#cos they're all unrealiable narrators

[metabolizemotions]

The wilderness wasn't just the harsh elements and circumstances out there. It also was and still is the darkness in them, their shadow selves. They reshaped their little society and created a new religion. They desperately needed a semblance of order, meaning and something greater than themselves to carry on.

With every decision, they lost a part of their humanity to keep their animal bodies alive. With every made-up ritual, they tethered themselves to the greater unknown entity - which they unloaded their primal instincts onto to remind themselves that they were still humans. W/o compartmentalizing, they would not have been able to keep themselves somewhat sane and survived. It even allowed them to have a bit of lightness and humor occasionally.

Civilization is another wilderness altogether. Societal pressure, the whispers and gossips... Their inability to reconcile what happened, what could have been and what is. They seem "normal" on the outside but are repressing their trauma and dissociating to various degrees. They have their basic needs more than met. They can survive but don't know how to live. They yearn for meaning to fill the void. Also something to feed the darkness within them that has been awakened.

(Except maybe Misty. She's always been like that. She wanted friends so bad she made more people become like her so that she's no longer alone. Nat was the other exception cos she was so tethered to reality that she had to escape with drugs.)

Jackie couldn't survive the wilderness out there for lack of trying. Nat couldn't survive the wilderness back here despite trying damn f*cking hard.

The ending is upsetting for a number of reasons. It shouldn't be Nat. It shouldn't be now. It shouldn't happen like that. She was plagued with guilt, self-loathing and addiction. She was the only one trying to deal with her repressed trauma properly. (Lottie tried, albeit by using her belief in the supernatural.) That's the tragedy of it.

But that is also why it happened like that... Cos that is the premise of the show. The plane shouldn't have crashed in the wilderness. People shouldn't have become cannibals. Life should have returned to "normal" when they came back to civilisation... Except that they didn't cos nothing would ever be "normal" again after what they've been thru.

Things are taking yet another darker turn. Nat, the moral compass of the group and their tether to reality is dead. Good cop Kevyn is dead. Those who they brought into the fold are complicit in their (sometimes unwitting) crimes as they try and fail to fit in.

"Does a hunt that has no violence feed anyone?"

The mass psychosis as they watched Shauna brutally beat up Lottie then. And as they followed thru with the ritual to hunt Shauna. To feed that darkness. They couldn't help themselves and they couldn't look away.

Ben, who thought himself morally above the rest, probably set fire to their shelter, with them in it. It would be even more challenging to survive and that would drive them further towards more conflict and violence...

(Callie looking intrigued and Shauna worried. This almost seemed like an initiation for Callie...? )