IT DID NOT RECORD! the agony. maybe. or the sport of poking holes on this thread. Still, I really hate it when that happens.
All of the episodes to date are available online here:
http://www.fox.com/wayward-pines
Yeah, that really happened is so much worse than one family committing suicide. And it looks like it really is AD 4028. What surprises me is that the project apparently went into Sleep Mode in 2014; meaning any technology they have would’ve needed to have been invented before then (& Ragnorak proofed). I’m just going to repeat the MST3K mantra and hope that this concludes in episode 10.
This episode re-opened both of my complaints. The first being that waking up in 4028 seems arbitrary. I don’t buy that his “algorithm” predicted that the earth’s environment would have returned to a state that wouldn’t mutate humans by 4028. That just seems silly.
But worse is how early they went into stasis. It’s just foolish. Looking at a cryogenically frozen little girl, the doctor himself admits “No, she wasn’t in danger, nor would her daughter have been, or even her granddaughter. But someone in her family eventually would have been.”
If there’s no meaningful danger for two full generations, maybe, just maybe, you’re jumping the gun on when you need to start freezing people.
I’m guessing that it was a lot more than two full generations.
The guy is a megalomaniac. He happened to be right, but what he did was evil.
There’s no way he could have even known that people could survive being frozen for 2000 years.
You start your cult (or whatever you call a fanatical following of something that’s actually correct), let it grow, and continue to gather scientific evidence. If you really are correct then you or one of your succesors will eventually be able to convince the scientific community of your theories. At that point the whole world can work on preventing it. If they can’t prevent it then maybe the imprimatur of the scientific community will make it possible to get enough actual volunteers (or perhaps the “cult” will have grown large enough by then) and the original plan can be put into effect with willing volunteers and more advanced technology.
The only reason for Pilcher to do what he did is so that he can be involved from beginning to end. Something that’s unnecessary for anything other than his ego.
Cool! it wasn’t there last night when we checked, but it’s there now! 
It seems strange to complain that the villain has behaved villainously.
At this point I guess we can’t be totally certain that Dr. Pilcher is intended to be the villain, but if this story has a true villain then so far it sure looks like it’s him. If (and it’s kind of a big “if”) he was being completely honest with Burke then he had noble intentions, but he wouldn’t be the first villain who believed he was doing the right thing.
Evil never sees itself as evil. People like Pilcher believe they’re doing the right thing. He’s convinced himself that he’s absolutely necessary to the process from beginning to end.
Or maybe the writers’ intent is that he really is a good guy who’s made difficult but necessary decisions. Burke certainly doesn’t seem to see him that way.
I see another possibility for him doing it now rather than leaving it to some future date.
Given the (questionable) premise that the entire human race has a genetic defect caused by environmental degradation, it may be that the DNA is degrading more and more with each generation, and we’re currently at a point were it’s reversible given a healthier environment, but in a generation or two it will have reached a point where, even though it has no noticeable affect yet, it’s not reversible and will continue to decline no matter what.
I’m not saying that makes sense scientifically, but if we accept the unscientific premise then within that context that could be the explanation.
Did Pilcher actually say that everyone circa 2014 already had this genetic defect? I took it that his concern was that in future generations everyone would have it, which could happen through a combination of mutations and good old fashioned sexual reproduction. He may have been trying to collect a sizable group of people without this genetic defect while such people were still common. And it’s not like he could put things off that much longer if he wanted to manage the project himself – he wasn’t getting any younger. While he could potentially have frozen himself for 10-20 years and then checked to see how things were going, he might have awoken in 2035 to find that his company was bankrupt or even that their kidnapping scheme had been discovered, all of his allies were in prison, and he was considered a fugitive.
Pilcher did mention briefly that the number of people who’d mysteriously disappeared was attracting unwanted attention. So his decision to wrap things up and put himself, Pam, Pope, and the other volunteers on ice circa 2014 may have been due more to desire to avoid law enforcement than anything else.
I think I recall it being stated that he had detected a defect.
I wasn’t talking about his decision to wrap things up, I was talking about his decision to even begin, given that there still seemed to be plenty of time. As I said, his belief that he himself was necessary to the project bordered on megalomania and caused him to kidnap innocent people. The correct way to proceed is to start the movement, continue to gather the evidence, and eventually either the scientific community will be convinced, or the movement will have sufficient volunteers. This might not happen within his lifetime but so what?
Of course, that’s only the correct way to proceed if human genetics will hold up that long, which was my second point.
The correct way to do things is irrelevant, as Pilcher is (see above) a megalomaniac and the bad guy of the series. The correct way to corner the gold market is not to irradiate the U.S.'s gold supply, but that’s what Goldfinger tried to do.
And, honestly, Pilcher had no choice but to start when he did. He had detected the mutation in at least some late-20th-century humans. He knew the change was coming, although he couldn’t tell how quickly. He presented his findings, and no one believed him. So, in order to save the human race (by his lights), he started the project.
Maybe it would have been 75 or 100 or 250 years before the situation became critical. But Pilcher doesn’t have that kind of lifespan. He had to start soon enough that he could carry it all out and put everyone into cryo before he became too old to see it through. Then he put himself (and his sister, and the Sheriff, etc.) into cryo as well, so that they would be there to guide the program when it restarted.
Yes, but was this defect said to be present in every human being alive at that time? Because I don’t remember that being stated.
Yeah, I don’t know what people think Pilcher should have been waiting for. If we accept that he believed that the danger was real then there are plenty of moral problems with the way he proceeded, but he achieved his goal. (And again, he is apparently the villain so his behavior kind of has to be morally problematic.) Had he twiddled his thumbs for another decade or so then this could only have hurt his odds of success.
You have to give him credit for being right. Society did collapse in only 80 years after he went into hibernation. That is unless he unleashed some sort of plague to cause it.
Where do you get the 80 years figure? I don’t recall that being stated.
Why be concerned about a defect unless it was present in most of the population? The human race has lots of genetic defects. Unless they’re advantageous in some way they’re not likely to spread.
I think he’s referring to the fact that at least in 2095 society still functioned enough to have minted money.
I assume Aquadementia is referring to the date on the quarter (2095), although we don’t know that this was truly the last year human society was still functioning.
You get that there’s a different between “most of the population” and “the entire human race”, right? If the goal is to preserve humanity as we know it, the best time to start collecting specimens would be before literally everyone has the “aberrant” genes.
As far as being advantageous, the genetic “aberrations” were supposedly in response to environmental changes and the “Abbies” did apparently manage to outlast Homo sapiens sapiens. I say “supposedly” and “apparently” because I don’t know how much we should trust Pilcher’s version of events, but if his story was mostly true then the genetic “defects” he detected did in fact give the Abbies a significant advantage over Homo sapiens sapiens. Either they were better equipped to survive in a changing climate, they managed to kill us all, or I guess perhaps we managed to kill each other off.
But all that indicates is that there were still humans (as we know them) and that society was still functioning at that point. It says nothing one way or the other about how well it was functioning or if it was near collapse.
Finally pulled it off the Internet and watched.
I think Pilcher said it would be several generations before there would be a problem. He just clearly wanted to be part of the solution. Your basic megalomaniac, all about me, nut job.
There is absolutely no rational reason why all of the people hiding in the mountain are fine with the new reality, why the kids are fine, and why anyone else woken up and told goes nuts and kills themselves or trashes the town. That’s nuts. If they can come up with brain washing for the “first generation” surely they can manage brain washing/safe programming to the reality for the folks they’re waking up and, oh yeah, brain washing.
Some people are told in fact, like our fearless/idiot hero, and he’s not going bugshit. Soooo… something smells in Denmark.
We still don’t know why the dead bodies are in the house, which is really bugging me.
And I just can’t get over the fact that 2014 tech kept all those people in cryogenesis for 2000 years with no issues. Can’t. Nope. My suspended disbelief stopped and I got out. Let alone everything else that was apparently kept in perfect condition all of this time. And they set up all the working 21st century tech. And built a town. In two years, with the Abbies trying to eat them. With a crew of what, 200? Yeah, disbelief un-suspended.
At this point I’m watching this in a sort of Sharknado way, only without the celebrity cameos. 