Wayward Pines "Don't Discuss Your Life Before" Review: Getaway Weekend

Wayward Pines S01E02: "Don't Discuss Your Life Before"

"Don't Discuss Your Life Before," the second episode of Wayward Pines, sort of blew my mind guys. Just when I thought I had a handle on what to expect, Wayward Pines took about 16 insane turns and now the only thing greater than my confusion is my enjoyment.

We picked up right where we left of in the previous episode, with Sheriff Pope holding Burke at gunpoint near the edge of town. (The edge of town being guarded by a 30-foot tall electrified Jurassic Park fence.) Some kids cycled by and they seemed rather non-plussed about their Sheriff holding a man at shotgun-point, foreshadowing the terrifyingly insane reveal waiting for us at the end of the episode. "Don't try to escape, Burke," one of them advised casually, and a quick skirmish later Burke was waking up at the Wayward Pines Hotel again, where as I understand it he already had an outstanding tab.

Never one to let the moss grow under his feet, Burke hurried back to the murder scene he'd found in the pilot. Not only was the corpse unmoved, but Burke noticed he had moss under his feet, like he'd been killed in the forest. And then suddenly Sheriff Pope came in with his trusty shotgun. Does Sheriff Pope just walk around town with his shotgun drawn? The answer might be yes.

Sheriff Pope had a lot of excuses about why a body had been left overnight even after Burke reported it the day before. He made it clear that as the sole police officer in town, he had things in hand—a forensics unit was on their way—but as of right now, Burke was the prime suspect in this murder. I'm not a defense lawyer but I find it hard to believe a man who popped up 48 hours ago killed someone who's clearly been decomposing for the better part of a month. Burke did not raise this point, not having a shotgun and all, but skedaddled on out of the crime scene over to the Biergarten, where Juliette Lewis was wearing the most 90s skirt yours and mine eyes have ever seen.

Juliette Lewis warned him everything they said could be heard, gave him a handful of cash, and he headed off to look Kate up at the toy store she runs. Because nothing pays the mortgage on a multi-story colonial like a boutique hand-carved wooden toy shop. It's quite a career jump from Special Agent to Fairy Tale Toymaker, but I can't say it's an unappealing one. Like, maybe Kate had just embraced life in captivity as a sort of chill early retirement?

And then she pointed out the rules to us.

YOOO! To me this was a giant series turn toward HELL YES!!! Like, oh, this is an openly tyrannical dystopian enclave?!

In addition to ushering in the game-changing existence of the Rules, Kate also dropped a few hints about the murdered Agent Evans: He had a widow. Burke hunted the woman down and discovered she had a ton of shocking statements, including that she and Evans had been married for a year (once again, Burke thinks Evans went missing five weeks ago), they have a newborn baby, and Evans killed himself. She knows, because she was watching when he did it.

Since we've seen Evans' body strapped to a bed decomposing, this statement seemed dubious. Had false memories been implanted in her? Was she "in on" whatever sorcery was behind Wayward Pines? Was she merely following some longer list of rules?

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Burke headed straight back to Sheriff Pope's office to match these suicide claims against an obvious crime scene, where Sheriff Pope was menacingly eating an ice cream cone, which seemed way too coy for where their relationship was at the moment. Like, sir, I don't know if you can backpedal to being implicitly threatening after you've struck a man with a shotgun. The hostility was in the open. Sheriff Pope revealed Evans' body had been schlepped off to the morgue, and Burke was like, "In the hospital? Okay, I'll go there next," and Sheriff Pope and I told him in unison:

You barely escaped Nurse Ratched with your life last week, and you want to head back there and put yourself in a syringe's distance of that bitch? No, no, no. There are bone saws and bad guys in there. But Burke really wanted the notebook he'd seen in Evans' boot, so he stealthily stole right in and immediately Nurse Ratched was there.

She'd recovered nicely from getting thrown face first into some plate glass the day before and she'd gotten all the blood out of her uniform, so good for her. But she creeped Burke out enough that he kept moving and saw his wife and son being wheeled into another wing of the facility!

Or did he? Remember, Wayward Pines doctors claimed he had blood on the brain. He knew from his flashbacks that a truck hit him in a head-on collision. Was he hallucinating some of this? Was he hallucinating all of this? The wife and son being strapped into gurneys and wheeled around the hospital was especially damning to Burke as a narrator because we were seeing them in an (assumedly) parallel timeline, calling and checking in on him.

My pet theory is that there's going to be a big reveal that the wife and son subplot is happening way earlier than the Wayward Pines timeline, but for now let's just stick with what they're showing us: The wife and son were shown as being outside Wayward Pines this episode, yet he saw them in the hospital.

What he needed was a nice long chat with Juliette Lewis. She explained when she first woke up in Wayward Pines, she was so mentally shattered that she just took everything at face value: She had always lived here, this was her life. Then real memories started surfacing and now she's desperately trying to find a way out. (Despite owning a lovely biergarten and an ENORMOUS house... like, as existential hells go, Wayward Pines is a pretty comfy one.) She also had a third take on the death of Agent Evans: He had been killed as punishment for trying to escape. He'd had his throat slit in front of the entire town, by Sheriff Pope.

DUN DUN DUUUUNHHHH!!!! This was ANOTHER turn, which made this series 100 times more awesome than it was previously. Small town ritualistic murder sanctioned by the local authorities?!?! Tiny tracking micro chips buried in people's calves?!

Hahahaha, I loved when she admitted she had no idea what she was doing while she was digging around in his calf. "I don't have medical training. I hope you weren't fond of jogging." "Do you have anything to close the wound?" "Duct tape." HAHAHAHAHA. This whole scene was sort of hilarious.

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With their microchips under their own control and Evans' escape plan in their hands, Juliette Lewis and Burke had everything they needed to plan and execute an escape. Then Kate and her hover-y husband appeared and invited Juliette Lewis and Burke to dinner and suddenly Burke was like, "We will escape immediately after dinner." I am really not sure what his logic was, but you'd think he might want to do a couple trial runs first, or take a little time to get the lay of the land, or read the entire notebook stuffed in that boot. But no. He instructed Juliette Lewis to drop her microchip in the Ballinger's bathroom, and then they'd make a run for it.

At least the dinner was fun.

It was sort of hilarious/unnerving that despite the fact everyone at the table was aware they were trapped in Crazy Town, where life was a terrifying existential hell, Kate was still committed to having entire breezy conversations made of boring small talk. It reminded me of an office I used to work in.

Then Burke claimed that Juliette Lewis had the runs and they needed to high tail it out of there before she painted the whole bathroom and dining room in fifty shades of chocolate. They took off and Kate's husband was like, "Are they going to make a run for it?" and Kate was like "Absolutely."

And then every telephone in the neighborhood started ringing at once!

Juliette Lewis started freaking out: This was what had happened last time, before Evans was killed! Guys, chills were GOING UP MY SPINE. Hearing all of the telephones ringing up and down the street was a gorgeous, terrifying device, and then a suburban mob poured out of the houses and starting forming in the street. Young suburban professionals with baseball bats were taking to the sidewalks to sniff out the fugitives!

Burke tried to draw the crowd away from Juliette Lewis and ended up sneaking into a building and snuffing out his lone pursuer. Juliette Lewis was not so lucky: She was brutally apprehended by a mob of her neighbors, dragged up on to a quickly-erected stage, and chained up by Sheriff Pope. The crowd was cheering like they were at a Counting Crows cover band concert as he proceeded to take out a giant-ass bowie knife and SLIT HER THROAT.

YOOOOOOO. This was some powerful stuff. A woman wearing Chico Casuals had her throat publicly slit for obliquely mentioning the past one time in front of two other people. Like, Wayward Pines does not play around about its rules. Juliette Lewis, who is obviously an extremely talented lady, conveyed visceral panic like she didn't even know this was going to happen. The crowd's fun fair atmosphere throughout this brutality was chilling. And now Burke was trapped in Crazy Town and his wife was headed straight for it!

This also gave new meaning to Evans' widow saying he killed himself while she watched. By trying to escape, he brought the inevitable punishment on his own head, and she saw him die because the whole town saw it happen. I think that may have been what she meant, and, guys, this show is so crazy! Wayward Pines is officially a hot mess of conflicting information and intersecting genres, and I have no idea where it's going from moment to moment, and that's so incredibly exhilarating. Four stars! Must watch! I ended this rather brutal episode DESPERATE to see the next episode... and that's the highest compliment I can give the series.

So! More timeline clues I noticed from this week's episode:

– Beverly thinks her birthday was in 1960, but she's clearly not 54. So were false memories implanted in her about "the past?"

– If Beverly was taken out of the world in '99 and then had her memory screwed with, that does line up with the idea Kate has been there for 12 years.

– If Evans did father a newborn, he must have been in town for at least 9 months.

– No planes have passed overhead in the year that Beverly remembers.

QUESTIONS:

... Did you pick up on any other clues as to how long Burke has actually been in Wayward Pines?

... What is Kate's deal? She helped Burke find Evans' widow, then she turned him in?

... Is Burke now a fugitive, or was Beverly actually the only one in trouble because she broke a rule by talking about the past?

... Is anyone else with me on the idea that Burke's wife and son's scenes are on a different timeline than his own?

... Is Burke's family also in the hospital or was that a hallucination? Or are they CLONES?