TV Round-Up - Agent Carter, Wayward Pines and Dark Matter

Symbolism!

I've been letting the TV reviews slide a little of late, so here's some catch up.

The season finale of Agent Carter, 'Valediction', delivered hard, from Howard Stark's return to save the day, through his failure and Peggy Carter's quiet triumph, defeating Dottie in combat before talking the hypnotised Howard down before Jarvis had no choice but to fire on his plane.

Stark had a lot of nice moments, playing up his own attachment to Captain America, the only good thing he ever helped to create, and finally realising that he needed to destroy his 'bad babies' rather than hoarding his mistakes. I was impressed by the doomsday weapon of choice, the rage gas proving not to be a deliberate invention but an accidental one intended to allow soldiers to operate on minimal sleep. Howard Stark is far more interesting as a flawed genius whose good intentions always end up creating weapons (which is of course a fine parallel to his son, and a family trait which culminates in the birth of Ultron) than as a father of monsters. Sousa also gets a much deserved hurrah, disabling Ivchenko while wearing earplugs.

We end with Thompson accepting all the credit, because he's a douchebag, if not without redeeming features, and Carter's recognition that what matters is that she knows what she is worth. It was also good to see the strengthening friendship between Carter and Jarvis, which has been a delight all season.

"The hell just happened..."

After a strong opening and an excellent couple of revelatory episodes, Wayward Pines sort of lost its way in the latter half of the season, leaning heavily on a contrived conflict between Ethan and Ben - engineered largely by the almost pointlessly Svengaliesque schoolteacher - and the emergence of the upperclassmen of the Wayward Pines Academy as the Midwich Militia, breaking into the Sheriff's office to execute insurgents in the name of the 'rule of law'. The Academy's curriculum is clearly short on illustrations of irony.

When Ethan reveals the truth to the people, Pilcher shows his true colours as a control freak and shuts down the fence, intending to start over with the next batch in storage. Ethan and Kate lead the population to safety and Ethan sacrifices his life to allow Kate, Theresa and Pam to build a better Wayward Pines, only for an epilogue to reveal that creepy, sociopathic youth has had its day as Ben awakens from a coma to find the town just as locked down as before, with added lynchings and a messianic statue of Pilcher; the kind of pleasant small town you hope will soon be eaten by the deformed cannibal descendants of humanity, because fuck those snotty little American Psycho wannabes.

Never trust anyone who wears a business suit on a spaceship.

In Dark Matter, it's time for a heist. Rescued by 'friendly' corporation Mikkei from a distinctly unfriendly flotilla, the crew of the Raza are encouraged to consider joining another crew for a vault job. Two doesn't trust the offer, but is overruled by the boys, because they're idiots. The heist primarily serves to establish Five as a full member of the team, rather than 'the kid', while the sudden but inevitable betrayal is used to expose Two's true nature as a largely indestructible superwoman. No, seriously; in addition to shrugging off the zombie plague and healing in hours, she can now add 'surviving in hard vacuum' to her achievements.

The poor Android, meanwhile, creates a holographic version of her default programme to monitor her for errors, and then gets ambushed and deactivated again, since she's basically too badass for the rest of the crew to be in peril if she's not out of it.

I'm not sure if Dark Matter would hold out for a second season, but it's been enjoyable enough. I am definitely looking forward to the finale of Dark Matter and a new season of Agent Carter, but honestly I couldn't care less if Wayward Pines got renewed. 

Wayward Pines - Betrayal

Big bada Boom!

Ethan Burke is in a bind, unable to make the truth about Wayward Pines public for fear of starting a panic. He does confide in his wife, however, who immediately assumes he has been brainwashed, which is actually reasonable enough given that he was ranting about surveillance and control and then suddenly is all 'it's 4028 so let's go along with it.' He also begins investigating the insurgents, and achieves in hours what Pilcher's entire team couldn't crack in years. Deducing that Kate is the ringleader, he tries to tell her the truth, but she also disbelieves him and thinks he's drunk the kool aid. Even when he stops the first attack on the fence, she won't roll on the rest of the group, and he realises that there is a second bomb.

I can not think of a more effective passion killer than teacher-
approved sexual pairings, except perhaps you parents giving
you a pack of condoms and a roguish wink on your way out.

Meanwhile, Ben Burke and his assigned special friend Amy are called up in front of the class during sex ed and basically presented as the ideal Wayward Pines couple who should not feel reticent in asking for a hall pass to boff like weasels in the toilets, because damn the teacher is keen for these kids to breed. This makes sense - Wayward lost almost a townful of survivors in the first panic so its numbers must be wobbly, and like the First Generation, any subsequent children can be raised Pines instead of living the lie of the 21st century - but is still creepy as all get out. It's not that the sex ed class is encouraging them to reproduce so much as how into it the Mrs F seems. She urges Amy to move forward with Ben and the two of them sneak out and hide on the delivery van... which then explodes.

My main takeaways from this episode are:

1. Pilcher's volunteers are useless assholes (I think it was supposed to be 'Ethan is awesome'.)
2. To Theresa, subtle is something that happens to other people.
   Theresa: I thought I'd check out that vacant lot.
   Big Mike: Don't check out the vacant lot.
   Theresa: I checked out the vacant lot.
   Big Mike: I said don't do that!
   Theresa: There's some sort of hatch there.
   Big Mike: How are you not understanding that I don't care and want you not to care?
3. Wayward Pines kids have a way different relationship with their teacher than ordinary kids; possibly that's the whole 'secret cult' thing.

Wayward Pines - 'Choices'

"Abby... Somebody. Abby Normal!"*

After last week's flurry of exposition, we have... more exposition. Where Ethan was essentially illustrating the truths revealed to Ben in 'The Truth', however, this week it's him getting the info dump.

Pilcher and his sister, Nurse Pam, explain how he discovered that humanity was on the brink of a catastrophic environmental and evolutionary collapse. Unable to convince the world, he devoted his genius and fortune to a project to create an Ark of sorts, developing revolutionary cryonic technology and creating the vast underground facility which stored his chosen survivors for 2,000 years and now serves as its support facility, nurturing it towards self-sufficiency.

All is not well, however. While Pilcher and his volunteers - including Mrs Fisher and Arnold Pope - were prepared for the new world, the first group to be awakened into the town freaked out, either fleeing into the abbie infested woods or simply destroying themselves and their families. Thus the adults are now kept in ignorance, merely paving the way for the First Generation, but some will never accept, and there is a resistance group planning to blow up the fence. Back in town, Theresa follows a paper trail to the mysterious Lot 33, while Ben struggles to deal with the truth and Kate and her husband build a bomb.

'Choices' once more does much to clarify the world of Wayward Pines, and brings us to the end of the material I know from the book. It works hard to ensure that Ethan's choice to throw in with the authorities seems reasonable, by giving a grim alternative - the fence is blown, the abbies storm the town - and by having him set his own conditions - no more Reckonings; no executions and a phasing out of the universal surveillance. While he accepts that people can't be told outright, he has no will to enforce a reign of terror. It also shows that what the town has been missing is a new voice in this secret cabal; someone who hasn't drunk all the kool aid and can still see beyond the party line.

There is a line of social commentary, even satire, in Pilcher's initial frustration with a society frittering its existence away with trivial entertainments, always putting off what needs to be done in favour of watching the latest TV craze or writing about it on the internet. It's always a little odd watching this sort of satire get stuck in to the hand that feeds, but it also explains why Pilcher didn't arrange for someone to lay in the next fifty years worth of DVDs after the hibernation began in order to provide some bread and circuses to distract the people.

I think the most important facet of the last couple of episodes is that they are bringing together the plot threads and tying off the material from book one, which means that we don't have the question of what the hell Pilcher thinks he's doing anymore. Now that Ethan is in on the secret, it is no longer madness to give him the badge and the guns, and he doesn't have to try to escape over and over and then have everyone act as if it's all hunky-dory. All-in-all it makes for a more convincing, and thus more compelling, story. Now, if only they can fit Theresa back in decently.

* It was this or 'Is it because I is slate grey?'

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.

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.

Wayward Pines - 'Our Town, Our Law'

"I'm a reasonable man, although I will confess a bit rapey."

Now that Ethan has twice made a direct escape attempt from Wayward Pines and actually stabbed a guy rather than just being accused of a murder he (probably) didn't commit, and has witnessed the Sheriff execute his friend Beverly, he is naturally still given the complete run of the place. (In fairness, this continuing liberty clearly pisses off Sheriff Arnold 'This is my town' Pope to no end. Ethan is slowly realising that there is more going on here than a local sheriff on a power trip; there is someone else pulling the strings.

He makes another escape attempt, stowing away on a curiously general purpose delivery truck which takes him to an underground garage full of abandoned cars, where he is once more knocked out by Pope and dragged back topside. To his astonishment, he finds that he now has a house in Wayward Pines - Beverly's old house - and that Theresa and Ben apparently live there with him. All three of the Burkes are pretty weirded out, especially when Pope comes around being all creepy at Theresa (his alpha male attitude taking on uncomfortably rapey overtones with Theresa.)

Ethan makes one more run at getting information from Kate, learning that she really has been there twelve years and that Bill Evans only showed up for the last two of those, apparently unaged as Ethan was. She also advises him to tell Theresa she is there before gossip does, but Ben has already tailed his dad and so Ben and Theresa head off on foot, only to be chased down by Sheriff Pope. When he threatens the family, Ethan attacks him, Ben runs him down in his own car and Ethan shoots him with his own gun (another reviewer points out the irony that his own symbols and tools of mastery are turned on Pope.)

The Burke's attempt to escape by using Pope's key fob to open a door in the Jurassic Park fence, but something comes through and snatches Pope's body, and they quickly slam the door on an eerie, inhuman howling.

The changes from the book continue to confuse me, as they pretty universally serve to make the forces controlling the town seem much, much stupider, its equilibrium far more unstable. Moreover, while it is important for recognition, making Ben an angry teenager before coming to Pines makes the appearance of the Burkes in the town much less unsettling, and is just one of the things that makes the whole setup less frightening. Despite Pope's speeches about everyone in town maintaining the order of things, it really is down to fear of a man with a gun at the moment.

Still, here there be monsters it seems, and that's got to shake things up a little, right?

Wayward Pines - Don't Discuss Your Life Before

"Nice face."
"Back at ya."

Ethan Burke is determined to leave Wayward Pines, and despite the opposition of Sheriff Pope, finds an ally in Beverly, who is still pretty spooked to learn that it is 2014. She helps him to dig a tracking chip out of his arm and he finds Bill Evans' escape map. They intend to abscond after a meal with Ethan's weirdly aged ex-partner Kate and her husband, but when Beverly slips up and mentions her life before Pines, all the phones in town ring and they find themselves hunted. Beverly is captured, and Ethan can only watch as Pope cuts her throat.

Two episodes in, and Wayward Pines is suffering from comparison to the book and the transition from eerie weird fiction to rather more overt conspiracy. The rules are posted in public places and intoned at the 'reckoning', which is neither as tense and terrifying as the book's fete - in which the entire town hunts Ethan and Beverly with machetes and kitchen knives - nor as creepy in its climax; Pope's dramatic execution replacing the corporate act of murder which binds the book's community in their shame and secrecy. The pacing is also significantly different, and again loses much of the tension through its more relaxed structure. As a side note, the network-mandated language restrictions make Nurse Pam's outbursts much more cutesy. Referring to a hefty needle as a 'bad boy' has less punch than calling it a motherfucker.

Unfortunately, these comparisons make it hard for me to judge the series as its own thing. It seems to have done very well for itself, so it must have an appeal by its own lights, but so many of the changes throw up plot holes for me. If the town is held together by constant fear, how come they all look so happy? And how come they all go along with it so jolly? There are other niggles that don't quite sit right, but although I'm running behind, I'll discuss them as they become not spoilers for the point in the series.

Wayward Pines - 'Where Paradise is Home'

The cast, many of whom are as yet mysterious.

Ethan Burke (Matt Dillon), Secret Service agent, wakes on the road into the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, with no wallet or ID. He dimly recalls an accident, a truck hitting his car and killing his partner. He remembers that he was looking for two other missing agents. And he can not get out of Wayward Pines, a town which seems too perfect to be true.

He meets a friendly barlady, Beverley (Juliette Lewis), who points him to a dilapidated house where the mutilated body of one of the agents awaits. He ducks the solicitous attentions of oh-so-chipper Nurse Pam (Melissa Leo), and attempts to extract his ID from either the hospital or the rum'n'raisin slurping Sheriff Pope (Terence Howard). Then a barman denies Beverley exists before knocking him out. 

As the cloying folksiness gives way to reveal a glimpse into something darker, Burke's family and co-workers in Seattle struggle with the fact that he has literally vanished: The car he was in has been recovered along with the body of his partner, but with no sign he was ever in it. His boss, however, seems to know more than he is saying.

A psychiatrist named Jenkins (Toby Jones, woo!) tells Burke he is suffering a brain hemorrhage and has him scheduled for surgery, but Beverley rescues him and tells him that the dead agent was trying to escape when he was killed. She also tells him that she has been in the town for a year, since a car accident in 1999. The next morning, he sees the other missing agent, his ex-partner and ex-lover Kate (Carla Gugino), but she is twenty years older and seems to have spent two decades in Wayward Pines since vanishing ten days ago. Considering this shit to be weirder than his pay grade, Burke breaks a rule; he doesn't buy a gun, but he does steal a car, he tries to run but he don't get far. The road out of town loops back on itself, and when he sets out on foot he finds a vast electric fence circling the town, bearing the legend: "Return to Wayward Pines. Beyond this point, you will die."

"What've they got in there? King Kong?"

Back at the car, the sheriff ambushes Burke and tells him 'you're not going anywhere'.

The opening episode of M Night Shyamalan's adaptation of the Wayward Pines novels is a beautiful thing, making the most of the bleak grandeur of its Idaho pine woods and mountains. The books wre a conscious tribute to Twin Peaks, and much has been made of the nods to other series on display here - in particular the parallels between the opening sequence and that of Lost. Sadly, the accelerated pace of the series loses some of the creeping weirdness that was so effectie in the first book, but it has to evolve and that might actually be easier from this base.