User Reviews

Season 1 had some mystery and a big surprise / twist ... this made an otherwise average show a pretty interesting one. There was a mad scientist, decent acting, oppression, bizarre societal secrets, rebellion ... interesting stuff.

However, Season 2 is kind of an insult. First, kids take over and are in charge -- both running the government and police. Really? We're supposed to buy into this? Maybe if the audience was 12 it might be OK ... I guess they could sing their favorite Frozen songs when it gets boring.

Another problem is that key characters from the first season are gone or backgrounded. Furthermore, no big mysteries or compelling dilemmas are introduced early on. The first three episodes of Season 2 witnessed a 40% drop in viewership ... for these or whatever other reasons.

The original Wayward Pines book trilogy took us through Season 1; Kudos to author Blake Crouch. After that, the show's producers took us in this inept new direction. Watch season 1; if you skip Season 2 you're not missing much -- and given the ratings, it's questionable if there will be a Season 3.

Ethan Burke climbs a steep hillside through a forest at night, finally arriving at the summit. He turns back to view where he came from and sees a small town in a valley, shrouded in mist like an evil Brigadoon. He is trying to escape the town of Wayward Pines, but for some mysterious reason, he is unable.

A Secret Service agent, he was sent to Wayward Pines to locate two missing agents. In the pilot for this new series by Fox, he encounters more questions than answers. He has a difficult time determining exactly what happened to him. Supposedly, he was in a bad car accident. He is pretty banged up and maybe his injuries have affected his memory and his perceptions. By the end of the first episode, the viewer will have some answers, but they just set the table for an intriguing mystery that, like Brigadoon, apparently involves the dimension of time.

The first episode feels like an episode of "The Prisoner", the sixties classic in which a secret agent tries to escape from a strange village with peculiar rules and a unfathomable purpose. "Wayward Pines" seems to promise a similar journey for its viewers. It's a great start.

Thanks to luck I was able to get a sneak preview of the first episode 'Where Paradise Is Home', and I, for my part, did enjoy it a lot, as far as pilots go.

I found the first episode to be a fun starting point. the mystery unfolds before you, but hell if I know what is going on with the idyllic village of Wayward Pines.

There's some seriously good acting, some really wacky scenes and dialogue and the humor did not fall short, surprisingly.

The story opens with our protagonist Burke waking up in the middle of nowhere, injured and confused, only to stumble upon eerie Wayward Pines. On a mission to find two missing Special Agents, one his former partner Kate, he is sucked deeper into the village's strange events. Finding no help in either hospital or with the Sheriff (Howard is funny and engaging, and together with Nurse Pam he easily steals the first episode), we will drift across town with him and learn more about Burke himself and the village.

The series is using the, nowadays, standard of location swapping together with flashbacks (and possible flash forwards), keeping you on your toes to follow the story. it's well done, but I cannot judge how good the twists will end up being. there's tons of them. the pilot is throwing a few, from what it seems major, twists at you, but keeping in mind that this is the first episode, I'd say most of them are smokes and mirrors for now.

There is also a lot of green screens and most of the town seems so overly fake that I am drawn to assume it is indeed on purpose. it never really does break the story and adds to the atmosphere of strangeness that hangs over the village.

If you have a warm spot for police mysteries a'la X-Files, creepy, isolated towns (thinking the Dome and Twin Peaks here, mixed with a less foggy and monster-less Silent Hill) with a weird sense of humor (looking at you over there, Eureka. you know we love you, right?) give it a go.

I for myself will be on the lookout for the next episode. even if it is only for Sheriff Pope

I've never seen anything quite like Wayward Pines, because it changed every week. Plot twists in the series didn't just change your perceptions about the show; they changed its nature.

The first week the show seemed a lot like Twin Peaks with elements of Lost (from which the first shot was cribbed), although to me it was closest in tone to the cut scenes from the video game series Silent Hill. Everyone was off. Everything was weird. Characters are there, and then they're not there and never were. It's all wonderfully creepy and odd.

By the second episode it felt more like the series was going in the direction of The Prisoner. But the series took so many left turns that it drove through conspiracy, sci-fi, action, and more, along the way continually killing off characters you were convinced were there for the duration.

Normally I am pretty good at guessing where things are going, but this mini-series kept me off balance for its entire run. I can't say I loved the ending, which was emotionally a bit unsatisfying, but I thought it was a clever way to end it all the same.

Overall, it was really remarkable.

I wish it lasted longer than two seasons. It's different than most post apocalyptic shows. I will be buying the trilogy books to read.

Spoilers for season 2 -- I can see why all the season 1 alum decided to get themselves killed off...just to get out of their contracts I would guess. But such meaningless deaths.

Killing Ethan off was their first mistake. Season 2 is just all over the place. Too many back stories, to many people doing things with no follow up.

How is the petulant little boy leader going to handle homosexuality? Kill them? Wouldn't that be a hate crime?

Patric just needs to put one in the head of the leader, his girl, the hypnotherapist, definitely that AfAmer brown-shirt jerk who loves to pull his gun on EVERYONE. And he needs to leave that wench wife of his, just move out. When she and her WP husband talked of all their 'good times' that they have had...in what, one year? I had to laugh.

Patric, nor anyone else, seems to care that they tried to kill him. that would anger me and not be something I would forget or allow others to forget.

Too much going on. No story makes sense. no loose ends wrapped up. You are left shaking your head.

What the heck happened to a show that was pretty good first season?????????

I do love a 'we stuffed up the planet so now what' story plot & Wayward Pines Series 1 does a great job of keeping you guessing. The reason why the characters are in their predicament is teased out satisfactorily & the actors do a good job of keeping the intensity up through each episode.

When the penny finally drops you care about Ethan Burke & his family so the fact they kill him off at the finale of Series 1 makes little sense. But to then replace him & his heroics with a gang of generic adolescent 'baddies' in the second series even less so. Series 2's overall story plot & character's journey felt rushed, like they were going through the motions & had a lacklustre feel. I gave up watching after the first four episodes..& it was hard work to stick with it even that long.

Series 1 - 7/10 Series 2 - 4/10.

It borrows from a lot. The Prisoner springs to mind, obviously Twin Peaks but that's just superficial...black suited agent in tranquil small town. The feeling I get mostly is a Twilight Zone one. The part where he steals the car and tries to drive out of town...unsuccessfully...is taken from a TZ episode I'm sure.

Dillon seems well cast for this and it's good to see more of Juliette Lewis in things these days too. Carla Gugino, Toby Jones, Terence Howard and Melissa Leo are all solid as well and hopefully will keep this intriguing. What I'm not hoping is that it turns out to be another Lost where each week there are more and more questions at the end of each episode and no answers

Sooooooo.

I guess, I didn't expect this. To be perfectly honest, I admit that I had no idea what to expect when starting to watch this series. Well, what I actually was kind of expecting was a mystery. In the beginning I thought that the MC was in a coma and that this town and the crazy things happening there are the result of his comatose brain's activity.

But soon I realised that I was very wrong. I hoped for many things, but certainly not that holey, stupid thing that some people are referring to as a plot. Because. What?! Are they serious? This is ridiculous and unbelievable on so many levels that I can't even...

Well, many other reviewers already described what's wrong with this show (possibly more coherent than me, too—but it's 3:45 am, I'm very possibly suffering from sleep deprivation and English isn't my first language, so there's that) but I'm going to add my two-cents nevertheless.

This was illogical and irrational, to say the least! And I'm only at episode 6. (But this "twist" caught me unawares and turned everything to, excuse my french, sh!!t, that I had to consult google in order to find out whether this was really, really going where I very much feared it was going to. )

It did.

So, a mutation that changed mankind. Or the "devolution" of the human race to these savage, super-strong aberrations, monsters, that lurk & live like brain-dead, naked beasts in the woods. And they don't only survive by killing big game with their pointy teeth and sharp claws, eating raw flesh—bye-bye fire and cooking, medicine, technology, even houses..—but manage to be at the very top of the food chain and are now the biggest threat to human kind.

Yeah. Human kind is devolving into those things and we are meant to believe that—while they so obviously lost all of human ingenuity and are a step down in the evolution—they are superior to humans? Are responsible for the almost-extinction of men? Don't get me wrong, I don't believe that humans are at the shiny tippytop of evolution (ever), but what I am certain of is that these creatures would definitely not win against human (nuclear) weaponry. But that is only the very start of what's wrong with this series!

We have hibernating human beings that are being woken up thousands (!!) of years in the future (in 4028) to live "happily" in Wayward Pines to ensure the survival of the human race. Unbeknownst to the residents of this lovely small town, of course. Because they are kept in the dark about everything that matters. All they know is that they've been abducted (in the 21st century, which is still the century they're living in as far as they're concerned) and are now kept prisoner in a town in which everybody's forced to put up a happy front and silently obey some stupid rules (let's sum them up as "don't-ask-don't-tell") or be publicly executed.

Instead of telling people the truth about anything they're executed for spray-painting walls! Very logical, especially when every human being and their genes are so very important for ensuring the survival of the human race!

But what is even worse and more unbelievable is the fact that all adults are supposedly too weak to stomach the harsh truth, whereas teenagers and children are not. The so-called adolescent "first generation" is taught about the creatures and everything at school and they're forbidden from repeating anything to their parents. Because adults can't handle it, will kill themselves rather than live in a world in which humans are almost extinct. Teenagers, though, are supposedly resilient, and are equipped to not only handle the truth but to do so on their own while lying to their own parents about it all.

Why some adults (like the teacher or the scientist and his sister who build Wayward Pines and ALL THE OTHER 200ish PEOPLE WHO SECRETLY ENSURE THE WORKS of Wayward Pines) are capable of living with full knowledge of the truth, despite „being of age" without trying to commit (mass)suicide is not explained, though…

It's quite a mystery as well where the lovely residents of Wayward Pines get their supplies like food and electricity etc. from. There's, after all, only so much that 200 behind-the-scenes people living in a secret facility can do without ever venturing outside, or anywhere. Or are we supposed to believe that these handful of people are (stock) farmers, scientists, electricians, and so on,who manage to solely ensure that the unsuspecting people of last-town-on-earth don't lack anything material like food, clothes, houses, toiletries and all the different stuff that they're accustomed to from before?

Or are they pulling all these supplies out of their asses? Or did they "deepfrost" these supplies as well? If so, is no-one concerned with them inevitably running out of these supplies at one point? Wouldn't it be much smarter to have the townspeople learn how to grow crop and so on instead of playing "real-estate agent"?

There are so many glaring plot holes I can't even begin to list them all in this review!

Have only a handful of Americans been deemed worthy enough to ensure the survival of the human race? Genetic diversity, anyone?? Have the writers ever heard of the word gene pool or do they have any idea at all how evolution and mutation work? Did they have biology at all in school? One can only guess. And, as far as I'm concerned, this guess isn't really in their favour, to be honest.

Well, I'm deeply disappointed by this series, which actually started out rather promising. Don't get me wrong, I'm not averse to science fiction in general, quite the opposite actually. But it has to be believable and make sense. It needs to have a solid plot that doesn't immediately collapse at the tiniest scrutiny...