Let’s check in with Lydia, who, as the only member of the
principal cast who didn’t get to participate in last episode’s rave-centered
mayhem, deserves some extra attention this time around. After having a
nightmare about Peter Hale mauling her in front of a cheering crowd of lacrosse
fans, Lydia wakes to find Ghost Peter lying in bed beside her, nattering away
about how he swears her life will return to normal, just as soon as she does
him one tiny little favor on the night of the full moon.
Ghost Peter, I have due respect for your entertaining brand
of villainy, but non-corporeal or not, stop crawling into bed with traumatized
high school kids.
Chris Argent disinfects Victoria’s bite and struggles to
keep his cool. He tries to convince Gerard that maybe the bite isn’t that
bad—she might not even turn into a werewolf!—but Gerard is having none of it.
Gerard coldly tells him Victoria is already dead: “That thing over there is
just a cocoon waiting to hatch.” Grief counseling is maybe not Gerard’s strong
suit.
Allison drops Matt off at home after their unsatisfying and
unsettling date at the rave (unsatisfying in the sense that there were no
sparks between them even before Allison abandoned him to go squabble with her
secret boyfriend; unsettling in that someone’s throat was torn out while a big
gun battle raged outside). Matt leaves his camera behind in the car. Allison,
who has no sense of personal boundaries, idly snoops through his photos… and
discovers she’s the featured subject in most of them (it seems Matt, too, has no sense of personal boundaries). Some of the photos appear
to have been taken through her bedroom window. When Matt returns for his
camera, both Allison and Matt make a game attempt at pretending the entire
situation isn’t disturbing and gross. Matt tries to pressure her to come inside
with him; Allison shuts him down gracefully and beats a hasty retreat.
So Matt’s blandly affable Paul Ruddesque exterior hides
something off-putting and unsavory. Not a huge surprise there.
It’s the first full moon since Derek formed his new pack, so
he’s taking precautions to chain up Isaac, Erica and Boyd to prevent them from
running amuck. Some of his shackles seem more, er, recreational than
functional, but it’s nice that he’s being thorough.
Stiles and his dad comb through old yearbooks in search of a
link between all the murdered graduates. Mr. Harris’s car, which features a
bumper sticker with an Einstein quote on it, was spotted at several of the
crime scenes, which makes him the most likely suspect; however, the murdered
rave promoter was never one of his students. While flipping through a yearbook,
Sheriff Stilinksi notices that all the victims were on the 2006 swim team… and
Isaac’s murdered father was their coach.
Lydia corners Jackson outside the locker room after lacrosse
practice to make sure he’s going to be at her birthday party later that night.
Y’know, the chronology here is verrrry tricky to follow. In that last scene,
Stiles and his father established that it’s spring break. And it’s already
nightfall, or very shortly before, because Derek has already started to chain
up his pack members in advance of the full moon. So… I suppose we should just
assume the lacrosse team is having a night practice during spring break? A
practice that team co-captain Scott plus teammates Stiles and Isaac all skip?
And that Lydia showed up at the closed school just to talk to Jackson? I guess
that works, sort of. Jackson is once again dead-eyed and spooky and clearly not
in control of his body. As soon as Lydia touches his arm, he snaps back into
himself. Panicked, he tells her she doesn’t want him anywhere near her party.
Lydia, assuming he’s worried about social awkwardness since they’re no longer
dating, reassures him it’ll be fine. Jackson, who is far more worried
about compulsively slaughtering all her party guests, tries once again to warn
her to stay far, far away from him. It falls on deaf ears.
As Lydia’s bizarre behavior has dented her social standing
in recent weeks, Scott, Stiles and Allison are the only guests at her party.
Scott browbeats the lacrosse team into making an appearance, while Stiles
summons the slew of new friends he made at the gay nightclub a few episodes back,
and before long, the shindig is in full swing. Jackson lurks in a corner,
looking dead-eyed and malevolent while balefully slurping punch. In fact,
everyone’s drinking a whole lot of punch. Which Lydia has, at Peter Hale’s
behest, laced with copious amounts of wolfsbane.
At the party, Matt pulls Allison aside to explain himself.
At first he downplays her concerns about the photos. He tells her,
“Photographers call them candids,” in such a pitch-perfect,
condescending, maddeningly douchebaggy tone that, for the first time since he
popped up on the show, I sort of love Matt, just a little tiny bit. She tells
him he’s behaving like a stalker; he responds by getting angry and abusive.
When he grabs her arm, Allison knocks him to the floor and storms out of the
room.
In the hallway, she hallucinates a hyper-competent crossbow-wielding version
of herself, who berates her for being such a helpless ninny before shooting her
in the gut.
And this pretty much kick-starts a whole deluge of
punch-fueled hallucinations: Stiles sees his dad, dressed in funereal black and
toting a whiskey bottle, drunkenly berating him for somehow causing his
mother’s death.
Jackson has a disappointingly tepid hallucination about
meeting his faceless real parents. A
wolfsbane-poisoned Scott thankfully steps in and ups the kink level by
hallucinating Allison locked in a passionate embrace with Jackson, who
transforms into the kanima.
While her own damn birthday party pretty much explodes into
chaos behind her, Lydia idly wanders off into the night.
Derek’s transformed pack members break out of their chains
and gang up on him. Overwhelmed, Derek leaves a nervous voicemail for Scott asking
him to drop by to help get them back under control. Derek, my love, you are a
terrible, awful, horrible excuse for an Alpha. Luckily for Derek, Isaac gets
his act together enough to help Derek pull Boyd and Erica back in line.
Considering how Isaac can barely get through a day at school without attacking
someone, it’s kind of surprising that he turns out to be the mature elder
statesman of Derek’s pack.
Victoria Argent gets ready to commit suicide to prevent
herself from becoming a werewolf. With assistance from Chris, as the light of
the full moon hits her, she stabs herself in the heart with a butcher knife. I
guess it’s sad? Kind of? I mean, apart from how her death would have been 100%
unavoidable if the collective Argents weren’t such a gaggle of intolerant and
viciously xenophobic drama queens?
Upon hearing the news of her mother’s death, Allison
dissolves into hysterical sobs at the hospital as her father tries to comfort
her. And, yeah, this part genuinely is sad.
Lydia’s midnight wanderings lead her into Derek’s lair. She
casually strolls up to a confused and wary Derek and blows a huge whiff of
powdered wolfsbane into his face, knocking him out cold.
Now that the hostess has abandoned her guests to their
hallucinations, Lydia’s party descends into chaos. Someone tosses Matt into the
swimming pool, which causes him to freak out on an epic scale. He splashes
around and hollers that he can’t swim, until Jackson hauls him out. Remembering
that the kanima is scared of water (whereas Jackson is the captain of the swim
team), Scott and Stiles realize Matt is the one who’s been forcing Jackson to
commit all the murders.
The cops arrive and break up the party. Everyone flees into
the night. Scott trails Matt and sees Jackson, who has now transformed into the
kanima, crouching beside him.
Lydia drags an unconscious Derek to the Hale mansion, where Peter’s burned corpse lies just beneath the pulled-up
floorboards. She places Derek’s wrist in Peter’s charred hand, then lets the
light of the full moon fall on them. Peter’s claws come out, his flesh heals
and restores itself to normal, and he returns to life.
Splendid stuff. Nice to have you back, Peter.
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