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clicked on a show called Wayward Pines on Hulu, m night shyamalan's name came up in the credits so i googled it to figure out how much of a chance I wanted to give it. premise: govt agent wakes up after a car accident in a town in the middle of nowhere, can't manage contact with the outside world, people behave very fishily, what is even up. apparently according to wiki when shyamalan signed his only condition was that they weren't all dead. like. m night shyamalan was like "don't make it a stupid twist" I don't even know what to think about that.
so one episode in we have: every character is potentially an unreliable narrator (constantly contradict each other and also multiple characters openly say "they're watching", "they're trying to break your mind", etc) including the protagonist (flashbacks about talking to a psych about how he's totally past the hallucinations)(but i am sort of throwing out "he dreamed it all" for the same reason "they're all dead" is out, it's a stupid twist), there may be something strange with time depending on how unreliable various characters are (one claims to have been here 1 year since 1999, in protagonist's 2014; another says she has been there 12 years, where the protagonist saw her in the outside world 5 weeks prior, but also there's shit like rotary phones bc why not), protagonist's boss may have signed him up for whatever the fuck this is (shown asking to call it off if not too late, of a creepy doctor seen in a hospital on the inside; this isn't protagonist POV scene, he's not present, so either we take it as true within the story or start assuming that the camera is lying to us too??), and there's a giant electrified fence between wayward pines and the rest of the world.
so far one of my biggest questions is logistical. If wayward pines is held completely self-contained inside the big fence wall (aside from occasional new inmates), is all food grown/herded locally? like that's less insane in bumfuck idaho than some places, but in general most places in the US at this point in time rely pretty heavily on trade with other places, on different foods being shipped in from wherever the fuck they're cheapest grown, on technology constructed on other continents. Gasoline, gasoline gets trucked into places and most cars don't run without it. Most fabric comes from textile industry, like even if there's people sewing their own clothes from McCall patterns all over creepy town, is there a textile mill or where the fuck are they getting the fabric?
basically how do you both cut off a place from outside trade and maintain any illusion that it's just like anywhere else, your calls are just going to voicemail how weird? is the answer regular supply drops? i kind of want regular supply drops. fresh fruit and the latest items out of the JC Penney's catalog drop out of the sky on main street every week.
the other thing I'm wondering about is protagonist's boss. see, protagonist was sent with another agent to creepy town, and in the inciting car accident, other agent died. this information is given in both creepy town and the real world scenes, so I'm tending to accept that there really was a dude who died. Did boss mean for other agent to die, or was he trying to send them both to creepy town, or is there some other elaborate explanation?
basically i'm prepared to be like 90% disappointed by whatever the hell the show is going to claim is going on, like way too much is going to be waved away by whatever conspiracy is central and some of the weirder things never acknowledged, I'm pretty sure. but it's a short series i'll probably watch it all in the next two days.
so one episode in we have: every character is potentially an unreliable narrator (constantly contradict each other and also multiple characters openly say "they're watching", "they're trying to break your mind", etc) including the protagonist (flashbacks about talking to a psych about how he's totally past the hallucinations)(but i am sort of throwing out "he dreamed it all" for the same reason "they're all dead" is out, it's a stupid twist), there may be something strange with time depending on how unreliable various characters are (one claims to have been here 1 year since 1999, in protagonist's 2014; another says she has been there 12 years, where the protagonist saw her in the outside world 5 weeks prior, but also there's shit like rotary phones bc why not), protagonist's boss may have signed him up for whatever the fuck this is (shown asking to call it off if not too late, of a creepy doctor seen in a hospital on the inside; this isn't protagonist POV scene, he's not present, so either we take it as true within the story or start assuming that the camera is lying to us too??), and there's a giant electrified fence between wayward pines and the rest of the world.
so far one of my biggest questions is logistical. If wayward pines is held completely self-contained inside the big fence wall (aside from occasional new inmates), is all food grown/herded locally? like that's less insane in bumfuck idaho than some places, but in general most places in the US at this point in time rely pretty heavily on trade with other places, on different foods being shipped in from wherever the fuck they're cheapest grown, on technology constructed on other continents. Gasoline, gasoline gets trucked into places and most cars don't run without it. Most fabric comes from textile industry, like even if there's people sewing their own clothes from McCall patterns all over creepy town, is there a textile mill or where the fuck are they getting the fabric?
basically how do you both cut off a place from outside trade and maintain any illusion that it's just like anywhere else, your calls are just going to voicemail how weird? is the answer regular supply drops? i kind of want regular supply drops. fresh fruit and the latest items out of the JC Penney's catalog drop out of the sky on main street every week.
the other thing I'm wondering about is protagonist's boss. see, protagonist was sent with another agent to creepy town, and in the inciting car accident, other agent died. this information is given in both creepy town and the real world scenes, so I'm tending to accept that there really was a dude who died. Did boss mean for other agent to die, or was he trying to send them both to creepy town, or is there some other elaborate explanation?
basically i'm prepared to be like 90% disappointed by whatever the hell the show is going to claim is going on, like way too much is going to be waved away by whatever conspiracy is central and some of the weirder things never acknowledged, I'm pretty sure. but it's a short series i'll probably watch it all in the next two days.