How Does 'Outer Range's' Time Travel Work? I Asked Josh Brolin And The Showrunner About It, And Their Answers Are Super Helpful

Interview with Josh Brolin

Transcript

00:00I was curious when it comes to Royal's understanding of that hole, how do you think he thinks time

00:05travel works? Well, everybody can only go by their own experience. I mean, he's jumped in a hole

00:13consumed by shame and was spit out at another time and then luckily was brought on by these

00:22people and raised and all this stuff. So what it represents for him is something where he comes

00:27from is this shame. But it seems to me, and what we talked about, and we talked a lot about, I

00:32even talked with my son about it who did illustrations. Look, we can't rely on uphold the

00:38wonder. The hole is the hole. Yes, the hole is the mystery. Yes, does the hole represent America?

00:44Whatever we want to symbolically kind of put on it to have something to talk about. I think it

00:51was really fun to get more specific with it. And the whole seems to have revealed itself

00:58to be this thing that makes you deal with the thing that you least want to deal with.

01:04So it puts you in a scenario you think you may want to be in, but it confronts you most with

01:13the thing that you're trying to avoid the most. That's what I think it is. And with

01:19Tamara, you see it with Palfrey, you see it with, which I kind of like the parallel,

01:25at least existential, we think through it. You go, is there really good and bad and what happens

01:32to you? And obviously there is, but I go, well, why did this happen? Well, you go, but it's an

01:37opportunity for me to look at another aspect of myself and have a different, maybe a shift in

01:42perception about how I'm going about living this life.

01:46The truth about time travel. So the writer's room, we had an astrophysicist in the room,

01:58Dagny Looper, and we had sci-fi heads, and then we had historical people who love history.

02:07And we just kind of talked about what was fact from a science perspective. And then

02:19we kind of leapt from there to wherever we wanted to deal with something emotionally. Because

02:29this is going to sound all hoity-toity, but when you think about time, like right now,

02:38being a kid, when you think about what it might be being an older person, when you think about

02:46this particular time you're in, sometimes you can have these moments where you're remembering

02:51something and it feels like it's happening as you're remembering it. And then there are other

02:56things that are distant memories where somebody has to bring it up to you and remind you and you

03:00go, oh, you know, and all of that is tied to how you see it through your emotions. So we decided

03:08that we would deal with time kind of based on what Josh said about the first season, about the hole,

03:18is that metaphorically, it was a man who had to go into this hole to deal with his own issues.

03:27So we took whatever science fact we had, right up, and butted it right up against

03:34where we needed to be emotionally in these episodes, so that the time in the portal,

03:42on the other side of the portal, you know, back on this side of it would affect the character so that

03:51we could grow conflict from it.