When American Primeval begins, the writing is on the wall. Every character we meet at Fort Bridger is facing an existential crisis, before they decide which path to take on their travels across the 1857 American frontier. “Their worlds are coming to an end,” director and executive producer Pete Berg tells Tudum.

Brigham Young’s (Kim Coates) Mormons are seeking to make a safe haven in Utah, even if bloodshed is required to create their utopia. The Shoshone Tribe led by Winter Bird (Irene Bedard) want to maintain their culture and community. Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin) and Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch) are on the run from their past demons. And Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham), well, he knows the end of an era when he sees one. He cuts his losses, sells his fort to Brigham Young, and moves on to greener pastures. “Bridger’s exit strategy was more effective than almost everyone else’s because almost everyone else dies,” says Berg.

It’s true. The series — helmed by Berg, writer, and executive producer Mark L. Smith, and executive producer Eric Newman — is a brutal tale of survival, no matter the cost. And for most of the characters, the cost is their lives, or at the very least, their way of life as they once knew it. Berg and his team actually entered production not knowing for sure who was going to live or die at the end of the show. “We had multiple options — from nobody dying, to all of them dying, to Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier) being the only one that survived,” says Berg. 

Instead, much like 19th-century frontierspeople venturing across the country, the creators observed how the characters existed among one another in an unforgiving world before deciding their fate. “Walking 20 feet into the woods to go to the bathroom could be a lethal experience,” says Berg. “Falling off a horse, an infected toe, a snake bite — anything could kill you. There was certainly no 911, and no paramedics were going to come save you.” 

Well, who lives then? Who dies? Who gains control of the lawless lands of 1857 Utah and Wyoming? Read on to find out:

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So we know Bridger is a real person and didn’t die at the end of American Primeval. Why does he sell his fort to Brigham Young? And where does he go on his horse?

Newman would describe Bridger as world-weary. “And who wouldn’t be?” he says. “And not just because of the physical toil.” As portrayed by Whigham, Jim Bridger is a man who’s lived a well-trodden life, and has seen plenty of people like Sara and her son Devin (Preston Mota) come and go through his trading post. “Shea Whigham just did a great job, and that was a role that grew and grew and became a really critical part of Primeval,” says Berg.

Exploring this real-life figure in the series actually traces back to Mark L. Smith’s script for 2015’s The Revenant (also a survival tale on the American frontier), which features Bridger as a young boy. Smith thoroughly researched Bridger’s past, and was eager to tell more of his story. “So I set [American Primeval] at Fort Bridger with Jim Bridger 50 years after The Revenant events,” said Smith.

Newman sees Bridger as a prime example of an essential theme in the story of the American frontier, which is that “the guys that settled it were not necessarily the guys that would continue it,” he says. “This is a guy who sees it’s over, [and realizes] that this thing we built is going the wrong way, and I’m getting out while I can.”

The way in which this chapter of his life ends in the series is true to reality — Bridger really did sell his fort, that he built from the ground up, to Brigham Young. “Fort Bridger was perceived to be this incredible asset by the US military and the Mormon church in terms of their ability to defend each other,” explains Berg. “Bridger knew this, and he held out as long as he could. He took the best deal he could, and rode off for perhaps one last chapter of his life.” 

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So why does Brigham Young burn Fort Bridger to the ground after he buys it in American Primeval?

As Fort Bridger would have been the logical staging ground for a battle between the US Army and the Mormons, Young decided that destroying the trading post would eliminate that possibility altogether. “Without [Fort] Bridger, [the army] would have trouble being able to attack them, so he bought it and immediately burned it to the ground,” says Berg.

And in case you were wondering, production really burned down half of the massive Fort Bridger set that was built largely by hand, with axes and shovels. “That’s one of the great things I love about that set, is that there were very, very few power tools used in [its] construction,” said Berg. “I would say, from designing it to building it, [there] had to have been at least eight months.” 

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But there’s still another battle on the horizon between the Mormons and the Shoshone. What happens in the finale?

So, for a quick refresher, Young’s Nauvoo Legion of Mormon militia are on the hunt all season to find Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), a fellow Mormon who witnessed their mass murder of settlers in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Her husband, Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan), who she recently married after his original betrothed, her sister(!), died, is also looking for her. But he descends into madness  after he’s nearly scalped in the massacre. 

Meanwhile, Shoshone warrior Red Feather (Derek Hinkey) and other members of the Tribe have been holding Abish captive. “We wanted to explore the idea of this young Mormon woman who’s pushed into a life and marriage that she did not ask for, and, through fate, ends up in a much different world and never fully assimilates,” says Berg. 

Lightfoot-Leon immediately connected to Abish’s “fiery dissatisfaction and unapologetic search for freedom,” which helps forge a mutual respect with her captors. “She always felt to me like a woman who belongs in a more forward-thinking century,” said Lightfoot-Leon. “She’s one of the few women we follow who’s making choices based on her gut rather than her brain. She fights for what she believes in.” 

And that includes fighting on the side of the Shoshone Tribe, when Young permits his Nauvoo Legion to strike them out in their pursuit of Abish. Both Abish and Red Feather die in the arms of people who love them: Red Feather in his son’s embrace, and Abish in Jacob’s. Yes, you read that right. Jacob marches with the Nauvoo Legion and unknowingly shoots his bride, a realization that prompts him to then shoot himself.  “[Abish] and her husband Jacob meeting the way they finally do at the end felt like an appropriate, beautiful, tragic reunion,” says Berg. “And that’s what we were looking for.”

Justin Lubin/Netflix

Does Isaac die in American Primeval? And why?

Sadly, he does. “Isaac is an irreparably broken man from the beginning,” says Berg. “It’s rare that you meet people whose problems and situations in life are so tragic that you actually think that a noble death is maybe the best possible outcome. Isaac is in that strike zone.” 

Over the six episodes, Isaac forms a found family bond with Sara, Devin, and runaway Two Moons and tries to learn to love again, something he desperately needs after the deaths of his own son and wife. “Isaac is a man in mourning,” said Kitsch. “Sara shows Isaac that there is still light in the dark. She represents hope to him, as much as he fights it.” So when he comes back to save her from the last trapper trying to claim the bounty on her head, Sara is overjoyed to see that her love has returned. But only too late do they realize he’s been fatally shot, and he is ready to, finally, die the “right” way through a noble death.

Berg and Kitsch formed a brotherhood over the years, reaching all the way back to the Texas football fields of Friday Night Lights. So deciding to kill Kitsch’s character was a difficult decision, especially when you take the acting element off the table and recognize that it’s your friend lying there. “It’s sad,” says Berg. “It’s an underreported aspect of filmmaking. I had no problem with Isaac dying, but seeing Taylor dying and realizing that he’s my friend and that my friend’s going to die one day, it’s just something that you never … It’s gotten me a few times in my career, directing.”

Most of the actors didn’t know their character’s fate till well into production. But halfway through filming, it was decided that Kitsch’s character would die, and it was Berg’s job to tell his longtime friend. “He took it well, but I think he probably believed up until we wrapped that day that we might change our mind — and possibly still thinks it’s not too late to go back and do a quick reshoot,” jokes Berg. 

Justin Lubin/Netflix

Does Sara reunite with Devin’s dad in Crook Springs at the end of American Primeval?

As the story begins with Sara and her son having fled Philadelphia after she murdered an abusive man, Newman sees Sara’s journey as a crucible in which “she finds out what she’s quite literally made of.” “[The] Sara at the end of this story would not have needed the protection of the man she had to kill in the beginning of the story,” he adds. “That, to me, is at the heart of this show.”

By the end of the series, Sara really is a survivor — and she’s good at it. “Her survival skills get tested in ways that a big city wouldn’t test,” says Berg. In 1857, big cities like New York and Philadelphia were comparatively modern. “In New York, you could buy a Coke,” jokes Berg. Gilpin, whose father, Jack Gilpin, plays a butler in the HBO series The Gilded Age, is mindful that that world of East Coast opulence runs parallel to the American frontier of the time. Regardless, Sara certainly wasn’t raised in a feminist culture. “If we’re going to tell the history of misogyny, we have to be honest about what it was really like,” said Gilpin. “She was a person who maybe believed the lie that her highest purpose was to sit in a parlor and wait for the right husband, because that was the option provided for her.”

In that old life, she was a woman who needed to use her beauty and intellect to find security with Devin’s father, who provided her with a son and a certain lifestyle that boded well for a while. But, in the backstory they crafted for the character, Berg says “he was basically an asshole.” Then, when she took Devin back East, the new man in Philadelphia helped ease her woes as a single mother. But once he proved to be dangerous, especially to Devin, that’s when she killed him. “And that’s where Isaac comes in,” says Berg. “She’s not able to manipulate, or coerce, or have her way with Isaac the way she might’ve with others in the past. Those were the kinds of things Betty and I talked about.”

Isaac helps Sara access the most primal side of herself that she’d had to suffocate in those high-society environments. “It’s almost like he’s a physical embodiment of something that Sara has felt inside for her whole life,” said Gilpin. “She’s just never been allowed to embody it. I thought about charting the inner Isaac coming out.”

So even though Sara loses Isaac, he helps give her the strength to realize she can stand on her own two feet and go to California. (Whether she finds Devin’s dad, however, is left unanswered.) “Sara always knew she was strong, but now she’s got an added ability to her strength,” says Berg. “ ‘I can survive. I am going to be responsible for my son and for this young girl. And we’re going to figure this shit out.’ ”

Stream all six episodes of American Primeval now, only on Netflix.

Additional reporting by Keely Flaherty.

The Making of American Primeval