I’m secure enough in myself to admit when I have NO CLUE, and we’re just about at Defcon Clueless with Teen Wolf, but I have such affection for this cast that I’m willing to go with it. And by Episode 4, I’d even completely forgotten the complete manipulation that these are FLASHBACKS. Let’s catch you up. I’m going to skate past diving too deep into the creepy doctors — who now have a formal name of “Dread Doctors” — and stick to our core team.
It turns out Tracy from “Parasomnia” is a doctor-manufactured Kanima/Wolf hybrid, and she goes on a killing spree that takes out her dad and two deputies before she descends on the police station and injures Lydia. Then the doctors kill her in front of Malia, whom everyone doesn’t quite believe when she explains what happened.
In the middle there, Tracy was out cold/in a sleep state long enough for Deaton to analyze her and realize she’d thought she was still asleep the whole time. Her revenge is apparently fueled by taking out people who tried to help — her dad with dreamcatchers in her bedroom, and Lydia’s mom at the school. Also in there we found out the Sheriff took off his ring to date Lydia’s mom (which is cute because Susan Walters and Linden Ashby are married IRL) but their first date is blown to hell when Tracy arrives on the warpath looking to kill her.
On the way out of the station, the doctors take Donovan, whose convoy Tracy hit in “Dreamcatcher,” which was maybe the point there all along? Then they rip out all of his teeth and replace them with pointy teeth. Then we learn Theo really is a BAMF because he’s in liege with the doctors and he tells Donovan the smart way to take revenge on the Sheriff is to go after someone he loves, i.e. Stiles.
A random kid is wheeled into the ER with off-the-charts pain from a seemingly human-sized scorpion. Scott takes his pain and the kid tells him “Lucas” did it. That dovetails into Lucas, another experiment, being at the same club as Liam and an on-the-prowl Mason. Hayden is waitressing, and she and Liam butt heads.
Mason hits it off with Lucas, who sprouts venomous spikes through his skin plus werewolf claws when they start making out. Thankfully, Liam and Brett step in before he’s hurt. Scott and Kira arrive and Scott drops an off-the-cuff I love you on her when she does something badass, which leaves her flailing. He stops her just short of killing Lucas and then the doctors finish him off. When Scott asks why, one of the doctors says his condition was terminal and he was a failure.
Malia realizes she’s still tangentially on Stiles’ wall of weird because he’s still hunting the ID of the Desert Wolf, so she wipes that Q off the board. Then she’s moved to go investigate Tracy on her own, and she finds the eponymous “The Dread Doctors” book. This leaves Stiles alone at the school and he’s jumped by Donovan, who bites him with the teeth in his hand.
The super hot Parrish is revealed to be some sort of firestarter. I’ll leave it in your capable hands to find the joke in there somewhere. He and Lydia work on training him to withstand heat and he tells her a half-truth about a dream he has where he’s naked (ahem) and on fire and carrying a woman’s body to the Nemeton. He lays the body down on the stump, and it’s consumed in fire — and several other bodies lie around it.
He only tells Lydia about the woman (Tracy?). We find out at the end it’s not a dream when he carries Lucas’s body to the tree, lays it on the stump, and sets it ablaze with fire from his own body. A purification of sorts? I really don’t know. He pleads ignorance about the Nemeton as he lies about the reality being a dream, so there’s an open question there as to whether he understands its significance.
We haven’t done true angels and demons, and I kind of hope we don’t. I’d rather he be some sort of variation on a phoenix. When he sees Lydia in the hospital, she asks him to teach her to fight, signaling that she’s DONE with being the victim.
So we’re left with Stiles in jeopardy (boooo), Deaton out of town to investigate after essentially warning Scott ad Kira that this is all next-level bad if someone is manufacturing hybrid monsters (and putting them in the ground to incubate them — Liam remembered the necklace, which turned out to be Tracy’s), and Parrish integral to disposing of those failed experiments.
Like I said, no clue. “Dreamcatcher” wasn’t as strong for me as “Condition Terminal” because it was a bit more frenetic, but I’m still in. And I have to go on record that I so appreciate, especially for the teen and twentysomething audiences, the sexual fluidity of this show. It’s remarkable that sexuality just *is* here. When Liam and Mason go in the club, which has pairs of all kinds and go-go boys in cages, Liam looks around and asks if it’s a club for both, and Mason just laughs and responds, “ish.” I love that. There was NOTHING like this on TV in my formative years.
Here’s the teaser trailer from last week’s Comic-Con, where it was announced that the show’s already been renewed for a sixth season. Woo Hoo!
Teen Wolf airs Mondays at 10/9c on MTV in the US and 10/7p on MTV Canada.
Photo and Video Courtesy of MTV