‘Wayward Pines’ has an erie first episode, leaving you with a lot of questions.
Matt Dillon plays Ethan Burke, a Secret Service agent in search for missing agents. The opening scene shows him waking up in the middle of nowhere with cuts all over his body. He stumbles into town only to collapse in a cafe. The next thing he knows is that he’s in the hospital. He doesn’t have his wallet or phone. He wants to call his wife, but he’s told his emergency contacts were already contacted by the police and the police have his belongings.
He then leaves the hospital, against the nurse’s orders, and heads to the Sheriff’s department, which is closed. He walks into a bar to find Beverly, played by Juliette Lewis. Juliette is certainly getting around. She just starred in ‘Secret and Lies’ on ABC. She plays a particular interesting character on ‘Wayward Pines’. At first glance she seems like just another nice civilian, but she’s so much more. Beverly lets Ethan eat for free, since he doesn’t have his wallet. She also gives him an address to look her up with, if he needs anything. The back of the receipt with the address has a very strange message: “There are no crickets in Wayward Pines.” But apparently there are sound boxes that give off cricket noises. Beverly is the only nice person Ethan will meet. The clerk at the hotel is not so understanding. He forces Ethan to vacate the room, since he can’t pay and it’s past check-out time.
This leads him to go to the address Beverly gave him. He doesn’t find Beverly, but he does find one of the agents he’s looking for, Agent Evens. But Evens is dead. The house is also falling apart from what looks to be because of a fire. Beverly clearly doesn’t live there.
Ethan finally makes it to the Sheriff’s office when they are open, but they don’t have Ethan’s things. He once again calls his wife, but his wife isn’t getting any of his messages. He sends the Sheriff to see the body as well.
He tries calling the Secret Service office, but the new woman is not very helpful.
Things just continue to get stranger and stranger. He tries to find Beverly, but the guy in the bar claims she doesn’t work there and knocks him out. He says on the walkie that number 101628 isn’t doing well. He then wakes up back in the hospital and they claim he has a brain bleed and he’s hallucinating. The nurse gives him a sedative to calm him down. Just as he’s going to go into surgery, Beverly shows up again to get him out of the hospital.
Here’s where things get really confusing. Beverly thinks the year is 2010 and she’s been in Wayward Pines a year. Ethan also runs into another agent he’s looking for, Kate, who he also had an affair with. She claims she’s been there for 12 years and she’s aged. Ethan saw her just five weeks ago. How can two people in the same city, have two different senses of time?
He has experienced hallucinations in the past and he even asks Kate if he’s having a relapse, she shakes her head.
Ethan desperately tries to leave, but ends up driving in a circle. Then he tries to walk out through the woods and finds he’s barricaded in.
What’s even stranger is his boss appears to have put him there and removed all evidence of him being in the car crash that put him there. Why? What kind of experiment is this? Are we in some sort of twilight zone? If time moved the same way, I would just assume it was some kind of social experiment, but it’s clearly more than that.
Can Ethan find a way out of Wayward Pines? We’ll have to watch to find out:
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb2E7GRB6SQ]
