Wayward Pines (new M. Night Shyamalan TV series)

I'm just glad to see that the art of large bronze statue making was taught to the kids. Certainly the perfection of a skill like this is necessary in a post-apocalyptic world

 

Pilcher probably had it built in the past knowing the town would need it one day.

 

So basically you're just complaining without a solution. How boring.

 

I already said I preferred the ending from the book. What's wrong with you?

 

So it looks like they are still keeping the adults in the dark, hence they are trying to get over the fence and being punished severely for it. Full circle. The game's the same only the players have changed.

The biggest problem I have with the new ending is that now it's all about the first generation youths. Sounds like the writers changed it up to placate the younger demographic if indeed there was more seasons coming.

 

When I saw the ending, I couldn't help but think 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' I do hope it gets picked up for another season. While I've nitpicked on some things overall it's an interesting concept and I'd like to see them develop it further.

 

From what I've read on the net, Sheriff Ethan Burke stays alive throughout all three novels and basically winds up as the guy running the town. It's dumbfounding that they chose to kill off the character at the end of the TV series... and even worse that they pick up the story three years later, and crazy zealots are running the town and harassing Burke's teenage son. I think this is unnecessarily downbeat and strange. I'd bet you that Shyamalan threw that in just to F with people.

I really, really liked the show up to that last 5 minutes.

 

Exactly.

 

This is exactly what I expected and it totally would've worked: Ethan almost gets caught, manages to jump out of the elevator just in time, and holds onto the elevator shaft ladder while the elevator car blows up and plummets downward, killing all the creatures. Insane that they didn't do this.

As per Writers Guild rules, a "story by" credit is in the form of a synopsis or a short story, generally only 5-10 pages for an hour-long episode, just a treatment or a fleshed-out idea, typically without a lot of dialogue. All the basic bullet points of the plot are still there. An actual script is typically much longer, roughly one page per minute of screen time, and has dialogue, character direction, and scene description, essentially the blueprint on how to shoot the show.

Think of the story as the skeleton, but the script as the connecting tissue, the blood, the muscles, the skin, the organs, and so on. The script builds on top of the story.

In some cases, there are writers who actually wrote a full-fledged script, but then that script was discarded and a new one was written and used for the final work. When this happens, sometimes the original writers will ask for a hearing with the WGA to determine if they should get a screen credit for the work they did. This recently happened with Jurassic World, where two writers wrote a script that got thrown out and an entirely new one was written by the director and another writer. The WGA ruled that there was enough chunks of story and character in the original script that they had to give the original two writers credit (and money), so you have two people given story credit, and two different people given script credit.

 

I would've hung the showrunners from lampposts, and the signs would read, "Do Not Change the Endings."

I agree totally with Variety critic Brian Lowry's assessment:

Although the producers are still talking about the possibility of another season, it’s hard to see what would be enticing about continuing this story, given where this arc concluded. Because while “Wayward Pines” began with the premise of whether people could find a way to achieve forced harmony and peace under these confined circumstances, it gave them precious little to aspire to — no hope of escape or redemption beyond its walls.

If those sadistic, sneering kids wind up representing humankind, hey, at least the rest of us have been dead a couple of millennia and don’t need to worry about whether these children are our future. So goodbye, “Wayward Pines,” another series that started with mystery and promise and, ultimately, couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

http://variety.com/2015/tv/columns/wayward-pines-season-finale-review-fox-1201547096/

 

I haven't read the books so I can only base the ending on the show itself.

And I liked the ending: the season finishes as it began (a dude waking up in a hospital, all confused and wandering the main street of familiar yet strange town) but the situation is now worse than when it started. The adults are in suspended animation and the sadistic kiddies are in charge. The evil scientist has won.

It eschews the happy ending and either allows for a sting-in-the-tail finale, or to set things up for another season (where the adults can escape suspended animation and fight for control of the conch).

--Geoff

 

I would want any future seasons to be centered around the adults. Those kids were too irritating. They should all be eaten.

 

That's what I mentioned earlier - I think the writers deviated from the books to have the story revolve around the generation 1 kids to attract ratings from that age group. Count me out.

 

Plus not having Matt Dillon would be a minus as well.

 

That's another thing that really surprised me : that I really liked him in this role. The only thing he's done in the past that sticks in my mind as something I liked was Drugstore Cowboy, and that was in 1989. I'm sure he's done other good work but I've either not seen the films or am blanking out on them.
At any rate, this role fit him perfectly, imho.

 

I remember watching him as far back as My Bodyguard. Always liked him.

 

Many questions were left unanswered: How was the town built? How was the wall built? Where do they get their power? How do the cars have fuel? How do the cars run at all if they're 2000 years old? Where does the underground staff live? Where does the food come from? How do they have fresh meat? How do they have fresh uncontaminated water?

How did humans evolve into monsters after only 2000 years? Normally, it'd take 100,000+ years for creatures to make that rapid a change -- at least, without radiation or biological warfare. How do the monsters reproduce? Usually if they're that genetically damaged, reproduction ain't gonna happen. What happened to all the other wildlife? We know pigs exist, but why aren't there rabid, carnivorous birds flying around and snipping at the Wayward residents? (I won't ask the "TV-clean" questions like how come no female monsters ran into the village, and why we never got to see any naughty bits.)

Bigger questions remain after the "revolution" and the death of Dr. Pilcher, with the takeover of the "first generation" teenagers: why would the staff continue to work for them and run the town? How could the teens possibly be skilled enough to do everything that needs to be done to make the town run, particularly doctors and contractors and engineers? I only saw at most 100 teenagers in that school. How could they overpower hundreds of adults and shove them in the deep freeze? Why not just kill them?

I also have some nitpicks in that if somebody like the kid has been in a coma for 3 years, trust me, they're not gonna hop out of bed and tap-dance. They're going to have all kinds of physical trauma from muscular atrophy and other problems -- it takes days and weeks of therapy just to start walking again.

Way, way too much of a bummer of an ending. Loved it up to that point. From everything I know, the novels explain most of this far more elegantly, and have a more believable ending, than what the TV show did.

 

I see on my iPhone app "Episodes", this show made the "no longer airing" list. So I guess that's it. The ending felt tacked on to me, to lead into a second season. If there's no season 2, the ending is twice as bad.

 

In the final scene there was an adult body hanging. I think it had a sign around the neck. Am I correct? Anyone read the sign?

 

Do not try to leave.

 

M. Night just couldn't resist could he. Notwithstanding numerous faults, I generally found the show enjoyable and was thinking to myself how refreshing it was to have a series that let out its secrets over the course of the show, had a narrative arc and a real dénouement giving closure rather than some insipid twist or cliff hanger. And then he needs to add on that silly epilogue twist. It is not that there needed to be a happy ending. Just an ending that flowed organically out of what came before. I felt it was kind of a slap in the face to the viewer to ask us to be invested for 10 episodes to a particular period of Wayward Pines and then jump forward in time to show that none of that mattered without bothering to show how it got to the point that none of that mattered (particularly in light of how unlikely/silly the ultimate outcome seems given the state of affairs at the point in time that the show ends prior to the epilogue). I don't even think this was much about preserving the possibility of a season 2 (which I think would be doubtful), but about a desperate need for a final twist no matter what.

 

Was it an adult? When Coma Boy was wandering the streets it seemed to me that the towns folk were all youngish, as in teenagers + 3 years.

After the kiddies' indoctrination about 'the olds' not coping with 41st century reality, the implication to me was that the population was now 'first generation'.

--Geoff

 

They thawed out enough adults from wave "C" to do all the grunt work around town. Cook, clean, empty the trash, etc. Some of them naturally try and scale the fence and have to have examples made out of them for the rest.

 

Oh, you're thinking. They don't allow that in Wayward Pines, certainly not with the Hitler youth in charge.

I watched all the episodes and was entertained, but it got too silly and the ending just added to the sillyness.

How about thousands of those creatures descending on the town the second the fence is turned off. What did they eat with no humans around? Had to be quite a bit of game to sustain that type of population.

 

Cannibalism?