If you like your tales about the future with a good smattering of eerie 1950’s styled dystopia splashed with a healthly dose of evolutionary horror, the first season of Fox television’s “Wayward Pines,” courtesy of producer M. Night Shyamalan and novelist Blake Crouch, must have been right up your alley when it debuted last year.
Of course, this special sort of anti- utopian, hyper apocalyptic landscape takes time to set up, so all of the first season was a slow and creepy reveal that in fact “Wayward Pines” is the hand full of humanity that is left after 2000 years of polluting the planet until it belches up the living and breathing answer to what humans have done to it – terrifyingly violent and seemingly mindless “abbies,” aka aberrant humans that seem hell bent on destroying what is left of what we know and hold dear as “human” today.
Heavy stuff. But that was last season and starting Wednesday, May 25 at 9:00 – 10:00p.m. ET/PT on Fox, a new season of “Wayward Pines” began with more than a few new faces in the mix, including Jason Patric as Dr. Theo Yedlin and then in a pivotal role to the future survival of that last of the ‘normies’ Djimon Hounsou as CJ Mitchum.
While Hounsou’s reveal in season 2 requires a set up that doesn’t truly begin to bear it’s fruit until episode 2, it’s a nice bonus that Terrence Howard makes a brief return as Sheriff Arnold Pope almost immediately in a telling reveal at the outset of this season’s brave new world order.
In addition,to the subject of old characters and old situations versus new, to the show’s credit, if you are coming to “Wayward Pines” season 2 without having watched the first season, it is not a requisite in order to understand what’s going on in regards to what looks to be the makings of an interesting second journey down the rabbit hole into what happens once everybody knows exactly what is needed to survive in this sadly strange town out in the middle of nowhere with wolves who look a lot like us waiting to kill us and burn the whole house down.
“Wayward Pines” Season 2 airs Wednesdays at 9pm ET/PT on Fox.