Wayward Pines: Blood Harvest Recap

Synopsis of 2×02: Theo’s jaunt outside the fence doesn’t last long. But once he’s back inside he has to somehow find a way to settle into the strange routines of Wayward Pines.

Rating: ★★★★☆

So at the end of the last episode Jason kills some people in an old fashioned reckoning and then wrecks a van carrying Theo, Ben, and Xander outside of the fence. Yeah. So.

Let’s think about this for a moment.

What’s the best way to win people’s hearts and minds? Spoiler alert, Jason. It’s not by killing someone in broad daylight, airing Pilcher propaganda, and broadcasting the death of yet another person on a live television feed around the community. But, you know, you keep doing you. Or, rather, you keep doing what Ms. Fisher tells you do do. It’s obviously not working. When there are members of your own fantatical generation rolling their eyes and looking bored you know you’re in trouble.

Also, when the Abbies ignore the van full of freshmeat (aka Theo, Ben, and Xander) and instead focus on trying to scale the town walls?

Yeah, you’re really in trouble.

At least the guys manage to get away relatively unscathed. Except for Xander who gets dragged off by an Abbie. But Theo and Ben seem to be okay so that’s something. The First Generation manage to fight back the Abbies but not before Kerry gets critically injured. There’s also a wonderful bit of irony in Jason sending Theo to his death only to send people out to find him literally moments later. Kerry also gets to feel vindicated in her belief that they needed Theo after all. I’m sure she’ll get to enjoy the ‘I told you so’ moment when she’s not, you know, dying.

At least Theo now has some leverage now! He forces Jason to bring Rebecca to the hospital and then he actually tells Theo the whole truth about everything – the Abbies, Wayward Pines, the end of the world. He saves Kerry and then gets to go home with his wife. We learn that Rebecca has actually been in Wayward Pines for a while now. Three years, to be exact. She’s lived through not just the current Rebellion but through all of the previous season. (She also might have something more to do with Wayward Pines…)

Theo understandably has a hard time dealing with everything.

Luckily work comes along. A woman with a sick child shows up looking for help. And the next day Theo is at work at the hospital where the kids are very glad to have him around. So are the people of Wayward Pines who all start lining up to see the first real doctor the town has had in a long time. Jason and Theo start butting heads and it’s all Kerry can do to try and get Jason to look past his need to control people so that maybe he can see Theo’s worth.

A little later, we FINALLY get introduced to Djimon Hounsou’s character CJ Mitchum. He’s one of Pilcher’s proteges and the guy responsible for keeping Wayward Pines fed. Unfortunately, that’s not going so great. Their crops had to be planted outside the safety of the town so basically everyone is malnourished at this point. They desperately need to harvest their already past due crops… so they go out in the middle of the night into Abbie ridden areas with flamethrowers. This is like a recipe for disaster but it actually works out.

Of course, then Ben shows up out of nowhere begging to be snuck back into town because he’s First Generation. He doesn’t make it back, though, and instead makes a final appeal to a security camera. Jason and the others make a big deal about how one member of the First Generation cannot harm another member of the First Generation. So Ben calls Jason on his bullshit. Guess who else is still around and pissed? Theresa Burke! She’s alive and understandably upset that Ben got kicked out of town and tries to get basically anyone to will listen to help her. Some of the kids want to go help Ben but the others… they aren’t convinced.

Kerry, though, she tries to talk sense to Jason and appeals for him to consider bringing Ben back. Jason says he just exiled him – he can’t be responsible for the harm he faces outside the walls. And, you know, he gets hurt. Badly. As in… killed and eaten by Abbies. At least that’s what it looks like.

Yikes.

Speaking of the Abbies, weird stuff is going on. Something about them – their physiology and their behavior  is off. They are changing and doing crazy things they’ve never done before like working in groups sorta like the zombies in the World War Z movie.

I like what this season is doing. I like that it’s developing Wayward Pines as more of a traditional dystopia – a sort of mix between Pilcher’s Pleastville-esque facade from last season and a sort of Fallout sort of existence. I also like that we’re doing more with the Abbies and that there just seem to be entirely different stakes. There is a weird dynamic shift from focusing on such young characters like Jason and Kerry and then on much older characters like Theo, CJ, and Rebecca – but I like it. It does a really good job of showing just how strained things are in Wayward Pines.

Hopefully the season keeps up the momentum because I’m really digging it so far.