Untamed Finale Episode 6 Recap And Ending Explained: Who Killed Sanderson?

The finale episode of Untamed is an act of unveiling, exposing us to bitter truths. There is an overarching theme that looms over the series—protection, or the lack of it. It has to do with the children who grow up in the forest, but also their parents who try their best to protect their offspring. However, are all parents able to do so? There are three sets of parents that we see—Lucy Cook’s parents, Maggie and Rory; Caleb’s parents, Jill and Kyle; and Gael’s parents, Naya and her former partner. With Lucy leaving behind the Miwork sigil for protection right before her death, the question intensifies—who failed to protect Lucy Cook? The Sanderson disappearance seemingly has something to do with Caleb’s death; while Kyle thinks he failed to protect his son, it intrigues us to know what lies behind the silence that he maintains along with Jill? “All Trails Lead Here” will reveal unexpected answers.

Spoilers Ahead

Our guesses were right: it was Shane Maguire who shot Kyle. In a chase down the trails, Shane is trying to shoot Kyle to death for discovering his stash of drugs and guns. Naya arrives just in time to save Kyle and shoots Shane to death. Kyle wakes up in a hospital with Souter and Naya waiting for him. Jill is informed about Kyle’s condition, but she decides not to go. She is finally trying to break free of the circle of pain, it seems. While at it, Jill has a confession to make to her husband, Scott. Jill reveals that it was Sean Sanderson who killed Caleb, and they got to know about it through Shane’s observatory cameras. Shane offered to shoot Sanderson to death; however, Kyle had already taken up the investigation. Jill would not be able to stand court trials dissecting her son’s death; without informing Kyle, she paid Shane to kill Sanderson. This is a secret that they were keeping for years, and Jill feels a relief after speaking about it.

Kyle has found out that Lucy Cook was not Rory’s biological child. He follows Matt’s lead to Nevada and finds a Gibbs family with a basement of kids beds. He tracks down Faith Gibbs, the daughter of the family, who reveals that Lucy lived with them under the name Grace for a few years as a foster kid. Faith’s father would collect the money and mishandle the children, and soon Grace/Lucy ran away. Faith mentions that before running away, Grace would mention that her father is a police officer.

Kyle is looking for Lucy’s real father; he asks Chief Jay, who is unable to provide any satisfactory leads. In his next conversation with Souter by the river, Kyle asks why Souter removed his daughter Kate’s DNA records from the database. It is revealed that Souter did it so that Lucy’s DNA cannot be matched with Kate and lead back to his paternity record. Lucy was actually an outcome of an affair between Souter and Maggie. It was Souter all along who lured Lucy out of the window since Maggie made him promise that he would look after their child. Souter placed him in the Gibbs family, but Lucy ran away and came back. She started turning up at Souter’s door for money and then started taking Sadie around the forest. Souter, scared to lose his marriage as well as Sadie, tried to get Lucy to talk to her, but he ended up shooting her in the leg. Lucy barely reaches the cliff and falls off—half dazed, dizzy with the shot. Souter desperately pleads to Kyle to cover his trails, but Kyle cannot take the weight of yet another death on his chest—as he turns to walk away, Souter shoots himself in the head and falls into the river.The case closes. With Esther Avalos, Kyle admits not being in the right headspace to lead the investigation and agrees to sign any document—his last act of protecting Jill and Caleb. After a last encounter with Caleb’s spirit, Kyle decides that he is to leave the forest. As Kyle drives away, he waves to the Chief and leaves the forest to Naya, along with a box of Caleb’s old cars for Gael. We see Naya riding Kyle’s horse through the meadow, among deer, and the deer do not run away from her this time. Naya had mentioned that when she walks among them, they stray off her path, and Kyle told her one day that if she were on a horse, they would stay grazing. Naya has fulfilled the evolution—she would carry Kyle’s legacy, as Kyle would move towards a new beginning that he desperately needs.

Lucy Cook was a forbidden act for Souter. Souter, who celebrated his successful marriage with his wife and has a granddaughter, looked like the perfect family man. However, as Milch had mentioned before, the forest brings out the unnameable in men. Souter had an affair with Maggie, who was full of life and charming; he submitted to his instincts. However, when Lucy was born, Souter did not offer her his name, paternity, or upbringing despite knowing Rory Cook’s nature. Even when Maggie died, Souter did salvage Lucy but put her as distant as he could have. Souter failed to become a father to Lucy because he thought it would come at the expense of his family. Tragically, we see that Souter’s other daughter, Kate, had fallen into the grasp of drug troubles, just as Lucy did. This leaves Souter with only his granddaughter, Sadie, whom he fiercely wants to protect. When Lucy started turning up at his door, Souter felt threatened but obliged with the money requests. However, when Lucy started taking Sadie around the forest, suddenly his failure to protect his children magnified into instincts that turned feral. To protect Sadie, he went to any length—he thought he was merely stopping Lucy for a talk, but that sounds like a frail apologist statement. Souter, in his desperate attempt to invisibilize his past mistake, shoots Lucy. He had shown no accountability towards the girl, and when she turns on him, he simply pulls the trigger. While Paul Souter looked like someone who is fatherly, protective, and a man of good intentions, the show turns his character inside out, revealing that beneath the exterior lies a complex interiority that can reach any extent to protect its facade. 

While all along we thought that Shane, Jill, and Kyle had some kind of weird romantic triangle going on between them, it turns out that what binds them is not romance, but a triangle of guilt. Shane acted as a hitman after Jill went behind Kyle’s back and paid him to murder Sanderson—who we surmise had tortured the kid before killing him and drowning his body in the lake. Jill admits that more than the death of their son, it is Jill’s betrayal of trust that made their marriage fall apart. A lot of the tension is clarified. Before, it seemed like the burden of the Sanderson murder was upon Kyle’s shoulders, but the only burden Kyle was carrying was the burden of love. For his loyalty and love for his wife and child, he betrayed his position as a police officer. He tells Avalos there are certain things that evade explanations. This is probably what sets Kyle apart from Souter. Despite not murdering Sanderson, Kyle showed accountability to the woman he loves, to the extent of carrying the burden of a crime that she committed. Souter, on the other hand, left Maggie high and dry and tried to escape his duties as a father even when Lucy was facing the worst troubles. What he did, by putting Lucy away, was a half-hearted attempt to clear his conscience, not an effort towards the child or her well-being. 

Jill’s choice to avenge her son’s death may not have been justifiable, but it is heartbreakingly human. In contrast, Kyle’s silent complicity and his willingness to carry the moral weight of Jill’s actions redeem him, not as a hero, but as someone who chooses the imperfection of love over morality, even when it means erasing himself.

Even with Kyle’s departure from the forest, the series does not end in despair but in a new reckoning. By leaving the legacy of protection to Naya, Kyle places her as the custodian of both Gael’s innocence and the fragile equilibrium the wilderness offers. This time, Naya would know better than her predecessors not to repeat the same mistakes or walk down the same trails. She would protect the wilderness without disrupting its spirits. In one of the series’ most poetic final moments, the deer stays grazing as Naya rides through; she has now become someone the forest has finally accepted, just as Kyle was.