Welcome back to Beacon Hills, friends! This first recap will be a bit different than normal, covering both nights of the two-night, SCREAM-promoting 5A premiere in one go. Think I can write concisely enough to fit two episodes worth of Jeff Davis plot in? WHO KNOWS. If you’re still jonesing for some Beacon Hills goodness when this is through, though, head on over to tumblr for THE TOP 8 TEEN WOLF DANCE PARTIES.
In the meantime, premiere!
PREVIOUSLY ON TEEN WOLF
Scott and Liam are werewolves; Malia’s a werecoyote. Kira’s a foxfire kitsune; Lydia’s a banshee. Stiles was possessed by an ancient trickster demon, but is better now. Peter went to crazy werewolf jail, AKA the sixth floor of Eichen House, where he was locked in solitary confinement with a trepanned British man who may or may not actually exist and who may or may not have a third eye in the middle of his brain. Parrish? Well, like Lydia, he’s something. Something that can survive being set on fire! Don’t worry, though, nice deputy: Lydia is on you the case.
Most important of all, though, is the fact that now Scott is the (true) alpha of his very own pack, and Derek has given his angsty farewell nod of approval (the nice thing about Derek is that every look he ever gives anyone could easily serve as a look of angsty farewell; good luck, Hoechlin, on your new film endeavors!). Okay, now, Scott—DON’T MESS THIS UP.
THIS [EP’S] WOLF PACK PUPPY
Liam, who is working so hard to learn the ropes of full moon self-control and to earn Scott’s approval. Also, just like a puppy, he apparently is prone to racing around the streets of town naked when he wriggles free on warm, full-moon nights.
Runner-up: Parrish, who may not yet know what he is, but who is still willing to risk everything to protect Scott/the town.
BEST REACTION TO SOMETHING SUPERNATURALLY RIDICULOUS
The random people in Mr. Tate’s ad hoc Good Citizens’ Brigade just…wandering away? after Malia singlehandedly lifts the storm-down tree they’ve teamed up to move.
[DAILY] REMINDER THAT BEACON HILLS IS ON A HELLMOUTH
A noise complaint leads to an abandoned mansion leads to a Cask of Amontillado basement prison wall leads to a phosphorescently-taloned monster leads to Dread Doctor mad science lab ghosts leads to death by bloody raven disgorgement. Of course it does!
(The obvious answer, of course, would have been every Stygian minute of Lydia being abused and tortured in Eichen House, but that is the future, and I want to put off having to accept it for as long as possible.)
REIGNING PRESIDENT OF THE SCOTT MCCALL FAN CLUB
Theo Raeken, returned to Beacon Hills all the way from witness protection with the Montgomery family of Rosewood, Pennsylvania just to join the pack led by THE Scott McCall.
THIS EPISODE
Radley Sanitarium: At Least It Isn’t Eichen House
Apologies in advance for the flood of Pretty Little Liars references that are sure to come this season. But between Theo né Mike and the Eichen House/Radley parallels, what else am I supposed to do?
This season opens on Lydia, alone and mostly catatonic, trapped inside Eichen House. The two orderlies in charge of her are cruel knockoffs of the murderous prick Parrish shot in the chest last season, abusing our favorite banshee verbally, physically, and pharmaceutically. The creepy af male orderly is even about to jab a bit fat syringe straight into Lydia’s carotid, when she bolts upright and screams. Bulbs shatter, electricity flickers, and Lydia bursts through her leather restraints and makes a break for freedom.
Like, a MAJOR break. Because our banshee? She’s picked up some fighting skills since we last saw her, both of the mundane muggle martial arts variety, AND of the supernatural sort. Guards and orderlies come at her from both ends of a gated hallway, and she alternately punches, kicks, knees, and banshee-sonar-blasts them all away.
She makes it as far as the rain-drenched front steps before another wave of guards descends, this group larger than the last. And still she is harder, better, faster, stronger. She bests them all and races for the final steps to the outer gate. But then AIDEN EFFING DEAD TWIN appears in the rain ascending the very same stairs, apologizing to her about her treatment not being quite finished yet, and she is struck so dumb by his appearance that the third wave of guards sent after her all catch her with their taser batons at the same time. And then she finally speaks. Shouts, really. “PLEASE!” she cries, “They’re all going to die! I have to tell them! Have to tell my friends! They’re all going to die!”
Sing a song we haven’t heard before, Lyds. Jeez.
The Best Laid Plans of Wolves and Men
We come back from the creepy new title sequence (which loses points for feeling the need to replace the Scott/Allison kiss card with a Scott/Kira kiss card—who needs a kiss card?!—but WINS points for losing all of the previous seasons’ arching naked girl torsos) to Scott and Stiles chilling in the light of the full moon on the last night of the summer before senior year. Stiles is planning way far ahead and looking for San Francisco apartments for the two of them for college—he’s got a plan! a beautiful plan! that includes every single one of their group packing up and moving en masse to SF come next summer’s end!—
—while Scott is just staring up at the sky, pondering the druid mysteries of life. “Such as?” Stiles wants to know.
“Such as regression to the mean,” Scott says, explaining that thing Deaton explained however many season back as a way to remind Scott that just as nothing can be All Bad all the time, neither can it be All Awesome. Scott’s words say he understands what Deaton meant, but then his brain gets in the way and tries to re-interpret the idiom to mean that nothing can be Just Okay all the time. “SO…” he sighs. “Things are either going to get really good,” Stiles finishes, “or really bad.”
Boys, go to school. You need some more training in logic.
Speaking of boys who should be in school: Liam is chained to a tree! All part of his wolf pup training. Apparently last full moon he went running around the streets of Beacon Hills, naked, inciting dozens of frantic calls to Stiles’ dad (/Parrish) at the sheriff’s department.
“Yes, but that was last month,” Liam insists. “I’m fine now.” Complete and total control? Scott wants to know, staring into Liam’s eyes, knowing he is about to lie. “Complete and total control,” Liam lies, revealing his secretly claw-punctured palms to the camera as Scott releases the final chain.
Call Parrish, Maybe
Speaking of frantic calls to the sheriff’s department—you maybe couldn’t tell from the beautifully calm night the boys were hanging out in, but there’s a major storm a-brewin’ in Beacon Hills! It’s taken down power lines and knocked out cell towers, and it’s just about all Jordan Parrish can do to keep up with the phone bank in the Deputy’s Time-Out Corner.
“Seriously!” he rages to Stilinski after hanging up with yet another hysterical old person. “Six months of directing traffic? Organizational rehauls of paper files? Phone banks?? What did I do to lose your respect!” Instead of answering, Stilinski hands Parrish a file. “Noise complaint???” Parrish fumes. But it, like him and Lydia, is something, so he heads out of the station to follow up. And finds, of course, an mansion which has somehow been abandoned long enough that the walls have crumbled and been sprayed with graffiti, but NOT long enough that any of the crystal chandeliers have been broken and/or stolen. Parrish quickly realizes the place is more than what it seems, so arms himself as he descends to the basement.
At his shout of self-identification, a series of muffled thumps sound from behind a very solid concrete block wall. And because he is a flipping war hero who used to make a living disarming bombs, Parrish assumes the person bricked behind the wall Poe-style is in need of rescuing, not in need of being kept contained. And so he races out to his squad car to retrieve a rescue pickaxe, and returns to break out whoever is trapped. Unfortunately, the person trapped is a phosphorescently-taloned giant maybe-werewolf, whose explosive escape is prefigured by black bile oozing and then spitting from the hole Parrish has made in the wall with his axe.
“NOT a werewolf!” the monster man growls as he tries to subdue Parrish’s glowing ember gaze with his own yellow maybe-wolf eyes. “But something.” He indicates that, at least for the night, he himself is something more than a werewolf, then promises to spare Parrish’s life if he tells him one thing: where is Scott McCall? “Never heard of him,” Parrish replies, and then the monster man’s talons glow neon blue and he slashes down.
Calm in the Driving Storm
As Scott, Stiles and Liam head back to town to meet up with the girls for Senior Scribe/drop Liam off with his dad at the hospital, the electricity cuts out. Not in the street lamps (there are none), but in Scott’s phone and Stiles’ jeep. The two leave Liam in the backseat as they get out to check on what might have gone wrong with the engine (hint: it’s 90% duct tape), Scott trying to settle Stiles’ mounting anxiety that they won’t make it to Senior Scribe in time/be all together this eve before senior year. Because of the positioning of the car/hood, only Liam can see the giant bolts of thunderless lightning that start striking the road closer and closer to the stalled jeep. The older boys ignore the wolf boy’s cries for attention (rim shot), only to nearly get electrocuted by a final, boom-free strike ten feet away from the front of the car. At which point the jeep starts back up on its own.
When the boys finally find Malia, she is fresh off impressing/scaring the hell out of her dad (welcome back, sir!!) by lifting a tree felled by wind with just one hand. (“Strong legs!” she explained, absurdly.) Mr. Tate is a gust of fresh, fatherly air as he assures Malia that, even if their phones aren’t working, she’ll “hear about it when she hears about it,” and as he eyes Stiles’ gravely after watching Malia make out with his face, reminding him, “you do remember I have a gun, right, son?” I mean, this much paternal awareness might have been nice LAST season, when Malia was literally living in Stiles’ bed, but I’ll take any non-Peter pater (familias) I—and Malia—can get.
And what was it that Mr. Tate was reassuring Malia of? “Your summer school thing, right? That if you don’t pass, you have to repeat junior year?” Liam asks, giving away the fact that Stiles and Scott shared that piece of sensitive information with the wolf pup after Malia explicitly asked them not to. STILES HAS A LOT OF ANXIETY, OKAY?
At the hospital, Liam finds that he does, too—anxiety over being left behind by Scott. See, Scott, the thing is?…earlier?…actually?…um?…he was lying. About being in control. “Ya duh,” Scott says with his warm, encouraging smile. Only he corrects Liam—it isn’t that he isn’t in control; it’s that he is still learning. And considering the fact that, according to Derek, Liam is one of the strongest wolves Derek had ever met at that age? Well, Liam has more power to master control over than most. “But that also means what?” Scott asks. “That I’m strong,” Liam says. “HELL yeah,” Scott smiles, right before the elevator door closes.
Upstairs, Stiles asks Scott about how Kira’s trip to NYC went, and is shocked to learn not only that they only texted once, but that Scott’s final words to Kira before she left were, “don’t worry about anything: have fun.”
“Have fun like bowling?” Malia offers, when Stiles asks her opinion as to how she’d interpret that if he said it to her, “or have fun like, sex with other guys?” SCOTT DON’T LISTEN TO MALIA. SHE IS NOT KIRA.
Who, speaking of, is stuck in the traffic jam caused by the jack-knifed semi on the highway that’s been sending all these trauma patients to Melissa’s wing. She climbs to the top of her parents’ car (welcome back, Yukimuras!) to try to get a signal, only coming down when her mom (…welcome back, Yukimuras) chides her through the window. Someone down the road catches her eye as she does so, and lo! A wild Mike Montgomery appears!
“Can’t get a signal either,” he shouts to her with a rueful, charming smile when he sees her staring.
Kira is hardly in the car for a minute before she decides that screw it! She’s walking! Only the moment she opens her door, the skies finally open. She shuts the door before her parents’ upholstery can get soaked, then groans as both of them start in on a European folklore lesson about the Wild Hunt. “Imagine a night like this, storm like this, winds like these…” her mother, the speaker of riddles begins. “Ghost riders and ghost dogs and ghost mounts, racing across the countryside, reaping people’s souls.” I mean, the Wild Hunt IS super interesting! But also, like, how many parents would be inspired to tell their child about that specific thing, when stuck in a thunderstorm traffic jam? Honestly it is incredible that Kira is as normal as she is.
What Where is Parrish?!
Things have turned downright nuts back at the sheriff’s department now that Jordan Parrish is off doing “real” policework. Phones ringing! Papers flying! Juvenile delinquents being caught with loaded .38s while breaking and entering, threatening the very life of our favorite sheriff! “Where the hell is Parrish!” Stilinski yells, quickly putting his finger on the problem.
So where is Parrish? Bleeding out through steaming (like, literally steaming) chest wounds in the basement of that abandoned mansion. He tries to walkie for back-up, but can’t get a signal. He does get Lydia’s voice coming back through the tiny box, though, and shortly gets Lydia, herself, walking down the stairs and across the room and right up to his lips.
Sorry, Parrish! Lydia is trapped in Eichen House; what you’re seeing/almost kissing is a hallucination. And one rudely interrupted by Stilinski racing in to save him.
When Stilinski lays Parrish out on a morgue slab at the hospital, Melissa hisses under her breath that she thought Stilinski has promised everyone (except Parrish) to keep him on low-danger tasks until they figured out what he was?? “It was a noise complaint!” the sheriff exclaims. Neither of them know what to do about the smoking claw marks on Parrish’s chest—maybe it is part of his healing process?—and then Parrish is bolting upright, eyes glowing amber, unaware of what is around him.
Stilinski pulls his weapon just in case, but Parrish has control. And a warning for Scott—whatever it was that attacked him, his claws were like talons (I knew it!) capable of draining a powerful person’s life force. “I think that whatever the rules say,” Parrish says, “this guy is someone who really could steal a true alpha’s power.”
Liam, of course, is eavesdropping on all of this. Go, wolf pup, go!
Watch Your Pack
While Liam is racing off to warn/help Scott, Scott is racing off to find/rescue Kira from the traffic jam. “How are you going to do that??” Stiles asks, “it’s not like you have a vehicle that is easily maneuverable through tight spaces and can seat two people or anything!!” Stiles—I know you love your jeep. But that doesn’t mean Scott’s motorbike doesn’t exist. And so Scott stops home to retrieve it, pausing in the kitchen just long enough to take note of the claw punctures in message he left for his mom about Senior Scribe (who just barely missed a run-in with the taloned monster man earlier that evening), and of the pile of demagnetized magnets laying on the floor in front of the demagnetized fridge. Even weirder, the lights flicker and everything magically remagnetizes just before Scott leaves. SPOOKY.
Passing right by Mike Montgomery’s car window, Scott weaves his way easily through Kira’s traffic jam. She hears his engine in plenty of time to leap out of the car and race to him in the pouring rain. “Did you have fun in New York?!?!” Scott asks frantically when he reaches her. “Not really!” she laughs, and then they kiss.
And on the spectrum of rain kisses, this one is a good one. So good, in fact, that they get right back to it when they reach the school ahead of schedule, stopping in that bizarre underpass to canoodle a bit more before they have to find the others. Bad plan, kids! Now you’ve let a taloned monster man corner you!
Up at the entrance to the school, Stiles and Malia are both anxious—Malia because she still hasn’t heard about her test scores, Stiles because, well, because what if after high school they all stop being friends? What if Scott is not his best friend for LIFE, but just his best friend for childhood? HOW IS IT OKAY that society just EXPECTS you to walk away from your friendships when you become an Adult?!?
Super fair point, Stiles. Society expects a lot from itself, transitioning from childhood to adulthood, and much of it is unnecessary posturing. But as far as you and Scott and the Pack are specifically concerned? Probably don’t use your normalsauce dad’s childhood friendships as a comparison. Did HE fight to the (near)death with them multiple times a semester? Did he literally walk through limbo for them? No, he (probably) did not. Your bonds are forged stronger than most, Stiles. You’ll be okay.
Malia probably would have said much of the same, were she not distracted by the happy realization that she is part of the friendship pack Stiles is so desperate to hang on to for always/the werecoyote realization that “someone is coming! someone FAST.” And boom, palm to the chest, and Liam is on the ground. “Scott’s in trouble!” he manages to breathe. And they race.
And Scott IS in trouble, even though he and Kira are doing their best to hold their own (Kira, amazingly, with a katana that was wrapped around her waist as a magnetized belt this whole time), AND even though a wild Mike Montgomery appeared! As a werewolf! There to help Scott fight off the monster! Only not even the three of them together were enough, and by the time Stiles, Malia and Liam reach the underpass, the monster man has dug his glowing talons into Scott’s gut and sucked all the alpha red right from his eyes. “I thought that would be harder,” he mocks, lowering Scott to the ground. Wrong thing to say, guy: Scott’s eyes flicker back to red, and he is breaking the monster man’s arm so that bone shows through, then breaking his talons off at the fingertips. “I don’t know what you thought you were going to do,” Scott growls, “but you can either stay and let me break something else, or you can run.” And from where he is watching solemnly on the sidelines, Stiles adds, “I’d suggest you run.”
And the monster runs. And the pack reunites. And the wild Mike Montgomery turns out to be…”Theo?? From fourth grade???” Yep, and he wants to be a part of Scott’s pack! Which, if we think of the pack as a metaphor for friendship (which I think we are definitely supposed to do, at least in the case of Scott’s pack), then how are we supposed to read this? How do we make new friends? Do we just decide who we like best and declare our intention to be their friend? Do we impress them and hope they pick us? Friendship is weird! And great. And always changing.
It’s Not Vandalism, It’s Tradition
(The real motto of every high school’s senior class.)
So Theo is a kid Scott and Stiles knew in fourth grade—who was, presumably, as irreconcilable with the confident teen werewolf he is now as Scott’s previous asthmatic self is with his current life as legendary True Alpha. Which is, in fact, exactly what brought Theo Raeken back to Beacon Hills in the first place. “I don’t trust him!” Stiles shouts. “I say, benefit of the doubt,” Scott responds. And thus is established our first major point of 5A contention.
But that fight is for later. Right now, they have all finally made it to senior scribe. And Malia has gotten the call that she passed summer school and so is officially a senior, and there is Lydia, fresh and sane and NOT trapped in Eichen House, exasperated that it took them all so long to get there! And then they are waiting for their turn in the library, where it is revealed the Senior Scribe is a tradition wherein all rising seniors inscribe their initials on the library shelves in indelible marker. It is and incredibly sweet tradition, and felt so true to what it means and feels like to be a real senior with a real future starting their real final year at a real school with a real local history, I teared up. The pack doesn’t always feel like real students—and BHHS doesn’t always feel like a real school—but the spirit of growing up and fitting in comes alive more on Teen Wolf than on almost any other teen show I can think of. A round of applause emoji, MTV/Jeff Davis. Nicely done.
So our pack takes turns adding their initials to the school’s history. Stiles seems unsure about taking that step, until he sees Derek’s initials blocked sternly further down the shelf. Kira worries that maybe this actually is vandalism, like her mom suspected, but Lydia assures her it is not. Malia pauses before adding her last initial, then smiles broadly when she sticks with the T for Tate. And Scott, once he is finished inking his own initials, hesitates for only the briefest moment before adding and A A beneath it. And if any of you say you didn’t get even a bit misty then, you are lying. I am as heartless and television viewer as they come, and even now I’m tearing up over it (beautiful Season 1/5 comparison gifset here).
“She’d have been with us,” Stiles says, Scott joining his friends after handing off the marker. “She still is,” Lydia adds. And while it is incomprehensible that Isaac doesn’t get a shoutout in all of this, the footprints that departed characters leave on this show are impressive.
Monster Mash
The taloned monster man didn’t run far. He stumbles down into a basement mad science lab, where three steampunk plague doctors (officially dubbed the Dread Doctors by Jeff Davis) shudder their ghostly way out of the shadows. The sound mixing on their voices is not great—they are almost impossible to understand, and not in the effective way. But it is clear that they are at least in part responsible for the power boost this werewolf man had when he went after Scott, as well as the order to do so in the first place. And now he is a wounded failure. And so they stab a sword in his chest, from which wound burst forth a dozen cawing ravens drenched in more of that oozing black bile.
The Future’s Open Wide (Let’s Stop the World)
And that brings us back to Lydia. Who, it turns out, is the only one in the episode living in the present. Everything we just saw? Her memories from the start of senior year, when everything bad was just about to begin. Aiden has her strapped to a hospital bed and is asking her to remember more about what happened, but she can’t. She also can’t believe that it is really Aiden there—and she is right. It is the trepanned man from Peter Hale’s cell, now with a whole skull. He tries to coax more memories out of her—some bloody battle between Scott and Liam; Melissa slapping Stilinski; Kira turning away from Scott in a lightning storm; Parrish walking out of a fire; Stiles lying unconscious in his burning, overturned jeep—but it is all too traumatic for her to focus on.
“That’s alright,” the British man says. “I just so happen to have this handy tool for a very useful procedure called trepanning…” And as he brings the drill inches from her forehead, the screen fades to black.
About the Contributor:
Alexis Gunderson is a TV critic and audiobibliophile. A Wyoming expat, she now lives in Maryland, where she runs the DC chapter of the FYA Book Club. She can be found talking about Teen TV on Twitter, and her longform criticism can be found on Authory.
