Wayward Pines 2.08 “Pass Judgment”

Rebecca Yedlin is an odd choice for main character, but she’s the most significant player this week again. Nimrat Kaur gives her a measured calm in the face of all the insanity of the town, even when she runs into an angry and vengeful Abbie Margaret on the very open streets Rebecca herself designed. Margaret moves as if to slash her belly, but intuits her pregnancy (revealed this week) and remembers her own murdered offspring. Her hesitation allows Xander to wound her, protecting his mate. As Rebecca tried to explain to Kerry in a low-key but powerful speech, “there’s the man you marry in Boston, and the man you marry in Wayward Pines.” Xander is the Wayward Pines model, clearly, and also the father.

That speech with Kerry was while Rebecca was breaking into the mountain facility on the force of sheer nerve (the 1^st generation of power-hungry children is very easy to manipulate to someone so wise), in order to find the plans of the original town Pilcher destroyed to create Rebecca’s vision of the perfect community. She gives Kerry the reality check she needs about too blindly following Jason, and encourages her to think and act for herself.

I guess it’s all about girl power this week, because Margaret is certainly thinking and acting for herself too, leading the inexperienced soldiers and frightened citizen militia in circles through the woods (crops won’t grow, but trees seem to have little problem) and basically terrorizing from the inside. The performer (Canadian actress/stunt woman Rochelle Okoye) leaps as athletically across rooftops as she does through the woods. Does she have a grand plan, or was her brief captivity all a reconnaissance mission, so she’d have something for the thousands of Abbies gathering outside the fence to do?

Unclear, but what is even a greater mystery is Adam’s collaboration with Margaret. When he finds her bolt-hole to the outside, he not only lets her go, he follows her, and is subsequently tolerated by the Abbie hoards on the outside. What that means about his time away is a world of mystery, but we know his only reason to stay was Theresa, who didn’t survive long into season two. With Pam and Megan also gone, that only loves delightfully crazed Arlene, who enjoys hair dryers even when her hair isn’t wet and offers to share the binoculars she definitely never uses to spy on her neighbors.

Jason spares time in his frantic search for a tearful goodbye to Megan (no budget for Hope Davis this week, as he’s talking to a shrouded figure on a gurney, but she got her big bloody death scene last week). Yedlin springs into action, sounding an alarm at finding Megan’s body, and Jason for once listens to some of his advice as they plan a search.

It fails, just like his attempts to reach out to Margaret were torched by Jason’s impetuous anger, and we’re left with a town even more frightened than it began and Margaret injured but back outside the gates. Jason has a plan for he and Kerry to head back into hibernation together, one which isn’t shattered by her bad news that her abdominal scarring (and maybe something else, very cryptic) prevents them from having children. She’s having a hard time letting go of the childhood teachings of Wayward Pines, though not as hard as Jason himself.

Is the only answer for survival to go back to sleep for centuries? It’s certainly a possibility that grows more tempting, as survival this season has gotten bleaker and bleaker from week to week.