We Are The Wave – Season 1 Episode 1 Recap & Review

Change Is Inevitable

How far would you go and what would you risk for your ideals? It’s an interesting question and one that opens We Are The Wave on a thought provoking note, which sees a young lady bringing a bottle of water to a man named Horst making a speech infront of a group of people. As she heads back to the shadows, she watches in smug satisfaction as the man drinks the spiked water. Donning masks, they snatch up Horst in the backstage area and hurry away.

We then cut to Lea, a high school student who wakes up and stumbles around her house, getting ready for school. As she does, we’re graced with a slick montage of her social media feed. As she takes her seat in class, a new student enters the room, Tristan, and Lea immediately takes a shining to him. Refusing to introduce himself, he heads off to the back of the room and keeps quiet.

Outside, Tristan antagonises a couple of kids trying to wind him up, brushing aside their attempts to hit him before catching Lea’s gaze once more. However, he spies Zazie in the distance being bullied and tells her she needs to stand up for herself as she hurries away from the group of girls picking on her.

Back inside, Lea shows Tristan around the school and tries to hide how impressed she is with his talent. He tells her to rebel against the system and after some back and forth, she decides to tag along with him, learning more about his ideology. After heading home and reading a book Tristan stole from the library, we cut to various other teenagers fed up with the system and desperate for change.

The next day, Tristan comes under fire again from bullies at the back of the bus but he stands his ground and calls them uglier for berating them. After convincing Zazie to go after the one in charge, a school trip takes the students to a paper factory. Hagen is furious at the damage its done to the fields but before he completely loses his cool, Tristan steps forward and joins him in berating the manager of the plant.

Back in school, Rahim joins the misfit group and as they all walk through the playground, Lea calls Hagen out for his bravey before attempting to find Tristan on social media during tennis. After a fruitless search, we cut back to Tristan and the others who track down the car responsible for almost running down Rahim earlier in the episode, and trash it, kicking the wing-mirror off and smashing the windows.

As the different misfits start to embrace their differences, we see the different family lives and their parents giving up on fighting for change. Meanwhile, Tristan formulates an elaborate plot single-handedly and manages to break into a safe, stealing some schematics as the alarms sound. Timing how long it takes for security to arrive, Tristan leaves the scene long before anyone shows up.

Setting the scene nicely, We Are The Wave revels in a few conventional tropes of this series, with the new-kid-on-the-block story taking centre stage. Still, the stylistic ticks and a few nicely worked character arcs should be enough to see you through to the next episode, which looks set to be a dramatic one.