The kanima, accompanied by a shadowy figure in a hooded
sweatshirt who is almost certainly its unknown controller, attacks a young
married couple living in a trailer in the woods. It butchers the husband and
lunges for the wife, but backs up and scurries off upon noticing her pregnant
belly.
Following last episode’s madcap kidnapping escapade,
Jackson’s father files a restraining order against Scott and Stiles, banning
them from coming within fifty feet of Jackson. This seems eminently reasonable.
Really, it seems like this was the only logical outcome of the situation, apart
from maybe Stiles and Scott both getting hauled off to jail. Those two, I
swear. Cute kids, but man, their plan-making abilities outright suck.
Cognizant of the omnipresent security cameras her various
immediate family members have installed around the school, Allison secretly
meets with Scott and Stiles in the library to discuss the kanima problem.
According to Lydia’s translation of Gerard’s bestiary, the primary function of
the kanima is to execute murderers, though if the human controlling it becomes
strong enough, it can be used against innocent people as well. The kanima is a
werewolf who can’t transform properly due to unresolved issues in his or her
past. Allison theorizes that Jackson’s transformation went awry because of his
lingering issues regarding his real parents—he was adopted by the Whittemores
at birth. Due to the restraining order, Scott and Stiles can’t get close enough
to Jackson to ask him about his adoption, so Allison volunteers.
Stiles tries to grill Lydia about Jackson’s real parents,
but she refuses to tell him anything. Erica overhears their conversation,
though, and corners Stiles, wondering what his interest in Jackson might be.
Stiles and Erica have mad chemistry together all throughout this episode, plus
some flirtatious banter (Stiles expresses an interest in playing the Batman to
Erica’s Catwoman), all of which will come to naught later on. Too bad. A scorching-hot,
giddy, doomed, reckless, singularly ill-advised fling with Erica is probably
exactly what Stiles needs in his life right now.
Allison secretly trails Jackson around the school, looking
for an opportunity to confront him. She runs smack into lovelorn Matt, who bats
his eyes at her and invites her to go with him to an upcoming rave. Distracted,
Allison agrees to the date.
Meanwhile, Jackson is doing all kinds of weirder-than-usual
crap. Like plucking a snake out of its tank in the biology classroom and
letting it slither down his throat.
Allison trails Jackson into the boys’ locker room (?), where
Jackson is taking a spontaneous shower. Just lathering himself up, right in the
middle of the school day, no big deal. Which means this happens:
Holy hell. Wow. Hi, Jackson.
Jackson, who is acting very unlike himself (…I mean, he’s
acting vicious and bitchy, which is certainly right in his behavioral
wheelhouse, sure, but there are strong and uncharacteristic undercurrents of
stone-cold evil going on, indicating that someone else is in control of him
right now), confronts Allison. He hisses abuse at her and menaces her in a highly
disturbing sexually-threatening manner. His claws come out, and he slams her up
against the wall.
Allison puts her well-honed Argent Family Fighting Skills to
good use and knocks him to the floor. Stunned, Jackson regains control of
himself. He seems wholly unaware as to why he’s naked and grappling with
Allison in the locker room. An enraged Scott bursts in right then and assesses
the situation (he clearly—and correctly!—thinks it looks really bad),
and Scott and Jackson, without ever transforming into their respective
supernatural alter egos, proceed to engage in the single most crazed,
destructive, acrobatic, balls-out battle in Teen Wolf history.
Restraining orders are violated, hair is pulled, faces are kicked, lockers are
toppled, sinks are broken, barbells are hurled, and god only knows how Jackson
finds the opportunity to pull on a pair of shorts in all this messy, glorious
madness.
The brawl spills into the hallway. Stiles and Erica jump in
and pull Jackson and Scott apart, while Matt scoops up Scott’s dropped tablet
and snoops through it, sneakily emailing a copy of the bestiary to himself
while he’s at it. Mr. Harris arrives and orders everyone—Scott, Jackson,
Stiles, Erica, Allison, and innocent bystander Matt—off to the library for
detention.
Confused and infuriated by her son’s recent behavior, i.e.
stealing a prison transport van and kidnapping Jackson, Melissa McCall ransacks
Scott’s bedroom in the hopes of figuring out what’s been going through his
pretty head lately. Upon finding a nearly-empty box of condoms, she heads to
the high school and informs Victoria Argent, who’s been filling in at the
reception desk in the principal’s office, that despite their public breakup,
their kids are still sneaking around.
So Victoria hauls Scott out of detention to ask him point
blank whether he’s sleeping with her daughter. All the while, she furiously
sharpens pencils down to tiny little stubs. Meaningful stubs. Scott
denies everything, which is a blatant lie, though under the circumstances, it’s
kind of hard to blame him.
Back in detention, Scott holds a whispered conversation with
Stiles. He’s now fully in support of killing Jackson; Stiles, however, has
completely reversed his original let’s-murder-Jackson stance and argues for
saving him. Meanwhile, Jackson is stricken with a sudden awful headache and
flees to the bathroom, where the snake he swallowed earlier crawls out of his
eyeball and slithers down the sink drain.
Yeah. Things are just kind of wrong with Jackson
these days, let’s just put it that way.
Erica huddles with Scott and Stiles and fills them in on
what she knows about Jackson’s real parents (her father was the insurance
investigator on the case, so she’s got the scoop). Jackson’s parents were
killed in a highly suspicious car crash the day before he was born; he was
delivered by cesarean after his mother’s death. Yep, a day after his
mother’s death. I’m still not 100% clear on how that’s supposed to work, but
that’s Erica’s story, at least.
(When I first watched this episode, I naturally assumed
Jackson’s strange and near-mythical origin story here would turn out to be
relevant to… I don’t know, something. Spoiler alert: It is not relevant
to anything. Just file it away in the Weird Things About Jackson folder and
move on.)
Mr. Harris, who’s already been doing a pretty lame job of
supervising this detention session, decides to leave the kids entirely on their
own. He instructs them to, like, shelve some books or whatever, then takes off.
His car has a bumper sticker with an Einstein quote on it, just like the car
driven by the kanima’s unseen controller.
In the middle of shelving, Jackson sees a message spelled
out on the book spines urging him to close his eyes immediately. He obeys, and
chaos erupts. He begins to transform into the kanima, then runs amuck in the
library, paralyzing Matt and Erica and toppling bookcases and scurrying around
the ceiling and smashing light fixtures. Still only half-transformed, he
scrawls a message on the chalkboard: Stay out of my way, or I’ll kill all of
you. Then he leaps up to the window and jumps out of the building.
The kanima venom triggers Erica’s epilepsy. While Allison
stays behind to call an ambulance for Matt, Stiles and Scott carry Erica off to
Derek’s lair. Derek squeezes the venom out of Erica’s wound and breaks her arm
to trigger her super-healing abilities. It works, and Erica recovers in
Stiles’s arms while telling him he makes a good Batman. Crazy chemistry, those
two. Missed opportunity, Teen Wolf. Just saying.
Scott tells Derek he’ll join his pack to help him track down
Jackson, provided they agree to catch him, not kill him. “And we’ll do it my
way,” Scott defiantly proclaims, his chin set, his eyes blazing fiercely. God
help us all.
The pregnant woman whose husband was slaughtered in the
opening scene gives birth in the hospital. Immediately afterwards, a
hoodie-wearing figure slinks into her room and suffocates her.
And Lydia wanders out of her home, barefoot and dazed, in a
fugue state similar to the one she entered when she disappeared from the
hospital. She ends up at a stately mansion in the woods, where she finds her
mysterious young suitor. He kisses her tenderly… and then she happens to catch the reflection in the glass
of a cabinet and sees she’s actually standing in the burned-out ruin of the
Hale mansion. And instead of kissing a fetching and age-appropriate schoolboy,
she’s kissing a badly burned Peter Hale. Stunned and more than a little
traumatized, Lydia realizes her mysterious suitor: a) was a high school-aged
version of Peter, and b) never really existed—he was a figment of her imagination
all along. Peter sits beside her and genially chats about how he’ll need to use
her—and, more to the point, her weird immunity to werewolf bites—for one very
specific upcoming purpose.
And then he vanishes, leaving Lydia sitting alone in the
ruined mansion and clutching a wolfsbane blossom, while deep in the earth directly
beneath her lies Peter’s burned corpse.
Okay! That was interesting! We’re moving right along, story-wise. Things got a little icky in parts—as I pointed out last season, whenever Teen Wolf forays into organic horror, Jackson’s always at the center of it—but very effective. Thumbs up.
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