Here Is Everything You Need to Know About the Twin Brother of Rick Legarski on 'Big Sky'
Oct. 7 2021, Published 9:00 p.m. ET
Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1 of Big Sky.
We love a classic twin twist on a show, which is why when John Carroll Lynch (who originally played Rick Legarski) appeared on the Season 2 premiere of Big Sky, we could hardly contain our excitement. In the season finale of Season 1, Rick Legarski was murdered by his wife after she found out about his sex trafficking scheme.
In the final scene of the Season 2 premiere, we encounter a man whistling, his back turned towards the camera. He moves through a large outdoor area, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, passing animals in cages. It looks like a sanctuary of some kind. He then enters a darkened house where he unlocks a door and says, "Wakey wakey!" It is then we see his face, the face of Rick Legarski, feeding food to a chained-up Ronald (Brian Geraghty).
Wait, is Rick Legarski still alive?
Nope! Rick is (finally) really dead. Rick's twin was teased out to us by showrunner Elwood Reid during the Television Critics Association 2021 summer tour when he said, “Careful viewers did pay attention. He does have a twin.”
At that moment, John Carroll Lynch interrupted the chat to exclaim, “When you get beaten to death with a hammer, you likely think that’s the last time you get to hang out with the family ... I just think it’s great that Big Sky is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe now, so we can use the multiverse.” If ABC and Marvel are both owned by Disney (isn't everything?), does that make Rick a supervillain?
What do we know about Rick Legarski's twin so far?
His name is Wolf Legarski, and his ponytail suggests he's a bit more relaxed than his state trooper brother. In an interview with TVLine, John Carroll Lynch talked about really going into the character of Wolf with Elwood Reid. They agreed he would be the polar opposite of Rick. "I started looking at images of people who were in the world that Wolf was to inhabit, animal trainers, people who worked with dogs a lot, and I saw a guy with a ponytail, and that really kind of started to gel for me."
John is also giving Wolf bad teeth, a conscious character choice he made based on something that happened with his own brother. Laughing while recalling this memory, he told a story about his brother Dan accidentally hitting him in the face with the family's Town & Country station wagon. "I was running around the car, and he opened up the door at the same time that I was coming around," he said. "That Town & Country door swung right into my face and broke my front tooth"
By seeing how utterly messed up Wolf is, albeit in a different way than Rick, it's clear the Legarski brothers come from a fairly broken home. The glaring difference between the twins is Rick attempted to bend to the will of the law until he no longer could, while Wolf was never on the grid. When asked to describe Wolf Legarski in three words by Entertainment Weekly, John said, "Disciplined, loving, and deluded."
Big Sky airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. EST on ABC
