The Wilds leaves us with the message that to survive life’s
worst challenges you have to unlock your authentic,
wild self--and for that, you need the right friends.
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 exploring the Season One finale of The Wilds.
After a group of teenage girls’ “plane crash” on an island
turns out to be a carefully orchestrated social experiment,
the girls come together to survive-- and ultimately prove researcher
Gretchen Klein right that women are capable of impressive collaboration.
But the increasingly shocking plot revelations expose just how
dubious this study’s ethics are, poke holes in Gretchen’s version
of so-called “feminism,” and raise a lot more questions
in this whole mystery of why this experiment is happening
and where it could lead.
“It is women, and not men, who have a natural gift
for creating harmonious and capable communities.”
In the finale of Season One, we see how and why Nora acted
as Gretchen’s main accomplice in the experiment.
After Nora rejects the boy she loved, Quinn,
due to her sister’s closed-minded judgment of him as weird,
“Isn’t he a little weird?”
she finds out Quinn has died in a fraternity hazing-related incident--
not unlike numerous real-life hazing deaths we continue
to see across the US.
The boy who killed Quinn turns out to be Gretchen’s son, Devon.
After Nora tries to visit Devon in prison and meets his mom instead,
Gretchen recruits her for the experiment--
essentially by blaming her son’s actions on “the patriarchy,”
“I’m not saying he isn’t to blame, but the patriarchy and its
institutions sure aren’t innocent.”
and promising Nora a storybook version of female bonding
as the cure-all to life’s pains.
“I want to help my sister. I want to find my people.
I want to find my strength.”
“I can promise you all those things... and so much more.”
At the end, we’re left with a crazy cliffhanger when Leah stumbles across
a control room monitoring another experiment called The Twilight of Adam.
“What the f[BLEEP]?”
Since the fake female empowerment retreat the girls signed up for
was termed The Dawn of Eve, it appears that Gretchen is
monitoring a group of young men as a “control group.”
From her presentation (and the titles “Dawn of” for the girls
versus “Twilight of” for the guys), we can gather Gretchen wants to prove
how much worse the guys did-- no doubt expecting they’ll
act out some kind of violent Lord of the Flies scenario.
Is that definitely what we’ll see in Season Two, though?
Earlier in the season, at Gretchen’s university,
a (far tamer) study about herd mentality in young women is
being mirrored by a similar one for men.
In that study, both the guys and girls didn’t do well.
“Well, if it's any consolation, the boys haven't fared much better.
They're all hormones and no backbone.”
So even though Gretchen is blown away by the
young women’s “performance” on the island,
“They reached milestone eight a full two weeks ahead of my projection.
They’re just… God they’re so brilliant! I could scream.”
there’s no reason to assume the young men on the island
won’t also bring surprises.
Gretchen’s generalizations are over-simplistic, as we see
when her statement that a female society will be
“entirely without conflict”
is immediately followed by a sequence of scenes of the girls brawling.
Her philosophy ignores the fact that people still make choices--
on some level it seems that she’s hoping this experiment can
definitively prove that society was at fault for what her son did.
“You can't do that.”
“Do what?” “Blame the frat and not him.”
With her fluent popular feminist rhetoric, Gretchen is
a stand-in for today’s corporate girlboss feminism.
She’s representative of companies and brands which utilize the idea
of female empowerment for profit, talking the talk and co-opting
the language of feminism for selfish gain without
truly caring about the suffering of actual women.
"We're not just thoughtlessly putting her death behind us.
We're moving forward so that what she gave amounts to something."
Gretchen’s outlook simply claims that women are better than men,
and implies that (instead of having equality)
we should just flip the existing power imbalance.
She’s not really interested in deeply challenging today’s
systems of power and money.
“Must be nice to control other peoples’ lives.
Money really does buy everything.”
“Including your ability to control the lives of nine young women.”
To quote the Atlantic: "the presumption of that
difference between women and men is also what made girlbosses
marketable to those who might patronize their businesses:
If these women could succeed while upholding feminist values
and treating their employees humanely, then maybe the patriarchy was just
a choice that savvy consumers could shop their way around."
Gretchen talks about how she actively raised her son
to respect women and resist toxic masculinity,
“I'd read him Adrienne Rich poems when I tucked him in at night.
I took him to the f[BLEEP]ing Women’s March.”
and she reasons that Devon must have rebelled against her.
“Every child runs from parental influence.
In his case, straight into the arms of Theta f[BLEEP]ing Kappa Theta
and their toxic male bullshit.”
But Devon may actually have been internalizing some of the
deeper lessons we witness in Gretchen’s actual behavior.
Her methods of proving her hypothesis of girl power
Follow the playbook of the very patriarchy that she claims to hate.
Gretchen’s line about the “piss on the weak” culture
that taught her son to pass down hurt to people
beneath him in the social order,
“He was victimized by that ‘dog eat dog,’ ‘piss on the weak’
culture they peddled, but when it was his turn
to dole it out, apparently he jumped at the chance.”
isn’t so far off from how she acts.
Gretchen’s research assistant Linh (known to the girls as Jeanette)
initially believes in the experiment’s mission,
“Do you hate men? I hate them.”
but when the sight of the unconscious girls triggers
a memory of her assault, she realizes this is a
gross violation of the young women’s consent.
“I can’t do this, they didn’t f[BLEEP]ing ask for this!”
--and her shock prompts the accident which leads to her death.
Gretchen, despite saying she lectured her son about consent,
“I’d sit him down and we would have long dialogues
about consent and respect and body positivity.”
overlooks the humanity of the subjects she claims
to care about and admire.
And she shows a gross disregard for the safety
of the women on the island.
We see in the finale how Rachel lost her hand,
“Shark!”
--likely what led to Gretchen’s team finally
intervening to get the girls off the island.
We also see how Nora has been frantically operating
on her own since Linh’s death-- a pretty absurd situation for
Gretchen to put a young person in.
(The mystery of how Linh’s body disappeared is resolved
in this episode, too, as Nora watches how Gretchen’s
team removes it in the middle of the night.)
In the present plot, Nora is nowhere to be seen,
and the other girls are not only being held against their will and
separated from each other, but Gretchen’s team is also
attempting to brainwash and bully them as some form of mind control.
“Why are you being so brutal?” “You’re projecting it onto me.”
Gretchen’s psychologist Dan strategically tries to make
Leah doubt her “obsessive” mind and blame herself,
“The more implicated these young girls feel about the tragedies
that occurred over there, the less inclined they are to expose us.”
--echoing the way Leah’s older boyfriend made her feel
at fault for his illegal relationship with her.
“You’re a child, and you lied to me.”
Gretchen justifies all her harsh treatment of these
women as necessary for building a better society,
“You don't wanna be watching the apocalypse wishing that
you'd had the courage to do something insane in the
name of f[BLEEP]ing progress!
but the project clearly serves her personal ego and ambition,
“It’s showtime.”
--and she even seems to get a high from manipulating the girls.
“Jesus Dan, that was virtuosic.”
“I’ve never seen someone so excited to watch a girl implode.”
When Gretchen’s experiment is getting underway, she says she feels
“Like Napoleon”
suggesting the only real difference between her
and history’s most famous macho conqueror is anatomy.
And at one point, she admits to being “mad” at Linh for dying.
“I also have some rancor toward her for the inconvenience
her passing has caused. I realize that’s an inappropriate reaction.”
Given the extremes to which Gretchen is willing to go
in terms of endangering minors and even covering up a death,
we have to wonder what the purpose of this high-stakes experiment really is.
We finally see Gretchen interacting with one of
her benefactors in episode 8,
and gather that clearly there are deep pockets involved.
“I personally helped design the eight course tasting menu for today.”
“Eight courses, great!”
“Should give you plenty of time to tell me how
you’re spending my money.”
And we also know she has connections powerful enough
to stop the pilot who found the girls from rescuing them.
“Did you have the pilot killed?” “What?”
Her team believes she’s capable of using violence in that case--
even though Gretchen offers a much more “reasonable” explanation.
“I hired a hacker to change the GPS of the planes…”
So who, in the end, is Gretchen presenting her findings to?
We know that the girls are being held in South America,
pretty far from the US.
“Roughly 800 miles west of Cusco.”
“Peru.”
And while Linh’s death couldn’t have been anticipated, there is
an extreme level of risk being tolerated here.
It’s unlikely that some purely “academic” thesis
would have the latitude for this, let alone the level of backing
to engage in extreme cover-ups.
“It's true what we're doing involves substantial risk,
but every game-changing endeavor does, and that is what we're after here,
radical game change.”
In an earlier episode, we also see how Gretchen
pacifies Leah’s parents about her progress during the supposed retreat.
“Leah’s doing beautifully.”
But what exactly has she been telling each of the girls’ parents
throughout this ordeal, and what was even her plan
for keeping the parents in the dark?
Similarly, it’s clear Gretchen researched each of the girls
extensively before their arrival.
But is there a greater order to why she selected
this assortment of personalities specifically?
“I read the dossiers. She’s not following typical behavior pattern.”
The Wilds contrasts Gretchen’s sleek-sounding feminism
as a marketing tool,
“Creating a world that men don’t control. A world of our very own.
How does that sound?”
with the messier but genuine relationships
we see form between the girls.
“It’s ‘cause I trust you.” “What the hell did I do to earn that?”
“You saved my life.”
The premise of young women stuck on an island with no idea
what’s happening to them-- or who’s pulling the strings--
is symbolic of how powerless these characters feel in their actual lives.
“But being a teenage girl in normal-ass America…
that was the real living hell.”
Underlying all of the flashback stories is the sense that being
a young woman in our society is tantamount to experiencing
a total lack of control to dictate your life.
“Control. Adults love to throw that word around. You know, always telling
us to use it, not to lose it, to get ourselves under it.”
Crucially, these girls have been dealing with their problems alone,
but the more natural and healthy state they discover on the island
revolves around facing their challenges together.
The series title, The Wilds, is echoed in how the women get
increasingly wild and primal as the days go on, in both
their appearance and behavior.
They become stronger and more resilient in their survival skills.
“This must be what cavewomen felt like when their men came home with meat;
like, I am legit hot for you right now.”
But they also reveal new vulnerabilities,
and peel back layers of performance they’ve been hiding behind--
ones which have only served to isolate them
from the help and connection they need.
“It feels so good to be full. Don’t let me forget that I said that.”
As they become increasingly free of the ways that they’ve been “civilized,”
this allows them to build stronger bonds.
Ironically, the experiment proves Gretchen’s theory right
to a large extent.
“As they work towards solving the challenges they face together.”
Ultimately, together they’re more powerful than even Gretchen
can imagine, and use their combined girlpower
to plot against Gretchen’s team.
“I’m not saying a word until you let me see her.”
Thanks to the support of her friends, Leah’s finally able to trust her mind
and how her obsessiveness enables her to observe that
they are victims of a secret plot.
“I think something pretty f[BLEEP]ed is going on here
and I think somebody knows all about it.”
When Leah escapes her room, and the alarm goes off,
it turns out the alarm is actually for Shelby,
“Her throat is closing up.”
who we earlier saw slip a note into Leah’s shirt.
The timing of her attack suggests that they’re working together.
So when Leah finally uncovers part of Gretchen’s scheme,
it’s a step toward all the girls at last breaking free of being controlled.
For all its answers, the finale raises a ton of questions.
Again, where is Nora? We haven’t seen her in
any of the “present day” scenes after the girls have been “rescued,”
which suggests something may have happened to her.
“This story, the two of you. You mind if I ask how it ends?”
“I don’t know. Guess that’s in your hands now.”
For that matter, where is Martha? We haven’t seen a present-day
interview scene with her, either, which means that
her fate is still unknown.
What is phase 2?
“Keep in mind with the rollout for phase two
has absorbed all available watercraft.”
What is Dot’s involvement? In an earlier episode,
we were able to see how Dot made a deal with Gretchen
after her father passed away to avoid CPS.
“What makes you think there’s a price tag?”
“‘Cause nothing in this world is free.”
So just how much does she know?
And finally, what exactly is The Twilight of Adam?
Was this all-male group on the same island as the girls?
And will they ever meet in the future?
So what do YOU think of The Wilds finale,
and what are you expecting from Season Two?
Let us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to
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