Wayward Pines Season 2 premiered on Fox May 25, but there’s still no sign of Tim Griffin’s character Adam Hassler. The last time we saw him was in episode 9 when Theresa found a tape confirming the truth about Wayward Pines. However, the mystery behind Hassler’s exploration will come full circle on Wednesday. As seen in the latest Wayward Pines teaser, Griffin will make his return to the series, but not as the same man we once knew.
“Everything is different. I've been on a mission by the creator and founder of Wayward Pines, but you don't know what's happened to me yet. The last you see me was episode 9 when they see a video that Hassler has sent back. They realize he’s been out exploring the world trying to make contact and see what’s left of humanity,” Tim Griffin told iDigitalTimes. “It’s not gone so well. They don't know if he’s dead or where he is. The tape was sent 10 years ago. Here it is 12 years later and I make my return.”
Griffin describes a version of Adam Hassler that is physically unrecognizable from the first season.
“I’m completely changed. I’ve gone mountain man like Leo DiCaprio in The Revenant. I haven't made contact with anyone in 12 years. It’s a total mind trip. What’s really fun is we shoot flashbacks so you can see what I look like back when I’m the head of the Secret Service--very clean cut and by the book.”
Hassler touched on the season 1 finale and says there were multiple rewrites, one of which actually included his return.
“It was something Executive Producer M. Night Shyamalan told me we were going to try and incorporate into Season 1 and we literally just ran out of road. There was too much story to tell. They rewrote the finale like three times. At the end of Season 1, it's Matt Dillon’s son who wakes up and sees that Wayward Pines has suddenly been taken over by the first generation….so there were a lot of different things. One of them was that Hassler walks back into Wayward Pines and they were going to tease it where you see there is this guy out there in the wilderness making weapons out of sticks. Basically everything they promised me in Season 1 is happening in Season 2. I was sort of set up for it, but I was completely unprepared for how extreme the change would be.”
As for Season 2, expect multiple big twists according to Griffin, who may be the only man who has been able to survive outside the fence with all the flesh-eating abbies for so long. Not only will Hassler serve as Wayward Pines’ new abbies expert, but he’ll also be dealing with the psychological affects of being alone on the brink of death for over a decade. Griffin teases that he and rest of the cast will be be pondering the existential question: Does humanity deserve to exist?
“Many big twists. The big secret in Season 1 was like what is the matrix...what is Wayward Pines? Now that we know what Wayward Pines is, they delve deeper into who are the abbies. That's my character’s function. I've been out there surviving amongst them, running from them and so there’s a really cool question he’ll have to answer: who deserves to survive? Just because this is the last outpost of humanity, does humanity deserve to exist? Or, did we jump our places in the evolutionary order? Everything that you think you know about the abbies and our relationship to nature gets turned upside down.”
Xander, who was trapped outside during the first episode, will also return this week where we'll find out more about the abbies and their existence. “They’re not our enemies, they’re our replacements,” the trailer teases. What does this mean? Find out when Tim Griffin returns in Wayward Pines Season 2 episode 4, “Exit Strategy,” at 9 p.m. Wednesday on Fox.
