*SPOILERS AHEAD … AND THE DISTASTEFUL SMELL OF DREAMS DYING*
So dreams huh? Lovely things to hold onto, filling you with hope and expectation, great lyrical fodder for Disney musical songs or Hallmark cards, but a real nasty piece of work when they die and disappoint.
Or if you’re Nurse Pam (Melissa Leo), once-revered sister of Wayward Pines’ founder Dr David Pilcher (Toby Jones) – well until she killed him of course; not that he wasn’t going all lala-nutso bananas on everyone but still, given he had assumed god-like for the First Generation, not the person you’ll be thanked for killing – really deadly.
Yes, Nurse Pam lived through the events of season 1’s finale, part of an impressively-untouchable group that includes Miss Menacing Calculation 4032 herself, the Goebbels of Wayward Pines, Megan Fisher (Hope Davis), and returns bearing maternal love, concern and a request that she not be stoned at sunrise by her vengeful “son”, the King of Humanity’s Twisted Last Redoubt Jason Higgins (Tom Stevens).
Actually she didn’t say that exactly but there was a very strongly-worded subtext to her sudden appearance in the dead of night – you expect Nurse Pam, she of the knowing glance and brutish oneliner to simply walk in during daylight hours bearing a pie and kind words? Amateur! – that she should be forgiven and restored to her rightful place at the side of God … er Jason.
Given she’d raised him from a baby – a shot near the start of the episode indicates he isn’t First Generation born so much as snatched from someone in the 21st Century and put to sleep for 2000 years like everyone else – and filled his mind with all sorts of fairytale loveliness (hence the episode’s title) of what Wayward Pines could be, he felt more than a little kinship and affection for Miss Malevolence herself and let her live.
Well for most of the episode anyway.
Right up until it became all too apparent that dear Nurse Pam, who had grown wary and then downright appalled at her brother’s commitment to his orthodoxy even at the expense of the survival of the dream itself, had given up on the dream, de-Martin Luther-ing herself, stealing smallpox, the better to take everyone else down with her sinking dream.
But hark, you say! How was her apocalyptic, disease-fuelled plan to end the world a second time stopped in its tracks? Did Jason wise up to her? Did Megan almost catching her in the Abbies lab reveal her murderous intentions?
Why no, in fact. Turns out good old Dr Theo Yedlin (Jason Patric), who is still searching for answers about why he and not one of the other hundreds of doctors in Hawai’i was selected to be drugged and sent off to save humanity in the future, came to the rescue, temporarily and pragmatically in league with Megan Fisher of all people.
And when he burst through the doors, announcing that Megan was rife with smallpox, fortunately for Jason, Kerry (Kacey Rohl), CJ Mitchum (Djimon Hounsou) et al not in an infectious way, Jason crumbled a little inside, and yes outside too, all the fairytales that Megan had spun for him turning to grim reality in seconds.
Despite Pam pleading with him to end things now and let humanity die, the dream having died with David, Jason, who is more scared little boy than maniacal Hitlerite, refuses to listen for once, believing that the dream is very much alive even if Pam, God bless her conniving socks and savagely short new ‘do, is most certainly soon not.
Which brings Wayward Pines the series, and town, to a deliciously philosophical juncture.
Where to now? Clearly jason hasn’t been dissuaded by Pam’s doom-and-glooming and is gung-ho to follow David’s plan and settle the valley beyond the town, emboldened by the sudden disappearance of the Abbies (who are increasingly looking more and more like they’re not as dumb as they were first presented).
Jason’s inclination to boldly go forward, Kirk-like, into David Filcher’s envisaged future is all very inspiring and wonderful on one level but quite troubling on another, largely because he seems unable to think outside his mentor/father’s rigidly-plotted box.
Yes folks the future of all of humanity, the last Ark-like remnants of Homo Sapiens rests solely on the shoulders, by his own design, of a scared little boy whose head has been filled with both fairytales of what might be and a divine sense of destiny that is only one way to bring this about.
Screw wise counsel from Kerry – onward with David’s plan come hell or Abbies-filled high water and damn any consequences!
Yeah that’s not quite how all great survival plans work Jason but then with Pam and David filling your head with inflexible wonder since a young age, what hope did you ever have of thinking otherwise?
And there was revealed the great Achilles Heel of rule by Jason, the First Generation and by extension David Pilcher, still pulling the puppet strings though long in the grave.
The entire apparatus of Wayward Pines, the very mechanisms that underpin its survival teeter on the all-too-easily broken inflexibility of dogma, which reality has shown time and again a callous disregard at just about every turn in humanity’s history.
Why should a nightmarishly apocalyptic future be any different?
So is humanity doomed a second time? (Or third or fourth depending on how you view the fail iterations of Wayward Pines to date.)
Not necessarily. Kerry knows that flexibility and nimbleness of thought and strategy is a must, Theo isn’t even remotely inclined to just do something just because Jason says, and good old CJ, one of the original gang, is as much a pragmatist as a true believer.
And with next week’s episode, “Exit Strategy”, promising some orthodoxy applecart-upsetting courtesy of revelations from survivors outside the walls, their perspectives will be critical if Wayward Pines, and indeed humanity itself, stands any chance of surviving another 2000 years or so.