Prime Video mystery drama series The Wilds debuted almost two years ago at the end of 2020 and is set to return for a second season on May 6. This series tells the story of eight high school-aged girls whose plane crashes near an abandoned island. The group is forced to survive for an undisclosed amount of time on the island before the survivors are rescued and interviewed in a quarantine facility. The first season starts with survivor interviews, showing the girls’ lives on the island and before the plane crash through flashbacks.
A lot happens on The Wilds between the three time periods, so here is everything you need to know (or maybe should just refresh your memory on) before Season 2 premieres next month.
Before the Plane Crash
Prior to the plane crash and their time on the island, the girls lead complicated lives. Fatin (Sophia Ali) and Leah (Sarah Pidgeon) go to the same art-centric West Coast school, but have barely interacted with each other. Other than her friend Ian (James Peter Fraser), Leah is a loner. Leah falls for an author that graduated from their high school, and they develop an intimate relationship after she lets him believe that she is 18. Jeff (Carter Hudson) breaks up with her when he mysteriously receives a copy of her birth certificate in the mail. Leah spirals, accusing Ian of sabotaging their relationship out of jealousy and then getting hit by a car while dancing drunk in the street. Leah’s parents sign her up for the Dawn of Eve retreat in the hopes that she’ll snap out of her funk and get the help she needs.
Fatin is a Julliard-bound cellist who rebels against the rigid practice schedule and expectations set by her mother by partying and embracing her sexuality. She leans on her more carefree dad to help get her curfew extended, but is enraged to discover that he has been cheating on her mom with multiple women. In retaliation, Fatin anonymously sends one of her father’s dick pics to everyone in his contact list. When her parents discover what she did, Fatin expects her mother to take her side, but they both are ashamed that she interfered with their marriage problems so publicly. They send her to the retreat as a first step with the aim of ultimately shipping her off to a traditional Muslim boarding school.
Dot (Shannon Berry) and Shelby (Mia Healey) both attend the same high school in Texas, but are from very different backgrounds and social circles. Dot’s father requires hospice care, and she has to care for him whenever his nurse, Mateo (Jose Velazquez), is off duty. She sells some of the pills he doesn’t take to help make ends meet and doesn’t really have friends at school. As her father’s condition worsens, he asks Dot to help him die on his own terms, so that he won’t be a burden to her any longer. On his deathbed, he gives Dot the contact information for Gretchen (Rachel Griffiths), the woman behind the Dawn of Eve, in the hopes that she can help Dot avoid child protective services and continue to live at their home as long as she wants to.
Shelby was raised in a wealthy Christian family and grew up in the pageant circuit. Her dad is a cycling coach that combines prayer with fitness to motivate his clients. He is also incredibly controlling, manipulative, and homophobic. While preparing for her next pageant, Shelby kisses her best friend Becca (Stefania LaVie Owen) right before her father walks in the bedroom. He calls Becca’s parents and baits her into confessing what happened. To stay in her father’s good graces, Shelby denies her role in what happened and cuts off contact with Becca. However, during the pageant that Becca was helping her prepare for, Shelby learns that Becca died by suicide. Even though she went on to win the pageant, Shelby is shaken by what happened and her role in it.
Martha (Jenna Clause) and Toni (Erana James) have been best friends since childhood. Martha is an optimist who tends to see the best in people and situations. Toni, on the other hand, is quick to anger and become physical when upset. Toni grew up in and out of foster care, so Martha’s home serves as a safe place for her. She is fiercely protective of Martha and does her best to be supportive when abuse allegations are made against Martha’s former physical therapist Dr. Ted (Lewis Fitz-Gerald). When Martha was seven, she hurt her leg in a trampoline accident and had to go to physical therapy. Martha only remembers the good things about her experience with Dr. Ted, but in a conversation with Toni, Martha’s mother reveals that Martha began wetting the bed after she started seeing him. This happens again right as Martha has to testify about Dr. Ted’s behavior during a hearing. While her exact words are never shown, it’s revealed that she lies about Dr. Ted’s behavior around her out of denial that it happened.
Toni’s pre-island events revolve around how her anger problems affect her relationship with Regan (Bella Shepard). She gets mad at her foster brother for throwing food at Regan’s car. She accidentally hits Regan when she attacks drunk guys harassing them in a parking lot. Then, she destroys Regan’s car after Regan dumps her. Regan appreciates Toni’s passion, but can’t handle her short fuse.
Rachel (Reign Edwards) and Nora (Helena Howard) are twin sisters who became somewhat estranged before the plane crash. Rachel feels like an outcast in her family. Their parents are academics and Nora was able to keep up with their brain-teasers and scrabble games with ease as a child. Feeling pressure to succeed and live up to the standards unintentionally set by Nora, Rachel becomes a competitive diver. After almost being cut from the team by her coach, Rachel develops an eating disorder in order to maintain the “proper” physique needed to stay on the team. Nora becomes concerned with Rachel’s well-being and struggles to convince her that she doesn’t need to be an Olympic-level athlete to be worthy of love.
While taking summer classes at a local college, Nora meets Quinn (Johnny Berchtold). He is an incoming freshman who is just as socially awkward as she is, and they become fast friends. At the end of the summer, Quinn asks Nora to be his girlfriend. Nora rejects him because she isn’t sure if she’s ready for a relationship and Rachel isn’t very fond of him. At the beginning of the school year, Nora reaches out to him again only to discover through instagram comments that he died during a frat hazing. She goes to visit one of the frat members, Devon Klein, in jail to show him that the life he took was worth something. There she meets Gretchen, Devon’s mother, who is so appalled by what her son did that she creates The Dawn of Eve. Gretchen recruits Nora as a double agent who will send her team updates as needed.
The Dawn of Eve: Behind the Scenes
Gretchen is a former professor who was fired after her son’s arrest for unspecified reasons. She uses the support of a colleague and wealthy donors to create the Dawn of Eve – a social experiment disguised as a leadership and wellness retreat for young women. After her son’s actions and arrest, she’s determined to prove that women are the superior sex, no matter the cost. Early on this season, it is revealed that the plane crash was fabricated to get the girls to the island and test their survival skills. Gretchen’s goal is to prove that, even under intense stress, that women can create a thriving society. The island is rigged with cameras that Gretchen and her team use to observe and record data during the girls’ time on the island. They plant one duffel bag with essential medication and supplies disguised as the pilot’s bag, but outside that the girls are on their own to scavenge the island and retrieve what they can from the wreckage.
Linh (Chi Nguyen), or Jeanette as the girls know her, is a grad student recruited by Gretchen to go undercover with the group. She’s supposed to be another informant and as an adult she helps Gretchen and the team avoid some legal liability. However, Linh trips and falls during the transition from the plane to the island and sustains injuries that later lead to her death on the island. Nora doesn’t know that Linh is the double agent until her satellite phone is found after her death.
23 Stranded Days on an Island
Based on the episode titles that correspond to a specific day on the island, we know that the girls were on the island for at least 23 days. The first few days are spent recovering from the crash and salvaging what they can. As an avid fan of survivalist shows, Dot takes the lead on inventory and offers suggestions for the best place to camp. Rachel, Nora, and Leah swim out to the plane’s wreckage to retrieve supplies and the black box. Shelby and Toni butt heads while trying to find water. The girls bury Jeanette and hold a makeshift memorial for her.
Days 6 and 7 are spent trying to make shelter and finding Fatin after she runs off. When a bag of Takis makes its way to shore, the girls decide to use it as a grand prize for a shelter-making contest. They split into teams – Toni, Shelby, Martha, Nora on one, Dot, Rachel, Leah, and Fatin on the other. Toni is upset that Shelby and Martha are growing close and destroys their shelter in a fit of anger. Leah gets upset that Fatin isn’t contributing to the camp. Fatin steals some water from the ration pile and runs off after the shelter is built. The next day, Toni finds a piece of Fatin’s clothes, torn and bloody, in the woods. Feeling guilty for being mean to her, Leah leads the girls on a search party to find her. At the end of the day they find Fatin, and a fresh water source.
On Day 12, Toni and Martha almost die when the group gets food poisoning from mussels. Days 15 and 16 see the girls lose their camp, and their spirits, to a tidal wave only to have hope reignited shortly thereafter thanks to a plane flying overhead. Expecting to be rescued soon, the girls party with the remaining food and alcohol they have left. On Days 22 and 23, the girls are desperate to find food. Martha, Toni, and Shelby go into the woods, but get separated when Martha gets uneasy about having to kill a goat they find. Toni and Shelby find a tree filled with lychees, and in their joy they finally give in to their feelings for each other and sleep together. Martha finds the goat and, after some self reflection, kills it so that the group can have food. Between the goat and the lychees, the girls have a feast. While this is happening, Leah has a breakdown and convinces herself that she can swim until she finds help. Rachel, who had been avoiding the water, overcomes her hesitation and saves Leah. They give Leah the last of their drugs to calm her down. Later on, Leah sleepwalks into the woods and finds Nora talking to a camera in a tree, telling Gretchen’s team about Leah’s suspicions. The next day, Nora leads Leah into a hole in the ground until she can be extracted, but Leah escapes before anyone arrives. Leah comes back to the beach to confront Nora, but is distracted by a shark heading toward Rachel in the water. So far, it’s unclear how much time passed between the shark attack and the girls’ rescue. One would hope that the shark attack would prompt a swift retrieval from Gretchen’s team, but at the same time, it’s hard to believe that Gretchen would be so quick to compromise the experiment ahead of schedule.
After “Rescue”
The survivors are led to believe that they are being held in a quarantine facility for their safety, and that they’ll be allowed to see each other after a short period of time. In reality, the “agents” that have been asking them questions and taking their statements also work for Gretchen. Their goal is to get information from the remaining girls about what happened beyond what the team could see on cameras. All the girls are interviewed except for Martha and Nora. During Rachel’s interview, not only is it revealed that she lost a hand (presumably to the shark attack), but she also implies that something happened to Nora that we haven’t seen yet. Martha’s fate is even more ambiguous, we learn about her past through her file and Nora’s notes from the island, but that’s it. It is implied that Shelby has snapped. While she acts like her typical joyful self in front of the agents, her head is shaved, she’s on crutches, and she willingly eats shellfish that she is highly allergic to. Leah does her best to answer the agents' questions, but it’s clear that she is still suspicious of their situation. After Shelby slips her a note during a rare visit telling her that she was right, Leah finds a way to slip out of her room. Rather than finding a way out, however, Leah stumbles upon something even bigger. She finds a room with information and surveillance on a group of boys also stranded on an island, confirming her fears that the crash happened on purpose.