Day 42/15
Episode 4 of The Wilds Season 2 begins with Fatin commenting how they’ve been on the island for 42 days. It’s July 18th and that’s big news. Why? Well, it turns out it’s actually Dot’s 18th birthday. Fatin is delighted and decides to throw her a birthday party. The girls are excited, bringing out the party supplies box again. Eventually they all party down on the beach, complete with their piñata, champagne, sparklers and plenty of laughs. Well, most of them anyway. Rachel isn’t in the laughing mood. She lies down next to them all, stares at the dancing flames and points out how much she hates birthdays. After all, she only has one birthday to celebrate now rather than two. Happy birthday Dot! Shelby follows Rachel when she heads off down the beach and sits with her, admitting to Rachel that the pain won’t end. Shelby opens up and reveals her backstory regarding her best friend, who killed herself last year. She repeats everything that happened, including the tragic tale of Becca and how the guilt and shame Shelby felt threatened to consume her. Until she turned to faith in order to steady her. In the present, Leah speaks to Daniel Fabe, claiming she’s struggling to keep up this charade, unsure whether she’s able to work with Raf or not. Gretchen listens to this and isn’t sure she’s telling the truth or working the room again. Faber eventually “convinces” Leah to continue, where she bursts into Raf’s room and claims they’re running out of time. Leah is desperate to know what tore the kids apart and what happened on that island. Raf eventually agrees to open up and reveal all. We’re up to day 15; the day where all the kids teamed up to tackle the jaguar. The kids disagree over the best way of taking it out, but Seth is the one who comes up with the idea of baiting it into a trap. Kirin sees through Seth’s perceived façade of playing camp counsellor. Kirin seems to know that he’s moving through the group to try and be everyone’s friends. For Kirin, that’s not going to work. Seth bites back though and points out that his tough-guy façade is not working. As they begin discussing girls, snapping twigs in the distance put them both on high alert. Meanwhile, Josh and Raf head off to the bunker and begin collecting up the supplies. In doing so, Raf bites his tongue as Josh begins digging himself into a racist hole. Speaking of which, there’s also some dick-swinging down on the beach too, as both Scotty and Ivan come to blows over what constitutes as a real man. Anyway, sticking with Josh and Raf for now, the former admits he was sent on this retreat to “learn a little grit.” His parents are hard on him and worse, they even regret spending money on getting him a speech therapist. These two are broken up by the rest of the boys showing and setting the trap. All of them are unsure whether it’s going to work but a growl from afar later that evening, sends them out to the bunker where they find the jaguar has fallen for the trap and is stuck in the bunker. Only, it’s still alive. So Kirin and Ivan step up and manage to kill it. Off the back of this, and on a massive adrenaline high, the boys all dance around the campfire. Ivan and Scotty also patch up their differences too. The attention turns across to Seth though, who’s told to speak up and give a speech. In the middle of this, Kirin pulls Seth’s trousers down and that sends him off alone, angry. As Raf continues his story to Leah in the present, he looks set to reveal something big that happened on the island. Leah catches sight of the hidden camera though and gets cold feet. Leah hugs Raf quickly and whispers to him that “They’re listening. We’ll find another way.” Gretchen, Daniel, and Dean are livid at Leah’s betrayal, with Gretchen bitterly disappointed by what’s transpired. That night, Seth’s true colours are shown as he pins Josh down and masturbates over him alone. Josh is understandably traumatized as Seth heads off and nonchalantly sits by the campfire. The episode comes to a close on a rather dark and nasty note, leaving things wide open for the second half of this one.
The Episode Review
The midway point of this show feels like a bottle episode of sorts. There’s really not a lot of movement on the plot and while this isn’t exactly a filler – especially given how this ends – you could easily skip almost everything that’s in this episode and not miss much. The different timelines continue to interweave and jump all over the place, but it’s done at the expense of paper-thin characterization for a lot of the new cast. We’ve learned barely anything about Bo, Henry and Ivan thus far, while a lot of the boys are walking clichés. Seth is at least an interesting character who has a darker side that’ll be interesting to discover but for everyone else, there’s just not a whole lot else here to cling to. Likewise, with the girls everyone seems to be stuck in a state of flux. I understand that Nora’s death is tough for all of them to handle but take that away and there’s very little going on in their storyline. They’re just doing the daily grind and partying it up, when the island isn’t trying to kill them of course. As we move into the business end of this season, hopefully we’ll see things improve and pick up but this has been a largely inconsequential season thus far.
