Post — Aaron Ngo

Major Spoilers are included in this season review. Please read with caution.

This show has a lot of potential to be something more than they showed us. The premise of the show is pretty much Lord of the Flies meets LOST. A couple hundred teenagers go off on a school field trip away from West Ham, the name of their hometown. They get unexpectedly dropped off after a terrible storm, but this is where things get… complicated. The teenagers are dropped off, but there are no adults anywhere. They can still text and use computers, electric is running, but there are no adults anywhere. In addition, the town is surrounded by an endless forest that cuts them off from the rest of the world.

The teenagers are grouped into the typical cliches like jocks, cheerleaders, nerds, privileged white kids, etc. Class President Cassandra (Rachel Keller) tries to rally everyone together so they can survive, but of course getting teenagers to cooperate like adults isn’t going to be easy. Standing by her side is the main protagonist and little sister Allie (Kathryn Newton), deaf cousin Sam (Sean Berdy), troubled kid and Allie’s love interest Will (Jacques Colimon), smart kid and Cassandra’s love interest Gordie (José Julián), and of course, Sam’s best friend Becca (Gideon Adlon).

The teenage antagonists are pretty boy Harry (Alex Fitzalan), psychopath Campbell, who is the brother of Sam and cousin of Allie and Cassandra. Later, another antagonist comes out of left field towards the end, but we’ll get to Lexie (Grace Victoria Cox).

The pacing is not particularly done well, and the character dynamics tend to change upon the situation. The relationships between Will, Kelly, and Allie were not handled properly. Cassandra was killed in third episode before her romance with Gordie could flourish. This made character investment difficult on my end because unlike LOST, there were no flashback episodes that would help peel back the layers of the characters before they were trapped in this weird parallel dimension.

Hearing the characters say things to each other like, “Why weren’t we this close in high school?” made me cringe because that’s exposition that didn’t get explored. It was something we’re told so we’d know they’re more than their high school reputations or whatever. I would’ve loved to see flashback scenes because we would’ve invested more and cared more about the main characters.

The writing is terrible, but it gradually became better as the season dragged on. The cast should’ve been diverse to be honest. It was particularly difficult to tell the jocks in The Guard apart for the first half of the season. Overall, the show has potential to become something in the second season as that cliffhanger is really WTF. I’m kind-of excited to see if the show will put a focus on the whole “where are we” plot.

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