It’s night, and chemistry teacher Mr. Harris is staying late
in his classroom, no doubt to think of new ways to slather his pupils with a
thick, sticky layer of contempt and loathing. The Alpha, seen only in shadows,
arrives to harass and terrify and presumably slaughter him for unspecified past
wrongs. Just before the Alpha attacks, Derek appears out of nowhere and fends
it off. Sheriff Stilinski shows up with a fleet of squad cars and surrounds the
school, sending wanted-fugitive Derek scurrying off into the darkness.
The cops pursue Derek on foot into an ironworks. Chris and
Kate Argent, who’ve been following the pursuit on the police scanner, join in
the chase. Chris Argent hunts Derek down and shoots at him… but then Derek’s
saved by the timely arrival of Scott and Stiles, who zip onto the scene in
Derek’s car, scoop him up, and whisk him off to safety. Look at Scott and
Stiles, being all newly-competent and badass! Keep up the good work, kids!
Derek grouches about losing the Alpha, just when he’d finally tracked it down from some clues left by his sister. Right before her murder, Laura Hale had
unearthed some connection between the Alpha and Mr. Harris; her other piece of
evidence was a drawing of a distinctive necklace—the same necklace Kate Argent
gave Allison for her birthday. When Scott reveals that Allison is the current
owner of the necklace, Derek orders him to steal it from her.
Meanwhile, Jackson visits a doctor for a long-overdue
examination of the rotting, festering scratches on his neck. The doctor whips
out a few medieval torture devices and roots around underneath Jackson’s skin
before pulling out a long, gristly, tangled vine of wolfsbane. Teen Wolf
doesn’t foray into grotesque organic horror very often, but when it does, it’s
usually pretty effective, and it usually involves something painful and awful
happening to Jackson. As Jackson howls in agony, the doctor suddenly transforms
into a gleeful Derek, grinning like a sadistic maniac.
And then Jackson snaps out of his hallucination to find the
doctor calmly assuring him he’s going to be fine—he’s just been suffering from
a mild case of aconite poisoning, which a wolfsbane-sickened Derek must’ve
passed along to him through his claws. At the nurses’ station, Jackson charms
Melissa McCall into letting him hop on her computer to look up uses for
wolfsbane.
Armed with this final vital piece of the puzzle, a smug and
triumphant Jackson confronts Scott: He knows Scott’s a werewolf, he’d very much
like to become one too, and if Scott can’t find a way to transform him into
one, he’ll spill the beans to Allison about Scott’s nasty alter ego. Later, in
the school cafeteria, Jackson uses Scott’s super-enhanced hearing to taunt him
from across the room. Scott, who realizes that helping Jackson become a
werewolf would be catastrophic for, like, humanity, and who also just wants to
eat his tray of batter-fried chicken parts in peace, does his best to ignore
him.
Jackson amps up his efforts to seduce Allison in the school
swimming pool (Jackson: “You see these cheekbones? Aerodynamically suited for
speed in water”). Allison, who is not immune to the allure of a great pair of
cheekbones, seems to be falling for it. An eavesdropping Scott seethes with
impotent rage as he pilfers shamelessly through Allison’s backpack to find the
necklace.
Jackson continues his dazzling, dizzying hot streak of
despicable behavior. He breaks up with Lydia via a bitchy text (“Lydia, please
give up my spare house key at your earliest convenience, as we are no longer
dating”). Furious, Lydia confronts him in the hallway. They hurl abuse at each
other: Jackson is jaw-droppingly cruel and condescending, Lydia is apoplectic
and spiteful, and it’s just wrong how wonderful and hilarious their
entire exchange is, from start to finish. (Lydia: “Dumped by the co-captain
of the lacrosse team. I wonder how many minutes it’ll take me to get over that.
Wait, seconds actually. Seconds!”)
Scott breaks into Allison’s bedroom and steals her necklace.
Outside the house, he runs smack into a friendlier-than-usual Chris Argent, who
invites him inside for a beer and an interrogation about the nature of Scott’s
relationship with Derek. Allison overhears Scott insisting to her father that
her safety has always been his highest priority. Her cold, Scott-hardened heart
starts to melt a little.
Sheriff Stilinski interviews a shaken Mr. Harris, who is
finally ready to come clean about the Alpha attack. Six years ago, it seems,
Harris had a singularly ill-advised drunken fling with Kate Argent. While he
never learned Kate’s name, he remembered she wore a distinctive necklace. Upon
learning of his chemistry background, Kate pumped him for information about the
best way to burn down a building. A week later, the Hale house went up in
flames. The Alpha is clearly seeking grim vengeance against everyone involved
in that fire, no matter how peripherally.
Stiles hides a still-fugitive Derek in his bedroom, which is
the perfect launching point for many wonderful plot developments. And indeed,
this episode doesn’t disappoint on that front. While waiting for Scott to steal
Allison’s necklace, Derek and Stiles set about finding out who sent the text
that lured Allison to the school the night of the Alpha attack. It turns out
Danny has crackerjack hacking skills (and the police record to prove it), so
Stiles invites him over and enlists his aid in locating the source of the text.
Danny refuses to help… until Derek whips off his shirt, revealing his
magnificent torso, which gets Danny’s undivided attention. It’s sometimes
helpful to view Danny as the surrogate for the entire Teen Wolf
viewership. To entice Danny to stick around and track down the sender of the text,
an increasingly surly Derek keeps trying on and taking off all of Stiles’s
too-tight shirts.
This is possibly the greatest scene in Teen Wolf
history.
The text, Danny discovers, was sent from Melissa McCall’s
work computer. Even though he’s supposed to play in the big quarterfinal
lacrosse game tonight, Stiles heads off to the hospital with Derek to talk to
Scott’s mom. Melissa isn’t around, so Derek tells Stiles to go to the long-term
care wing and seek help from Jennifer, the nurse who’s been assigned to look
after Peter Hale.
Stiles can’t find the nurse. He does finds Peter, who
is out of his wheelchair and wandering the halls. Peter, in fact, is the Alpha.
He introduces himself politely to Stiles, then starts beating the crap out of
Derek.
After clobbering Derek into a pulp, Peter admits to killing
Derek’s sister, which gave him enough strength to recover from his injuries and
transform into an Alpha. While Derek watches in alarm, all the burns on Peter’s
face vanish away entirely.
Right before the game begins, Jackson plops down on the
sidelines beside Scott for a serious discussion about werewolves. Scott, for
whatever damn fool reason, gets imprudently chatty. He blabs about how Jackson
would have to be bitten by an Alpha to transform, how he doesn’t even know who
the Alpha is, and how Beacon Hills is crawling with gun-toting werewolf
hunters. Because Jackson is a whole lot smarter than Scott, he immediately
deduces that Scott is talking about the Argents (he snottily points out that
“Argent” means silver in French). He gives Scott three days to figure out how
to make him a card-carrying member of his cool werewolf club.
The Argent clan, meanwhile, is seated in the stands right
behind Jackson and Scott. Allison points out Jackson to Kate. “Holy hotness,”
Kate murmurs, which is the only sensible reaction upon initial viewing of
Jackson’s holy hotness. And then she sees the claw marks on Jackson’s neck. She
nudges Chris Argent, and, as a horrified Scott listens in, they have a furious
whispered conversation about how Jackson must be the other Beta that Chris
spotted with Derek in the pilot episode.
A majestic episode, chock-full to bursting with all the
elements that make Teen Wolf occasionally achieve teen-soap greatness. Full marks.
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