For no particular reason, August is going to be all-Teen
Wolf, all the time around these parts. Every day this month, I’m going to
review/recap an episode of the MTV series, starting right here with the pilot.
Why Teen Wolf? Because it’s sort of adorable. Because
it’s often smarter and funnier than it has any right to be. Because one of the
executive producers/directors is the always-great Russell Mulcahy, who tends to
get name-checked all over the place on this site. Because it’s fun.
Before we get started in earnest, here’s a rundown of the
major players:
The titular teen wolf, Scott is an agreeable lunkhead with a strong do-good streak, a terrible academic record, and a propensity for whipping his shirt off at the slightest provocation.
Stiles Stilinksi (Dylan O’Brien)
Scott’s best friend and the son of the local sheriff. Hyper, sardonic, and cute as a bug. Has a dazzling array of weird facial expressions.
Allison Argent (Crystal Reed)
The love of Scott’s life. Strengths: Archery, gymnastics,
dimples. Weaknesses: Most of her immediate family members (she comes from a
long and distinguished line of totally psychotic werewolf hunters) have
a keen interest in murdering her boyfriend.
Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin)
Lydia Martin (Holland Roden)
Allison’s friend and the object of Stiles’s unrequited love.
Beautiful, cold, and shallow, with a strong mercenary streak and a genius-level
intellect that emerges at the damnedest times, Lydia is: a) full of stealth awesomeness, and b)
perpetually underutilized by this show.
The captain of the school’s champion lacrosse team, Jackson
is as spoiled and as beautiful as his girlfriend Lydia. Snarling, venomous,
power-crazed, and hilarious. Sadly, Haynes defected over to The CW’s Arrow
after Teen Wolf’s second season; MTV should have ponied up whatever sum
was necessary to keep him around, as Jackson was a fantastic antagonist. The
malevolent, slightly unhinged energy he brought to the show has been sorely missed in the most
recent episodes.
Here we go: We open in the small California* town of Beacon
Hills, where half of a young woman’s mutilated body has been found in
the woods. The sheriff’s teen son Stiles and Stiles’s best friend Scott sneak
out at night to search for the rest of the corpse, for no reason other than to satisfy
their macabre curiosity (of the revelation that only half of the body
has been found, Stiles proclaims, “That’s the best part!”).
Hmm. Let’s hear from Teen Wolf creator Jeff Davis on this: “I originally had this idea in my head to do an homage to Stand By Me,
in the beginning. Kids go out and search for a body in the woods, and it’s not
quite what they expect.” Fair enough, but the kids in Stand By Me were
preadolescent and thus their moral compasses were still underdeveloped. Scott
and Stiles, on the other hand, are both sixteen. They’re too old to be given a
pass for their creepy-ass behavior here.
*For the first two seasons, before the entire production
migrated to Los Angeles, the role of California was played by Georgia. Eh,
close enough.
Whilst snooping around the crime scene, Stiles gets caught
by his dad and sent home, leaving Scott alone in the woods. In an excellent bit
of casting, Stiles’s dad, Sheriff Stilinksi, is played by Linden Ashby, best
known as Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat, which is the second-greatest
cheesy mid-nineties film based on an old arcade game, ever. Left on his own, Scott
stumbles across the top half of the mutilated corpse, runs afoul of rampaging elk, and gets his
torso chomped by a vicious unseen creature. Apart from confiding in Stiles, he
keeps the discovery of the corpse a secret. Nope. Wrong. Totally wrong. Here’s
the way it works: You find a dead body, you report it to the
authorities. You do this even if you're feeling a little unsettled from being recently gnawed upon by a werewolf.
I’m not going to get serious very often while reviewing this
show, because it’s a show about sexy teenaged werewolves, but
allow me to drive this point home: Prior to creating Teen Wolf, Jeff
Davis was the creator of the long-running CBS crime procedural Criminal Minds, a show that, like Teen Wolf, tends to be much better than
general word-of-mouth would have you believe. Anyway, Davis served as a
co-executive producer on an excellent early Criminal Minds episode
titled “The Popular Kids”, which concerned a group of otherwise well-adjusted
high school students who find a body in the woods and who leave it there for,
like, months, just for the cheap thrill of watching it decompose. The episode
made it clear that this was a morally-bankrupt and unnaturally callous thing
for them to do. Mandy Patinkin’s FBI-agent character even said so, in as many
words, while wearing a expression that was simultaneously grim and world-weary
and heartbroken.
So… Scott and Stiles, your actions in this episode with
regard to the poor mutilated dead woman would make Mandy Patinkin sad. And Jeff
Davis, you know better than this. Due to their behavior here, I didn’t like
Scott and Stiles much when I first watched the pilot. That’s a shame, because
from the next episode on, these two are a delightful and charming pair of
irrepressible scamps.
Morning: It’s the first day of school at Beacon Hills High.
Scott’s bite mark has mysteriously healed itself up. We’re introduced to
super-pretty transfer student Allison, upon whom Scott develops a massive
instant crush, and to queen bee Lydia, who promptly gloms onto Allison and
invites her to her swanky back-to-school shindig. We first meet Jackson when he
zips into the school parking lot in his silver Porsche, swings open the door
with enough force to almost knock Scott off his bicycle, and hisses out a
warning to Scott not to mess up his paint job. As character introductions go,
it’s not bad, though in future episodes he’ll reach such dizzying heights of
hilarious douchebaggery as to make this look like amateur hour.
After school, Scott brings Stiles into the woods to show him
where he found the corpse. The corpse is now gone, but they run into the hunky and brooding Derek Hale
(Stiles helpfully exposits to Scott that Derek’s entire family was killed in a
fire several years back), who glowers handsomely and snarls at them and
frightens them off.
Then there’s a meet-cute with Allison at the animal clinic
where Scott works part-time. She hits a dog with her car and understandably
loses her shit about it, he calms her down and picks eyelashes off her face and
asks her to go to Lydia’s party with him, they compare dimples and start to
fall in love. They make a beautiful, sweet-natured, deadly dull couple.
I’m going to zip right past a whole bunch of plot, because
not every Teen Wolf moment needs to be recounted in loving detail. Rest
assured, though, Scott finds some excuse to take off his shirt in pretty much
every scene.
Lacrosse team tryouts! Perpetual benchwarmers Scott and
Stiles try to make the first line. Scott’s werewolf superpowers (super-hearing,
accelerated healing, heightened speed and reflexes, glowing yellow eyes) kick
in on the playing field, thus rousing the suspicions of surly team captain
Jackson, who slams Scott into lockers and mutters dark threats about how he’s
going to uncover all of Scott’s secrets. It’s great. All lacrosse-related Teen
Wolf plotlines are sheer gold.
Scott’s new lacrosse prowess leads Stiles to draw the only
logical conclusion, i.e. Scott is now a werewolf. I mean, obviously. As there’s
a full moon out, Stiles urges Scott to skip the party and cancel his date with
Allison. Scott dismisses Stiles’s fears and goes to the damn party anyway…
…where he promptly turns into a werewolf and flees into the
woods to avoid ripping Allison to pieces. So that turned out well. Derek,
looking waaaaay too old to be hanging out with high schoolers, sidles up to an abandoned and disgruntled Allison at the party, claiming to be
one of Scott’s friends, and escorts her home safely.
Suspecting that: a) Derek is also a werewolf (correct!), and
b) Derek is going to kill and eat Allison (incorrect!), a fully wolfed-out
Scott ambushes Derek in the woods and rolls around on the ground with him for a
while. There are many reasons to watch Teen Wolf—come for the hot
shirtless guys in overtly homoerotic predicaments, stay for the clever sight
gags and witty banter!—but the special effects and werewolf prosthetic makeup
maybe shouldn’t be too high on the list.
Their battle is interrupted by the arrival of a team of
crossbow-wielding werewolf hunters, led by Allison’s sorta-evil dad, Chris
Argent. Chris nails Scott to a tree; Derek rescues him and hauls him to safety,
then volunteers to serve as Scott’s personal guru in all werewolf-related
matters.
Scott is not thrilled by this turn of events.
An imperfect start to the series—there are definite traces
of the great charm and wit that will come to define the first season, but, as
is often the case with pilots, all the right elements aren’t quite in place
yet. Give it some time. It’ll get there.
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