Chris Pine And Jason Schwartzman Are Alive And Rockin’ In ‘Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later’–But How?

The Wet Hot American Summer franchise is like a tin can that’s overstuffed with vegetables. That’s a roundabout way of saying it has more cast members than it knows what to do with–but then again that’s the point, so therefore it actually does know what its doing. This show is built to carry the combined weight of dozens of comedy superstars, and any attempt to thin the herd doesn’t work because those characters just claw their way back from the grave.

That’s what happened in Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later, the latest installment in the Wet Hot epic. Eric (Chris Pine) and Greg (Jason Schwartzman), the two characters that bit the dust in 2015’s prequel mini-series First Day of Camp, are revealed to be alive and well and groovin’ ten years after the wild summer of ’81. But how? Both of them were shot! Greg got a bullet in the forehead and Eric was shot in the chest, fell off a building, and was run over by a military vehicle! How did they survive?!

The first clue that Eric had slipped through death’s fingers came at the end of First Day of Camp, which saw Chris Pine’s rocker decked out in cowboy garb, hitchin’ a ride on the side of the road. Ten Years Later elaborates on that reveal, and it of course involves cyborg assassins.

By episode six (titled “Rain”) of Ten Years Later, Mitch (H. Jon Benjamin’s camp director-turned-can of vegetables) and Vietnam vet/chef Gene (Christopher Meloni) have recruited Eric and Greg to save Camp Firewood from Ronald Reagan and nuclear weapons. Gene finally asks the question viewers have been asking–or maybe not, since resurrection is actually plausible compared to, you know, nukes under Camp Firewood.

This opens up Eric’s mind, which is covered by a few pounds of Adam Duritz dreads, and he digs into a flashback that honestly could be its own 90-minute Netflix original movie.

Journey back to the finale of First Day of Camp, which saw Eric get pumped full of bullets and mangled under government tires. It turns out all of that was expertly staged by the U.S. government! With dozens of Firewood and Tigerclaw counselors present, secret agents used a cassette tape of prerecorded “gun sounds” and a red “blood” stain stick-on to create the illusion that Eric had been gunned down. Then, Eric took a dive off the roof and onto a mat, also placed there by men in black. While the rest of the counselors were in shock and screaming out plot points, Eric was abducted and replaced with an incredibly detailed mannequin.

Looks just like him.

If you’re wondering how Schwartzman’s character survived getting assassinated by The Falcon (Jon Hamm), then Greg has an answer for you.

Mystery solved!

Eric and Greg then found themselves in the plot of a late ’80s Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, basically. The two characters, who never interacted during First Day of Camp, were taken to an underground C.I.A. training facility where they became guinea pigs in the government’s quest to merge machine and man into lethal cyborg assassins. With their transformation and training complete, the C.I.A. dispatched Agents Eric and Greg on covert missions to take out hostile world leaders.

With those sword hands, Eric could shred more than just a guitar! But a life (or, knowing WHAS, probably just a day) of killing on behalf of the United States took its toll on the two of them. As Eric said, all of that murder began to murder them “on the inside.” So they quit the C.I.A., and that’s where that First Day of Camp coda comes in. It turns out the guy that picked up Eric the hitchhiker was, in fact, counselor-turned-cyborg Greg.

Freed from the shackles of government-endorsed killing, these two cyborgs started a two-man jam band called Soul Glimmer. But Soul Glimmer wasn’t destined for big time fame in 1982, and Eric quit the band because he couldn’t handle major label rejection. Eric got a job as a copywriter at an ad agency called Saatchi & Saatchi, where he quickly rose through the ranks thanks to his work selling the latest in high tech appliances.

But much like murdering foreign officials, the advertising game started to murder Greg on the inside. An ad with the slogan “follow your dreams and never stop rocking” jolted Eric out of his ad man stupor. He knew what he had to do: grow some dreads and reconnect with Greg. From that point on, Soul Glimmer was back in action and together they danced that silence down through the mornin’ (sha la la la la la la la yeah).

Their story doesn’t end there, of course, as Mitch and Gene pulled them back into the high stakes drama of Camp Firewood. That was a smart move, because if you’re going up against an ex-president and a nuclear bomb, you want a cyborg jam band on your side.

Where to stream Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later