When the final episode cuts to black, we’ve just witnessed Leah making a break for it and discovering a secret control room with files not just on the Dawn of Eve (the shady organisation we have watched observe and track the girls) but also the intriguing Twilight of Adam. So is a second run of episodes on its way to explain what exactly that means? While nothing has been confirmed there is certainly enough ground to cover to justify a second season. Here are just a few of the reasons it deserves a renewal… That’s just scratching the surface on the many questions viewers have been left with, and the list also includes the whereabouts of Nora, how Rachel lost her hand, why Shelby is dissociating and what Dot knows about the whole situation. Do the rest of the girls know that Jeanette and Nora were spies, or is it still just Leah who holds that information? While the girls’ general backstory and motivations were indeed filled in by their individual flashback episodes, what we see of them in the present day raises a heck of a lot of new questions about what has happened in the time between the island and now.
How (and when) do they get off the island?
The biggest unanswered question of all is how, why and when the girls actually make it off the island and back to the facility of the present timeline. Did something go wrong, or could this just be yet another stage of the experiment designed to isolate them even from each other? We know that the Dawn of Eve has an interest in designing a society built around women instead of ruled by the patriarchy, so this could all be a test to see if they will – when pushed – turn on each other. There’s also the big question of how much time has passed, with perhaps the biggest indicator being how well Rachel’s hand has healed. It’s understandable to assume that the injury was sustained in the shark attack that we glimpse near the end of the tenth episode, but the truth of that kind of depends on how long The Wilds ends up running. It would be quite simple for the writers to sidestep that particular question if they wish to extend the girls’ island stay for another season, giving them time to justify the characters we see in the past becoming those we see in the post-island interviews. Storylines like Nora’s relationship with Quinn proved that the show’s writers are more than capable of telling a complete and compelling story in a very short amount of time, but TV has always been a place where ideas get to play out over a longer period. The Wilds needs more time to develop the connections that we’ve only just seen emerge. It could also become the point of a show that aims to portray how young women are able to survive together without male supervision. If being a teenage girl is the real trauma, as Leah says in the opening scene, then maybe the group can create their own society irrespective of whatever the Dawn of Eve’s master plan turns out to be.
It needs time to get weirder
The jury may be out on whether mystery shows of yore like Lost and Pretty Little Liars got more interesting after a few seasons or simply jumped the shark, but there’s something to admire about how willing The Wilds’ is to withhold information at the end of its first season. In the age of limited event series and reddit threads intent on cracking the code, it’s refreshing to see a narrative committed to its status as a mystery show. In an ideal world where it has a multi-season run, these first ten episodes would be looked back on as the introduction of characters and concepts, with later seasons really fleshing out the ideas we’ve seen so far and building upon them with new and weirder ones. The Wilds’ first season was content to concentrate on building its characters and the connections between them, and that will serve it well should the conspiracies, secret organisations and nefarious matriarchs be allowed to torture them for another season. It’s a strong foundation to build a truly wacky premise upon.
