Lydia and Jackson sit in the car outside a video store (a
video store! how quaint!) and bicker over their rental options. Jackson wants Hoosiers,
which Lydia refuses to consider. Jackson howls, “I am not watching The
Notebook again!” Smash cut to Jackson wandering around the store: “Can
somebody help me find The Notebook?”
As it turns out, nobody can: The sole clerk is lying dead,
his throat gashed open. Upon finding the corpse, Jackson looks up and sees a
werewolf—the Alpha, in fact—stalking him. The Alpha lunges at him, ripping up
the store and knocking over racks of DVDs in its wake. Jackson scrambles for
cover, but a toppling shelf knocks him down and pins him to the floor.
(Look at the videos behind Jackson: What kind of slipshod
video store would place the acclaimed Swedish vampire film Let the Right One
In right next to the horror-comedy Severance? What sort of
random-ass filing system is that? No wonder Jackson was having so much trouble
finding The Notebook. Clearly, the store clerks don't know jack about
alphabetizing.)
The Alpha slinks over to a trapped and terrified Jackson and
prods at the still-healing welts on the back of his neck, which Derek caused
last episode when he scratched Jackson with his wolfsbane-tainted claws. The
wound glows blue. Pretty! The Alpha exits the store in a dramatic fashion by
crashing straight through the plate-glass windows and scampering off into the
darkness. This finally captures the attention of Lydia, who’d been too busy
snapping selfies in the front seat of Jackson’s Porsche to notice the attack on
her boyfriend.
In the aftermath of the attack, Sheriff Stilinski questions
a gobsmacked and more-dickish-than-usual Jackson, while Derek and Scott, on the
trail of the Alpha, lurk on the roof of the video store and eavesdrop on their
conversation. It’s only a few days before the next full moon, which, per Derek,
is when the Alpha will either force Scott to kill someone as part of a pack
initiation, or will kill Scott himself.
Lydia is absent from school the next day. Jackson shows up
late, shaken and jittery (as Stiles eloquently puts it, “Jackson looks like
he’s got a time bomb inserted into his face”). In chemistry class, Stiles
pesters Danny for the scoop on the attack, but Danny can’t help him—even though
he’s Jackson’s best friend, Jackson won’t talk about it.
Derek shows up at the school to cheerily manhandle Jackson a little
and intimidate him into telling him all about the Alpha attack.
Whereas Jackson was mouthy and aggressive during their earlier encounter, he’s
now terrified and compliant. Because the Teen Wolf creative staff love
their viewers very much, this scene takes place in an otherwise deserted locker
room, while Jackson is dressed only in a towel.
Colton Haynes, just FYI, is a former Abercrombie & Fitch
model. Yeah, it shows.
Stiles drops by Lydia’s house to see how she’s holding up.
Lydia, who usually can’t be bothered to remember Stiles exists, is friendly and
flirty. Stiles’s hopes rise, until he realizes that: a) she’s stoned off her
gourd on prescription pills to deal with the trauma of whatever she saw in the
parking lot, and b) as a direct result of this, she thinks he’s Jackson. She’s
unable or unwilling to tell him any kind of coherent story about the attack.
Stiles snoops in her phone and watches a video she accidentally shot outside
the video store, which clearly shows the Alpha.
After getting his weekly fix of menacing Jackson in an
overtly sexualized manner, Derek returns to his burned-out home, strips off his
shirt, and does a whole bunch of push-ups and chin-ups. There is no shirtless
scene too gratuitous for Teen Wolf. It’s one of the many charms of this
show. A shotgun-toting Kate Argent and two of her werewolf-hunting lackeys
arrive unannounced. Derek hides, but Kate lures him out into the open with
strategic taunts (of Derek’s murdered sister, she says, “Too bad she howled
like a bitch when we cut her in half!” Kate’s just wrong).
Derek takes out the redshirts, but Kate knocks him out of
commission with her 900,000-volt cattle prod. As Derek writhes in shirtless
agony at her feet, Kate remarks, “This one grew up in all the right places. I
don’t know whether to kill it or lick it.”
Wow. Kate. Wow.
Now that she has the upper hand, Kate tells Derek that,
taunts aside, she didn’t kill and mutilate Laura Hale—it was the work of the
Alpha. At first, Derek doesn’t believe her, but then he uses his special
lie-detecting ability (it seems werewolves have this power, which: cool) and
determines she’s telling the truth. Kate wants Derek to give up the identity of
the Alpha; when it becomes clear Derek himself doesn’t know, Kate decides he’s
outlasted his usefulness and tries to kill him. Derek makes a break for it and
scurries off into the woods in all his shirtless glory.
So… what’s our main character been doing this entire episode
while all this tremendously exciting stuff has been going on? It’s Allison’s
birthday, so Scott ditches school to spend a romantic day with her. Scott and
Allison frolic in the woods for hours and hours, smooching and nuzzling and
falling in lurve and acting like they’re starring in the most hilariously
insipid toothpaste commercial ever. While the rest of this episode is sleek and
sexy and exciting, these (loooooong) scenes between them are a smushed-together
smorgasbord of lazy romantic clichés. Because Teen Wolf is much wittier
than this, I figure we’re supposed to view Scott and Allison’s relationship as
some kind of scathing commentary on the all-encompassing banality of teenaged love.
It’s parent-teacher conference night at Beacon Hills High.
As a solid D-student, Scott is required to attend his conference with his
mother, but he blows it off so he can hang out with Allison longer (he also
blows off his after-school job at the animal clinic. This episode is not
Scott’s shining hour). The various conferences are shown in a montage: The
chemistry teacher, Mr. Harris, tells Jackson’s parents that Jackson is
“unusually driven” and “obsessive.” Yep, sounds like our boy. This is all
intercut with scenes of Jackson, drunk and distraught and growing more unhinged
by the minute, doing frenzied lacrosse drills by himself in the middle of a
dark field at night. Lydia is scarily brilliant and a natural leader, Allison
is sweet and well-adjusted, Scott is sinking ever deeper into irrevocable
academic decline, and Stiles, as Coach Finstock informs Sheriff Stilinski, is
whip-smart but scattered.
(The entire conference between Finstock and Stilinski
regarding Stiles is pretty entertainingly bonkers. We learn that Finstock likes
to be called “cupcake”, that Stiles wrote an Econ paper on the history of male
circumcision, and that Stiles has an unrevealed but really awful real first name. As Finstock puts it, “Wow. That’s a form of child abuse.”)
Allison and Scott arrive at the school just as the
conferences wind down. They’re confronted by an angry Melissa Hale and the
Argents. While Chris Argent gives his daughter and her slacker boyfriend an
epic tongue lashing for their irresponsible behavior, chaos breaks out in the
school parking lot when some kind of unseen creature begins attacking people.
Argent whips out his gun and shoots the creature… which turns out to be only a
mountain lion.
Okay! Strongest episode yet for the way it advances the plot
while hitting that Teen Wolf sweet spot of intriguing plus funny plus
sexy plus disturbing, with an added dollop of emotional resonance for good
measure (for all Jackson’s bad behavior and prickly prickishness, there’s
something bizarrely poignant about watching him come apart at the seams). Great
stuff.
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