"The Wilds": more than just "Lost: For Girls!"
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of The Wilds, a new thriller-drama on Amazon Prime, that is basically just Lost: For Girls!: A group of teenage girls end up on a deserted island after a plane crash; we learn about their surprising and dramatic backstories through specific flashback episodes; there’s more going on than meets the eye and they try to figure out if the crash was really an accident (dun dun dunnnn). There are also flashforwards to when the girls have been rescued (after an unspecified amount of time) and they’re being asked about what, exactly, happened to them on the island.
And there are some incredibly heavy-handed moments — especially in the first episode, when in a flash forward, 17-year-old Leah (Sarah Pidgeon) is asked about the traumatic experience of the crash. "There was trauma,” she says. “But being a teenage girl in normalized America? That was the real living hell.” Oof.
That said, though, there’s more going on here than that. It’s a show that uses its high concept to really explore and highlight the different ways that women, and especially young girls, are hurt and made to suffer in modern society, often at the hands of men. From being manipulated and assaulted by older men (and then being manipulated into thinking it was their fault), to being expected to be spectacular at all times, to feeling left behind by everyone, each character in The Wilds brings their own complicated personal traumas to the island with them. Furthermore, I appreciated that the show doesn’t just toss in a diverse cast and call it a day — for instance, there’s Martha, who is Ojibway, and her backstory shows how her native dance traditions form an important part of her personality. (Martha’s played by Canadian actress Jenna Clause, who is a Cayuga Nation Wolf Clan Member of the Haudenosaunee People from Six Nations Reserve.) The diversity is a feature they expand upon, and while it’s not perfect, the effort is admirable.
My main quibble is that the stuff that actually happens on the island doesn’t add up to much in its first season; most of the juice comes from the flashback and flashforwards. Yes, there’s some interpersonal conflict on the island, but it seems at times that the writers were struggling to come up with things for the girls to do without pushing the plot forward too quickly. (There’s an entire episode where there’s a shelter-building competition to win a bag of Takis.) There’ll be an episode where they look for a cave that’ll provide shelter and ultimately find it, but in the next episode, they reveal that off-camera, the cave sucked and they’re still back at the beach. The island action starts to ramp up a bit by the end of the season, but there’s a lot of treading water before that.
However, the overall mystery is fun and made me want to keep watching to find out more. Props to the show for revealing what’s going on well before the season is over — whether you like the reveal or not is probably a personal thing, but I found it fun. And the reveal doesn’t mean the intrigue and suspense is over at all, because there are plenty of places for the show to go from there.
It’s also fun to see Rachel Griffiths (Six Feet Under, Muriel’s Wedding) back on screen. She’s a compelling character, and although she’s required to make a ridiculous speech at one point in the season (which includes her saying one word that totally bummed me out — you’ll know what I mean when you get to it), Griffiths commits 100%.
The season does end on a cliffhanger, but not one so egregious that it’ll feel like you wasted a season or anything (there’s no “what’s in the hatch???” moment here). If The Wilds gets a second season, I’m definitely going to be tuning in.
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That’s all for me today, gorgeous. Talk to you soon.
Love,
Kat
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