Season 2 of FOX’s WAYWARD PINES wouldn’t have felt out of place on Syfy, and that’s not a compliment. Season 1 had a strong cast (Matt Dillon, Carla Gugino, Toby Jones, Juliette Lewis) and a clever twist, revealed halfway through: the bucolic yet sinister titular town was actually the last outpost of humanity, its inhabitants brought out of cryogenic sleep in the 41st century to find that they shared the world with mutated hunter beasts called “Abbies,” short for Abnormals (no credit ever given to Mel Brooks or even Marty Feldman). Wayward Pines was meant to be a closed-end miniseries, with Dillon’s protagonist heroically dead at the end, but the ratings were higher than expected, and FOX eagerly cobbled together a Season 2.
This time, the regular cast was weaker, with Jason Patric the only name on hand (some members of the Season 1 cast made guest appearances of various lengths). More seriously, with the big reveal out, there wasn’t much story to tell. The focus was on defrosted doctor Theo Yedlin (Patric), and his thorny but not terribly interesting conflicts both with the town’s proto-fascist teen leader Jason (Tom Stevens), and with Rebecca (Nimrat Kaur), who had been his own wife 2000 years ago, but who was married to another in Wayward Pines. In last week’s bizarre plot turn, Jason found out that his girlfriend Kerry (Kacey Rohl), unbeknownst to either of them, was actually his biological mother, and she–still not knowing the truth–killed him in self-defense when he attacked her. (With a little help from Yedlin, who allowed Jason to die of his wounds on the operating table.) Meanwhile, it became increasingly clear that the Abbies, far from the mindless animals Jason and the other leaders dismissed them as being, were cunning and had what amounted to telepathic superpowers.
It all seemed to be building to a climactic war between the surviving humans and the Abbies… except that Wayward Pines didn’t have anywhere near the budget to be able to stage such a battle. (There was barely enough money for some subpar shots of digital Abbie hordes milling about.) So tonight’s season finale, written by showrunner Mark Friedman and directed by noted indie horror filmmaker Ti West, had an ending but not much point. The decision had been made in last week’s episode to put all the Pines-ians back in their sleeping pods, only to discover that there was no longer enough power in the town generator to keep all the pods going. In Jason’s absence, Yedlin had to decide who would get to occupy the working pods, and who would die. Reluctantly, he did so–first condemning and then saving Rebecca’s new husband–but meanwhile he’d decided to sacrifice himself for the sake of the rest of humanity by taking all the most contagious plagues that were conveniently in the laboratory (because what lab should be without a supply of bubonic plague) and then allowing himself to be eaten by the Abbies. But it turned out that the incest subplot had a sort of payoff, as Kerry, who had finally learned Jason’s true identity, injected herself before Yedlin could, allowing herself to die and the good doctor to take her pod.
It was all rather stiff and prosaic, and with rare exceptions, not even scary. Despite West’s experience with low budgets, he wasn’t able to do anything distinctive with the dull material. To his credit, Patrick never condescended to his B-movie role, but a lot of the other acting was merely proficient. Between the unimaginative plotting and the painfully obvious budget issues, it felt more like a basic cable product than one from a major network, even as a summer series. The ratings have been below last year’s, but that was generally true of all this summer’s scripted series, and not about to be fooled again, FOX made sure that the Season 2 ending allowed for the possibility of a continuing story, so Wayward Pines isn’t necessarily over. Whether it’s a location anyone really needs to visit again is a different question.
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