Royal Abbott spent an entire lifetime trying to protect his secrets from his family. But slowly, all of them came out, and no matter how much Royal wanted to control his fate, he couldn’t do anything about it. As ‘Outer Range’ began, Royal saw a hole in the face of the earth. It not only reminded him of something from his past life, but was also a sign of impending danger. Royal obsessively tried to hide the existence of the mysterious pit, but by the end of “Outer Range” Episode 7, most of the people around him got to know about it, especially Luke and Billy Tillerson, and Royal’s own son, Perry Abbott.
Previously, in ‘Outer Range’ Episode 6, Perry left a letter at the police station and confessed to killing Trevor Tillerson. His decision led to a heated tussle in the family, and it was the first crack in its foundation that made us all believe that sooner or later, the family was going to break apart. The question was, when and why?
‘Outer Range’ Episode 7: Recap And Ending
The episode began with a short flashback sequence shot inside a game parlor, Roller King, where a pre-teen Perry lost control of himself and knocked out a young Trevor Tillerson. It was the same rage and the same brawl that happened years ago, and when Royal tried to ask Perry why he hit Trevor, his son had no answer. Maybe it was destined that Perry would someday kill Trevor, and a small fight in childhood hinted towards it, or maybe Perry had an eternal rage inside him which he couldn’t control. Perhaps his wife, Rebecca, faced it too, and that’s why she left.
In the present, Royal and Cecilia had to pay 500,000 dollars to bail out Perry, and the family didn’t have that kind of money. Hence, Cecilia decided to give up her ranch papers to bail out her son, but there was a condition. If Perry failed to appear before the court on the day of his hearing, then the Abbott Ranch would be fortified by the government. It was an important information because Tillerson and Autumn Rivers were interested in buying the Abbott property because of the mysterious minerals they had witnessed or heard about on those lands.
As soon as Perry came out of prison, he obsessively questioned Royal about whether he knew anything about Rebecca. This seed of doubt was sown by Royal’s nemesis, Autumn, who told Perry that Rebecca’s disappearance had something to do with Royal. Autumn was pulling the strings in both families, i.e., Abbott and Tillerson. In the previous episode, she took Billy to the pit and showed him one of the mysterious wonders of the world. Billy quickly connected the dots and figured out that it was because of this hole in the ground that his father was so crazy about the west pasture of Abbott ranch. But Autumn told a lot of other things to Billy, and thus he became a puppet in her grand scheme of things. Billy showed the pit to his brother, Luke, who couldn’t believe the supernatural in front of his eyes and started calculating its worth instantly. Later, Billy crushed his father’s favorite rock that had the same black mineral found inside the pit, and as soon as his body came in contact with it, he had visions of the future in which he saw Autumn beside him, acting like a leader of the mother earth. But when Autumn asked him whether he saw Royal in his visions, Billy confirmed his presence. That made Autumn believe that she would never be able to ultimately realize her purpose until and unless Royal Abbott was alive and thus began a ploy to kill him.
In ‘Outer Range’ Episode 7, the faith of many people was put to the test. While Deputy Sheriff Joy Hawk came closer to her cultural values and entertained the thought of supernatural occurrences in the human world, Cecilia’s faith was slowly breaking apart. In the previous episode, she dragged the dead body of a young bear inside her shed, and in Episode 7, the mother of the animal came looking for its child. When the mother bear saw Cecilia, it immediately charged toward her and attacked her, and Cecilia had no other option but to pull the trigger on it. She killed the mother bear, and as the creature took its last breath, it was Cecilia, who repented of her sins both mentally and emotionally.
Billy met Royal on the road and pointed a gun at him. He took him to the closed down Roller King parlor, where he threatened him to leave Autumn alone. In the meantime, Autumn met Perry in an ice cream parlor and revealed to him the secret about the pit that Royal had been hiding all along. She probably told him a lot of other things, but Perry didn’t believe her immediately. Rather, when he returned home, he took his father for a ride, and they rode towards the pit. As soon as Autumn’s words were confirmed, Perry believed that she might be right about other things, especially what she told him about Rebecca and her return. Hence, Perry didn’t turn back, but instead jumped straight into the pit. Royal couldn’t do anything but watch his son disappear into the abyss. Maybe the hole in the underground needed to be filled with something. Something of his own, something that was dear to his heart, and hence, as soon as Perry jumped into it, the pit disappeared. Disappeared for the time being.
See More: ‘Outer Range’ Episode 5 & 6: Recap And Ending, Explained – Why Did Autumn Help Billy Tillerson?
What Was Royal’s Untold Secret? Was he from the past or the future?
Royal had been hiding a secret from his family all along. He didn’t belong to this world, or to be particular, the timeline that he was living in. He was a kid from 1886 who jumped into the pit. His heart was heavy with a guilty conscience. When Royal was just eight years old, he accidentally shot his father while hunting for a deer in the woods. He tried to save his father, but the bullet was too deep inside his chest. Royal wanted to return to his mother and his sister, but he couldn’t gather enough strength to reveal the news to his family. And hence, he ran away. He kept running away until he came across the pit. Now, no one knows whether the appearance of the pit was a boon or a curse for Royal personally, but he did know one thing: that there was God in all good and bad things.
When Royal crawled out of the pit, he realized that he was in 1968. The first thing he saw was Wayne Tillerson. Probably, it was the first time when the pit appeared in 1968, which instantly captivated Wayne’s attention, and the mysterious boy crawling out of it scared him to the core. He ran away from there, but the incident left a deep scar on him. One accident, one decision, and one action led to a string of events that were going to influence the lives of many.
A stray Royal reached Abbott Ranch, but probably by this time, he believed that the real Royal was lost somewhere in the pit and the one that came out was someone else, and thus he wanted to start over. He lied to the Abbott family that he didn’t remember anything about his family, and hence, out of sympathy, the family adopted the kid who fell into the future. Perhaps it was the reason why Royal wasn’t a fan of too many modern gadgets. He never kept a mobile phone and preferred a horse over a motor vehicle.
It wasn’t just the Abbott family, to whom Royal had lied to. He even lied to Autumn when she inquired whether he remembered anything from the first ten years of his life. Unlike Autumn, Royal remembered all of it. He even kept a photo of his family hidden in the barn. But he didn’t want to bring the past into the future because he believed that the sins of his past life might bring wrath on his family. And Royal is right in thinking so; the pit, or a symbolization of the past, did destroy his happy family.
Royal tried to protect Perry from the shadows of his own past, but his son didn’t listen. Autumn had promised him something. He believed jumping into the pit would bring back Rebecca, and thus Perry didn’t think any further. For the happiness of his daughter, Amy, he jumped straight into it, and soon the pit disappeared from the face of the earth.
