Wayward Pines: Choices

June 25, 2015 8:53 PM - Season 1, Episode 6

Ethan learns more about Pilcher's grand design. Kate and Theresa have coffee. Kate and her husband hatch a plan.
posted by trunk muffins (8 comments total)

Worth the two week wait. But...did Ethan come around a bit too abruptly? Or is it legit?
posted by davidmsc at 9:19 PM on June 25, 2015

Ah, okay, they did explain my issue from the previous episode (old sheriff being involved in 2014 abduction). I just wish they hadn't taken like 80 percent of the episode to do it. This one dragged for me, despite it being objectively pretty good. Less Matt Dillon looking confused, more Carla Gugino plotting.
posted by Etrigan at 6:05 AM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

This episode was a bit slow, after last week's reveal. Not seeing much here that couldn't have been told while something else happens.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:24 AM on June 27, 2015

I don't think Ethan came around as much as recognized the best way to protect the people of Wayward Pines from everything including Pilcher and themselves is from within. Fighting Pilcher at this point....even if what Pilcher did is wrong is essentially pointless. Well maybe not entirely, but Ethan has to deal with the most immediate threat and then figure out a way that is not through fear to peacefully govern the town first. Part of that may be overthrowing Pilcher, but Pilcher is correct that he has developed part of a structure that works (the fence, the food delivery) and I honestly don't think Ethan's up to the task of taking all of that over.

So what's up with the kid? Seems like he isn't coping so well.

And suddenly what's his faces work room is entirely free of bugs? Of all the rooms, it seems weird that surveillance would be nonexistent in a room where a person was guaranteed to 1 spend a lot of time 2 would have tools that could be used as weapons or in the fashioning of an incendiary device. The entire town is bugged BUT that room? Seems like a serious oversight.
posted by miss-lapin at 11:53 AM on June 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, he's reacting to the news as a regular teen would if he was told the world he grew up into no longer exists. Your favourite band? All dead for longer than Beethoven. Your favourite sports team? Unless they're the Detroit Lions, they probably won something in the meantime, but yeah, gone. Like movies, tv shows or videogames? Tough shit, there's nobody left to make them.
All your friends? That red-haired girl you though of asking to go on a date but never did because you chickened out when you saw Chad giving her the sweet-talk? Dust. You had none? You better like the kids in the glee club of the damned, because they're the only ones left! Wait, you don't like it here? There's no place else!

I've mentioned that snatching pre-schoolers or even younger kids would make a lot more sense for his Khmer Rouge plan, unless they couldn't be cryogenically put on hold. And even then, freeze a bunch of people to serve as forced breeders to a new generation that isn't legally a couple millennia old would be a better plan, and only marginally more morally corrupt than abducting and freezing them and make them live in make-believe land, with more public throat-slicing.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:02 PM on June 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

lmfsilva, I agree that it would make more sense to abduct younger kids as they would be more malleable and, in addition, talk about unpredictable? Teenagers what with the angst and hormones and now aBut I think Pilcher does want to save humanity and that includes some degree of free will and thus his dilemma.
posted by miss-lapin at 1:30 PM on June 27, 2015

After Plan A ended up in a riot where I'd guess most either died at the hands of themselves, each other, or the aberrations, a breeding plan with the with the volunteers and survivors and Plan B subjects capable of adapting to the new reality (if not, well, here's you car, have fun dying), raising kids brought to the world knowing it was 4028 and they were the only humans left, would have been a much better exercise of maintaining free will than a thought control experiment where deviancy is punished by death. But the problem with idealists is that they are often so clouded by their ideas and ideals that they don't understand the full extent and outcome of their moral choices.

I don't think Pilcher is evil, and there was some tone of regret in his voice, but like many cult leaders, he and his closest followers lost where the moral horizon is. We've now seen Pope as a lowly night-shift security guard, expressing fear over his first kidnapping. We've met him as someone who didn't have much of a problem cutting the throat of someone who was not a true believer, in front of dozens of cheering people (and those who don't, would be the next in the almost literal chopping block).

I understand the whole "extraordinary times require extraordinary measures" thing, but Pilcher's civilization will be one of severely fucked-up people.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:33 PM on June 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Somehow I can't help but imagine this as a YA novel after the episode before this one.
posted by gryftir at 2:56 AM on June 28, 2015 [1 favorite]