S02.E10: Bedtime Story

[ottoDbusdriver]

When CJ announces that the town is powering down, he says that only power to the pod room and the fence will remain.  
Why would they keep the fence running while they were in cryo ?  It would be an extraordinary waste of power. And then they show later as Kerry walks through the fence that the fence was already powered down.  These writers don't even pay attention to what they just wrote 1 or 2 scenes previously.

[Julie23]

What the hell was that?? No Abbie revolution, no named characters left behind (except mom/wife), nice neat bow on a pile of crap.

[iMonrey]

Quote

Yeah, I don't think that article really explained anything. Also, like my 8th grade English teacher said, if you have to explain your writing to a reader, you didn't do your job. Being ambiguous is one thing, but I just don't understand what the hell was going on in that final scene.

The author's claim that the thrust of the show was about mankind facing his own extinction isn't even consistent with the myriad other "themes" that ran thru this season. Even though they exhausted most of the book material in the first season, a decent writer could have come up with a more coherent story for a second season.

For example, the show could have remained focused on Theo and his rebellion against Jason and the other brownshirts running the town for the whole season. Make the story about the adults vs. the teenagers. There's a ton of potential in a setup like that.

Or - if they wanted some sort of zombie apocalypse type of  show with the Abbies storming the city, then they should have stayed focused on that, and the various attempts to disperse them or destroy them.

Instead what we got was ten episodes that seemed to refocus the premise every week on something else. There just wasn't any cohesion to it, like ten different writers wrote ten different episodes and each one had a different idea of what they wanted the show to be about.

[Tara Ariano]

In case you missed it, here's the Previously.TV post on the episode!

Wayward Pines Puts Its Second Season To Sleep With A Terrible 'Bedtime Story'

Stare into Djimon Hounsou's lycra-wrapped pecs and think of the future.

[Reciprocity]

Things that make you go... hmmmm. Take a look at the listing for Air (2015) on IMDB. Djimon Hounsou and the guy who plays Daryl on The Walking Dead co-starred.

[Casually Observant]

I am puzzled about the ending with the baby. The baby was bawling with a hearty voice.  Could it be that the new children can vocalize in something more than a growl?  But, the baby's head had nasty white powdery crud on it. Was this supposed to signify that the baby had one of the deathly diseases Kerry brought out? Was it crying because it was sick? Is that why its mother seemed so miserable? She was also too skinny and did not appear to have any full mammary glands for that baby to suckle. Is that why the males in the scene turned around and looked at them, because the baby was making odd sounds or was it because the baby had something wrong with it?  And, how long afterwards was this scene supposed to take place?  Did the plagues and sicknesses spread?

Arlene -  love her.  She's so good. Too bad Dr. Yedlin can't fall for her. They both deserve some happiness. Someone who adores them. Maybe someone who is yet to be thawed out can be a good partner to them.

Dr. Yedlin - loved his straight talk and no B.S. He's the guy you want in charge.  Glad he's still around. However, he had a little bit of a nasty streak in him. Especially when, and how, he spilled the beans about the 'very rare' blood type 'very!' cooincidence to Kerry. Barf.

Rebecca - sorry, but I don't like the character. She is lacking in warmth. She doesn't connect with those around her. Voice is flat.  She acted the victim/sheep. I really got Xander there at the end. He truly had feelings for her and was a decent guy and saw the big picture.

Kerry - I felt bad for her. She'd had an awful life. Agreed to come to the future. Thought she'd been picked to be the princess by the new prince and reveled in her newfound power position, only to have her world fall to absolute madness. In the end she saw the big picture too, and took one for the team.

Jason - He was only the product of his twisted upbringing and the unrealistic expectiations thrust upon him before he was mature enough to handle them.

Megan/Hypnoteacher - very good in this part.  Awful. Misguided. Manipulative. Scary. Great ending to her character.

'Group B' man who hung himself after being left behind. Clever that he pretended to be painting his post in order to explain the ladder to the roof. Did he think someone would notice and stop him?

Can't wait for season 3.

[ottoDbusdriver]

6 hours ago, Reciprocity said:

Things that make you go... hmmmm. Take a look at the listing for Air (2015) on IMDB. Djimon Hounsou and the guy who plays Daryl on The Walking Dead co-starred.

So Djimon Hounsou basically played the exact same role -- one in a movie, one in a TV series.  

But the movie filmed and debuted before WP was renewed for Season 2 and well before Djimon was even cast for the role of CJ.

Ironically, the whole waking up every 20 years for maintenance purposes

Spoiler

was not in the book.  So it looks like Djimon's role in 'Air' must have gavin the writer's ideas.  And by ideas, I mean a complete ripoff.

[Dowel Jones]

Quote

...tenures as a toll booth operator, a hockey mascot, and an adult book store manager. Theo eventually decides to bring her along to the future because, hey, they're gonna need some tonally discordant comedic relief when they wake up in whatever hellscape comes next. Arlene will survive us all.

Or, in the inexplicably discordant universe that WP has become, they might just need one or all of those jobs to be filled.  I mean, someone has to take tickets to the carousel.

[Johnny Dollar]

I'm wondering what job Pilcher thought Arlene would fill in the first place to make her pod-worthy. None of her professionalities seem to be particularly usefulable.

[ottoDbusdriver]

I think this explains a lot about how S2 was so much worse than S1

While S1 was primarily written by Chad Hodge and the talentless Duffer brothers, S2 had none of the writers from S1 and the responsibility squarely goes on one Mark Friedman for the shit show that was S2 since he wrote or co-wrote the first 2 episodes and the last 2 episodes.

Season 1

E1 Chad Hodge 

E2 Chad Hodge 

E3 Chad Hodge 

E4 Steven Levenson 

E5 Chad Hodge 

E6 Brett Conrad/Ross Duffer/Matt Duffer 

E7 Rob Fresco/Chad Hodge 

E8 Rob Fresco/Chad Hodge/Blake Crouch/Patrick Aison 

E9 Ross Duffer/Matt Duffer 

E10 Tim Hunter/Chad Hodge/Ross Duffer/Matt Duffer/Blake Crouch 

Season 2

E1 Mark Friedman 

E2 Michael R. Perry/Mark Friedman

E3 Anna Fricke 

E4 Nazrin Choudhury 

E5 Edward Ricourt 

E6 Tyler Hisel 

E7 Anna Fricke 

E8 Seamus Kevin Fahey 

E9 Mark Friedman 

E10 Mark Friedman 

[Free]

5 hours ago, ottoDbusdriver said:

I think this explains a lot about how S2 was so much worse than S1

While S1 was primarily written by Chad Hodge and the talentless Duffer brothers, S2 had none of the writers from S1 and the responsibility squarely goes on one Mark Friedman for the shit show that was S2 since he wrote or co-wrote the first 2 episodes and the last 2 episodes.

Season 1

E1 Chad Hodge 

E2 Chad Hodge 

E3 Chad Hodge 

E4 Steven Levenson 

E5 Chad Hodge 

E6 Brett Conrad/Ross Duffer/Matt Duffer 

E7 Rob Fresco/Chad Hodge 

E8 Rob Fresco/Chad Hodge/Blake Crouch/Patrick Aison 

E9 Ross Duffer/Matt Duffer 

E10 Tim Hunter/Chad Hodge/Ross Duffer/Matt Duffer/Blake Crouch 

Season 2

E1 Mark Friedman 

E2 Michael R. Perry/Mark Friedman

E3 Anna Fricke 

E4 Nazrin Choudhury 

E5 Edward Ricourt 

E6 Tyler Hisel 

E7 Anna Fricke 

E8 Seamus Kevin Fahey 

E9 Mark Friedman 

E10 Mark Friedman 

Damn, this explains a lot, the sudden shift in the back half of S1, as well as the boring mess this season.

[Mrs OldManBalls]

The people of Wayward Pines are still going to have to face the issues of no food, no meds when they wake up again in the future. Plus the town will probably be gone.

If the show is renewed, the writers have their work cut out for them. 

[needschocolate]

I can see why they titled this one "Bedtime Story" it was boring enough to put one to sleep.  

The only way anyone connected with this show could explain this season - "I was drunk."

My version of what happens next - the Abbies go through the gate and eat the humans that are left.  Then they move into the houses and when CJ comes out of the cryo to do his check in 20 years, the Abbies are living in town and acting human-ish - Abbies walking around with briefcases or riding the merry-go-round.  One Abby is selling ice cream to the little Abbies exiting the school.  However, it turns out that Red Vines are intoxicating and there are more than one Abby wandering around town drunk, growling to themselves.  Meanwhile, the viruses Kerry injected herself with died out centuries ago.  She never got sick, but she did run into Adam out in the wilderness.  They are afraid to go into town because of the Abbies living there (they don't realize that the Abbies have domesticated themselves) so they remain outside the fence, living off of nature.  The baby we saw at the end is Kerry and Adam's baby (yeah, Kerry was infertile, but it isn't like any of the other details were set in stone).

On 7/24/2016 at 9:52 AM, ottoDbusdriver said:

Then there's the question of the number of cryo pods in the mountain -- last episode they said they only had power for 500+ pods and half the population of WP would be left to their own devices.  Does this mean that Theo was the last person entombed in the cryo pods -- because that seems REALLY hard to believe ?  Only having a little over 1000 people in WP and a full 1/3 of them are students at WP seems utterly ridiculous.  No wonder they don't have any food.

Thanks for all the great recaps Otto.  When CJ and Theo were having their philosophical discussion about "if you save one, you kill another," CJ mentioned that about 300 of the pods still had people in them that had never been released.  CJ pointed out hat they could let some of those people out to make room for more of the ones who are currently living, but then the recently released would die.

 

On 7/27/2016 at 9:38 PM, juliet73 said:

Why did I waste 10 hours of my life for this sh!t? 

So you could enjoy the time you spent reading the funny comments on this forum?

 

On 7/28/2016 at 11:07 AM, iMonrey said:

The other thing that cracked me up was the people in line for the pods were snaked through one of those serpentine line barriers you see for carnival rides. Why on earth would they even have such a thing? Did they raid a Six Flags before they were put into cryogenic sleep 2000 years ago?

Perhaps Pilcher thought the merry-go-round would be much more popular than it was.

 

On 7/29/2016 at 11:10 AM, iMonrey said:

The author's claim that the thrust of the show was about mankind facing his own extinction isn't even consistent with the myriad other "themes" that ran thru this season. Even though they exhausted most of the book material in the first season, a decent writer could have come up with a more coherent story for a second season.

For example, the show could have remained focused on Theo and his rebellion against Jason and the other brownshirts running the town for the whole season. Make the story about the adults vs. the teenagers. There's a ton of potential in a setup like that.

Or - if they wanted some sort of zombie apocalypse type of  show with the Abbies storming the city, then they should have stayed focused on that, and the various attempts to disperse them or destroy them.

Instead what we got was ten episodes that seemed to refocus the premise every week on something else. There just wasn't any cohesion to it, like ten different writers wrote ten different episodes and each one had a different idea of what they wanted the show to be about.

And, instead of stories about survival and the end of mankind or "Lord of the Flies" style stories of what happens when a teenager is in a position of power,  we got the soap opera story of Jason discovering he's been having sex with his mother.  What was the point of that anyway?  Were the writers thinking "We  need  to kill off Jason, but we can't have an Abby do it, because we just did that with Megan, and I see no reason why anyone else in town who's life has been ruined by Jason and his tyrannical ways would want to kill him, so we need to have him get shot in a struggle with...um ....Kerry...because ..errr...uh...because he discovers that she is really his mother. Then we can devote an entire episode explaining how that happened, which is good because we only thought of plots for 6 of the ten episodes and need some filler."

Edited August 4, 2016 by needschocolate
because proofreading is important

[KaveDweller]

10 hours ago, needschocolate said:

Perhaps Pilcher thought the merry-go-round would be much more popular than it was.

I think it goes along with the whole idea of making Wayward Pines an idealistic old-time town. He had an idea of making a new perfect society instead of thinking about actual survival. Instead of using his magical preserver of everything to store merry-go-round supplies he could have saved up more food supplies.

[LocimusPrime]

For such a "genius" , Pilcher was an idiot.

• He decided that he didn't need any scientists, politicians, military officers ect, but wanted blue collar people.  People that where doers like farmers, mechanics, teachers, doctors. Well brainiac, who was going to create the medicines that the human race would continue to require. Who's going to manufacture glasses or contacts? Who's going to create more fuel from crude oil for the vehicles. Who was going to manufacture the plastics that would be required to fix the computers and monitors which would eventually break down? 600-1000 people aren't enough to accomplish this. 
• Hey pilcher wouldn't it have been easier to buy a 25 square mile island and just wall it?  Then the Abbies wouldn't have been able to ever get to you. But let's say you didn't think the Abbies would be there after 2000 years, it would have been safer to develop your society on the island and once it got big or strong enough, start a colony on the mainland. 
• Instead of just killing the Abbies, did pilcher even try to negotiate with them?
• Instead of making all those homes, why not build one or two luxury condo buildings. If you're going to be spying on people having everyone in one or two mid rise buildings would have been easier. 
• History has taught us that in modern warfare, air superiority is key. Why not bring more helicopters and combat helis like the Apache. If he had just 1 Apache, all of Abbies would be dead. 
• Ok Pilcher, you managed to procure grenades for your security forces, so why stop there? Why not done body armor for your soldiers? Why not some night vision gear? Why not a couple of humvees, 1-2 tanks?
• What kind of Perv is Pilcher if he wanted 12-13 year olds procreating. Smh. Disgusting 
• Ok, why did they create such a dumpy and dreary looking school. It looks like a 70s design. Horrible

[Smita1900]

LocimusPrime, I agree with you about the idiocy of non-recruitment of scientists, engineers, agronomists and builders. It is too bad the potential of S2 was dissipated but the fascination of the topic - mankind marooned in the future in this picturesque, misty, besieged town - carried me through it. The acting was fantastic also, especially was struck by Kelly's acting in ep. 9: conveyed the tragedy and irony of her life. Kacey Rohl is a fantastic actress.  The "incest" twist wasnt totally superfluous to the plot, though pretty gross, playing with time-lines could lead to awful mix-ups like these (and they didnt do it knowingly), but there were so many more pressing issues pointed out by others above that werent being given enough focus.  Anyway, glad to find a forum to share. I actually loved the idea behind Wayward Pines and was totally fascinatd by it, despite the annoying plot holes, and hope they can do justice to the concept in a fresh Season, but they havent left themselves much room for that.

[KaveDweller]

19 hours ago, LocimusPrime said:

For such a "genius" , Pilcher was an idiot.

• He decided that he didn't need any scientists, politicians, military officers ect, but wanted blue collar people.  People that where doers like farmers, mechanics, teachers, doctors. Well brainiac, who was going to create the medicines that the human race would continue to require. Who's going to manufacture glasses or contacts? Who's going to create more fuel from crude oil for the vehicles. Who was going to manufacture the plastics that would be required to fix the computers and monitors which would eventually break down? 600-1000 people aren't enough to accomplish this. 

I think Pilcher wanted to be the smartest person in Wayward Pines. So, he didn't abduct anyone who could threaten him.

[Jordan27]

On ‎7‎/‎28‎/‎2016 at 11:10 AM, Chaiboy said:

If this show is not picked up for a 3rd season...maybe it should be offered to the BBC and they could do a spin-off and call it.........(wait for it) "Downton Abbies" ??

Or  Downton Abbies:  The Next Generation.

[Jordan27]

Well, I like the finale a lot more than I liked S1's.  S1 had those Nazi teenagers taking over which I thought was a dreadful ending and almost caused me to not watch this season, 

But, I did and I actually kind of liked it.   Jason Patric was really good in his role and we at least got the town back to maybe having a democracy. 

And if this is it, I do have to say something about Pilcher's plan.  If you can't tell people the truth, which he tried and it didn't work, you can't lie to people and create a town without freedom.  It never ends well.

[blueiris]

I've sadly been away from the forum but have watched the shows.  I cannot remember....did we get closure on Ben and his mommy?  I know the other guy with the beard dove into a sewer pipe so he could be alive.