Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 29, 2025
Let’s get this out of the way first: Netflix’s Wayward is about “wayward” teenagers trapped in a cult-like school in Tall Pines, Vermont, created by and starring Mae Martin. Wayward Pines, exec-produced by M. Night Shyamalan, was a 2015 Fox series based on the Blake Crouch novels about the mysterious small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, where anyone who enters is trapped forever. The Institute is an MGM series based on a Stephen King novel about kids with special abilities who get trapped in a school. They’re all different series with one thing in common: They’re not very good. Wayward, however, may be the worst of them, though still better than the second season of Wayward Pines.
In Wayward, Mae Martin plays Alex Dempsey, a police officer who moves to Tall Pines with his pregnant wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon). Tall Pines is a Vermont community founded by hippies in the 1970s, dedicated to supporting the Tall Pines school, where parents send their troubled teenagers. Laura once attended the school.
The school is run by Head Teacher Evelyn Wade (Toni Collette), who is immediately suspicious on account of those big glasses and the fact that Collette plays her in all her bonkers glory. The series begins with a mentally disturbed teen trying to escape. He makes it as far as Alex’s house, where Alex accidentally kills him while defending his wife from a knife attack. That death is later used as leverage by the town to try to silence Alex.
Most of the kids at the school are miserable. Treatment consists of isolation from the outside world, deprivation of basic comforts, and constant berating. During therapy sessions, the teens psychologically torture one another, picking at insecurities until they’re broken down, only to end the session in a group hug.
The primary focus at the school is on Abbi (Sydney Topliffe), who was sent there by her strict parents, and Leila, Abbi’s best friend, who followed her to help her escape. Both ended up trapped.
As things at the school worsen, Alex tries to uncover its secrets. He learns that 18 students have disappeared since the school’s founding, never seen again. We eventually learn that they were most likely killed, and the town covered it up. The townspeople, all former students, bought into Evelyn Wade’s radical therapy. We also eventually learn that Evelyn became the Head Teacher after she murdered the original cult leader, whom Evelyn considered a pretender. The rest of the community, at the time, converged around Evelyn, and Tall Pines was born.
Meanwhile, Laura, once a favorite student of Evelyn’s, begins to recall memories from her time there and grows distant from Evelyn. No one in Tall Pines has ever had children; Laura is expected to be the first. At the school, Leila, the most troubled of the teens, is broken down and won over by Evelyn’s manipulation tactics, straining her relationship with Abbi.
The big mystery: what exactly does the school do to “change” its students? Favored students undergo “The Leap,” a nonsensical process involving water, hypnotherapy, some drug, and rituals meant to exploit trauma and emotionally sever them from their parents or anyone outside. That’s why they stay in Tall Pines. We learn that Laura, as part of her Leap, murdered her parents. Laura isn’t too bothered by that recovered memory.
Unnecessarily long story short: another student is murdered (and the town covers it up). Abbi and Leila plan an escape with Alex, who also wants to flee with Laura before the baby is born. But Laura doesn’t want to leave — she wants to use her baby to unite the community and replace Evelyn as its leader. Her plan is to give up her and Alex’s baby to be raised by Tall Pines and to change the town into a place where all children are raised collectively.
Leila and Abbi do escape, but Leila chooses to return, finally finding in Tall Pines a place where she feels at home.
After Alex realizes Laura’s plan, it appears that he takes the baby and flees with Abbi, and they agree to start a new life together in upstate New York. However, if you close your laptop too early in frustration with how stupid the show is (as I originally did), you’ll miss a short scene before the credits that reveals that Alex’s escape with the baby is a stupid dream.
Alex stays behind and, presumably, becomes part of the community, allowing them to raise the baby, as he’s presumably too chicken-sh*t to leave Laura, who rises as the new cult leader after the probable death of Evelyn. Abbi, however, still does manage to leave, although her destination is unknown.
tl;dr: The cycle repeats itself as Laura replaces Evelyn as cult leader of the community, just as Evelyn replaced her mentor, and Alex and Leila are absorbed into Tall Pines, although Abbi does escape. The ending is vague and open-ended enough, too, that if Wayward is popular enough, Netflix will renew it, even though it’s supposed to be a limited series.
