A few weeks ago, I asked why those of us who were still watching Fox’s Wayward Pines continued to do so. All the mysteries of the first season have been resolved, the mysteries of the second season haven’t held much intrigue, the characters are flat, the dialogue constipated, and none of the interesting possibilities the series continues to tease ever amount to anything. Arcs are aborted, characters are randomly killed off, and two-time Oscar nominee Djimon Hounsou is criminally wasted as a side character who occasionally offers updates on the crops. Has Wayward Pines given us any reason to continue watching?
Last night’s sixth episode, “City Upon a Hill,” finally provided us with the perfect reason to persist: To watch the Abbies destroy the humans.
With four episodes remaining in the season, and probably the series, this is the way that Wayward Pines has to end. Not just because the human characters are a potent combination of unlikable, dumb, and prideful. It’s also not just because this new society has been reduced to “procreation rooms” designed to create 40th century Übermenschen, or that they will kill anyone not fit to breed, even if it goes against their sexual orientation or maturity level. Wayward Pines is not a good place to live, and the 1,100 humans remaining on the planet hardly deserve the title of “human.” They’re chattel with dour dispositions, and given that the rest of the planet is overrun with Abbies, it’s all they will ever be: Breeding machines doomed to arranged pairings and menial jobs, forced to live on what looks like the set of The Truman Show for the rest of their meaningless lives.
More importantly, the Abbies deserve to survive more than the humans. Consider the big picture: A narcissistic, megalomaniac named David Pilcher abducted scores of people and forced them into a 2,000 year cryogenic sleep, during which time he had predicted that the human race would go extinct. When they awoke 2,000 years later, however, he discovered the humans were not gone. They’d devolved into these Aberrations, animalistic creatures that have taken over the planet.
But maybe the Aberrations haven’t devolved. Maybe they evolved into something better than humans, a race of creatures that doesn’t abuse the planet, that has forsaken war and politics and has returned to the land, where they create peaceful communities and communicate through telepathy. What did Pilcher and his men do when confronted by nonviolent families of Abbies frolicking in the woods and caring for their children? He shot and killed them with machine guns from the safe distance of his helicopter.
No wonder the Abbies are pissed.
Maybe the Abbies didn’t immediately fight back, not because they are dumb, but because conflict and war had been removed from their society, and they are only just now learning how to defend themselves by watching the citizens of Wayward Pines. It’s their planet, after all. What gives Pilcher and his village of Aryan douchebags the right to squat on it? The Abbies were living nice, peaceful lives until this gated community came along and started using barbaric weapons from the past to mow down the Abbies of the present, round them up, and do experiments on them. What did they discover? That the female Abbies have bigger brains and the power of telepathy. Aha!
Wayward Pines is screwed. They have six weeks left of food before they starve to death. There’s next to no medication remaining. Weaponry is running low, and the Abbies have figured out how to fight back out of necessity, not out of savagery. There’s a showdown coming between the citizens of Wayward Pines and the Abbies. Wayward Pines is outnumbered one million to one, and those Abbies are even willing to sacrifice themselves by building towers made up of their own corpses so they can climb over the Wayward Pines’ wall. That’s dedication to the status quo.
Truthfully, I don’t know how Wayward Pines is going to hold them off for another four episodes.
