60 Teen Wolfs in 60 Days: day 45, The Fox & the Wolf

[hth]

Oh, lord, we're doing more things with time. I don't know what it is about this show or my brain getting old and slow, but every time we do flashbacks on Teen Wolf, I get completely befuddled.

 

It took me a little while to notice it, because Stiles on his own is pretty fidgety anyhow, but there's that particular drumming motion that the Stilesitsune does with his fingers that's distinct to it, which is quite cool now that I'm alert to it. Now I want to go back in the season and see where we first begin to see Stiles do that.

 

They don't really get into it in this season, but I'm hoping they come back around to the kitsunes' immortality. Is Kira going to live 900 years, too, or does being half-human reduce her chances of that? And there's definitely a lot to be played with in this idea that Kira, like her mother, might sometimes choose to marry a human, which would be an episode in her lifetime, but the whole of her spouse's life. There's definitely meat on the bones of that whole concept.

 

Okay, they're really overkilling it with the drums. We can't hear Noshiko's important speech about where the nogitsune came from if you keep putting the dramatic drums really loudly over her talking.

 

Not sure there's that much to say about this one. It's nice to get some backstory around the nogitsune, I suppose, and I do like how the show's mythology continues to wind back around the nemeton in various ways. Allison got a nice bit, hearkening back to her fears about being powerless, which have been a big deal for her character all the way back to the beginning. I feel like the B team did a lot of running around with very little to show for it, except possibly the realization that they'll have to think in terms of riddles and tricks to understand what the nogitsune is throwing at them, which could pay off at some point.

 

Putting the period-piece flashback stuff in there was an interesting opportunity to play with a different visual quality in the series, but I still feel like it all stretched out a little longer than the story really warranted. I suppose at this point in the season, I feel like we should be into the propulsive, ticking-clock stuff; episode 9 is a hell of a time to take a breather and deepen our monster mythology at the expense of literally anything else they might be having to deal with. Maybe this is just the point where it's starting to become a handicap for the show that this season only has one villain and one threat; all of the other seasons have made such good use of the collision of different forces as they close in around the main cast, I'm not sure the writers quite know what to do with a plot as linear as this one.