Part puzzle-box mystery, part prestige teen drama, part castaway survival thriller, Prime Video’s new teen series,The Wildsis basically ifLostwere a psychological experiment masterminded by a grown-up Mona Vanderwaal. You’ve got your trapped and tormented teen girls. You’ve got your ludicrously advanced surveillance system. You’ve even got your torturous mind games in an underground bunker. (Pretty Little Liarsnever had a shark, sure, but had the Liars ever made a decision as foolish as taking a beach vacay together, you know Mona would have totally seized the opportunity.)
WhereThe Wildsstands apart from bothLostandPretty Little Liars, though, is in how willing it is to dispense with the manipulative hyper-cleverness that bogs down so many puzzle-box narratives. (As Kellie Herson explains in herexceptionally sharp dissectionof the puzzle-box trend that seemed to take television over in the late 2010s, puzzle-box shows work best “when they try to grapple with mortality and morality and trauma rather than whether fuck-robots have consciousness or what fictional symbols mean.”) Gone, then, isLost’s weird mysticism; gone,PLL’s anarchic word games and strategically trained exotic birds. In their place? Nuanced investigations into the complex real-world traumas the girls left behind when they got on the puzzle-box plane, and a seemingly genuine desire on the part of creatorSarah Streicherand the writers to give the viewer as many answers as possible, as soon as those answers will make sense.
To that end — and in the spirit of contributing to the “media outlet explainer content economy” which Herson notes that puzzle-box shows likeThe Wildsare custom-built to fuel — I give you everything that, 10 episodes in, we (A) know and (B) don’t know about what, exactly, is going on with the girls ofThe Wilds, Gretchen (Rachel Griffiths), and the island she abandoned them on.
[Editor’s note: The following containsspoilersthrough the Season 1 finale ofThe Wilds, “Day Twenty-Three."]
What We Know
1. Who (and what) was on the island.
Obviously (for reasons we’ll get to in a minute), all nine girls who were on the plane made it to the island alive: Leah (Sarah Pidgeon) and Fatin (Sophia Ali), from the same artsy hipster school in California; Dot (Shannon Berry) and Shelby (Mia Healey), from the same public school (if not social circle) in Texas; Martha (Jenna Clause) and Toni (Erana James), best friends from the same rez-adjacent small town in northern Minnesota; Rachel (Reign Edwards) and Nora (Helena Howard), twin sisters from New York City deeply on the outs; and Jeanette Dao (Chi Nguyen), the sole solo traveler, the sole solo traveler, who ultimately becomes the island’s first casualty.
As forwhatwas on the island, well, that list initially includes little more than Fatin’s suitcase (helpful) and Jeanette’s secret cell phone (not), but eventually it grows to also include:
and, on one exceptionally bizarre occasion—
Since there was never an actual “crash,” we should probably also include the fuselage that Rachel, Nora and Leah find on their swim out to sea to retrieve supplies, in which Gretchen’s team has planted a fake black box, the existence of which drives Rachel into such an obsessive fervor she nearly drowns Leah in her effort to get it back to shore.
2. How they got there.
If we’re talking how the girls got to the island, like, on a personal level, well, that’s really the point of the whole show — as Leah stresses to her interrogators in the first episode, being a teen girl in “normal-ass America” had traumatized them all plenty before they even got to the island.
If we’re talking how they got thereliterally, though, that’s much easier: Gretchen and her team faked enough turbulence that the girls would remember the plane starting to go down, then drugged them into unconsciousness, landed the plane safely, and ferried them out to the island amidst the staged detritus of a crash that never happened.
3. Who (for sure) left the island.
Leah, Rachel, Dot, Fatin, Toni and Shelby, all of whom we see interact with Dr. Faber (David Sullivan) and Agent Young (Troy Winbush) in the undisclosed bunker location post-rescue.
4. Who (for sure) did not.
Jeanette Dao, AKA Linh Bach, the third-year doctoral student who had been embedded as the experiment’s sole ‘confederate’ spy/responsible (undercover) adult.
As we learn in Episode 7, the internal injuries that ultimately lead to her sudden death the first day on the island weren’t sustained in the plane crash (which never happened), but rather on the dock when she and Alex are getting ready to ferry an unconscious Leah out to the island. Having been drugged and groped by a bunch of boys in high school — a formative experience that turned her interest in teen girl psychology into academic fanaticism, ultimately joining Gretchen’s project as a True Believer — seeing Leah splayed out, insensate, in the bottom of Alex’s boat sent Linh physically reeling. In trying to stop her from running away, Alex only managed to knock her off balance, sending her sprawling, gut-first, onto a metal bar on the edge of the dock before tipping over into the water. When she came spluttering back to the surface, he’s ready to pull the plug, but she’s back on board. Convincing him she doesn’t need medical attention, she makes him take her and Leah to their drop point. A day later, she’s dead.
It’s utterly senseless. It’s also exactly what the story needed, to show that Gretchen’s “bold measures” (see below) are less ‘bold’ than they are borderline psychotic.
5. Where the island is/Where the girls are now.
According to the smartphone GPS Leah tricks Agent Young into showing her in a moment of fraternal weakness, both are somewhere off the coast of Peru. (Which explains, according to Young, why none of the girls’ parents have been able to get to them yet—visa issues.)
6. Who’s behind… everything.
We’ve name-checked her a dozen times already, but just to make it official: Gretchen Klein, an ambitious research psychologist whose response to getting summarily fired from her last academic gig for undisclosed (but definitely suspect) reasons was, apparently, to launch a VC-funded research project using unwitting, underage human subjects to prove that rooting society in female power is the way of the future.
Or, in her own three-martini-lunch words: “GOD! I can’t wait for these timid-minded fucks to see what bold measures can do.”
7. Who else is in on the scheme.
On the island: Jeanette, who we know from early on was an official part of Gretchen’s research team, and Nora, who we learn in Episode 10 was manipulated into playing the double-agent role after getting knocked sideways by the grief of losing her first love (John Berchtold). Nora lost him twice: first figuratively, after her sister convinces her to dump him for being “weird,” and then literally, after a boy who turns out to be Gretchen’s son hazes him to death during rush for a frat he didn’t even want to be in.
In the bunker:Both Dr. Faber and Agent Young, who it turns out were hired by Gretchen to play specific roles in the post-rescue phase of the experiment. Faber, we learn at the end of Episode 6 as he glories in the mental anguish he manages to drive Leah into, is more than sociopathically ambitious enough to match Gretchen beat-for-beat on her psychological research journey. Young, by contrast, seems to have less of a stomach for the whole business, having been prescripted less for his own relevant professional zeal than for a (presumably sizable) paycheck.
Out in the real world:The rest of Gretchen’s team, which is comprised of actual human adults who have come to the actual reasoned conclusion that what they are doing is morally acceptable, as well as Leonard Whitney (Mark Mitchinson), a fellow researcher still in the academy, who seems to be in charge of the Dawn of Eve’s brother Twilight of Adam group. Additionally, the investors behind Gretchen’s project seem to know a fair amount about what she’s doing (enough, at least, that they should know better), while at least a few of the parents (Leah’s, in particular) seem to have at least known that the scope of the retreat they’d signed their daughters up for was different than what they’d told the girls it would be.
- What Gretchen’s plan is once the girls are back in the world.
Instill enough guilt and paranoia in both them and their families that they won’t feel able to sue. Or, to quote Faber directly, “The more implicated these girls feel about the tragedies that occurred over there, the less inclined they’ll be to expose us.” Cool therapy plan, dude!
- How the evident success of her master plan makes Gretchen feel, just, like, in general.
“Promise not to tell anyone else? Like Napoleon, with a cunt.”
What We Don’t Know
- When the girls get off the island, or how.
Episode 10 is titled “Day Twenty-Three,” so we know they’re stuck on the island at least that long, but given how many things still need to happen to the girls to get them from what they look like on Day Twenty-Three to what they look like in the bunker, it seems really likely there’s a chunk of island time still missing from the narrative.
2. What happened to Shelby’s hair/ankle/sanity.
Shelby has a genuine breakdown in Episode 8, her slow-kindling feelings for Toni getting tangled up with her memories of beating her sexuality back with such violence that she drove her best friend to suicide. As breakdowns go, though, the one we see only ends up leading to a couple hacked-off hanks of sun-bleached hair, and a night spent alone in the forest with Toni. That fully shaved head we see when she sits down across the table from Faber and Young, that busted ankle she hobbles in on, that glassy-eyed intensity she pins them down with? All yet unaccounted for.
- What happened to Rachel’s hand, and when.
Similarly, while the last scene we see of the girls on the island in Episode 10 heavily implies that Rachel is about to be attacked by a shark, the thoroughness with which her stump is healed when she reveals it at the end of her flashback episode suggests a much more significant chunk of time has passed between when she loses her hand, and when the girls eventually get “rescued.”
4. Where Nora is.
The implication isfound out and “in custody”(Faber asks Rachel if she wants to talk about what happened with her sister, not to), but could be worse.
5. What happened to Martha.
The implication isdead(her flashback episode comes from Young being tasked with sorting through a box of her things before recommending to Gretchen that she should just write Martha’s family an enormous check), but it could be clearer.
6. What the boys’ half of the experiment is.
Given how Gretchen seems dead set on her dream of a Gynotopia (her term), the most reasonable assumption is that Leonard’s Twilight of Adam project is meant to be a control group foil to Gretchen’s primary Dawn of Eve experiment — a proof, that is to say, of concept, that any society run by men will ultimately lead to misery and self-destruction.
- If there’s another group of girls running the island experiment a second time, now that the first group is in the rescue bunker.
Self-explanatory, this one. As we know from one of Gretchen’s gag-inducing scenes with Leonard, she’s all aboutpraxis. Praxis in this case? Gotta run your experiment more than once, if you want your data to mean anything.
- Who’s going to give us our next DNCE-inspired fever dream, if Martha’s really gone?
When it comes both to puzzle-box mysteries and to prestige-adjacent teen dramas, too many creative teams forget to also havefun(I’m looking at you,Grand Army). Not so, The Wilds, which manages to juggle three separate timelines, ten different traumatic backstories (well, nine traumatic backstories, plus Gretchen’s unstable one), and aLost-meets-PLLmystery, all without losing sight of the fact that even when life is crushingly hard, there’s still levity and joy and goofiness to be had. Dot’s sock dance to Poison in Episode 3 is one of the season’s high notes in this respect, as is the collective “Unsinkable Eight” morning show daydream the girls indulge in on Day Sixteen.
The absolute highest point, though, is obviously Martha’s trippy “Cake by the Ocean”music video fever dream, which, narratively, slots directly in between Martha collapsing from E. coli poisoning at the end of Episode 6, and nearly drowning in a flash tidal surge at the start of Episode 7. What a show!
- Why (and how) the girls managed to keep shaving their legs and armpits for at least the first twenty-three days they were stranded.
Okay, this is less a part of the bigger mystery yet to be solved, and more a pet peeve about a show that otherwise seems genuinely willing to dispense with social beauty conventions in the name of both reality and (god help me)praxis— I mean, the girls’ faces are left not just to get a bit dirty, but also to get sun-baked and acne-scarred, covered in scratches and scrapes and patches of peeling skin. Their hair gets greasy, sun-bleached, or poofed-out and a bit raggedy, depending on what’s most realistic for their type. Their clothes are stained, shredded, and shared as needed. Sure, Fatin always looks great, her face made up to a T, but that’s acharacterthing, based both in her identity as a self-proclaimed girly-girl, and in the fact that she’s the slowest to accept that rescue (and thus, a return to real life) isn’t imminent. Plus, she landed on the island with her suitcase, and most of what was in that suitcase was make-up. It just makes sense.
Butshaving? Look, twenty-two days in, Shelby and Toni are making out, silky bare pits and legs entwining, Martha’s hunting a goat with perfectly smooth legs, and Rachel’s swimming with the sharks and her bare skin is so burnished and hair-free, the shark’s teeth might just slip off. That Fatin’s and Martha’s bags might have had a couple razors and some shave gel is reasonable enough. But that all the girls would have been sharing them, for nearly a month, on a deserted island where they’re literally, constantly on the edge of death? Beggars belief!
Beggars belief, that is, until you remember just how strong the patriarchy’s hold on gender norms is. Or, to once again quote Gretchen, this time ranting to one of her male grad student team members on the subject of stiletto heels: “Yet another mechanism of oppression! This is what the patriarchy wants, to turn us into tall, slow geishas with fallen arches andfucking sciatica.” Why wear stilettos, then? Answer: “Because my legs look good in them.”
And then, without missing a single beat (or drawing a single mental connection), she goes back to practicing her big speech about how her island experiment promotes self-motivated behaviors.
And that, in a nutshell, isThe Wilds. I truly hope I see you all back here again for Season 2.
