"The Dark Moon, Part Two:" Or: Emily Still Isn't Done Talking About Teen Wolf

I have a problem, my friends, and that problem is Kate Argent. Between her hijinks in the time since her "death," her weird connection to Araya and the Calavera hunters, and those crazy bony things that I am pretty sure are berserkers, I have so many questions (and half-formed theories) and I am DYING for answers. And that's not even getting into that whole "turning-Derek-into-a-cute-teenager" thing. Like, what the fuck is she doing? What are her motivations? I have a couple ideas, tbh, though probably unlikely-- with this show, though, you never really know. I'm hoping it will help out timeline-wise, as well, although we all know Jeff Davis is allergic to numbers, and as such, trying to make a logical timeline is totally futile. I cannot take credit for all of these ideas, though; anything in this post are theories and hypotheses that are a result of my frequent brainstorming sessions with my dearest Kathleen, which is very much a collaborative effort.


ALRIGHT, so I've been waffling about how to go about this, because there is a LOT and it's kind of all over the place, so I think I'm going to do a timeline of what we know with regards to Kate, with episode references first, and then kind of go from there. Kate's death played a role in the plot for three main episodes between seasons 1 and 2: S01E12 "Codebreaker," S021E01 "Omega," and S02E02 "Shape-Shifted." From there, I have been able to, after a TON of hair-pulling and general brain-twistiness, in addition to a lot of guesswork, managed to figure out a roughly six day timeline between Kate's death and the following full moon, which, according to Scott in this week's "The Dark Moon," was when Kate finally made her full transformation into a werejaguar. Granted, knowing Jeff and his inability to give us actual dates or time spans for anything, there's a huge possibility that this is completely wrong or will be jossed somehow in the future, but still, I'm going for it. So, here's a brief-ish outline of events:

Day 1: (I'm thinking that this takes place on a Friday, because I'm pretty sure the dance happened after the kids had school)

• The formal dance is that evening: Scott is outed as a werewolf to Allison, and Lydia is attacked and bitten by Peter.
• Allison's family makes her go straight home to pack up before being sent off with Kate to go to the house in Washington. Instead of going there, though, Kate takes Allison to the hospital to visit Lydia and uses the attack to manipulate Allison into helping her catch Derek and Scott in the woods by the Hale house. Meanwhile, Scott has broken Derek out of where he was being held by the hunters, and Stiles spills the beans to Chris about Kate setting the Hale Fire.
• Eventually, Peter kills Kate by ripping her throat out with his claws, and then Peter was set on fire by the kids and ultimately killed by Derek. Chris leaves Allison's Argent pendant on Kate's body, which leads the police to realize Kate was the one responsible for the Hale fire as well as the murders of all of her accomplices in the fire (though we know that was actually Peter's work.)

Day 2: (I'm guessing Saturday. Also, weirdly, I'm pretty sure the flashback from "Omega" came before Chris and Victoria's chat in the kitchen at the end of "Codebreaker)

• Scott and Allison hang out in Allison's car and make out, where they're found by Chris, who threatens to shoot Scott in the head until Allison promises never to see him again.
• That night, Chris reads a newspaper article about Kate that ties her to both the Hale Fire and Peter's murders. Victoria is pissed about it. She informs Chris that "they" (ie Gerard and his hunter goons) will be arriving in two days. Chris tells Victoria that he's not the only one Scott needs to worry about now (which is what made me think that this scene came AFTER Chris threatened Scott with his gun.)

Day 3: (the night before Kate's funeral, presumably on Sunday)

• Scott sneaks over to Allison's to hook up. Her parents come home early and Scott is forced to flee the house, lest Victoria chops him into itty bitty pieces with her knives. 
• Meanwhile, Stiles is said by Melissa to have spent the entire weekend at the hospital to check in on Lydia, which suggests that this all happened on a Sunday night.
• Lydia goes into a Peter-Hale-induced banshee-fugue-state and flees the hospital, so Stiles, Allison and Scott run into the woods to look for her.
• Isaac digs Kate's grave in preparation for her funeral, and in the process, stumbles upon an omega wolf who is chowing down on the organs of a recently deceased and buried body. He's rescued by Derek and is presumably offered and given the bite that night.

Day 4: (the day of Kate's funeral, I'm guessing it's Monday)

• Allison hears rampant rumors about Kate being a serial killer all over school before she leaves early for the funeral service. 
• Once there, she and her parents are harassed by hordes of various reporters asking questions about Kate and her involvement in all those crimes, and the Sheriff and his deputies eventually have to put up a barricade. Victoria makes it a point to mention that it was Gerard's idea to have such a highly publicized funeral.
• Gerard and his goons finally arrive just in time for the burial, and he introduces himself to Allison, who only barely remembers him. Chris never at any point calls Gerard his father; he only ever refers to him by his first name, which I also think is important.
• Once night falls, Gerard and Chris, followed by many of their hunter reinforcements, stumble upon the omega in the woods, which Gerard kills with a broadsword; this is witnessed by both Scott and Derek, who are hiding nearby. Chris is clearly disgusted by Gerard's disregard for the Code, but Gerard reminds him that the werewolves killed "[his] daughter" and, in response to that, he declares war on the werewolves.
• Lydia is found by Stiles and Sheriff after running through the woods for over a day. (Lydia told Allison at school that she had been missing for two days, but in reality she was only missing for two nights, with one day in-between.)

Day 5: (Tuesday, the day before the full moon)

• Late that night, Allison and Scott have a secret meeting in the woods at midnight. Scott is clearly still rattled about having watched Gerard kill the omega the night before, and asks Allison if she's sure that Gerard doesn't know that he's a werewolf. 
• Isaac gets into a fight with his dad. His dad throws a glass at him, which shatters and cuts his cheek, though it heals in seconds, revealing that he had already been bitten and healed from it. His dad is shocked, so Isaac runs away on his bike. His dad chases him down into a dark alley, where his dad is killed by the kanima.

Day 6: (Wednesday, the day of the full moon)

• Lydia returns to school for the first time since she was attacked by Peter, and Allison's family is still very curious/suspicious about what Lydia is, since she was bitten by an alpha and didn't die, but also hasn't seemed to have turned into a werewolf either.
• Isaac is arrested as a suspect in his father's murder, which is terrible timing, because this day is his first full moon. Derek and Stiles ultimately team up to break Isaac out before he has the chance to hurt anyone, while Allison helps lock Scott up so he doesn't hurt anyone, either. Allison and Scott later see the kanima for the first time that night.

It's definitely possible that I've made a mistake somewhere in here, but either way, I feel comfortable guessing that there was roughly a week, give or take a day or two, between when Kate died and the following full moon. This is where we start applying the information we just learned from this week's episode. Scott said that the Calaveras heard that Kate had been clawed to death by an alpha, and wanted to make sure she was really dead and not turning into a werewolf, so they went to go check her body. Since she was still in the morgue, I'm gonna say that she was probably taken-- while still probably unconscious and healing-- somewhere around Days 2-3 of the timeline. From here, it's mostly guesswork. I'm feeling pretty confident that she was just kept in that gross bathroom until she finally gained consciousness in the days leading up to the full moon, while her body was slowly healing itself. By the time she was finally moving, it was already the full moon, which is by when bitten hunters are supposed to have killed themselves, BEFORE they transform for the first time. We saw this with Alexander Argent in "Motel California," and with Victoria Argent in "Party Guessed," so that lines up with what we've been told thus far.

Unfortunately for the Calaveras, they played this very, very stupidly, especially for a group of people who are said to have taken it upon themselves to make sure that their precious Code is upheld. First, they gave her a straight-razor with which to kill herself, which, as I've already talked about in the recap, was really dumb, considering her body had literally healed so much that she was MAGICALLY HEALED FROM HER FATAL INJURIES AND BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE. Maybe it's because Kate was such a werewolf-hating hunter, and they weren't expecting her to want to actually live as a supernatural creature, or maybe it was the opposite and they were worried Kate's survivor instincts would kick in and she might actually use a bigger/more lethal weapon against them instead of herself. 

Either way, it totally didn't end up working. It was also poor timing for the Calaveras that she had only become conscious so close to the full moon, because it ultimately worked in her favor-- she needed her the strength of her full transformation in order to make her escape, which meant she needed to stay alive until the moon rose and gave her it's power. Then, while our Beacon Hills Gang was too busy trying to keep Isaac from eating anyone he came across, or scrambling to figure out what the fuck that lizard-thing was, Kate had slit her wrists just enough to leave a convincingly-sized puddle of blood for her to lay in, and after that, all she had to do was play dead and wait. She got lucky again when she was found by a bunch of newbie hunters instead of the big guns who might have put up a fight, like Severo, so she was able to channel the pain of transforming into the fuel to fight and kill her way through them and finally make her escape.

Now, the million dollar question is, what has she been up to in the meantime? We obviously don't have enough information to account for everything that she did between S02E02-S03E24, but I do have a hunch about part of it, something I've already discussed on Tumblr here. Basically, when we first saw the Alpha Pack at the end of S02E12 "Master Plan," there were an awful lot of feminine-looking, light-skinned clawed hands in the mix, way more than should have existed, considering that there was only one female werewolf that we knew of in the Alpha Pack--Kali, who was biracial, and who had a much darker skin tone than these hands. See what I mean? It looks just like Kate's body.

So, whose hands are they? Well, I can't say for sure, obviously, but I'm pretty sure at least one pair of them belongs to Kate. Both bodies look a lot like Kate's build and style-- they both seem to be tallish, thin and fit bodies that are wearing tight jeans, tank tops, and black leather jackets, which is basically Kate's entire wardrobe. Plus, I mean, this is the first we've ever heard of a nagual/werejaguar in Teen Wolf thus far, aside for that one time that they called the kanima a werejaguar and then ended up making it a lizard-creature (which is something that kind of pissed me off, but that's another story for another day), so I can imagine that Deucalion would be extremely interested in having a nagual in his pack, especially considering they have the hunters as a mutual enemy. 

Plus, her eyes are green, and not gold or blue or red like we've come to know from other supernatural creatures; for example, Malia is a werecoyote, but she still has blue eyes, thanks to the fact that she took innocent life as a child; and likewise, Kira's kitsune eyes are a different (and prettier, if we're being honest) shade of gold, but they're still in the same color family. So, could the green eyes be a sign of some kind of extra abilities that your typical werewolf/coyote creatures wouldn't have? I think it's a pretty safe bet, especially considering the fact that she managed to de-age Derek--that seems to suggest some kind of magical abilities. So yeah, I'm definitely starting to think that Kate was at least allied with the Alpha Pack at some point, even if she wasn't a member herself.

Now, time to move onto the next question I have-- why is Araya SO obsessed with finding Kate? We kind of got the indication last season that the Calaveras and the Argents have a history, and it would be logical to assume that since they're both hunter families, they just probably have worked together a lot over the years. Still, though, there seems to be a lot more history there than just family friends, and the fact that Araya went all the way to the USA from Mexico just to make sure that Kate wasn't turning (and then, when it was shown that she was turning, Araya went through all of the trouble of smuggling her into Mexico where they could keep an eye on her until she could uphold the Code and kill herelf) seems pretty overboard, even for a family who has proclaimed themselves to be dedicated enforcers of the Code.

Then I started thinking-- is there a Grandma Argent? We've always been told that the Argents have a matriarchal leadership, but we've never seen or even really heard anyone talk about Gerard having a wife, which is weird, because if he had one, wouldn't she be in charge? The only real Argent matriarchs we've ever seen were Victoria and Allison, and even when Vicki was alive, Gerard still seemed to be the one ultimately calling the shots. When you add that in with the fact that we've never (to my recollection, anyway) heard Chris call Gerard "dad," nor have we really ever heard Gerard refer to himself as Chris' father, and it made me start thinking--is it possible that Chris and Kate are actually half-siblings? Consider this scenario, for a moment: what if Chris is Gerard's stepson, from his former wife's previous relationship or marriage, while Kate is actually his biological daughter? And furthermore, what if Chris and Kate's mother was ARAYA? She and Chris did seem to have a very intense and strained relationship with Araya, and she called him "mijo" ("my son,")--although, to be fair, she also called Scott and Lydia "mijo"/"mija," so it's also possible that she just uses that as a term of endearment, of sorts.

Still, I could totally see it. Imagine it: Araya had Chris during her first marriage, or maybe out of wedlock, and then, a couple years later, she married Gerard and had Kate with him. Gerard adopted Chris as his own and groomed both kids into following his hunter footsteps. Then, of course, Araya realized that Gerard is the worst of the worst psychopaths, and totally left his ass; but, Kate and Chris were Gerard's little soldier protegées, so they stuck with him/the Argent family. It just seems to explain a LOT-- if Kate was Araya's daughter, Araya would NOT want to see her child become the kind of creature she loathed, and would be fucking LIVID to find that her daughter had not only failed to kill herself before her first transformation--per the Code, just as many hunters before her had done in her position-- but also KILLED HER OWN PEOPLE in order to get away from them so she could stay alive as a monster, in their eyes. It could also explain why she would be so intent to find her that she would torture a bunch of teenagers for information about her, and why she would be so desperate to get Kate back into her clutches that she would send said teenagers with a well-known supernatural mercenary to find her? Like, if Kate was any other supernatural, wouldn't they just send a team out to take her down? Why bring her back, alive, unless there was some kind of connection?

I have another theory too, which is sort of connected to the aforementioned theory, but I'm thinking it's pretty unlikely that BOTH will end up happening. However, I'm sharing it anyway. Maybe one of the two will be correct, or neither, but it's fun to speculate anyway. I've already seen discussion about this possibility as well, so I'm apparently not the only one who is thinking it. SO, we were recently introduced to Malia Tate, who had spent half of her life living as a coyote after she unexpectedly started changing on a full moon in a car with her mom and sister and ultimately caused the wreck that killed them both. We were also told by Lydia, who used her banshee senses and Talia Hale's claws to figure out that Peter was actually Malia's father--a fact which Talia made Peter forget by stealing his memories of it by using her alpha-claws-in-the-neck trick, at some point before she was killed in the fire. Ever since we learned that Peter is Malia's dad, we've all been wondering, "Who is Malia's mother?" And guys, I'm honestly starting to believe that it's Kate, and here's why:

First, let's compare some dialogue, shall we? All the way back in S01E09 "Wolf's Bane," Kate followed Allison on a run to the Hale house, where Allison admitted that she was hoping to find some answers as to why Derek was the way he was, since back then, she was still under the impression that Derek was a scary murderer who tried to kill them all in the school that one night that Peter tricked them all. Allison made a comment about Derek being a "psychotic killer," to which Kate replies, "You don't have to be psychotic to be a killer. You just need a reason. And even then, sometimes, you can surprise yourself." 

Then, in this week's episode, Araya said something that was eerily familiar while she was torturing Scott. "Tell me who actually has Derek! Who had a reason, a vendetta particular to the Hales?" A REASON, they kept saying. Like, say, a baby, conceived between Kate Argent, from a centuries old hunter family, and Peter Hale, who was from a well-known, centuries-old werewolf family? Maybe the two tried to figure out how to make it work, by hiding Kate and taking care of her while she was pregnant, and maybe they even got help from Talia and the family to do it. But, over time, Talia knew deep down that, if the Argents were to ever to find out that Kate and Peter had a child together, they would likely kill Peter, which would also put the pack in danger, not to mention what horrible things could happen to Kate and the baby. So, she takes Peter's memory of having a child with Kate, takes the baby and gives it up for adoption. 

We don't know if the memory thing works on humans, but I would guess that it probably doesn't, so Talia could do nothing to make Kate forget about the child. In that respect, all she could do was hope that Kate would care too much about her own life (and that of her child's) to rat Talia out to her family, knowing that she would be unable to do so without seriously implicating herself as well. And maybe that hope ended up being true, to an extent-- maybe Kate went crawling back to Gerard, lying about feeling rebellious and trying to get out of the hunter life to cover up the fact that she was hiding because she was pregnant. Maybe she apologized to Gerard and swore up and down that being a hunter is what she is and that she wants to take her place back in the hunter ranks, and made she she came to Gerard bearing a detailed, ruthless plan to take out the Hales in one go that would please Gerard so much that he would welcome her back with open arms. Then, it would just be a matter of going after poor, sweet little Derek, who she knew had just had just suffered the loss of his first girlfriend Paige. Kate was older than him, and really pretty, and called him handsome, and she told him what they had was so special that no one would understand, so he kept it from everyone in his family. He was too young and unobservant to know or care to realize how she was connected to his family, and Uncle Peter in particular. And after that, I think we all know what happens. 

Granted, if Malia is ACTUALLY the product of the unholy alliance that is Peter Hale and Kate Argent, I will feel SO BAD FOR HER, because that's a hell of a legacy to have to bear. But, I just can't help but think about how much it all just makes so much sense. We never understood how Malia could have randomly turned one night while driving with her mother and sister, without anyone expecting it would happen, but if Malia had been adopted by parents who had no idea she was supernatural, (like, say, if Talia was trying to keep this part-hunter, part-shapeshifter baby on the down-low as to not arouse suspicions) then that would explain why no one put it together until Sheriff started to look at the case again. Plus, we know that Araya was in possession of Talia's claws, because Derek and Peter found them at her house after they had been captured by them (and released by Braedon.) So, maybe Araya starts putting things together, knows somehow that Talia's claws have some purpose that can shed some light on the connection between the Hales and the Argents, and somehow came upon them and held onto them. Whether that was because she wanted the information, or whether she was trying to prevent OTHERS from learning it, I have no idea. Regardless, I can't shake the feeling that Peter and Kate have some kind of history we don't know about yet. 

There is one MUCH less likely theory that Kathleen and I were kicking around, which is that Araya is Agent Douchenozzle's mother, which would explain why Araya was so weird with Scott and why she was so preoccupied with wanting to know what kind of alpha he is, and why she made such a big deal about how she'd have to hunt him down in the event that he ever bit someone and made a beta of his own, even if it was consensual, which seemed kind of weird to me. I don't really have a lot of evidence to support this, though, and if the Araya/Kate/Chris connection winds up being true (and it makes a lot more sense than this theory, imo), it will render this theory void anyway, but it's still been niggling at my brain a bit either way. If that were the case though, ADN would have probably been brought up in the hunter lifestyle as well, and while FBI agent isn't exactly a huge leap from hunter (and we already know that Argent hunters at the very least have contacts in law enforcement anyway), I still don't really have any other information to explain how that would work.

Moving on-- do you think any of the Argent family knew that Kate was really alive/had turned? Would the Calaveras have let them know about it, or would Araya have thought she was doing them a favor by allowing them to think she had just been killed, rather than knowing that she had come back, just to have killed herself anyway? Even if they didn't tell them, though, I could TOTALLY see Gerard figuring it out from his own hunter contacts-- you'd think that Kate's escape would have probably resulted in some rumors flying around the hunter community, right? Six hunters dead at the hands of a newly-turned werejaguar, by a fellow/former hunter?. The fact that it was Gerard who insisted on such a public funeral makes me extremely suspicious that he knew and was trying to cover it up somehow, too. Plus, we know Gerard isn't exactly opposed with teaming up with supernatural creatures if it gets him what he wants-- he made that alliance with Scott to get the bite, and then took control of kanima!Jackson after Gerard killed Matt-- so why would teaming up with his newly nagual-werejaguar-daughter be any different? That said, I have a hard time believing that Chris knew anything about it, and same with Allison; she was MUCH too freaked out about her hallucinations and nightmares of Kate to have known, either, otherwise wouldn't she have said something more about it?

Which, of course, brings up the question-- was something trying to tell Allison about Kate being alive via her hallucinations in "Anchors" and "More Bad Than Good?" The Nemeton, maybe? Kate herself? She not only hallucinated Kate being in the same morgue drawer where the Calaveras found her after she died, but she also hallucinated her with fangs before we ended up learning that she's a werecreature, too. That just seems to be important, but now that Allison's gone I'm not sure we're going to get any answers about it. 

My last thing that I wanted to talk about were those creepy bony-creatures who are apparently berserkers (YESSSS!) and how they seem to relate to La Loba. So, we already know a little bit about berserkers, from when Chris and Derek were talking about them in "Echo House"--they were originally Germanic warriors who wore the skins of bears to channel their ferocity, and ultimately BECAME THEM. According to Chris, he knew someone whose son and his friends had been doing rituals with animal skins and somehow tapped into the berserker magic, and since they aren't tempered by the moon like werewolves are, they ended up being WAY more vicious and brutal than any werewolf. Now, last season in "More Bad Than Good" and at the end of "The Divine Move," Araya and/or Severo were interrogating Peter and Derek about La Loba, and though Derek assumed that they were referring to Cora, we learned that they had no idea who Cora was, right before Kate showed up, which led us all to believe that Kate was, in fact, La Loba. 

According to folklore that I've read that is supposedly specific to the Tarahumara Indians, La Loba is a woman, also called "the bone woman," who wanders the world and gathers bones. She especially likes the bones of wolves, and when she has collected enough bones to make a full wolf skeleton, she sings over the bones until they grow skin and fur and become live wolves. Then, if sunlight or moonlight hits the wolf in just the right way, the wolf turns into a laughing woman. I'm not sure how much Jeff is actually taking from this myth, but it definitely looked like the maybe-berserkers were assembling themselves out of bones and pieces of flesh, so perhaps it's kind of a melding of the stories of La Loba and the berserkers? She gives them the power to become alive, using bones and animal skins, and then they become super vicious creatures, a la the berserkers who channeled their ferocity from the skins, and who end up being completely under her control as a result of the fact that she was the one who made them. That is a pretty terrifying thought, tbqh, but I am intrigued nonetheless.

So yeah, to say that there are a lot of ridiculous possibilities for what could happen next is the understatement of the century. Basically, Kate Argent is a woman of mystery, and despite not being her biggest fan, I'm still super fascinated by her, and really excited to see where she will take us in this newest season. 

I'm going to save everything else regarding Derek and Kate for Monday's episode, because this thing is already way too long as it is, plus we don't have a lot of information about it yet so it's probably a good idea to wait. In the meantime, what do you think about Kate and the Cavaleras? What are your theories? Are you feeling good about this season thus far? Tell me what you're feeling. :)