- Matt Dillon ( ) as Ethan Burke
- Melissa Leo as Nurse Pam
- Terrence Howard ( Iron Man ) as Sheriff Arnold Pope
- Carla Gugino as Kate Hewson
- Toby Jones ( Your Highness ) as Dr. Jenkins
- Shannyn Sossamon as Theresa Burke
- Reed Diamond ( Dollhouse ) as Harold Ballinger
- Tim Griffin as Adam Hassler
- Charlie Tahan as Ben Burke
- Juliette Lewis as Beverly
Season 1
Wayward Pines [Season 1, Episode 1]
Where Paradise Is Home
Shown 14/May/15
US Secret Service Agent Matt Dillon ( ) is ordered to visit a remote town in Idaho. He must recover two missing Agents, including Carla Gugino (with whom he had a recent fling).
Marshal Dillon is in a car crash. He wakes up in a massive hospital in a small town named Wayward Pines. The hospital only has one full-time staff member, Nurse Ratchett ( Melissa Leo ), whose bedside manner consists of veiled and blatant threats.
Dillon explores the town. Everyone stonewalls him except the friendly bartender ( Juliette Lewis ). The Sheriff (Terence Howard - Iron Man ) is particularly creepy.
Dillon’s mission was to find his ex-partner ( Carla Gugino ). When he finds her, she claims to have been there for twelve years - even though he last saw her five weeks previously.
Wayward Pines [Season 1, Episode 2]
Do Not Discuss Your Life Before
Shown 21/May/15
Dillon finds himself trapped in the town, where everyone is kept under electronic surveillance. It is surrounded by an enormous electrified fence, like something out of Jurassic Park .
This is an unusual show. In a sense it is more like The Prisoner than anything else, though the obvious comparison would be with Twin Peaks . It turns out that it is based on a series of novels, like most of the concept-based Sci-fi shows in recent years. Flash Forward springs to mind, as does Under The Dome . would they have been commissioned as TV shows without a successful literary precursor?
Dillon and his new friend ( Juliette Lewis ) try to escape from the town. However, the Sheriff (Terence Howard - Iron Man ) is a ruthless SOB!
Wayward Pines [Season 1, Episode 3]
Our Town, Our Law
Shown 28/May/15
Dillon’s wife ( Shannon Sossymon ) and teenage son go looking for him. They have no backup plan, and blunder around asking his FBI colleagues about his secret mission. Soon she gets pulled over by a familiar-looking Sheriff ...
Wayward Pines [Season 1, Episode 4]
One of Our Senior Realtors Has Chosen to Retire
Shown 04/Jun/15
Dillon and his wife ( Shannon Sossymon ) are given nice middle-class jobs in the town. He is the new sheriff, and he must punish a miscreant. There is a three strikes law, even for misdemeanour graffiti.
The son begins class in the new school. He even makes a new friend - a girl who looks like a young Summer Glau .
The big question is - what is on the other side of the fence? Sheriff Matt takes it upon himself to find out.
Wayward Pines [Season 1, Episode 5]
The Truth
Shown 11/Jun/15
Marshal Dillon tries walking to Boise, Idaho. But he is going cross-country, and he is soon on the run from some scary naked albino dudes.
Meanwhile, schoolteacher Hope Davis gives the new school pupils (including Dillon's son) their induction talk. This gives exposition that answers a number of questions raised by the show.
The main mystery that is solved is - why was Toby Jones ( Your Highness ) hanging around in the first episode? He seemed oddly out of place in a small town in the American Midwest. But now, everything makes sense!
Wayward Pines [Season 1, Episode 6]
Choices
Shown 25/Jun/15
Toby Jones ( Your Highness ) gives Matt Dillon a lot of exposition. This includes flashbacks to him recruiting the Sheriff (Terence Howard) and teacher ( Hope Davis ). Despite having his own tech lab, he needed a book-reading tour to get acolytes. Dillon was thawed out to help the Sheriff - a pity that both Nurse Ratchett and the Sheriff went to such lengths to antagonise him, Which lead to him beating one up and killing the other.
Dillon’s son knows, but the wife ( Shannon Sossymon ) does not. She starts asking questions about a mysteriously undeveloped piece of land.
Carla Gugino and her husband (Reed Diamond - Dollhouse ) are not the collaborators they appeared to be. They have a resistance plan. But it is bound to backfire spectacularly.
The mountain above the town has a bunker complex housing 200 crew. They are needed to manage the town’s secret infrastructure. Basically, the town is not self-sustaining and it needs constant monitoring. This is almost as inefficient as expecting a single wall to stop the Aberrations from encroaching. There is no backup, and the houses do not have any sign of fallout shelters.
Wayward Pines [Season 1, Episode 7]
Betrayal
Shown 02/Jul/15
The new Sheriff goes about his first task, locating a group of insurgents before they blow a hole in the fence and unintentionally let the mutants kill everyone. He goes through the files, and discovers that Ian Tracey was an insurgent in that other post-Apocalyptic survival dystopia, The 100 . He then tracks Tracey to Reed Diamond ( Dollhouse ) and Carla Gugino , who are obvious suspects because they are not bothering to breed. Since the only role of adults in the town is to repopulate the world, they are deliberately sabotaging the town’s missions by selfishly staying childless for a dozen years.
There seems to be a problem in the people that Doctor Pilcher chose to populate the town with. Instead of choosing small-town people who would be content to stay put, he selected people with wanderlust and a certain set of skills, as Liam Neeson put it in Taken. Explosives experts, Secret Service Agents and the like. Not the kind of people one can put under house arrest indefinitely. And what kind of punishment suits such people? Marshall Dillon opposes any further Reckonings, and he is right to believe that public executions are counter-productive. But they cannot build a prison for everyone who transgresses. The best option is exile ... let the rebels try to walk to Boise!
Marshal Dillon tells both his women about the year they are in. Neither believes him, although how they rationalise the 12-year age gap and the massive dinosaur-proof fence are not explained.
Wayward Pines [Season 1, Episode 8]
The Friendliest Place on Earth
Shown 09/Jul/15
The teenagers have survived the explosion, but they are hospitalised. The teacher ( Hope Davis ) manipulates the boy against his father, blaming the sheriff for letting the suspect (Reed Diamond - Dollhouse ) go. Naturally, the child’s mind accepts a simplistic black-and-white version of reality. Realistically the sheriff had to catch ALL the cell members, not just a token suspect. Standard procedure is to let one go, and follow him to catch the others. Unfortunately the Sheriff’s former career in the Secret Service (AKA Homeland Security) was marred by just such an incident. An illegal snatch-and-grab op in the sovereign nation of Mexico was called off, and the suspect was later implicated in a mass bombing attack. Now he has a second bombing attack on his conscience.
The Doctor (Toby Jones - Your Highness ) disregards the skills of the insurgent leader ( Carla Gugino ) and assumes she has an inside man. He has his sister interrogate all the surveillance operatives. Of course, he keeps HER under surveillance too. And it turns out that SHE is a much more sympathetic person than we thought. It seems that the character is being watered down, as it makes no sense that she was a sociopath towards Marshall Dillon and is now a bleeding heart.
Doktor Jones also underestimated Agent Gugino. She should never have been defrosted, as she was a well-trained Federal Agent who could easily see through the Potemkin Village illusion. Despite pretending to play along in order to be freed from the Asylum, over a dozen years she made no attempt to donate DNA to the procreation project. As such she was obviously more trouble than she was worth. It seems the main flaw of the village management is human error.
Wayward Pines [Season 1, Episode 9]
A Reckoning
Shown 16/Jul/15
It is midnight, time for a Reckoning. The Sheriff (Matt Dillon) takes the insurgent ringleader ( Carla Gugino ) out to the scaffold and offers to execute her. Of course, this is phony jeopardy. We flash back several hours to see the real story …
The insurgents have breached the fence. First, Marshall Dillon must plug the gap. Then he must find the other insurgents, before they do even more damage. The flaw in the town’s security system is obvious. There are over five thousand cameras all over the place, but if there are only five operators to man the consoles at any one time then there are a thousand cameras per operator. You can watch all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot watch all the people all of the time!
There is a civil war in the brewing, and the insurgents are not the only side. A group of school-kids decide to play Vigilante, and take the law into their own hands. This illustrates the generation gap that the war would unfold along - the parents want to go back to the world that was, while the youngsters want to build a new and better world in Wayward Pines.
Dillon’s plan is simple – stoke the people up into a revolt. He blames David Pilcher, the town’s unseen and benevolent dictator, for the problems. In other words, he is trying to stop Carla Gugino from rocking the boat by causing a mutiny on Noah’s Ark.
Wayward Pines [Season 1, Episode 10]
Cycle
Shown 23/Jul/15
After Marshall Dillon tried to start an insurrection in the previous episode, David Pilcher (Toby Jones – Your Highness ) shut down the power. The irony is incredible. Pilcher fought so long to keep the town safe, but now he decides to let the Abbies wipe it all out. Carla Gugino fought for so long to destroy the town, but now she and her terrorists are the only defence it has.
The civil war takes a step for the worse. The children who Reckoned the terrorists in the previous episode are left locked up, without food or weapons or medical care. Marshall Dillon is too busy invading the inner sanctum. Luckily for him, the guards’ Kevlar vests are vulnerable to his puny low-velocity 9mm bullets.
Unfortunately the rear door, which the Marshall and his friends decide to use, is also incredibly vulnerable to the Abbies. They can punch through sheet metal, such as you would find in a door or an elevator.
Wayward Pines [Season 2
, Episode 1
]