If you were disappointed that season 1 of Outer Range didn’t have enough sci-fi in it, Josh Brolin knows how you feel. The actor, who has played Thanos for Marvel and Gurney Halleck in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films, knows a thing or two about nerd culture, and he regrets that the first season of his Prime Video series didn’t spend enough time exploring the big interdimensional portal in Royal Abbott’s backyard.

“We were really finding our way in season 1,” Brolin tells Entertainment Weekly. “It was a great concept and we never really saw it through in a way that I felt totally comfortable with.”

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Rest assured, season 2 does not shy away from that portal. From the first episode of the new season, things get timey-wimey. Brolin’s Royal is now convinced that drifter Autumn (Imogen Poots) is actually his daughter Amy, grown up and visiting from the future. Meanwhile, Native Americans and buffalo are pouring forth into 2024 America.

Some of that genre change is due to Brolin’s goals for Outer Range, and some of it is due to Charles Murray, who takes over as showrunner from original creator Brian Watkins. Brolin says he and Murray were quickly on the same page about storytelling.

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“It was really fun to be involved in the show not as a vanity producer, but as an active producer — getting in there with Charles and saying, ‘Let's really design this whole thing with a solid foundation this time’” Brolin says. “What can be the most explosive? What can be the most dynamic? Where do we need to take a breath and allow people to relax and then hit 'em with this other thing?”

Messing around with space and time, after all, is never simple. What does the modern “American West” mean when native people and bison, both of whom were nearly exterminated during the process of Americans settling the western frontier, come roaring back? If time is no longer linear, what does that mean for other concepts that Royal takes for granted — like masculinity? Or God?

Brolin has a simple comparison.

“This is the ayahuasca trip that you're afraid to take,” Brolin says of Outer Range season 2. “This is the thing that I appreciated when I read Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles as a kid. This is the thing that I appreciate about Dune: You have this fantastical otherworldly thing, but then you're also watching this coming-of-age story about what it means to gain power: Are you going to use it for good? Are you going to use it for bad? Are you going to use it selfishly? I love all this stuff. I love big themes.”

Outer Range season 2 is streaming now on Prime Video.