‘Wayward Pines’ Season 2: M Night Shyamalan, Blake Crouch Interview

M Night Shyamalan and Blake Crouch
M Night Shyamalan and Blake Crouch from Fox’s ‘Wayward Pines’ at WonderCon (Photo by Richard Chavez / Showbiz Junkies)

Fox returns to the bizarre world of Wayward Pines for season two beginning on May 25, 2016 at 9pm ET/PT, and at WonderCon executive producer M. Night Shyamalan and author Blake Crouch promised the new season will answer questions left lingering about the ‘abbies’ (short for aberrations). Teaming up to discuss the second season, Shyamalan and Crouch also revealed they plan to finish the story over three seasons, if Fox renews the show following season two.

The Wayward Pines Season 2 Plot: The second season will pick up after the shocking events of Season One, with the residents of Wayward Pines battling against the iron-fisted rule of the First Generation. Dr. Theo Yedlin (Jason Patric) – a new resident of Wayward Pines – awakens from suspended animation and finds himself in the middle of this rebellion, as he tries to understand what Wayward Pines really is and help preserve the endangered human race.

M. Night Shyamalan and Blake Crouch Interview:

What was the appeal of making the books into a series?

M. Night Shyamalan: “I love all stories that are contained but there’s something giant going on outside, whether it’s like Signs where it’s the end of the world but from a family’s perspective. This is that. The idea that Blake came up with is exactly that vibe. I wish I’d come up with it. [Laughing] I take credit for it as much as I can when Blake’s not around. Blake’s not real – that’s my pen name. But, I do like the contained feelings of what the human beings like. I’m not the big spectacle guy. ‘Add more space ships, add more space ships, add more…’ It’s more sound effects and keep it insinuated. Blake’s ideas are always insinuated. For so long in the whole first novel you don’t even know what’s going on. It falls in line with that thinking so we’re always telling the writers, ‘Slow down. Slow down. Yes, you’re going to reveal that but wait. Wait.’ They’re like, ‘How long?’ We’re like, ‘Maybe four episodes.’ ‘What?!’ ‘Slow down.'”


Are there any new sets we visit this season?

M. Night Shyamalan: “Well, it is Wayward Pines…there’s not a lot of land.”

Blake Crouch: “Not a big annex. Wayward Pines West.”

M. Night Shyamalan: “But we are outside the fence a little bit. This season we learn about the abbies so that’s the big exception.”

Blake Crouch: “There was much more time outside the fence this season.”

With all of your projects, how much time do you actually get to spend with Wayward Pines?

M. Night Shyamalan: “You know what? That’s a great question. I would say right now too much time. You agree?”

Blake Crouch: “I agree!”

M. Night Shyamalan: [Laughing] Always on the phone. You can’t get out of Wayward Pines! Literally, my hotel room is just Wayward Pines stuff, like piles. When I’m on the plane ride I’m organizing what I’m going to read and watch for Wayward Pines. It’s addictive, you know? The fun part, I guess maybe you’re the same way, I very much need to have that buzz all the time, a creative buzz. The outline from 207 is there and then you can watch the dailies from 204. You can call the actor about the 205 notes that he had. It’s always [something]. It’s fun. My wife would say it’s terrible, like a crack addiction. And I’m sure the writers are like, ‘Night’s on the phone again.’ I should put a camera on that side so when I’m calling from Philly and they’re like [rolling their eyes].”

This was originally planned as an event series. How did the fact season one was so popular affect the way you approached the story?

M. Night Shyamalan: “Well, you know, it was a very serious thing what you’re talking about. For me, I get really hyped about not taking advantage of opportunities to reduce the quality of storytelling. Say they say, ‘We guarantee you and Blake you can have 10 seasons of this,’ that’s a no. We came together and we said this was fantastic and for me I said to him, ‘Your premise is so powerful, I want to finish talking about what it means, the implications.’ We actually just got to do in the first season is just present the premise and didn’t actually get to talk about what that means to be the last town, what are the abbies, all the Biblical stuff that I love. So we sat together and…”

Blake Crouch: “We approached it a little bit like Jurassic Park. There’s a line where Jeff Goldblum’s like, ‘Just because you can do something, should you do it?’ and that was like the related conversation that we had over the summer as we’re realizing that people are very much responding to this. I think we both went in very skeptical that we would do a second season. We wanted to just kind of sit for a few days and talk in the broadest of terms about why we would continue this story and did we have something very important to say in a finite structure. We walked out of those days feeling like, ‘Yes, we have something very big to say.’ Bigger even than the first season. That’s why we did it.”

M. Night Shyamalan: “We went and kind of thought of the end and then said, ‘How many episodes would it take to tell that story?’ So I think the beauty of where we are now with television is you can fit the format to the story now, and you don’t want it to suddenly… It had such a structure to it, the first season had a structure like what was holding up the tent – the poles – and we wanted it to have the same kind of thing where you could tell we’re aiming towards them. I love the analogy but just finding more people on the island, you’re aiming toward a thing and we’re letting you in on it one episode at a time to where we’re going.”

Blake Crouch: “That’s why it consumes our lives right now because it’s inventing the wheel every new episode. I’m so jealous of the procedural model because that seems like – I know it’s not easy but you kind of know what you’re doing where this is hard every single time. You want to make sure you’re leaving nothing on the field. Each episode is a revelation of what this idea is and where the characters are.”

Is Tales from the Crypt going to be a new story each week or would you consider the American Horror Story model?

M. Night Shyamalan: “I can’t say 100% but I’m thinking it’s more…right now where I am, if you would have asked me this six months ago I would have had a different answer but where I am right now is more individual Black Mirror type of stuff.”

Will there be a crypt keeper?

M. Night Shyamalan: “Yes.”

Does this give you an additional outlet a lot of authors don’t necessarily have to be able to continue working with your creation but in a new media that you’re involved with?

Blake Crouch: “Yeah, it does and it’s really exciting and fulfilling. When I finished The Last Town I was and still am 95% sure I’m not going to write another Wayward Pines book. That was like five years of my life doing that and I’m doing new things now. I feel like I’ve said everything in that medium that I’m going to say about this town and I would rather leave people wanting more than they’re full of this meal and let’s move on to the next thing. So, yeah, it’s amazing to get to explore it in a different medium.”

Without any spoilers, how much of the second season is going to be outside of the walls?

M. Night Shyamalan: “It’s a very contained piece. We can say the second season is about the abbies. It seems at the end of the first season you have a primitive understanding of what that is, what an abby is but that’s actually not what an abby is.”

Are you going to leave the end of the second season open?

Blake Crouch: “I mean I think we have an idea for how the show would end and it’s a question of are we fortunate enough to get to tell that story beyond season two.”

M. Night Shyamalan: “Yeah, we’re – I think we can say, I think we’re allowed to but I’ll just say it anyway – it’s a three season story. If we get the opportunity to tell the third and final season, then we finish the story. [Laughing] If we didn’t, we don’t and I guess we’re all screwed.”

It has to end after three?

Blake Crouch: “Absolutely.”

M. Night Shyamalan: “Not with us. It won’t be with us.”

How does it feel to see your town realized?

Blake Crouch: “It’s amazing. It’s even crazier to go up and actually walk through the sets in Vancouver. The first image I ever had of the books of Wayward Pines was a little snow globe on Sheriff Pope’s desk. It’s in the books and it’s a whole thing of it because it’s the model of the town. It’s a town in glass. They had recreated that snow globe and when I went up there I was like, ‘That’s so cool!’ The neatest thing when they wrapped production on season one they’re like, ‘Do you guys want anything?’ I was like, ‘Can I have the snow globe? That’s all I want.’ Now the snow globe sits on my desk.”