Untamed wastes no time making a strong first impression. The Netflix series opens on El Capitan, with two climbers inching their way up

the sheer rock face, the show quietly letting the risks of height and exposure speak for themselves. Then a body falls, entangling them in

ropes and changing the tone of the series in an instant. It’s a sharp, unsettling opener that immediately sells the idea that Yosemite isn’t just a pretty backdrop, but a place where things can go very wrong, very fast.

Then Eric Bana’s Kyle Turner arrives. He’s a National Parks Service investigator who operates by his own rules and has a complicated past – with the job and the park itself. Bana is joined here by Sam Neill, a brilliant Rosemarie DeWitt, and Lily Santiago, all playing colleagues and concerned family members caught up in a larger murder conspiracy. Turner is brusque, hyper-competent, allergic to teamwork, and he clocks the preferred “suicide” ruling as nonsense almost on instinct. It’s a familiar type, but Untamed doesn’t linger on making him likable or mysterious. What the show seems more interested in is the problem he’s up against: investigating a violent death in a place this big, this remote, and this invested in maintaining the illusion of safety for those tourist dollars.

The mystery at the heart of Untamed is a fairly classic one: a woman’s death doesn’t add up and the case is quickly dismissed by others but relentlessly pursued by an archetypal brooding investigator. Turner’s intensity and stubbornness are familiar territory, but the environment (and Bana’s rugged, tortured presence) elevates the story. Yosemite is big. Like, labyrinthine, with hidden paths, remote corners, and unpredictable hazards that make even routine investigative work a logistical nightmare. The terrain constantly pushes the characters, turning what could be a standard procedural into something that demands our patience and its characters’ ingenuity.