The Wilds Season 2 gave us some bombshell answers
and ended with another huge cliffhanger.
This is the Takeaway, a series brought to you by the Take,
where we break down the endings of your
favorite films and TV shows, to get at their deeper
meanings and messages.
In this episode, we’re talking about The Wilds
Season 2’s takeaways, its answers, and
the new mysteries it raises.
Spoilers ahead!
In the Season 2 finale, The Dawn of Eve
and Twilight of Adam participants all come together –
and it seems like Dr. Gretchen Klein’s
manipulative social experiment has at last been undone.
Leah has managed to tip off the FBI about what Gretchen’s up to
and she’s feeling victorious – but then, at the last minute,
Gretchen makes a getaway and reveals this whole nightmare is continuing:
“The show goes on.”
The girls and the guys realize they’ve been abandoned
on another island – apparently Phase Three
is turning them together into a new control group,
which Gretchen will monitor through some inside informants.
The Wilds’ second season probes deeper into the morality
of both Gretchen’s experiment and the subjects themselves.
When can bad choices be excused by traumatic backstories
or good intentions?
And when do they make you a bad person?
Near the end of the last episode in Season 2,
it SEEMS like Leah is coming out on top
It’s revealed she’s been working with Agent Dean –
he briefly gave Leah back her phone, and she called her old friend Ian,
who tracked down an address for Dawn of Eve that led him
to Gretchen’s son Devon.
Devon, who clearly hates his mom
and resents having to fake his own death
at the start of the Twilight of Adam experiment,
seems to help Ian inform the FBI about Gretchen’s
dangerous island experiments.
Meanwhile, we see that Leah’s unhinged,
emotionally unbalanced behavior in the bunker has been an act –
she’s actually been planning her escape since before
the girls ever left the island.
“You're the only one who knows the truth about this place.”
and intentionally making people underestimate her.
[Angrily] “I am not a child!”
“I know you're not, but if others want to believe that,
you use it.”
This methodical, obsessive planning culminates in a satisfying moment
where Leah flips the script on Gretchen
“You almost, almost got my number.”
“How do you know I didn't?”
When Gretchen’s phone rings, it’s Leah who’s expecting this call
and Gretchen SEEMS to be foiled now that the authorities
have found her out.
However, the girls and guys come together
and happen on a celebration that Gretchen planned
and now isn’t attending.
[Over speakers] “Welcome to the revolution.”
“What the hell is this? Where is she? We have to find her.”
Leah realizes that Gretchen and her team
have abandoned the girls and the boys and destroyed all the evidence
of what they were doing.
Gretchen takes off on a private jet with Devon,
who seems to make up with his mom,
[Quavering] “Mom, I'm really, really sorry.”
psychologist Daniel Faber and her ever-skeptical assistant, Alex.
Just before that, she sends her betrayer, Agent Dean, away.
“You're headed to your apartment, where your daughter's waiting.
I stacked a few decks so that she can be in your life again.”
But not before making sure he doesn’t talk about
or interfere with her operation if he wants to keep
his daughter in his life
“All my gifts come with receipts, Dean.”
Still, all that doesn’t mean the experiment is over –
Gretchen is initiating a new phase.
The new combined group of girls and guys
discover they’re stuck on yet another island.
Gretchen has just said:
“A whole new control group has sprung up
without me having to lift a finger.” –
which implies that she hopes to contrast disastrous
results from this new mixed group, with the girls’ initial results.
And even though Gretchen destroyed all the surveillance equipment
“I mean, we took everything out, the bugs, the surveillance”
she reveals that she has insiders on the island
“You really think I would have fled if I didn't have people on the inside?”
So who is Gretchen referring to?
Gretchen alludes to multiple people, so we know she has more than one spy.
But after Gretchen’s comment, the camera cuts to someone surprising:
Shelby.
Could Shelby have struck some kind of deal with Gretchen?
We know she’s upset due to being in a difficult place
in her relationship with Toni, who’s devastated by
Martha’s mental breakdown and seems to resent Shelby for it.
So maybe Shelby thinks leverage with Gretchen
will give her power to help Toni, Martha and the others
eventually get home safely.
The finale begins with a dream sequence
in which Shelby sings the song “Martha” while Toni’s in the audience,
and then Gretchen shows up in a Matrix homage
to present Shelby with red and blue sour gummies.
In the Matrix, the red and blue pills represent a choice between
staying in the Matrix or leaving it for true reality.
So could this foreshadow that Shelby decided
to stay in her Matrix?
Shelby also isn’t exactly eager to return home
to a family that won’t accept her sexuality.
“The boat, the light, it was…it was gone.
I was so afraid of my other life that I hesitated.”
Another potential insider is Gretchen’s former
female operative Nora, who we know is alive.
“Nora. Is she stronger?”
“Hell, yeah.”
She’s been offscreen all season except for a brief moment
when we witness her with Gretchen’s team.
So, we don’t know what she’s doing
or what’s going on with her psychologically.
But she could still be on the island, about to reunite with the group –
which might be messy since some of the girls now know
Nora was aware of the experiment and hiding something major from them.
“I don’t have to tell you she’s fine because you already know,
because you’ve known for a long time.”
As a side note, when Fatin says
“Someday soon...being able to tell her she was right,”
this sets up the moment in the Season 1 finale
when we saw Leah get the note: You were RIGHT.
There's also a chance Josh could be helping Gretchen
since we know he's the one who spilled the boys' secret to her.
We can more definitively say who one of Gretchen’s insiders is:
as the group discovers they’re on another island,
someone puts on music - and we see that the group’s DJ
is Seth, who’s now taken over Gretchen’s old haunt.
Her former operative in the guys’ group
is a masculine parallel to Gretchen.
Seth has shown a Gretchen-level aptitude
for masterful manipulation tactics and a near identical ruthlessness
when it comes to getting what he wants.
As much as they alienate and anger everyone around them,
time and time again these two come out on top.
Season 2’s focus on how survival calls for desperate measures
draws out interesting questions about morality:
Can you still be a good person if you do bad things?
And when should someone be written off as a bad person?
“Hey, you're the one that said zero tolerance, did you not?”
In Season 1, we see the girls making a number of BAD choices
in their pre-island lives.
However, the context of these actions reveals that
there is a bigger picture that allows us to empathize.
In Season 2, we likewise often feel for The Twilight of Adam boys
while watching them make bad choices,
but at times the plot goes further to question
how much we can still empathize with them
when they’re clearly in the wrong.
The situation that truly tests where these lines should fall is
the focus of much of the boy’s tension:
Seth’s banishment.
After Seth sexually assaults Josh, the boys, except for Raf,
feel it’s only right to banish him.
But the ethics of this situation are complicated.
While “zero tolerance” might make sense in some of
our world’s settings,
the stakes on the island are literally life and death.
“We can’t just…sentence him to death.” [Stammering] “With…It’s…We’re not
a f-[BLEEP]-ing court of law.”
After Seth manages to wrangle his way
back into the group, though, his step-brother Henry
realizes Seth has an established pattern of harmful, abusive behavior.
He stole his ex-girlfriend’s cat and physically hurt her.
“You hurt Julia. You hurt people. This is who you are.”
So the group comes back to the decision that he’s unforgivable
and kicks him out permanently after all.
“You don’t know what she did to me.”
“Did that give you the right to do whatever heinous thing you did?”
Gretchen, even more so, is portrayed as far beyond
any potential for redemption or forgiveness.
“‘Cause you're a f-[BLEEP]-in’ psychopath.”
But the season’s portrait of Seth invites us to understand a little more
how and why a person with a lot of gifts might cross over
into highly manipulative, antisocial behavior.
Seth’s flashback episode shows how his being abandoned
by his mother drives him to find any means necessary
to make everyone like him and stay with him.
While Gretchen’s voiceover blames Seth’s mom
for how he turned out.
“To mishandle or abandon a young developing thing
without seeing it through to maturity, that is a violent and dangerous act.”
the subtext of her speech is that Gretchen is the bad mother figure
“D-Does she know yet?”
[Angrily] “That you asked to be extracted? Of course.
She’s really f-[BLEEP]-ing disappointed in you.”
to Devon, Seth, Josh and all these young people
whose lives she’s ruining.
“This entire enterprise is my child, and I do not give up on my children.”
The season sometimes makes us feel for why Seth is the way he is,
and it showcases just how magnetic his good qualities can be,
which is why our emotions about such a person can be so confusing.
“You’re not stupid for thinking he was great
because a lot of him really is.”
But in the end the Wilds suggests that,
while most of the characters exist in gray areas,
Seth and Gretchen are just too morally bankrupt
for their actions to be excused by any kind of relativism
or sympathetic backstory.
“You’re not some sad case that snapped once.”
[Screams] “You’re a f-[BLEEP]-ing monster.”
Meanwhile, the two people who have come the closest
to toppling Gretchen and Seth are Leah and Raf.
Both Leah and Raf at times seem to share qualities with Gretchen and Seth.
Raf is capable of great violence, like Seth.
And Leah schemes like Gretchen – her escape plan
sometimes calls for dishonesty, manipulation and callousness.
Leah doesn’t tell Raf she plans to trade the information
she extracts from him.
“I can get them what they need, but there’s something I want, too.”
She also pushes a highly distressed Rachel too far
for information about Nora.
“Do you remember how she heard about it?
Was it at school? Or your parents?
Or…did somebody else get involved?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
Still, Leah’s overall goal is a moral one: to free all of the young people
who are Gretchen’s prisoners.
And despite her plans, she stops Raf from revealing
the boys’ big secret while Gretchen is listening.
[Whispers] “They're listening.”
Most importantly, the crucial difference
between Gretchen and Seth, versus Raf and Leah,
is the ability to care for others.
“I wrote in my diary that I would, like, die for you.
Which felt so true then. But obviously it wasn't.
But I would for them.”
Leah and Raf rally the people around them
as a team that works for each other,
while Gretchen and Seth motivate and play others
to do their own bidding.
[Angrily] “This is what you do, you lie, you hide and you fake
your way into everyone’s f-[BLEEP]-ing SYMPATHIES.”
Early in Season 2, Gretchen seems happy
because her all-male control group apparently did worse,
proving her hypothesis right that women are better
at governing than men.
“They lasted 34 days, while the women lasted the full 50, so…”
But what did we actually see?
On the one hand, some of the male behavior does
seem to prove Gretchen’s assumptions about toxic masculinity:
there’s more aggressive drama and weird ego trips,
especially between Seth and Kirin
who are vying for leadership control of the group.
“Why did I just do what he told me to do?”
“It's that captain daddy voice. You just can't fight it.”
The guys split up into factions, hoard food before
they stabilize their supply, and they don't bond
or get vulnerable with their feelings to the same degree the girls do.
At the same time, though, it seems like Gretchen
may have intentionally chosen male subjects she believes
will cause trouble and clash - Kirin and Ivan already had beef;
Bo and Scotty are a bonded unit who won’t be loyal to the group as a whole;
Raf, Henry, and Josh are loners;
and, most glaringly, Seth is an abuser.
Despite their issues, a number of the boys
do grow and come together at times.
They actually solve their food problem issues
sooner than the girls.
Also, while Gretchen says that the boys only lasted 34 days,
all the events we see leading up to their extraction
are initiated by her own spy Seth, who steals a dinghy
and takes others with him before almost killing Kirin
and provoking Raf into beating him.
In Season 2, Episode 7, Gretchen visits Josh with sour gummies,
and seems to emerge satisfied before she tells her team:
“Everything that went wrong with our control group
can be laid at the feet of one simple, straightforward thing…
bad…male…behavior.”
So we can infer that Josh finally told Gretchen the secret
of the big thing that went wrong on the island for the boys:
Seth’s act of sexual assault.
Gretchen seems to assume that this act of violence
proves her point about the males.
Still, the aggressor here was HER OWN operative –
an individual with a history of antisocial behavior,
whom any responsible person would never have placed unsupervised
with other minors.
So it’s hard to see how this proves the boys in general failed the experiment.
Overall, at least from what we’ve seen, Gretchen’s generalizations
that females are unilaterally better and males are innately bad
are not proven.
And with all her interference and the tons of extra variables
not being controlled for, her experiment comes across
like very suspect science.
The Wilds Season 2 has left us with many mysteries.
Before she even knows about the assault,
Gretchen says the boys failed their 50-day test for Phase One,
but why?
The last time we see the boys on the island,
Raf is beating Seth on the dinghy – but this isn’t explicitly stated
as THE reason the boys are removed.
[Distantly] “There's a boat!”
Why did their situation call for rescue more urgently
than when Rachel LOST A HAND?
Also, we now know that some of the parents
have paid for the experiment –
"I do wonder why Gretchen picked someone like Josh
with all of his health issues."
“His family is one of the few that paid.”
Fatin’s parents being some of Gretchen’s donors
was a fan theory from Season 1 – and this now seems pretty plausible,
given that it’s confirmed Josh’s did, and Fatin’s and Josh’s suitcases
both made it to shore.
Could other parents be donors, too?
Now that our groups have linked, what will surviving
on the island look like?
Each individual group has already established
specific dynamics and leaders.
Will Season 3 bring the return of Nora?
And how bad will Seth get?
Finally, perhaps the biggest mystery of all is:
what is Gretchen's true endgame motive?
Season 2’s ending feels ominous.
But there’s a lot of reason for hope: there’s a new unity between the groups.
Leah is surrounded by people who finally trust her judgment.
Nora and Martha are both alive.
Ian, Devon, and the FBI seem to be setting
the wheels of justice in motion.
And Agent Dean might not uphold his end of the blackmail.
In the end, the deciding factor in this whole experiment isn’t gender –
all of these young people have the potential to grow
and help each other through the hardest challenges.
And while Gretchen is a formidable foe,
she repeatedly underestimates just how much these kids are capable of.
What did you think of the Season 2 finale?
Do you have any theories about Season 3?
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