Netflix’s Untamed centers around the investigation into the murder of Lucy Cook, who had fallen off El Capitan inside Yosemite National Park. When ISB agent Kyle Turner found her body, he noticed injuries on her thigh that indicated that she’d been attacked by coyotes or bears in the woods. Well, as it turned out, Lucy had taken refuge in a cabin to protect herself from her assailant, where she was attacked by a bear. Coincidentally, these marks had camouflaged the gunshot wound Lucy had on her left leg, because of which Agent Turner wasn’t able to ascertain whether Lucy was murdered or attacked by an animal. So, how did Lucy die exactly? And who fired the shot at her?
Spoiler Alert
In Untamed’s ending, Kyle’s senior, Paul Souter, confessed his life’s biggest secret to Kyle and told her that Lucy was his daughter. Back in the day, while Paul was already married to Mary, he started an affair with a Native American, Maggie, and she gave birth to Lucy. However, both Maggie and Paul agreed to keep their relationship a secret, as it would not only have broken their respective families but also destroyed Paul’s career. But things changed when, some seven years later, Maggie was diagnosed with cancer, and before her death, she shared the greatest burden of her life with Lucy. She told her who her real father was.
Before her death, Maggie requested Paul to get Lucy away from her physically violent husband, Rory, as she feared her daughter wouldn’t survive such an abusive father. I guess Rory already suspected his late wife of cheating on him and might have blamed Lucy for her mother’s infidelity, which was why Maggie asked Paul to protect their daughter from the monster. On 19th July, 2010, three weeks after Maggie’s death, Paul kidnapped Lucy from Rory’s house, leaving behind some of Lucy’s blood in her room to implicate Rory in her murder. Due to the allegations, Rory and his stepson, James, left town and moved to Fresno to get away from threats; however, people don’t forget the child killers so easily. Someone found him and beat him to death outside a bar.
The thing is, even though Paul had saved Lucy from her abusive father, he himself had no intention of keeping her with him or raising her for that matter. If he would have taken her home, it would have opened another can of worms, which Paul didn’t have the courage to face. He knew Mary would have left him and taken their daughter, Kate, with her. Or maybe he feared how society would see his relationship with a Native American. So in order to protect his marriage, Paul gave away Lucy to a Christian man named Lester Gibbs, who ran a foster home outside Yelton, Nevada.
You may call it bad luck, or maybe Paul’s ignorance, that he didn’t try to investigate the family whom he was handing his own daughter. Maybe he was just in a hurry to get rid of Lucy and bury his mistakes, something for which Lucy held him accountable till her last breath. It turned out Lester Gibbs was a crooked man who was running a foster home racket, collecting government cash from single mothers and drug-addict fathers. Parents like Paul, who refused to raise their own child, were always easy prey for Mr. Gibbs. He would lock these kids in the basement and starve them, giving them enough food to keep them alive. No one can really imagine the things Lucy went through in her childhood. She kept telling Lester that her father was a cop and that he would come for her, but Paul didn’t even bother to check on his daughter. In the end, Lucy realized that no one was coming to her rescue and therefore ran away from the foster home and came back to Yosemite National Park, where she spent the rest of her life selling drugs for Shane Maguire to keep going.
Some fourteen years later, Paul’s past mistakes finally caught up to him. Lucy confronted her biological father and asked the question he had been running away from all his life: why did he leave her with Gibbs? Why didn’t he ever come to meet her? Why didn’t he bother searching for her after she ran away from the foster home? As was obvious, Paul didn’t have the answers. Lucy asked him for money, and Paul gave it to her, thinking he would be able to atone for his sins with cash, but Lucy kept returning, like a recurring nightmare, reminding Paul of how he not only destroyed her childhood but also traumatized her for the rest of her life. I guess Lucy, too, believed that asking for money from her father would give her some peace or at least provide her the security she never had, but her inner demons kept haunting her, pushing her to take revenge on the man responsible for all her misery.
Moments prior to her death, Lucy kidnapped Paul’s granddaughter, Sadie, from her room. To put it in context, Paul and Mary’s daughter, Kate, was an addict and was probably behind bars or spending her days in a rehabilitation center. Hence, Paul and Mary had to look after Sadie. So, in order to make Paul feel the same pain he had put her through, Lucy took away Sadie, leaving a note behind that she was going to leave Sadie at Lester Gibbs’ house, the same way he had abandoned Lucy because he was too afraid to call her his daughter and raise her as his own. Paul panicked and raced all through the woods, looking for Lucy and Sadie, when someone called him and told him that they had spotted Sadie up on the ridge above Maggie’s old place. Lucy had no intentions of hurting Sadie. She just wanted Paul to accept her as his daughter in front of the whole world, but instead of handling the matter with love and sincerity, Paul decided to sort it out with violence. In the show, Paul told Kyle that he just wanted to talk to Lucy, but no person would carry a rifle if they were just going to have a conversation and have no ulterior motive in mind.
It was obvious that Paul wanted to threaten Lucy and teach her a lesson so she wouldn’t dare come near his family again. And for that, he was willing to go any lengths. The question I want to ask is: was Paul any different than Rory? Well, I don’t think so. If Rory had assaulted or beaten Lucy physically, then Paul, through his actions, tortured her emotionally and mentally.
After bringing Sadie home safely, Paul, who was seeing red, picked up his rifle and went after Lucy. Maybe Lucy could already sense the danger approaching her, and therefore, even after multiple warnings, she didn’t stop. Paul’s patience stretched thin, and he fired a shot at Lucy that went through her leg. Lucy somehow managed to climb to the summit of El Capitan, but she knew that her end was nigh. It wasn’t that Paul was going to kill her, but when you have spent your entire lifetime in such a hostile environment, you basically lose all your faith in people, even your own father. Lucy stood near the cliff and remembered her last memory with her mother, where she saw her younger self sitting on the edge with her mother, who was wearing that yellow dress Lucy kept hidden in her trunk. Running that memory in her mind, Lucy finally jumped to her death.
So, in the end, it wasn’t an animal or a bullet that killed Lucy. It was the ignorance and the arrogance of her own father that did the job. Fathers not only wronged her. They destroyed her. She just wanted to be a part of a family. She wanted to belong. She wanted Paul to accept her, but he didn’t flinch. Maybe Lucy understood a simple truth in her life: she had become an orphan the moment her mother died. And she had no other family than her, which was why she jumped off El Capitan so El-o’-win would take her to her mother and reunite them in the afterlife.
