This is a review. Thus, it is likely to contain spoilers. If you haven’t, as yet, found yourself at liberty to view this episode then consider yourself apprised of the potential jeopardy and proceed at your peril.
While I am aware that the show is based on a series of books by Blake Crouch, I have not read them and do not intend to until this show has ended. I will be reviewing the show solely on its own merits, not as an adaptation.
It’s difficult to adequately review a television show when you can’t figure out what genre it belongs to.
I don’t mean that it straddles the line between comedy and drama or that it is horror with comedic elements, I truly mean that I am not even certain that we have a proper name for it. To be fair, at least in the opening hour, it isn’t immediately clear that the creative team wants us to know what they’re up to.
It isn’t satire, it feints at being homage and it does a decent impression of being a pastiche, but it doesn’t cleanly land under any heading. I’m tempted to label it “Meta” given how gleefully it wears its inspirations on its sleeves, but with no breaking of the fourth wall, no omniscient awareness by any of the characters, and no indications that it takes place in anything resembling the real world, “Meta” falls as short as the other misnomers.
If everything you have read so far (assuming that you are, in fact, still reading) leaves you a bit puzzled but also intrigued and strangely compelled to continue, then Wayward Pines may be just the show for you.
Given the mildly referential title, the pine-heavy small town locale, and the federal agent protagonist, it probably won’t surprise anyone that Twin Peaks is the fountain from which this show draws the most water (right down to a fanboy-worthy recreation of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Office complete with quirky female desk clerk), but it is far from the only one.
Though star Matt Dillon’s dark suit and tie may be vintage Dale Cooper, his eye-opening awakening and disoriented stumble through a forest is pure Jack Shepherd. Fans of the Dharma Initiative will recognize it as a shot by shot nod to the opening scenes of Lost. His ‘is this really happening or am I relapsing’ confusion is like a Cliff’s Notes version of Shutter Island and there are plenty of other riffs in there. The creative team references everything from The Truman Show, to Seven, to The Prisoner, to Dark City.
While it may make for great fun for television nerds like me, mashing up great past shows and films doesn’t necessarily make for something compelling in its own right. However, pilot director M. Night Shyalaman makes a strong case that they know what they’re doing. Though it is an admittedly low bar to get over, this is the best thing he has directed in a decade.
It is a breakneck hour that easily covers as much ground as five episodes of most of the shows that it is aping. If there is humor to be found in this episode, it is found mostly in the absurdity of raising what would be season-long questions on other shows and then answering those questions only moments later. It’s like some sort of bizarre send-up noir. The breathless pacing works for the most part. Viewers may be befuddled at times, but I challenge anyone to be bored. The few pacing missteps that do exist seem to be intentionally placed to prop up the off-kilter, uneasy tone that permeates the episode. For instance, how does Agent Burke find the dilapidated house on the edge of town and how does he arrive there so quickly? He has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no working knowledge of the town and, given the bizarre nature of the events that he has experienced, you would think that he would be stopping and interrogating every person that he passes on the street. Alas, this isn’t that kind of show (any more than Lost was the kind of show where major characters felt the need to relay crucial info to each other, even when given ample opportunity).
This is a show where night and day seem to shift as easily as doors open and close and where geography is best left hazy.
Perhaps that is the point. The thing that I keep returning to is that despite the major reveal at the end of the episode, we still don’t know what the show is really about. We know what this small island of the show is about (containment, primarily), but the writers clearly want the audience to be aware of a much larger world out on the periphery. The lack of that knowledge prevents a couple of things. One, it prevents further classification. If it turns out that the puppet masters controlling the town live in a world where shows like Twin Peaks and Lost exist and they are intentionally patterning their little experiment on those shows, then we can just move the show into the ‘Full Blown Meta’ column right next to Cabin in the Woods and move on. Two, it prevents the audience from making any real emotional connections to the characters because if we don’t know what the reality of their situation is then we don’t what the stakes are outside of their immediate survival. Lost took a similar situation and used a protracted multi-season approach to their story, doling out tiny tidbits of backstory in a way that constantly shifted the audience’s perception of the characters. I doubt this show has anything quite so elaborate planned, but it’s worth mentioning that though Dillon’s Ethan Burke is our main character so far, we don’t actually know if he’s the good guy. For all we know, the people who want him out of the way have sent him to Wayward Pines because he’s a bad guy. Time will tell.
Speaking of the cast, if the show fails it won’t be because they didn’t hire good actors. Pound for pound, it’s one of the best ensembles on television. Matt Dillon has been rock solid since before half the cast of Orange is the New Black was even born. You also have Carla Gugino, Juliette Lewis, Reed Diamond, Shannyn Sossamon, Terence Howard, and Melissa Leo. Like I said, the casting folks did well. Unfortunately, in the opening hour most of them aren’t given much to do beyond basic action descriptions. I suspect the screenplay for the pilot had lots of “Ethan looks angry and confused” and “Kate smiles at Ethan.” There’s nothing wrong with any of the performances, it’s just a little early to be giving out too many kudos. Dillon is the sturdy foundation that a show with quirk needs and Gugino appears to be capable of going full Stepford if it’s called for. Juliette Lewis is good with what little she’s given but mostly serves as a plot device up to this point. Terence Howard seems ready and willing to chew scenery alongside his Rum Raisin ice cream and that’s a good thing.
That said, the one cast member that stood out (though it helped that she had a generous helping of dialogue) was Melissa Leo. Her Nurse Pam is an early gem that bears a close eye. Leo seems to have immediately grasped what show she is in and finds the perfect mix of small town chummery with an undercurrent of sociopathic malice. Her line reading of “He says you’re doing A-Ok!” is one of the scariest moments of this year of television.
The speed at which the first episode goes by makes it elusive for a reviewer. Like the characters, you feel like you can’t quite get a firm grip on what you’re experiencing. With so little to go on, all I can really say is that I was never bored and I’m very much looking forward to the second installment. In the end, what more can you ask for?
Though his involvement with the show does not seem to extend beyond directing this episode, I cannot shake the feeling that this show owes a great deal of DNA to M. Night Shyamalan’s back catalog. Like many of his lesser films, one cannot help but have a nagging feeling that this may be a story written in reverse to justify a future twist. Then again, that may not be a bad thing. It may be refreshing to, for once, have a show that has an end goal in mind from the beginning instead of being forced to cobble together an ending after seasons of convoluted and contradictory plotting (Lost, I’m looking at you). I suspect that the second hour will be a strong indicator of whether the show is able to stand on its own, story-wise.
Bottom line, it is impossible to tell at this early point whether the show will turn out to be greater than that sum of its parts, but there is no question that they chose excellent parts to add together.
Some closing thoughts:
I don’t watch future episodes before I write reviews, but I was quite pleased when I glanced at the list of directors that they’ve brought in to helm the remaining nine episodes. They have a number of excellent veteran television and music video directors like Steve Shill, Charlotte Sieling, and Jeff T. Thomas, as well as a couple of Hollywood directors like Nimród Antal (yes, I know he did the rather dull Predators, but in this case you should focus on his earlier film Kontroll, which was very good and similarly moody) and James Foley who, in addition to helming the rather excellent Glengarry Glen Ross, just happened to direct one of the first season episodes of a little show called Twin Peaks. Interestingly, Foley is not the only Peaks alum. Tim Hunter is also on hand to direct an hour and he directed three Peaks episodes (I should mention that he also has 71 other directing credits spanning TV and film, including the 80s classic River’s Edge). I have a hard time believing that it is a coincidence that there were only 30 episodes made of Twin Peaks and this show managed to grab directors responsible for four of them.
For the most part, it is a handsomely made show with some really lovely photography, particularly in the forest scenes. Given that, it makes it all the more bewildering that certain small bits seemed less polished and stood out as a result. Shannyn Sossamon’s scenes back in the “real world” all looked poorly lit, as if considerably less attention had been paid to them. The weirdly tight angles also made it look like they were all shot on the same day in more or less the same locations and they hoped that we wouldn’t notice. That may well have been the case and it isn’t a terribly unusual practice, but shows usually do a better job of covering it up. Along the same lines, there is some mediocre green screen work going on in the vehicle interior shots (to be fair, this is a trend that I’ve noticed on quite a number of shows in recent years). I don’t know what the budget was like for this show so it’s possible that the bigger effects shots and the large-ish cast ate up enough of the funds that cuts had to be made elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if things even out going forward.
Jack McKinney is a professional camera salesman by day and a freelance filmmaker, Paste contributor, and amateur prestidigitator by night (and occasionally weekends). You can cyber-stalk him on Twitter.