*SPOILERS AHEAD … AND THE END OF THE WORLD … AGAIN (SORT OF)*
REM may have felt fine about the end of the world but not so much the morally-challenged folk of Wayward Pines who suddenly found just slightly less than half their number surplus to requirements.
Yup, the end of the world had arrived again – seems to keep happening a lot to these benighted souls, many of whom hadn’t asked to be kidnapped and taken 2000 years into the future in the world first place, and who now, to add insult to fatal injury, were now going to be left apart to be ripped apart by the Abby hordes.
So no peaceful shuffling off this mortal coil over Matlock reruns so much as dinner for a bunch of evolutionary aberrations.
As you can imagine news of the reduced number of people who would make it into the pods didn’t go down too well and there were the customary riots, looting – seems like a shortterm strategy with no real payoff but what the hell right? – and screaming crowds baying for blood.
See it doesn’t take long for the shiny veneer of civilisation to wear off, leaving the sort of animalistic baying for retribution that made the Abbies look like the very soul of socially-acceptable behaviour.
But frankly who can blame them? They’d been kidnapped, treated like citizens of an autocratic republic with every last detail of their unasked-for new lives detailed and now they were about to be effectively murdered.
Yeah I wouldn’t too happy with the powers that be in those circumstances either.
One man who most definitely wasn’t happy, and hadn’t been happy since he was unceremoniously reawoken was Theo Yedlin (Jason Patric), who saw his chance to enact some revenge.
In this case on one Jason Higgins, Lord of the Fascist Flies and Deer in the Dictatorial Headlight, who came rather the worse for wear after he found out that the woman he had been sleeping with, Kerry Campbell (Kacey Rohl) was in fact HIS MOTHER.
All very Oedipal and as you can imagine, not the sort of thing to make a man already unhinged more than a little – he kept bleating about Pilcher this and Pilcher that even when it was patently that that deluded boat had well and truly sailed and hit an iceberg and sunk and been devoured by sea bottom dwellers and … – suddenly react with peace, calm and equanimity.
He was, of course, rushed to the hospital where Theo went through machinations of saving him and alas, failed; it all looked above board and ship shape but eagle-eyed intern Oscar (Amitai Marmorstein) queried why the good doctor has missed a critical part of Operating on a Bleeding Person 101.
He was quickly hushed up and Theo went out to the crowd outside the hospital, who apparently with the Abby Cataclysm mere hours or perhaps moments from happening had nothing better to do than loiter outside a medical facility, and told them Jason had sadly died, that they must rally and fight to survive … and oh yeah, Jason was a big fat dictatorial turd.
OK, he didn’t use those words but he was pretty close.
In the end who was in charged mattered little as the selection process for who would live and who would die became readily apparent to anyone and everyone and rolled on regardless of who was upset or vexed by the whole thing.
Not even Theo could change the way of things and so Rebecca (Nimrit Kaur) found herself separated from Xander (Josh Helman) and Lucy (Emma Tremblay) from her brother Frank (Michael Garza) – he was left behind thanks to non-useful to survival of the species homosexuality, a nasty piece of Nazi-era discrimination if there was one – and families from either the mother or the father.
As evacuations go, it was messy and emotionally-wrenching and poorly-handled as you’d expect, and underlined how flawed Pilcher’s self-proclaimed visionary plan for the future had been, littered as it was by a control freak mentality, the usurping of basic human rights and a complete denial of basic human nature.
In the end though while the plan largely went to, ahem, plan, a few notable exceptions emerged – Arleen (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), the living breathing comic heart of Wayward Pines made it into a pod after all, Theo was in a pod, then not in a pod then back in again after Kerry, full of remorse for her part in the downfall of the town, took his place as a Typhoid Mary who, injected with the Black Death, Typhoid and another nasty epidemic disease, was going to walk outside the walls and essentially kill off all the Abbies.
And Frank and Xander were spirited onto the Wayward Pines Ark too by means not explained and so everyone went to sleep, delayed only by a last minute crisis of confidence by CJ (Djimon Hounsou) who wondered if they should even bother hitting the reset button.
And so ended Wayward Pines season 2, which essentially repeated season 1 with a lot less action and way more humanity is doomed conversations.
As an exercise in existential musing, it excelled; humanity was laid out as the poorer of the two species – and this was compared to slavering, flesh-hungry Abbies who it turns out did have a civilised attribute or three hundred after all – one unfit to be saved at all, especially in the heavyhanded way that Pilcher dreamt up and enacted.
The major criticism then is that the show, which clearly left with a “to be continued” neon sign flashing above its closing scene of everyone going to sleep and Abbies doing familial things out in the forest as if to once again affirm their innate “humanity”, really left itself with nowhere to go.
As endings go, it was dramatic yes but after spending ten episodes extolling on the baser aspects of human nature and how these almost always rise to the surface, Wayward Pines hasn’t exactly left us rooting for the future of Homo Sapiens.
And who’s to say that the same pattern won’t repeat itself once everyone wakes up again in 2000, 10,000, 50,000 years? Either way, and even with the Abbies possibly gone – Theo’s Typhoid Mary gambit may work but who’s to say it will? – people may embrace the better angels of their nature and utopia will at last be achieved.
But at this point, pessimism nixes optimism and the whole brave experiment to keep humanity on the face of the Earth seems doomed to failure.
So a cracker of a final episode yes, with genuinely good moments (although frank, how could you leave the kids behind at the school?) but one that essentially finished off backing the show into a narrative dead end with only the same old same old awaiting everyone.
Quite whether Fox will renew the show isn’t known at this stage, but much as I like Wayward Pines and think there is still potential in the premise, I can’t help wonder whether it wouldn’t be better just to let humanity slip off into the long good night perchance to dream of a more sustainable longterm narrative.