Wayward Pines - 'The Truth'

Manly.

As Ethan heads off into the woods with a shotgun and a manly action face, his son Ben, utterly frustrated with his mother's unexplained clinginess and rather less concerned about possible conspiracies than the possibility that he might score with his assigned cutey, is called into Room 101 for 'orientation'. Ethan faces the humanoid monsters in the woods - super-fast and razor-clawed, but otherwise basically naked dudes - as he makes his way to Boise. He passes ruins where there should be buildings, before finally reaching the wreck of what used to be Boise. Meanwhile, Ben is learning that the monsters are 'abbies', an aberration of human evolution that has arisen while the children and their parents slept for 2,000 years in suspended animation.

Mrs Fisher's creepy over-familiarity is reminiscent of real-life hypnotists like
Derren Brown, but even more creepy in a teacher.

The children are told that they are part of the first generation, the hope of the future, brought to Wayward before the collapse of the civilisation to be the future of humanity after. They are watched over by the founder of the town, David Pilcher - the man Kate Hewson was sent to track down - but must not tell their families, adults who learned the truth having previously turned self-destructive.

In Boise, the psychiatrist Dr Jenkins comes in a helicopter to collect Ethan, introducing himself as David Pilcher. He explains that Wayward is the last refuge of humanity and they flee from a pack - although Mrs Fisher uses the word herd - of abbies. Ben and his fellow orientees are photographed and brought into a hall for a candlelit welcome where the other children do everything short of chanting 'one of us'.

This is surely the stuff of adolescent nightmares.

And Theresa... Theresa gropes slowly towards an inkling of the truth that her family have just been handed on a plate while enduring the mild leching of her new boss. To say that she is not pulling her weight as a character might be an understatement.

For the first time in a couple of episodes, Wayward Pines makes more sense after 'The Truth'. Clearly Mayor Fisher's pronouncement was literal truth; the town is all about the children; the adult abductees are basically maintenance workers to keep things running while the more mentally flexible younger generation are prepped to take over by the few who are in the know. It's still a deeply flawed system which relies on an increasingly wobbly control mechanism, but less rockheaded if all of the grownups are deemed expendable. Well... all except Ethan, and that's odd given the level of trouble he's caused.

Coming to this after the first book I notice a lot of flaws, but it's interesting to note that reviewers not familiar with the books were heading for the same time travel explanation I leaned towards while reading. Onwards and upwards, perhaps to an episode in which Theresa does something which contributes materially to the plot.