Wayward Pines is like Twin Peaks, except modern and for Fox. It also has nothing to do with David Lynch, the person responsible for making Twin Peaks great. Instead, it’s from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan, which is, at this juncture, less of a selling point and more of a curse. After giving the world some good movies (Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs Until the Alien Showed Up), he unleashed a pretty bland movie (The Village) and then some real pieces of shit (that movie about a woman who lives in a swimming pool, the egregious abortion where Marky Mark and Zooey Deschanel run around making frightened faces). It stars Matt Dillon, who is best known for portraying Dally, the heart-throb who can’t be tamed in the 1983 classic The Outsiders. My thoughts going into it are as follows:
I mean, I GUESS this could be interesting, right?
Man, I need to watch The Outsiders. I fucking love that movie.
Patrick Swayze is dead. I hate when I remember that. RIP, Swayze.
Anyway, should you watch this show? Let’s see.
0:01 Matt Dillon is bloody and waking up confused in this woods.
0:02 Now he’s talking to a psychiatrist. I think this is a flashback. His name is either Nathan or Ethan. (I watched the whole episode and I’m still not sure.) He’s talking about his feelings for another “agent.” Now it’s modern times again and he’s wandering through a town that I’m assuming is Wayward Pines. He wanders into a coffee shop and an Asian barista says, “you’re in Wayward Pines!” I was right.
0:03 Here come the credits. It’s shots of a small model town and some music. Oh, it’s a model town of Wayward Pines! I get it. Because this is that show.
0:04 Here’s some back story! He’s looking for two missing agents and he used to date one of them. Like, illicitly date one of them. He was in a car crash apparently and the other agent he was with was burned up to death. We learn all of this through hurried conversations at the agency. The guy talking is named Adam.
0:05 Now we’re looking at Matt Dillon’s hot wife and his strange looking son who are sharing tacos by some body of water. She’s calling Matt Dillon’s phone and getting worried. His weird looking son might be in The Strokes, I’m not sure.
0:07 Matt Dillon is in the hospital and it’s very barren. There’s a nurse there and man, is she sufficiently fucking kooky. When she leaves, he rips his wires and IVs out and grabs his suit from the closet. She tries to stop him as he gets on the elevator and it is clear that this bitch is CUH-RAZY.
0:08 He’s back in town and he goes to “Biergarten” where Juliette Lewis is the bartender. She orders a burger, “bloody.” He doesn’t have his wallet, but she’s all, “that ain’t no thing” and he tells her he’ll come back once he’s got his business figured out. He also tells her that he’s secret service and she lets him try to call his house. No one answers, but we learn they have a wacky answering machine message which is something I don’t think people actually have these days.
0:10 More back story! He tells her that he’s looking for two missing agents and then she gives him her address because he doesn’t have a wallet or a place to stay, but also because she probably also wants the Matty Dillon D.
0:12 On his way to the sheriff’s office, he finds a box that’s making fake cricket noises in the bushes. SHIT’S GETTING WEIRD, YOU GUYS. Sheriff’s office is closed.
0:13 So he wakes up the next morning in the hotel. He overslept and the desk clerk is at the door, and like the nurse, he is also fucking weird. Something about this town is bananas, that much I know.
0:16 The address Juliette Lewis wrote down for him is a spooky, crumbling house. He goes in anyway and I’m beginning to question his credentials as a secret service agent.
0:17 Oh, SNAP—one of the missing agents is a decomposing corpse chained to a scary-ass bed, y’all!
0:20 He’s at the sheriff’s office now. The secretary—who acts peculiar like all of the other people in this town so far—is that one lady from that thing. You’d know her if you saw her.
0:21 Terrence Howard is the sheriff. I don’t know what I know him from, or how I know it’s him, but I do. He’s eating an ice cream cone as he listens to Matt Dillon’s story. “You like rum raisin,” he asks, not really seeming to care about the corpse or anything else. He’s really good in this scene!
0:24 Matt Dillon goes back to Biergarten and a redheaded man sitting at the bar says, “Juliette Lewis doesn’t work here!” Matt Dillon starts getting a little crazy and the redheaded guy blackjacks his brain when he’s turned around.
0:28 An ad shows me they’re bringing back Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? and I wonder why. Who was clamoring for that show’s return?
0:31 He’s back at that hospital again, and now he’s handcuffed to the bed. A little man who looks like a penis introduces himself as a psychiatrist and he tells Matt Dillon that he’s having a psychotic episode, which is something Matt Dillon refutes. He promises brain surgery will fix him. The nurse comes back and sedates him.
0:34 When the nurse leaves him momentarily unattended, Juliette Lewis shows up and starts wheeling him out. They try to make a break for it, but he’s wobbly from the horse tranquilizers. He hides in a room and she hides in another and then the nurse finds the corridor where they’re both hiding. The nurse thinks she’s about to figure it out but then BLAMMO! Matt Dillon shoves her into a glass fire extinguisher case, bloodying her up. They run out—slowly, on account of Matt Dillon’s drugged nature.
0:43 Juliette Lewis takes him to ANOTHER spooky house but I don’t think it’s the same one? BACK STORY ALERT: She explains that SHE came to town as a sales rep to help with the Y2K bug. Then she says, “that was 1999. I’ve been here a year,” and he’s all, “bitch! It’s 2014!” Just. Crazy.
0:45 Matt Dillon’s pretty wife is talking to Adam, Matt Dillon’s buddy agent, and Adam is explaining that there’s no trace of Matt Dillon. Some part of Matt Dillon’s pretty wife thinks it’s all a cover and that he’s actually out gallivanting with the agent he used to throw his dick into. (The one he’s supposedly looking for.) Adam assures her that this isn’t the case though and she seems to believe him.
0:46 He wakes up in Spooky House Number Two and goes back to the town for some reason. He happens across a happy cookout in the town square. Suddenly, he’s having a flashback where he’s talking to—and then making out with—the lady agent he’s there to find. Maybe he recognizes her at the cookout?
0:48 Oh, yep, he does. He follows her home, which seems totally smart. He goes to her door and knocks. He asks for Katie and holy shit, the lady of the house is named Katie too! Wait—now she’s admitting that she IS the Katie he’s looking for. WHAT. Only her hair is longer and she’s all, “sit down on the stoop, Matt Dillon. Let me talk to you. They’re watching us.” He sees a camera on her porch’s ceiling fan.
0:51 She says that she’s been there 12 years and he says no, it’s been five months and so it’s like the whole Juliette Lewis thing but in reverse. OH, THIS WACKY TOWN. (I think that’s what they should have named the show; Wayward Pines sounds like an old folks’ home.) She asks him to leave because he’s putting her in danger.
0:53 He hot-wires a car and now he’s getting away! What a disappointing conclusion!
0:54 Oh, except he just keeps driving through the town, and reentering it, and driving through it again, and reentering it.
0:55 Adam is meeting with someone outside of the secret service building. Oh shit, it’s the psychiatrist who was telling Matt Dillon he’d be better after brain surgery!!! Adam says that he wants to “call it off” but the penis-looking doctor says it’s too late. WHOA.
0:57 Matt Dillon parks his stolen car and runs through the woods. He finds the edge of town, and it’s a giant wall with all sorts of security looking things and signs that say “if you leave, you will die.” He doesn’t try to leave because, damn.
0:59 He goes back to the car and then a cop pulls him over as he starts to drive off. This is GREAT NEWS because he needs some help right now, but oh wait, it’s Terrance Fucking Howard.
Anyway, this all seemed like a long Twilight Zone episode without a conclusion. That’s fine, I guess, because it’s a series and not a standalone episode. Despite a little clunky dialogue and a bit of unnecessary meandering, I think I’m legitimately interested in watching at least another episode. Good job, M. Night! You can watch the first episode ON DEMAND, and it’s also re-airing on May 21st before the second episode airs.
Made the mistake –on a now ex-friend’s advice — of reading the first novel (it’s a trilogy) from which the show is adapted. Indeed, from your description, it sounds like that episode ends right at the midway point of that book.
Was totally underwhelmed by the plot, character development and “surprise” twists and turns.
But you have fun with that.
Yeah, if characters don’t start fleshing out within the next couple of episodes, it could certainly be problematic. Everyone in the town being “weird” and “creepy” was a good tone-setter, but it’ll get old fast.
no offense, lefty, but it got old fast just reading your account of the one show.
off topic… did anyone else know that Randy Raley is apparently back on the air? one morning drive a week (thurs) on….KKFI. cool.
I am going to give it a chance. The production values are pretty good. Once you let yourself go and buy in to the “nothing is exactly as it seems nor is it otherwise” part, there might be an interesting story there, although it moves too slowly for my taste. I enjoyed your review very much.
Thanks, Lydia!
I have to give someone credit for having read something more than a Marvel comic book. At some point we all get tired of Rocky 27, and the movies made about the Brady Bunch, some twenty years later. Some books do not make good movies, and some inspire sequels long after the author is dead, such as Bourne Flatulence Revisited. Ludlum would be turning over in his grave. Not every network can have a success like Game of Thrones, and if they do, like HBO, they’d discover the cost seriously crimps the production of other programming. AMC has several “wins” in the can with Breaking Bad, Hell on Wheels, and Mad Men, but they’re coming to an end. We’re already seeing Better Call Saul, based on Breaking Bad, and the magic is gone. In short, regular network television has little to offer against satelite and cable. Even Fox is an also ran.
Better Call Saul is just as good or even better than Breaking Bad. The Brady Bunch movies were pretty funny. I understand where you are coming from but those are bad examples you cite.
The show features a deranged hospital nurse, which is closely a kin to including an evil circus clown — not the sort of thing that most want to see because it hits too close to our phobias. They should’ve cast that hot redhead with all the cleavage as the nurse, and then had the ex-wife be the demented one (to the extent that someone has to be unhinged on the show). Many of us can identify with a psychotic old lady, but we want no part of that in our female health care broads, who should be hot, bosomy, and non-murderous as a general proposition.
Haha. Well said.