60 Teen Wolfs in 60 Days: day 5, The Tell

[hth]

 

This is going to be a shorter recap than the others, and I can't tell if it's because I'm getting tired/lazy already, or if.... No, that seems like it's probably it.

 

Nevertheless, this is a really good episode! I feel like I've crossed a divide; I watched the first four episodes in this sort of information-seeking mode – What Is Teen Wolf? How does it work? Do I like these characters and what are they like, and what do I want them to accomplish? What kind of tone/genre are we in, what are the supernatural rules, etc etc etc. This is the first episode where I kind of went, oh, okay, I'm watching Teen Wolf now! I know this show. What happens this week on Teen Wolf? I feel like for me, this was the first regular episode.

 

I feel like they got the mix right on this one. Little bits of it are funny: Lydia totally ignoring Jackson's impassioned pleas for a Nicholas Sparks reprieve, Stiles mocking his dad's mistaken impression that he's an adult who can choose his own food, Stiles totally ignoring Danny's clear desire not to be buds who share information, Scott and Allison's truly darling flirting, most everything about the parent/teacher conferences. Other parts are pretty genuinely scary: Jackson trapped under the shelf while the Alpha stalks around him, Kate tipping over from Argents-are-scary to scary psycho killer.

 

I don't think the parking-lot sequence quite worked for me on an action level for some reason, but I think it's actually an important show-moment, because you're exiting the point at which you can keep the overall world of Beacon Hills completely placid and have your plot take place totally on that Secret-History-of-the-World level. The whole thing is creepy and violent enough that even if people have no doubt that it was just a mountain lion in the parking lot, it's still like-- what the fuck, there are mountain lions in parking lots now? It kicks the story to a place where everyone is sort of affected by the creeping dread of what could happen at Beacon Hills at any moment; suddenly this isn't a story about a secret war taking place in a quiet little town, but a story about an objectively freaky town where people go around knowing anything could happen. It started out Sunnydale, but by the end of ep5, it's Twin Peaks, and that's a weirdness difference in kind, not degree.

 

Scott and Derek continue their process of slowly and painfully negotiating what kind of werewolf Scott can be, and what kind of werewolf he's willing to be. I think they have an interesting relationship; it really is very familial in some sense already, marked by this need they have for relationships with people like themselves and the heavy expectations they're already putting on each other – teach me, help me with this, I can't without you. It seems like in this universe werewolves seek packs in a somewhat instinctive way, driven by this never-entirely explained sense that they're “stronger together,” not just as unit but in and of themselves. I'm down with that, as the kind of fan who almost always bonds with the Team Entity as much as, or often more than, with pairings. (What I'm saying is, Everyone Is Poly Because Pack, right? Y'all have to tell me that's a thing. I need it to be a thing.)

 

My own lifemate, Mary, was in the room with me while I rewatched this one, paying just enough attention to go over the last few days' ground (“Is that seriously his hair?” “I KNOW, right? This is what I'm saying!”) (“Who's the cut-rate Dean Winchester?” “Thank you!”), and her reaction to Derek cornering Jackson at school was, “How does this guy not get arrested?” I don't really have a good answer for that, but yeah, I gotta say that security is pretty fucking lax at Beacon Hills High. It's interesting to see a scene between two guys that's shot with the kind of sexual menace that female characters are often subjected to in this genre – Jackson is exposed, vulnerable, and terrified; Derek is stronger, unpredictable, and deliberately violating his space. It's a scene that, as far as I remember, has no real equivalent for any of the female characters on the show, and that's.... I mean, on a human level I feel bad for Jackson, who is clearly traumatized by thing after thing and we're not even halfway through the first season, but it's kinda nice to see the show buck the whole knee-jerk “being female=being sexually vulnerable” equation. Refreshing? Can you be refreshed in a super uncomfortable way?

 

In case that scene made you feel less than warmly toward Derek, they don't wait very long to let his karma rebound on him. Just a few scenes later, he's exposed and frightened, his home invaded by someone he can't effectively fight, and subjected to an extremely sexualized form of dominance. Again, seeing that gender dynamic fucked with was interesting; the highly-sexual Wicked, Predatory Woman type character is a trope, yeah, but usually her scenes with the hero are framed in a way that makes her seem, at best, unsettling – and often that makes him seem cautiously intrigued as well as oppositional. It's interesting to see that Killer Dominatrix character be so entirely successful, both in her physical attack on the male character and in terms of making him genuinely frightened to the point of flat-out running for his life. I think it points up how much I normally expect that type of character to be immediately undercut; she exists for audience titillation, not normally to be the full-on master villain that the heroes confront and lose to several times before the end. Kate's sexual menace isn't there to be fun, it's actually as legitimately scary as it would be if she were a male character making veiled rape threats against a female protagonist. Learning what we learn down the line – that she's not just threatening him sexually, but gloating quietly about having already exploited him sexually – just doubles down on the creepiness in this scene and obviously makes his fear even more poignant. It also says something potentially interesting about how he deals with Jackson: we see in his confrontation with Kate how Derek has learned to feel about power and fear, what he's learned to believe a show of strength looks like, and how you put someone in their place.

 

Happily, sustained contact with the lovable dorks Derek has fallen in with begins to re-humanize him in fairly short order, but I think we get a glimpse in this episode of exactly what kind of vengeful sociopath Derek was capable of becoming.

 

 

 

Comments

[mecurtin]

Kate's sexual menace isn't there to be fun, it's actually as legitimately scary as it would be if she were a male character making veiled rape threats against a female protagonist.

This is definitely how fandom has perceived it, but I'm not at all sure that's how either most of the audience *or* the suits at MTV perceived it. It's so contrary to what Hollywood has taught people to expect that I'm not sure most people could actually parse it properly onscreen. And then -- for whatever reason -- neither Jeff nor the cast has really talked about Derek as an abuse survivor, not until fans pressed them and even then kind of vaguely.

I think we get a glimpse in this episode of exactly what kind of vengeful sociopath Derek was capable of becoming

Yes.

[hth]

Heh, I'm usually terrible at guessing how other people perceive things! Other people see all kinds of stuff that sounds legitimately nuts to me. The thing I focused into about Kate -- and it's a combination of the script and Wagner's acting choices, I think -- is that she's an extremely credible antagonist. She's already killed werewolves by the fistful. She's not fucking around in combat: she gets Derek on the ground almost instantly, she unloads a hail of automatic fire on him. I think it's a strong choice to make her someone who can walk into a main character's house and rout him *entirely,* hurt him and bring him in minutes to the point where he knows it's run like hell or die. So to me, this Hollywood-typical sexual banter is totally upended: it's not Batman and Catwoman sparring, it's a serial killer toying with a victim who just needs to get out of the house. (Also, it's not banter. Derek doesn't step up to return any of her volleys; the only thing he says to acknowledge any of it is, I know you're a liar.)

I may be the one succumbing to Hollywood logic, though. Often when you have a hero that badly beaten, there's some personal thing he has to resolve before he can come back stronger and do better; I may be projecting "Derek has to stop being terrified of his abuser" onto that when it wasn't meant to be. Still, I think it's one of those readings that adds something retroactively! Particularly when you do see him at this point in his life waffling on that edge of victim/victimizer. Seeing Kate as a trauma that has to be dealt with not only deepens the series of Kate/Derek conflicts, but also provides a little more explanation for what motivates Derek's change from kind-of-an-asshole to gruff-but-fond in his relationship with Scott&co.

[anatsuno]

Yes, yes yes yes. Everything you say about the Jackson incident, Kate as a credible masterful antagonist, and Derek's various dealings with others. Just. Yes.