*SPOILERS AHEAD … AND THE CORPSE OF ONE HUMAN BEING WHO DIDN’T LEARN AS FAST AS THE ABBIES*
So let me riddle you this, dear Wayward Pines viewers?
If you were wanting to find some way to head off the looming Abbie-ocalypse, in which the town will be overrun by thousands of male Abbies anxious to get their queen, nicknamed Margaret, back by murdering every last living Homo Sapiens in the vicinity, would you …
(a) Spend countless hours teaching Margaret who is a quick study and is able to figure out thing like, oh I don’t know, combination locks to cages, a system of communicating by cards to foster some sense of, if not peace and comradeship then at least of marginally declining enmity?
OR would you …
(b) Rashly storm into the lab, go on and on, all evidence to contrary – evidence so strong that it almost swayed head of the Brainwashed Originals Megan (Hope Davis) that the Abbies needed to be reasoned with, not butchered (don’t get too carried away; she remained true to the cause) – that the Abbies were a threat, we are war and that no one knows how to cook your eggs properly? (OK that last bit didn’t happen but man he was on a roll so it was only a matter of time.)
If you are a cranky, cynical scientist by the name of Dr Theo Yedlin (Jason Patric) who appreciates that Margaret is one smart cookie and needs to be talked with rather than studied at then you would have picked option (a) which, as the numbers of severely pissed-off male Abbies grows outside the walls and your home, your unwilling but hell there it is anyway home is in danger of being overrun and consigned to the dustbin of non-mutational history, seems like an eminently sensible option.
If you are scared out of his ever loving brain Jason Higgins (Tom Stevens) who is less calm, assured leader these days and more scared little boy in a fascist-military uniform, you would pick option (b) convinced that shooting the male Abbies and indeed Margaret – you’re stopped from getting that far but only just – is the way to striking back against the Abbies who goddamit refuse to play by Pilcher’s (Toby Jones) grossly flawed assumptions.
No prizes for guessing who’s on the right side of history with this one with some deftly used backstory, featuring C J Mitchell (Djimon Hounsou), underscoring who got the Abbies right and who got them wrong – psssst Pilcher may be a teeny bit off, OK a LOT, in his assumptions about the Abbies (i) that they’d die out quickly leaving humans to once again inherit the Earth and (ii) that they’d be warlike and must be exterminated (uh-uh … NO) – and why the current struggle or not just the soul, though that is happening – but the very physical existence of humanity, is more pitched than even the Chief Cynic Dr Yedlin realises, and trust me, he’s bang on the money for the most part …
You see the only person who can really say how much of a mess humanity now finds itself in is C J himself who the interspersed flashbacks showed us had been awoken for one day every 20 years to make sure that all the pods were still keeping humanity alive, to check on the state of the world and to play some chess till the time came to seal himself back in his granular prison.
It was CJ and CJ alone who witnessed through TV and radio broadcasts the decline and the decline of humanity as war, pestilence and finally plague claimed us, in this case the H1-N3 virus, or almost all of us, those who did survive mutating into a particularly aggressive form of bipedal life that Pilcher saw as aberrations but which Adam Hassler (Tim Griffin) quite correctly sees as our replacements.
If evolution is judge, jury and execution and great minds like Darwin seems to think it is, then it appears it has spoken like Judge Judy on a particularly bad day, and with a megaphone piped through a planet-wide sound system with the volume turned up to 66 gazillion on the dial.
Everyone got that or are you still not listening? Yeah I’m talking to you Jason!
Quite apart from what C J witnessed all alone with his chess games and conversations with his long-dead wife/girlfriend, which trust me was poignant, distressing and not at all pretty, he came to appreciate that there was a certain inevitability to humanity’s slow, disease-ravaged decline, that perhaps, not that he ever said as much to an eventually-roused Pilcher that many of the assumptions underpinning his great Homo Sapiens ark were flawed to the point of dooming the whole experiment.
C J saw through the great decline and fall of the human race that the Abbies weren’t so much as mutational blip on the evolutionary radar as much as they were the next inheritors of planet Earth, something that neither Pilcher nor Jason would ever countenance but which is pretty exactly what the situation is, with those who see it for what it is all too aware that if the Wayward Pines leadership doesn’t get onboard the peace-not-war bandwagon that humanity is dead in the water.
Seriously dead … you know like Megan who died before even she even realised she was dead at the hands of Margaret who gosh darn it is smarter than the average bear after all!
The recurring theme of this season is hubris – the idea that humanity is so damned important, so superior that it deserves to survive all evidence to the contrary.
But so far in the PR stakes, it’s looking more and more like Abbies 1 Humanity 0 with our pettiness, power mongering, infighting, and sheer disregard for the truth in favour of well-massaged assumptions and lies indicting far more than the baleful stare of Margaret, who like any other displaced indigenous race is looking to resume the land and place taken from them by an invader.
“Time Will Tell” made it clear that not only is humanity is on borrowed time and blinded by Pilcher-induced assumptions that have hardened in place such as that they rebuff, like Teflon, any moves by the likes of Yedlin and to a lesser extent Hassler and Kerry to change them to suit the current reality on the ground, but it placed humanity as the usurper, the taker of a place and time that is no longer theirs.
They are now the unwelcome foreign interlopers, the invaders, the usurpers, and a smug sense of misplaced superiority aside, they are doomed by the very race that they think is beneath them.
Think again humanity – you are now the cockroach underfoot …
- So Margaret is on the run and humanity is cracking from within and without. Just another day in the “paradise” that is Wayward Pines when next episode “Pass Judgement” casts its judgemental gaze upon us …