Wayward Pines Preview: Does M. Night Shyamalan Want A Third Season?
Anyone who has watched this season of Wayward Pines knows the town’s residents, who know its secret, always have an option if things get tough: going back into cryogenic suspension. One can assume the technology still exists, and the manufactured settlement 2,000 years into the future seems to have a never-ending supply of all sorts of materials, although it is running dangerously low on food.
As Entertainment Weeklyreported in its recap, Episode 7, “Time Will Tell,” revealed that Wayward Pines founder David Pilcher didn’t know the Abbies would still be around when the residents woke up in 4014. But when CJ Mitchum suggested the residents might go back to sleep until the aberration ran its course, Pilcher decided to build a wall. Now, in a preview clip uploaded by CarterMatt, it’s implied Episode 9 will find the townspeople choosing to find safety in those suspension pods.
This appears to be more of a mass migration into a time warp than a special place of safety just for Kerry and Jason, the town’s tyrannical leader and his spouse. A.V. Club‘s recap of Episode 8, “Pass Judgment” recalled how Kerry nervously revealed her inability to bear children — a concern for the leadership of a town obsessed with procreation in order to save the human race — while Jason showed her the specially-designed pods for the couple and their baby to sleep through the Abbies’ attack. In Episode 9, one character says that there are only enough pods to save about half of the population.
There is much to be learned about the Abbies, and it’s unclear how far Wayward Pines will get in exploring their unique abilities in this 10-episode season. It’s been shown that the female Abby has traumatic memories from when the newly-awakened humans chose to crush their settlement with gunfire. In Episode 8, as the Entertainment Weekly recap stated, she seemed to start an attack on Rebecca Yedlin before stopping, perhaps revealing that Theo’s — and Xander’s — wife is pregnant.
In past episodes, the would-be researchers of Wayward Pines — the now-deceased hypnotherapist Megan Fisher and town surgeon Theo Yedlin — discovered that the female Abby had some kind of psychic control over the male members of her species and that an area of her brain was much larger than that of a typical human’s. The female Abby’s status as leader of her brethren is part of what motivated man-who-spent-years-on-the-outside Adam Hassler to refrain from killing her when he had the chance, only to follow her route beyond the wall and get her protection.
So, will the story end after Episode 10? There has as yet been no word as to whether Wayward Pines will have a Season 3. But this past April, several weeks before Season 2 debuted, executive producer M. Night Shyamalan told a Wondercon audience, reported by Slash Film, that he envisioned a three-season arc for the series.
“I think we can say it’s a three-season story. If we get the opportunity to tell the third and final season, we can finish the story.
“This season, we learn about the Abbies so that’s the big [reveal.] I think we could say the second season is about the Abbies. It seems at the end of the first season, you have a kind of primitive understanding of what that is, what an Abby is, but that’s actually not what an Abby is.”
Wayward Pines airs Wednesday nights on Fox.
[Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images]
