The Wilds Recap: Candles and Crack-ups

It always seemed inevitable, didn’t it? That spending weeks alone in the wilderness pushed to their absolute limits would mentally break one of our castaways? They were all slightly damaged goods to begin with, after all. And yet, when the break did come, that didn’t make it less heartbreaking because, ugh, these poor kids. These poor fucking kids.

Let’s take it back to the beginning, though. We open “Day 46/26” with Gretchen falling totally off the control wagon. She’s disheveled, drunk, and playing some knock-off Candy Crush while buried under a blanket in her office. The dude doctors come a-knocking and she goes off on them, saying the study is fucked, that the boys were the control group and they were the ones who went off the rails, and all of this was for naught. Excuse me for not remembering why any of this actually fucking matters, but all the adults in this show are basically evil, so I don’t entirely care if their cruel experiment didn’t work. I’m not sure all of them do anymore either.

Meanwhile, in interrogation, we’re finally getting to know a little about Ivan, who seemed harsh but fairly level-headed up until now. He’s phone-addicted, he’s over the top, and he’s a little self-important, but in the grand scheme of things, he’s also not the worst kid out there. We meet his seemingly very normal boyfriend, Luke, who seems lovely, and we get to hear Ivan justify violating Luke’s privacy for a very good, representation-related reason, but also, like, use those words to ask him before you fucking post that pic, man. I’m sure that Ivan believed all of that, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t absolutely only have himself in mind when he actually did it.

It’s interesting that the interrogators press Ivan a little, saying they thought he’d be more of an open book. His explanation is that he’s essentially been living stranded inside his own body for years — an island among his high school peers — so he’s fucking tired of having all the answers. It also seems like he may have learned a little humility or futility on the island. It’s unclear which one as of yet, but it could be a column A/column B situation.

Speaking of couples: Shoni are out doing whatever daily work they have to do when Shelby tells Toni she loves her. Toni freaks out a little and clams up. Rachel and Leah stumble on a hot spring that looks fake as hell (on a hill, really? With blue ice water and a white-ish bottom? Sure) and take off back to camp to spread the good word. Martha jumps at the chance to take a dip, saying she wants to own a heart-shaped hot tub with color-changing lights someday, which is a good reminder that she’s probably still the most childlike and fragile of all the girls. That’s not to say that she’s not also grown up as hell, but she still has some joy buried in her heart … for now, at least. (Insert ominous music here.)

Flashing back to Ivan, we come to learn the reason he and Kirin are on the island. Kirin made some goofy lacrosse lip sync (to Carly Rae Jepsen!) where he cuts it up at the end with his coach. After proclaiming the coach to be a DILF, Ivan does a deep dive on his socials, only to find an Insta pic from 2013 where the coach is wearing blackface at a Halloween party where he was doing a Kimye couples costume with his wife. Ivan promptly puts him on social-media blast, and he gets fired from his job at the school. Kirin takes it particularly hard, but since we’re seeing everything through Ivan’s eyes this episode, we don’t get to know why just yet.

Turns out Kirin taking something hard isn’t exactly a one-time trait for him. When the beach group’s fire goes out, they go looking for the lighter and realize that, oops, Seth has it wherever he is. The group tracks him down, and Kirin kicks the shit out of him to get it back, even though Seth (probably?) would have easily given it to them if they’d just asked. Josh gets in on the action, too, taking some cheap shots at Seth’s ribs and putting out his fire. It seems like ten days of sympathy and Seth-less life have emboldened Josh, who’s becoming more like the guy we saw inside the interrogation room — meaning he’s turning into a monster.

That violence doesn’t exactly sit well with the group, including Raf, who brings it up back on the beach. A Kirin- and Josh-driven kerfuffle ensues, and Josh’s pants catch on fire during an extremely cringeworthy devil sticks accident. Raf slips off with some supplies, which he takes to a pathetic-looking Seth off in the woods. There, Seth asks Raf if he thinks he could have possibly done what he’s being accused of, and Raf responds something to the effect of “You don’t deserve what they’re doing to you,” which is a pretty solid dodge.

Here’s the thing: There are no winners in this situation. In the real world, Seth probably would be facing some sort of legal challenge for what he did to Josh, assuming that the DA or whatever had enough to charge him, and if the courts didn’t, we’d say that it was total bullshit that justice wasn’t being served. That being said, the courts absolutely wouldn’t sentence Seth to death, which seems to be what Kirin and Josh would like to see happen, even if they’re not willing to do the actual deed themselves. It looks like the pair want some sort of plausible deniability or group responsibility to say, “Well, you all went along with it” if anything did happen, which … also awful. And then there’s Raf, and eventually, Ivan, who come off seeming the most reasonable here, but who really are not doing anyone any favors either way. Again, Seth is the fucking mole and he’s not a good dude, even if he was maybe abused as a child and (as we find out from Henry) suffers from night terrors. Boy Island is bathed in shades of gray across the board, and everything is just awful.

Also awful: The reason Ivan and Kirin are there. After a very sweet moment with Luke, Ivan hears a commotion in the boys’ locker room. He finds Kirin there, drinking and crying. Kirin is very upset and tells Ivan that the coach was a good guy with a wife and kids and that he treated Kirin like family. Ivan wouldn’t know this, but the coach’s ban is a huge deal to him, given Kirin’s actual family situation. Ivan assumes Kirin’s anger is based in hate and urges the jock to call him a litany of awful names. Kirin demurs, saying no, it’s not about that. Ivan baits him repeatedly, and eventually Kirin breaks, screaming slurs at Ivan, who, surprise surprise, is filming Kirin on his phone. He posts the video, and Kirin is expelled.

All of this ends up causing Luke to break up with Ivan, who he says is so concerned with “not letting them win” that he’s letting the fight take over his life. Ivan’s so angry about being othered that Luke thinks he’s forgotten how to be anything else, and he just can’t have that in his life. Ultimately, it seems like Luke also outs his ex to the school’s authorities, and Ivan is expelled.

When Kirin catches Ivan trying to take a makeshift candle to Seth, he’s upset that Ivan, who took such a hard line in their situation back home, seems to be waffling here. Ivan apologizes for what he did at home, though it’s clear that Kirin doesn’t believe him. He tells Ivan not to come back, and so he joins Raf — who’s also now expelled — and Seth off in exile. The interrogators ask Ivan if the island was a learning moment for him, and he demurs. How, he says, do they know that he didn’t live to regret his decision? After all, just because you “try to do right” on the island, it “doesn’t mean that shit won’t go absolutely fucking left.”

And now we have to talk about what happens to Martha. She’s off checking her snare traps when she finds a rabbit who has chewed off its own leg to get out of the snare, all in an effort to either (a) get back to her brood of extremely tiny baby rabbits, or to (b) go have her babies away from the trap. (Probably A.) When Martha finds the bunny, the babies are suckling on the mother, who is presumably either dead or dying. It. Is. Awful.

That’s really all it takes to break Martha, who was always sort of on a knife’s edge about the whole “killing and eating animals” thing. I still don’t really know why the girls let her take it all on herself, but they did, and so here we are. She tears back into camp, screaming about what she’s seen and starts hitting herself. Toni tries to calm her down, but while her back is turned as she tries to convince the other girls to go find the baby bunnies, Martha takes off. The girls race through the dark woods trying to find her, only to eventually locate her kneeling over the bunny family, now all dead, as Martha holds a bloody knife. It’s unclear what really happened (at least to me), but whatever it is, one good look at Martha’s dead, steely eyes suggest that it’s very, very not good.

Wild Observations 

• Holy fucking shit, Ben Folds was in this episode. Like, for real. He popped up in one of Leah’s hallucinations, calling himself the first target of her obsessional attentions. While I won’t say Folds is on the fast track to a guest-star Oscar, he’s not awful. It doesn’t hurt that part of his role involved singing the Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost In You,” which is Leah and Jeff’s “song” (barf), and Folds is, after all, a pretty good musician. His presence reminds Leah that there’s always a kernel of truth in her psychosis, meaning that she’s not totally, completely batshit just yet. Yet.

• I checked, and it does not seem like there is erotic fan fiction about the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory … yet.