60 Teen Wolfs in 60 Days: day 28, Unleashed

[hth]

Scott is doing Science! Oh, man, that's too fucking cute for me. Shut down the recap! We're done here!

 

Oh, my god, I so very much hope Jennifer is being literal and she actually has a therapist. Can you even imagine? I do think it's sort of sweet that this Derek thing kind of happened to her without being part of her plan. I mean, I think it's easy to do Scheming Evil Lady, but I kind of like Awkward Evil Lady who's all beflustered by meeting a cute boy while she's trying to wreak gruesome revenge on Deucalion. Oh, uh – spoiler alert?

 

Okay, so, Stiles and his virginity. There's a lot of things I love about this scene. All the things, really, are things I love about this scene. What are the things? The things, let me tell you them.

 

1. I love Scott making fun of Stiles for asking him dumb questions. “It's a new policy!” Scott is usually too full of intense Feelings to be the witty one, but when he does get a joke off, it's usually all the better because of it. (see also: “I think I will take that drink now.”)

2. I love the poker face Stiles gives Scott for making fun of him. You're not funny, McCall. Only he is, though! Whatever, Stiles, you're just mad because he made you think about him having sex with Kyle and now you feel funny.

3. I love that Stiles is, once more, actually wrong in his earliest theories. I mean, he got the virgin thing, but the whole truth is far too complicated for anyone to guess, so he's working off misleading partial information and stressing about the wrong things. I love this as a subset of a larger issue on Teen Wolf, which is that this show doesn't stress out too much about Virginity as a concept. We never really know when either Scott or Stiles lose theirs, because it's not a specific event that has profound significance; we know that they are, and then they get older and have girlfriends and things progress and at some point they aren't anymore. It's not a Very Special Episode. It's not a narratively significant moment for either of them. It's just a part of growing up, which is so nice to see on tv. This show really just has the nicest, healthiest attitude toward sex.

4. I love Danny. I love that, once more, Danny thinks you're kind of a dipshit for assuming it's that easy to get him into bed. Rock on with your high standards, Danny!

5. I love that Stiles thinks it's sweet. I think it's a callback to first-season Stiles worrying that Danny doesn't like him, but whether it is or not, it's just such a Stiles reaction to be touched by the gesture he thinks Danny is making.

6. I LOVE THAT HIS FIRST IMPULSE IS TO LOOK AT SCOTT. I don't know what he was checking for there; could be anything, really. Could be, Is everyone hearing what I'm hearing? Could be, Should I, y'think? Could be, What would you think of me if I did? It's just so telling to me about how tangled up Scott-and-Stiles are with each other that Stiles instinctively and automatically includes Scott in his decision-making process in re his virginity. I could spin it a hundred different ways. But the thing is, he totally checks in with Scott, and that is pretty much all the things for me.

 

Kali's not that much of a character – the season's just too overstuffed for everyone to get to do interesting things – but I do like her fighting style. She's always just especially fun to watch in the melees. I don't know if it's the actress or her stunt double or the choreography or what, but I like the way she moves.

 

I feel like the talking-to-Derek-while-impaled scene shouldn't really work because of how transparently it's a rehash of Gerard's talking-to-Scott-while-knifed scene from season two, but I guess I'm easy. Half the fun of supernatural shows is watching the characters take just insane amounts of damage from villains who are really only aiming to piss them off.

 

Speaking of underused characters – Boyd, my friend. I'm trying to pull for you here, buddy, but you're not making it easy on me by being friends with Erica. What about Isaac? He worked hard to find you! And you had a lot of time to bond with Cora; you can't have Cora as your one friend? She's useless, but at least she's not fucking Erica, you know?

 

Will somebody just add Lydia to the mailing list already? Jesus Christ.

 

Aaaand Scott's eyebrows just killed me at the end of that motorcycle scene. Dead of Scott's eyebrows, now, thanks.

 

Because they've used the Evil Chorale before as background music, it took me wayyy too long to realize that Lydia was actually hearing it, and that wasn't just the score to Lydia's regularly scheduled psychotic break. I feel like the process of figuring that out distracted from what should've been a nice, creepy scene.

 

Okay. So I don't usually talk that much about religion on my blog of fannish joy, but as it happens, I'm an actual card-carrying druid, so it's always a bit of fun to run across my people in pop culture. Usually it's an ahistorical mess, of course, which is fine. This is all fantasy; I don't get any more bent out of shape about it than I would expect practicing Catholics to get about all the angels running around in Certain Other Shows. Sometimes I do a little teeth-grinding over the nonsensical way that a lot of writers just pile together a bunch of random Gaelic-y looking shit and declare it Ancient Celtic Thus-and-Such, because – that's just not a thing. I mean, it's sort of a thing, but “Celtic” a classification that linguists and archaeologists and historians use to lump together a whole bunch of semi-related cultures over the course of something like a thousand years (arguably longer, but what you might think of as “ancient” Celtica spanned about 500 BCE to 500 CE) from Ireland to Turkey. So when you declare something Ancient Celtic, you're almost always going to be wrong, because practically nothing is applicable to everything that existed throughout that span of time and space.

 

That said... Teen Wolf is less shitty with their Ancient Celtic Nonsense than pop culture usually is! There's actually a certain amount of sound research in this show, mixed in with the nonsense, and I don't consider that necessary (I mean, this is a world where druids get to be Werewolf Guidance Counselors, which if only that were true), but it is nice! I was really afraid when they started playing the druid card that this would get painfully embarrassing, but I actually really enjoy getting to claim Dr. Deaton as one of my own, and the Nemeton concept actually makes some rather deft use of western European lore about world-trees, and Deaton's stuffy umbrage at Stiles' misapprehensions is quite satisfying for me, as someone who sometimes takes stuffy umbrage to shitty 18^th century pseudoscholarship posing as fact about druids, and no, darach doesn't mean “dark oak,” it's just Scots Gaelic for plain ol' regular “oak,” and druid isn't Gaelic at all, it's Latinized Gaulish, but I'm going to throw them this one for free because Gaelic defeats literally everyone eventually.

 

Basically I'm saying – fuck it, I know “Dr. Deaton Is a Druid, Actually” is nonsense, but it's my nonsense and I'm allowed to embrace it. Sure thing, Teen Wolf. Bring it on. Bog bodies and mistletoe and nemetons, let's do this thing. I got your back on this. Anyone gives you trouble, you just send them to me.

 

Aw. Poor, stupid Derek, feeling obligated to hurt the last person who actually kind of wants to be around him. And poor Isaac, obviously! I suppose the children of abusive assholes are often warped in the sort of way that encourages them to react to more abusive assholery with “Did I do something wrong?” (I mean, I get that Derek isn't actually being an asshole here, but it's still arguably abusive, even if he has the purest intentions on earth. Telling the kid who sees you as his only family, “You're too much work and I want you gone from my life” is definitely abusive, whether or not you're lying.)

 

Nice knowing ya, Harris, you rotten little weasel. There's an old saying: aid and abet one psychotic murderlady, shame on her. Aid and abet two psychotic muderladies, shame on you.

 

 

Comments

[green_grrl]

Huh. I pretty much take Jennifer as putting on an act from the start. Julia was an emissary for Kali's pack and steeped in the werewolf world. Deucalion happens, she nearly gets killed, she warps the natural course of things to resurrect, she sacrifices wildlife like crazy to get the power to glamour herself as much younger ...

I don't know that she had targeted Derek from the start, but once he showed up in the school basement while she played supernatural naïf, she was armed with virgin power and realized he was the perfect way to keep tabs on the wolf world. Derek's 22, Julia/Jennifer is at least in her thirties if not older. Not too many women in their thirties are legit flustered by a boy-man, even if he is handsome. I took her therapist line to be a private joke—she's actively ritually killing people on a grand revenge scheme. I think she knows objectively that she needs therapy, but she ain't getting it.

Since Derek started out as her protector, her acting like a bumbling, flustered girl, like the teenagers Derek already protects, gives him the illusion of being the knight/protector over helpless Jennifer. Perfect defense against suspicion. I did get suspicious when he fell so quickly because, seriously, Derek has trust issues on top of trust issues. He's marginally better than the asshole in the woods who threw Scott his inhaler, but not much, and only with the kids who he has a few mutual life-saving incidents with. Killing virgins to get power over sexuality was Jennifer's very first move in town, and I thinks she applied it, deliberately, right away. (And, once again, Derek gets used by an older woman.)

I do love that Stiles/Danny scene! Stiles' "really?" moment is so adorable. (It's hilarious that Danny draws the line at Stiles, but frankly his taste in boyfriends is shit. Stiles would be a much better choice than his cheating ex or a murdering alpha! I see them as guys who could hook up at their ten year reunion when Danny gets past the "Stiles is a geeky spaz" high school scene.)

[hth]

See, I think Derek was always a wrench in Jennifer's plans! She never made any real use of him, and that's because she never had any real use *for* him; she met him entirely by accident, he pursued her (the virgin-power probably served as catnip, but there's no indication she deployed it intentionally, instead of it just being a kind of charm-aura she has now), she doesn't try to get him to do anything until her plan is falling apart and she needs his help to extricate herself, and she's seems very intent on getting his -- forgiveness, or whatever she's pleading for when she tells him her story. He would never really have been effective as a spy against Deucalion; he didn't particularly know anything about Deucalion, certainly nothing she didn't know. He didn't actually seem to be of any value to her at all, except emotionally.

I don't think Jennifer is at all the cunning liar that Kate was, although maybe I just think that because it would be foolish of the writers to re-use the exact same plotline. If Jennifer is somehow luring him in (though how, exactly, and to what ends I really can't puzzle out), then she really is just the same story over again. It's more interesting if she's the weakened and confused figure that she claims to be, lashing out at those responsible for her murder but still as neurotic and emotionally vulnerable as she appears. The mess that ensues when she accidentally gets entangled with another neurotic and emotionally vulnerable person is more interestingly tragic in that case, rather than warmed-over from previous subplots.

I noticed before that Danny definitely seems to have a weak spot for the cold-blooded killers! When your track record is Matt and Ethan, that's just frankly worrisome. Heh, now I'm imagining him taking a second look at Stiles, but only while he's possessed....

[mific]

Covers eyes and hides because spoilers!
But I am almost caught up.

[hth]

Eeeek! I'm sorry. I really do feel like the last person on earth who hasn't seen this show, so I forget that I'm technically not!