60 Teen Wolfs in 60 Days: day 2, A Second Chance at the First Line

[hth]

 

Amazon Prime Summary: Now aware that he's become a werewolf, Scott must deal with hunters trying to catch him. (Okay, only...that doesn't actually happen? I mean, he's aware of hunters in this episode. He mentions hunters in this episode. But they don't try to catch him and he doesn't really deal with anything. You gave me one sentence, Amazon Prime, and only the dependent clause was technically true. That's some weak sauce.)

 

HERE WE GO! indeed, Stiles. HERE WE GO indeed. I feel like we have a major tonal shift in the second episode, whose whole first five minutes is legitimately hilarious. Not that much in Wolf Moon was really funny, per se, although O'Brien does manage to consistently wring wry humor out of his lines and his reaction shots. But I don't think I laughed, per se, except maybe at “Try not to take any in the face,” (FINSTOCK 4LYFE), whereas I did probably three times in that short locker-room scene alone. I feel like it establishes Scott and Stiles's dynamic perfectly: Scott is jittery and helpless and generally frozen in life's headlights, and Stiles employs a combination of gently pummeling him around and issuing direct instructions in a determinedly upbeat manner to get him off of square one. Occasionally this makes Scott feel herded, and he retaliates by, extremely briefly, raising his voice, and then doing what Stiles tells him to.

 

I'm not missing anything, am I? That's pretty much the drill? Cool, just checking.

 

Episode MVP: the lifeless corpse of Finstock's dead grandmother. And also Stiles, of course, but that goes without saying. Good job being a tool-using mammal, Stiles!

 

At this point, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about Melissa. I think the actress is quite likable, but the character is sort of uncomfortably jumpy for a parent. Like, I fully accept that parenting is hard and parenting a teenager comes with no instruction manual, but job one has got to be not to let them see that you don't have the first idea what you're doing, right? She just kind of has this weird, wobbly thing going on, like she needs to be constantly reassured that she's not failing, and that's both a little endearing and – troubling, I guess, to me. It seems like an unhealthy dynamic, potentially. Like, lady, your kid is 15 (16? I feel like this must be the start of his sophomore year, which is usually 15, but do they call him 16 at some point?), and it's really way too much responsibility to ask him to shore up your confidence in your parenting skills. But at the same time, I feel like it's good to be clear in our cultural stuff that being the Mom isn't automatic magic, and even perfectly good parents feel out of their depth and worry that they're blowing it. So obviously I'm all over the map here.

 

Good use of horror devices with the buffering and the terrified “look over your shoulder!” look, etc. They really go to the mat trying to sell this Serial Killer Derek red herring, and I commend the effort, but come on. Obviously the guy who gets all the terrifying music and lighting in the first two episodes is not the villain. That's not how stories work. It's not going to be like, Twist! The lurky, creepy one with the madman string-twangy theme did it! Honestly, though, very nice try. You did everything you could, show.

 

Right, so – Danny! I am easily manipulated by Positive Gay References on high school shows, and again, I blame being the age I'm at. I was in high school in the very late 80s and early 90s. I'm sure anyone who follows me is supercool and well aware of this, but just to stress the point – there were. no. Dannys. on tv when I was in high school. Nothing like that existed. You couldn't just toss out there that, hey, some students are gay. You got ONE EPISODE per show, which was an issue episode about how some main character's cousin thought he might be gay, and at first that sounded like the worst thing in the world, and eventually the characters would decide that it wasn't the very worst thing in the world, probably, and anyway he'd already suffered enough and it was okay to be kind, and then you'd never see that character again ever. And none of it reminded you of anyone you knew, because none of it resembled how humans thought and acted, and you thought maybe it had something to do with you but weren't totally sure what, and my god. My god, if Scott McCall had said on your tv “Yeah, I know Danny's gay, whatever, can we focus on something important?” – I don't know. It would have been a whole parallel universe. Everything in life would've been different. Everything is so different now, and I can't entirely get over it sometimes. Maybe my bar is too low; I'll leave it to the millennials to keep demanding more and better, because that's what being young and having energy and idealism is for. I can still cry sometimes because Glee is terrible and Teen Wolf is some random show on cable that I keep having to explain to people exists and isn't the one with Michael J. Fox, but there's a whole parallel universe where Santana Lopez and Danny Mahealani exist, and I live in it, and I'll never not think it's huge.

 

I really wonder how much of Lydia's – just, how much of Lydia was planned out in advance, and how much she was just supposed to be the Mean Girl counterpart to Jackson's Jock Asshole, but on account of Holland Roden being a wildly charming motherfucker, she turned into...Lydia. I feel like the character here is almost unrecognizable, but at the same time, this is a show that isn't afraid of an arc, and they already set her up as Stiles's – whatever that's all about, so surely some payoff was intended at some point.

 

Wait, what is happening with this plot? At the start of the show, half a Laura was found. Then in episode one, Our Heroes found another half of Laura. Now Stiles wants to find-- How the hell many halves does Laura have? Or did they lose the one from last week? I guess Scott found it after Stiles had been dragged home by the ear, and then I guess after that Derek recovered Half #2 and buried it, so yes, on further reflection that's exactly what happened. But it's still ringing weirdly to me that – I mean, how do they know the body isn't still where Scott last saw it? Did they go back to look for it? Did they do the rational thing that a normal person not on tv would do and call the sheriff's station to report finding the body? It seems like that's useful information, if they did do that and they did find out that Laura's severed torso is missing for the second time – and if they knew that, then why isn't that probable cause in and of itself? You don't have to tell the Sheriff all the werewolf stuff. You tell him about the dicking around in the woods (which you already haven't gotten in trouble for and aren't going to now) and finding the body, and being shouted off of Derek's private property, and then Derek is known to have been at the place where her body was and then wasn't, so wouldn't that get you a warrant? This business with the hospital and smelling Half #1 seems really unnecessarily convoluted to me.

 

Okay, Stiles. Okay, check this tendency before it gets out of hand. The “unspoken connection” you think you have with the girl you never speak to? It is some dubious shit. I get that crushes from afar are a high school thing. I get that you corrected course pretty quickly and acknowledged that from her point of view, this Big Moment you're trying to have is a meaningless waste of her time. I'm not lowering the hammer on you yet, but now is the time to choose not to do this. It is embarrassing for all of us, and it makes you look like a bad dude. You're better than this, Stiles!

 

I'm going to go you one better than hating this plan, Scott. I am going to contend that this is not a plan at all. “He can only kill one of us, probably!” is not a plan. It's just an observation on your own mortality. Not. a. plan.

 

Nice aerial shot. I also just like the conceit in general – that you have to worry about post-mortem transformations when you bury a werewolf.

 

I feel like the Sheriffs Stilinski and Mars need a support group for single parents of unreasonably determined criminal-investigation-meddling children. Someone's written that crossover, right?

 

One thing I like about this show is that they generate a lot of wrong theories. It seems like most supernatural shows have Mulder Syndrome, where the one and only improbable explanation the explanation-guesser guesses is 95% correct on the first try. I appreciate that Stiles brainstorms all kinds of stuff – it's a separate breed of werewolf, it's a skill you learn, it only works for girls! – most of which is totally useless, because that's how people actually come up with things, even if they are very smart and have already read everything on Google and in the grotty Tome of Lore.

 

You think I'm going to mock the werewolf sideburns, but even I think that's low-hanging fruit, and I'm better than that. I do like the Grandpa Munster tufts on the ends of his eyebrows, and the widow's peak. I'm not even being ironic; I think they're quite dapper, or at the very least that they compare favorably to the actual hair that he actually wears that way on purpose.

 

One thing I'll say about the lacrosse scenes is that I appreciate that they don't care if I learn how lacrosse works. Clearly the only significant thing going on here is who gets spiked headfirst into the ground, so I can just concentrate on that.

 

It's sweet of Stiles not to want to harsh Scott's buzz, but I feel like “we'll talk later” is ultimately not helpful when your news is “the probable psycho killer that you fingered for his sister's murder is now a free man.” That's time-sensitive, you know? I mean, assuming they know what they think they know, which they really don't, but as far as Stiles knows? Later is maybe a tad too late for Scott to find this out. Come on, Stiles, I know he's pretty fucking cute when he's all happy like that, but I rely on you to be the practical one around here. Get your head in the game!

 

 

 

Comments

[copracat]

but there's a whole parallel universe where Santana Lopez and Danny Mahealani exist, and I live in it, and I'll never not think it's huge.

+

[hth]

:)

[anatsuno]

I love that you appreciate Stiles brainstorming any and everything, and I'm sad that actually, as time wore on, TW became a show "where the one and only improbable explanation the explanation-guesser guesses is 95% correct on the first try." (on small-ish stuff if not huge always overarching plots) - actually it became a terrible offender in that respect, imo. :(

I'm sure (I'm hopeful) that there are several V.Mars/Twoof crossovers, but there's only one I have read. It's part of a long series that might be an acquired taste (a sprawling AU with human-yet-Alpha!Stiles) but that I enjoy as all hell. :))

[hth]

I'm sad about that, but not terribly surprised. You know, I feel like it's so rare to even get your show picked up, and then not get cancelled, or then not renewed -- I can't honestly blame creators for putting a ton of effort into those first run of episodes/first season, and then realizing they can't reproduce all of that every year thereafter. I think when shows didn't have such a short window to make it, you saw the opposite -- a creaky pilot/early episodes/first season that eventually found its legs and became more creative, but now a lot of times there's this thing where the first season will be hammered out tight, and then as things go on you can almost hear the writers going, "shit...we have to think up more of that?"

[mecurtin]

As someone who went to HS in the early 70s, the Positive Gay Characters thing is almost overwhelming, it's so revolutionary.

However, I tend to agree with cupidsbow, who argues that the suits at MTV are a bunch of scaredy-cats if not homophobes, who got nervous later on (esp. in S4) about the amount of gayness Jeff put in, and throttled it back. It's really dumb on their part, because the rate of change in social acceptance of queers, especially by the young, is staggeringly fast -- much faster than anyone expected.

[hth]

I know there was some eleventh-hour panic about the show being perceived as too gay -- it's one of the few things I knew about the show before I started, since I read an article about it at, I think the Daily Dot? It does seem like a dumb move, and I'm sure in about six weeks I'll be complaining mightily about it! *g* It would be interesting to go hunt down that article I read now that I know what the heck they're on about and see what I get out of it on a re-read.