[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Untamed.]

“It was such a gut punch for Kyle,” Eric Bana says of the shocking reveal in the Untamed finale.

The series follows his character, Kyle Turner, an ISB agent who investigates a mysterious death of a Jane Doe in Yosemite National Park. Alongside him is chief park ranger Paul Souter (Sam Neill) and Los Angeles cop-turned-ranger Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago). Other players include his ex-wife, Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt), as the two continue to grapple with the death of their son, Caleb, and former army ranger Shane Maguire (Wilson Bethel), who lives out in the woods and has a secret that, if revealed, would greatly affect Kyle and Jill.

But who killed Lucy? And which of the major players die? Read on for the answers to those and more burning questions, plus insight from Bana, Santiago, Bethel, and co-showrunner Elle Smith.

Who killed Lucy?

Jane Doe is revealed to be Lucy, who previously went missing from the park as a kid. Thought to be dead all this time, she grows up in a foster home where they don’t really care about her, then returns to the park and seemingly gets caught up in the drug business. Though Kyle thinks it was Shane who killed her, connected to said drugs, it turns out to be Paul — Lucy’s biological father! He’s the one to set her up in the foster home, then turns her away when she comes back to him years later for money because it would’ve cost him the rest of his family. He claims that after he did give her some money, she kept turning up for more, with threats, and the last time, she took his granddaughter. She was safe, but Paul then went after Lucy to make her listen. He never meant to hurt her, but when she fled him after he shot her, she went over the cliff and died.

Paul wants Kyle to let it go, even offering to fix his suspension and ensure he could stay at Yosemite, where he’s been seeing a version of his dead son, but the ISB agent refuses. As he walks off, Paul dies by suicide.

“When I realized that was going to be the reveal in Episode 6, I felt like I’d been kicked in the head. It was such a gut punch for Kyle,” Bana tells TV Insider. “There was almost a case of, well, how do you calibrate the reaction to that and what that means to Kyle in the context of what he’s been investigating, what he’s been through personally, what Souter means to him as a confidant and a friend and a coworker? Yeah, it felt like a classic Mark Smith move. It was so well written and I didn’t see it coming until we discussed it. Yeah, quite dark.”

According to Elle Smith, that reveal all goes back to what the show is about: family. “It’s a show about what would you do for your family? How are you willing to protect your family? What happens if you can’t protect your family and what happens if you choose not to? Souder’s someone who chose not to protect his family. He’s the only character in our show that does that,” she points out. “He’s such a paternal character for Turner, and so the betrayal is so much stronger. It was the theme of family and who’s the one person that could let Turner down the most?”

While they found that ending in the writing, with Elle Smith admitting, “We weren’t sure who the killer was going to be until maybe halfway through writing this season, and we let the script tell us,” there wasn’t anyone else she and co-showrunner Mark L. Smith seriously considered having be the killer. “Ultimately, we wanted the final ending to really be personal, and the only way to do that was with someone that Turner really cared about,” Elle explains.

There also wasn’t a world in which Souter lived. “We love Sam, but he was always a goner,” she says.

Santiago reveals she was “absolutely heartbroken” by the Souter reveal. “My perspective became that he was sort of like a father figure to Naya, or he trusted her and so she felt like she had a companion and he understood the challenges of working with Kyle and entrusted her with it anyway,” she says, adding, “I was sort of disappointed that I didn’t get a moment to, as Naya, mourn the loss of that person who I had felt had grown into somebody she really trusted and admired.”

Who is Sanderson? What happened to him?

While Kyle and Naya are looking into what happened to Lucy, there’s an investigation into him regarding a man named Sanderson who died in the park. There are questions about Kyle’s investigation years ago, which happened to be a few months after Caleb’s death. It’s revealed that Shane killed Sanderson — after Jill asked because he murdered Caleb. (Shane’s cameras around the park picked up footage of Sanderson with Caleb.) Kyle only found out when Sanderson was reported missing. More than losing Caleb, it was her betraying him that ended their marriage, Jill tells her husband Scott (Josh Randall).

Courtesy of Netflix

“It’s again going back to that theme of, what would you do for your family and how these people choose differently, how Turner chooses and how Jill chooses to take matters into her own hands and then having to live with that decision,” says Elle Smith. “So while Turner’s driving out of the park with a little bit of hope somewhere, Jill is also having to sit with that and what she did, whether Maguire lived or not.”

As for why Shane killed Sanderson for Jill, Bethel points to his character’s “extremely strict moral code,” which “makes a lot of sense to him, and he’s not afraid to enforce that moral code by means of violence. He has a background in the military, so that’s not foreign to him. So I think that when he’s approached about the situation, the math just makes perfect sense to him. Maybe if somebody came up to us with a quandary like that, ‘This person has done a horrible thing, I want you to kill them,’ we start weighing the good and the bad. I think for Shane, it makes perfect sense. Yeah, this guy deserves to die. His code is locked in enough that it’s not a question.”

Does Shane kill Kyle?

Kyle tracks down Shane thinking that he killed Lucy, but as he does, he warns Jill that Shane would probably tell his secrets — meaning hers, too — as well if he takes him down.

Bethel isn’t sure if Shane would’ve taken down Jill, but he “100% would’ve gone after Kyle just because at that point there is this antagonism between them and from Shane’s perspective toward Kyle — it comes out in at least one of the scenes — he looks down on Kyle because he feels that Kyle should have been the one to approach him and that then Kyle has spent all this time pitying himself. And from Shane’s perspective, again, a guy who sees very much things in moral terms in terms of black and white, I think he looks at Kyle as being soft in a way. So I don’t think he would’ve any compunction about taking Kyle down. In some ways, he probably thinks of Jill as being a stronger person than Kyle because she had the guts to actually ask for the thing that you wanted.”

There is so much conflict in pretty much every scene with Kyle and Shane, “almost to a fault,” says Bethel with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘Can these guys just be nice to each other for like 30 seconds? Can they pretend?’ I think that it’s obviously owing to the stakes of their history. They just couldn’t be any higher. One of the things that this show does amazingly well through the writing is slowly reveal to you just how high the stakes are. You think the stakes are one thing, and then they sort of get ratcheted up a level and then ratcheted up another level. And so these guys, especially I think from Kyle’s perspective, share the biggest, deepest, most meaningful secret imaginable, basically. And that creates a dynamic in their relationship that is just a mess there.”

He adds, “Even in limited screen time leading up to that [ending] between me and Eric, I think there’s a really cool history that gets established between them and the tone that gets established between them that’s really expertly calibrated with the writing. … Getting to act opposite an actor like Eric is of course a really a wonderful experience and a great honor. I felt great about every scene that we got to do.”

In the finale, Shane hunts Kyle down in the woods, and Bethel tells us those were his favorite scenes to film. “So much fun,” he says. “There’s just something kind of iconic about those kinds of scenes where the pursuer and the pursued, you know that the filmmaking of it is just you’re walking a razor’s edge in terms of the tension, and that makes it fun, you know — or at least you hope or you have a sense of — how it’s going to feel in the final product, and that’s really exciting.”

Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix

Shane does catch up to an injured Kyle, but Naya shows up before he can kill him. If she hadn’t, he “for sure” would’ve killed Kyle, says Bethel. “There wasn’t much of a road back at that point.”

Does Shane die?

Yes. Naya kills Shane when she finds him and Kyle in the woods. Like with Souter, Shane was “always a goner,” despite the love for Bethel, says Elle Smith.

Bethel didn’t know much about his character’s arc when he signed on. “I had inklings, some of which were dead wrong,” he tells us. “You’re trying to make an educated guess based on the tone and what you know of a character, what you know of television and the tropes of how it works. But you’re doing a lot of guesswork, and one thing that was amazing about these scripts was just how on your toes they kept you, and it was really cool to be drawn in just from the outset as a fan because the scripts were so good and the writing was so good and so twisty.”

Santiago admits she was “happy” with her character killing Shane. “I think it shows she’s such a good second-in-command,” she says. “She’s the gal you want to have around because she’s going to have your back and she’s going to find you wherever you are dying in the woods. So I loved that.”

Why does Kyle leave Yosemite?

Throughout the series, Kyle sees a version of his son, Caleb, ultimately saying goodbye to him at a dock rather than join him. “I don’t think I’m ready yet,” he says, but “No matter where I am or where I go, you will always be with me.” As the finale ends, he’s driving out of Yosemite.

“That was really tough,” admits Bana. “It felt like a very realistic version of someone dealing with a very deep grief in the sense that he wasn’t saying goodbye to him completely. He was just saying goodbye to a part of him in that location. And Paul Souter, the way that he tries to help Kyle deal with his grief and get him to move on, I thought was really beautiful and interesting. So yeah, all that stuff was interesting to play.”

As for why he’s ready to leave, “I think it was a bit of everything, and it’s the interplay with the character of Jay [Raoul Max Trujillo] as well,” Bana says. “I really loved the relationship that he has with Jay and the way that he’s the indigenous link to the park and almost like a spiritual link to the park that helps him see things differently. So I think it’s a combination of his experiences over the course of the season that put him in the place that he’s right at the end. And I liked it because I felt like there was closure, but there wasn’t. It’s not wrapped up so neatly. He’s still grappling with things and trauma in a way that someone really would. And I think a lot of people will find that hard to watch, but also really beautiful and they’ll be able to relate to it in some way.”

According to Elle Smith, “this whole season, Turner’s arc is about, can he or can he not leave the park? Because leaving the park would mean leaving Caleb, and this is his first opportunity to really let go. Either he was either going to jump in the lake to join Caleb or he wasn’t, and he chose life. So for Turner, he’s leaving the park, having chosen the ability to imagine a life where he can kind of keep Caleb with him, but also live on his own and not be in this sort of purgatory space.”

She agrees that despite everything that happened, Kyle’s probably doing the best he is all season in those final moments. “Eric is so great with that little, tiny smile that he gives us at the very end that gives us just a hint of hope that he’s going to be okay,” she adds.

Does Scott stay with Jill?

While the finale does a great job of wrapping up loose ends — it is billed as a limited series — there is one thing that’s left unanswered: whether Scott stays with Jill after she tells him about Sanderson. She admits that she’s afraid Scott won’t be able to get past it like Kyle wasn’t.

“We want it to be that way,” says Elle Smith. “We wanted audiences to feel like, what would you do if you were in that position?”

She also can’t reveal if Scott stays or not. “Even Mark and I have different opinions on how things end there. So yeah, I think it’s up to everyone’s interpretation.”

What did you think of Untamed? Let us know in the comments section below.

Untamed, Streaming Now, Netflix