Wayward Pines
After two agents mysteriously disappear in Wayward Pines, a small town in Idaho, Ethan Burke, a secret agent, takes over the case. His investigations lead him to several revelations.
TV Series 2015 – 2016
2 Seasons – 20 Episodes
Much in the same way that no one sets out to make a bad television show, no one hopes to see something that they will have to review negatively (at least I hope not). Unfortunately, people do make bad shows and sometimes we do have to write negative reviews. This is going to be one of them.
I have no choice. Wayward Pines has become a truly bad television show.
I pulled for it until past the big twist, which I thought was well executed. Sadly, the momentary gain in momentum was slowly squandered by absurd and overblown plotting, laughable dialogue, and a penchant for lazy characterizations.
Oh, who am I kidding? This thing is a fucking disaster artistically. It is an insult to the shows and films that it rips off. Worse, it is an insult to the audience that it has pandered to with increasing verve since the big twist happened. At least in the first half of the show—when we didn’t know what was really going on—we could write off the banal dialogue and contrived plot to either homage or ignorance. Who knows, maybe the overlords behind the cameras and microphones were making the townsfolk talk like that, right?
When the twist happened and Ethan began to slowly put together the clues of his mystery, the audience began unraveling an enigma of our own, except instead of discovering that we were living in the future, it slowly dawned on us that the show we were watching made less and less sense as time went on. Even more frightening, it would seem that the creative team either didn’t care about what they were making, or worse, lacked the self-awareness to step back and objectively analyze their product.
By tonight’s finale, capable actors had been reduced to scenes that could not possibly have taken up more space in the script than ‘Theresa grimaces then climbs the ladder’ or ‘Ethan grimaces then looks like he can’t remember if he left the oven on’ or ‘Ben grimaces and tries desperately not to appear as if he is having a stroke and fails’ or ‘Pam grimaces then grimaces some more because she has no idea what her character’s motivation is, seeing as how she seems to be an entirely different person than she was in the first half of the season. Hey, maybe she’s a clone. That would be cool. Pam likes clones.’
