Seeing the Wild Hunt was thought to presage some catastrophe such as war or plague, or at best the death of the one who witnessed it. Mortals getting in the path of or following the Hunt could be kidnapped and brought to the land of the dead. A girl who saw Wild Edric’s Ride was warned by her father to put her apron over her head to avoid the sight. Others believed that people’s spirits could be pulled away during their sleep to join the cavalcade.
The Wild Hunt, Wikipedia
THIS [EP’S] WOLF PACK PUPPY
Mason, who has so avidly been researching everything in folklore that could POSSIBLY explain the 8-foot tall bear-skulled man the sheriff blew up with a claymore mine at the end of last school year, and whose reaction to seeing his best friend go claws-to-the-wall is awed vindication.
Runner-up: Malia “I’m so excited! I’m so scared!” Tate, picking up normal teen skills (like driving) one at a time.
BEST REACTION TO SOMETHING SUPERNATURALLY RIDICULOUS
*Girl with chronic night terrors pukes up a gallon of black tar with one single black feather in it*
Adult: “Yes but things like eating your feather pillow are normal for stressed insomniac high school seniors!”
[DAILY] REMINDER THAT BEACON HILLS IS ON A HELLMOUTH
I mean, how else would confirmed degenerate pig Councilman Dexhart be transported all the way from Pawnee to suffer in Theo’s gingerbread hell, if not through a hellmouth wormhole?
REIGNING PRESIDENT OF THE SCOTT MCCALL FAN CLUB
Um, did you see him working so hard to get the dog’s injection right, and to study for the first day of AP Biology, and to help his best friend calm down, and to give everyone the benefit of the doubt? ME. I am the reigning president of the Scott McCall Fan Club. OBVIOUSLY.
And finally, stealing one of my favorite awards categories from my Jane the Virgin recaps (because really, what show do I watch that is more blatant about this than Teen Wolf???):
BEST PRODUCT PLACEMENT
A phone, of course! Which phone? Who knows! Dumb Teen “I fell in a hole” Liam gave it a mud facial. So while it was obvious that the mystery brand’s phone’s continuing functionality under the daily hard wear conditions of life as a Teen Wolf was the point of the product placement, the metric ton of mud they used to prove it did the job a little too well.
Runner-up: Duct Tape! Keeping teen boys’ clanker engines stuck together since 2011.
THIS EPISODE
The Wild Hunt Is On
A wretched-looking senior named Tracy is in Natalie Martin’s office talking about her chronic night terrors. “Some of it was so real! But obviously not all of it could have been. It just felt like someone was coming to get me!” Apparently now that Deaton’s morally gray sister has moved on from her post teaching French/counseling supernatural teens at BHHS, Lydia’s biology sub mom is filling in. “Ah, parasomnia!” Natalie exclaims. “Super common. You just need more sleep! I’m certain that there are no birds trying to get in your window and kill you. Oh, what’s that you’re doing? Vomiting black sludge and feathers all over my desk? No, you’re fine. Just nerves!”
What a town to be gaslighted in. And not even one kindly male figure has warned our girls to throw aprons over their heads yet! WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TEACHING, MR. YUKIMURA. (Student Driving, is what.)
Doctor Scott Is In
At his early morning vet clinic shift, Scott is practicing giving little dogs shots as Deaton looks on approvingly. Scott really knows his stuff! Including how to have a great bedside manner with pooches AND people.
After the dog’s owner takes off (thanking “Dr. Scott,” prompting him to reply “I’m not a doctor…yet”), Deaton calls Scott over to the magnifying glass, where he is examining one of the claw-talons from the premiere’s monster man. They appear to belong to some kind of harpy eagle, Deaton explains, and it makes no sense why a werewolf would have had them. Maybe Parrish was right—maybe this guys COULD have taken Scott’s power. “I thought no one could do that?” Scott says. But not even that is true—apparently someone can: a beta of Scott’s own making. Dun dun DUNNNN. Scott considers this. “What about any member of my pack, if I let someone new in?” Clearly he has a wild Mike Montgomery Theo Raeken on the mind. “Normally I’d say no,” Deaton muses, “but after everything we’ve seen lately, I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps the rules aren’t changing…or someone is changing the rules.”
Okay for real now, dun dun DUNNNNNN. And a potentially great reason for Stiles’ mounting suspicions to be taken seriously. “His dad has a SPEEDING ticket!” Stiles exclaims to Malia as they walk up the steps to the first day of school. “You know who gets speeding tickets? People with something to run from!”
Malia quickly points out the seventeen-ticket-long reason Stiles’ reasoning in this regard is flawed, but does not disagree that as far as Theo goes, Stiles has reason to feel threatened. “Hot, great hair, perfect body…” Okay, Malia. Enough. Anyway, there is Theo now, waving to them from the curb wearing his charmingest charming smile.
Guess where else Theo is wearing his charmingest charming smile? AP Biology. Which Scott, to both Lydia and Kira’s utter shock, is not only taking, but has studied for.
“And what is your top college pick, Mr. McCall?” the no-nonsense teacher grills him mere moments after stumping Lydia on a warm-up question. “UC Davis,” Scott stutters out. And color us all impressed! “That’s the best school in California for biology,” the teacher responds, impressed. “Now—everyone start studying for tomorrow’s test! I WANT TO WEED OUT THE WEAK.” And in the back of the room, Theo just keeps grinning.
Sophomoric
Meanwhile, starting their sophomore year are Liam and Mason, the latter of whom is jabbering rapid fire about all the folklore research he has been doing all summer trying to figure out just what exactly happened when he was down in the hallway with Lydia and the Berserker at the end of last year. “Have you ever heard of this crazy text-pokel-atl…” Mason starts. “Texcatlipoca*,” Liam corrects absentmindedly. “And no.” Then they walk into their American History class to find a girl that Liam clearly has a raw history with sitting and staring and blowing her gum bubble at Liam in the most aggressive way one could ever blow a gum bubble at a person.
“Are you going to sit down?” Mr. Yukimura asks from the front of the room. “Can I answer that in the negative?” Liam wants to know. No, he may not. And so he sits. Right in the girl’s gum. And the girl (her name is Hayden) grins malevolently. Later, after Liam diverts Mason for yet another round of supernatural trivia by mentioning that the boys’ soccer team is about to go take their shirts off for practice (#priorities), he finds that Hayden is his new locker neighbor.
“Um,” he starts. “You’re not still pissed about sixth grade, are you?” Oh. OH. Hayden’s NOT PISSED, Liam. She’s vengeful. And also has a line delivery style exactly like Holland Roden’s. So, this will be a challenging summer for me.
*That may not be the actual name that Mason mangled/Liam corrected, but it sounds similar, and is the Aztec god of “Smoking Mirrors,” which is almost the title of the Season 4 finale, so. I went with it.
We Need To Talk About Tracy
In a sudden shift of tone, the poor, black bile spewing senior from the opening rounds the corner, shoulders hunched, eyes glassy with anxiety and a lack of sleep. As she is opening her locker, the light and noise level in the hall shifts, and suddenly she is back in her nightmare world. She can hear something coming for her from inside the locker bank further down the hall. When she gets her locker open, the real world returns, but the respite is brief: soon enough black bile is oozing from the locker slats a few doors down, and one of the Dread Doctors is crawling sideways out of an upper locker, scrabbling towards her along the wall. “It’s not real; I’m dreaming. It’s not real; I’m dreaming. It’s not real; I’m dreaming,” Tracy whispers to herself over and over, scrunching her eyes closed all the while.
Right before the doctor reaches her, Lydia appears, hand on Tracy’s shoulder. “Maybe we should go get some fresh air,” she suggests, and the two girls leave, a clawed-up locker door swinging menacingly after them.
In her mom’s office, Lydia tries to argue that something really is happening to Tracy, something that should be taken seriously. “Well she refuses to go home and miss the first day of school,” Natalie says. “And if there is something wrong, that is for professionals to handle, not us.” Well! With that statement, Lydia could not agree more! And so she takes Tracy straight home to meet Deputy Jordan Parrish, who inspects her attic bedroom floor to ceiling to skylight that turns out NOT to be sealed shut for weatherproofing like Tracy had thought. He also finds bloody claw marks and the corpses of a dozen ravens out on the roof, but that is a detail he saves to share with Lydia privately later.
“I’ll come by after my shift,” he tells Lydia—both because he agrees with her that something superspooky is up, but also because he is getting antsy from paperwork duty under Stilinski’s cautious eye. “Well, I’ll bring you coffee!” Lydia declares. And then they flirt, and we learn that they spent three long weeks together over the summer (after her eighteenth birthday, if you’ll recall the boathouse scene last season when Natalie gave Lydia her grandmother’s letters a few weeks early) searching the Argents’ bestiary for any details about what Parrish is to no avail, and also that Lydia had enough credits to graduate last semester, and is only taking one class this year. She doesn’t say it in so many words, but my suspicion is that she chose to take another class rather than graduate early in order to stay with the pack/her friends. Anyway, Parrish agrees to let (“let”) Lydia do whatever she wants to, as regards coffee gifts and visiting him at midnight.
Meanwhile, Back at the BHHS Ranch
it really is a shame that Kira broke the only real estate sign in all of Beacon Hills. Her dad was a professor at Columbia! And now he’s stuck splitting his time between classrooms full of literal sophomoric pranks and serving time in the prison of the student driver car in the bus lot. And with Malia behind the wheel, alternating between Malia-like glee over getting to drive, and panic from flashbacks to the car wreck that killed her mother and sister, it really is a prison.
Also in a metaphorical prison is Theo, who has been trapped by Stiles (and Scott) in the boys’ locker room to come clean about what happened to him, how he became a werewolf, why he is a lone wolf right now and not part of his own pack.
Theo’s story starts—like so many of the best stories do—in a skate park, where as a younger teen he ended up one day for some reason, even though he is the first to admit how shit he is at skating. So there he was, skating, and he came off his board halfway down the side of an empty pool, landing so hard on his back that it took him a minute to realize he hadn’t heard his board hit the ground, too. And when Theo looked up, that’s when he saw the alpha that promptly jumped down to bite him.
“He meant to turn you,” Scott says, while Stiles demands to know why Theo isn’t a part of that pack now. Answer? That alpha was killed by two of his own omegas. Twins. But Scott knows that lone wolves can’t remain lone wolves forever, and so that is why Theo sought Scott out. He wants to believe that Scott is the same kid he knew in fourth grade.
Everything about Theo’s story rings so true, it’s false, as far as Stiles is concerned. So Theo trots out a very detailed memory about the first time Theo had to use his inhaler for his asthma, and how Scott calmed him down by explaining exactly how, medically, everything would work out. And it worked! And then the bell rings, and Theo begs off. “You two aren’t the only ones I have to impress.”
And impressed Scott is. “Benefit of the doubt!” he repeats. “I JUST HAVE A FEELING!” Stiles repeates back. And then promptly goes off to the administration office to steal Theo’s transfer request form to compare his dad’s signature with the one on the speeding ticket from years ago that he already stole from his dad’s office.
“They’re totally different!” Stiles exclaims to Scott, Kira, and Malia when he finds them in the beautiful new library an hour later, holding out two nearly identical signatures for them to examine. “Classic criminal tremor!” Okay…the pack says. But what are they supposed to do *if* the signatures come from different people? What would that even mean? “Well for one, if his parents are psychotic killers, we probably shouldn’t trust him!” Stiles starts. But Malia’s parents are Peter and the Desert Wolf, Malia points out, so…
“FINE I DON’T NEED ANY OF YOU!” Stiles exclaims, then stalks off to his jeep, grabbing Liam on the way, to go trail Theo and catch him in the act.
A Bridge to Rosewood
The act they catch him in (after Liam falls into a hole, gets mud all over his phone, and notices the silver necklace that had been hanging on Tracy’s nightstand earlier now laying in the mud, too)? Not menacing Aria Montgomery/leaving candy for Mona Vanderwaal, for sure. No, what Theo is doing is leaving white lillies for his sister, who disappeared when she was eight and died of exposure. And as soon as Stiles figures that out (“He smells like grief,” Liam adds, helpfully), he rightfully is flooded with guilt and pulls Liam away.
Not soon enough, though! Theo cuts them off before they can make it back to the car, and after he is presented with the signature anomalies that Stiles has ferreted out, explains that it wasn’t just Scott’s pack that he came back to Beacon Hills for: it was also for Stiles. Or at least, for the kind of friendship that would send a person out into the woods alone at night, just to help a friend. “I don’t have anyone like that,” Theo laments. “I’m hoping to find that as part of Scott’s pack.”
You know who also didn’t ever have anyone like that, and then did find solace by becoming part of Scott’s pack? Well, neither does Stiles! Because no one in the current Beacon Hills world remembers a boy named Isaac ever shone his inner light amongst them.
Anyway, Scott is waiting for Stiles and Liam at the jeep when they return, ready not to gloat, like Stiles anticipates, but to ask if now, finally, is when they can give Theo that benefit of the doubt. “And?”
But Stiles still doesn’t trust Theo, and is growing angrier by the minute that Scott can’t get on board with that. “But WHY can’t you trust him?” Scott wants to know. “BECAUSE YOU TRUST EVERYONE!” Stiles screams back, slamming his hand into the engine block. This burst of anger embarrasses him further, but Scott just takes his best friend’s hand between his and siphons off the pain. GOD. There are so few friendships in the television world as strong or as thoughtfully portrayed as theirs.
We Need To Talk About Wolves
In agreeing to be Stiles’ spying partner/guard dog all night, Liam managed to stand Mason up for a workout date, which was really the final straw in terms of Mason’s patience for Liam’s new pattern of avoidance. “You seriously haven’t told him everything yet??” Stiles is shocked to have to ask when Liam admits that he couldn’t tell Mason where he was going, because he hasn’t actually told Mason anything yet. “Dude. Scott and I have been down this road so many times already—it is always better to tell them.”
A-FREAKING-MEN. Secrets kill, in Beacon Hills!
Anyway, Liam has decided that he finally, finally is ready to tell Mason. And when he meets him in the bus lot outside the school, he really is about to do just that. Until they are attacked by an actual black wolf, who chases them inside the school, only turning away once Liam remembers that, oh yeah, he’s got his own claws and fangs, and turns to roar the wild animal away.
“Dude!” Mason exclaims happily from the stairs ahead of him. “You’re a werewolf!“
Obviously the black wolf was no wild animal, though (no wolves in California, recall!). Only here’s a twist: it wasn’t Derek Hale, peeking into Season 5A to give Mason one last boost of confidence, either! Nope. It was Theo Raeken.
God, Derek is even tragic when he’s not on the show anymore. It took him FOUR SEASONS to make the long, painful transition to purity of wolf spirit/ability to evolve into a real shapeshifter. Theo? Probably evil, and a real wolf at age 17.
Why evil? Oh, only because he really has hired people to play his parents, and hammers the “dad’s” hand in order to give him a casted signing arm that will be excuse enough to nudge Stiles’ suspicions in another direction for awhile. AWESOME.
Not that Stiles will listen to that particular brand of reason: he has already added Theo to his murder board, regardless of Stilinski’s warnings to always trust proof before instinct. Well, time will tell!
We Need To Talk About Tracy 2
Unfortunately, Parrish’s interest in Lydia’s interest in him causes him to look away from Tracy’s house for one brief moment later that night, during which Tracy sleepwalks out of her house and disappears down the street like a walking skeleton, leaving Parrish and Lydia to conclude the next morning that they were wrong about superspookiness at Tracy’s, after all, and leaving Tracy alone and helpless in the Dread Doctor’s basement lab, stuck in the neck by a rusty hypodermic as she continues to mutter her useless mantra of none of it is real, nothing is real, I’m asleep, I’m asleep, I’m dreaming.
“You’re not dreaming, Tracy,” the dread doctors say. “You’re just waking up.”
And then she rises and lifts her fanged, golden-eyed face to the sky and roars.
NEXT WEEK
Probably a billion things! All of them worse and worser!
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.
