A kind of 'Tor' but wholesale

The most watched series on Netflix these days is Indomitable (Untamed), a rural thriller that hooks you from the first scene. It's a very commercial production that follows the platform's most typical standards. Besides captivating you, it has an added element: you can critique the script's more forced devices and comment on its flaws. You're hooked and question it at the same time, like a guilty pleasure. Indomitable It would be a kind of Tor in Yosemite's version, that is, wholesale. A spectacular and wild natural environment that hides mysteries, a group of crazy hippies occupying the mountain, several conspiracy theorists, murders, economic interests surrounding the natural park and a cast of very macho men marking their territory. If Carles Porta never decides to finish the show around Tor With a fiction, it is essential that it is inspired by this series.

Indomitable It opens with a tense, vertigo-inducing sequence at the foot of El Capitan, the steep cliff so admired by climbers. The discovery of a girl's body leads to an investigation that reactivates past conflicts. The protagonist is Kyle Turner, a federal agent from the natural park, plagued by trauma and with a dark personal history. He knows Yosemite National Park like the back of his hand and rides around on horseback, dressed as Colonel Tapiocca, as if he were filming a department store ad. He's a jack-of-all-trades: he knows how to ride, flies helicopters, practices extreme mountaineering, has superb eyesight that can detect a hair on a branch in the middle of the forest, and a sense of smell worthy of the finest mammals. Despite being bad-tempered, living like a homeless person, being depressed, and lifting his elbow too much, he leaves the cabin every morning looking dapper to go on patrol. Part of the script's narrative strategy is to create a circle of characters in which all try to hide a painful past. Because everyone explains their life in half, the mystery always remains.

The series enhances the hypnotic effect of Yosemite's spectacular landscapes, and all the human fauna that lives hidden among the leaves, in small campsites that look like the Decathlon campsite. What is truly untamable are the clichés and stereotypes, especially the masculine ones. There are testosterone overdoses of gentlemen in jeans and plaid shirts armed with hunting shotguns and who at night drink whiskey to drown their sorrows. And yet, you want to know what happened and how it ends. There are only six episodes, and from the third on, the series loses its rhythm a bit because the skein starts to get too tangled. The plot drifts into a story somewhat more sordid than the initial rural mystery; the dramas of too many characters accumulate, and, when it comes to unraveling the story, everyone has to give too many explanations. Perhaps that's why, when the finale arrives, the series seems to struggle to find the right moment to close. Of course, just as happened with Tor, Indomitable It might stimulate a tourist pilgrimage to Yosemite. It's a magnificent promotion for the natural park. It's no wonder they opened it during the holiday season.