Wayward Pines executive producers M. Night Shyamalan and Chad Hodge discuss the finale and a potential season 2.
Warning: This story contains major spoilers for Wayward Pines episode 10, “Cycle.”
In the Wayward Pines finale, Abbies invaded the town. Ethan and Kate managed to bring some townspeople into the bunker under Plot 33, which had an elevator that led to David Pilcher’s mountain base. However, the Abbies got into the bunker and Ethan was forced to sacrifice himself to stop the Abbies from catching up with the rest of the survivors. Meanwhile, Pam ended up killing her brother when she realized he was too far gone.
But when Ben awakened after an injury suffered during the battle with the Abbies, he was greeted by an aged version of Amy who revealed that more than three years had passed since he was knocked unconscious. He and the other adults were placed back in suspension, and the First Generation took over, putting the old rules of Wayward Pines back into effect.
With this ending, we have both a complete story and one with an open-enough ending that further seasons could come out of it. And rumors are swirling that Fox would like to renew the series due to strong ratings. However, the ten episodes of Wayward Pines covered all three books in Blake Crouch’s trilogy.
Season 2?
“We’re super surprised, excited, humbled by the reaction to Wayward Pines, and I did ask Blake to come over to my house, which he did. We did sit down for a few days, and we talked about all kinds of things, and we both felt very good about our time together,” Shyamalan says.
“We both made a pact saying if we did decide to do something more here that we would approach it with a very high level of integrity and not let the opportunity dictate it because we’re both happy to walk away.”
Show vs. book
According to Hodge, Wayward Pines‘s ending is “not the original ending from the books, it is a variation on the ending from the books.”
Spoiler alert: “In the books, everybody goes back into suspension realizing that we can’t survive against the Abbies for now. Everybody goes back into suspension for several thousand more years. ‘Let’s just go back into these chambers. This is not our planet right now. Let’s see what happens when we wake up in 10,000 years.’ They wake up and you see Ethan’s eye pop open and that’s the end of the book.”
As for why the series’ ending differed from the books’, Hodge says, “The First Generation and that whole plot is not part of the books. When Ben comes to town and starts going to the school, that whole aspect that the kids know the truth and they’re being groomed was an original part of the show. From that point forward, everything had an element of the First Generation in it, so the ending would be different somehow.”
‘Cycle’
Rather than teasing a potential second season, Hodge says the ending brings the series full circle. Ben waking up is “actually partly shot-for-shot exactly what we did in the first episode as Ben comes up Main Street and sees people staring at him.
“It’s meant to be full circle that Ben is now experiencing, in a way, exactly what his father experienced when he came to Wayward Pines. Not that much has changed, but in fact, things have maybe gotten a little worse,” as evidenced by the bodies hanging from poles.
‘Choose-your-own adventure’
As for how the adults were all placed back in suspension, Hodge is a bit coy. “The last we see is Kate and Pam talking about how this didn’t work and this is the last of humanity, things have to change. But the strength and insanity, you could call it, of Pilcher’s ideology and the First Generation that he groomed so effectively was stronger,” he says.
“While, of course, we don’t know the details of exactly what happened between then and now, obviously they took over. They put all of the adults back in suspension. They felt the adults would just be their downfall.”
He describes the events of those three years as being up to the audience. “It’s sort of a choose-your-own-adventure,” he says. “The important thing is that the First Generation somehow put all of the adults back into stasis and took over the town.
“And now Ben wakes up, just as his father did, in this town with a nurse standing above him and, in this case, it’s his girlfriend who is now a nurse at the hospital. He encounters Wayward Pines the way his father did, implying that things change but they stay the same. The violence obviously endured, and is this the way this town should be run? Probably not.”
Real world implications
Hodge adds, “You can look at Wayward Pines as a microcosm for our real world. It’s easy to look at that ending and say, ‘Well, they’re still being violent and they’re still killing people and they’re running this crazy town. Why are they doing this?’ But even in our world today, as many lessons as we learn about war, killing and the horrible things we humans do to each other, we still do them over and over.”
Hence the title of the episode: “Cycle.”