Untamed Recap ‘Terces' & 'All Trails Lead Here’: Make Things Right

Untamed Episodes 5 & 6 (Finale) Recap and Review

In the final two episodes of Untamed, two good people, ridden with guilt, tried to end their lives. One of them succeeded, the other did not; one joined the many before him who flowed through the raging river, the other found the strength to begin to heal. 

What was the secret about Sean Sanderson that had been eating into the souls of grieving parents Kyle Turner and Jill Bodwin all this time? Kyle being Kyle, he would call it murder, but Shane Maguire, the man who did it, likely saw the act as justice. As part of his work in wildlife management, Shane set up motion cameras across the Park to track migration patterns. It was these motion cameras that caught Sean Sanderson with young Caleb. Shane brought these images to Kyle and Jill, and told Kyle to let him  kill Sean. Kyle was a lawman, he wanted indisputable evidence so Sean could be brought to the kind of justice he believed in.

Jill, the grieving mother, wanted justice that was quicker and more certain than a long court battle. She paid Shane to contact and kill Sean Sanderson. Kyle only found out what Jill did when Sanderson went missing. Jill believed that this single decision, what she called a betrayal, ended her marriage to Kyle.

Shane moved on from this as though nothing happened. But Jill and Kyle were good people and their conscience bothered them, especially when the Sanderson family investigator started pursuing a wrongful death suit against the Park. Jill in particular struggled with the thought that she was a terrible person for ordering someone’s death, even if that someone snatched an innocent off this world, an innocent who happened to be her son.

A dangerous encounter with Naya’s ex Michael (we will briefly discuss this later) whilst babysitting young Gael brought JIll’s complex feelings to the surface, and she tried to kill herself. She survived, but Kyle was beside himself with anger, and he blamed the one person he has been blaming all these years for the weight that had been on Jill’s soul – Shane Maguire. He found Shane drinking with some friends outside a hotel in the Park, and punched him. Shane talked back even as the still raging Kyle had started to walk away, and he turned back, this time with his gun out, and shoved it to Shane’s throat.

As consumers of fiction, it was tempting to view Shane far more kindly than Kyle did. After all, Shane did the right thing by coming to Kyle, a federal agent and father, when he realised he had footage that could shed light on what happened to poor Caleb. He did not even expect Kyle to exact street justice, he offered to do it himself. And, when Jill came to him and he did the deed, he did not hold it over the heads of Kyle and Jill, at least, not until Kyle practically accused him of killing Lucy (spoiler alert: he did not). It felt like Shane was happy to let things be as long as Kyle stayed out of his business. 

‘You should’ve told her no’, Kyle raged at Shane, for whilst Jill had no understanding of the toll of taking someone’s life, even the life of an evil person who killed her son, Shane as a soldier would have had some idea, even if he did not feel the weight himself. Shane snapped back that Jill was Kyle’s wife, he should’ve been the one to tell her no instead of crying into a bottle. Kyle being an emotional wreck at the time of Caleb’s death certainly contributed to his anger at Shane; he was angry at himself, and he was taking it out on him. He was frustrated that he could not protect his wife, and he was furious at the man who exposed her even further to the darker side of life and stripped her of the comfort of an unblemished conscience.  

On a more practical level, however, Kyle must have known that Shane knowing that huge a secret about him and Jill would one day bite him. After all, Kyle knew that Shane did not exactly stay on the legal side of things. At some point, he as the lawman and Shane as the criminal would go face to face, and Shane had something that could ruin Jill.

It was a testament to Kyle’s insistent character that when he decided to arrest Shane, he called and warned Jill, but he did not hesitate to do what he felt was his duty. Because of his unprovoked attack on Shane outside the hotel, witnessed by dozens of people, Kyle was suspended and his cases given to Agent Bill Dixon. Bill told Kyle candidly that he was being pressured to lump Lucy’s death with the drug arrests. Kyle turned over all his case files to Bill, and was going to hand over Lucy’s back pack as well, when he found her long dead phone in a side pocket. He kept the phone, charged it, got the coroner’s help in unlocking it using Lucy’s face, and found a video that confirmed that Lucy’s secret crush, Terces, the man who got her involved in the drug business, the man who might have been responsible for beating her up, the man who might have killed her, was Shane Maguire.

Why did Kyle decide to go into the woods and arrest Shane alone, instead of handing over the phone and its incriminating information to Bill? Well, Shane knew the Park perhaps better than most of the rangers and certainly better than Bill, who was new to the assignment. Kyle could track Shane quietly on his own. A huge police presence would be more difficult to hide; Shane would be forewarned and he could disappear into the wild, just as Lucy did for years and years.

Why didn’t Kyle just wait for Shane to show up at the bar at the hotel? Perhaps Kyle wanted Shane arrested before he got wind that Lucy’s backpack was not amongst the evidence logged, and figured out that Kyle took it. Or, perhaps it was simply more cinematic to watch two men hunt each other with the incredible backdrop of the wild. Kyle found Shane’s camp easily enough, but Shane was ready for him. Shane’s bullet went through Kyle’s stomach, wounding him. Shane’s next bullet hit Kyle’s rifle, leaving him with just a handgun as night fell. Kyle might have gotten the better of Shane had there been even one round left in his weapon. But, there wasn’t, and he was already quite weak from blood loss.

Kyle’s phone call to Naya telling her when he left the phone evidence saved his life. Naya arrived just in time to shoot Shane, who had already decided to kill Kyle. Shane’s image in Lucy’s phone, along with Naya personally witnessing his attempt to murder Kyle, was enough to convince everyone that he killed Lucy.

But Kyle was not done. There was still the question of the missing years, of what happened to Lucy from the time she disappeared at the age of seven to the time she died off El Capitan. Though Paul tried to dissuade Kyle from going to Nevada and following up on his sole lead about young Lucy’s post-Park life, Kyle went anyway. What he found was heartbreaking.

Lucy had been left with a pastor who ran a side hustle, taking in children, leaving them in neglect at the basement of his house whilst he collected government checks. His daughter Faith Gibbs knew Lucy as Grace, and remembered how ‘Grace’ used to talk about her father coming in and arresting Pastor Gibbs. That meant that young Lucy knew that Rory was not her biological father (he was not a cop) and, more importantly, she knew who her real father was. Kyle had the lab re-send Lucy’s DNA test results to him.

Several times in Untamed, Paul Souter tried to send Kyle away, tried to persuade him to get a fresh start away from the painful memories of the Park and, also, away from his caseload. Kyle carried the guilt of not finding Lucy when she first went missing, of thinking that her abusive father Rory killed her, of perhaps not looking for her hard enough. He was not going to stop until he has exhausted all means to understand what, exactly, happened to young Lucy. When Kyle’s career inside the Park ended with his attack on Shane outside the hotel, part of Paul must have felt some relief. Sure, he wanted his good friend Kyle to find some peace, but he also wanted a relentless investigator away from his secrets.

Paul was Lucy’s biological father; this was confirmed by the DNA results that included Paul's daughter Kate (her DNA was in the system from her last arrest). Lucy didn’t know, not until a few weeks before Maggie died. As a final request before she passed, Maggie asked Paul to take Lucy away from Rory. Paul genuinely thought the Gibbs were good people; he had no idea the environment he left Lucy in, not until she showed up back at the Park.

Paul’s first concern was his wife and legitimate daughter Kate. He told Lucy he would help her, he would find her someplace new to live. Lucy had already survived two abusive homes, she was not able to risk going into a third. She ran off, and Paul never saw her again.

That was Paul’s initial story, until Kyle told him he would call Dixon to collect his hunting rifles from his place. Paul still tried to create an excuse about lending his rifles, but eventually, he knew they were at the end of the road. He confessed that Lucy, whom he did not know had been living in the Park, came to his house about a year ago. Lucy wanted money, and he gave her some. The price kept going up each time Lucy came to see him, along with threats of what she would do if he did not pay.

Was this a plausible story about Lucy? Perhaps. Could Lucy have mentioned her life story to her older boyfriend Shane, and Shane taught her how to extort money from the old man? Maybe. We could not really get a good read on Lucy, because we barely saw her. Six episodes was a good length for a Netflix mystery, but it had tradeoffs, one of which was, we did not have enough time to truly get to know a couple of the characters. Abuelo was mentioned multiple times, his name was used in the interrogation of Simon, he was an integral part of Glory’s life in the Park, but we never met him. In contrast, Teddy Redwine only had a few minutes of screentime, but he was a well fleshed out character.

Another interesting facet of this story by Paul was that very likely, by the time Lucy allegedly started extorting money from him, she was already earning money from the drug trade. Since she had a good source of income, why was she risking angering the head of the park rangers? If we believed Paul’s story, and if we believed that Lucy came up with this scheme herself and alone, then Lucy did not do it for the cash, she did it to get back at the father who gave her hope then abandoned her.  

According to Paul, one day when he was watching his granddaughter Sadie, whom he thought was in her room, he came in and found a note. Lucy had taken Sadie up the ridge where she and her mother Maggie used to live, and left her there. Paul got Sadie home, then went after Lucy, supposedly, just to talk to her. When he fired a shot off his rifle, he only meant to stop her, but of course she thought he was trying to kill her. He lost her trail and only picked it up again near El Capitan. 

In the end, Milch was right. Since the park rangers first arrived at the scene, Milch thought the body was a jumper. Lucy did jump to her death, but it was after living most of her life with abuse and neglect, after finding herself in an abusive relationship with Shane Maguire, after having her biological father shoot her in the leg and chase her through the wilderness. Lucy’s life was short but it was exhausting, with only pockets of peace like those she enjoyed when she met her friend Summer. She jumped toward freedom from a life that had been unkind to her. Jay asked for her body so they could send her off to el-o’-win; perhaps she had finally found the peace that eluded her.  

Paul insisted that he only wanted to protect his family but, as Kyle pointed out, Lucy was family too. To the very end, Paul still frantically thought of ways to prevent Kyle from spilling his secret, from promising to help him regain his job at the Park to pointing a gun at him. In the end, Paul knew Kyle would not yield; he yelled his apology, and shot himself. 

Kyle began Untamed with a conversation with young Caleb about going to the lake, about finally joining his son after over five years of ceaseless pain. Near the end of the series, he went to the lake and apologised to his boy; he was not ready. He was choosing to live. He left Caleb’s box of toys in his cabin for Naya, along with his horse. It took a long time and heartbreaking tragedies, but Kyle eventually found the strength to move on, to drive away from the Park that held his soul for too long. He was not free from grief, only moving on. 

Untamed’s strengths as a series was not so much on the mysteries it introduced (the Sanderson bit in particular was fairly predictable) but on the execution – the breathtaking locale, the solid to great performances (Eric Bana, Sam Neill, and Rosemarie DeWitt in particular), the persistent throb of grief and guilt that was heartbreaking but not suffocating. The limited number of episodes worked mostly in its favour because it kept the story moving forward without narrative bloat. Untamed is more character study than mystery, and its best character was the Park itself.

Rating: A

Strays

⛰️I combined episodes five and six into a single recap because it would have been difficult to discuss Jill’s struggles in episode five without putting it in the context of episode six.

⛰️Somehow, the drug dealers were able to convince three women who served as mules that they were better off dead if the mine was discovered. These women were found dead from suicide. There were four cots and only three bodies, and Lucy’s backpack with her yellow dress was there. This likely meant that this was the tragic life she lived before her own biological father shot at her.

⛰️Naya’s ex Michael went to Kyle’s cabin looking for Naya and Gael. Jill tried to lie to him but young Gael came out of the house and of course Michael saw him. The confrontation turned violent, and Jill and Gael were only saved by the timely arrival of Kyle and Naya. Michael was arrested, and Naya and Gael were able to return home. It was this incident – seeing Naya hold her son after he was rescued, and feeling an overwhelming sense of jealousy rather than relief or happiness – that triggered Jill intro attempting to take her own life. The scene between Kyle and Jill at the hospital – that scene of shared grief – was perhaps the best scene in this whole series. Eric Bana and Rosemarie DeWitt gave quietly powerful performances. 

⛰️To the end, Shane didn’t really show animosity toward Kyle. He was a threat so he moved to eliminate him. Even his parting ‘Go see your boy’ carried a small understanding of what Kyle had suffered all these years.

⛰️Agent Dixon's team found a stash of drugs and cash in Shane's camp, along with a crate of guns.

⛰️Jill told her husband Scott what happened with Sean Sanderson and what she did. Since she later visited Kyle at the hospital and assured him that she would be okay, it seemed that this confession lifted much of the burden on her soul. Whether her marriage survived, it was not clear.

⛰️When the Sanderson family investigator Avalos came to see Kyle again, he told her he was not at his best at the time of the Sanderson case and should not have taken the lead in the search. He told her he would sign a statement for her, fully aware that this would help with the family’s wrongful death suit against the Park. Was Kyle trying to assuage his conscience by ensuring that Sanderson’s family would receive just compensation? Or was he trying to put an end to this enquiry to protect both Jill and himself, since the one other person who knew what happened, Shane, was already dead?

⛰️In episode three, Naya on foot whilst leading her horse caused a herd of deer to scatter and her horse to bolt. Kyle told her that if she were ahorsed, she may have been able to ride through the herd. Naya did just this at the end.

⛰️There was only one horse left because Shane shot Kyle’s horse. That was completely unnecessary, Shane.

⛰️Thank you so much for joining me on these Untamed recaps! I appreciate you all!

You can access Recap Lab’s full coverage of Netflix’s Untamed via this link.

Episode Title: Terces & All Trails Lead Here

Episode Writers: Mark L. Smith and Elle Smith

Episode Director: Neasa Hardiman

Original Air Date: July 17, 2025

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