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Amazon Prime Description: Scott's first date with Allison ends up in the confusion of the dreaded “group date.” (This is a truth-fact, Amazon Prime! See, that wasn't so hard, was it?)
Let me talk a little bit about the metaphysics of werewolves! I think it becomes relevant at this point in the series. Stephen King famously tagged one of his three archetypal horror tropes The Werewolf, or the Jekyll&Hyde – the horror-factor essentially coming from the idea that all our pretensions to humanity constitute nothing but a fragile veneer over our essential nature as violent predators, and that whatever we think is civilized about us can be stripped away, leaving us powerless in the grip of our instincts and unable to prevent ourselves from doing what would be abhorrent to our rational minds. It's the same fear that underlies the Reavers (at least the Firefly Reavers – the Serenity Reavers are, in my opinion, badly defanged by being rewritten as victims of illicit experimentation; it's not an objectively bad idea, but it's profoundly different from the idea that a Reaver is what you become when you “stare into the Black” – literally when you drift too far from civilization), and arguably the same fear that underlies most zombie movies, except that (again, in my terribly humble opinion) zombies are less frightening because if you did become one, you'd never come back to yourself long enough to experience the horror of what you had become (also a problem with Reavers, now that I think about it).
That's the Classic Operative Metaphor behind werewolves: we are, at base, things that are more than capable of taking what we want without moderation or mediation by things like ethics or empathy. (For a gruesomely relevant example of what a person who gets too sucked into that particular fear can become, go on and Google Phil Robertson – a guy who makes a lot of money telling other fearful people that the werewolves are everywhere, and a vote for the Republicans is a silver bullet in your best guy's gun.) Every time you write a werewolf story, or a story that features werewolves in any significant way, you have to make some crucial thematic/worldbuilding decisions about how closely you're going to hew to the Classical Werewolf.
You do have other options. Werewolf as Noble Savage has become a popular one, shoved into the spotlight by Twilight (and I would argue that Meyers's Mormonism is at play in a huge way in that choice), but also leveraged to good effect as a metaphor for the very contemporary fear that Nature Itself is coming to destroy us not out of amoral hunger, but in righteous revenge, notably by the World of Darkness gaming franchise. The rise of the paranormal romance genre has necessitated a more user-friendly werewolf, a trustworthy sort who often stands in contrast to the much slipperier and potentially dangerous vampires. I think that begins to hare off from the horror genre altogether, and it seems to be powered mainly by the idea of Werewolf as Hierarchy, where the pack, not the predator, becomes the operative element, and the werewolves are defined by the way in which they're embedded socially among their own kind – the Patricia Briggs books come to mind, and to a lesser degree the Southern Vampire Mysteries.
But the thing is, what kind of werewolf story you want to tell forces your hand on what kind of rules to establish for your werewolves. Are they going to remain themselves when they shift? Do they shift involuntarily: some of the time, all of the time? Is it painful to shift? Is it painful not to shift? Do they remember the things they've done in their wolf form? Are the transformations predictable, or can they sneak up on you? Do they cooperate amongst themselves or compete for territory and privileges? Do they conceptualize themselves as humans with a curse or a power, or as a species apart? Do they enjoy killing, or are they cold-blooded hunters, or misunderstood guardians? Every time you make one of those decisions, you give up certain plotlines and virtually guarantee that your characters are going to need to encounter others.
Teen Wolf seems to have embraced a kind of Classical Werewolf Lite. It's using the fear-of-our-own-savagery when it suggests that lycanthropy is indeed a curse because it can compel you to do things your superego would never allow – things you can and will genuinely regret afterwards. But at the same time, it can't really go for broke with that, because the Classical Werewolf is a tragic monster, not a protagonist. You can feel terrible for that guy, but you can't root for him, and we're supposed to root for Scott. So that means they need a brake pedal. Scott needs to be confronted with his capacity to cause harm, but also given the means by which not to cause harm and assert his heroism; that's a storytelling need that their worldbuilding has to support.
This means that the world and the overarching story of Teen Wolf can't help but be essentially about ethics. If the Classical Werewolf is a symbol of the beast that we are, then introducing the possibility that Scott can still make choices carries a metaphorical weight whether you intend it to or not: It's saying to the symbol-logic part of the viewer's brain, “Look, yes, you're in some sense a beast, but the You that you think you are is not subject to your beast. It is still the alien to be kept in check, and the hand on the controls is still Yours.”
This is some straight-up Stoicism; my boy Marcus Aurelius should get a producing credit on this show. The whole premise of Stoicism is that everything is governed by natural law, by an underlying order that seeks a kind of homeostatic benevolence, and that the proper work of the successful human is to subdue the desires of the animal-self in favor of the long-term flourishing of the rational-self, not because the animal is evil, but because the animal is ignorant of natural law and incapable of learning how to bring itself into alignment with the underlying order. So the animal thrashes around, following urges and derailing your life as it tries to hare off in search of the nearest gratification. The proper Stoic corrective is the exact corrective that Teen Wolf prescribes: learn better. Moral philosophy is a skill to be passed from mentor to student, just like the mechanisms of controlling your wolf in the world of this show are transmitted from more experienced werewolves to newbies. It doesn't mean you won't feel your animal urges – you will, and you should, because you wouldn't be vital and powerful without those; Stoicism doesn't have the same concept of “temptation,” “sin,” and “depravity” that our culture inherits from Christian tradition – but it does mean you won't submit to them. The correct hand stays on the controls.
What am I even going after here? Because I wanted to establish that Teen Wolf is at least partially a show about ethics, and particularly sexual ethics, which is one of the most direct applications most of us will ever experience for this stuff. (Our non-sexual ethical choices arguably have much greater impact in the long run, but sexual morality is easier to focus on because there tends to be less of a gap in time and space between action and consequence; poor economic choices, for example, change the world in slow and convoluted ways, but poor sexual choices can and do bring nearly immediate disaster for your health and intimate relationships.) There's a lot of sex on this show, and my argument here is that even more than in most stories, sexual choices in a story about werewolves necessarily have to be about sexual ethics. Even if your only goal in life is to make a fun story that sells product placement space (and oh, god does this show love its product placement) and lets people get off on sexy young people pretending to have sex in front of them, the nature of your worldbuilding choices bakes an ethical argument directly into your story.
In this scene, a girl who likes a boy goes with him “somewhere they can be alone” and ends up terribly hurt. You can't make this a scene without a meaning. The whole thing is a Stoic treatise on how to balance reason and the animal, and so it's making a philosophical statement here. The statement it's making is: unmediated by the intentional application of learned skills, Scott's sexuality is destructive (extrapolate that to “male sexuality” or “all sexuality,” as you prefer). It's so destructive that Scott, being a decent-hearted human who wants to live in concert with the Providential order (Scott is, as Marcus would say, constituted for the benefit of his fellow rational beings), can't just let it be what it is. He has to go learn a thing. He has to appeal to someone he doesn't even necessarily like, but who has skills he needs to learn, and be taught how to literally become human.
I'm biased, being more than a bit of a Stoic myself, but I think it's a pretty damn good ethical stance to take, especially in a show targeted to teenagers. It's essentially saying, Look, you want things, and that's fine. The bite/your youth is a gift. It's made you strong and resilient and made you feel things passionately. But you're honestly kind of an idiot, and the decisions you make right now are likely to be idiotic. You can learn how to put all this passionate energy you have in the service of your humanity, but it's something you have to learn over time and with help from people who have been there before.
We have a tendency to treat morality in our culture as something that you just have. You're a good person or a bad one, and good people will go about doing good while bad people go about doing harm. But the thing is, that's terrible. It's an ignorant, absurd way of thinking about right and wrong, because being good is a skill. You study it, and you practice it, and you get better at it, or you do none of those things. What you can't do is just blunder around feeling a certain type of way and hope that your inherent desire to be a good person spontaneously makes you one. It won't, because that is never ever how it works, even though we keep expecting it to, like there really is a Sorting Hat that will tidily separate the people of good character from the dreadful ones before anyone's character has any chance to form whatsoever.
In short: fuck the Calvinist bullshit our culture insists on deploying in order to make us feel like we've become good people without any effort beyond liking to imagine ourselves as good. Teen Wolf is Stoicism, and Stoicism is better in every way.
Man, now almost anything I say is going to come off a little flat in comparison, isn't it? I mean...it's cute how Scott grimaces at nobody when he realizes he's thrashed Jackson's locker, but... I feel like there should be a segue there that I just don't have! It's cute, okay? Scott is super cute.
Also, I just – look, guys. Look. I'm trying to make these show-centric and not Crazy Shipper Manifesto hour, but – I mean – come on! The look like a kicked puppy on Stiles's face when he's separated from Scott! “No,” – no, he doesn't think he would benefit from distance! He does not think that at all! When even your chemistry teacher is aware that you get the shakes when you aren't directly up in your best friend's space all the time, that just seems like something might be going on with you, feelings-wise. I mean, I had same-gendered friends I couldn't bear to be separated from as a teenager, too, but – the things is, I actually am queer. I do not remember observing that dynamic among the straight males in my teenage social circle, but maybe my friends were just a hard and loveless people.
I think the girl in the cute hat is the same girl that was Stiles's other friend for 2.1 seconds in episode 1. So she did get another line! Good for her!
This might be where I started to like Allison. She has this look on her face when the word “competition” comes up that suggests she really enjoys fashioning drinking cups from the skulls of her enemies, and while I can't really relate to that – my bowling style is a little more like Big Lebowski quotes and shitty nachos and not being very good at bowling, which is a perfectly valid life choice! – I think Allison wears it well.
Okay, someone who's young, fill me in on this “you don't hang out with hot girls” thing. Is this reality-based? Because it seems to me like that actually is the languaging now, and I remember being confused by it in the past! Stories that made no real sense to me actually cleared themselves up with I realized that for “hanging out” or “talking to,” I had to mentally substitute “casually but consistently dating.” (I live in a college town, so I hear dating stories various places. I'm not out collecting them deliberately, I swear.) When I hear “we've been hanging out a few months,” I imagine what Stiles is describing – people who are part of the same social circle but haven't established a romantic relationship – but eventually I twigged that it really meant “we've been involved for a few months, at an intermediary stage between FWB and officially a couple.” Has the phrase rebounded? Does it mean actually just hanging out again, or is this script just written by a room full of 30somethings who are channeling their own high school experiences?
So, Stiles's sexuality. This is a fucking bonanza of a topic, isn't it? And a well we will return to, oh, so many times in the coming weeks. I feel like when you have a teenage character literally yell down the hall that he needs information about his attractiveness to gay guys, you have two and only two options. You're either writing the single most secure-in-his-heterosexuality 16-year-old boy on the planet, or you're writing a ball of anxious sexual confusion with limited brain-to-mouth filters.
Now, I feel like I gave due consideration to the first option. Stiles is a weirdly secure person in some, though not all, ways. You could argue that his own self-concept, sexuality-wise, is so firmly constructed around a decade-long obsession with a pretty girl that it honestly doesn't occur to him that there's any reason to obfuscate around the topic, so there's no existential threat involved with admitting that he would like to be admired by whomever. I mean, just based on the two episodes and ten minutes I've watched so far, I think that would not be a ridiculous characterization of Stiles. It's at least worth entertaining.
I actually kept it on hand as an option for some time, just to make sure I wasn't succumbing to pure wishful thinking. I can't say that I ever though it was the more persuasive of the two, though.
It's really great to see Seth Gilliam get a role that I can get behind! I was a fan of him as an actor on Oz, but holy fucking balls, the bullshit that show put Clayton Hughes through as a character. I mean, Oz, I love Oz, but it was just a skullfucking insane show about 70% of the time, and while some actors got incredibly rich, nuanced roles, other actors were Seth Gilliam.
Aaaand, this is where I start to like Derek a little. The deadpan on the yeses was good, but it's the “probably” that sells him to me, and let me tell you why! I don't know the ultimate semantic difference between stressing the first versus the last syllable of “probably”; it's perfectly likely that it's just a regional dialect thing or whatever, I have honestly no idea. But intuitively, to me, there's a slightly bitchface connotation to the last-syllable inflection. Like if someone says “Am I going to kill someone?” and you say “Probably,” that's a stern intonation of warning. But if you say “Probably,” what you're actually saying is much more like, “Probably, knowing you.” It just takes this Heavy Scene of Ominous Discovery and kicks it slightly sideways, so that Derek for the first time actually is treating Scott like he's Derek's idiot younger brother, and that's an awful lot of weight to put on a shift of accented syllable, I realize, but it really just charmed the fuck out of me and foreshadowed much of what I would come to love about Derek.
Stiles, I know you don't want to be Robin, but trust me, you don't want to be Batman, either. That guy's a jackass. You are already so much more awesome than Batman, who Marcus Aurelius would not like at all.
The initiation thing is another perfectly good idea that doesn't happen to pan out! Stiles should totally write werewolf novels. I like his creativity.
Okay, holy shit, I'm trying to write most of these in a way that reflects my first viewing, even though this is actually my second, but this scene between Argent and Derek is one of the few so far that changes enormously on the second watch. The first time, I got in a general way that they were trying to establish Argent as a credible opponent for werewolves; it's all well and good to say he's a hunter, but we already saw him and his posse fail to be all that dangerous to Derek and Scott at the end of “Wolf Moon,” so they need to establish him as ruthless enough that we're still willing to be scared of Scott getting into violent conflict with him. So the scene does that, and fine, it succeeds. It's also hinting that he's not as oblivious as we were hoping, and that he does in fact know or at least suspect that his daughter is getting tangled up in this stuff, hence the speech about family. But Jesus hopping Christ, when you watch it knowing that Derek thinks he's hearing this “That's something I learned from my family / you don't have much of that these days” speech from a dude who set his family the fuck on fire, it just rings really, really differently. Derek is made of fucking industrial-grade, diamond-plated badass for not just coming across the car and eating his face directly off right there.
I kind of enjoy Lydia's hard-on for, not to put too fine a point on it, alpha males. I realize they had to make that go away, because it was far too disruptive for any number of plotlines to make Lydia sincerely interested in Scott, but I do feel like there's something interesting there in connection with the whole “true alpha” business. If Scott is not just a Winner of the variety that gets Lydia's motor running, but is some kind of Platonic ideal of philosopher-king leadership, I feel like she should react to that in some way, or relate to Scott differently when she comes to understand it, or something. I think you could do it, especially as Lydia's character matures, on some plane other than just the “Lydia wants to bang Scott now because he's the best.” But it seems like some kind of projection or transference or whatever is motivating Lydia to be the way she is should impact her relationship with Scott in later seasons in some way. (Wow, I'm doing a terrible job of pretending I haven't seen the later seasons yet, aren't I?)
You know, from any other teenager on any other show, I'm pretty sure “But we lock the front door. He wouldn't be able to get in,” would be a bit of snark. I'm also pretty sure that from Scott McCall, it isn't. He's puzzled. That's a genuine and confusing flaw in his mother's plan. She seems to be suggesting that Stiles should only be in the house some of the time, for instance when people are available to let him in, and that just doesn't make logical sense to Scott, because then some of the time Stiles might want to be in the house but instead have to be outside the house. She's just speaking some kind of crazy moon-language, as far as Scott's concerned.
I'm hoping this time around I can sort out the rules of pack and pack hierarchy, but I don't hold out a lot of hope. So far we know that Derek thinks he's a beta, but it's also clear in larger context that he doesn't seem to answer to any pack or alpha – which should make him an omega, right? A lone wolf? And he says that Scott is part of the pack of the alpha who bit him, as though it's a thing that's true whether or not Scott agrees to it, which doesn't seem to be the case elsewhere; Scott agreeing to join a pack or refusing to do so seems to be a big deal, which means you're not just jumped into one automatically when you're bitten, that there's free will involved. But Scott is also a beta, so you can be a packless beta. So what the hell is the difference between a lone wolf/omega and a packless beta? It's almost as if someone is making all of this up as they go along!
Great noodly cats, this one ran long!
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Date: 2015-03-29 01:00 am (UTC)From:This is a scene that, to me, always felt like it was about racism. The way Argent acts, and the way Derek has to stand there and take it, gave me very much the vibe of The Old-School Southern Sheriff and the Black Guy. That Derek is reacting like someone who expects to be oppressed and disrespected, and who knows there's nothing he can do about it.
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Date: 2015-03-29 03:56 pm (UTC)From:I think there's something especially chilling about it because we personally like Sheriff Stilinski; he doesn't have to be a Villainous Character in order for us to know that *Derek is right,* he can't report this as an assault. He's a person of dubious reputation who's had what you call "run-ins with the law" (doesn't matter that no charges stuck), and Argent has money and a veneer of respectability, and Stilinski might listen with some awkward sympathy, but he's sure not going to investigate on nothing but Derek's word. That's how police corruption really happens most of the time, you know? You just have to have basically nice folks who instinctively weight the words of the right kind of people higher than the words of the wrong kind of people, because of who just *feels trustworthy* to them. And suddenly you have a license for predators to operate, because no one takes their victims seriously.
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Date: 2015-03-30 09:56 pm (UTC)From:Also, there's a third explanation for Stiles' shout down the hall, which is that this is a parallel world that differs from ours in a) werewolves and b) no homophobia. which doesn't exactly preclude either of your options, but lowers the degree they would need to be true to explain Stiles' actions.
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Date: 2015-04-03 02:05 pm (UTC)From:With the alpha-beta-omega thing, I wonder if what Derek meant was that he and Scott are *potentially* betas, in that they're not alphas. But they're not part of Peter's pack until they choose to be (the free will thing). So yeah, technically I guess they'd both be omegas. But maybe Scott's too new to be a real omega - he's hardly a 'lone wolf' yet. And Derek was born a werewolf, into a werewolf family, and lives on his pack's turf. Laura's only just died so he hasn't been 'lone' for more than a few days or so. Derek'd probably have the strongest drive to join the new pack given the rules about how alphas are made and that the new alpha's actually family (not that he knows that yet), but *this* alpha killed his sister to claim the title so fuck them, he's not joining, he's going to find the alpha and kill it. What I'm saying, I think, is that the unusual circumstances of Laura's death and Scott's very recent bite mean that the beta vs omega categories don't quite apply, or haven't had time to solidify yet.
Also, what is it with Tyler Posey's face? I mean he's cute as a button and hot and all that but in oblique shots his face looks weirdly asymmetrical. Yet full-face it's fine. He must have very oddly-shaped facial bones. Derek's much more classically symmetrical from any angle, but with Scott I keep thinking he's suddenly had half his jaw or cheek removed.
I'm really enjoying it on the laptop. I think TW lost a lot 1st time around as I watched it on a smaller more distant TV screen. I'm catching loads more details this way. Finstock was wonderfully bonkers - he does excellent crazy eyes - and Stiles' facial expressions are priceless.