For the first time, I received a review copy of a yet to be released television show. The show in question is Fox’s miniseries “Wayward Pines” — a miniseries based on the “Wayward Pines” novels by Blake Crouch.

The show was developed by Chad Hodge and has M. Night Shyamalan as the executive producer. This was when I became aware that this show might be awful.

Shyamalan is a name that inspires great dread and fear within anyone who has seen his work. Shyamalan has a Midas’ Touch that rather than turning everything he touches into gold, he turns it into a vomit inducing mess. He has a vampiric quality with actors, seeming to suck so much talent out of them that they appear like they have never had an interaction with humans before. That being said, I wasn’t going to let this stop me from watching the show.

“Wayward Pines” is the story of a secret service agent named Ethan Burke, played by Matt Dillon, who finds himself in the strange town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, after a bizarre car accident.

The first episode opened with some purposefully disorienting cinematography that had me thinking that the show might actually be good. However, this is thrown out almost immediately in favor of very standard shots.

Ethan Burke wakes up in the forest and walks into town, where he is taken to the hospital. Matt Dillon seemed to have not realized his mumbling is not the same as talking, so I had to turn the volume up substantially to even understand what he was saying.

This episode was dull, and relied heavily on the sheer vastness of the mystery of how Burke ended up in Wayward Pines, and why he can’t leave.

By the time I started watching the second episode, I was prepared to hate this show. The dialogue was awful, the  computer-generated imagery was ugly and overused, and I had watched any chance of this show being interesting die before my eyes when key parts of the mystery were revealed in the first episode.

Still I pushed on, and I came to discover that episode two was actually pretty good. The show seemed to embrace its wackiness in a way that made it a lot of fun to watch.

At one point in the episode, Burke sneaks into the morgue to look at a body when the crazy nurse walks in. She then says the best line in the whole show, “I bet you really miss your wife. I bet when you see her again, you’re going to bang her brains out.” I had to pause the episode at this point because I was laughing so hard.

The episode continues this with a hilarious performance by Terrence Howard as the town’s deranged sheriff. At one point Howard says that the ice cream cone he is eating has been a very bad boy. The entire energy of the show picked up as it developed into something that was much more upbeat and funny than the first episode, and for the first and last time I was excited to watch more of the show.

I thought that the series was going somewhere after this episode. I had my hope restored. But my hope was about to be slaughtered.

The third episode brings in Burke’s wife and son, who to this point had only been seen outside of the town. The episode makes almost no progress story wise until the end. Terrence Howard was carrying the entire show on his back with a zany and over the top performance. He was the lifeblood that made the show watchable — and I wouldn’t spoil this if I didn’t find it absolutely necessary — and at the end of the episode, he is killed off.

I can never comprehend how the decision to kill off the most interesting character in the show was made, but it could not have been a worse one. From this point on, the show lacked a much needed presence that Howard had brought in spades. With one foul swoop, the show had destroyed any hope that I had for it.

At this point I had to change disks; and when I did, something odd happened. What was supposed to be episode four had a review of the show’s events before the episode that hinted at an episode that I had never seen. While seeing this episode may have helped the show, I doubt it would have saved the show.

The whole mystery is pretty much revealed in the fourth episode and the resolution is incredibly dumb. It involves — and once again I must spoil it, in order to adequately describe its awfulness — the devolution of the human race into hunting machines that kill all of the humans, so a scientist freezes some humans and brings them to live in a sanctuary, and the year isn’t 2014, but actually 4028 and there is a resistance and blah blah  blah. This is stupid. This whole show is stupid.

I am giving “Wayward Pines,” an incredibly generous one star out of five, in part because that is how many episodes are actually decent, but mostly because we don’t have a graphic for zero stars.

The show wreaks of lost potential. It is poorly written, poorly directed and lacks any consistency in style or character motivations, and at times had me questioning if I had seen a character before or if I was supposed to recognize them, only to tell me five minutes later that I didn’t know them.

Don’t watch this show. For your sake and mine, just don’t.

Alex Bertsch is the opinion editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].