Where Will ‘The Wilds’ Go in Season 2?

In the age of peak TV and streaming, it’s hard to find a new series that will instantly captivate you. Sometimes it’s the plot that draws you in, sometimes it’s the characters that make you want to stick around, and if you’re really lucky, you find a show that gives you both.

This is the case with Amazon Prime Video’s latest drama, The Wilds. Marketed as Lord of the Flies meets Pretty Little Liars, the show introduces a wealth of fresh talent in the eight focal characters, a group of teenage girls who are plane crash survivors stranded on an island.

While there are certainly twists throughout the ten-episode season, none is more paramount than the reveal at the end of the pilot, letting us know that our “stranded” girls are actually under supervision of what can only be described as an ongoing psychological social experiment. 

This changes the whole game and leaves me with a ton of questions and a ton of theories. The most important? What the heck happened to Martha and Nora?

The Wilds Season 1 left us with multiple cliffhangers. On our island timeline, Leah has just escaped the pit Nora trapped her in, having found out that Nora is the confederate AKA “in on the whole thing”. At the same time, Rachel is floating asea and is pulled under by a shark.

In our post island timeline, we’ve seen Rachel alive, albeit missing a hand. Astute watchers will notice that her arm looks pretty healed up for someone who was allegedly a shark attack victim. If the girls get “rescued” right after the shark attack, her hand should be more mangled, shouldn’t it?

This begs the question — would mad-scientist Gretchen allow the experiment to continue knowing that one of the subjects needs dire medical attention? Or is she so fascinated by group dynamics that she wants to know how they deal with a major tragedy? Is she forgetting that these poor girls already had to deal with the death of who they thought was a peer? 

Besides the unresolved Nora/Leah conflict and the shark in the water, the last massive reveal that ultimately draws the curtain on the season is Leah escaping her bunker room only to find an abandoned camera room, playing footage of ANOTHER ISLAND, this time with boys.

It feels inevitable. As any good researcher knows, an experiment is practically worthless without a control group to compare results to. Thus, we have an island of boys who seem to also be under the impression they are survivors stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Is it supposed to be ironic that the research team is monitoring every detail of the girls’ behavior and are ignoring the boys, or have the boys already gotten off the island and we’re being tricked into believing they’re still stranded out there?

Is this another metaphor for how women are scrutinized to a higher degree than men are? How there’s a burden of proof for women to convince the world they’re good leaders, whereas society just assumes men can lead and we don’t have to police their every move?

Gretchen Klein, for as feminist as she claims to be, seems to be subjecting the girls to just the thing she claims to despise. 

In the early half of The Wilds Season 1, when the girls decide to dive the plane “wreck,” Gretchen comments that they are ahead of schedule. We assume she’s talking about an arbitrary timeline, but I think she’s comparing them to how the boys previously performed on their island.

I’ll just put it out there — in no way is this experiment valid. Unless the conditions are exactly the same on both the boys’ and the girls’ islands, there are so many confounding factors that come into play that will skew the results either way.

For example, Janette/Linh dying, is a major event that undoubtedly primed our eight heroines into acting a certain way. In fact, Leah became suspicious right off the bat, noting how uncommon it is for teenagers their age to know CPR, and yet they all are certified.

Unless the adult confederate died on the boys’ island, it’s impossible to even compare the actions taken on each island. Does Gretchen know this? I’m sure she does. Does she care? Doesn’t seem like it!

Unfortunately, she is at the mercy of some wealthy circles funding her research (we’ll circle back to this later), and she must produce some sort of result for the money that all of these people are providing her with, no matter how wild things get (pun intended).

Two of the most pressing unanswered questions at the end of the season are 1) where is Nora? and 2) where is Martha? Neither girl is seen in the post-island bunker and their fates are hardly touched upon by the other girls nor the research team.

As I mentioned, the characters in The Wilds are genuinely so likable (except Gretchen and Faber) that I’m dying to know what happened to the girls and I’ve been theorizing ways to explain their absence. Here are two likely scenarios to explain their disappearance.

Theory #1:

To start off, I don’t think that any of the “Unsinkable Eight” will end up dead over the course of the series. Gretchen’s intentions are dubious, at best, but don’t seem to be intentionally malicious and she does seem genuinely torn over the loss of Linh/Janette.

Data is everything to her experiment, and the loss of a subject would completely throw off its efficacy; Linh/Janette dying was tragic, but she wasn’t really going to give them any valuable new learnings since she was in on the act.

Anyway, all signs were pointing towards Shark Attack at the end of The Wilds Season 1. Finally having gotten over her timidness towards the water, Rachel decides to take a calming float in the ocean, only to get pulled underwater by a previously foreshadowed shark.

So what happens next? It looked like her sister, Nora, was running out to the ocean to rescue her twin. We don’t see Nora in any of the bunker scenes post-rescue, which either means she has died, or she didn’t need to be interrogated because she was in on the operation.

As I noted earlier, Rachel is shown missing her extremity while speaking with Gretchen’s interrogators, but the wound is very healed. I’m no medical expert, but if the girls were extracted immediately after this shark incident her hand would be much more mangled.

It doesn’t seem likely that Gretchen seems this massive medical incident is worthy grounds to get the girls out of there. Wild, right?

Nora, who only bought into this experiment as a way to “save” her sister will likely feel immense guilt about the injury. And since Leah already knows she’s up to something, I think it’s possible that Nora is going to spill the beans about the truth of the island.

In the chaos of the shark incident, it’s likely that Gretchen’s researchers lose track of the girls’ actions, and without their inside gal providing consistent updates (which she won’t be able to if her sister is seriously hurt!), Nora will be able to tell the truth without the research team knowing.

If the research team isn’t willing to “save” the girls, even with one girl seriously injured, I think Nora will become disillusioned by the whole experiment and will actively work with the others to mess up their study. We see the beginning of this conflict when they refuse to extract Leah, even though Nora pleads with them to do so.

There seems to be a lot of island that we haven’t explored yet, and knowing just how easy it is for the girls to lose one another (remember Fatin running off?), it’s possible that the eight of them use this to plan a way to get the research team to pull them out.

Nora — and her satellite phone — will mysteriously vanish from the group. The girls will all try and find her and become increasingly “distraught” at the disappearance. Without their confederate providing primary data, and with the possibility that another girl has died, Klein & Co. will pull the plug on the island portion early.

Again, losing Nora and her data will be crucial to the experiment, and it’s going to open a huge can of worms when the families start to get involved. The bunker scenes, in this case, would be the researchers trying to suss out what the girls know about Nora.

Meanwhile, Nora, staying out of sight of the cameras and away from the shores where her friends and sister are rescued, will be able to call for help via the satellite phone. Even if she doesn’t know where the girls are transported to after the island, she knows Gretchen’s name and enough for the real FBI to start looking for the missing girls.

Now, where is Martha in this scenario? My money is on her being injured and comatose, stemming from an injury she sustained while getting off the island. All of Toni’s behavior on the island indicates that she would be heated in the event that something bad happens to someone she loves and we don’t see evidence of that in her interview.

Unless her time with Shelby causes her to grow exponentially in a short amount of time, I think Toni would be a lot more volatile in her interviews if she knew something had happened to her friend/sister.

(That being said, it did seem like Toni’s hard outer shell was melting into a pile of lovey mush after her night at the lychee tree with Shelby, so it’s possible they bring out the best in each other and grow together as their time on the island passes.)

So if Martha gets hurt in the extraction process, Toni and the other girls wouldn’t know about it, and it explains why we have little emotional reaction from them while they’re being interrogated. It’s also why Gretchen is trying to dig up dirt on the poor girl, so her family can’t sue.

The endgame here is Nora and a team of real FBI agents busting down the doors at this offshore bunker facility and saving her sister and new friends.

Theory #2

Okay, this one is similar but also not. Nora is clearly getting too sloppy with her reporting on the island and Leah is sus — and rightly so! There’s a scene towards the end of The Wilds Season 1 where Gretchen and her partner are talking about extracting one of the subjects.

I think they might get Nora out of there. Hear me out — since Nora is technically a confederate, her data isn’t 100% pure in the confines of the experiment. Removing her would still give the research team the chance to observe the girls, just a little less in-depth.

So let’s still assume Rachel is getting attacked by a shark and Nora goes out to save her sister. They both make it back to the beach, though Rachel is severely injured, i.e. missing a hand. Nora, pissed that her sister has been hurt in what was supposed to be an experience that would only help her sister, becomes unhinged.

Not wanting Nora to ruin her experiment, Gretchen sends Alex to the island to effectively “kidnap” Nora, but safely get her off the island and into confinement back at the bunker.

Now let’s talk about Alex. He’s essentially a foil to Thom, the other young researcher that Gretchen has in her Dawn of Eve HQ. Where Thom is completely on board with this scheme and is Team Gretchen all the way, Alex is more reticent and is a begrudging helper.

This is where the Twilight of Adam storyline comes in. Alex knows his way around this island very well for a research assistant who seems to hate his job. I’m betting that he was actually a part of the boys’ island experiment, though as a subject or as a confederate I’m not sure yet. This also explains his prominent facial scar.

I feel fairly confident that the footage Leah finds at the end of The Wilds Season 1 from the boys’ island is old, and that portion of the experiment has already concluded. As I previously mentioned, why isn’t anyone manning the cameras that Leah finds?

Oh, that’s because all of it already happened, and they just keep the room ready to rewind the tape and rewatch what went down. Of course, that begs the question, if the boys are back in society why haven’t they tried to take Gretchen down?

Here’s what I think is the answer: the boys never figured out they were part of an experiment. They were picked, just like our girls were, because their families needed something to change for them. Their parents were never worried about their survival, and when they were “rescued,” they just assumed it was the FBI who did it.

Maybe their parents told them they were in on it the entire time, or maybe they were paid off to keep their mouths shut, or maybe the entire opposite is true and it turns out their parents signed some terms and conditions that they can’t go after Gretchen without legal consequence.

(Is Gretchen’s study actually just trying to see which group figures out everything is a lie quicker?)

Either way, Alex was on that island, which makes him hate Gretchen a bit and makes him sympathetic to the girls and their plight. After he extracts Nora from this island at Gretchen’s bidding he feels guilty.

There’s already been a sort of connection built between him and Martha, so I’m thinking he’s able to make contact with her, tell her what’s really going on, and have her break the news to the rest of the girls. Then he “kidnaps” her, worrying Gretchen and the team, and keeps her hidden from the researchers once they decide to remove all of the girls from the island.

Remember, Alex would know the island well and probably has hidden nooks figured out where they can lay low. Martha and Alex are then able to get in contact with the mainland and blow the cover on the whole operation, rescuing the girls and living happily ever after. Martha deserves a happy ending!

This also leaves room for an explanation of Shelby’s sneakily passed note to Leah in the interrogation dorm. If Nora disappeared from the island shortly after the shark attack, it’s unlikely that Leah will be able to convince the other girls this is a big scheme without seeming fully off the rails.

However, if Leah broaches the topic once or twice after Nora’s disappearance, is quickly shot down but never fully backs down from it, I’m sure she can plant the seeds of doubt into the minds of at least one of her comrades. And if it’s Shelby — I mean, trainwrecks unite, right?

Shelby is the most antagonistic towards the bunker personnel besides Leah, but I’m not sure if she’s fully on the same wavelength as Leah until she asks to see “her” in her interview, and Faber and Young automatically assume she wants to see Toni. How would they know anything about #shoni unless they had been watching the girls the entire time? *Insert side-eye emoji*

Overall, there’s a lot going down on the island, off the island, and in the bunker that we don’t seem to be privy to yet. There are people, especially in Gretchen’s circles that we don’t know yet and are playing a major part in this experiment.

She is at the mercy of her benefactors, some of whom may have had a hand in sending the poor girls to the island in the first place. Creators of The Wilds have hinted that Leah’s English teacher, the one who introduced her to Jeff, may have had a part in her being sent to the island.

Here’s the thing — at the end of the day, no matter how noble Gretchen’s intentions are towards her study, she’s as much of a pawn in the entire game as the girls on the island are. In many ways, Gretchen is likely being used just as much as the girls are being used by her.

Sure, she’s probably right that stripping away societal expectations caused the girls to step out of their comfort zones quicker, and helped them come together for the greater good faster than the boys were able to achieve it.

Would life be different if we lived pivoted to a matriarchal society? Probably! What Gretchen fails to address though, is that the societal aspect of leadership can’t be unmarried from the economics of leadership. Power is intertwined with money, as much as we hate to admit that.

Unless Gretchen Klein is some ultra-rich megamillionaire, she’s not the person funding her research and staging these elaborate plane crashes and is, unfortunately, a product of the society she claims to hate.

I’ll bet money that by the end of The Wilds Gretchen is forced to compromise her scientific integrity in order to satisfy her benefactors’ wants. It’ll be a bit of poetic justice for our villainess, though I think she might be better served with prison time. 

I genuinely can’t wait to see what comes next with this delightful new series and can’t wait to see this cast, who all seem to genuinely like each other, back together on screen.

It’s so refreshing to see female-led stories come to life under a female-led team of filmmakers, about issues that teenagers and former teenagers like myself can really relate to.

—

What do you think happened to Martha and Nora? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below, and let us know what other theories you like best.

The Wilds Season 1 is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.

 Follow us on Twitter and on Instagram!

 

Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!