Comedy
Dead Boy Detectives
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
Wayward Pines seems like a pretty place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Not that anyone has much of a choice in the matter.
This quaint little Idaho mountain town is an impossible place to leave, you see, not because of the spectacular views or the charming residents or the mighty fine pie they serve at the local diner, but because the whole hamlet is surrounded by an electric fence.
The one road into town never leaves on the other side. And some of the residents are quite insistent—murderously so, it would seem—that visitors stick around.
Ethan Burke learned this the hard way in Season One. A Secret Service agent with a history of mental illness and hallucinations (the Service’s screening procedures must be more forgiving than I’d imagined) landed in town after he and his partner were hit headlong by a semi. Alas, the other guy didn’t survive, and Ethan somehow wound up in Wayward Pines—a village filled with sweetly sadistic nurses, creepily lethargic sheriffs and handfuls of huddled townsfolk who may or may not fear for their own lives.
The town is a little like the island in Lost—only a whole lot weirder. And it turns out Burke jumped ahead about 2,000 years and landed in the last presumed outpost of humanity, a village locked in the past and surrounded by humanity’s naked, mutated, bloodthirsty descendants. Pollution and climate change have resulted a downward evolutionary spiral of sorts, turning us all into raging animals with cannibalistic tendencies. Wayward Pines was humanity’s last gasp to preserve a form of humanity that still knows what to do with a dinner fork.
But Wayward Pines has its own problems. The town’s run by the so-called “First Generation,” a legion of young ‘uns born in the town who rule it through a blend of idyllic Confucianism (“We all have our place”) and brutal fascism (“And if you don’t know what that is, we’ll have to kill you”). Leader Jason Higgins may mean well, but he’s made it pretty clear: If you’re gonna live in Wayward Pines, you’re going to have to do what he, and Wayward Pines Academy teacher Megan Fisher, say.
“Clear rules and severe punishment,” Megan reminds Jason. “It’s the only way.”
Alas, Ethan didn’t survive the first season. But his son, Ben, is on the scene doing his best to lead a revolt against Jason’s extremism. Meanwhile, the city’s brought in a new doctor from the past, Dr. Theo Yedlin, to patch up its oft-injured residents. But he’s not yet on board with the program either.
Meanwhile, the ravenous aberrations outside—not-so-affectionately called “Abbies” by Wayward Pines residents—continue to clamor at the door, looking for any weakness in the walls so they can walk into town and have a most excellent feast.
Fox’s summertime mystery, full of inexplicable time shifts and inscrutable motives, comes with an impressive pedigree. M. Night Shyamalan, director of creepy twisteroo movies The Sixth Sense and Signs, helped create the thing. And while Wayward Pines hasn’t yet earned the raves of, say, Mad Men, it’s been pretty well received.
David Lynch’s early 1990s series Twin Peaks was clearly an inspiration for Wayward Pines. And at least early on, the latter show seemed to embrace what most would think of as early 1990s levels of grit and grime—not squeaky clean, not even close; but also not the viciously bloody 21st-century template set by The Following and Hannibal.
But in Season Two, Wayward Pines seems to be growing bloodier by the day. Murder and suicide and blood-splattered walls are all-too frequent in this quaint little town. Infidelity is also a big theme.
I mean, hey, the show is called Wayward Pines, after all.
“Enemy Lines”
Dr. Theo Yedlin gets drunk vacationing with his wife in Hawaii and wakes up in Wayward Pines. He’s forced to operate on a woman who’s been shot in the shoulder. Dr. Yedlin begins to have grave reservations about the town he’s landed in, what with its constant soldier patrols and occasional explosions. Alas, Kate, the woman whom Theo operates on, still doesn’t make it out of the episode alive. Oh, the bullet wound is fine. But she winds up cutting her own throat, with the camera lingering as she commits the suicidal deed and graphically bleeds out. (We later see her corpse in a pool of her own blood.)
A woman is executed on a platform before scores of horrified onlookers; someone shoots her in the back of the head and she falls from the stage. Another woman is given a shock treatment, a rubber dowel clenched between her teeth. Someone has his head smashed against a car window. An explosion apparently kills someone (the blast is visible, the fatality is not). We hear about people dying. Unclothed, monstrous Abbies run headlong into Wayward Pines’ wall, getting shocked or electrocuted as they do so. We hear gunfire. It’s possible that someone attempts to harm someone via an IV drip.
We see a woman in a bikini. Conversation makes it clear that she and her husband are having marital difficulties over her unwillingness to have a baby. Characters say “d–n” twice and misuse God’s name once.
“When Paradise Is Home”
After a car accident, Ethan—his face bruised and bloodied—wakes up on the outskirts of Wayward Pines. (He’s suffered a concussion and some broken ribs.) He quickly finds that most of the townspeople are extremely unhelpful, while Secret Service investigators determine that there’s no evidence Ethan was even in the crashed car.
Ethan’s been working to find some missing agents, and he does find one of them—dead, his rotting corpse tied to a bed. He tells the sheriff that the agent had been tortured and mutilated. There’s talk of other deaths, the “Easter bomber” and being forced to endure a painful surgery while awake. Note that to escape such a severe surgical fate (replete with menacing power tools), Ethan throws a nurse against a fire hose box; her face shatters the glass, leaving her bleeding.
In flashback, Ethan kisses Kate. (It’s the moment that triggers their affair.) Later, her top reveals quite a lot of cleavage. People lie and mislead. Scenes take place in a bar. We hear a stray “h—” and a misuse of God’s name. On the plus side, for his birthday Ben wishes for his parents to stay married forever.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
An elf mage contemplates on connection and regret as she watches her human friends grow old and pass away.
