Warning: The following article contains spoilers from Outer Range season 2.

Prime Video’s sci-fi western Outer Range hoards mysteries like it’s gearing up for doomsday. Unlike True Detective: Night Country or Yellowjackets, Outer Range is a remarkably open-ended show, refusing to answer its biggest puzzles. While that can make for a frustrating experience for some viewers, others love the endless possibilities that live within Outer Range.

The series centers on a massive hole that appears on Royal Abbott’s (Josh Brolin) family ranch in Wyoming. The hole is a portal through time—and the show never really tells us how it works. Several of the characters’ journeys through time only complicate the plot, opening up a new can of worms every episode. Now that Outer Range has wrapped up its second season, we turned to the fans on Reddit who think they have it all figured out.

POV: You’re the hole.

Who Created the Hole?

In season 2, Royal suggests that God created the hole just to see what humans would do with it. He sees the chaos that the hole has caused those close to him, even though his family seems messed up enough already. But the hole has arrived nonetheless—and fans are desperate to figure it out. One scene—in which Royal is transported two years into the future to see a company called BY9 mining on his land around the hole—is a constant sticking point.

“I had always assumed the hole was created without the aid of humans, either naturally or supernaturally,” one fan wrote on Reddit. “Royal’s narration about the landscape changing and mountains appearing and disappearing over millennia seemed to support this....But I’m now wondering if the hole is, and always was, created by BY9 in its efforts to mine the black mineral and study the space/time anomaly under the land.”

The hole...created by humans? And what is BY9?

“I was convinced throughout most of season 2 that BY9 would be started by Perry,” another commenter added. “He makes a fortune betting on some football game or early investing into Microsoft or something and then starts a mining company....I thought it couldn’t be a coincidence that the alias he chose was Ben Younger.”

Will we ever learn how the hole appeared?

How Does Time Travel Work in the Hole?

Whenever Outer Range ends, it’s possible that we’ll never learn how the hole works. Though fans will continue to speculate on its origins, there’s no guarantee that the show’s central mystery will ever be revealed. Still, the questions just keep racking up.

“Are we seeing time travel in a single timeline or time travel in an alternate reality situation?” one commenter asked in a string of questions. “Is this universe deterministic or does free will exist? Can the actions of those traveling to the past affect the future? Can multiple holes exist? Could it appear anywhere on earth/in the universe?”

These are all fantastic questions, /uregalshield. I hope we receive an answer to at least one of them someday.

Royal is...the Time God.

Royal Is the God of Time

Hell, maybe science doesn’t even matter on Outer Range. Everyone is ingesting rocks from the hole and having mind-blowing out-of-body experiences. You want to know how the hole works? Fuck it, Royal is the Time God! “I think Royal is a time lord of sorts and that he created the hole,” one Reddit user suggested. Sure, why not!

The Hole Is a Portal to Yellowstone

As a Yellowstone fan, I’m glad I’m not the only one seeing similarities here. As another Outer Range viewer predicts, “Royal rides through the hole on the bison and is suddenly in the field with Kevin Costner on Yellowstone, crossover edition.” It’s a far-fetched prospect, of course, since Yellowstone is in turmoil on Paramount and Outer Range streams on Prime Video. But never say never! Television gods, do your magic. Let’s put Royal Abbott and John Dutton on screen together in season 3. You know you’d love to see it.

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