Wayward Pines 2.03 “Once Upon a Time in Wayward Pines”

All wonky sci-fi shows need Melissa Leo to narrate their flashback sequences, I think. Nurse Pam makes a surprise return, and it’s also a stellar finale for the character who was so important to the ongoing sense of threat and unease in the first season. The only real tragedy is that she, Hope Davis as Megan and Siobhan Fallon Hogan as Arlene don’t have a scene together to give the scenery a nuclear meltdown. Hogan is turning into a minor revelation this season, having traded in the hostility she showed Ethan Burke (under Sherriff Pope’s orders) for outrageous flirting with Dr. Yedlin. Hogan has made movies with Bjork and Tom Hanks, so she’s one to watch.

Hope Davis, of course, is so ingrained in Megan that simply rolling her wheelchair angrily away from Jason’s public welcoming of Pam Pilcher (previously consigned to a scary old house on the far outskirts of town, you know, since killing her brother David) conveys volumes, and lets you know that she and Pam will have a cool confrontation scene soon enough. That takes place in the science lab that Davis now runs (“Must be hard, almost overwhelming for a hypnotherapist?”), with three caged Abbies growling in the background. Pam has snuck in to steal a vial of something, and you almost think she’s developed a drug habit in her isolation. But it’s much worse; she’s apparently lost her mind, and let’s face it, the Pilchers weren’t exactly scions of sanity.

Leo does everything she can with her connections to the people in town, her tension with Megan (who will never forgive her for the murder, despite any reasoning behind it – like Pilcher opening the town to abbies when he got fed up with their resistance to his conservative and dated sense of order), her antagonism to the new doctor (so like her indirect threats with Burke in the past), but most of all her love for Jason, the 1^st among equals in the 1^st Generation, the first boy they woke up.

She recounts in believably dreamy sequences how he’s been trained to lead from childhood, how through impossible demands and conflicting explanations a skewed sense of entitlement were instilled in him by the adults who acted as his surrogate parents. It’s like the Pilchers are totally blind to the ways they alienate their chosen awakened citizens from all the human rituals they expect them nonetheless to perform. Contradiction piled on top of contradiction, and then frustrated rage when things don’t work out, hardly the formula for a new society.

With the (apparent) killing of Ben by Jason, Pam has decided she needs to act, and she puts on her best red dress and jewelry to do it. It wasn’t drugs she stole, but Smallpox, and she’s injected herself to act as an infectious agent in order to wipe out the whole town. Because it’s become clear (in her isolated guilty cabin of course) that the experiment was a mistake and needs to end, that they’ve created nothing but hate, fear and violence.

It’s super-dramatic, but Megan and Yedlin figure her plan out in time to stop her. She has a final conversation with Jason, who at least now is understandable in his murderous and fascistic tendencies. The kid never had a chance. Nurse Pam gets a funeral pyre for her sins, but it’s nearly a tour de force ending for the character, who at least is lived and died by epic rules in her own mind.

And we’ve still got Arlene, and Djimon Hounsou’s CJ Mitchum, who apparently was there from the flashbacks, and who Knows Things. Can’t wait to find out what!