‘Wayward Pines’ EP M. Night Shyamalan Teases What’s Ahead After That Massive Reveal

After last week’s big Wayward Pines reveal, fans are itching to get to the bottom of what’s happening in the strange town.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Those of us who haven’t read the books never saw the reveal that Wayward Pines is actually set over 2,000 years in the future coming, which was a welcome surprise. We learned that the small town actually houses the last of humanity as we know it. The creatures outside of the electric gates, the Abbies, are what rules the earth now, but the most disturbing thing about the entire reveal, was that the Abbies actually evolved from us.

The show’s executive producer M. Night Shyamalan talked to reporters about what’s ahead now that the majority of the Burke family knows the truth about Wayward Pines and according to him “you can assume it’s not going to be warm and fuzzy.”

Theresa Burke is currently the only member of the Burke family that has no clue what’s going on in Wayward Pines. While Ethan escaped over the fences to find an answer for himself and Ben was being creepily inducted into the First Generation, Theresa was busy trying to figure out the town’s deal the best way she could…by blending in and doing her newly assigned job. So when we asked Shyamalan about how long Theresa will remain in the dark, his reply of “Soon.” was pretty surprising. “She’ll find out soon,” he continued. “I can’t tell you how and all of that stuff, but definitely. That’s also a fascinating part of the conversation. It’s intimated—it’s touched on there, in the indoctrination scene of the children, but that will be expanded on over the next episodes…the differences between adults in this situation and children in this situation and which one has a handicap and which one has an asset.”

Speaking of the children, how bizarre was that whole First Generation business? It’s a new addition to the story, separate from the books, which places a lot of responsibility and power into the hands of the children of Wayward Pines. “It’s a fascinating thing to—they reference the ark and Pilcher’s intentions to make an ark,” Shyamalan told us of what’s ahead for the First Generation. “There’s a thing that we take for granted because there’s so many of us right now that freedom and lack of rules or flexibility of social environment is a given—that’s a right. But if there was only X number of us, does one of us get to jeopardize the group? Well, no that couldn’t be allowed, right? Those kinds of freedoms couldn’t be allowed because there’s so few of us, so we’re going to have to make really stringent rules. So this kind of mentality—I’m really dancing around it—but this kind of thinking of how valuable this last group is and to what extent would you go to make sure that that group expands. It pushes all moral things that we take for granted right now because there’s seven billion of us…you can imagine when we’re talking about so few of us, how precious those children are.”

Although the big reveal has been made, there’s still PLENTY of story to tell and it looks like we’ll be getting the blanks filled in via Shyamalan’s favorite device: Flashbacks! “I’m a crack addict when it comes to flashbacks. It’s just my thing,” he admits. “I just find it so moving when we can go back and see how someone—where they came from or how they got here or how the couple got to a problem and all that stuff. For me that was the beauty of finally getting to tell everyone in 5 and 6, I could start to go backwards now and tell you how we got here. The how we got here from all the characters’ perspective is so exciting. It was something that—and you’re really tapping into what the structure was that I fell in love with at my house when I had the writers here and I was like this is the structure, let’s go back and tell how we got here.”

Wayward Pines returns with a new episode Thursday, June 25 on FOX.

Photo Credit: Jaguar PS / Shutterstock.com