Wayward Pines recap: Pass Judgment

Oh, how I wish Margaret got a glimpse of Jason’s face when he realized she’d escaped. The First Generation’s lone captured female Abby (not “Abbie” — thanks for the spelling lesson, Frank!) flitted through town and beyond in this episode, driving the civilians into hiding and the secrets of some — Kerry and Rebecca — out into the open.

The panic, though, doesn’t begin immediately. The cries of Abbies beyond the fence startled people inside, but Jason‘s broadcast urging everyone to continue living normally has convinced most of the Pinesians to go about their days as usual. But when Theo returns to the lab after a night at the hospital, he sees the gruesome scene of Megan‘s murder and alerts the troops that Margaret has escaped and taken her first victim.

Could she be after more? We see her sneak through the hallways of the Pines’ headquarters, while remembering the times Megan painfully tested on her and the three shots Jason fired at the male Abbies near her. Jason and his goons immediately act to contain her escape, racing through the halls until they figure she must have gone into the tunnels. They’re on the right track: Margaret, having escaped through the weak entry points through the drainage system, winds up on a cliff, where she casually drops herself to the ground and survives the steep fall.

Margaret falls, but Kerry faces a personal uphill battle. (Sorry.) Earlier in the elevator to work, Theo told her the results of her test, explaining that, possibly because of the Abby attack that almost killed her, she won’t be able to have children. It’s a blow, and kudos to actress Kacey Rohl for selling Kerry’s pain and frustration at not being able to talk to Jason about the issue amid the chaos of Margaret’s escape. Even Theo, who broke the news, moves on almost immediately: He and Jason argue over what the town should do, and Jason finally agrees to broadcast the truth.

Of course, the truth isn’t easy to swallow. Across town, people begin bracing themselves for the Abby attack to come. At the Wayward Pines Academy, students are ushered inside (while some couples sneak away for some extra-dangerous alone time), parents take their children away from the carousel and town square, and shop owners lock their doors. Lucy and Frank, though, decide to go to Rebecca‘s, where Lucy feels safe. Even Xander joins the effort to protect his fellow survivors.

But barricading themselves inside stores and picturesque single-family homes isn’t enough. Margaret stalks through the woods, catching glimpses of Lucy and Frank on their way and the Academy couple who refused to return to the dorms. She eventually makes her way back into one of the town’s residential neighborhoods, where she attacks a First Generation soldier who just put on his uniform and stashed his weapons on his body to prepare for the hunt. After the soldier’s (I’m guessing) wife and child listen to his death (oof), Margaret drags his body into the woods, letting the blood spill all over the path.

The trail of blood confuses Theo and Adam, who have joined on the hunt for Margaret, the Abby “trophy.” They’re off-target — when they reach the soldier’s body, they realize Margaret fooled them into thinking she was hurt — and Margaret has already made her way back to Main Street, where Mario and his fellow Jason-abiding goons attempt to shoot her off the roofs, to no avail. (She’s got a super-impressive leap.) But Jason isn’t done fighting just yet, though: Standing over Megan’s body, he reminisces about her impact on his life, saying he regrets not being there for her. As he wipes away tears, he vows vengeance against the Abbies yet again, before going ahead and encouraging civilians into helping with the search around the perimeter.

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It’s a dangerous request already, but Xander has something even more dangerous in mind. He brings his secret stash of weapons to give to civilian volunteers a meeting at Wayward Beauty, where Rebecca explains how they can find the best points to stop Abbies from entering town again. After a few townspeople give Rebecca a hard time for designing the town, two civilians arm themselves and volunteer to take down Margaret, while Arlene — who totally bird-watches — donates a pair of binoculars that she definitely, absolutely does not use for spying on her neighbors.

Sure, Xander is the one pressuring Rebecca to talk to Theo about staying with Xander, but Rebecca could be the key to saving Wayward Pines. Unlike Kerry, she’s fertile — with Xander’s baby, not Theo’s — and she knows the inner workings of the town and the original one that Pilcher covered with his plan. To find a blueprint of the town from centuries ago, she rifles through Jason’s office for documents on the area, only to get caught by Kerry.

NEXT: Three Men and an Abby

The confrontation between the two turns into a mentor-mentee dynamic, instead of a contentious one. Rebecca wonders why Kerry would stay with an untalented Head Douche (that would be Jason, if you’re just tuning in), but Kerry wonders why Rebecca would want to stay with Xander now that her original husband has come back from the presumed dead. “There’s a man you marry in Boston, and then there’s a man you marry in Wayward Pines,” Rebecca explains, apparently not making Kerry feel any better about the world.

You know who’s feeling great about the world at the moment? Margaret. After leaving false trails and leaping off cliffs around town, she’s almost appreciative of all the attention. Hopping off of a truck that just entered town, she watches as Theo and Adam argue over which direction to take, eventually choosing to split up rather than split hairs.

And in the neighborhood, the First Generation stalks between houses, hoping to find the elusive Margaret, but when the soldiers meet up with the civilian couple who volunteered to hunt Margaret using Xander’s secret stash of weapons, chaos ensues: See, the soldiers themselves would rather have civilians off the streets for their safety, but the threat of Margaret looms over everyone outside, resulting in fear and paranoia that causes triggers to be pulled and two people shot. One is Mario, who escaped the bullets. The other is Tom, an abruptly named civilian who accidentally winds up with a bullet in his neck while Margaret watches.

Instead of listening to Kerry’s suggestions and questions about what comes after this attack, Jason takes her to a secret lair in his house, where pods have been set up to sustain the human race. If all else fails, Jason says giddily, at least they’ll have this lair in which to procreate and incubate their offspring.

Aaaaaand that’s when Kerry finally breaks the news: Her reproductive system is as barren as Jason’s secret couple’s hideaway. (Sorry, again.) As Kerry cries, Jason apologizes — yes, apologizes — for pushing her and comforts her, telling her he would have handled everything differently if he’d known.

Great job, you two — but there are bigger problems outside the walls of your house. For one thing, Margaret has literally stopped Rebecca in her tracks, threatening her mission to find the weak spot in the fence. Margaret considers her when Rebecca clutches her stomach — the Abby appears to remember when she nursed a baby Abby, or is it the other way around? — and appears to back away when… BANG: Xander shoots Margaret in the arm, wounding her as she scrambles away from the scene.

After the pair, well, reconnect, Rebecca talks about the weaknesses along the fence she’d been looking for. At this, Xander realizes he might know the answer: A while back, he had been tossed into a deep pit. Could the Abbies have been using the drainage system to get inside and out this whole time?

Yes, it turns out. Margaret, trying to recover, heads for the entrance of a tunnel in the woods, just as Adam points his gun to her back. Defiant, she glares at him and remembers the times he came to her defense, watching until Adam finally lowers his gun. After she crawls into the tunnel, he looks around and decides to follow, putting all of his trust into the Abbies that wait on the other side.

Luckily, he makes it out alive with Margaret’s help, as she tames her fellow Abbies when he arrives. Back at the entrance of the tunnel, Jason and the First Generation wonder what happened to Adam (his gun remains by the tunnel entrance). They toss grenades into the tunnel, hoping to close it, but it could be too late: Even Mario, loyal Mario, wakes up in his hospital bed wondering if everyone’s dead. Theo doesn’t have a good answer, and so Mario just repeats his haunting Wayward Pines mantra over and over. “I think that having a happy and productive life in Wayward Pines is the most important contribution I can make, sir,” he chants, crying on his bed.

That disillusionment — a complete 180 from the look of awe on Adam’s face when he reaches the Abbies’ home, and the look of vengeance on Jason’s when he saw Megan — also drives Theo. He confronted and convinced Jason earlier in the day about reporting on the attack; toward the end of the hour, he confronts Xander about the idiotic decision to arm civilians and have them help take out Abbies. Rebecca steps in to defend her baby daddy: “Sometimes accidents happen here,” she says, referring to Xander’s mistake — and potentially to her own pregnancy.

But while the humans bicker, the Abbies only grow stronger. Hundreds more have gathered near the fence, and though Margaret has been bleeding out and thinking back to the peace before Pilcher took her home away, she’s not dead just yet. (Or is she?) She stares up at the sky in the final shot, ready for her and her kind to do what they have to do against the humans. Sigh. Why can’t humans and their aberrations simply get along?