Day 30/1
Episode 1 of The Wilds Season 2 starts with all the girls reflecting on the horrific ordeal they endured on the island. Specifically, what happened to Nora on the beach. As they all discuss how bad things got, we jump back to see things from the boys’ perspective.
We’ve got all the clichés here, and a video montage of the kids before heading across on this “retreat” only reinforces that. Gretchen watches her “control group” and revels over how the girls lasted longer than the guys did – 34 days to 50.
Daniel and Dean resume their interrogation duties, this time questioning Rafael, or Raf as he likes to be called. He takes us back to the first day on the retreat and what happened to them. We’re post-crash though, with the boys all on the beach.
Josh is struggling to hold it together, crying on the beach. Lacrosse dude Kirin is not happy and doesn’t think they should be sitting around doing nothing. Instead, he splits everyone up to go in search of the perfect hotel he believes is just around the corner.
Kirin takes half the group in one direction while the rest band together and trek across the beach in the opposite direction. One of the boys, DJ, ends up slowing them down so he decides to give up, wishing them luck.
With the recon mission a failure on both sides of the island, the boys reconvene later on and find the mutilated body of DJ. He’s been completely torn apart, with his face ripped off. The boys have no idea what happened to him.
Interweaving around this day 1 timeline is that involving the girls, who reflect on time after Nora as they’re up to day 30. It’s been tough for everyone. Shelby admits she hasn’t been doing a whole lot of praying right now while Rachel is in danger of flying completely off the handle. She clings to Toni though, who’s her rock through all of this. The pair continue kissing.
While Dot and Fatin set up a large SOS sign on the beach again, each of the girls deal with their own drama and also remain worried about Rachel, given what happened to Nora.
Leah sits with Rachel and tells her that she thinks of Nora every day. However, she wants to know how Nora found out about the island and the retreat. Leah presses her on finding out details about the retreat, but Rachel is a woman possessed. She screams at Leah, telling her that her sister is gone and she (Rachel) is to blame.
While most of the girls head into the woods for their new camp, Dot stays with Rachel, admitting to her that she’s going to feel awful for a while. Dot doesn’t BS her friend and points out that grief is awful to try and get through. For now, she’s going to stay with her.
Back with the boys, Raf ends up befriending Seth. The latter constantly checks in with him, as the pair admit they’re not doing well. For Raf, he’s still not much better in the present either, as he tells Young and Faber in his interview that he’s still struggling to this day.
Raf goes on to admit some of the boys were turning into monsters, alone in the wild. It’s your classic Lord of the Flies scenario. Anyway, when Raf heads back to his room, Leah pops up behind him and tells him not to scream.
Remember DJ? Well, the end of The Wilds jumps back to day 1 with the boys as it turns out he’s absolutely fine… and also Gretchen’s son. He’s not happy about her destroying the lives of these kids, calling her a psychopath.
The Episode Review
The Wilds is back and messier than ever. Not just narratively, but also with its editing too. The title of this episode is evidence enough that we’re going to be jumping to different time periods between the two sets of characters but in doing so, it’s stretching everyone incredibly thin.
So far all the boys we’ve met are walking clichés, and the jumps between day 1, the present and day 30 are in danger of really starting to muddy together and give this a much less cohesive feel than the first season.
For those who followed by recaps the first time around, you’ll know I’m not a big fan of this show but I always like being proved wrong and for shows to come out swinging and nail a KO on this doubting critic.
Season 2 though staggers out the corner with very little to offer. In fact, the arrival of the boys has a detrimental effect on the rest of the show, as one can’t help but want to spend more time with the girls instead.
Hopefully the rest of the season can improve but aside from a couple of nice twists, this show feels like t’s losing sight of what reeled people in in the first place.
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Episode Rating
(2.5)
I partly agreed.
But I also believe that as you conceded, you’re being exceedingly harsh on a mere single episode.
The end of this episode neatly tied the story from not just the Kiwiland-produced freshman season, but even number of flashbacks. I do think that the indubitably rushed introduction of boys because of the episodes giving less than half of an episode’s duration to them can likely come across to you as that camp being full of “walking clichés”, but I haven’t seen that yet. In the spirit of “clichés”, did you say the very same about girls in the preceding season? If not, why not?
Overall, it’s premature to say but I do believe that the introduction of boys in this teen/YA, not-fantasy “TV-MA”/now-“16” to “18”/”MA 15+” rated take on ‘Lost®’ makes it all the more richer and makes the “FemiNāzī”-revolutionary of a visionary in Ms Griffiths’ character far more( what’s-that-word? Errrmmm.. Ha!) ‘sympathetic.’ After all.. As [self-]righteous as the rant by “DJ” aka Devon to cocky-her was, let’s not let it slide that Devon was the one who completed the transition of Quinn’s fate triggered by Nora’s dependence on Rachel’s approval of somebody who was antithesis to so-called toxic masculinity; even though to Rachel, Nora was already pampered disproportionally by their mutual parents, to have a boyfriend as well. In other words: Too Much of a living, breathing solution to her perennially self-absorbed escapades to ever ingeniously lean into that “girls have it bad!” ethnocentrism bka “war of sexes” TP, in order to encapsulate her parents’ perceived approach to her vis-à-vis “girly” Nora. “Win-win for Nora” continues, as the trope of “teenage angst” would tell us. Ms Griffiths’ character, on the other hand, was far more indoctrinated( read conditioned) as an adult and determined for change, so not even having met Quinn( seeing photos and/or other abstracts of “memories” don’t count) unlike “tomboy” Rachel face-to-face[ for a sec]: Found it far more of a motivator in her cause and, recruit Nora. To spell-out: In her worldview, Quinn’s death was single-handedly caused by hegemonic masculinity, as exhibited by her apparently entitled frat-son. She nearly as much as gave that subtext, regardless of whoever Quinn was as a fellow human, without having to challenge Nora’s perception of a dead boy, he would’ve transitioned to being that very same kind of frat-boy his own son became and that was how she declared that her cause is justified, without coming to expressly acknowledge that in the process.. And in spite of her [self-assuring ]denials to the contrary, she is excusing her son’s deed as more of a symptom of the Human Civilization’s ills vis-à-vis ideals( “collectivism”), and not the consequences of a risky, testosterone-fuelled powerplay of a ritualistic “game” that her son, which as she did concede, chosen to be a part of( “individualism”). I guess, [going as far as ]conceding that her maternal-side is overpowering her quest would just make her an “average” ciswoman, a “walking cliché”, as you would put it, and as a visionary, she can’t afford to be that. The world, and immediately, that means, her investors, are accordingly predisposed to be too harshly judgmental of her, because of her gender-identity. A view which I empathize( a mental-hardwork, unlike that overrated trait of “sympathy”) with, BTW. That also explains her “tough boss” demeanour whenever somebody, especially a cisman, dares to jab a finger at her because of indubitably genuine-concern for the sake of her ‘lab rats’. It simply isn’t suitable to her binary, of “the world as it is, and the world which I wanna lead in shaping”. Which, to us as level-headed viewers, does come across as “psychopathic”. In other words, to summarise it in a clichéd way: It is in fact, a vicious-cycle. In that, it’s a yet-another instance of: Her cause might be on to something, but her means of reaching to the finishing-line, on the other hand.. After all, progress is fought for, and still, comes with, risks. And as latest as less than a century ago, number of serious science-experiments were conducted in a way which could be considered in their parlance, grossly: Unethical.
In that, whether somebody judges her harshly because of her sex in a cisheteronormative Humen Civilization in spite of the ever-increasing denouncement of enforced-politeness aka “pC SjW”[ IRL]: I guess that quite like the conditions created for her ‘lab rats’, if we, the audiences were in a parallel-universe( somewhat like the perennially-moving island on ‘Lost®’) with not what’s dubbed “conventional morality”[ for those who have read Machiavelli] drilled into neurotypical-us, and perhaps more suitable to her worldview, she wouldn’t come across as ludicrous, or yes, “evil” for her means to change “the world”( read Human Civilisation).