Wayward Pines - 'One of Our Senior Realtors has Chosen to Retire'

Graffiti = Death
Murder = Sheriff
Presumably the mayor is an arsonist and all the school teachers habitual
jaywalkers

Having killed the Sheriff and inadvertently fed his body to the totally wolves, honest, Ethan is somewhat surprised when the night mailman delivers a school acceptance letter and uniform for Ben, like a very small Hagrid. He breaks into the Sheriff's office to steal some hardware, but is surprised by Arlene the receptionist, Pam the nurse and a man named Fisher, the Mayor of Pines, who have brought cake to congratulate him on replacing the retiring Pope. They even bring a copy of the newspaper announcing Pope's retirement.

As Sheriff, Ethan gets access to the files of everyone in town, listing not just their occupations and addresses, but the details of their former lives. For example, Mayor Fisher's wife is the Stepford school teacher and a former hypnotherapist, so Ben's induction interview ("Where do you come from? Where do you live? Where is home?") is almost as creepy as the fact that he seems to have been assigned a cute girl to help him feel more welcome. As the Mayor explains when the Burkes invite the Fishers for dinner, "It's all about the children; shaping their minds."

Theresa confronts Kate, who basically gives her the condensed version of the 'your life as you knew it is over' spiel, and Nurse Pam makes a citizen's arrest on the realtor who introduced the Burkes to their house and pointed out the monitors. Apparently this man, Peter, is an 'insurgent', who defaces public property with demoralising graffiti. As this is his third strike, she tells Burke, he needs to be hounded through the streets by a mob before Ethan cuts his throat. Justice! (The title of the episode is taken from a letter sent to Theresa offering her his job.) Naturally, Ethan refuses, and bonds with Peter for a while before trying to smuggle him away, learning that he was brought here after an indiscrete liaison with a much younger Nurse Pam. Peter hugs him, tells him the town needs him, and then throws himself onto the deadly electric fence.

Ethan decides to leave Theresa and Ben in the town while he goes for help, scaling the cliff beside the fence while something humanoid but inhuman watches from the shadows.

Wayward Pines grows ever more mysterious, but also less credible, the powers that be apparently feeling that the way to win Ethan over is to give him access to enough information to confirm that serious hink is going on, to all the guns, and persuade him to their way of thinking by... I don't know; having Pam needle him about being shit until sheer machismo makes him determine to be the best darn sheriff this town has ever seen. And then there's Ethan, who has realised that something is up with the school, which is run by a former hypnotherapist, but leaves Ben there while he goes for help, despite the fact that there is clearly some wibbly wobbly timey wimey shit going on. Matt Dillon's naturally baffled expression is working increasingly hard here.

At this point, the series seems to me to be a lot of excellent parts - the performances are top notch - struggling to create a coherent whole. I think the main problem is that their determination to stretch out the mystery while involving Ethan's family has created a scenario that seems utterly untenable and forces unlikely turns such as Ethan's appointment as Sheriff while still utterly at odds with the town, and his knowing abandonment of his wife and son despite the possibility that any help he brings back after a week could be mysteriously a decade too late.