The Wilds – Season 2 Episode 6 “Day 46/26” Recap & Review

Day 46/26

Episode 6 of The Wilds Season 2 starts with Gretchen drowning her sorrows in alcohol, believing the ship is sinking and the experiment is a complete failure. Their control group is gone, they’ve messed up their research and with mutiny in the ranks, Gretchen is not happy.

Meanwhile on the island, our focus centers on Ivan who actually gets some flashbacks (unlike Kirin, Henry and Josh last episode, amirite?) Anyway, during flashbacks we see Ivan and his boyfriend Luc together kissing in bed. Ivan wants to take pictures and broadcast this in social media but Luc isn’t so enthused about that.

On the island, we’re 10 days past Seth being kicked out the group. Kirin starts cracking jokes but Ivan is not happy with the nature of said humour. He’s also not happy with Kirin full stop, given they went to the same high school and have some serious bad blood. We’ll get to that shortly!

Kirin approaches Seth and takes his lighter after choking him out. Josh also puts his fire out and walks back to the beach, leaving Seth with nothing. The boys start bragging about what they’ve done, but in doing so, take their eye off Raf long enough for him to take Seth some supplies from camp.

When Raf returns, Kirin confronts him about the supplies. He points out that Seth could die and didn’t want to be responsible for his death. Raf couldn’t sit back and let that happen. Kirin though steps up and decides Raf also needs to be kicked out of camp. Unfortunately, the other boys agree.

As mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of bad blood between Ivan and Kirin. In the past, we see Ivan get Kirin kicked out of school, goading him to call him every homophobic name under the sun. When he does, Ivan records the whole incident. This also as the knock-on effect of seeing Luc leave Ivan, seeing what he’s become.

On the island, Ivan apologizes to Kirin for what happened between them at school. Ivan also loads up a “peace offering” for Seth and the others in the form of makeshift torch.

Back with the girls, Leah starts spacing out with Rachel in the woods. The latter believes they’re going to make it back, fingering the cross around her neck as she tells Leah that she has hope.

The pair go exploring and wind up finding a hot spring. That cross has done wonders for Rachel, who’s actually now almost a completely different person overnight. She’s bouncy and excited for the other girls to come and join them at the springs.

Elsewhere, Shelby admits to Toni that she loves her (which she says back later in the episode after processing this news) while Toni remains suspicious over the number she’s found in Martha’s journal. Martha shrugs it off but out in the woods, she notices a rabbit, dying, whilst several babies feed.

Martha comes wailing back into the camp, calling herself a monster. She doesn’t stick around for long though, eventually carting off into the woods, where Leah finds her sitting with a knife in her hands. She’s completely destroyed the rabbit.

The Episode Review

It’s hardly a surprise to see Martha falling off the deep end but this cabin fever is only a small part of this episode, which almost exclusively focuses on the boys instead.

That attention settles on both Kirin and Ivan who have a lot of history together. Why this wasn’t a bigger part of the earlier episodes I have no idea. I can’t help but feel this could and should have been a much larger part of the boys’ group, because if these two hated each other so much then those feelings would have been exemplified on the island.

Unfortunately it also highlights one of the bigger problems with this season and that comes from both pacing and time. The Wilds has way too many characters this year and as a result, no one is getting the development they need.

Henry is still incredibly one-dimensional, we’ve seen nothing about Josh’s past while Ivan and Kirin are lumped up together. This results in the pair feeling diluted given we don’t really see what drives either of them.

This has not been a season to remember, which is a shame because there’s definitely potential here.