He is, meanwhile and inevitably, locked in a dispute over land with a more successful neighbouring clan, the Tillersons. And then, as if the spectral buffalo wasn’t enough, things take a further turn for the unsettling when creepy backpacker Autumn (Imogen Poots) asks permission to camp on the Abbots’s land. Royal is clearly the sort to say “no” to such a request. And yet, because the story demands it, he says “yes” anyway. 

Brooding braggadocio is Royal’s daily bread as he and his clan grapple with the challenges of staying in business as an independent farm. That powder-keg of resentment and frustration detonates at the end of the first episode via a bloody twist that threatens everything Royal and sons Perry (Tom Pelphrey) and Rhett (Lewis Pullman) have worked towards. Fortunately the super-massive black hole out back is just what Royal needs as he sets out – under an impenetrable blanket of darkness – to dispose of some damning evidence .

Awkwardly, Autumn is on hand to witness the skulduggery. And so she and Royal are made reluctant co-conspirators – their connection strengthened by the revelation that they may share a childhood trauma linked to a mysterious cult. 

Outer Range is a lumbering, self-serious hodgepodge of sci-fi and modern Western. Brolin and Poots have, to their credit, bought into the premise of a magical realist love letter to the passing into history of a certain idea of American self-sufficiency. Audiences, though, may find Outer Range more drab than fab – epic only in its drawn-out running time and crying out for a close encounter with a cattle prod.