I have two confessions to make.

1. I used to watch Lost. A long time ago, before the polar bears but after the weird smoke. Maybe it was the other way around? But I’m a quitter, and I quit Lost because I could no longer deal with the fact that this story might not have an end point and I never had a single one of my questions answered. It’s not that Lost wasn’t a good show. It was. It just was not made for me and my brain. During it’s final season I used to receive a weekly episode synopsis from a coworker who was still on the Lost train. We worked Thursday night shifts at a particularly small and deserted shopping centre, so you know, we passed the time how we could.

2. I have never seen Twin Peaks. I’m 27 years old, which makes me about five years too young to have been swept up in it when it originally aired. I like David Lynch too, but it’s just one of those things that I haven’t gotten around to watching. By the way, that list is virtually endless.

Why am I talking to you about Lost and Twin Peaks when the title clearly says Wayward Pines? These are the two shows that it seems to be getting the most comparison too, although that seems to be dropping off a little the further into the story we go.

My friendly neighbourhood cable TV provider, Foxtel, advertised the shit out of Wayward Pines for about three weeks before it premiered. I was intrigued, but I thought to myself “you cannot get involved in another never ending vortex of questions that you can’t answer. You don’t have a boring retail job that someone can spend their shift explaining it to you anymore”. I was pretty on the fence about the whole thing. Fortunately I did my research and was pleasantly surprised to find out that Wayward Pines would be a clean, tidy and finite ten episode mini-series. I was thrilled! A mystery with an END POINT. What I realise now is that this doesn’t actually guarantee answers, just a date where I’ll either be really impressed or really annoyed. I was almost turned away by the fact the series executive producer is M Night Shyamalan, well, because, M Night Shyamalan.

Obviously, based on the fact that I’m writing about it, I got past that and decided to watch.

And I am so glad I did, but I am so far down the rabbit hole it isn’t funny. I am ALL IN on this one. And it’s taken a grand total of two episodes to achieve this. It probably would have only taken one if Foxtel hadn’t essentially played the entire first episode as a ‘trailer’ to the point that there was virtually nothing left to reveal. Continue reading →