I read somewhere that when your own life feels meaningless, you start looking for purpose in the oddest places. These folks, I mean, people like Evelyn Wade, introduced as a spiritual coach in Wayward, try really hard to make sense of things around them. While most of them go mad in the pursuit, Evelyn, fortunately, found her calling. And now she was on a mission to show the same path to all the broken children across the globe. Evelyn believes that the root of all evil in these children’s lives is their parents. They grew up in abusive households, around people who don’t deserve to be parents, and the only way to cure these kids was to sever their connections to their caregivers, the ones who caused them so much pain. And that’s where the “Green Door” comes in.
Spoiler Alert
In the beginning, the Door was nothing but a symbol to help people get over their childhood trauma. It all started as a community gathering where a hippie named Weldon shared stories about his father, who came back to life after a tragic road accident. Weldon’s father was in a coma for a month, and by the time he finally woke up, he had lost all his memories. Weldon, in describing him, said “He was like a child again.” Weldon told the group that before his father woke up from his coma, he saw a green door in front of him, and he knew that he had to leap through it. He had to let go of everyone who had been holding him back. In short, the leap ceremony transformed him into a completely different person in the same old body. It almost felt like a rebirth.
In 1974, Weldon used this visual metaphor to lay the foundation of the cult with his partner, Evelyn, in the same house in Tall Pines, which Evelyn rented to her former student, Laura Redman, and her husband, Alex Dempsey in 2004. In this new community, Weldon and Evelyn used to free people of their intergenerational trauma with the help of the leap ceremony, using the dynamics of the “Green Door.” The door acted as a threshold between their former self with buried trauma, and their reformed self who was no longer burdened by their past. Everything was going perfectly, until Evelyn came up with the idea of making the leap more permanent. She wanted to use psychedelic drugs made from the venom extracted from the Sonoran Desert toad, Bufo alvarius. This hallucinogenic drug can make a person experience ego death, wherein they lose a part of themselves. While in reality the effects of this drug are temporary, Evelyn somehow made its impact permanent, so that the children are no longer in touch with their former selves, thereby facing an identity crisis. Quite extreme, right? Well, this was likely the reason Weldon didn’t agree with Evelyn’s plan to use drugs on their followers, and told her that no one was ever meant to open the door anyway. It was just a symbol to help people overcome their fears. But you see, Evelyn had become obsessed with the idea of the leap, and she was willing to do anything to make it work. You don’t bring drugs into the equation unless you’re confident about your methods, but Evelyn wanted to perform the leap ceremony in a way that would mean people would never be able to go back to their former selves or end up becoming like their parents. Metaphorically speaking, Evelyn put a latch on the door, so they could never go back to their former self. Through the Mirror Room, she would identify the wound troubling the kids and later use the drugs during the leap ceremony to sever the connection between traumatic memories and their consciousness so it no longer has any impact on their personality.
Evelyn even chants a mantra during the ceremony, forcing her victims to imagine a situation where their mother is facing a wall. The mother then turns to face the kid, and the child can see a door in her mouth. This particular door is a symbolic representation of the path to cutting ties with one’s parents by making the leap through their mouth. The mother that once gave birth to these kids is no longer a figure to be worshiped, and therefore these kids should forget everything that happened to them before the leap, who they were, or where they come from. She performed what Laura described as a “chemical lobotomy” on these children against their will. It not only erased their memories but also robbed them of their bodily autonomy, because of which they lost touch with their own feelings. But here comes the interesting part. Did you notice the pattern already? Evelyn was doing the same thing that her parents did to her. She was a control freak who stole people’s kids from them, just like her parents took away her baby from her. Evelyn, much like everyone else, was stuck in a loop, but because she was the one running the show, she was in denial of everything wrong with her methods. Through her process, she also created a wall between a particular kid and the rest of the world so that the child doesn’t have anyone to look up to but her. It was her way of getting the validation she never received from her own parents.
But you may ask, did Evelyn actually cure anyone? I think the answer is no. The wounds of their childhood lingered; they just no longer felt the pain, which, neither in medical nor psychological terms, can be termed a recovery. I am not denying that these kids needed help, especially the ones like Laura, who may have actually killed her parents. But what they needed was a psychiatrist who could help them overcome their trauma by “making peace” with the past. As an individual, I really believe that you shouldn’t erase pieces of your past, because those are the things that make up your whole personality in life. And when you triumph over the darkness and walk to the other side of the “Door” by yourself, that’s when you feel the strongest. You don’t need someone to push you or drug you to make the leap. You have to do it by yourself, for yourself.
In Wayward’s ending, Evelyn, injected with multiple doses of lethal psychedelic drugs, found herself facing multiple Green Doors inside her head. Well, it’s another visual metaphor, which could mean almost anything. These doors either symbolized Evelyn’s own past traumas for which she never got any help, or they could represent Evelyn’s guilty conscience that she faced in the moment of her death. The doors here could represent every person she has wronged in her life because of her methods, and now in the afterlife, she was surrounded by her sins. Well, I won’t fire too many shots in the dark here, but I would love to know your opinion on this scene.
Jumping straight to the last question: what’s going to happen to Evelyn’s project now that she’s dead? Well, there are two possibilities here. If Laura takes over the school, including the Tall Pines Academy, then she’s going to abolish these barbarous methods from the community. However, there’s a slim chance that Evelyn’s apprentice, Rabbit (whose real name is Rebecca), will want to continue her master’s doctrines and maybe continue performing the leap ceremony somewhere else. We also know that Ponderosa, the shell corporation, has other schools under its wing, which might be following the same guidelines as the Tall Pines Academy, which means Evelyn’s death isn’t really the end of the Green Door or the leap. Maybe her ardent followers are still practicing it in some other part of the world? Well, if there’s a second season of Wayward, maybe we will find out more about it, but if not, I think it’s safe to assume that at least one school is saved from the wrath of the Door.
