Diksha Sundriyal
In Netflix’s ‘The Tourist,’ trouble ensues in the Australian Outback when a mysterious man’s arrival changes everything for the residents. The Man, who loses his memory after a car crash, leaves a bloodbath in his wake, spurring trouble in otherwise sleepy towns where nothing interesting ever happens. Two of the towns affected by the Man’s arrival are Cooper Springs and Devil’s Rock, their locations bookending the six-episode first season. The Man, his newfound friends, and all his enemies converge at these locations, making things even more interesting. After seeing all this, one is bound to wonder if any such towns, which never saw a day of trouble and then suddenly found themselves rippled with crime, exist in real life. SPOILERS AHEAD
Cooper Springs and Devil’s Rock are Fictional Towns in The Tourist
As real as the events and the people in ‘The Tourist’ appear, the entire thing is fictional, even the towns mentioned in the show. The show is set in the Australian Outback, and the crew did employ locations across the Outback to film the show, but when it comes to the names of the towns, they chose fictional names rather than using real names of the locations where they’d filmed. The towns of Port Augusta, Quorn, and Peterborough were employed to film several scenes, which were then threaded together to make it look like an entirely different type of town. Cooper Springs and Devil’s Rock were created in this manner.
The story of the Man starts at Copper Springs, where he wakes up in a hospital to discover that he knows nothing about himself. He is entirely clueless about his identity and origins and has no idea what he was doing in the Australian Outback in the first place. The amnesia is a result of the injuries sustained in the car crash that happened in the middle of nowhere, but because Cooper Springs is the largest town in the surroundings and has the best medical infrastructure, he is taken there and admitted into a hospital that takes good care of him. However, he doesn’t stay there for long.
The Man soon figures out that he won’t find any answers about himself in Cooper Springs. Instead, he needs to go back into the desolation of the Outback and try to trace the path he took before the accident. This is the only way he can figure out what happened to him. The show is left behind in his rearview mirror and doesn’t come into focus until the end when he circles back to the hospital after another car crash.
Another location that becomes important in the final leg of his journey is a town called Devil’s Rock. This is where he ends up while trying to run away from the authorities after he is blamed for a crime he didn’t commit. A location of the same name is in Canada, but there is no connection between it and the town in the story. Devil’s Rock serves only as the final stop in his journey before he is ready to say goodbye to Australia and continue forward in his quest to figure out who he really is.
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