Ethan Burke (Matt Dillon) is looking for two missing partners when he gets into a horrible car accident. He wakes in the woods, just outside the pleasant-looking town of Wayward Pines, Idaho. Soon, he’s in a hospital run by a clearly sadistic nurse (Melissa Leo) and bizarrely bereft of fellow patients. He escapes the hospital, where he befriends a local bartender (Juliette Lewis) and crosses paths with a nefarious sheriff (Terrence Howard), who basically tells him there’s no way to leave Wayward Pines. He even finds one of his missing partners, Kate (Carla Gugino), with whom he once had an affair. Kate tells him she’s been there 12 years (even though he saw her five weeks ago), just before she warns him that they are always watching and always listening. Meanwhile, Ethan’s wife (Shannyn Sosamon) and son (Charlie Tahan) try to track down their missing family member. Toby Jones shines as a doctor who clearly knows more than anyone else in town while even small parts are filled out with excellent TV character actors like “Homicide”’s Reed Diamond.

At first, “Wayward Pines” doesn’t quite have the visual personality to match its narrative oddity. It wants to be “Twin Peaks” or “Silent Hill” but isn’t creepy enough to manage either tonally. The stakes don’t feel high enough. And poor Dillon is stuck without a character, as he’s mostly in service of a runaway narrative, always commenting on what he needs to do next or asking what’s happening now. There should be a disorienting quality to the first few episodes that’s just not quite there. The incredible thematic depth—identity, history, the future all turned in on each other—isn’t quite explored, and I could easily see viewers getting frustrated by the storytelling of the first three episodes.

Be patient. The repetition fades away as writer Chad Hodge (who adapted his books) starts working more with answers than questions, and even the already-strong cast improves as “Weeds” veteran Justin Kirk gets some great time in the spotlight in episode four and Hope Davis steals both four and five. Giving a student orientation and casually throwing in the line, “Assuming you all make it through today…” is the kind of picket fence malevolence that Davis does as well as anybody. The show actually pays off on its premise by episode five, answering so many questions that I expected to be drawn out until the finale. It makes me wonder where they’re going in the second half of the series. And excited to find out.

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