“Who’s the little fear demon? Come on, who’s the little fear demon?”
“Don’t taunt the fear demon.”
“Why? Can it hurt me?”
“No, it’s just tacky.”
-Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) and Xander (Nicholas Brendan), Buffy The Vampire Slayer, “Fear Itself”
I try not to compare and judge Teen Wolf to other supernatural teen shows, but I couldn’t stop the above Buffy exchange from jumping full-force into my brain while watching “After Images.”
So, it’s not just Gerard whipping Beacon Hills into a fear frenzy, it’s also whatever the season’s supernatural big bad is (previously known as Super Evil, but I think I”ll go with Fear Monster for now).
We get our first real taste of it as Melissa is trying to take a tissue sample from the weird, skinless body that Liam didn’t smell in the locker room last episode. The scenes in the morgue and lab, while kind of confusing at first, were also amazing. Watching Tyler Posey grow as an actor has been one of the more rewarding behind-the-scenes aspects of Teen Wolf, but it’s important to not overlook the veteran cast of adults that really make the show sing. JR Bourne and Melissa Ponzio absolutely killed their scenes as two people terrified by they don’t even know what.
Also, while I’ll always be a little sad that it really looks like Stiliniski/Melissa is a ship that will never sail, there’s a sheepish adorableness to Argent/Melissa that I’m warming up to. If it weren’t the last season, I’d totally be all about an episode that was entirely focused on the adults of Teen Wolf. Hell, depending on how things go, I might still like it now.
The bulk of the episode though is focused on Scott, Malia, Liam and Lori trying to track down Brett who’s been wounded, poisoned and is on the run from Gerard and the new guidance counselor who’s name I’ll have to look up.
I didn’t mind this story line, but I think it was a mistake to have this episode set immediately after last week’s. The crunched time span worked in the earlier seasons, but it’s asking a lot to expect the audience to believe that the counselor would take up with Gerard on the spot after he saves her and start wandering around full of bravado and jonesing to kill something. This wouldn’t be a difficult fix, either. Change their clothes toss in a line of dialogue for them and one of Lori saying Brett’s been missing a few days. Wall-to-wall action only works if it makes sense, and this didn’t, really.
But Scott’s come a long way from being the kid who couldn’t track things by scent because he spent all his time trying NOT to smell everything. It’s kind of a shame he still can’t really get people to listen to him about anything.
And that brings us to Lydia, Mason and Corey. I wasn’t opposed to the idea of them trying to use Lydia’s precognitive banshee powers to learn more about Skinless and this year’s weirdness — and I love that Mason is still seeing the body everywhere he looks — but I was also really annoyed by it in practice. It was just so contrived! Corey and Mason talk through Lydia’s attempt, she tells them not to. They say OK and then keep talking until she tells them to shut it again, and then Corey starts messing around with those kinetic clacky-ball things until she shoos them away.
There just had to be a smoother way to get them to the library, where Nolan ominously questions these two chimeras about whether people and DNA can change to create new things and then stabs Corey in the hand with a pen, causing an improbable geyser of blood to go shooting up in the middle of the library. With a wound that instantly healed. Teen Wolf’s been ramping up the speed it takes its supernatural creatures to heal, and I don’t know what I think about that. Also, Nolan is clearly not right, and I think it goes beyond garden variety fear of the unknown.
Which brings us to the last main point of this post. It turns out, Gerard’s plotting had less to do with hunting Brett and more to do with exposing werewolves — in this case an angry Liam after Brett and Lori sure look like they’d died getting hit by a truck as they ran. He says there’s no better way to build an army than to make people afraid.
While this season was shot well in advance of this weekend’s events in Charlottesville it’s not hard to see the metaphor of people who are so afraid of a changing world that they’ll participate in all manner of vile-ness to maintain the their view of the status quo. Seeing what Beacon Hills residents resist and rise up to fight Gerard’s mentality of fear and oppression should be an interesting ride with a hopeful mirror in reality.
Teen Wolf airs at 8/7c Sundays on MTV.
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* Because Peter was on point last season, and nobody likes a Nazi, here are some links to suggestions for fighting racism and hate.
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