Drama
Doctor Who
The good Doctor’s been flitting around time, space and the BBC since 1963. Now he’s also a fixture in the US, toting his curiously British brand of sci-fi in his highly mobile TARDIS. Just how safe is this contraption?
Newlyweds Liv and Will have it all. They’re attractive, successful, and they’ve just moved from England to New York for Will’s fancy high-rise job. Liv was forced to give up her career as a journalist in order to relocate, but she’s got a stunning apartment, a perfect husband, and is just desperately in love. How can she complain?
Very easily, it turns out, since she soon finds out that Will is having an affair.
Liv’s immediate reactions are just like anyone would expect—shock, betrayal, anger. But then comes a different emotion altogether: fear. Liv is petrified of becoming just like her mother, who divorced Liv’s father due to his infidelity and has spent the last 20 years bitterly watching him move on with another woman. Suddenly, Liv finds herself playing out the exact same story, facing the exact same ending.
Not on her watch, Liv decides. She won’t end her story as the lonely, wounded divorcée. No, it’s going to finish on her terms. So when Will suggests embarking on a road trip across the picturesque American West, Liv sees her chance—a chance to free herself from her once-perfect marriage, to give her husband the retribution he deserves … and most importantly, to stop him from moving on to a life without her. Really, to stop him from moving on to any life at all.
As you can likely tell from the premise, Wilderness is a bit of a content minefield. Infidelity and revenge are key plot points that recur throughout the narrative, though in the first episode, the former is far more prevalent. While we hear more than we see, in the form of graphic spoken references to Will’s conduct, sexual content appears onscreen as well, most explicitly in a brief video Liv watches of Will and his mistress. In the pilot episode, violence is more of a thematic issue, as Liv considers different ways to cause her husband’s “accidental” death. However, there’s nothing to suggest this won’t be ramped up in the future when Liv’s plans are potentially put into action.
But while Wilderness presents plenty of issues on a surface level, we must dig deeper to uncover where the bigger problem lies.
Will’s infidelity proves to Liv that the cycle of relationships is concrete and unbreakable: Woman falls for man; woman gives up her life and ambitions to be with man; man betrays woman and leaves her in the dust. Not exactly the depiction of godly love Christ lays out for us in the Bible. But to Liv, this is simply how the world works. It’s a dangerous (not to mention untrue) idea to be putting into viewers’ heads, particularly younger ones.
And then, of course, there’s Liv’s reaction to the horrible situation she’s been placed in. She tries to forgive Will at first, coming around to the idea that it was a one-time mistake that he deeply regrets. But when she discovers the affair is ongoing, she leaves thoughts of absolution—or even divorce—far behind. To quote Liv herself, “Turns out the whole forgiveness shtick, being the better person…sort of stuck in the craw.”
There may be time for the series to subvert its concerning central theme, but this reviewer wouldn’t hold out much hope. Audiences should be wary of venturing into Wilderness simply because of its many content issues. Add in a biblically-adverse worldview that bleeds into every corner of the show, however, and this doomed road trip might be worth a pass.
Liv’s glamorous New York life and fairytale marriage are destroyed when she learns about her husband Will’s affair…leading her to plot a deadly end to their great American road trip.
Will’s infidelity takes center stage in this pilot episode. Liv stumbles upon explicit texts and emails from his mistress, some of which leave very little to the imagination, and even reads one aloud to her husband. Liv also finds a video of the two together in Will’s email; we see brief female nudity and hear the video play out while focused on Liv’s horrified expression. In a flashback, a young Liv walks in on her father with a woman in his office, though the scene is brief and no nudity is shown. At the end of the episode, a love scene between the married couple is interrupted by a call from Will’s mistress, which he plays off as trouble with work. When he returns to their lovemaking, we see graphic motions while Liv stares blankly at the ceiling.
Themes of violence and revenge run throughout the episode, as Liv begins plotting her husband’s demise. In the first images of the series, a large spider is flattened under a car tire (the same event is shown again later in the episode). In a montage, Liv fantasizes about different ways she could cause Will’s “accidental” death, from hitting him over the head with a rock to luring a bear into his tent to crashing their car on the highway. Each of the three possibilities cut away before we see anything graphic, but each ends with blood spraying onto Liv’s face.
Guests at a party drink martinis, and Liv downs a bottle of liquor after learning of her husband’s infidelity. Liv’s mother is implied to have a drinking problem; her only company on Christmas is alcohol, and in a flashback to Liv and Will’s wedding she seems to have had too much to drink. Liv shares a cigarette with her friend Ash, and she later smokes another in bed. Will describes his wife’s Christmas decorations as “Hamley’s on crack.”
The f-word appears 11 times over the course of the episode, one being typed out in an email. The s-word is heard four times, while “d–k” is said twice and “b–ch” and “a–“ once each. Crude British insults such as “bloody” and “bugger off” are also heard.
Lauren Cook is serving as a 2021 summer intern for the Parenting and Youth department at Focus on the Family. She is studying film and screenwriting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. You can get her talking for hours about anything from Star Wars to her family to how Inception was the best movie of the 2010s. But more than anything, she’s passionate about showing how every form of art in some way reflects the Gospel. Coffee is a close second.
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