Wayward Pines

It’s the ideal summertime distraction.

It’s moody, strange and a bit surreal, while still pulling you into its world and making you believe in it.

The question becomes will more screen time allow the Big Secret to make sense? That will determine if the whole of Wayward Pines is ultimately worth watching. If nothing else, the first five hours are at turns intriguing, mysterious, engrossing and spooky.

Wayward Pines is a splashy, melodramatic thriller: smart enough to stay ahead of itself, well-made enough to keep the audience engaged; creepy enough to be delightful.

The good news is that Wayward Pines is a creepy mystery that gets more compelling--and shocking--as it goes along.

It’s not going anywhere you’d likely suspect, and the big reveal episodes have a lot of explaining to do, but this hyper-paranoid, time-twisting and addictive show is actually laying a foundation for something. How that something eventually plays out remains a question, but the ride there is an undeniable kick.

Come for the mystery, stay for the performances.

Wayward Pines doesn’t require note-taking or study groups. The story simply unfolds, letting us follow along until we’re so firmly hooked, we couldn’t stop watching if we tried.

The pilot ends with a big reveal (and more mystery), kicking off what is shaping up to be some great summer escapism.

[A] stylish, well-acted thrill ride.

Wayward Pines looks as though it has the potential to rise above its false starts while grippingly spooling out truths that are “worse than anything you could even imagine.”

It's TV designed for people who watch a lot of TV and know a lot of TV, and aren't necessarily coming into Wayward Pines to be stunned by its novelty but to see if a group of talented actors, writers, and filmmakers can stitch a crazy quilt of influences into something coherent and pleasurable. They do. But it takes a while.

Equally happy to consider the joys of rum raisin and the need for ritualized violence, Wayward Pines veers, at times, toward a self-consciousness one might call Fever Dream Camp. But mostly it's good, creepy fun, a round-the-fire story of a series that may turn out to be about something bigger than it seems.

Matt Dillon is perfectly cast in the lead, and though some themes and visual cues are a little hokey at first, Wayward Pines soon enough turns into thrilling network television.

I’m not sure if Wayward Pines can sustain its mood and outlandish occurrences for the full length of its 10-episode season, but I guess I’m intrigued enough to keep track of what’s going on in that damp, puzzling little town.

Though it’s unclear in three episodes where such ideas might go in Wayward Pines, the show does provide plenty of unanswered questions to pique our interest.

At first, Wayward Pines doesn’t quite have the visual personality to match its narrative oddity.... Be patient. The repetition fades away as writer Chad Hodge (who adapted his books) starts working more with answers than questions, and even the already-strong cast improves.

If you’re up for something completely different that may end up imploding just as easily as it could be riveting, then make the commitment. Wayward Pines is filled with enough guest stars and gear shifts to never stay in the same place and thus remain interesting, though not always logical or satisfying.

Wayward Pines is eerie, atmospheric and compelling. The new series on Fox is addictive--until it takes a turn toward the metaphysical.

Everything about Wayward Pines is tense and spooky from the get-go (Chad Hodge adapted the project for TV), down to the old-fashioned rotary phones, which certainly plays into Shyamalan’s strengths as a filmmaker.... That said, the cat-and-mouse game begins to become a bit tiresome in the later episodes (five were previewed), before the fifth offers a fairly concrete explanation regarding what’s going on.

Enjoy the atmospherics. They're good. Just don't expect them to lead to a satisfying payoff. It might never come.

Melissa Leo, Howard, and Gugino--who has the most alluring mystery--know how to work well in the murk. They pull you through everything that’s tired, tedious, and trippy and nurture hope that Wayward Pines will add up to something novel. Or, at least, just add up.

It's a great premise; unfortunately, Wayward Pines makes a massive misstep almost immediately. Instead of keeping the action trapped inside the town, embedding the audience into Burke's paranoia and terror, the show moves between the town and Seattle.... Across the board, the casting is stellar, though it's Melissa Leo as the quasi-deranged Nurse Pam who's the stand-out, as her mercurial shifts represent the very best elements of the premise's potential.

The tone is ominous throughout in a show that provides its share of good jolts, including one built around the public punishment of a rule infraction that may stay with you for awhile. Unfortunately, subtlety appears to be among the many things banned in Wayward Pines--a series that comes at you weird and gets weirder as it goes along.

Suspense-building requires walking a line, though. If you spend too long getting to the point, the bubble you’ve inflated starts to lose air. That’s close to happening a couple of times, which is too bad, because when we get to the reveals, we’d like to still really care.

The series doesn’t waste much time, plunging ahead with unremarkable dialogue but effective plotting, and establishing quickly that no one is safe and you should take little for granted.

All the creepy set pieces and engaging performances are no match for the increasingly absurd exposition.

It's not fun enough while waiting for the explanation in the fifth and final episode I saw (there are 10 episodes altogether), and the explanation doesn't do a good enough job of justifying everything that's happened before.

The main characters are not that interesting as people, but acceptably valid because of their situation of being stuck in a small town. Some of the secondary characters may not be drawn in too much detail but are more interesting.

It’s a 10-episode thriller based on a series of novels by Blake Crouch that feels plodding. A small town can be sleepy, but the mystery that binds its residents shouldn’t also be soporific.

Wayward Pines has moments where it’s a happy hot mess, but it’s mostly a muddy puddle of confusion, and it has executive producer M. Night Shyamalan’s fantastical fingerprints all over it.

When answers are provided--at length--the preposterous illogic is stupefying, not stimulating. [4-17 May 2015, p.12]