The story can be seen as commentary on the folly of a disarmed civilian population and surrendering freedom for the illusion of safety.
The safety was real, but they didn’t trade freedom willingly. I don’t know how anyone could expect the unfrozen people to just accept their new life confined to one Orwellian small town.
Yeah if they only cared about the children the obvious solution was to only unfreeze children and use the true believers as caretakers. The whole town thing was always a dumb idea.
Assuming early 21st century body armor, it’s not useless, but it’s also not as effective as far too many TV shows and movies make it. At a few yards, odds of penetration are very high AND you still have to cope with the impact.
Well, at some point he did; Wayward Pines 4028 appears to be where Wayward Pines 2014 was. Since we know Pilcher must have been frozen long before the collapse of civilization, how’d he pull that off?
When they go into the bunker on Lot 33 it looks like they walk about 100, 150 yards to the elevator that takes them up to the control center. WTF? The control center’s in the mountains. The mountains are visible several miles, at least, from the center of Wayward Pines. How does that line up?
At the beginning of the show Ethan tries to steal a car and drive away, but the road circles him back to town. He tries twice, but circles around both times. But then later we find there’s a road that goes straight to the “gate.” The existence of the fence and gate are an open secret so they can’t be that hard to find; why did he not find it? Didn’t he think “hey, better hang a left instead of a right at that fork in the road” his second time around?
Why did they open the gate to be an “Abbie” take Sheriff Pope’s body? How would they know it wouldn’t eat the body on the Wayward Pines side and they go sprinting off to eat the townsfolk?
Why bother with reckonings? Why not allow anyone who wants to leave to leave? After all, it’s a death sentence. You want out? Here’s your coat, chief. Seeya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.
Where the hell is all the fresh food coming from and why is nobody training to learn to grow food?
How in the name of Christ did the “abbies” conquer human civilization? Why do a thousand of them come hauling ass to Wayward Pines when the fence goes off?
The more I think about the show the dumber it gets.
I thought the idea was that the Abbies evolved from humans.
Evolution doesn’t work by living animals waking up one day as a new species. They give birth to the evolved version, which then grows up and is more successful at breeding (or killing off the original species) to gradually replace the original species.
It’s highly unlikely that humans would have just let the Abbies be and the Abbies simply out-procreated humans to the extent that humans no longer had any food so we died off. The only way we go the way of the Neanderthal is by the Abbies actively hunting us to extinction.
Which is so stupid the mind boggles.
There could have been some sort of genetic bottleneck where humans were nearly all killed off, perhaps by a disease, and the few that remained were few enough that they evolved into something different (the abbies, eventually).
Of course, that doesn’t really fit with Pilcher being able to predict the whole thing.
You guys make me really glad I jumped ship when I did! 
I’m still questioning why Juliette Lewis had the keys to Matt Dillon’s handcuffs when she was helping him escape from the hospital in the second (or third?) episode. I thought for sure that mystery would be solved in the finally. Disappointed again.
That was great; I really enjoyed this. I was waiting through the first few episodes for the big reveal in episode 5, but it was a few episodes after that when they revealed Kate had a secret Wayward Resistance going on that I was all in. It’s nice to see she had never given up during those twelve years and showed off why she was an agent in her past.
I also liked Pam’s character arc. I had written her off as a cheesy sadistic nurse, and was really glad to see her character change when she was interviewing the nervous surveillance tech and realized yeah, those are real people down there.
For pretty much the same reason, I liked the sheriff’s receptionist’s small scene of heroics when she made her stand and spat in the face of the Hitler youth. She seemed just like some airhead before to get in Ethan’s way, and I’m glad to see her get her moment. That whole jail scene had good suspense and successfully made me hate the little monster.
The real monsters aren’t effective. They provoke no fear, and I wish the writer had come up with something more interesting for what’s outside the fence. That’s prime mystery real estate there.
Why the need for artificial crickets? Why keep dead bodies in an old shack for days? How the hell do you engineer car accidents that knock out but don’t otherwise injure the occupants?
Pretty sure there’s going to be no Season 2.
The whole point of the public reckonings is make an example of rule breakers and keep everyone else in line. Just letting people leave wouldn’t have that effect, and it would even encourage malcontents because everyone thinks leaving the town = going back to the real world, not certain death.
No one was sure when this thread was started.
I figure that the kids are the ones ruling the town, but there are still a bunch of the older folks around to do the technical work. The way I figured this happened is that there is massive confusion after the disaster and the death of Pilcher - a lot of people from the town are dead, and the control center personnel are divided into people loyal to Pilcher’s vision and people who think that Pam was right to kill him. The one group of surviving people that is organized in a military fashion is the kids, under the leadership of the principal - and she’s a Pilcher loyalist. So the followon society worships the dead Pilcher, and replicates that structure that the kids are most familiar with (with reckonings and secrecy) even if it doesn’t make sense.
Oh god, I’m hooked. I am avoiding reading much of this thread.
I’m on episode 4.
Please just tell me–do we have reasons to think this will end well, or is this another Lost?
I will say there are a lot of cases, like in Lost, where people mysteriously don’t tell other people things those other people really ought to know. This is often explained by people having to do the whole “roleplay” thing about living in a small town, but not always. I just saw a case where Burke and the real estate agent were talking very frankly, and Burke asked “why can’t people leave” and the other guy just said “there’s one way out” and indicated suicide. Real people in this situation wouldn’t remain so mysterious–he’d at least have said “no fuckin’ clue”.
I haven’t seen Lost, but I’ll just say that you’re likely to be disappointed by the whole thing,
Okay, I’ll steel myself for that. 
I’ve gotten to the point where Burke is being shown around the facilities with all the people in hibernation chambers etc. To me the backstory being provided here does not explain the totalitarianism in the town at all. Is it supposed to?