to be emotionally in these episodes, so that the time in the portal on the other side of the portal, back on this side of it would affect the character so that we could grow conflict from it.
Obviously, there are still a ton of questions surrounding time travel on Outer Range -- especially in regard to the mineral from the hole, if traveling to the past impacts the present, and why it opens and closes at seemingly random times.
The sci-fi Western is very thought-provoking, and it’s because it doesn’t obviously give you answers to questions like: How does time travel work? However, Josh Brolin and Charles Murray’s explanations of it help us better understand why various characters end up when they do.
To see how the time travel system in Outer Range has evolved, you can stream all of Seasons 1 and 2 on Amazon Prime.
