Teen Wolf season 4 episode 8 Sum Up

 

One of the highlights of Teen Wolf Season 4 is the way it has embraced its metaness. It’s a show about teenage werewolves on a channel that used to be called Music Television, so it makes sense that Teen Wolf would both poke fun at its history. There’s a knowing awareness of the fact that it’s a television show, not in terms of the performances, but in terms of some of the written content. Stiles is a great example of this, since he’s always making commentary that winks at the fourth wall, but there was an interesting moment in this week’s episode involving someone not usually on in the fun.

The plot is very clever, but very simple. The Teen Wolf kids on the Dead Pool list are going to pretend that they’re dead, lure the Benefactor out with the promise that the body cannot be photographed because it’s in the hospital, then jump out and attack him. Scott, being the highest of the high value targets and the one strong enough to survive forty-five minutes or so in something between hypothermia and a coma, is chosen as the stalking horse while Chris Argent and the rest of the gang minus Lydia (who has problems of her own) wait within the hospital to spring the trap.

It’s pretty smart, as far as Scott’s plans go, but there’s a moment where it actually really works for me, particularly in the opening moments. A body is wheeled in on a gurney, declared dead, and the doctor tells someone to get Melissa McCall. We see it’s Scott on the gurney before we find out about the plan and then later on we see Mama McCall screaming and having a breakdown in the hallway. However, it seems a little forced, even a little hokey. Turns out that are for a good reason: Mama McCall is in on the plot, and her breakdown is Melissa Ponzio acting the character’s attempt at acting. It’s good enough that, for the people of Beacon Hills, it’s believable; it’s bad enough that the audience, who knows Ms. Ponzio to be a very good actress, won’t necessarily buy into it. It’s a great, sly performance choice that ends up coloring the rest of the episode, which is very heavy on deception and perception.

Despite spending most of the episode in a coma-like state, Scott gets a lot of interesting things to do in a trio of scenes that are very David Lynchian in execution. Jann Turner, the director of the episode, really delves into the unpleasantness of Scott’s coma (reinforced by Peter’s discussion with his daughter Malia about how much it sucks to be in a coma for werewolves, aware and conscious but unable to escape from their own thoughts) by repeating the same sequence three times, each time with a different, worse ending. Scott wakes up in a hospital freezer, crawls forward into what looks like an air duct, falls through the locker into the school, and witnesses the Mute (or himself, in the most effective, darkest time line version) kill Liam over and over and over again. Even in Teen Wolf dream sequences, no one stays dead.

Speaking of not staying dead, one of the bigger teases of this week’s episode was that we’d find out just who the Benefactor is. We did, in a sense; Lydia’s grandmother apparently isn’t guaranteed dead, she knew Meredith, and the code used in the computerized dead pool is similar to that in the coded note left by Lydia’s grandmother, but did we ever meet Lydia’s grandmother in the early days of the show? Jeff Davis has said it would tie back to the first season somehow, but so far I’m not seeing it. Peter being the Benefactor is too obvious, since his name isn’t on the dead pool. Kate’s clearly not it, since she and Chris  were both looking to use Scott to trap the guy.

Both Peter and Kate work well as a sort of freelance villain. No real purpose other than whatever gains them something. Peter wants his power back and is clearly stealing it from Derek; Kate wants her place in the family back, but not so badly that she’d do permanent harm to her brother (or him to her). There’s a chaotic selfishness to the two that gives them the freedom to aid the good guys or aid the bad guys, depending on just how they’ll be rewarded on either side, and that gives the show a fun gray area to play in with those two without making them overtly one way or the other, and it also eliminates them from being the Benefactor in an indirect way.

 

So who is the Benefactor? Uh… how about Danny? That seems to be a popular theory, even if it seems really out of character for the Danny we used to know and while he knows all the supernatural kids, he doesn’t seem to have a reason to want to kill them since he’s either best friends with or actively dating werewolves. I’m sure that whoever it is, the end result will be pretty fun for everyone involved, and hopefully it’ll clear the way for Peter and Kate to form a beautifully evil power couple with Malia as their evil vixen-in-training.

Teen Wolf Season 4 Episode 7 Weaponized Recap

A virus is sweeping through Beacon Hills in this week’s stomach-churning Teen Wolf Season 4. Knowing a little bit about how television production works, Teen Wolf’s latest episode seems like it could almost be a ‘ripped from the headlines’ sort of affair. While not intended to capitalize on the Ebola outbreak in western Africa and the fact that the United States is currently bringing two Ebola-infected people to Atlanta in an effort to treat the insanely unpleasant and deadly disease, it could not have been timed more perfectly. The United States government is importing fatal diseases and Beacon Hills High School is ground zero for an entirely new disease that’s spreading like the gross rashes on the bodies of its victims.

One of the interesting things about Teen Wolf this season is how they seem to be more actively trying to remember that the stars of the show are supposed to be high school kids who still do high school things when they’re not being shot at by assassins. But even a simple thing like the PSATs, a relatively meaningless test measure most high school students take, ends up being potentially fatal for the shape-shifters and supernatural monsters that compose most of Beacon Hills’ population.

Turns out it’s all Coach’s fault. Well, coach and a wannabe biology teacher/killer by the name of Simon who has developed a pretty clever way to kill all the werewolves without getting in danger of being killed by those very same werewolves, using a genetically modified version of canine distemper. Now with the CDC coming into town with a quarantine to lock down the high school, it’s up to the lucky few on the outside, namely Lydia, Derek, and the ever-clever Deaton, to save those trapped on the inside: Scott, Stiles, Kira, and Malia. Maximum feels.

Teen Wolf has a way with a bottle episode, and the high school has become almost like another character in the programme given its relative importance to the show as a whole. As fun as it is to learn little facts about Coach like the fact he’s a recovering alcoholic and spend a little time with the lovely Ms. Martin, the center of Teen Wolf remains its teenagers, specifically their romantic relationships. Any time you get Stiles involved, there’s going to be an outpouring of feels, and Alyssa Clark’s script mines the continuing relationship between Scott and Stiles to maximum effectiveness. They really feel like lifelong friends, this week more than most, plus there’s the added chemistry between Dylan O’Brien and Shelley Hennig’s Malia that makes that first love pairing work like gangbusters, too.

I have no doubt this week’s episode kept the fandom on the edge of their seats, even as the normal folks began to recover and our were-critter friends took respective turns for the worst. There’s really nothing creepier to us old folks who remember the specter of the Cold War than people in germ-proof suits. With Ebola in the news, it’s doubly effective. I’m sure even Teen Wolf’s target audience of kids home for the summer have heard about that outbreak by now, and director Tim Andrew does a great job of taking the familiar school setting and turning it into something spectacularly creepy thanks to added plastic tents and forced air circulation tubing. Andrew also does a fine job of accentuating the script’s themes with some of his shot compositions, particularly Stiles on one side of the vault and Scott on the other, both of whom look like they’re slowly dying.The two action sequences, a stellar dual between Deaton and Satomi played by Lily Mariye and another fight between Satomi and a nameless assassin, are spectacular bursts of frenetic energy that perfectly blow off the tension of the episode at crucial points.

That’s an admirable through point with Teen Wolf since the very beginning. The show isn’t afraid to make its adorable cast of shirtless hunks and leggy hunkettes look absolutely awful. It’s not afraid to blow a hole in someone’s forehead and splatter its breakout star with corn syrup blood. It’s not afraid of teeth and claws and blood and hair made lank by fevered sweat. It’s not afraid of lesions. It’s not a show that fears getting sticky and gross at times, and it’s all the better for that fearlessness and the constant evolution of the core cast. Things will be getting a lot bloodier before all is said and done this season.