Are there enough surprises left in 'Wayward Pines'?

Was ever a town so ill-named as the one in Wayward Pines?

The community at the heart of Fox's M. Night Shyamalan-produced series doesn't value waywardness. Not in its trees. Not in its people.

And as the sci-fi series, based on novels by Blake Crouch, returns Wednesday for a second 10-episode season, the tension between the rugged individualism that we like to think of as the American character and the fear-driven conformity that too often overtakes it is more than ever the focus.

If you missed the first season - which delivered its big twist halfway through the run rather than wait for a Shyamalan-like ending - there's a prologue in Wednesday's premiere that hits most of the possibly hard-to-swallow high points.

(If you think you'd like to catch up on Hulu instead, please stop reading now to avoid spoilers.)

After a flashback that offers another glimpse of Terrence Howard (Empire), whose character experienced one of last season's several big deaths, Wednesday's premiere begins with another disoriented new arrival, this one a surgeon named Theo Yedlin (Jason Patric). He's every bit as confused as Matt Dillon's Secret Service agent, Ethan Burke, was when he woke up in Wayward Pines last year after a car accident.

This time, though, we're not confused. We know where the doctor is, where he's been and how he came to be waking up 2,000 years in the future in a world where the only still recognizable humans are living in the ultimate gated community.

Outside the electronic fences, humanity's other future is represented by a feral bunch referred to as "abbies" - for "aberrations" - whom the residents of Wayward Pines regard in the same light as humans on The Walking Dead regard "walkers."

Since I'm not particularly entertained by humans mowing down their evolutionary cousins, I needed what's going on back in town to be at least as interesting.

Which it only occasionally is.

The gap between the town's middle-aged residents, most of whom were abducted into this ark for humanity, and its native First Generation has widened. The adolescents, led by Jason Higgins (Tom Stevens), are now in charge and fighting a rebellion whose leaders include Burke's son, Ben (Charlie Tahan).

Like Peter Pan's Lost Boys, members of the First Generation have a Wendy in their former school principal, Megan Fisher (Hope Davis), whose mantra, "Clear rules, severe punishment," ensures the public executions, or "reckonings," will continue in a regime that perversely claims to value every human life.

What they lack is a doctor. It's turned out to be easier to accelerate population growth - pregnant 12-year-olds have become the norm - than a medical education, which gives the irascible Dr. Yedlin a little more leeway than most of his fellow adults in questioning authority.

At least until those white-coated teens learn everything he knows.

Giving adolescents a major stake in their future isn't just the driver for some of the most popular young-adult fiction, from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games, it makes sense in a show that spans many more years than the brief era in which some of us have been privileged enough to infantilize young people.

What's not clear in the two episodes I've seen so far is whether there are enough surprises left in Wayward Pines to justify viewers of any age spending another summer on reckonings and rebellion.

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