'The Wilds' Season 2 Review: The girls are back and better than ever, but do we mind the boys?
Even though the series is completely different and have distinct vibes, it's tough not to compare 'The Wilds' to another current drama concerning a plane catastrophe and a group of adolescent girls. However, if Showtime's 'Yellowjackets' is about teens being torn apart by the most heinous conditions, 'The Wilds' is about how a group of girls, most of whom are foreign to one another, come together.
You could have missed 'The Wilds' when it initially appeared on Amazon in mid-December 2020, when our attention was on other things. What a delight to discover Sarah Streicher's thrilling YA drama for the first time — and then have the pleasure of instantly jumping into season 2, which turns the survival narrative into an even more compelling psychological thriller. Here's a fast recap for anybody who can't remember what happened last week, let alone two years ago.
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Spoilers for Season 1 follow
Dot (Shannon Berry), Shelby (Mia Healey), Martha (Jenna Clause), her closest friend Toni (Erana James), Nora (Helena Howard), her sister Rachel (Reign Edwards), Leah (Sarah Pidgeon), and Fatin (Sophia Ali) are among the teen girls whose plane crashes on their trip to a "fempowerment" retreat in Hawaii. And there was no way out. Rather, the girls are participants in "Dawn of Eve," a social experiment sponsored by a probably deranged scholar named Gretchen Klein (Rachel Griffiths) who seeks to demonstrate that women are more equipped to control the world than men.
The story alternates between the group's struggle on the island, their life before being deserted, and the current day, when the girls are interrogated by two Dawn of Eve officials, Daniel Faber (David Sullivan) and Dean Young (Troy Winbush), following their "rescue". In the finale, Leah discovers surveillance footage of a new, unknowing control group, dubbed "The Twilight of Adam."
Season 2 spoiler ahead
Season 2 begins with a series of quick video introductions to the boys who will soon be stranded: DJ (Elliott Giarola), a tracksuit-wearing "man of taste," Josh (Nicholas Coombe), a loquacious, over-diagnosed rich kid; Ivan (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), a sharp-witted activist; Kirin (Charles Alexander), a dude-bro lacrosse star and Ivan's classmate/nemesis; Bo (Tanner Ray Rook), a kindhearted neat freak; Bo's savvy best friend Scotty (Reed Shannon); Henry (Aidan Laprete), a nose-ringed doomsayer; Seth (Alex Fitzalan), Henry's affable stepbrother and self-described "try-hard kiss-ass"; and Rafael (Zack Calderon), an introvert from Tijuana.
Season two picks up precisely where we left off in the first season, with no prologue: Following Rachel's shark incident, Nora and Rachel swim in the ocean. The girls tell what happened as we view the wreckage onscreen from their post-rescue interrogation suites - all set to Taylor Swift's 'epiphany' - with Dot perforating Rachel's wound, anguish at Nora's disappearance, and Leah understanding the abyss she dug her way out of has been filled. (This is the first of many indicators the music budget this season was high.) The swiftness with which 'The Wilds' resolves last season's cliffhanger is astounding; we're fast-moving on to new territory.
Except we're also into the old stuff. The title of each episode mirrors the narrative's split, with the premiere reading "Day 30/1." The main issue is that day one for the boys feels like a repeat of season one, albeit with new characters we don't get to know very well. The first season was distinguished by episodic attention to each girl, which mixed recollections from her childhood with post-rescue interviews and her stay on the island. Season two doesn't have that privilege, with two fewer episodes and twice as many characters. Some episodes don't have flashbacks at all, and when they do, they usually only feature two characters at a time and in a limited way. The segue between the islands is inconsistent, with some touching and others uncomfortably unfinished, but every cut to the males' story is upsetting because we're losing the girls' impetus.
The initial goal was that these boys would act as a counterpoint to the group we were familiar with, providing an interesting contrast that would help flesh out the characters. While there are clues that this might have been the intention, it ultimately falls short. Rather, these new individuals go through the identical actions as the ones we've already seen. They find themselves stuck on an island, unsure of what to do, and must band together to make the best of a bad situation.
The problem is that their characters are simply less engaging; we've spent less time with them, and what we have seen of them feels superficial. 'The Wilds' had previously been interested in demonstrating how our first impressions of individuals can be questioned as we get to know them, but it appears to have abandoned that framework here. Our new faces vary from the quiet emo child to the oafish jock, and they're all walking clichés that make you wish the program would show mercy and keep them in the B-plot. Rather, we spend so much time with them that it all feels like a pointless exercise.
Season two can do fascinating things with the females because they are so well-known, nuanced, and recognizable. The dynamics are constantly reshuffled due to their established backgrounds. Shelby and Rachel, for example, didn't have a personal link in season one, but they connected via their remorse about losing Becca and Nora. Toni confronts Fatin about her rage at Leah's self-destructive behavior. Martha abandons her vegetarianism to become the group's hunter, which brings her into contact with Shelby, who is also undergoing a value shift as she grows more secure with her sexuality.
Toni and Shelby's love story continues to grow in truly lovely moments, with winks to the audience such as Fatin addressing them by their ship name, "Shoni." The actors appear to be more at ease with their roles, with Pidgeon, James, Berry, and Ali giving particularly moving performances. Not that the girls' journey is without flaws: Leah has always been drawn to lunacy, but this season it becomes a lot more concrete and a lot less relatable. Gretchen's experiment is becoming increasingly jumbled and incoherent, with strands being picked up and abandoned without explanation.
Returning to the lads. The season's big question is: What do they bring to the table? What can 'The Wilds' say about them that it couldn't say about the females by themselves? "We wanted to be men," Rafael recounts, "but the truth is, some of us were becoming monsters." Although this is true, one of the things we liked about season one was that, even though all the females did horrible things, none of them could be termed a monster. It feels like a weak analysis of masculinity to turn any of the lads into villains. Many of the male characters in this story feel more like ideas than real individuals.
When someone commits a heinous deed against another, the writing fails miserably to deal with it and instead becomes further exaggerated for the sake of shock. It's a subtle way for the plot to hint that it's about to introduce a new opponent, albeit it does so with all the delicacy of a hammer slamming down on your head. It never feels as fluid or interesting as what we had come to witness in the first season, which is shown through flashbacks with an ugly visual approach that only tends to look cheap. While there may be some overlap between the two groups in the future, it will be tepid and bland in comparison to the original story's enthusiasm. Even the aspects of what the weird experiment is about begin to feel less well-thought-out, weighed down by an additional situation that appears superfluous but continues to be pursued nonetheless. For this, the awe of the event and the general tension on the island is lost, undermining itself at every turn until it has nothing left to stand on.
The good news is that the women remain captivating, lively, frustrating, and approachable. The bad news is that we spend far less time with them. There are twists and turns, a great opening sequence, and some incredibly lovely moments with our girls that seem like a great payoff for watching the show in the first place.
This is a dismal season. Surprisingly so. Prepare for it, and take this as a big warning. Season 2 of 'The Wilds' is now available on Amazon Prime with all-new episodes.