Eric Bana’s hunt for a killer deep within Yosemite comes to a shocking conclusion.

The wilds of Yosemite National Park hold plenty of secrets, and in UNTAMED, it’s Kyle Turner’s (Eric Bana) job to uncover them. Turner is a special agent with the National Park Investigative Services Branch, and his latest case is the mysterious death of a Jane Doe, an unidentified young woman who fell from the top of El Capitan, the 3,000-foot-tall rock formation that dominates Yosemite. It’s the sort of mission Turner signed up for, but it will take him down a steep drop of his own, into the depths of the park — and his own past.

“Turner is a decorated agent, but he has had some personal trauma and this case is going to dredge that up for him,” Elle Smith (The Marsh King’s Daughter), who co-created the series with her father, Mark L. Smith (American Primeval, The Revenant), tells Tudum. “He’s going to have to answer to that while he’s solving the crime.”

“I think the job and the location is something that’s very cathartic and very therapeutic for him,” Bana (Black Hawk Down, Troy) tells Tudum. “The job in general is a way that he deals with the things that have happened in his past.”

“And then the two paths cross, and he has to deal with both aspects,” Mark adds. Two paths in the woods of Yosemite … sounds like a job for an ISB special agent. Read on to learn exactly how Agent Turner unearths the truth — and what’s waiting for him when he does.

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Who is Jane Doe?

The mystery of the deceased girl’s identity is solved by Turner’s partner, Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago), a former LAPD officer who’s now a rookie park ranger. As it turns out, Jane Doe already has a file at Yosemite; she’s Lucy Cook, a young girl who went missing from the park in 2012. It’s a circumstance Turner is tragically familiar with. Five years earlier, he and his now-ex-wife Jill (Rosemary DeWitt)’s son, Caleb, was murdered in the park; Turner has been hallucinating his presence ever since.

Family, and all the unexpected pain that comes with it, lies at the heart of UNTAMED. “We looked at the series as more of a character study [about] family than an investigative mystery piece,” says Mark L. Smith. “And then it’s like, OK, now we do the investigative stuff so that we can tell these other stories as well.”

The series’ definition of family extends beyond blood, to characters like chief park ranger Paul Souter (Sam Neill). “We were trying to find someone who had a very paternal vibe about them, and you understood how much he cared about family and also how much he cared about Turner,” Mark says. “The age gap isn’t enough [for him] to be a father figure, but he’s definitely an uncle, an older brother figure, and he helps guide Turner.”

Turner needs all the help he can get — the investigation of Jane Doe doesn’t end with discovering her identity. The evidence shows she was clearly running from someone on the top of El Capitan, and her disappearance as a child is still an overlapping mystery. At first, all eyes were on her father, Rory, but turns out he was killed in a bar fight three years later. And DNA results make something else clear: Rory wasn’t even Lucy’s biological father.

What happened to Caleb?

As Turner and Vasquez dive deeper into their investigation, they come into contact with aspects of the seedier side of Yosemite: a crew of drifters, a (literally) underground drug ring, and Shane Maguire (Wilson Bethel), the park’s wildlife management officer. Turner has a history with Maguire, and the casually cruel hunter needles him at every turn. As it turns out, Maguire played a large role in the dissolution of Turner’s marriage to Jill — although not in the way you might think.

It all comes back to the disappearance of Turner’s son Caleb, which is revealed at the end of UNTAMED’s first episode. Kyle’s hallucinations of Caleb are initially presented as reality, a tricky task for Bana and his fellow actors to play. “We were quite careful about how we calibrated that in terms of how we tease that out with the audience,” Bana says. “There were a lot of discussions about that. We didn’t want him to appear almost like a ghost character. We wanted him to be there as a kind of spiritual guiding presence for Kyle.”

That presence becomes entangled with the mystery Turner is solving in the current action. “We started with the Lucy mystery, and we weren’t totally sure how the Caleb thing was going to play out,” Mark reveals. “But we always had it set up that the reason for the Turner/Jill split was what Jill had done.”

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What did Jill do about Caleb’s disappearance?

Even as he investigates Lucy’s murder, Turner is haunted by the past in more ways than one. Another unsolved case crops up — the family of a missing man named Sean Sanderson is filing a wrongful death suit. But in the final episode of UNTAMED, we learn that Kyle and Jill are fully aware of what happened to Mr. Sanderson: He killed Caleb, and Jill hired Shane Maguire to kill him.

“The fact that she had Maguire do this without Turner knowing — that is what really split them apart,” Mark says.

“I remember reading the words that were going to come out of Rosemary’s mouth,” Bana says. “And I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is incredible.’ And she was so fantastic in that scene.”

Maguire takes every opportunity to shove Jill’s actions in Turner’s face, especially after he becomes embroiled in the investigation of Lucy’s murder.  Meanwhile Jill grows so terrified the truth will be revealed that she attempts suicide. The conflict between Turner and Maguire comes to blows, and Turner is suspended from duty.

“I liked the fact that he had the least amount of control around McGuire,” Bana says. “There was something that just really, really set him off based on what had happened in the past, and so that’s [where he’s] the most combative. Those scenes were fun because they were a bit more traditional — but then, of course, we realize that that’s not how it all went down.”

Turner’s fury toward Maguire is, in a sense, also a fury directed at himself. “Every character in our show is exploring the idea of ‘What would you do to protect your family?’ and what happens when you can’t,” Elle says. “Turner couldn’t protect his family. So what we’re seeing happen in real time is what happened, the grief that he’s going through, but also what he can do for the next girl, what he can do for this case, and how can he serve her family by solving this case and [the mystery of] what happened to her.”

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Who killed Lucy Cook?

Her father did — at least, accidentally.

In the final episode of UNTAMED, the case appears solved: Turner and Vasquez bust up the drug ring and Maguire — whose face turned up on Lucy’s phone — is shot by Vasquez after he and Turner hunt each other through the darkening park. It seems clear in retrospect that Lucy, who’d been living in the park for some time, was wrapped up in the drug trade and killed by Maguire after some kind of deal gone wrong.

But Turner isn’t so sure. Despite Souter urging him to let the case lie, Turner is determined to fill in Lucy’s missing years, after she disappeared as a child but before she returned to the park. He traces her to a foster home in Nevada, where she was dropped off by a man claiming to be her father — a police officer of some kind.

Turner races back to Yosemite, where he confronts Lucy’s biological father: Paul, whose affair with Lucy’s mother has been hidden for decades now. When her mother’s husband became violent, Paul was recruited to spirit Lucy away to a foster home, but she soon escaped and returned to Yosemite. Paul didn’t see her again for years — until she began to blackmail him, extorting money from her father under threat of revealing his secret to his family.  As he was trying to chase Lucy down on El Capitan, Paul fired a warning shot to get her attention, and an injured Lucy raced to the edge and jumped.

“He’s not a cruel person,” Mark says. “It goes back to what Elle was saying about ‘How far you would go to protect your family?’. He was trying to protect his family, but he missed one of them. And then it just got worse and worse, and it became this.”

For Bana, shooting the revelation scene with Neill was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. “It was always going to be a gut punch with the way it’s revealed,” Bana says. “Souter is one of the only characters that he respects and looks up to and actually listens to. So to be let down by him in the end, it’s just so much for him. Getting to play that with Sam, when I first read it, I was like, ‘This is going to be one of those things that you’ll never forget as an actor.’ ”

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Where does Turner go at the end of UNTAMED?

Still suspended, Turner parts ways with Vasquez at the end of the series and leaves Yosemite for good. Vasquez has been on her own journey all this time, protecting her son from his abusive father. Meanwhile Turner has shown up as  a protector, a mentor, and a friend; he leaves Vasquez the horse he taught her to ride, and a box of Caleb’s toy cars for her son.

At the beginning of UNTAMED, Turner is a man ready to say goodbye to the world, joining his son in the lake where his body was found years earlier. “That first moment is Turner deciding whether to live or die,” Mark says. “And then the radio call that Lucy has been found stops that.”

So at the end of the series, Turner is bound for another destination, leaving Caleb — and the park that Caleb’s memory is so entangled with — behind. Finally, he’s moving on. “His time spent with Vasquez and her son, Gael — that’s kind of the first child he’s really spent any time with since Caleb’s death,” Elle says. “It brings out a softness in him, and a sense of hope that maybe he hadn’t remembered or recognized in a while.”

Turner and Vasquez say goodbye at the end of the series, but they’ll always be a part of each other’s lives in some way. “I think what he’s passed on to Naya is respect and love for the park and for nature and for its healing qualities and for its spiritual potential without really ever saying those things,” Bana says. “I think it’s just a part of who he is.”

Wherever he goes, that will be true. Where is Turner heading? That’s a question for another time. But one thing’s for sure, according to the series’ creators: It won’t be too comfortable.

“Instead of Turner being in his element, he’ll be in a land where he doesn’t understand all the dangers and the risks, and he doesn’t understand the people around [him],” Mark L. Smith says. “He’ll be a little bit on his back foot and a little bit unsure, and he’ll have to learn as well.”