Ahhh! Sorry for the delay, all. I traveled home to Wyoming to watch the totality/day drink at my friend’s distillery, and only just got to watch this past weekend’s doubleheader, which MTV very uncoolly only just announced like three days before that would be happening at all. MTV! WYD!
Anyway, while MTV’s scheduling and promotional plans make zero sense, Teen Wolf itself is still bringing the woke anti-prejudice, anti-racial purity, anti-genocide HEAT. Like, they literally included the word genocide in their dialogue, and Gerard Argent was figuratively turned into Humanity’s Grand Wizard in a moment so stark, anyone waffling on whether or not maybe there were SOME “very fine people” in Charlottesville or anywhere similar will hopefully have immediately realized NO.
Loud enough for the rooftops: EFF. ALL. RACIAL. SUPREMACY.
Okay! Let’s talk wolves!
PREVIOUSLY ON TEEN WOLF
Gerard Argent skulked through the Beacon Hills Preserve every night until he stumbled upon BHS’ newest guidance counselor, Tamora Moore, training herself to genocide supernaturals. After some light Sun-Tzu fueled stalking, he officially brought her under his age’d, malevolent wing, and together they straight up MURDERED Buddhist wolves/Liam’s oldest lacrosse frenemy and his siter, Brett and Lori. Liam was two seconds too late to stop it, and two minutes too late to stop revealing himself in all his wolfy glory to every human suddenly gathered around that usually extremely abandoned nighttime intersection. Whoops!
Melissa and Chris, meanwhile, investigated a skinless corpse that turned out to be radiating #terror and also not actually be a corpse or human at all, while Stilinski and Parrish investigated the unlikely and terrifying murder of an ancient Hellhound by (they do not yet know) Tamora, while Scott, Malia, and Lydia investigated what came out of the Wild Hunt with Stiles that this ancient murdered Hellhound had been so hellbent on guarding that he built Eichen House a hundred years ago, while crazy-eyes Nolan investigated how Corey and his weird invisibility might make him different from other humans by stabbing him in the hand as Mason looked on, horrified. Things in Beacon Hills are great! SO SO GREAT!
AWARDS
THIS WEEK’S WOLF PACK PUPPY
OMG Liam, you are not my favorite, but you are a legit fucking hero.
Clark Kent just WISHES (I don’t read Superman, don’t @ me).
Runner-up: Linden Ashby, who made his directorial debut on this heartbreak of an ep!
BEST REACTION TO SOMETHING SUPERNATURALLY RIDICULOUS
Nolan using a handful of…chalk dust??…to reveal Liam from his hiding place in Mason’s wake/Corey’s lent invisibility.
Or maybe it wasn’t chalk dust, considering it passed right over a black kid wearing a black jacket without leaving one speck on him. Maybe Nolan is actually a malevolent sorcerer??? You hate most in others what you hate most in yourself, they say…
WEEKLY REMINDER THAT BEACON HILLS IS ON A HELLMOUTH
The endless brutality of threatened white male human feelings.
Gabe: “Who cares?”
GIFs from dailytwgifs
AKA, l’enfer, c’est les autres.
REIGNING PRESIDENT OF THE SCOTT MCCALL FAN CLUB
Melissa “I’ll NEVER tell him to run” McCall, DUH.
Runner-up: Chris “I want Scott to run and LIVE” Argent. Shit’s complicated! All parenting love is good parenting love, in this case!
BEST PRODUCT PLACEMENT
This week brought to you by LIAM’S Beautiful Toyota!!! But also, thanks again to the reminder from the After After Show: Throwing Up Spiders!
THIS WEEK
Scary Movie MCMXVII
Aaron’s back! Friends!! AARON’S BACK!
I am not okay. Nothing is okay. Aaron, slumped and staring, lifeless, into the camera, is DEFINITELY not okay. My ardent hope as this scene first played out was that Melissa would at least find him later and we would get to see that the spider fear demon had only been possessing him, and that he was totally alive, but then Melissa DID come back later with Stilinski and Parrish after Parrish nearly had a terror-induced Hellhound heart attack in the middle of the station seeing the skinless body stalking him (why they weren’t called in or at least *alerted* to the terror-inducing inhumanity of the body after Melissa and Chris figured it out last episode is beyond me) and found the morgue—and morgue drawer—completely empty, and not one mention of Aaron from any of them, so honestly who knows!!!
Aaron is probably dead. Chalk another human loss up in Tamora’s blame column, I guess.
Speaking of Tamora’s blame column, there’s a new wolf in town! There are so many wolves in town, and how they all end up in Beacon Hills without True Alpha Scott knowing a damn thing about them is as beyond me as Melissa and Chris not calling in the local supernatural constabulary at every new supernatural discovery. ANYWAY, mirroring that Season One scene in which Kate Argent was introduced as a surprise Hunter after her car was suspiciously stopped in an abandoned alley in the dark, Beacon Hills’ newest werewolf, Quinn, is introduced the exact same way! At fault for her car trouble, though, is not another wolf, but a pack of neo-Hunters who very rudely spiked her tires with neo-Hunter arrowheads.
“Have you ever seen one of these?” one of the hulking brute dudes menaces as Quinn is surrounded by other, even more hulking brute dudes and every woman, girl, and non-hulking brute dude in the audience shivers from fearful and lifelong innate sympathy. “Yes,” Quinn says, before wolfing out and summarily kicking their asses, one by one. But don’t cheer too soon! She is still technically outnumbered, and who knows what kind of backup they all have. Thankfully, at that moment a sheriff’s deputy pulls up, headlights glaring, and Quinn swings around to her, grateful and un-wolfy and bloody. But her pleas for help are for naught, as the deputy is the same one who saw Scott freak out in the woods. She lifts her gun, aims it straight at Quinn’s face, and fires.
Captains of Blame, Captains of Fear
Next thing we know, it’s the Monday morning after Brett and Lori’s murder/Liam’s self-outing. Time for Liam to go to school! Which, naturally, he has negative interest in doing. People SAW him. With his WOLF teeth. I have no idea if he knows about what happened between Nolan and #Morey, but even without all that, everyone’s terrified of Liam, and being at school with all of them is the last thing he both wants to do and thinks is smart.
Scott isn’t about to let him off the hook, though. For one, Scott successfully navigated high school by consistently and willfully refusing to acknowledge any of the supernatural weirdness that chased him down every hallway and lacrosse game, and so like every adult in the history of time, he is convinced that his experience and strategy will translate exactly. Also, though, his True Alpha nature means he will always focus on the most optimistic outcome of any situation, so the possibility of Liam failing to overcome this one unfortunate incident basically doesn’t cross his mind. “You are like Clark Kent!” he exclaims, pulling Liam’s comforter off him like the True Alpha Dad he is, “who, if his glasses fall off, just picks them up and puts them back on and says, I’m still Clark Kent!“
Scott is…not good a metaphors. Or pop culture. It is moments like this in which Stiles is most acutely missed.
As much as we know Liam appreciates Scott’s faith in him, he isn’t moved a bit by the speech. Even if he could just “put his glasses back on,” it wouldn’t matter. Unlike Clark Kent, he explains, first to Scott there at home and later to Mason and Corey in the halls at school, he isn’t a superhero. He’s a monster, with claws, who people are afraid of, no matter how heroic those monster trait have allowed him to be.
Case in point: everyone at school is talking about what a literal monster Liam is, and the lacrosse team, spurred by the increasingly manic-looking Nolan, is pumping themselves up to beat him down. We know this in part because Liam’s wolf hearing catches every whisper of it, and in part because Corey, whose supernaturalness Nolan explicitly proved, but whose supernaturalness no longer apparently matters, has been lurking around school to confirm. “You’ll be fine!” Mason insists. “You literally won’t be fine,” Corey reports. “But it was dark, and late, and foggy!” Mason argues. “It was clear out, with a full moon, in a well-lit intersection,” Corey corrects.
Liam, I know you’re in trouble, but I’ve just got to take a moment to say: ugh, these two. I LOVE THEM.
While Liam et al are just trying to get through their morning, Scott, Malia, and Lydia have rendezvoused with (Chris) Argent in his underground bunker/office to discuss the “Gerard is back and fomenting war” development. “We thought it was just the new Hunter, alone,” Scott starts, “but all that know-how in the tunnels…” It all points to Gerard, Chris acknowledges. Which in turn points to him, who let Gerard go. “You couldn’t have done anything,” Lydia says, reassuring him. Malia is baffled by this line of reasoning. Couldn’t have DONE anything?!?!? “He could have killed him,” she states baldly, completely unaware of why anyone would NOT acknowledge this. Lydia and Scott are shocked, but Chris just shrugs in agreement.
Scott and Lydia try to argue that they aren’t executioners, but Malia is having none of it: you are if you’re at war, she argues back. “That’s why we’re going to make peace,” Scott says earnestly. Which makes it Lydia’s turn to be baffled at having to state the obvious: “with GERARD?!?!?!?” Yes, with Gerard, Scott says. They’ll set up a peace summit, Scott says. It will be fine, Scott says! “The last time Gerard agreed to a peace summit, he blinded Deucalion and killed his own men,” Lydia reminds all of us. Gerard is truly the spawn of Hell. Still, Chris offers to go and make the proposal. “He won’t kill me,” he reasons. Um, bitch, he might.
He doesn’t, but not out of an abundance of loyalty towards his human blood relative. No, actual Grand Wizard Gerard only deigns to keep race-traitor Chris alive in order to deliver a message to Scott: RUN. There will be no peace. “Then what will there be?” Melissa asks anxiously, as Chris rushes home to her (!!!) right after. “Genocide,” Chris says. And then he tells her to tell Scott to do just what Gerard said, and run. He doesn’t want Scott and everyone else to die, doesn’t want Melissa to have to watch Scott die (again), and as crazy and armed as Gerard is, that’s the only ending Gerard sees.
Thankfully, Melissa has never told her son once to run from trouble and people who need his help (not true, for the record, but we can forgive her for her former moral judgment errors, as they were rooted in shock). She’s not about to start now. “But what if this is the one fight Scott can’t win?” Chris fires back.
“There doesn’t have to be a fight,” Scott says. How does he know? He just got a call from Liam, who himself just uncovered Tamora as the mysterious neo-Hunter when he stumbled into her office while trying to hide from a violent lacrosse posse (sidebar: please read this as lacrosse-y posse) and she had mysterious supernatural books on her desk and mysterious claw scratches on her neck and a mysterious obsession with the kids who are bullying him (new recruits!) on her mind. Now that they know who the green new Hunter is, Scott reasons, they can target her to set up a peace summit. And so, they send Lydia off to her mom’s office to try.
It does not go well. Tamora is completely uninterested in considering Lydia or anyone else in Scott’s pack as equivalent to human, and no matter how fervently Lydia argues about how nothing good ever comes of highlighting differences, and how Tamora didn’t become a guidance counselor to hunt people, Gerard’s new shadow remains unmoved. She gets up to go, and Lydia, out of options, unthinkingly snatches at her arm. “Is that how you get your visions of who’s going to die next?” Tamora breathes, as unnaturally worked up at seeing the supernatural in action now as she was when Brett’s gash healed before her eyes, and as Nolan was when he watched Corey’s stab wound disappear before his.
It isn’t, of course, which Lydia tells her. But also, THERE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE A NEXT! Lydia has never relished this power, and if Tamora had the eyes for it, she would see that burden all over Lydia’s face. But spoiler alert!!! TAMORA WANTS THEM ALL TO DIE, so she doesn’t cotton on to one bit of Lydia’s unhappiness.
Still, she apparently agrees to the summit after all, as the next thing we see is Scott rushing through his house to meet with her, alone, in the middle of the trap-infested tunnels. “It is obviously a trap!” Malia shouts at him, but what is he supposed to do, NOT go? Yes, obviously. But also obviously, Malia can’t make him agree to that. Anyway, he knows it is a risk, but he also knows that it is a risk he can take—he wouldn’t go if he didn’t think they couldn’t handle themselves without him. “We need you,” she says, meaning I need you, but Scott doesn’t get it, and Malia won’t (or can’t) spell it out, and so off Scott goes.
Scott: I’m kinda getting confused.“
GIFs from alina-aleksanders
These two dummies. THESE TWO DUMMIES.
Everything is a Trap
It is a trap, obviously. Malia totally called it! Scott gets down into the tunnels, and there Tamora is, flanked by a whole clutch of hulking brute neo-Hunters and also Gerard. She isn’t even trying to pretend it is a trap, is how venomous her resentment of Scott and his ilk is. “Honestly,” she smirks at him, “I can’t believe YOU came alone.”
Joke’s on you, lady! Thanks to Malia and Lydia knowing what is actually up (i.e., not being blinded by Scott’s True Alpha optimism), they followed Scott from the beginning, and just hung out in the nearest tunnel waiting for their opening.
So now there’s a true standoff, but Scott just gets right back to work trying to make peace. #NotAllWerewolves are violent and bad, he argues. She is new to this world, he argues. She doesn’t know all the nuances of things from the supernatural side of the story, he argues. She doesn’t, and tbh SHOULDN’T, just blindly follow Gerard, he argues. But now it’s Scott’s turn to be the butt of the joke, because turns out? No one is following Gerard; everyone is following Tamora. She’s the brains of the operation. Gerard is just the mentor.
So what happened to Tamora to make her hate supernaturals so much? Scott wants to know. “No, what happened to make me hate YOU, Scott,” she corrects, then launches into a harrowing story of having been leaving BHHS late one night during Season 5B, only to be caught up in one of Scott and Parrish’s standoffs with the rampaging Beast of Gevaudan, who mauled every last one of her colleagues. Tamora only survived by pulling her friend’s corpse on top of her, and then waiting until hours later when Stilinski and the rest of the non-Parrish deputies came to look for survivors. Did it even OCCUR to Scott to look for survivors???
No, admittedly, which fact clearly tears Scott up. But also, Scott, buddy! You were still fighting the Beast. You can’t be a fighter AND a first responder, not always! Like, take this for the learning moment it is, but also recognize that there is still only so much a single person, True Alpha or not, can accomplish at one time.
Anyway, the skinless terror body is down in the tunnels with them, and chooses this moment to start amplifying all their anger and fear. Malia and Lydia figure it out pretty quick, but by the time they do, the neo-Hunters are so caught up in the terror that they start shooting their automatic rifles at shadows/each other. Scott pulls himself and the girls out of the way down a side tunnel, but with the fear monster still in the tunnels, that is no assurance. Just then, a manhole opens from above, and down drops a flare, followed by a familiar Hellhound body. “Backup,” Lydia breathes, and Parrish races with his flare straight for the fear monster, sticking it in the chest and holding it tight until they both explode in a ball of fire.
He, of course, escapes with the shorts on his butt. So do the Hunters. The fear monster is down, but considering it wasn’t alive to start with, there’s not saying it’s actually dead.
Back at the high school, meanwhile, things are only getting worse for Liam. After a full day of everyone avoiding him in the halls and in class—everyone was so united in their fear of him in AP Science that they collectively agreed to take a failing grade rather than volunteer one of their own to be his lab partner—Nolan and now Gabe have wrangled the lacrosse team to block all the exits at the end of the day to try and force Liam into shifting right there in public, for all to see.
This plan seems bad, and not least because Liam already shifted in front of everyone. Like, what more does Nolan want!
But crazy knows no bounds, and so, after un-invisibling Liam and Corey in the halls, Nolan and Gabe and the rest of the senior class push him into an empty classroom and just set to pummeling him. It is so bloody, and so awful, and Liam is so. very. good. at keeping his rage in check. His eyes flash a few times, but he doesn’t shift, not even when the science teacher shows up and immediately backs right back out, explaining to a horrified Mason that “sometimes it’s best just to let the students work it out.” LADY. GROW A PAIR.
Gabe and Nolan are only stopped from actually crushing Liam’s head in by Coach Finstock, who appeared briefly earlier in the day during Liam’s first standoff with the lacrosse posse, but only to let Liam stew in his own decision to back off being captain in order to appease Nolan. Now, though, Finstock is back, and he is FURIOUS. He screams at every student watching that their faces make him sick, and physically hauls Nolan and Gabe by their necks off Liam’s broken body before kneeling down and tenderly helping Liam to his feet and into Mason and Corey’s waiting arms.
Look, Finstock can be a real bully on the field/in the economics classroom, but he is not a bad man. He is a very, very good man who has no patience for physical abuse or hateful prejudice of any kind. Remember how he protected Meredith against that abusive Eichen House nurse way back in like, Season Three? Or how he just pulled Kira onto the team, not one word of gender bias clearly even crossing his mind? He wants his students to be BETTER, and is pretty rude about how he tries to accomplish that, but he doesn’t want anyone to hurt. Coach: thank you for being on our team.
As Mason helps Liam limp to his Beautiful Toyota, a bit later, he tells him he knows why he took that beating. “You think you deserve it, for what happened to Brett and Lori,” Mason says, “but you don’t.” Liam isn’t so sure, but Mason channels Stiles in full and refuses to back down in telling Liam how wrong he is. “You took that beating,” he says again, “but you didn’t deserve it.”
Fear Itself
Back in the neo-Hunters’ bunker, Tamora is shaken from what happened in the tunnels. “Why me?” she wants to know—why did Gerard pick HER? Well, one: talent. But also, Gerard is crazy, and sees the same crazy in her (they do not use these words), and he knows that SHE knows that this world, it isn’t for anyone but whites humans. (Sidenote: having the Hunter zealotry manifest in a young black woman is either very canny on the show’s part, or very thoughtless, given the direct corollaries the entire storyline draws with reality.)
Back at Scott’s, meanwhile, the elder pack has found a surprise visitor: ISAAC!
JK (so far). It isn’t Isaac, but rather Quinn, the girl we last saw facing down the barrel of a terrified Beacon Hills deputy. Her brow is bloody and she is pale, but she is very much alive. And she knows it was a deputy who shot her. They have everyone, the pack realizes. The fear-afflicted neo-Hunters now have everyone.
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.
