Teen Wolf Season 5, Episode 7: "Strange Frequencies" Recap/Review
[Sorry once again for the lateness, guys! I don't know if it's summer slow-down, or another cycle of my never-ending on-and-off depression, or what, but I have been ridiculously slow-moving, unproductive, and generally crappy-feeling the last week or two. Here's hoping this Debbie-Downer cycle ends soon so I can get back on schedule and actually get started on replying back to comments/messages/etc as well. Thanks for understanding. --Emily]
So, remember when I said that the events of the last four episodes were going to make "Required Reading" feel like a pleasant dream? Well, it's already starting, and my heart is shattered into a million pieces, and if it's already this bad, then the last three episodes are going to be even worse in intensity? Are you guys ready for it? Because I'm really, really not. I don't mean to say that I don't like it, because I do, a LOT-- if I had to rank the seasons, I'd probably go with 3B, 4, 5A, 3A, 2, and 1, in that order. My problem is mostly just that I'm super overwhelmed because I hate seeing all of the characters hurting like this, and since everything is literally in shambles, it all just feels so hopeless-- the McCall Pack (and Scott especially, as the True Alpha and leader) draws its strength from each other and the bonds of their friendship, so if they're fractured and turned against each other, what hope do they have of succeeding? And since the Dread Doctors are sticking around through Season 5B, it could very well be that the midseason finale doesn't have a happy ending, and I'm dreading it very much.
Okay, so let's talk "Strange Frequencies," yeah? Buckle up, kiddos, because this is gonna be a long one.
Previously, on Teen Wolf: A electricity-eating chimera named Josh Diaz chomped on the wires to the generator on the roof of the hospital and then almost chomped on Stiles, who had wandered up there in the middle of a book-induced hallucination of his sick mother. Theo showed up just in time to save him, but ended up killing him by ripping his throat out with his claws. Theo begged Stiles not to say anything to Scott about what he had to do to defend himself and Stiles from the chimera, and when Stiles asked him why he shouldn't, Theo reminded him that he didn't say anything about Stiles killing Donovan. Liam, trying to make things up to his frenemy and future girlfriend Hayden, was helping pay back the money he owed her for spilled drinks and figured out that Hayden is also a chimera test subject of the Dread Doctors when he saw that her eyes reflected the light of a glow stick held in front of her face. Kira has been having some supernatural problems of her own, because her aura has become huge and fiery as hell, giving her increased strength, agility, and katana-wielding skills, but also causing her to get out of control to the point of trying to kill a chimera who was no longer a threat and muttering "I am the messenger of death!" in Japanese under her breath while she sleeps. When Theo brought this up to Scott, he admitted that he didn't think he could trust Kira anymore, a statement so uncharacteristic to Scott that your friendly neighborhood recapper is now convinced that Scott has been compromised by the Doctors or something. And this is kind of where we pick up today!
Our opening scene begins right where we left off in the previous episode, with Theo finally putting away his fangs and claws and looking at Stiles with a strange expression that seems like a mix between fear, sympathy, and something else I can't identify. Probably the strain from acting like he gives a shit, I'd guess. The generator is still shooting out showers of sparks every so often, and Josh's body is still laying on the ground at their feet. "I know what happened to Donovan," Theo explains in a tired voice. "I know everything." Stiles gets so furious about this that he totally forgets that he's a lowly human against a werewolf(/possibly a chimera) and grabs him by the front of the shirt before shoving him up against the chain-link fence surrounding the generator. "You don't know anything," Stiles sneers, causing Theo to briefly fight back by grabbing Stiles by the arms and spinning him so that he's the one with his back pressed to the fence instead, though Stiles is still gripping the front of his shirt.
"I was there!" Theo retorts loudly. "I was at the library. Malia found the book. She was texting us to see where you were. She said she left you at the library. I told her I was close. When I got there, I heard the scaffolding come down." I was trying to think back to what happened in "Condition Terminal," and whether or not Theo could have actually been there, but when I skimmed through my recap about it, I remembered that Theo pretty much only showed up at the creepy lab, when he was acting shifty and taunting Donovan and psychopath-monologuing to him before freeing him to go after Stiles, so while there were no hints that he was there when Donovan was killed, there are also no hints that he wasn't, so it's likely he's being honest about it. Plus, he was the one who sent Donovan after Stiles in the first place, so it makes sense he'd want to follow him and see what happened, and the fact that Malia apparently texted him to see if he knew where Stiles was just gave him an excuse to cop to having witnessed it so he can try to win Stiles' trust.
Anyway, Stiles, who realizes that Theo knows way too many details about what happened to be lying, reluctantly lets go of Donovan's shirt and asks him if he saw Donovan, but he states that he only saw the body. "I watched you come out," Theo continues. "I was gonna say something, but then I saw the cop car, and the body was gone." Stiles gives him a questioning look in response to that statement, but Theo swears that he has no idea who took him-- he only saw what Stiles saw, and when Stiles didn't say anything to anyone, he figured Stiles would appreciate it if he kept his mouth shut, too, which is pretty much the exact same thing he said to Malia about the Desert Wolf in last week's episode, which only further convinces me that this is just a ploy to win their trust, probably so he can further destroy the pack from within. Just then, they hear sirens approaching the hospital, and Theo's usual steely-calm gets just a little bit rattled. "That's not an ambulance, is it?" Theo asks, visibly exhausted, and when Stiles shakes his head in response, he insists that they need to get the fuck out of there, pronto.
Stiles, who is also starting to freak out a little, reminds him that they can't just leave the body there, so Theo suggests that they take it with them, citing the fact that someone is stealing the bodies anyway as further reason to go for it-- at least this way, they can find out who is doing it. Stiles, still panicking, looks down at Josh's body and notices the very obvious werewolf claws on his hands, and Theo firmly repeats that they have to do something soon unless they want to deal with the police. Stiles brings up the fact that Theo killed Josh, but Theo maintains that he did it in self-defense, because otherwise Josh would have killed both of them. I don't know, you guys. I mean, on the one hand, Josh was a chimera, and every time Theo got one over on him in the fight, he was able to shake it off pretty quickly and get back into it, which suggests that not only was he not fully conscious of what he was doing, but he was also working with some seriously good healing ability that allowed him to recover quickly enough to jump back into the fight, making him a hard opponent to fully overpower.
On the other hand, Theo did end up having the upper-hand in the fight just before he killed him, and even despite the fact that Malia seems to be stronger than he is, he's working with above-human strength, so when Theo ripped Josh's throat out, he wasn't exactly in immediate danger of death, and neither was Stiles. I don't know, I don't know-- like I said in the previous recap, Theo killing Josh was not the same kind of situation as Stiles killing Donovan, and I think both of them know that, but Theo is relying on Stiles not wanting Scott (or Sheriff) to know about Donovan to cover this up. ANYWAY, Theo, whose eyes are starting to fill with tears just like Stiles', reiterates that not leaving right now means that they're either going to have to tell the truth or come up with a convincing story. He then adds that it's Stiles' choice, because he's not going to ask him to lie to his own father. Fortunately for Theo, Stiles is just 1,000% done with everything right now, and just replies, "Don't worry, I've had plenty of practice." Dun dun dun! And so it begins! Stiles walks over to Josh's body and starts to grab his shoulders to pick him up, so Theo, looking relieved, rushes after him to help.
Meanwhile, over at Sinema, Liam has apparently filled Hayden in on the basic details of what's been going on in the Shadow World of Beacon Hills, because she is in the middle of storming out of the club and toward her car. A short moment later, Liam quickly follows behind her and tries to get her to believe him with little success. When he calls out to her to wait, Hayden just scoffs and replies, "Asking me to close my eyes was weird. Sticking a glow stick in my face? Even weirder." When she makes it to her car, she finally stops to turn back to face him. "But werewolves and dead doctors?" Liam, who has finally caught up with her, corrects her by telling her that they're actually "Dread Doctors," but she gives no fucks whatsoever-- she just wants to get out of there, and wants Liam to go away.
"What if I could prove it to you?" Liam replies desperately while she tries to unlock her car door. When Hayden just scoffs again and asks him what he's supposed to be proving, Liam says, "This" before letting out his golden beta eyes and fangs and roaring right in her face! Um, Liam, I know that this was how you told Mason you were a werewolf, but you didn't growl at him, you growled at full-shift!Theo when you thought he was going to attack you guys! So, maybe you could have chosen a less scary way of revealing yourself? Just a thought. As you would expect, Hayden immediately shrieks in terror and straight-up punches him in the face with so much force that Liam falls flat on his back onto the concrete with a bloody nose, just as Hayden finally gets into her car and zooms away. A+ for effort, Liam, but you get an F for execution.
Of course, Hayden's drive home involves her driving through the woods, and since she's all by herself, she's setting herself up for something terrifying to happen to her. Sure enough, she's already panicked enough as she drives through a darkened part of the woods with very few lights when she starts freaking out so badly that she just stops the car where she is. She grips the steering wheel and tries to pull herself together, but after a moment, she notices her injured knuckles from hitting Liam so hard and uses her uninjured hand to lightly put pressure on it. Suddenly, there's a weird sound like when you are sitting on a leather cushioned chair and it makes that groaning noise when you move, and when she looks at her injured hand again, she finds that the swelling is gone and the lacerations are totally healed, just like when she got clawed by Tracy in "Dreamcatchers." Do you think Tracy was drawn to her when she came to the school because she subconsciously knew that Hayden was a chimera and just couldn't remember being experimented on? I seriously need some answers about that.
Just when she's starting to wonder if maybe Liam wasn't actually telling the truth, the electronics in her car start going wonky and flashing before the Surgeon's robotic voice is heard through the radio (whose station is 91.5, I don't know if that's important or not)-- "Your condition improves." Yup, that's sufficiently terrifying. And, if that weren't scary enough, the headlights on her car start flickering until the engine is shut down completely, leaving her parked in the middle of a darkened back road. Thoroughly freaked out, Hayden starts frantically turning the key in her ignition to get the fuck out of there ASAP, but no matter how hard she tries, the engine won't turn over. She then starts hearing the Dread Doctors' weird rattling/hissing noise, just as they start marching slowly toward her from the opposite direction and flickering in and out of focus in that glitchy way of theirs. This sight only makes her even more desperate to try to drive away, but the car's machinery has been manipulated by the Doctors' electromagnetic powers to where it won't work. In a last ditch effort to save herself from them, she tries to open both the driver and passenger-side doors, but they just use their powers to lock them all from the inside to ensure that she can't get out.
Apparently, they just loooooove scaring their chimeras, too, because they start to broadcast their voices saying "Hayden. Hayden. Hayden," through the radio as well, along with cracking the windows, windshield, and side mirrors of her car, which gives the scene such a nightmarish quality that I was literally ready to have a heart attack and die when I watched the live airing. Fortunately for Hayden, not only to the Dread Doctors walk extremely slowly (possibly because they have their own health issues despite their powerful abilities and longevity?), but Liam continued to follow her even after she told him to get away out of her desire not to believe what he was telling her. So, just when she's sure she's about to get captured, Liam jumps up onto the roof of her car and peels the moon roof off of it before reaching his hand through the window toward her. "Come on!" he yells urgently, but he doesn't have to ask twice-- Hayden gives her his hand and allows him to pull her out before the two start running away from the Doctors, who don't seem to be happy, judging by the light bulbs they explode as they watch them run away. Yeah, Liam! Good job, buddy! That more or less makes up for scaring the shit out of Hayden earlier. TITLE CARD!
When we return, we catch up with Stiles, Theo, and Scott at the animal clinic. Hey, where the hell has Deaton been all this time, anyway? He left like, four episodes ago. I think the plot synopsis for next week's "Ouroboros" says that he'll be back then, so hopefully he'll be able to give us some answers about what the hell is going on in Beacon Hills right now. Anyway, Stiles lifts a sheet off of Josh's body to show Scott, and both he and Theo give Scott worried looks as Theo asks him if he knows the kid. "His name's Josh," Scott replies sadly. "He was a junior." Scott is clearly overwhelmed by this discovery and turns his back on them to think for a moment, leading Stiles to considerately cover the body back up so he doesn't have to look at it. Scott then asks, "Which one did it? The one with the cane?" which indicates that they told him the Doctors did it, which is kind of smart, even though that throat does not look like it was ripped out with a sword cane, but whatever-- Scott is way too stressed out and overwhelmed to question their story, and Theo determines that it's easier for them to just make up the lie as they go, so he's just nods, all, "Mmhmm, yup, the one with the cane totally killed him, you're absolutely right."
Stiles then asks what the hell they're going to do with him, because setting the alarm and leaving won't work, considering that's how they lost Tracy's body the last time. Poor Scott, he's so anti-killing for any reason, and he still has so many bodies of murdered teenagers to figure out what to do with on a consistent basis (although Jordan pretty much has been dealing with it for them, however unaware he is about what's going on). And now that Stiles is complicit in yet another lie about how a chimera died, after Scott insisted that they should be trying to save the chimeras, shit is going to hit the fan hard when he figures out they've been lying to him. Stiles, seeing the overwhelmed look on Scott's face, reluctantly states that someone is going to have to stay with the body, so Theo volunteers for the job, considering he created it in the first place by killing Josh. "It's not like I had a big Saturday night planned," he claims, as though he didn't have some kind of shit-stirring murder agenda to get back to this evening. I'M WATCHING YOU, VILLAIN. Anyway, since we're now in the last four episodes of the season, none of them can just deal with one problem at a time, so Scott gets a text from Liam that causes his eyes to widen in alarm. Stiles immediately asks what is up, so Scott informs them that their best baby beta confirmed another chimera.
Cut to the McCall house, where Scott and Stiles have just arrived to find Liam standing awkwardly outside Scott's locked bathroom door. I love that Liam's first instinct was to bring Hayden to Scott's house, especially since when Liam first turned, he ended up in Scott's bathroom too, even if that was more kidnapping than what Liam did. Anyway, Scott wastes no time knocking on the bathroom door and calling out, "Hayden? I know that you're scared, but we just... we want to help." When Scott focuses his hearing, he realizes that her heart is pounding like crazy, and turns to tell Liam so before asking him what the hell happened. "She was okay when we got here!" Liam exclaims, although that can't be 100% true, because who would be "okay" when they've almost been snatched by creepy steampunk mad scientists? "I went to text you for two seconds, and she locked herself in." Scott doesn't understand why she'd do that, but Liam doesn't know, which is also kind of silly, because DUH-- I know the pack has been desensitized to this sort of thing after being dealt shock after shock for the last two years, but this shit would be seriously traumatizing if you're not accustomed to it.
Scott asks Liam for confirmation that he's sure Hayden is really a chimera, but Liam knows what he saw, and Hayden also told him about the fact that the Doctors told her "Your condition improves." "Okay, that's deeply unsettling," Stiles retorts anxiously before pushing past Liam and heading for the locked door so he can try his luck at being nice and comforting for the first time in a while. "Hayden? This is Stiles. Your sister works for my dad down at the station? Look, just open the door, okay? You can trust us." Aw, Stiles! Please be like this more often-- I feel like this season has just been Stiles fraying at the seams and being so irritable and anxious that he's just snapping at everyone. As a fellow person with severe anxiety and panic attacks, I know how hard dealing with it can be, but it doesn't excuse you from being kind of a jerk to your best friends. Anyway, Scott walks back over to the door and adds, "We just need to tell you the truth, Hayden, and that kind of thing usually is better face-to-face."
When they still don't hear anything from her, Scott sighs and kindly continues, "Listen, either you're gonna unlock the door, or I'm gonna have to break it open. It's okay if you don't want to talk, or if you're not ready to believe us. But, I just... I gotta know that you're okay in there." He waits for another long moment, and when she doesn't respond, Scott gives Stiles and Liam a look and backs up a little to kick the door down, but before he can, the door is unlocked and slowly opens just a crack. Relieved that she's at least able to understand what they're saying, the boys slowly open the door, and though they're aware that Hayden is likely a chimera, they're all completely shocked at the sight of what they find inside-- Hayden, who has partially transformed with werewolf claws, fangs, and the glowing gold eyes of a beta, plus a terrified expression on her face. "I believe you," Hayden says in a quiet voice, as the three boys just look at each other, all, "Awww, here we fuckin' go again."
We then cut to the next morning, where Ken has enlisted Kira to help him bring in boxes of stuff to the school to decorate the classroom. Wait, didn't school start a week or so ago? Why is he just now bringing in stuff like globes and models of the Eiffel Tower and whatnot? I guess since this is actually just a ploy to test Kira, maybe it's supposed to be a pointless activity, I don't know. "Was this really necessary on a Saturday morning, Dad?" Kira whines, as she communicates that the writers have no idea how to create continuity, because didn't Theo just say that it was Saturday night at the animal clinic the previous night? Are we time-traveling? Or was Theo just suggesting it might be a two-night job and it was actually Friday night? Whatever. Moving on. Ken thanks his only daughter for her help, which Kira accepts, though she does remind him that he didn't actually give her a choice in the matter. They put their boxes down on his desk, and Ken unconvincingly finds an excuse to leave because "there's one more box in the car." Spoiler alert: there is no third box.
So, he gets the hell out of there with a quickness while Kira starts boredly unpacking the boxes they've already brought in. After a moment, she hears the sound of a sword unsheathing and pauses in place to focus her hearing on what the hell is going on. Just then, Noshiko, wearing her best all-black-leather ninja warrior outfit and stiletto boots, starts running across the tops of the desks toward her daughter with a loud war cry. She then lunges for Kira, flipping in the air and slicing one of the books on the desk in half with her sword. "Mom? What the hell?" Kira shrieks, clearly startled by this development, but Noshiko doesn't say anything and instead just keeps trying to fight Kira, forcing her to duck away from her strikes and finally stepping on the tip of her mother's katana when she tries to cut at her legs to stop her. "Kira, where's your sword?" Noshiko asks, noticing that Kira isn't wearing her belt, but Kira doesn't even get a chance to finish saying that she thinks she left it somewhere before Noshiko pulls the sword up and causing Kira to do a very impressive back-flip in the air and landing agilely on her feet. "Mom, this isn't what I would call quality mother-daughter time," Kira exclaims with wide eyes, so Noshiko throws her the katana she's using and pulls a second one out of the scabbard she's wearing on her back. "Kira! Defend yourself!"
So, Kira does as she's told, raising her katana in a defensive position as the women start to fight each other. I'm really bad at describing fighting as it is, but sword fighting is even more beyond my understanding, so just trust me when I say that they're spinning and blocking and striking very impressively, though Noshiko quickly gets the upper-hand and strikes Kira's sword with her own so hard that Kira is thrown into the air, where she pirouettes multiple times and falls into a heap on the floor. This brings out Kira's competitive nature, so she shakes it off and gets back onto her feet as she lunges for her mother with her sword, starting the fight anew. After a moment, Noshiko blocks her strike and growls, "Who are you?" in Japanese, which causes Kira to narrow her eyes in confusion for a moment before being forced back into the fight. Kira launches herself at her mother with more ferocity than ever, but after a moment, she's pinned down to the desk by Noshiko, who shouts, "Show yourself, kitsune!" I really wish I could translate this into Japanese, but I'm more of a Romance language girl-- Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc are languages I can actually deal with. So, if anyone who knows Japanese would like to tell me what the actual Japanese part is, I'd be more than grateful!
Anyway, this order triggers something in Kira, and her eyes glow their sunset-orange color as Kira's inner kitsune comes out. Her aura bursts out of her like an inferno, and she strikes back at Noshiko with so much force that she's thrown backward toward Ken's desk. Kira then full-on leaps through the air like a werewolf, her aura glaringly bright, as she swings at Noshiko with her katana and fully slices right through her mom's sword like it were made of butter, causing a shower of sparks to rain down along with the top half of the katana blade. Noshiko looks horrified and falls down onto the ground, putting her hands up in front of her face to protect herself and/or surrender, but Kira's in full-on kitsune-mode now, so she's just about to make the final blow when Ken finally runs in, shouting "KIRA!" and flinging Kira's shuriken-shaped obsidian tail into the desktop, which distracts her enough to snap her out of it.
They all gasp for breath and stare at each other in fear before Kira finally glares at Noshiko and shouts "I COULD HAVE KILLED YOU!" Wow, I really don't think we've ever seen Kira so mad before! I kind of like it. ~It's always the quiet ones~, you know? Noshiko looks at Kira with wide eyes and replies, "Not you! The fox inside you." Ummm, what is that supposed to mean, Noshiko? When I first saw this scene as the sneak peek several days before the episode aired, I thought it might mean Kira was possessed by a different kitsune, maybe a fire one, but now I'm thinking it's Dread Doctor manipulation plus Kira having a new tail plus the fact that she's essentially a kitsune/human hybrid and things will probably be different for her than with regular kitsunes. Still, I am seriously concerned about our thunder princess, you guys.
Cut to the library, which is full of kids working on stuff, despite the fact that we're being led to believe that this is a Saturday morning. Mason is there, and is in the middle of picking a book out off the shelf when he sees Corey-- our cute little baby twink, better known as the boyfriend/friend with benefits of Lucas who got stung by his stingers and had to be hospitalized/pain-sucked by Scott-- through the slot on the other side of the shelf. As soon as Mason sees him, he immediately panics, since he totally macked on Corey's now-dead beau and most certainly feels awkward about it, but when he goes to put the book back and flee the scene, Corey notices him and starts up a conversation through the shelf. "Mason? You're Mason, right?" Mason confirms that he is indeed himself and identifies the boy as Corey, leading him to bring up the fact that he heard Mason saw Lucas at Sinema that night. "Yeah, uh... I met him that night," Mason says uncomfortably, not wanting to get into the details for the boy's sake. "He was, uh, really cool."
When this statement only seems to make Corey sadder, Mason apologizes for what happened to Lucas, but what Corey really wants is answers-- specifically, whether Lucas said anything to Mason about him that night, or about what Lucas did to him beforehand. Of course, Corey didn't come up at all while Lucas was checking Mason out, and then cornered him in the club and started making out with him before trying to sting him with his scorpion stingers, but since Mason obviously doesn't want to tell him that, he just sheepishly replies, "Sorry. I mean, I already told the cops everything I know... which wasn't much." Corey looks seriously upset by this, so Mason once again apologizes for what happened, but Corey just turns to put his book back on the next shelf and leaves with a defeated look on his face. However, once he's gone, Mason notices the book Corey just returned to the shelf, which is entitled, "Miraculous Healing: True Stories of Impossible Medical Cures," and determines that this is definitely not a good sign. YUP, COREY'S A CHIMERA, and Mason is already way smarter about the supernatural thing than anyone else so far. Like, he's a human on the fringes of the pack, and he still just gets so much shit done, I love it so much. He is so great this episode.
Scott and Stiles have just arrived at another table in the library, where Scott pulls out the map of they snagged from Danny all the way back in Season 3A's "Currents." Stiles seems surprised that they're actually going back to telluric currents again, but Scott wisely points out that since the Dread Doctors either couldn't enter Eichen House because of them, or otherwise just didn't like to for whatever reason, then maybe they can use the currents to protect Hayden. When Stiles asks him where the strongest convergence of currents is besides Eichen, Scott points out that they're standing on it and points to their location on the map-- it's the school, which we knew had to be a major point, since Jennifer chose to kill one of her philosopher sacrifices there in "The Girl Who Knew Too Much." If I remember correctly, Chris (ugh, come back, Chris! I miss you so much) said in "Alpha Pact" that three of the major convergences were the bank vault, the animal clinic, and the high school, so I don't know if that means that those two other sites will be coming up as well or not, but I figured I'd better mention it just in case. That was way before we were even introduced to Eichen House, so maybe that's why they didn't mention it back then.
Stiles isn't exactly thrilled about the thought of hiding Hayden in the high school and asks how long they're going to do it, but Scott insists that they'll stay all night if they have to. As they continue to outline their plan for the audience's benefit in voiceover, we cut back and forth to the various pack members and see their preparations, so get ready for some jumping around. "Liam convinced Hayden not to say anything to her sister yet," Scott explains, as we look over at the school's entrance to see Liam and Hayden walking in with a large gym bag full of supplies. We then cut over to the Sheriff's station, where Clarke is working intently on the computer at her desk in the bullpen. "She's working a double tonight, and she thinks Hayden's staying at a friend's."
(For the record, Clarke is working on a missing poster for poor chimera Josh, which has the following information: Josh Diaz, age 17, Hispanic, brown hair, brown eyes, 6 feet tall, 160 lbs, and last seen at Beacon Hills High School. So, I guess this confirms that Sheriff and the rest of the deputies don't know about Josh's death yet, which makes sense, considering Stiles and Theo left with the body before the police got there so they wouldn't have to come up with any explanations. It seems weird that Scott would have been okay with lying to Sheriff about it, though-- maybe this is more evidence of Scott being compromised by the Dread Doctors somehow? Or, maybe it's just that Scott saw how badly Sheriff took Tracy's death and didn't want a repeat performance of Sheriff having to lie about it? All of this lying is making me so sad, and since the episode after next, S05E09, is called "Lies of Omission," I'm guessing all the secrets being kept are going to spill out and make the already tense and overwhelming situation even worse. I'M NOT READY FOR ANY OF THIS.)
Back in the library, Stiles points out that their school isn't exactly a fortress, which is totally true-- Gods know just how many horrifying murders, near-murders, and kidnappings have gone down there. But, fortunately, Lydia's got a plan for that as well. "Remember how Valack quoted Tesla?" Scott asks, even though he wasn't even there for that part. Stiles does, in fact, remember, and brings up the "frequency and vibrations" part, which Lydia thinks wasn't just Valack trying to sound smart and superior, but to give them a clue to disrupt their electromagnetic frequencies. We then cut to Jordan's apartment, where he is working on some kind of wireless device while Lydia watches from next to him. "Parrish took three cell phone jammers from the station," Scott continue in voiceover. "He thinks he can broaden their range of frequency. It's a long shot, but it's the best we've got right now." Woohoo, Wendy's prediction in the comments of my recap for "Condition Terminal" that the jars and wires in Jordan's apartment were related to some kind of radio thing was actually pretty spot-on! They're still all about wavelengths and whatnot, so I'm going to call that a win. :)
We then cut over to the McCall house, where Scott is finishing running down the plan a second time to Kira, using the map of the telluric currents to demonstrate. Kira asks what her part of the plan is, and Scott hesitates for a beat too long before replying that she'll come to the school with them, since they need all the back-up they can get. When he adds that she should bring her belt, Kira looks a bit embarrassed before admitting that she thinks she lost it again. Speaking of her amazing katana belt-- I was trying to think of when we last saw it to figure out when Kira lost it and if it's possible that someone could have stolen it. I'm pretty sure the last time we saw it was in "A Novel Approach," when she had to give it to Creepy Sadist Nurse at Eichen House before they went into the supernatural ward.
Could she have left it there? I mean, Scott had to get himself and Kira out of there really quickly to save both of them from the Dread Doctors, and we don't even know how Stiles and Lydia got out, so I have no idea. Plus, we already saw in that same episode that Kira couldn't find the belt before they left, but when Scott looked at her with his wolf eyes, he saw her aura pointing under Scott's bed where Kira accidentally left her belt the night before. Could this mean that Kira is trying to hide the belt from her kitsune self? Or is her kitsune self hiding it from her human self? Or, did Kira truly lose it, only for it to fall into someone else's hands, like the Dread Doctors, or Theo? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.
Anyway, Scott very sweetly offers to help her find her katana and asks her if she thinks she left it here at his house, but Kira just gives him an equally sweet and sad smiles and tells him it's okay, since the last time she was around telluric currents, it didn't go so well. Scott reminds her that this time is different, since they'll be doing it at the school, where she literally spends at least a little time every single day, but Kira is still beating herself up about what happened at Eichen House and just shakes her head. "I made it worse by being at Eichen," Kira argues gently. "They used me to get inside. I think I need to figure out what's going on with me before I try helping anyone else." Annnnd my heart is shattered. Which is probably not a good thing, since the really heartbreaking parts are still yet to come. You can tell Scott feels terrible about this, and he starts to protest, but Kira just carefully takes her hand and squeezes Scott's with it before leaning forward to kiss him.
While they kiss, the lens flares JJ Abrahms-style, and "Open Heart" by Morgan Page (ft. Lissie) starts to play as we see flashes of two of their cutest moments throughout their relationship. Specifically, their slow dance in the boat house at the Martins' lake house in "The Benefactor" where Kira seductively nibbled on his ear and caused him to get a werewolf-boner, and their date at Derek's apartment in "A Promise to the Dead" where Scott filled the loft with light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Of course, the one thing these two events have in common is that they were short-lived-- in the former, Liam woke up after Kira had knocked him out with a boat oar, broke out of his chains, jumped through the boat house window and started running around in the woods, forcing Scott to leave Kira behind and chase after her; in the latter, they were just about to have sex when Kate and her berserker showed up, beat the shit out of both of them, and then kidnapped them so they could bring them to La Iglesia and turn Scott into a berserker, too. Not exactly perfect date nights by any means, but Scott and Kira can't ever seem to catch a break.
"If you need to take time / When you make up your mind, I will be here / You don't have to hide or keep it all inside / I'm always near."
I'm hoping this is just Kira reminiscing, or maybe her inner kitsune spirit trying to figure out why any self-respecting fox would get it on with a wolf, because if this is some sort of foreshadowing that Kira is leaving the show or that Scott and Kira are going to be facing a relatively long-term breakup, I might just riot. The lyrics to the song are great and totally relevant to the scene, but the tone suggests it could go either way and it's driving me crazy with anticipation. Scott and Kira are so harmless, and their relationship is, like, the one relatively normal thing each of them have in their lives, and they just care about each other so much that I don't want anything to happen to them. :( My poor Scira-shipping heart!
"It's okay to love blind / And you know you'll be fine, no need to fear / Hold me up to my words / The passion behind my eyes is reserved all for you."
Anyway, they finally break apart, and Kira tells him to be careful that night before she gets ready to leave, but before she walks out the door, she stops to ask Scott one last thing-- "If this works tonight, what happens tomorrow? Are you gonna keep trying to find places to hide her?" Scott gets a determined look on his face and shakes his head in the negatory before replying, "No. If this works tonight? We're gonna catch one of them." Sounds legit. I'm sure there's totally no way whatsoever that this could go wrong. Man, you know who would be really helpful in making sure that these plans had at least a small chance of success? CHRIS FUCKING ARGENT? Come back, my silver-haired, grief-bearded fox! We miss you! Having Derek for some additional muscle and also perhaps some background information on the different chimeras or the Dread Doctors themselves would also be a good idea, too. Sigh.
"I try so hard to write it all down / You work so hard to push it all out / You keep your heart / You keep your / Open heart / Hidden in the dark / Open heart / Afraid that it'll break apart."
Meanwhile, Theo is still at the animal clinic, after having watched over Josh's body through the entire night. Since Lydia was with Parrish working on the frequency jammers for gods know how long and the body is still at the clinic, I'm going to guess that our favorite body-snatcher hasn't had a chance to go into a supernatural, body-burning fugue state yet. After a moment, Theo hears that creepy skittering noise that is characteristic of the Dread Doctors and slowly makes his way into the lobby, where he finds the Surgeon standing out in the open and silently waiting for him. For the record, he's standing inside the mountain-ash barrier that is in the front desk/door to the exam room, so I guess that confirms that mountain ash doesn't affect them, either. "Checking up on me?" Theo asks, and when he gets no response, he adds, "You can't tell me you don't want to know who's taking the bodies."
The Surgeon finally speaks up, but only replies with one word-- "Inconsequential." Theo is understandably confused by this reaction and asks why they wouldn't care that someone is running off with their failed science experiments, but when the Surgeon once again doesn't dignify that question with a response, he realizes that the reason why they don't care is because they already know who it is. This does not please him one bit, and when the Doctor keeps standing mutely in front of him, he raises his voice and growls, "Did you forget that you were supposed to be keeping me in the loop on everything?" The Surgeon reiterates that the matter of who is taking the bodies is still inconsequential, but Theo just yells, "Not to me!"
Okay, before we go on, let's unpack this a bit, yeah? First of all, I already outlined my theories about Jordan and what the hell is going on with him in the previous recaps-- I figured he was either A) being controlled by his supernatural spirit just like Kira seems to be, B) being controlled by the Dread Doctors to clean up their messes, C) being controlled by the Nemeton to use the bodies as sacrifices to help give it more power, or D) a combination of B and C, in which the Dread Doctors were purposely sacrificing their failed chimeras to the Nemeton to help increase its power so they could draw on it and become more powerful themselves. However, now that we've seen one of the Doctors sort-of discussing it, I'm guessing that they have nothing to do with Jordan's recent extracurricular activities, and are mostly just letting him slide because he's both harmless to their cause and unintentionally helping them out by disposing of the bodies so they don't have to do it themselves. So, that's kind of reassuring where Jordan is concerned, but now I'm wondering if maybe there isn't another entity of some kind of who isn't manipulating him instead? We'll get into that more when we catch back up with Jordan, though.
Now, where Theo is concerned, it's a little trickier, because we still don't know much about him at all. What we have been told so far is this: he went to school with Scott, Stiles and Lydia until fourth grade, when he moved away; he (supposedly) had asthma; his sister died when Theo was eight from exposure (though we'll learn there was more to it than that in a little while); he was (supposedly) bitten against his will by the Alpha of the pack that Ethan and Aiden ran with as Omegas right before they killed him and the rest of the pack so they could join Deucalion's Alpha Pack; he somehow heard Scott was a True Alpha and decided to move back to Beacon Hills so he could join the McCall pack; and his parents are likely not his parents, given the drama with the signatures and whatnot. I'm not convinced that he isn't a successful chimera of some kind, but it also sounds as though he's been recruited by them, and the tone in which he uses with the Surgeon seems to indicate that they're equals-- or, at least, Theo wants it to be that way. The Surgeon, on the other hand, doesn't seem to necessarily agree with that, but Theo must play a pretty significant role in their plans to be able to talk to him that way.
There has also been discussion in the fandom about how weird it is that we've been shown that Theo is a bad guy pretty much from the start, which never happens-- throughout the series, the major Big Bad reveals nearly always happen in the season's ninth episode (though, on occasion, they will be revealed several episodes earlier or later) and until that point, we either don't know who the bad guy is at all, or we are mistakenly led to believe that someone else is the Big Bad, when in reality, they're either being controlled somehow (usually by the Big Bad), or are a lesser bad guy in comparison, sort of a Medium Bad rather than the King of Bad Guys. Let's refresh our memory on our antagonists, shall we?
Anyway, back to the scene-- Theo pauses for a moment when he hears the sound of a vehicle parking in the parking lot, but when he looks back at the Surgeon, he finds that the Doctor has already disappeared. Probably a smart plan, too, because not one second later, Stiles comes stomping into the clinic through the back entrance. Theo immediately assumes that something has happened since they last spoke, but it's nothing like that-- Stiles has just realized that whoever is responsible for stealing the bodies likely isn't going to do it if they see them standing guard next to them, so it's time to change their plan.
Theo asks him if he has a better plan, and though Stiles does have a different plan, I'm not sure if we should be throwing around words like "better," because his plan involves Stiles leaving a cell phone wedged onto one of Deaton's shelves with its video camera on and pointing at the exam table where Josh's body is laying. Then, Stiles has a smart watch that is hooked up to the video feed (did they steal that from Chris Argent???) so the boys can watch it while they sit out in Stiles' Jeep in the parking lot. I mean, personally, this does not seem like much of an improvement on the original plan, but then again, I've seen the entire episode, unlike these two, so I guess I have the power of hindsight on this one.
Once settled in, Theo suggests that perhaps they take shifts for the rest of the weekend, but NOPE, Stiles is still on his "Theo is evil" kick and insists that he wants to spend some quality time with him as he attaches the smart watch to his rear-view mirror. Oh, Stiles, you're so transparent, and Theo totally knows it, because he just smiles without missing a beat and assures him that some quality bro-time totally sounds good to him. Little does Stiles know that Theo is going to end up learning way more about him than Stiles will learn about the guy who has his paranoia cranked up to 1,000% during this little bro-time of theirs.
Over at the Yukimura household, Kira is shirtless and laying on her stomach on her bed while her mother quietly and efficiently places acupuncture needles into various spots onto her back. I was about to question how Noshiko knows so many things, like acupuncture, but then I remembered that she's nearly nine hundred years old, so I'm guessing she's probably picked up some hobbies and knowledge over the centuries. Anyway, as she places the needles, she explains what she believes is going on with Kira right now. "The balance of power inside you is in conflict-- the struggle between the fox and the human. Perhaps this will shift the power back into your hands."
That's a really interesting concept, honestly, because ever since Kira got her new tail, I've wondered how Kira's human heritage would affect her kitsune powers, because what little we know about kitsunes suggest that Kira is pretty unusual-- she's only, what, seventeen? Eighteen? And she already has a human form, thanks to her human father, which is something usual kitsunes can't achieve until they're at least a hundred years old, plus the majority of her powers didn't emerge until the last year or so, either, instead of having access to them from birth. Tell us more about kitsunes, show! Noshiko is such a badass, you need to have her on screen more and telling us all kinds of interesting Japanese mythology tidbits.
Anyway, you can tell that this is all just way too much for Kira, who starts crying silently as she presumably thinks about just how fucked up everything has become in just a few short weeks. When Noshiko notices the tears running down her face (which don't even mess up her eyeliner, because even when crying, Kira is a flawless being) she assumes that Kira is in pain from the needles, but Kira just shakes her head and insists that she's fine. It's not the physical pain that's affecting her, it's the emotional-- the anxiety of having a supernatural force inside her that she can't control and barely understands, the fear that she's going to lose the tenuous control over her kitsune spirit that she has and hurt her friends or civilians in the process, or that her lack of control will once again mess up one of the pack's plans like it did at Eichen House. Gods, I have always adored Kira, but never so much as I do in this episode.
Across town, Sheriff has shown up to see Melissa, who is, as usual, working yet another shift at the ER at the hospital. When he approaches the nurse's station, he holds up the Dread Doctors book and sighs deeply, all, "This fucking book, I S2FG." Wait, does this mean that he read it? I mean, I doubt it would have an effect on him, considering he's way above the age the Doctors like for their test subjects, but still, I'd be pretty worried regardless of what would happen to him after reading it. Anyway, he explains that while he tries to brainstorm what the hell is going on from a detective standpoint, he keeps coming back to the damn book, again and again and again. Melissa doesn't seem surprised to hear that Sheriff still doesn't have any leads, so he points out that it's making him think that he's thinking about this from the wrong direction. Yes, Sheriff, I imagine that's pretty much always the case where these supernatural cases are concerned.
When Melissa asks for clarification, he explains his reasoning. "Well, the whole time I've been looking at this, I've been thinking 'science fiction.' But, they're not Dread Scientists-- they're Dread Doctors." Melissa's eyes widen in surprise when she realizes what he's implying and guesses that he's looking for a medical connection, which is totally smart, and is something the fandom has been debating since Season 5 even started. "Or a medical condition," Sheriff adds. "Something that Tracy, Lucas, and Donovan could have had in common." Whoops, I totally forgot that Sheriff is seriously in the dark right now and has no idea that Josh, Hayden, and Corey have also been revealed as chimeras as well. Oh, Sheriff, you sweet summer child.
Melissa gets that mischievous glint in her eyes and flirtatiously replies, "You're not asking me to hand over medical files without a court order, are you?" Sheriff, picking up what she's putting down, smiles and assures her that he would never do such a thing, so Melissa holds up the RFID card she's just pulled out of the pocket of her scrubs. "Good, because they may take away this key card... which allows me access to medical records. Do you want to see how the key card works?" Of course Sheriff wants to know how the key card works, so he nods and follows Melissa as she leads him to the file room to get to investigating.Gods, I love them both so much. Natalie Martin is sweet and fine as hell, but Sheriff/Melissa > Sheriff/Natalie, in my humblest of opinions. (Edited to add: after watching "Ouroboros" last night, Sheriff is officially on my shitlist, and until he redeems himself, my stance is that Melissa can do way better than his self-righteous ass. I'll get into this more in the next recap.)
Night has fallen in Beacon Hills, and the McCall pack's plan is finally being enacted in full at the high school. Outside in the parking lot, Lydia, Malia, and Jordan have just arrived, and are in the midst of unpacking the trunk, which is full of the frequency jammers Jordan jury-rigged for the occasion. Unfortunately, none of them really look that impressed by them, and even Malia is like, "We're seriously betting our lives on these?" Lydia snarks in response that she's pretty sure they're actually just betting Hayden's life on them, which not only isn't a very nice thing to say about an innocent girl who got turned into a man-made monster without her consent or really even her knowledge, but it's also kind of dumb, because how do they know that none of the rest of the pack are still targets? I'm just saying, it's a liiiiittle presumptuous to assume that because they've made it through the last few confrontations with the Doctors without death, they're somehow not at risk of being turned into a chimera or some other test subject. Not to mention wrong, considering what happens at the end of the episode.
Anyway, Jordan, bless his heart, retorts, "Yeah, well, I'm glad I brought my gun." Oh, honey. That is equal parts adorable, naive, and a little bit misguided, because really? These dudes can make you forget you ever saw them and control electromagnetic fields-- I'm thinking your gun isn't going to scare them very much. Inside, the gang finishes up their preparations for this plan of theirs. Lydia sticks one of the frequency jammers into what looks like the guidance office, or maybe Coach's old office, and turns it on, while Malia does the same to a second jammer that she places on top of a trophy case in the main hallway. Finally, Jordan places the last one in the locker room itself, where the majority of them will be hanging out for the duration of the evening. Scott finally sets down a heavy gym bag onto the bench, and anxiously glances over at Liam and Hayden, who are securing the locker room doors by moving a row of lockers in front of them. Once everything is set up, the gang moves into position-- Jordan will be guarding the outdoor entrances, since he's got the gun and all, and Malia is guarding the main hallway inside while Scott, Lydia, and Liam guard Hayden from inside the locker room.
After a moment, she gives Scott a look and hisses, "Is it me, or is Liam not aware of the second part of the plan?" as she glances over at the bag Scott set on the nearby bench. Scott, who looks overwhelmed and stressed as fuck, shakes his head anxiously and sighs before replying that he's not even sure if there's going to be a second part of the plan. Lydia's eyes widen in alarm, and she whispers back, "Or if it's going to work?" Not willing to lie to Lydia, who is probably one of his closet friends after Stiles, Scott just shrugs and gives her a look like, "What do you really expect, given how completely unprepared we are to deal with these steampunk assholes?" Ugh, poor Scottie. :( This is way too stressful even to watch, let alone actually live through. I would most certainly be dead by now if I was in his position.
Outside the building, one of the Dread Doctors (either the Surgeon or the Pathologist, I'm guessing, though we don't see its face) holds up its hand right beside one of the classroom windows, and the clockwork glove the Doctor has on its hand has a bright, smoky-white light coming out of the back of it, which causes the lights inside the classroom to flicker . The first time I watched this episode, I thought this was a mountain-ash-like reaction to the frequency jammers, like the guy couldn't get inside because of it and he was trying to break through, but apparently the Doctor was releasing some kind of hallucinogenic drug? Which makes way more sense, really, given everything that happens afterward. Malia, who is pacing up and down the hall, tenses up when she senses something hinky afoot, and Jordan, who, like Malia, is pacing back and forth by his SUV with his gun tucked into the back of his waistband, sheds his leather jacket and throws it into the open window of his car. Inside his vehicle, the radio starts to flicker on and off as well, only the station is 97.1 this time instead of 91.5, which Hayden was listening in her car on her way home before she got intercepted by the Doctors). Where I live, 97.1 is the ~cool adult alternative~ radio station, so imagining Jordan listening to Hootie and the Blowfish or Sheryl Crow or something is seriously hilarious to me. Thanks for that, Teen Wolf!
Meanwhile, at the animal clinic, Stiles and Theo are still sitting quietly in Stiles' Jeep in the parking lot until Theo finally breaks the silence by asking him if he's still wondering why he didn't say anything to Scott about Donovan. When Stiles admits that yeah, maybe he has, Theo correctly assumes that he still thinks he has some sort of ulterior motive, which Stiles confirms by replying, "More than likely." Theo goes in for the hard sell and asks whether or not he'd believe him if he said all he wanted was for the pack to trust him, and though Stiles assumes that Theo is lying, I don't actually think he is. Granted, he probably wants the pack to trust him so he can lead them to their doom or something equally awful for them, but I don't doubt one bit that his desire for the pack to accept him and trust him as one of their own is genuine.
Plus, when you're a werewolf, the key to being strong is being in a pack, and since Scott is a True Alpha leading a unique pack of various supernatural creatures and humans, there's a lot of power there to draw from. Anyway, as you can probably guess, Stiles isn't buying it one book, which doesn't surprise Theo a bit, though he does sigh before exhaustedly replying, "So, you're here because you're never going to trust me?" Stiles just hilariously chirps, "Yup! Glad we had this talk." Unfortunately for Stiles, Theo has got his number with regards to how he feels about family, so he brings out the big guns.
Apparently Melissa is off the clock now for the first time all season, because she's now at the station with Sheriff and standing in his office while they look through all of the hospital records they pilfered. She notices the diagram taped to Sheriff's cork board that is titled "Phases of the Moon" and points out that there's a full moon coming, which of course there is, because again, once the last four episodes of a season/half-season start, literally everything bad that can possibly happen happens all at the exact same time. So, I'm guessing that the Doctors will be using the full moon to their advantage, either by creating more of them, or setting loose the ones they have to run even more rampant than they already are.
Anyway, Sheriff explains that he put the diagram up when he realized just how much bigger his job has gotten since he learned about the supernatural, and when he trails off and looks back at his crime board, where he stares at Donovan's mug shot, Melissa notices where his mind has gone and gently states, "You don't think [Donovan]'s still alive, do you?" Sheriff sighs and admits that he doesn't, although he does wish that he did, which surprises Melissa, considering that Donovan literally threatened to kill him on multiple occasions. However, even Sheriff is smart enough to know that there was more to Donovan than met the eye. "Yeah, but he was just a kid," he argues. "More than anything else, a victim of circumstance. The day his father was shot, Donovan jumped on his motorcycle to get to him. He was hit by a car two blocks from the hospital. So, when his father was finding out that a bullet had severed his spine, Donovan was being wheeled into surgery for internal bleeding."
Okay, I really wish we either knew how old Donovan was when he died, or how long ago this shooting happened, because I guessed it was before Sheriff was sheriff, since he doesn't really need a partner to run the station, you know? So, we know that Sheriff's first task after being elected was informing Papa Tate that Malia and her mother and sister died in the car accident, which was eight-nine years ago, which means that Donovan's dad had to have been shot before then, and Donovan himself would have to have been at least sixteen then in order to drive a motorcycle, which would make Donovan around twenty-five now, more or less the same age as Derek.
I thought the Dread Doctors only wanted teenagers? I mean, twenty-five is still young, obviously, but there's a shit-load of growing that happens between eighteen and twenty-five, so that just seems really weird. Ugh, why do I keep obsessing over this timeline when I know that it's a pointless endeavor? Someone take away my number and time fixation, pleeeeeease. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is hard. Anyway, Sheriff's story about Donovan gives Melissa an idea as she's skimming through Donovan's medical file, and when she remembers that Sheriff mentioned skin grafts, she asks him about it. Sheriff, confused, explains that it was Tracy who had the skin graft, which they learned after Deaton examined her body and found the graft on her shoulder. Melissa starts rifling through Donovan's file for a moment until she realizes that he, too, had a skin graft after his accident. Ohhhhh shit! Finally, we're on to some damn answers!
Back at the school, Hayden is looking at herself in the mirror over one of the sinks in the locker room, and Liam, knowing all too well what his newly returned friend is going through, assures her that she shouldn't worry too much, because she'll learn to control it. "I'm not like you," Hayden replies glumly. "I wasn't bitten by a wolf. I was... somebody's science experiment." She continues looking at herself in the mirror and proclaims this situation to be "so bizarre," which is the understatement of the century. It's clear that Liam seriously feels bad for her and everything she's gone through without her consent and though he agrees that yeah, it is pretty bizarre, he also promises her that she'll be okay. After a moment, Hayden looks at him and quietly asks, "What am I?" which breaks my heart into even tinier pieces than before, because what a horrible question to have to ask! And while Liam has no idea what exactly she is (obviously she's part-werewolf, but they have no idea what other characteristics she possesses), he still manages to give the perfect answer with the most beautiful smile in the world-- "You're Hayden." This response is so sweet that even our vengeful goddess Hayden can't help but smile and giggle at him with freshly-activated heart-eyes fresh eyes for a moment before replying, "By the way-- if you get me out of this, I'll forget all about the sixth grade," which gets a giggle out of Liam himself.
LIAM BETTER BE RIGHT, THOUGH, OR I AM MARCHING TO LOS ANGELES TO BOP JEFF DAVIS IN THE NOSE, HAYDEN-STYLE. For the record, IMDB says that Victoria Moroles is set to be in the rest of 5A and all of the episodes of 5B except for two, but it also said that Daniel Sharman/Isaac was returning in this episode, which clearly didn't happen, so I have a hard time believing it 100%-- I still can't help but worry that she's going to get killed off in some devastating fashion, and that is the exact opposite that I want. She's like the Allison to Liam's Isaac, which may be a bad comparison given how few people actually shipped them together, but it's true-- their relationship started off rocky as hell, but then they ended up bonding over their shared experiences and grew closer as their connection developed from a friendship into a romance. Besides, I think it would be great to have a reformed chimera in the pack, you know? They can use all the were-creatures they can get, and Hayden has the potential to be very powerful in her own right once she learns the extent of her abilities/identity and how to use them.
Across the room, Scott is sitting on a bench and watching his baby werewolf son and his best lady talking and giggling, and he gets this wistful and sad look on his face. If I could guess, I'd say it's mostly guilt over the whole "using Hayden as bait" thing, but I think the Allison and Kira parallels are probably smarting a little as well. Either way, it's literally soul-crushing to see. He's broken out of his reverie by a weird slithering sound coming from nearby, which understandably startles him, given who they're waiting to show up.
When he gets up to investigate, he sees what looks like a leather strap of some kind is being dragged along the floor and out in the hall, leaving what looks like a smear of blood behind, like some gross, horrifying slug. Before he can see what it is, Lydia rushes over to him and distracts him by bringing up a problem she just realized while she was brainstorming-- since they can't use their phones, they also can't check in on Stiles and Theo, nor can those two call them if there's trouble, either. Scott sighs and admits that he didn't even think about that, and he is only very minutely comforted by the fact that Lydia didn't, either. "So, we're standing here waiting for guys in masks and breathing tubes to show up," Lydia continues. "But who-- or what-- are Stiles and Theo waiting for?" Excellent question, Lydia, although considering the answer is your newest romantic endeavor, you might not be pleased by the answer you get.
Speaking of Stiles and Theo, they're still sitting in the Jeep, keeping an eye on the smart watch with the video feed of inside the clinic's exam room. After a moment, Theo breaks the silence caused by Stiles aggressively ignoring him by bringing up the fact that he saw Donovan's teeth that night he went after Stiles. "He was a, uh, wendigo, wasn't he?" Theo asks, which is a nice touch of acting, considering he actually saw Donovan in the Dread Doctors' lab after they yanked all his teeth out (still scarred for life by that, to be honest) and then set him loose to go after Stiles, but okay. Stiles confirms that he was, indeed, a wendigo, so Theo continues to play dumb while he gets Stiles to engage in his ploy to get information so subtly that Stiles doesn't even seem to realize what he's doing.
We've seen it in Teen Wolf (Scott giving the bite to Liam to keep him from falling to his death or at the very least grievous injury, the debate over whether or not to turn Stiles when he was possessed by the nogitsune and they thought he had FTD), The Vampire Diaries (pretty much how everyone was turned into vampires, and, in the case of Tyler Lockwood, being forced to trigger his werewolf gene to survive Kai's blowout), The Originals (Hayley turning into a hybrid, Klaus feeding Father Kieran his blood before he died to buy Cami more time to say goodbye to him, Marcel turning his entire squadron in World War I to prevent his brothers from dying from mustard gas after the military didn't give them the gas masks they needed), and probably a dozen other different supernatural dramas. In the end, people are scared of dying, so they'd rather be beholden to the moon, or forced to feed on the blood or flesh of the living to survive, than to die and have to deal with the unknown afterlife, if one even exists. I know this has little to do with what is currently happening, but Theo must have brought it up for a reason, and I hope it's just Theo trying to turn Stiles to his side, and not some sort of awful foreshadowing.
Anyway, Theo references Stiles' comment about the wendigos being punished for their dietary choices before turning it around and asking what the punishment for killing a chimera is. "You spend five hours in the car with Theo Raeken," Stiles snits, which makes Theo chuckle for a few moments before Stiles finally gets serious and confesses that he already knows what his punishment will be-- he's going to lose Scott, his best friend. I mean, I get why Stiles would be worried, given what we know about Scott and his policy against killing, especially when it is someone like Tracy, who never asked for any of this and who couldn't control what she was doing. However, wasn't it literally only five episodes ago in "Parasomnia" that Stiles was talking about Scott being too trusting and too forgiving? So, why doesn't he apply in this case?
As I've said in pretty much every recap since it happened, I highly doubt Scott would have turned away from his brother-in-arms if he had just been honest from the jump about what happened-- Donovan attacked him and threatened to eat his legs off after already having threatened his father's life on multiple occasions, and Stiles was so in fear of his life that he tried to incapacitate him long enough to get away by dumping the scaffolding stuff on him, which accidentally killed him. Stiles is a human, and even if Donovan wasn't intending to kill him, the injuries Donovan would have inflicted upon him could have ended up killing him anyway, or at the very least seriously handicapping him for life. Scott doesn't hold humans to the same standards as supernaturals who have the strength, speed, and healing to neutralize their foes instead of outright killing them. However, now, not only has Stiles been lying to everyone, Scott and Malia included, about Donovan and his death for days/weeks, but he also lied about Theo killing Josh because of that fear of his lies coming out. And we all know the lies will be coming out, and Scott (and probably the others) will end up being seriously upset by it, not necessarily by what Stiles did, but the fact that he didn't come straight to them. UGH, THIS IS GOING TO BE SUCH A DISASTER.
Over at the Yukimura house, Noshiko, now in her pajamas and a bathrobe, walks into Kira's darkened room to check on her, only to gasp in horror when she sees the bed. She shouts for Ken, who rushes in and gets the exact same scared expression on his face as the camera turns so we can finally see what they see-- Kira's bed is empty, indicating that she's flown the coop, and all of the acupuncture pins that were in her back have now been arranged on her headboard to spell out a number-- 115. At first, I was wracking my brain to try to come up with the significance of this, since the 5 kind of looks like the jiko kanji for "self" that the oni were branding on everyone they checked for the nogitsune, but nothing was making much sense until I reread my recap for "Creatures of the Night" and realized that 115 is the state route that Kira and Theo were on at the beginning of the episode when they were stuck in traffic.
And-- SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT-- in the promo for the next episode, we see Kira being pulled out of the moon roof of the Yukimura's car by the Dread Doctors on that same road where she's wearing the same clothes from that episode, so I think her kitsune spirit (who seems to have a mind/will of its own) has figured out that Kira was experimented on by the Dread Doctors before Scott got there, and the Dread Doctors just made everyone forget that it happened. Kathleen thinks it had to have occurred in between when Kira left to walk to the school rather than wait for traffic to clear up and when she got back in the car, or maybe it was before we even first saw the family in the premiere. Either way, I'm seriously worried-- it looks as though they're doing something to her eye, and it makes me wonder if they're managing to control her with it, or if her kitsune spirit is getting wild out of anger that they would dare mess with her, or what, but consider me terrified for our thunder princess. And, if they managed to do that to Kira, then what are the odds that they've done similar things to Lydia, Scott, and/or Malia? THIS IS SO SCARY.
Meanwhile, in the school, Scott and Lydia are still in the locker room with Hayden and Liam, who are sitting on the floor side-by-side while they leaning back against a row of lockers. After a moment, Hayden starts to get sleepy and rests her head on Liam's shoulder, and you can just see his heart start to pound in surprise and excitement at how affectionate she's being. He's clearly surprised by it, but at the same time, the seriousness of their current situation overpowers any happiness he might have had about it. Of course, that's when he notices the bag that Scott brought and set on the bench, and though he obviously doesn't want to move, he eventually scoots out from under Hayden in an attempt not to disturb her before getting up and looking inside the bag. What he finds is quite a few lengths of chains, and when he pulls them out, Scott and Lydia both realize he's found something they weren't exactly eager for him to find and rush over to do damage control. Liam asks them what they're planning on doing with those, so Scott vaguely replies that they brought them just in case, and at first, I figured they were worried about Hayden getting violent or something, because do they really think that a bunch of chains could hurt those clockwork assholes? I'm going with "no."
Liam isn't buying that excuse either, so he asks "In case of what?", causing Lydia to sigh before she patiently explaining that they were hoping they might have a chance to catch one of the Doctors. "If we can't make the school a fortress, then maybe we can make it a trap," Scott continues, trying to back Lydia up, but Liam isn't an idiot, and points out a pretty obvious design flaw in this plan-- since the Dread Doctors are coming for Hayden, that pretty much means she's the bait in this so-called trap, right? Hayden, not at all thrilled by that statement, looks at Scott and Lydia in horror, and they both look at each other. To Scott and Lydia's everlasting credit, you know that they don't like this plan any more than anyone else does, but they've been in this game a lot longer than Liam has, and they definitely have more than Hayden has, so they know that sometimes the things they have to do to defeat their enemies, or to protect their fellow Beacon Hills citizens, aren't exactly the safest, the most thought-out, or even likely to work. But, as Scott will say in a few-- are there any better plans out there, aside from running the hell away from Beacon Hills like their asses are on fire? Not really.
Outside in the bus bay, Jordan has moved inside his SUV to do watch in a less conspicuous and more comfortable position, and is looking really tired and bleary-eyed as he looks around to make sure that no one is approaching from any direction. Suddenly, he looks down to find a playing card laying face-down on the floor by his foot, and, as expected, when he picks it up, he finds that it's the Queen of Diamonds card with the illustration that looks eerily similar to Lydia. According to Wendy, the card thing is a reference to the movie Manchurian Candidate, but I've never seen it, so I'm going to have research into it more/hash it out with her more before I can really get it, I think.
Before he gets the chance to process where the hell that card came from, he looks over to his right and finds Lydia, in a totally different outfit from the one she was just wearing inside the school (before, it was a really pretty royal blue floral dress; now, it's a gauzey teal top and presumably a skirt that I can't really see since she's sitting down and only visible from the chest up). She's uncharacteristically quiet, and just looks at him demurely as she grips Jordan's forearm, almost massaging it as she makes her way up his arm to his biceps. I feel you, Hallucination!Lydia-- Jordan has great arms and shoulders, it's totally true. Jordan looks at her with confusion, and seems to both not understand what the fuck is happening while also being so overwhelmed by it that he's completely forgotten that he's there to guard the school to protect the kids.
They stare at each other for a long moment before not-real!Lydia leans over and caresses his face with both hands before pulling him toward her so they can make out. She then wastes no time tugging off his shirt, and Jordan is so into it that he quickly and easily rips her shirt down the front like it was tissue paper. They get back to making out, even more passionately this time, but while they're pawing at each other, Lydia scrapes down Jordan's shoulders and chest with her fingernails, revealing burning flesh that quickly turns to ash trailing down his abdomen. Jordan, feeling a little weird about this, pulls away to find what is apparently his worst nightmare-- hurting someone (especially Lydia) with his powers. When he looks up at her, he finds that Lydia has been completely burned, and you have to give it to both the makeup people and Holland Roden, because she 100% sells this creepy-as-fuck scene. Her hair and clothes have been burned so badly that parts of it have melted to her skin, which is cracked, dry, and blackened in many places. She cups Jordan's face in her painfully-burned hands as Jordan looks as though he's about to pee himself from fear, and despite the fact that he's clearly not into it anymore, Lydia starts making out with him even harder this time, even as he tries to pull away. Eventually, all he can do is just brace his arm against the windshield and hope this nightmare passes quickly.
Sure enough, we cut inside to the main hallway, where Malia has heard the sound of a car ignition being started before it speeds away like a bat out of hell. "Parrish?" Malia mutters to herself under her breath. "Where's he going?" She turns and walks toward the main entrance to go out to see what the fuck is happening, but before she can, a humongous animal trap pops out of the linoleum tiles of the floor and clamps down hard on Malia's ankle, causing her to let out the most bloodcurdling, soul-crushingly awful scream I have heard since the time Kate turned Scott into a berserker in "A Promise to the Dead." Seriously, just rewatching this scene to write about it is almost causing me physical pain. Malia is so overwhelmed by the pain of the long teeth of the trap impaling her ankle that she is unable to stop herself from falling backwards, where two more perfectly-placed traps burst out of the floor and snap onto her wrists, causing her to be splayed out in a pose that almost looks like a crucifixion of sorts. Malia, now in even more agony, starts to shriek at the top of her lungs when another trap underneath her head shoots out a spike that impales her right through the throat! NOOOO, NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!
Just then, the Dread Doctors show up, and the three of them march down the hall with that slow lock-step that they do that reminds me a ton of the oni, revealing that they can, in fact, enter the school despite the convergence of telluric currents. Unsurprisingly, when they pass by Malia on the floor of the hall and pay her absolutely no attention whatsoever, we can see that Malia isn't stuck in animal traps at all, she just thinks that she is, because somehow, whether by some kind of hallucinogenic gas like the one the Scarecrow uses in the Batman Trilogy, or their own electromagnetic mind-wiping powers, they've managed to convince Malia that she's being attacked by her own worst fear, which, as it turns out, is being caught in traps like the ones Papa Tate set up all around the woods when he was trying to kill her in her coyote days in "More Bad Than Good." Also, it seems like the Doctors also have some sort of power that gives them invisibility? Or otherwise some sort of power that just distracts or compels people into not paying attention to what they're doing, because it seems like they've done a lot of stuff around people that no one else has noticed except for the McCall Pack kids, and Malia is literally wailing from excruciating agony and none of the others can hear her despite the fact that most of them have enhanced senses. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THEM?
Back at the station, Melissa and Sheriff are poring through the medical records they've dug up regarding the chimeras they know of, but Melissa has determined that there is nothing in Lucas' medical history that suggests that he had a skin graft, so he doesn't fit the pattern. Sheriff insists that it can't be a coincidence and asks her if there's anything of interest in the file, so she brings up the fact that Lucas was born with congenital glaucoma, but that has nothing to do with skin grafts. Uh, I'd still say that's pretty relevant, because when Sheriff asks her what the treatment for glaucoma is, Melissa explains that according to the chart, Lucas had a cornea transplant several years ago, which was probably around the same time that Hayden got her kidney transplant, I'm guessing? "It's a fairly routine outpatient procedure," Melissa continues. "It was an allogeneic transplant taken from a recent donor."
This triggers something in Melissa's memory, and when Sheriff tells her to spit it out, she reminds him that Tracy's skin graft was allogeneic as well. All it takes is a few additional seconds to skim through Donovan's file to find that his transplant was also allogeneic, and all of them were taken from outside donors rather than using their own skin to transplant it elsewhere, so, DUN DUN DUN, all of the now man-made supernatural chimeras were already genetic chimeras before they were made, because they had the DNA of two separate beings inside them. I knew that AP Bio lecture about genetic chimeras in "Parasomnia" would be relevant to their current supernatural drama soon enough! Yay, look at Mrs. Finch actually being helpful in her own weird, rude way. I'm so glad that at least this part of the puzzle has finally been solved! Now, if we could just get answers to the other 345,234,098,345,902,834,509,823,092,409,234 questions I have, that would be amazing.
Back in the high school's locker room, we finally come to the point where I realized that the earlier heartbreaks were nothing compared to what is about to happen in this scene. Lydia has her best grown-up voice on, and tries to calm Liam down by channeling her inner Natalie Martin and assuring him that they brought Hayden there to protect her, but Liam's just, like, "Yeah, I can tell by the fact that you're making her the cheese in a Dread Doctor mousetrap." When Hayden asks Scott if she's really the bait, Scott insists that no one is the bait, though he does end up adding, "But we can't be bodyguards to everyone every night," which, really, is an excellent point, and one it's taken Scott a really long time to learn. Scott is constantly working to make sure everyone around him survives whatever new threat has popped up, which is a great quality, and one of the billions and billions of reasons why Scott McCall is one of my favorite television characters of all time, but it's not something that can be sustainable for longer than a couple of days-- eventually, they're going to run out of places to hide, people to protect the chimeras in danger, and luck to keep them all safe.
However, Liam is still a kid, is still new to the supernatural, and is too overwhelmed by fear to fully understand how well and truly fucked they are, and I honestly can't blame him for that. They're all literally just a bunch of teenagers who are always in terrifying, dangerous situations and are just doing whatever they can do to get through it, and sometimes, that means arguing about what the fuck they're supposed to do, which is exactly what happens next.
Yikes! So, yeah, everyone is wound up so tight they're about to snap, and it's no bueno. Liam and Scott both take a moment to compose themselves, but before Scott can apologize, Liam takes a step toward Scott and looks him in the eyes. "Scott... Promise me you'll do everything you can to save her." The look on Scott's face when he hears this kills me, because you can tell all he wants to do is make that promise, but he knows better by now than to assume that he has the power to save everyone every time. But, when Liam stares even more determinedly into Scott's eyes and repeats, "Scott-- PROMISE ME," Scott is powerless to say no to him. "I'll do everything I can," Scott replies solemnly with a nod. "I promise."
Unfortunately, shit's about to go downhill quickly-- Hayden, who apparently started digging around her bag as distraction from the tense argument in front of her, has just realized that she forgot her anti-rejection medication, which I totally forgot about in the flurry of drama that has happenednin the last two episodes. You'd think that her super-enhanced chimera healing would make the drugs unnecessary now, but there's not much that her cellular regeneration can do to trick the immune system into thinking that the transplanted kidney she received from a donor has been hers all along. I wonder if the Dread Doctors know or care about the risk of her body rejecting the kidney if she doesn't have access to her medication, considering Hayden never does end up finding her pills, if I recall correctly, but who knows? For doctors, they don't seem to be particularly concerned about infections, considering all the gross tools they use to do surgery in a gross basement lab. Anyway, she tells the kids that she's got a spare bottle in her locker, which is smart, but when she offers to go get them herself, Scott, having just made a serious promise to his werewolf son to keep her safe, blurts out, "I'll get them. What's your combination?"
Lydia and Scott end up moving the row of lockers from in front of the locker room door so they can leave, and Lydia hisses at him to hurry while she keeps watch. Scott then hesitantly makes his way down the hall to where Hayden's locker is, but you can tell by the background music that something totally fucked up is about to happen. Once he starts to put in the combination, he's distracted by that slithering sound again. When he turns to find the source of the sound, he sees the bloody leather strap from earlier-- which we can now see is Roxie's leash from Scott's hallucination in the previous episode-- being dragged down the hallway and into the science lab, leaving a smear of blood trailing in its wake.
Just like Parrish earlier, Scott completely forgets what he's supposed to be doing and instinctively starts following the leash, because the Dread Doctors are really good at pinpointing fears and using them against people. I mean, look how easily they managed to completely incapacitate the four guards so they could do their kidnapping without interference! You gotta give them props for that, no matter how horrible they are. Anyway, once inside the lab, Scott frowns in confusion as he makes his way to the aisle between the two columns of workbenches to try to look for whatever was attached to the leash. Just as Scott stops at the front of the room, he's stabbed right through the chest from behind with the now familiar-looking blade of Kira's katana belt and groans in pain, because SURPRISE! Scott's worst fear, at least at the moment, is Kira getting out of control and hurting him. "Kira?" Scott gasps as blood begins to drip from his mouth, but hallucination!Kira has no mercy whatsoever for him. Her kitsune eyes are blazing sunset orange in the dark classroom, and her mouth is twisted into a sneer as she yanks the sword out of his chest and wraps the leash she used to lure him into the room around his throat before yanking it tightly toward her.
GODS, this is giving me major flashbacks to two different episodes with similar themes, and it hurts my soul. The first is from "Anchors," when Allison had the sex dream about Isaac that turned into a dirty Kate strangling Isaac with a garrote and telling Allison that they should "do him together," which will forever creep me out. The second is when Scott got stabbed in the abdomen by one of the oni in "Letharia Vulpina," and Nogitsune!Stiles knocked Kira out before torturing Scott with the sword. Do you remember what he said? "Oh, you really have to learn, Scott. You really have to learn not to trust a fox! Hmm-mmm. No, 'cause they're tricksters. They'll fool you. They'll fool EVERYONE."
Honestly, now that I'm thinking about it, Scott's hesitation with regards to Kira and her growing powers starts to make a lot more sense. Especially since we still don't know much about kitsune and their morality (or lack thereof.) Eep! Anyway, Scott grunts in pain and struggles against her, Kira speaks in a super-distorted voice, "You know who I am!" He begs her to stop, but Kira just strangles him even harder and adds, "I am the Messenger of Death!" as she tugs the leash even tighter around his throat and full-on growls at him like a wolf! As glad as I am that this isn't our Kira, it's also really great to see Arden Cho flexing her acting muscles, you know? She does evil trickster really well.
Meanwhile, Lydia is still standing watch at the locker room door and waiting for Scott. When several moments pass with nothing from him, she starts to get worried, and calls out for him as quickly as possible while she has a momentary internal struggle between whether she should stay or go see what's going on with him. Finally, she groans and starts walking down the hallway to see what's going on with him, completely distracted away from her job as a guard and leaving the locker room door open and unfortified. Yes, that will certainly not bite anyone in the ass later! (I'm not hating on Lydia, by the way-- she was affected as badly as the others! It just sucks to see the pack once again completely knocked on their asses pretty much from the start. EVERYTHING IS SO AWFUL RIGHT NOW).
When Lydia makes it to the staircase, the camera work gets all crazy and makes it look like she's zooming backwards as she gapes in shock at who she sees at the top of the stairs. It's Tracy! She's wearing the exact same outfit she wore in "Parasomnia," with the cute little cropped-leg jeans and the red and white jacket, and Lydia is so relieved to see her alive and seemingly well that she forgets that, hello, Tracy is dead, and instead just rushes up the stairs to go see her. "Lydia? Thank god!" Tracy exclaims in relief as she sees Lydia approaching her. "I need your help." Of course, she has a bit of a complex about not being able to save Tracy, just like Malia does, so she doesn't even take the time to think about it. "What do you need?" Lydia asks urgently. "What can I do?" Tracy's voice goes cold, and she gives Lydia the evil eye before she sneers, "I need you to scream."
Man, if Lydia had a dollar for every time someone said something this to her, she'd be able to pay for her pricey, Ivy League undergrad and graduate degrees in mathematics upfront and in cash It's seriously ridiculous. Before Lydia can even react to this request, Tracy jerks her arm toward Lydia so quickly you can barely see it, and Lydia gags as Tracy straight-up reaches into her mouth and rips out her tongue! Oh my gods, I'm literally going to throw up. Blood starts pouring out of Lydia's mouth, and her knees buckle beneath her, causing her to tumble backward down the stairs and fall into a puddle of her own blood while Tracy watches and smirks from behind her.
As Lydia continues to gag and sputter from the involuntary tongue-ectomy we just witnessed, the Dread Doctors walk down the stairs and pass Lydia without even a second glance, and when we pan back to Lydia, we see that she's totally fine, aside from the fact that she's hallucinating her own worst fear-- not being able to help someone, and losing her powers, however unreliable they may be. GODS, THIS IS TOO MUCH. None of them ever stood a chance against the Dread Doctors, honestly, and with how easily they were all overcome by these hallucinations, it just makes everything feel so hopeless, don't you think? How the fuck are our heroes going to get out of this? And if the Dread Doctors are still supposed to be around for 5B, then how the hell is this season going to end? I'M NOT READY. On the plus side, the lady Doctor (the Geneticist, I'm pretty sure?) has really awesome looking black platform boots with tons of buckles that I really want. I love stompy boots.
Over at the animal clinic, Stiles and Theo are still on stake-out for the body-snatcher, and Theo is still trying to low-key interrogate Stiles without him even realizing it. "If Scott really gave up on you for some piece of crap like Donovan, then he wouldn't be a True Alpha, would he?" Theo asks exasperatedly, but Stiles has clearly thought about this before, because he immediately replies, "Or maybe that's the definition of one-- someone who doesn't put up with murder." Theo can't help but chuckle in frustration and point out that the pack really needs to look up the definition of justifiable homicide, and Stiles' response made me crack up so hard-- "Did you seriously just say that to the son of a cop?" WORD. Stiles has probably had the entire California legal code memorized since he was ten years old. Theo's next argument comes from a mythological standpoint, and he reminds Stiles that werewolves' eyes are supposed to change color when they take an innocent life, flashing his still-gold eyes at Stiles to prove that they haven't turned blue. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that when Theo's werewolf eyes flash, they don't make that ringing sound effect that usually happens when Scott, Liam, or Malia, etc flash their eyes-- instead, it's like a rattling noise, not exactly like the Dread Doctors' skittering noise, but definitely wayyyy too similar for comfort.
This has been a point of intense debate in the fandom ever since they realized how weird it was that Derek's eyes were blue as a Beta, and so were Jackson's when he was turned from a kanima to a werewolf, but everyone else who was a Beta had gold eyes-- what do the different eye colors mean? In Season 3A's "Visionary," we learned from Peter that a Beta's eyes go from gold to blue when you take an innocent life because it takes something from your soul or some bullshit, but many in the fandom think that it's actually guilt that changes a Beta's eye color, and not the actual death itself. Now, of course, because of what Stiles is about to say, the fandom seems to be taking it as confirmation that that theory was correct, but I don't know, you guys-- just because a character says something doesn't mean it's true. Characters get wrong information all the time and believe it to be true, only to learn later that it was actually incorrect, and this could just as easily be one of those times.
I don't know, I just don't think that an off-hand comment by a character who is purposely trying to prove Theo wrong means that blue-eyed Betas are absolutely ones who feel guilty about their kills and that there are golden-eyed Betas out there who have killed and didn't feel guilty. I mean, we saw that Derek's eye color changed from blue to gold and back to blue after Kate did some weird werejaguar magic-mojo on him, and I don't think it had anything to do with him feeling guilty or not guilty about Paige's death; likewise, Peter's eyes are blue, and I highly doubt he has ever felt even the tiniest bit of guilt for killing anyone he's killed, either. I know some people suggested that Peter feels guilty about Laura, but I don't think so-- he may wish that it didn't have to come to having to kill his own niece, but since he wanted the Alpha power to help him finish healing and create his own pack to take on the people who started the Hale fire, I have a hard time believing he's ever regretted it, or felt guilty about doing it.
My personal theory regarding the eye-color debate is that Theo isn't a supernatural werewolf (or at least not fully one), but is instead a successful chimera. We saw with Tracy in "Dreamcatchers" that she had gold eyes even after she killed her father and her psychiatrist, instead of turning blue as you would assume, and I think it has something to do with the fact that the chimeras aren't "natural" supernatural beings-- they're made by science, not magic, and it kind of changes and/or breaks all of the rules that govern the supernatural world and its creatures. I don't know, or maybe the Tracy thing was a continuity error, or it really is a guilt thing and Tracy's eyes didn't change because she wasn't aware enough of her actions to feel badly about killing her dad and her shrink. You never can tell with this show! Hopefully we'll be getting more details about this soon, though, for the sake of all of our sanity.
Anyway, so Theo insists that both Stiles and himself only killed out of self-defense, but Stiles just retorts, "Or maybe you just don't feel all that bad about it? You can't say one life is objectively less innocent than another one. What if they turn blue 'cause you feel guilty?" Honestly, I think it's all about intentions-- Donovan was intending to hurt and/or kill Stiles, who didn't do anything to Donovan or anyone, really, to deserve such a fate, and Stiles wasn't even actually intending to kill Donovan, he just wanted to hurt him badly enough to buy him some time to get away. Theo's situation with Josh is a little trickier, because we know he's working with the Dread Doctors, who created the chimeras in the first place, si it's possible/likely that Theo only killed Josh to try to win Stiles' trust/the trust of the pack as a whole. But, since Josh was fighting Theo and attacking Stiles, it could still be argued that since Josh was intending to do them harm, and Theo was intending to protect Stiles/possibly himself (regardless of motive), it's kind of the same deal. So, Theo asks him if he really thinks that the eye color thing is up for interpretation, and Stiles confirms that yeah, maybe he does, so Theo doubles down.
"Okay. Then here's my interpretation of what happened with you and Donovan-- not guilty." Stiles looks as though he's really having trouble believing that, which does not escape Theo's notice, so he decides to pull on that thread and see where it leads. "Did you feel bad about it?" he asks quietly, and when Stiles gives him a confused look, Theo clarifies that he's not talking about right now, but right after Stiles dropped the construction materials on him. "What were you thinking the moment you knew he was dead, and there was no saving him?" Stiles thinks about this for a moment before slowly replying, "One word... Good." Stiles can't even make eye contact with Theo after this confession, which is a good thing for Theo, because he starts grinning like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. WHAT IS THEO'S DEAL? Is he trying to turn Stiles bad? Is he just pumped to get even more information to use to break up the pack? I'm thinking it's the latter, but I still can't get a read on this guy, and it's driving me bananas.
Anyway, after a moment, Theo frowns and takes a deep breath through his nose, and when Stiles realizes that he senses something, he asks him what's up, and Theo admits that he caught a scent-- smoke, like something's burning. Stiles eyes widen in alarm when he sees something out the passenger window, but he's not fast enough to warn Theo before a strong, flaming fist is thrust through the open window and punches Theo so hard in the face that Theo projectile-spits about eight ounces of blood toward Stiles, which ends up splattering all over his face, since you can't put Stiles in a dangerous situation without his face getting soaked in blood. Stiles immediately throws up his arms to protect his face, but it's too late-- Theo has been rapidly pulled out of the car before their assailant walks around the back of the Jeep, lifts it up by the bumper, and fully flips the car over and onto its hood!. As the car flips, Stiles' now-unconscious body flops onto the ceiling of his beloved Jeep, and a pretty substantial fire starts to burn around the scene. Uh oh, we know what that fire means...
It's Jordan, who is once again in one of his flaming trances that compels him to steal bodies. He pops into the clinic just long enough to grab Josh and throw him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry before walking back out of the clinic and into the night. PARRISH, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? He's about to totally regret it at some point, because as he walks away with Josh's body and presumably heads to the Nemeton to torch it there, he passes by the smart watch, which fell out of the driver's-side window and is still functioning, which means that Jordan also didn't notice the camera inside and will have most certainly been recorded as he stole a chimera's corpse from inside the clinic. SHIT SHIT SHIT. I mean, it's a good thing that everyone will be knowing what he's been up to soon enough so they can figure out what the hell he is, but I'm still worried for him, especially if the reaction to Kira's issues is any indication about how they're going to be treating him. Yikes!
Also, is this confirmation that Jordan has super-strength? Because I speculated about it in my pre-Season 5 speculation post that, like Malia and Kira with their own respective powers, Jordan seems to have always possessed enhanced strength-- or at least since whatever creature he is was awakened inside him-- but it was just laying dormant and waiting to be actively triggered so it could be used. For example, when he initially tried to free Chris in "A Promise To The Dead," he couldn't muster up the strength to bend the rebar that was impaling him, but once he and Chris gave themselves something to focus on, Jordan's eyes flashed orange for the first time (that we'd seen, anyway) and he seemed to be able to tap into that supernatural strength.
It's not unprecedented, either, since we have learned throughout the series that born supernaturals have a different run of it than bitten/turned supernaturals, and their powers often require them to consciously activate them rather than being a passive ability-- for example, Kira and her healing in "Smoke and Mirrors," or Malia saying that she could be really strong when she focused in "Echo House." Just a thought! I mean, Jordan's a buff guy, but not buff enough to flip Stiles' ancient-ass Jeep with no assistance, supernatural or otherwise. Also also, it almost looks as though the fire that starts around the Jeep starts up just as Jordan is walking past it it into the clinic, so it's possible that he not only has an ability to cause himself to burst into flames, ala Firestorm from DC Comics/The Flash TV show, or Johnny Storm from Marvel Comics/Fantastic Four, etc, but can also cause fires elsewhere without making contact with it? Unless that punch caused Theo to catch on fire, which then spread elsewhere, but that seems less likely since Theo's burns were localized to his face and his clothes seemed fine.
Over at Sinema, yet another old-school horror movie is playing the projectors as little Corey the cutie from earlier is drinking his sorrows. Wait, if he really has enhanced healing, can he even get drunk? I thought it was established that werewolves can't get drunk? Though, in fanfic, I've seen it work if there's a little wolfsbane in the booze, or if they do it on a lunar eclipse. Anyway, he's in the middle of sipping a vodka tonic or something through a straw, but eventually just says fuck it and chugs the whole drink down, grimacing a little as the liquor burns his throat. Mason chooses the perfect moment to arrive to check on him and see how he's doing, but when he hesitantly approaches Corey and asks him if he's okay, the little dude just slurs that he's never been better before accidentally dropping the glass onto the floor.
Regardless of his healing ability, he's looking a bit like a messy drunk right now, I can see that much. He starts to lean closer to Mason to try to kiss him, but Mason, who is the smartest of all of the characters on this show, knows this is a terrible idea and backs away before changing the subject to something more relevant to the current circumstances. "It healed, didn't it?" Mason asks, and though Corey is visibly shocked by this question, Mason gently grabs his hand and pulls up the sleeve of Corey's jacket to reveal that the scorpion sting he got from Lucas only days ago has totally vanished without even a scar to show that it happened. WHOA! That's alarming. I'm wondering if Scott pain-draining him/possibly venom-draining him with his powers helped him heal better than he normally would have? Or maybe he wasn't even a chimera yet until he got hurt by Lucas in the first place?
Back at the school, Liam is startled by the sound of heavy, wheezing breathing and the rattling sound of their clockwork armor that pretty much now screams "TROUBLE IS HEADED YOUR WAY" and immediately asks Hayden if she heard it. She understandably starts to freak out and correctly guesses that the Dread Doctors are there in the school, which leads Liam to unwisely walk over to the door to call out for Scott and Malia. Of course, their guards are too busy wrestling with their subconscious fears inside their minds at the minute, allowing the Doctors to appear in the doorway undeterred so they can confirm Liam and Hayden's suspicions.
As they stomp into the room, Liam instinctively puts himself between them and Hayden, but the Doctors just keep walking toward them until Liam and Hayden are backed into a corner and given no choice but to stand and watch whatever happens to them. The Surgeon takes his sword cane and uses the handled end (which, weirdly enough, looks like the head of a regular old hammer) to swipe the frequency jammer off the top of the gym lockers and onto the floor as the two kids gape at him in fear and anger for torturing them like they have been the last few weeks. "We're on a frequency you can't possibly imagine," the Doctor says cryptically in his robotic voice as they lunge for the kids. NOOOO, LEAVE THOSE PRECIOUS CHILDREN ALONE!
We cut back over to the animal clinic, where Stiles is still laying unconscious on the ceiling of his overturned Jeep. I don't know if you guys have ever been in a car that has flipped over before, but it's scary as hell-- this happened to me a couple years ago when my former roommate and I were on a roadtrip cross-country, and we accidentally hit some black ice while she was driving and slid off the road and down into a ravine. It was so steep that we flipped two and a half times and landed upside down, and my back hasn't been the same since. Anyway, I'm getting sympathy muscle aches for Stiles right now, especially after Theo uses a fire extinguisher he must have gotten from the clinic to put out the flames around Stiles before pulling him out of the wreckage. YIKES! Fortunately, Stiles doesn't seem to be having any spinal injuries, and being pulled out of his burning Jeep is just the amount of movement needed to wake him up and cause him to start coughing up all the smoke he just inhaled. Before Stiles can say anything, Theo, whose face is burned on the right side and bleeding from his nose and a wound at his hairline, grimly informs him that Josh's body is gone. Welp! Wonderful.
Over at the school, Scott is still struggling against hallucination!Kira's strangle-hold, and hallucination!Kira is still snarling and growling at him as she pulls the leash tighter and tighter until finally, a relatively deep cut opens up on Scott's hand from thumb to wrist. Scott immediately screams in pain and reflexively jumps to his feet, realizing a second later that he's suddenly been snapped out of his hallucination. In the real world, he finds a panicked Mason standing in front of him in the science lab with a bloody scalpel in one of his hands, both of which are raised in a non-threatening pose.
"Sorry! Sorry!" Mason yelps anxiously. "I was trying to help. Liam said pain-- he said it makes you human." OH MY GODS, MASON, YOU ARE THE SMARTEST, LOYALIST AND MOST PRECIOUS PERSON IN THE WORLD. He's only been around for twenty episodes and he's already made such a great addition to the pack, I cannot get over it. Never ever change, Mason! Scott, realizing how fucked everything is, frantically asks Mason what happened and what he's doing here, so Mason quickly explains that he found another chimera named Corey. Of course, this reminds Scott of the chimera they've already found, and he instantly demands to know where Liam and Hayden are. The two rush over to the locker room, where they find a forlorn looking Lydia and Malia. "They're gone," Lydia says sadly. "Hayden and Liam are gone." NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE. I HATE ALL OF THIS.
Speaking of Hayden and Liam, the latter has just awakened on the floor of the creepy Dread Doctor lab, where he finds his right arm tightly bound in a leather and metal brace from wrist to shoulder that is meant to keep his elbow straight so the long tube full of a dark fluid that has been inserted into one of his brachial blood vessels isn't disturbed. NOOO, DON'T YOU DO ANYTHING TO MY TINY WOLF PRINCE! I can't really tell if it's putting fluids in or taking his blood out, but it seems to be attached to a smaller tank next to the large one with the disgusting body floating in it; the smaller tank is also pretty gross, with a brackish liquid inside with weird floating stuff that kind of looks like algae. It doesn't seem very sterile or hygienic, I'll tell you that.
Anyway, when Liam looks up, he sees that Hayden has been strapped face-down to the exam table, and is looking both scared and paralyzed as the Doctors all surround her. Liam, still weak from whatever they're doing to him, tries to tell them to stop, but his voice isn't loud enough to catch their attention. The Surgeon picks up what looks like a rusty, old pair of gross scissors and gets ready to use it to cut into Hayden's side. "No, no, no!" Liam shouts. "Don't! Don't hurt her! Hayden! Hayden!" As the Doctors do that weird thing they do where they move around the table like they're playing musical chairs before starting their experiments, and the Doctors start chanting her name like they did earlier in the episode before starting to do some sort of test or operation on her side. "Hayden. Hayden. Hayden. Hayden." NOOOOOOOOOOO!
Finally, we return to the McCall house for a short time as we follow Melissa inside after what I assume was a long shift at the hospital. However, as soon as she walks into the front door, her hands fly up toward her face and flail around as she shrieks at the top of her lungs in terror. When the camera spins around, we finally see what the source of her bloodcurdling scream is-- there is the body of a red-haired lady chimera with long, black claws the diameter of pins laying sprawled on her back on the kitchen table. However, the most noteworthy observation of the scene is the murder weapon: a familiar katana with a perforated blade, which was stabbed through her chest, pinning her to the table. NOOOO! KIRA!
Next episode: Scott, Malia, and Mason go on a rescue mission, while Stiles, Theo, and Lydia seek out answers regarding where the Dread Doctors' are doing their experiments. Meanwhile, Kira is in some serious legal trouble, and the Sheriff loses his damn mind.
NOTES/SPECULATION/QUESTIONS:
-Fashion reruns: Kira's camo varsity jacket was first (and most recently) seen in Season 3B's "Letharia Vulpina," and the teal blouse Lydia wore in Parrish's hallucination was the same one she wore in her flashbacks in "Frayed," when she was making out with Aiden in Coach Finstock's office. Oh, Coach, I miss your antics.
-WHAT THE HELL WAS UP WITH THAT CHIMERA AT THE MCCALLS? Like, who is she? What is she? Where did she come from? Did she break into the McCall's house, or was she brought there? Also, I know I brought this up on my Tumblr, but I'm still not fully convinced that Kira killed this person. First off, Kira said twice in the episode that she thinks she lost her katana-belt, so the possibilities seem to be either that A) she's telling the truth and she truly lost it; B) she's lying, and she didn't actually lose it (seems unlikely); or C) either she's purposely hiding it from her kitsune self, or her kitsune self is purposely hiding it from her. We already know that her kitsune spirit can at least sort of think independently, because when Scott was looking at her aura with his wolf-eyes, the aura pointed to where Kira's belt was laying under the bed after Kira wasn't able to find it herself.
Like I said earlier in the recap, the last time we saw it was when Kira had to surrender it to go inside Eichen House, so it seems the most likely that she really did lose it, meaning that someone else could have taken it and used it to kill the chimera. My first instinct is to say that Theo is framing her, because he seems to be wanting to break up the pack, and the fact that this happened just one episode after Scott admitted to him that he wasn't sure if he could trust her just seems too convenient. Kathleen also has a hunch that the Desert Wolf did it, which could be interesting, especially if her theory that the Desert Wolf is actually a Dread Doctor chimera is true ends up panning out as well. Either way, it makes for an interesting story, but I just need answers already!
-Jordan, like Kira, seems to be under the control of someone or something else. In Kira's case, it's by her inner kitsune spirit, which has been thrown out of balance with her human body, and for Jordan by something-- I'm thinking the Dread Doctors basically calling him harmless is leading me to think they're not the ones manipulating him into stealing the bodies of the failed chimera test subjects, so we're back to Jordan being controlled by his own supernatural spirit (*prays to the Gods* pleasebeahellhoundpleasebeahellhound), the Nemeton, or some other entity we're unaware of at this time. (*prays to the Gods* pleasebetheMorríganpleasebetheMorríganpleasebetheMorrígan)
-In "A Novel Approach," we established that, as far as we know, the Dread Doctors have created eleven total chimeras based on the ten holes they found dug in the woods and on the lacrosse field and the few failures they had run into already. So, before this week, we had Belasko, Tracy, Lucas, Donovan, and Josh, plus we now have confirmation that Hayden and Corey are also both chimeras, along with the dead body left on the kitchen table at the McCall's, which means that we've met eight of the eleven, leaving us with three more to meet. Plus, of course, the Doctors could always just create more, though with only three episodes left, that might be tricky. We also don't know for sure that they haven't messed with the various pack members, either, so the potential number of chimeras could end up being way higher.
Speaking of chimeras, we also have a pretty substantial body count. Kira may or may not have killed one, and Stiles and Theo have definitely killed one each, leaving Belasko, Tracy and Lucas to be killed by the Dread Doctors themselves. Yikes yikes yikes!
-Here's the music in this episode that I haven't already talked about in the recap itself.
"Blush" by SBCR, Elisa Bee & His Majesty Andre (Scott outlines the plan for Stiles and Kira as we cut to Liam, Hayden, Clarke, Lydia, and Jordan in turn)
"Drexler" by MADE IN HEIGHTS (Noshiko performs acupuncture on Kira's back and explains the imbalance of power between her kitsune and human halves)
"Get Back Up" by The Unknown (Scott, Lydia, Malia, Jordan, Liam, and Hayden set up the frequency jammers and get into position to guard Hayden from the Dread Doctors at the high school)
"Holland" by Glass Face (Liam and Hayden talk about Hayden's new supernatural identity, and she promises to forgive him for the sixth grade if he gets her out of this situation."
"Pleasure" by Wurk Insoxx ft. K-Mi (Mason finds Corey drinking at Sinema and questions him about healing from his scorpion stings)
So, remember when I said that the events of the last four episodes were going to make "Required Reading" feel like a pleasant dream? Well, it's already starting, and my heart is shattered into a million pieces, and if it's already this bad, then the last three episodes are going to be even worse in intensity? Are you guys ready for it? Because I'm really, really not. I don't mean to say that I don't like it, because I do, a LOT-- if I had to rank the seasons, I'd probably go with 3B, 4, 5A, 3A, 2, and 1, in that order. My problem is mostly just that I'm super overwhelmed because I hate seeing all of the characters hurting like this, and since everything is literally in shambles, it all just feels so hopeless-- the McCall Pack (and Scott especially, as the True Alpha and leader) draws its strength from each other and the bonds of their friendship, so if they're fractured and turned against each other, what hope do they have of succeeding? And since the Dread Doctors are sticking around through Season 5B, it could very well be that the midseason finale doesn't have a happy ending, and I'm dreading it very much.
Okay, so let's talk "Strange Frequencies," yeah? Buckle up, kiddos, because this is gonna be a long one.
Previously, on Teen Wolf: A electricity-eating chimera named Josh Diaz chomped on the wires to the generator on the roof of the hospital and then almost chomped on Stiles, who had wandered up there in the middle of a book-induced hallucination of his sick mother. Theo showed up just in time to save him, but ended up killing him by ripping his throat out with his claws. Theo begged Stiles not to say anything to Scott about what he had to do to defend himself and Stiles from the chimera, and when Stiles asked him why he shouldn't, Theo reminded him that he didn't say anything about Stiles killing Donovan. Liam, trying to make things up to his frenemy and future girlfriend Hayden, was helping pay back the money he owed her for spilled drinks and figured out that Hayden is also a chimera test subject of the Dread Doctors when he saw that her eyes reflected the light of a glow stick held in front of her face. Kira has been having some supernatural problems of her own, because her aura has become huge and fiery as hell, giving her increased strength, agility, and katana-wielding skills, but also causing her to get out of control to the point of trying to kill a chimera who was no longer a threat and muttering "I am the messenger of death!" in Japanese under her breath while she sleeps. When Theo brought this up to Scott, he admitted that he didn't think he could trust Kira anymore, a statement so uncharacteristic to Scott that your friendly neighborhood recapper is now convinced that Scott has been compromised by the Doctors or something. And this is kind of where we pick up today!
Our opening scene begins right where we left off in the previous episode, with Theo finally putting away his fangs and claws and looking at Stiles with a strange expression that seems like a mix between fear, sympathy, and something else I can't identify. Probably the strain from acting like he gives a shit, I'd guess. The generator is still shooting out showers of sparks every so often, and Josh's body is still laying on the ground at their feet. "I know what happened to Donovan," Theo explains in a tired voice. "I know everything." Stiles gets so furious about this that he totally forgets that he's a lowly human against a werewolf(/possibly a chimera) and grabs him by the front of the shirt before shoving him up against the chain-link fence surrounding the generator. "You don't know anything," Stiles sneers, causing Theo to briefly fight back by grabbing Stiles by the arms and spinning him so that he's the one with his back pressed to the fence instead, though Stiles is still gripping the front of his shirt.
"I was there!" Theo retorts loudly. "I was at the library. Malia found the book. She was texting us to see where you were. She said she left you at the library. I told her I was close. When I got there, I heard the scaffolding come down." I was trying to think back to what happened in "Condition Terminal," and whether or not Theo could have actually been there, but when I skimmed through my recap about it, I remembered that Theo pretty much only showed up at the creepy lab, when he was acting shifty and taunting Donovan and psychopath-monologuing to him before freeing him to go after Stiles, so while there were no hints that he was there when Donovan was killed, there are also no hints that he wasn't, so it's likely he's being honest about it. Plus, he was the one who sent Donovan after Stiles in the first place, so it makes sense he'd want to follow him and see what happened, and the fact that Malia apparently texted him to see if he knew where Stiles was just gave him an excuse to cop to having witnessed it so he can try to win Stiles' trust.
Anyway, Stiles, who realizes that Theo knows way too many details about what happened to be lying, reluctantly lets go of Donovan's shirt and asks him if he saw Donovan, but he states that he only saw the body. "I watched you come out," Theo continues. "I was gonna say something, but then I saw the cop car, and the body was gone." Stiles gives him a questioning look in response to that statement, but Theo swears that he has no idea who took him-- he only saw what Stiles saw, and when Stiles didn't say anything to anyone, he figured Stiles would appreciate it if he kept his mouth shut, too, which is pretty much the exact same thing he said to Malia about the Desert Wolf in last week's episode, which only further convinces me that this is just a ploy to win their trust, probably so he can further destroy the pack from within. Just then, they hear sirens approaching the hospital, and Theo's usual steely-calm gets just a little bit rattled. "That's not an ambulance, is it?" Theo asks, visibly exhausted, and when Stiles shakes his head in response, he insists that they need to get the fuck out of there, pronto.
Stiles, who is also starting to freak out a little, reminds him that they can't just leave the body there, so Theo suggests that they take it with them, citing the fact that someone is stealing the bodies anyway as further reason to go for it-- at least this way, they can find out who is doing it. Stiles, still panicking, looks down at Josh's body and notices the very obvious werewolf claws on his hands, and Theo firmly repeats that they have to do something soon unless they want to deal with the police. Stiles brings up the fact that Theo killed Josh, but Theo maintains that he did it in self-defense, because otherwise Josh would have killed both of them. I don't know, you guys. I mean, on the one hand, Josh was a chimera, and every time Theo got one over on him in the fight, he was able to shake it off pretty quickly and get back into it, which suggests that not only was he not fully conscious of what he was doing, but he was also working with some seriously good healing ability that allowed him to recover quickly enough to jump back into the fight, making him a hard opponent to fully overpower.
On the other hand, Theo did end up having the upper-hand in the fight just before he killed him, and even despite the fact that Malia seems to be stronger than he is, he's working with above-human strength, so when Theo ripped Josh's throat out, he wasn't exactly in immediate danger of death, and neither was Stiles. I don't know, I don't know-- like I said in the previous recap, Theo killing Josh was not the same kind of situation as Stiles killing Donovan, and I think both of them know that, but Theo is relying on Stiles not wanting Scott (or Sheriff) to know about Donovan to cover this up. ANYWAY, Theo, whose eyes are starting to fill with tears just like Stiles', reiterates that not leaving right now means that they're either going to have to tell the truth or come up with a convincing story. He then adds that it's Stiles' choice, because he's not going to ask him to lie to his own father. Fortunately for Theo, Stiles is just 1,000% done with everything right now, and just replies, "Don't worry, I've had plenty of practice." Dun dun dun! And so it begins! Stiles walks over to Josh's body and starts to grab his shoulders to pick him up, so Theo, looking relieved, rushes after him to help.
Meanwhile, over at Sinema, Liam has apparently filled Hayden in on the basic details of what's been going on in the Shadow World of Beacon Hills, because she is in the middle of storming out of the club and toward her car. A short moment later, Liam quickly follows behind her and tries to get her to believe him with little success. When he calls out to her to wait, Hayden just scoffs and replies, "Asking me to close my eyes was weird. Sticking a glow stick in my face? Even weirder." When she makes it to her car, she finally stops to turn back to face him. "But werewolves and dead doctors?" Liam, who has finally caught up with her, corrects her by telling her that they're actually "Dread Doctors," but she gives no fucks whatsoever-- she just wants to get out of there, and wants Liam to go away.
"What if I could prove it to you?" Liam replies desperately while she tries to unlock her car door. When Hayden just scoffs again and asks him what he's supposed to be proving, Liam says, "This" before letting out his golden beta eyes and fangs and roaring right in her face! Um, Liam, I know that this was how you told Mason you were a werewolf, but you didn't growl at him, you growled at full-shift!Theo when you thought he was going to attack you guys! So, maybe you could have chosen a less scary way of revealing yourself? Just a thought. As you would expect, Hayden immediately shrieks in terror and straight-up punches him in the face with so much force that Liam falls flat on his back onto the concrete with a bloody nose, just as Hayden finally gets into her car and zooms away. A+ for effort, Liam, but you get an F for execution.
Of course, Hayden's drive home involves her driving through the woods, and since she's all by herself, she's setting herself up for something terrifying to happen to her. Sure enough, she's already panicked enough as she drives through a darkened part of the woods with very few lights when she starts freaking out so badly that she just stops the car where she is. She grips the steering wheel and tries to pull herself together, but after a moment, she notices her injured knuckles from hitting Liam so hard and uses her uninjured hand to lightly put pressure on it. Suddenly, there's a weird sound like when you are sitting on a leather cushioned chair and it makes that groaning noise when you move, and when she looks at her injured hand again, she finds that the swelling is gone and the lacerations are totally healed, just like when she got clawed by Tracy in "Dreamcatchers." Do you think Tracy was drawn to her when she came to the school because she subconsciously knew that Hayden was a chimera and just couldn't remember being experimented on? I seriously need some answers about that.
Just when she's starting to wonder if maybe Liam wasn't actually telling the truth, the electronics in her car start going wonky and flashing before the Surgeon's robotic voice is heard through the radio (whose station is 91.5, I don't know if that's important or not)-- "Your condition improves." Yup, that's sufficiently terrifying. And, if that weren't scary enough, the headlights on her car start flickering until the engine is shut down completely, leaving her parked in the middle of a darkened back road. Thoroughly freaked out, Hayden starts frantically turning the key in her ignition to get the fuck out of there ASAP, but no matter how hard she tries, the engine won't turn over. She then starts hearing the Dread Doctors' weird rattling/hissing noise, just as they start marching slowly toward her from the opposite direction and flickering in and out of focus in that glitchy way of theirs. This sight only makes her even more desperate to try to drive away, but the car's machinery has been manipulated by the Doctors' electromagnetic powers to where it won't work. In a last ditch effort to save herself from them, she tries to open both the driver and passenger-side doors, but they just use their powers to lock them all from the inside to ensure that she can't get out.
Apparently, they just loooooove scaring their chimeras, too, because they start to broadcast their voices saying "Hayden. Hayden. Hayden," through the radio as well, along with cracking the windows, windshield, and side mirrors of her car, which gives the scene such a nightmarish quality that I was literally ready to have a heart attack and die when I watched the live airing. Fortunately for Hayden, not only to the Dread Doctors walk extremely slowly (possibly because they have their own health issues despite their powerful abilities and longevity?), but Liam continued to follow her even after she told him to get away out of her desire not to believe what he was telling her. So, just when she's sure she's about to get captured, Liam jumps up onto the roof of her car and peels the moon roof off of it before reaching his hand through the window toward her. "Come on!" he yells urgently, but he doesn't have to ask twice-- Hayden gives her his hand and allows him to pull her out before the two start running away from the Doctors, who don't seem to be happy, judging by the light bulbs they explode as they watch them run away. Yeah, Liam! Good job, buddy! That more or less makes up for scaring the shit out of Hayden earlier. TITLE CARD!
When we return, we catch up with Stiles, Theo, and Scott at the animal clinic. Hey, where the hell has Deaton been all this time, anyway? He left like, four episodes ago. I think the plot synopsis for next week's "Ouroboros" says that he'll be back then, so hopefully he'll be able to give us some answers about what the hell is going on in Beacon Hills right now. Anyway, Stiles lifts a sheet off of Josh's body to show Scott, and both he and Theo give Scott worried looks as Theo asks him if he knows the kid. "His name's Josh," Scott replies sadly. "He was a junior." Scott is clearly overwhelmed by this discovery and turns his back on them to think for a moment, leading Stiles to considerately cover the body back up so he doesn't have to look at it. Scott then asks, "Which one did it? The one with the cane?" which indicates that they told him the Doctors did it, which is kind of smart, even though that throat does not look like it was ripped out with a sword cane, but whatever-- Scott is way too stressed out and overwhelmed to question their story, and Theo determines that it's easier for them to just make up the lie as they go, so he's just nods, all, "Mmhmm, yup, the one with the cane totally killed him, you're absolutely right."
Stiles then asks what the hell they're going to do with him, because setting the alarm and leaving won't work, considering that's how they lost Tracy's body the last time. Poor Scott, he's so anti-killing for any reason, and he still has so many bodies of murdered teenagers to figure out what to do with on a consistent basis (although Jordan pretty much has been dealing with it for them, however unaware he is about what's going on). And now that Stiles is complicit in yet another lie about how a chimera died, after Scott insisted that they should be trying to save the chimeras, shit is going to hit the fan hard when he figures out they've been lying to him. Stiles, seeing the overwhelmed look on Scott's face, reluctantly states that someone is going to have to stay with the body, so Theo volunteers for the job, considering he created it in the first place by killing Josh. "It's not like I had a big Saturday night planned," he claims, as though he didn't have some kind of shit-stirring murder agenda to get back to this evening. I'M WATCHING YOU, VILLAIN. Anyway, since we're now in the last four episodes of the season, none of them can just deal with one problem at a time, so Scott gets a text from Liam that causes his eyes to widen in alarm. Stiles immediately asks what is up, so Scott informs them that their best baby beta confirmed another chimera.
Cut to the McCall house, where Scott and Stiles have just arrived to find Liam standing awkwardly outside Scott's locked bathroom door. I love that Liam's first instinct was to bring Hayden to Scott's house, especially since when Liam first turned, he ended up in Scott's bathroom too, even if that was more kidnapping than what Liam did. Anyway, Scott wastes no time knocking on the bathroom door and calling out, "Hayden? I know that you're scared, but we just... we want to help." When Scott focuses his hearing, he realizes that her heart is pounding like crazy, and turns to tell Liam so before asking him what the hell happened. "She was okay when we got here!" Liam exclaims, although that can't be 100% true, because who would be "okay" when they've almost been snatched by creepy steampunk mad scientists? "I went to text you for two seconds, and she locked herself in." Scott doesn't understand why she'd do that, but Liam doesn't know, which is also kind of silly, because DUH-- I know the pack has been desensitized to this sort of thing after being dealt shock after shock for the last two years, but this shit would be seriously traumatizing if you're not accustomed to it.
Scott asks Liam for confirmation that he's sure Hayden is really a chimera, but Liam knows what he saw, and Hayden also told him about the fact that the Doctors told her "Your condition improves." "Okay, that's deeply unsettling," Stiles retorts anxiously before pushing past Liam and heading for the locked door so he can try his luck at being nice and comforting for the first time in a while. "Hayden? This is Stiles. Your sister works for my dad down at the station? Look, just open the door, okay? You can trust us." Aw, Stiles! Please be like this more often-- I feel like this season has just been Stiles fraying at the seams and being so irritable and anxious that he's just snapping at everyone. As a fellow person with severe anxiety and panic attacks, I know how hard dealing with it can be, but it doesn't excuse you from being kind of a jerk to your best friends. Anyway, Scott walks back over to the door and adds, "We just need to tell you the truth, Hayden, and that kind of thing usually is better face-to-face."
When they still don't hear anything from her, Scott sighs and kindly continues, "Listen, either you're gonna unlock the door, or I'm gonna have to break it open. It's okay if you don't want to talk, or if you're not ready to believe us. But, I just... I gotta know that you're okay in there." He waits for another long moment, and when she doesn't respond, Scott gives Stiles and Liam a look and backs up a little to kick the door down, but before he can, the door is unlocked and slowly opens just a crack. Relieved that she's at least able to understand what they're saying, the boys slowly open the door, and though they're aware that Hayden is likely a chimera, they're all completely shocked at the sight of what they find inside-- Hayden, who has partially transformed with werewolf claws, fangs, and the glowing gold eyes of a beta, plus a terrified expression on her face. "I believe you," Hayden says in a quiet voice, as the three boys just look at each other, all, "Awww, here we fuckin' go again."
We then cut to the next morning, where Ken has enlisted Kira to help him bring in boxes of stuff to the school to decorate the classroom. Wait, didn't school start a week or so ago? Why is he just now bringing in stuff like globes and models of the Eiffel Tower and whatnot? I guess since this is actually just a ploy to test Kira, maybe it's supposed to be a pointless activity, I don't know. "Was this really necessary on a Saturday morning, Dad?" Kira whines, as she communicates that the writers have no idea how to create continuity, because didn't Theo just say that it was Saturday night at the animal clinic the previous night? Are we time-traveling? Or was Theo just suggesting it might be a two-night job and it was actually Friday night? Whatever. Moving on. Ken thanks his only daughter for her help, which Kira accepts, though she does remind him that he didn't actually give her a choice in the matter. They put their boxes down on his desk, and Ken unconvincingly finds an excuse to leave because "there's one more box in the car." Spoiler alert: there is no third box.
So, he gets the hell out of there with a quickness while Kira starts boredly unpacking the boxes they've already brought in. After a moment, she hears the sound of a sword unsheathing and pauses in place to focus her hearing on what the hell is going on. Just then, Noshiko, wearing her best all-black-leather ninja warrior outfit and stiletto boots, starts running across the tops of the desks toward her daughter with a loud war cry. She then lunges for Kira, flipping in the air and slicing one of the books on the desk in half with her sword. "Mom? What the hell?" Kira shrieks, clearly startled by this development, but Noshiko doesn't say anything and instead just keeps trying to fight Kira, forcing her to duck away from her strikes and finally stepping on the tip of her mother's katana when she tries to cut at her legs to stop her. "Kira, where's your sword?" Noshiko asks, noticing that Kira isn't wearing her belt, but Kira doesn't even get a chance to finish saying that she thinks she left it somewhere before Noshiko pulls the sword up and causing Kira to do a very impressive back-flip in the air and landing agilely on her feet. "Mom, this isn't what I would call quality mother-daughter time," Kira exclaims with wide eyes, so Noshiko throws her the katana she's using and pulls a second one out of the scabbard she's wearing on her back. "Kira! Defend yourself!"
So, Kira does as she's told, raising her katana in a defensive position as the women start to fight each other. I'm really bad at describing fighting as it is, but sword fighting is even more beyond my understanding, so just trust me when I say that they're spinning and blocking and striking very impressively, though Noshiko quickly gets the upper-hand and strikes Kira's sword with her own so hard that Kira is thrown into the air, where she pirouettes multiple times and falls into a heap on the floor. This brings out Kira's competitive nature, so she shakes it off and gets back onto her feet as she lunges for her mother with her sword, starting the fight anew. After a moment, Noshiko blocks her strike and growls, "Who are you?" in Japanese, which causes Kira to narrow her eyes in confusion for a moment before being forced back into the fight. Kira launches herself at her mother with more ferocity than ever, but after a moment, she's pinned down to the desk by Noshiko, who shouts, "Show yourself, kitsune!" I really wish I could translate this into Japanese, but I'm more of a Romance language girl-- Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc are languages I can actually deal with. So, if anyone who knows Japanese would like to tell me what the actual Japanese part is, I'd be more than grateful!
Anyway, this order triggers something in Kira, and her eyes glow their sunset-orange color as Kira's inner kitsune comes out. Her aura bursts out of her like an inferno, and she strikes back at Noshiko with so much force that she's thrown backward toward Ken's desk. Kira then full-on leaps through the air like a werewolf, her aura glaringly bright, as she swings at Noshiko with her katana and fully slices right through her mom's sword like it were made of butter, causing a shower of sparks to rain down along with the top half of the katana blade. Noshiko looks horrified and falls down onto the ground, putting her hands up in front of her face to protect herself and/or surrender, but Kira's in full-on kitsune-mode now, so she's just about to make the final blow when Ken finally runs in, shouting "KIRA!" and flinging Kira's shuriken-shaped obsidian tail into the desktop, which distracts her enough to snap her out of it.
They all gasp for breath and stare at each other in fear before Kira finally glares at Noshiko and shouts "I COULD HAVE KILLED YOU!" Wow, I really don't think we've ever seen Kira so mad before! I kind of like it. ~It's always the quiet ones~, you know? Noshiko looks at Kira with wide eyes and replies, "Not you! The fox inside you." Ummm, what is that supposed to mean, Noshiko? When I first saw this scene as the sneak peek several days before the episode aired, I thought it might mean Kira was possessed by a different kitsune, maybe a fire one, but now I'm thinking it's Dread Doctor manipulation plus Kira having a new tail plus the fact that she's essentially a kitsune/human hybrid and things will probably be different for her than with regular kitsunes. Still, I am seriously concerned about our thunder princess, you guys.
Cut to the library, which is full of kids working on stuff, despite the fact that we're being led to believe that this is a Saturday morning. Mason is there, and is in the middle of picking a book out off the shelf when he sees Corey-- our cute little baby twink, better known as the boyfriend/friend with benefits of Lucas who got stung by his stingers and had to be hospitalized/pain-sucked by Scott-- through the slot on the other side of the shelf. As soon as Mason sees him, he immediately panics, since he totally macked on Corey's now-dead beau and most certainly feels awkward about it, but when he goes to put the book back and flee the scene, Corey notices him and starts up a conversation through the shelf. "Mason? You're Mason, right?" Mason confirms that he is indeed himself and identifies the boy as Corey, leading him to bring up the fact that he heard Mason saw Lucas at Sinema that night. "Yeah, uh... I met him that night," Mason says uncomfortably, not wanting to get into the details for the boy's sake. "He was, uh, really cool."
When this statement only seems to make Corey sadder, Mason apologizes for what happened to Lucas, but what Corey really wants is answers-- specifically, whether Lucas said anything to Mason about him that night, or about what Lucas did to him beforehand. Of course, Corey didn't come up at all while Lucas was checking Mason out, and then cornered him in the club and started making out with him before trying to sting him with his scorpion stingers, but since Mason obviously doesn't want to tell him that, he just sheepishly replies, "Sorry. I mean, I already told the cops everything I know... which wasn't much." Corey looks seriously upset by this, so Mason once again apologizes for what happened, but Corey just turns to put his book back on the next shelf and leaves with a defeated look on his face. However, once he's gone, Mason notices the book Corey just returned to the shelf, which is entitled, "Miraculous Healing: True Stories of Impossible Medical Cures," and determines that this is definitely not a good sign. YUP, COREY'S A CHIMERA, and Mason is already way smarter about the supernatural thing than anyone else so far. Like, he's a human on the fringes of the pack, and he still just gets so much shit done, I love it so much. He is so great this episode.
Scott and Stiles have just arrived at another table in the library, where Scott pulls out the map of they snagged from Danny all the way back in Season 3A's "Currents." Stiles seems surprised that they're actually going back to telluric currents again, but Scott wisely points out that since the Dread Doctors either couldn't enter Eichen House because of them, or otherwise just didn't like to for whatever reason, then maybe they can use the currents to protect Hayden. When Stiles asks him where the strongest convergence of currents is besides Eichen, Scott points out that they're standing on it and points to their location on the map-- it's the school, which we knew had to be a major point, since Jennifer chose to kill one of her philosopher sacrifices there in "The Girl Who Knew Too Much." If I remember correctly, Chris (ugh, come back, Chris! I miss you so much) said in "Alpha Pact" that three of the major convergences were the bank vault, the animal clinic, and the high school, so I don't know if that means that those two other sites will be coming up as well or not, but I figured I'd better mention it just in case. That was way before we were even introduced to Eichen House, so maybe that's why they didn't mention it back then.
Stiles isn't exactly thrilled about the thought of hiding Hayden in the high school and asks how long they're going to do it, but Scott insists that they'll stay all night if they have to. As they continue to outline their plan for the audience's benefit in voiceover, we cut back and forth to the various pack members and see their preparations, so get ready for some jumping around. "Liam convinced Hayden not to say anything to her sister yet," Scott explains, as we look over at the school's entrance to see Liam and Hayden walking in with a large gym bag full of supplies. We then cut over to the Sheriff's station, where Clarke is working intently on the computer at her desk in the bullpen. "She's working a double tonight, and she thinks Hayden's staying at a friend's."
(For the record, Clarke is working on a missing poster for poor chimera Josh, which has the following information: Josh Diaz, age 17, Hispanic, brown hair, brown eyes, 6 feet tall, 160 lbs, and last seen at Beacon Hills High School. So, I guess this confirms that Sheriff and the rest of the deputies don't know about Josh's death yet, which makes sense, considering Stiles and Theo left with the body before the police got there so they wouldn't have to come up with any explanations. It seems weird that Scott would have been okay with lying to Sheriff about it, though-- maybe this is more evidence of Scott being compromised by the Dread Doctors somehow? Or, maybe it's just that Scott saw how badly Sheriff took Tracy's death and didn't want a repeat performance of Sheriff having to lie about it? All of this lying is making me so sad, and since the episode after next, S05E09, is called "Lies of Omission," I'm guessing all the secrets being kept are going to spill out and make the already tense and overwhelming situation even worse. I'M NOT READY FOR ANY OF THIS.)
Back in the library, Stiles points out that their school isn't exactly a fortress, which is totally true-- Gods know just how many horrifying murders, near-murders, and kidnappings have gone down there. But, fortunately, Lydia's got a plan for that as well. "Remember how Valack quoted Tesla?" Scott asks, even though he wasn't even there for that part. Stiles does, in fact, remember, and brings up the "frequency and vibrations" part, which Lydia thinks wasn't just Valack trying to sound smart and superior, but to give them a clue to disrupt their electromagnetic frequencies. We then cut to Jordan's apartment, where he is working on some kind of wireless device while Lydia watches from next to him. "Parrish took three cell phone jammers from the station," Scott continue in voiceover. "He thinks he can broaden their range of frequency. It's a long shot, but it's the best we've got right now." Woohoo, Wendy's prediction in the comments of my recap for "Condition Terminal" that the jars and wires in Jordan's apartment were related to some kind of radio thing was actually pretty spot-on! They're still all about wavelengths and whatnot, so I'm going to call that a win. :)
We then cut over to the McCall house, where Scott is finishing running down the plan a second time to Kira, using the map of the telluric currents to demonstrate. Kira asks what her part of the plan is, and Scott hesitates for a beat too long before replying that she'll come to the school with them, since they need all the back-up they can get. When he adds that she should bring her belt, Kira looks a bit embarrassed before admitting that she thinks she lost it again. Speaking of her amazing katana belt-- I was trying to think of when we last saw it to figure out when Kira lost it and if it's possible that someone could have stolen it. I'm pretty sure the last time we saw it was in "A Novel Approach," when she had to give it to Creepy Sadist Nurse at Eichen House before they went into the supernatural ward.
Could she have left it there? I mean, Scott had to get himself and Kira out of there really quickly to save both of them from the Dread Doctors, and we don't even know how Stiles and Lydia got out, so I have no idea. Plus, we already saw in that same episode that Kira couldn't find the belt before they left, but when Scott looked at her with his wolf eyes, he saw her aura pointing under Scott's bed where Kira accidentally left her belt the night before. Could this mean that Kira is trying to hide the belt from her kitsune self? Or is her kitsune self hiding it from her human self? Or, did Kira truly lose it, only for it to fall into someone else's hands, like the Dread Doctors, or Theo? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.
Anyway, Scott very sweetly offers to help her find her katana and asks her if she thinks she left it here at his house, but Kira just gives him an equally sweet and sad smiles and tells him it's okay, since the last time she was around telluric currents, it didn't go so well. Scott reminds her that this time is different, since they'll be doing it at the school, where she literally spends at least a little time every single day, but Kira is still beating herself up about what happened at Eichen House and just shakes her head. "I made it worse by being at Eichen," Kira argues gently. "They used me to get inside. I think I need to figure out what's going on with me before I try helping anyone else." Annnnd my heart is shattered. Which is probably not a good thing, since the really heartbreaking parts are still yet to come. You can tell Scott feels terrible about this, and he starts to protest, but Kira just carefully takes her hand and squeezes Scott's with it before leaning forward to kiss him.
While they kiss, the lens flares JJ Abrahms-style, and "Open Heart" by Morgan Page (ft. Lissie) starts to play as we see flashes of two of their cutest moments throughout their relationship. Specifically, their slow dance in the boat house at the Martins' lake house in "The Benefactor" where Kira seductively nibbled on his ear and caused him to get a werewolf-boner, and their date at Derek's apartment in "A Promise to the Dead" where Scott filled the loft with light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Of course, the one thing these two events have in common is that they were short-lived-- in the former, Liam woke up after Kira had knocked him out with a boat oar, broke out of his chains, jumped through the boat house window and started running around in the woods, forcing Scott to leave Kira behind and chase after her; in the latter, they were just about to have sex when Kate and her berserker showed up, beat the shit out of both of them, and then kidnapped them so they could bring them to La Iglesia and turn Scott into a berserker, too. Not exactly perfect date nights by any means, but Scott and Kira can't ever seem to catch a break.
"If you need to take time / When you make up your mind, I will be here / You don't have to hide or keep it all inside / I'm always near."
I'm hoping this is just Kira reminiscing, or maybe her inner kitsune spirit trying to figure out why any self-respecting fox would get it on with a wolf, because if this is some sort of foreshadowing that Kira is leaving the show or that Scott and Kira are going to be facing a relatively long-term breakup, I might just riot. The lyrics to the song are great and totally relevant to the scene, but the tone suggests it could go either way and it's driving me crazy with anticipation. Scott and Kira are so harmless, and their relationship is, like, the one relatively normal thing each of them have in their lives, and they just care about each other so much that I don't want anything to happen to them. :( My poor Scira-shipping heart!
"It's okay to love blind / And you know you'll be fine, no need to fear / Hold me up to my words / The passion behind my eyes is reserved all for you."
Anyway, they finally break apart, and Kira tells him to be careful that night before she gets ready to leave, but before she walks out the door, she stops to ask Scott one last thing-- "If this works tonight, what happens tomorrow? Are you gonna keep trying to find places to hide her?" Scott gets a determined look on his face and shakes his head in the negatory before replying, "No. If this works tonight? We're gonna catch one of them." Sounds legit. I'm sure there's totally no way whatsoever that this could go wrong. Man, you know who would be really helpful in making sure that these plans had at least a small chance of success? CHRIS FUCKING ARGENT? Come back, my silver-haired, grief-bearded fox! We miss you! Having Derek for some additional muscle and also perhaps some background information on the different chimeras or the Dread Doctors themselves would also be a good idea, too. Sigh.
"I try so hard to write it all down / You work so hard to push it all out / You keep your heart / You keep your / Open heart / Hidden in the dark / Open heart / Afraid that it'll break apart."
Meanwhile, Theo is still at the animal clinic, after having watched over Josh's body through the entire night. Since Lydia was with Parrish working on the frequency jammers for gods know how long and the body is still at the clinic, I'm going to guess that our favorite body-snatcher hasn't had a chance to go into a supernatural, body-burning fugue state yet. After a moment, Theo hears that creepy skittering noise that is characteristic of the Dread Doctors and slowly makes his way into the lobby, where he finds the Surgeon standing out in the open and silently waiting for him. For the record, he's standing inside the mountain-ash barrier that is in the front desk/door to the exam room, so I guess that confirms that mountain ash doesn't affect them, either. "Checking up on me?" Theo asks, and when he gets no response, he adds, "You can't tell me you don't want to know who's taking the bodies."
The Surgeon finally speaks up, but only replies with one word-- "Inconsequential." Theo is understandably confused by this reaction and asks why they wouldn't care that someone is running off with their failed science experiments, but when the Surgeon once again doesn't dignify that question with a response, he realizes that the reason why they don't care is because they already know who it is. This does not please him one bit, and when the Doctor keeps standing mutely in front of him, he raises his voice and growls, "Did you forget that you were supposed to be keeping me in the loop on everything?" The Surgeon reiterates that the matter of who is taking the bodies is still inconsequential, but Theo just yells, "Not to me!"
Okay, before we go on, let's unpack this a bit, yeah? First of all, I already outlined my theories about Jordan and what the hell is going on with him in the previous recaps-- I figured he was either A) being controlled by his supernatural spirit just like Kira seems to be, B) being controlled by the Dread Doctors to clean up their messes, C) being controlled by the Nemeton to use the bodies as sacrifices to help give it more power, or D) a combination of B and C, in which the Dread Doctors were purposely sacrificing their failed chimeras to the Nemeton to help increase its power so they could draw on it and become more powerful themselves. However, now that we've seen one of the Doctors sort-of discussing it, I'm guessing that they have nothing to do with Jordan's recent extracurricular activities, and are mostly just letting him slide because he's both harmless to their cause and unintentionally helping them out by disposing of the bodies so they don't have to do it themselves. So, that's kind of reassuring where Jordan is concerned, but now I'm wondering if maybe there isn't another entity of some kind of who isn't manipulating him instead? We'll get into that more when we catch back up with Jordan, though.
Now, where Theo is concerned, it's a little trickier, because we still don't know much about him at all. What we have been told so far is this: he went to school with Scott, Stiles and Lydia until fourth grade, when he moved away; he (supposedly) had asthma; his sister died when Theo was eight from exposure (though we'll learn there was more to it than that in a little while); he was (supposedly) bitten against his will by the Alpha of the pack that Ethan and Aiden ran with as Omegas right before they killed him and the rest of the pack so they could join Deucalion's Alpha Pack; he somehow heard Scott was a True Alpha and decided to move back to Beacon Hills so he could join the McCall pack; and his parents are likely not his parents, given the drama with the signatures and whatnot. I'm not convinced that he isn't a successful chimera of some kind, but it also sounds as though he's been recruited by them, and the tone in which he uses with the Surgeon seems to indicate that they're equals-- or, at least, Theo wants it to be that way. The Surgeon, on the other hand, doesn't seem to necessarily agree with that, but Theo must play a pretty significant role in their plans to be able to talk to him that way.
There has also been discussion in the fandom about how weird it is that we've been shown that Theo is a bad guy pretty much from the start, which never happens-- throughout the series, the major Big Bad reveals nearly always happen in the season's ninth episode (though, on occasion, they will be revealed several episodes earlier or later) and until that point, we either don't know who the bad guy is at all, or we are mistakenly led to believe that someone else is the Big Bad, when in reality, they're either being controlled somehow (usually by the Big Bad), or are a lesser bad guy in comparison, sort of a Medium Bad rather than the King of Bad Guys. Let's refresh our memory on our antagonists, shall we?
SEASON ONE: The Argent hunters/Kate Argent (minor antagonist(s)); Derek Hale (mistaken antagonist through much of season, later manipulated by Peter); Peter Hale (Big Bad, revealed S01E09 "Wolf's Bane").
SEASON TWO: The Argent hunters/Gerard Argent (Big Bad); Matt Daehler (Medium Bad, revealed S02E09 "Party Guessed"); Jackson Whittemore (kanima, controlled by Gerard and Matt, revealed in S02E06 "Frenemies"); Peter Hale (minor antagonist due to his creepy possession of Lydia's mind throughout the season), Derek Hale (minor antagonist during the first part of the season when he created his pack to use to force Scott to join them and to try to kill Lydia when he thought she was the kanima)
SEASON THREE (A): The Alpha Pack (Medium Bad, introduced as antagonists in S03E01 "Tattoo;" Jennifer Blake (revealed to be the Darach in S03E09 "The Girl Who Knew Too Much."
SEASON THREE (B): The oni/Noshiko (Medium Bad, minor antagonist, revealed in S03E15/S03E18 "Riddled"); the Nogitsune (Big Bad, revealed in S03E17 "Silverfinger"); Severo/Araya Calavera (minor antagonists, revealed in S03E14 "More Bad Than Good")
SEASON FOUR: Kate Argent/her berserkers (initially minor antagonist(s), revealed as such in S04E01 "The Dark Moon," then was revealed to be a Medium Bad in S04E10 "Monstrous"); Peter Hale (Big Bad, revealed to have originally created the concept of the deadpool and to have intentions of stealing Scott's powers somehow by working with Kate in "Monstrous"); Meredith Walker (revealed to be the Benefactor/the creator/architect of the deadpool on Peter's orders in S04E09 "Perishable" and "Monstrous;" Araya/Severo Calavera (minor antagonist, revealed as such in "The Dark Moon."So, the fact that we've been shown that Theo is untrustworthy from the beginning is kind of weird, and leading quite a few people in the fandom to believe that there has to be more to him than meets the eye as a result of it, which is a valid point, though the fact that this season is split into two ten-episode halves instead of one or two sets of twelve episodes like the other seasons could be messing with the usual plot time table as well. Could it be possible that Theo isn't all bad? Or that the Scott McCall effect could work its magic on him in the same way it worked on everyone else who has spent significant amounts of time hanging out with him/fighting alongside him? With this show, the phrase "Never say never" is especially applicable, so I wouldn't necessarily rule it out, but I don't know, you guys. The fact that Jeff has been referring to him as Teen Wolf's version of Joffrey from Game of Thrones in interviews seems to suggest that he's going to be more or less irredeemable, even if he does seem to have some sort of soft-spot for Scott. I don't know, what are you guys thinking? Theo just confuses me so damn much.
Anyway, back to the scene-- Theo pauses for a moment when he hears the sound of a vehicle parking in the parking lot, but when he looks back at the Surgeon, he finds that the Doctor has already disappeared. Probably a smart plan, too, because not one second later, Stiles comes stomping into the clinic through the back entrance. Theo immediately assumes that something has happened since they last spoke, but it's nothing like that-- Stiles has just realized that whoever is responsible for stealing the bodies likely isn't going to do it if they see them standing guard next to them, so it's time to change their plan.
Theo asks him if he has a better plan, and though Stiles does have a different plan, I'm not sure if we should be throwing around words like "better," because his plan involves Stiles leaving a cell phone wedged onto one of Deaton's shelves with its video camera on and pointing at the exam table where Josh's body is laying. Then, Stiles has a smart watch that is hooked up to the video feed (did they steal that from Chris Argent???) so the boys can watch it while they sit out in Stiles' Jeep in the parking lot. I mean, personally, this does not seem like much of an improvement on the original plan, but then again, I've seen the entire episode, unlike these two, so I guess I have the power of hindsight on this one.
Once settled in, Theo suggests that perhaps they take shifts for the rest of the weekend, but NOPE, Stiles is still on his "Theo is evil" kick and insists that he wants to spend some quality time with him as he attaches the smart watch to his rear-view mirror. Oh, Stiles, you're so transparent, and Theo totally knows it, because he just smiles without missing a beat and assures him that some quality bro-time totally sounds good to him. Little does Stiles know that Theo is going to end up learning way more about him than Stiles will learn about the guy who has his paranoia cranked up to 1,000% during this little bro-time of theirs.
Over at the Yukimura household, Kira is shirtless and laying on her stomach on her bed while her mother quietly and efficiently places acupuncture needles into various spots onto her back. I was about to question how Noshiko knows so many things, like acupuncture, but then I remembered that she's nearly nine hundred years old, so I'm guessing she's probably picked up some hobbies and knowledge over the centuries. Anyway, as she places the needles, she explains what she believes is going on with Kira right now. "The balance of power inside you is in conflict-- the struggle between the fox and the human. Perhaps this will shift the power back into your hands."
That's a really interesting concept, honestly, because ever since Kira got her new tail, I've wondered how Kira's human heritage would affect her kitsune powers, because what little we know about kitsunes suggest that Kira is pretty unusual-- she's only, what, seventeen? Eighteen? And she already has a human form, thanks to her human father, which is something usual kitsunes can't achieve until they're at least a hundred years old, plus the majority of her powers didn't emerge until the last year or so, either, instead of having access to them from birth. Tell us more about kitsunes, show! Noshiko is such a badass, you need to have her on screen more and telling us all kinds of interesting Japanese mythology tidbits.
Anyway, you can tell that this is all just way too much for Kira, who starts crying silently as she presumably thinks about just how fucked up everything has become in just a few short weeks. When Noshiko notices the tears running down her face (which don't even mess up her eyeliner, because even when crying, Kira is a flawless being) she assumes that Kira is in pain from the needles, but Kira just shakes her head and insists that she's fine. It's not the physical pain that's affecting her, it's the emotional-- the anxiety of having a supernatural force inside her that she can't control and barely understands, the fear that she's going to lose the tenuous control over her kitsune spirit that she has and hurt her friends or civilians in the process, or that her lack of control will once again mess up one of the pack's plans like it did at Eichen House. Gods, I have always adored Kira, but never so much as I do in this episode.
Across town, Sheriff has shown up to see Melissa, who is, as usual, working yet another shift at the ER at the hospital. When he approaches the nurse's station, he holds up the Dread Doctors book and sighs deeply, all, "This fucking book, I S2FG." Wait, does this mean that he read it? I mean, I doubt it would have an effect on him, considering he's way above the age the Doctors like for their test subjects, but still, I'd be pretty worried regardless of what would happen to him after reading it. Anyway, he explains that while he tries to brainstorm what the hell is going on from a detective standpoint, he keeps coming back to the damn book, again and again and again. Melissa doesn't seem surprised to hear that Sheriff still doesn't have any leads, so he points out that it's making him think that he's thinking about this from the wrong direction. Yes, Sheriff, I imagine that's pretty much always the case where these supernatural cases are concerned.
When Melissa asks for clarification, he explains his reasoning. "Well, the whole time I've been looking at this, I've been thinking 'science fiction.' But, they're not Dread Scientists-- they're Dread Doctors." Melissa's eyes widen in surprise when she realizes what he's implying and guesses that he's looking for a medical connection, which is totally smart, and is something the fandom has been debating since Season 5 even started. "Or a medical condition," Sheriff adds. "Something that Tracy, Lucas, and Donovan could have had in common." Whoops, I totally forgot that Sheriff is seriously in the dark right now and has no idea that Josh, Hayden, and Corey have also been revealed as chimeras as well. Oh, Sheriff, you sweet summer child.
Melissa gets that mischievous glint in her eyes and flirtatiously replies, "You're not asking me to hand over medical files without a court order, are you?" Sheriff, picking up what she's putting down, smiles and assures her that he would never do such a thing, so Melissa holds up the RFID card she's just pulled out of the pocket of her scrubs. "Good, because they may take away this key card... which allows me access to medical records. Do you want to see how the key card works?" Of course Sheriff wants to know how the key card works, so he nods and follows Melissa as she leads him to the file room to get to investigating.
Night has fallen in Beacon Hills, and the McCall pack's plan is finally being enacted in full at the high school. Outside in the parking lot, Lydia, Malia, and Jordan have just arrived, and are in the midst of unpacking the trunk, which is full of the frequency jammers Jordan jury-rigged for the occasion. Unfortunately, none of them really look that impressed by them, and even Malia is like, "We're seriously betting our lives on these?" Lydia snarks in response that she's pretty sure they're actually just betting Hayden's life on them, which not only isn't a very nice thing to say about an innocent girl who got turned into a man-made monster without her consent or really even her knowledge, but it's also kind of dumb, because how do they know that none of the rest of the pack are still targets? I'm just saying, it's a liiiiittle presumptuous to assume that because they've made it through the last few confrontations with the Doctors without death, they're somehow not at risk of being turned into a chimera or some other test subject. Not to mention wrong, considering what happens at the end of the episode.
Anyway, Jordan, bless his heart, retorts, "Yeah, well, I'm glad I brought my gun." Oh, honey. That is equal parts adorable, naive, and a little bit misguided, because really? These dudes can make you forget you ever saw them and control electromagnetic fields-- I'm thinking your gun isn't going to scare them very much. Inside, the gang finishes up their preparations for this plan of theirs. Lydia sticks one of the frequency jammers into what looks like the guidance office, or maybe Coach's old office, and turns it on, while Malia does the same to a second jammer that she places on top of a trophy case in the main hallway. Finally, Jordan places the last one in the locker room itself, where the majority of them will be hanging out for the duration of the evening. Scott finally sets down a heavy gym bag onto the bench, and anxiously glances over at Liam and Hayden, who are securing the locker room doors by moving a row of lockers in front of them. Once everything is set up, the gang moves into position-- Jordan will be guarding the outdoor entrances, since he's got the gun and all, and Malia is guarding the main hallway inside while Scott, Lydia, and Liam guard Hayden from inside the locker room.
After a moment, she gives Scott a look and hisses, "Is it me, or is Liam not aware of the second part of the plan?" as she glances over at the bag Scott set on the nearby bench. Scott, who looks overwhelmed and stressed as fuck, shakes his head anxiously and sighs before replying that he's not even sure if there's going to be a second part of the plan. Lydia's eyes widen in alarm, and she whispers back, "Or if it's going to work?" Not willing to lie to Lydia, who is probably one of his closet friends after Stiles, Scott just shrugs and gives her a look like, "What do you really expect, given how completely unprepared we are to deal with these steampunk assholes?" Ugh, poor Scottie. :( This is way too stressful even to watch, let alone actually live through. I would most certainly be dead by now if I was in his position.
Outside the building, one of the Dread Doctors (either the Surgeon or the Pathologist, I'm guessing, though we don't see its face) holds up its hand right beside one of the classroom windows, and the clockwork glove the Doctor has on its hand has a bright, smoky-white light coming out of the back of it, which causes the lights inside the classroom to flicker . The first time I watched this episode, I thought this was a mountain-ash-like reaction to the frequency jammers, like the guy couldn't get inside because of it and he was trying to break through, but apparently the Doctor was releasing some kind of hallucinogenic drug? Which makes way more sense, really, given everything that happens afterward. Malia, who is pacing up and down the hall, tenses up when she senses something hinky afoot, and Jordan, who, like Malia, is pacing back and forth by his SUV with his gun tucked into the back of his waistband, sheds his leather jacket and throws it into the open window of his car. Inside his vehicle, the radio starts to flicker on and off as well, only the station is 97.1 this time instead of 91.5, which Hayden was listening in her car on her way home before she got intercepted by the Doctors). Where I live, 97.1 is the ~cool adult alternative~ radio station, so imagining Jordan listening to Hootie and the Blowfish or Sheryl Crow or something is seriously hilarious to me. Thanks for that, Teen Wolf!
Meanwhile, at the animal clinic, Stiles and Theo are still sitting quietly in Stiles' Jeep in the parking lot until Theo finally breaks the silence by asking him if he's still wondering why he didn't say anything to Scott about Donovan. When Stiles admits that yeah, maybe he has, Theo correctly assumes that he still thinks he has some sort of ulterior motive, which Stiles confirms by replying, "More than likely." Theo goes in for the hard sell and asks whether or not he'd believe him if he said all he wanted was for the pack to trust him, and though Stiles assumes that Theo is lying, I don't actually think he is. Granted, he probably wants the pack to trust him so he can lead them to their doom or something equally awful for them, but I don't doubt one bit that his desire for the pack to accept him and trust him as one of their own is genuine.
Plus, when you're a werewolf, the key to being strong is being in a pack, and since Scott is a True Alpha leading a unique pack of various supernatural creatures and humans, there's a lot of power there to draw from. Anyway, as you can probably guess, Stiles isn't buying it one book, which doesn't surprise Theo a bit, though he does sigh before exhaustedly replying, "So, you're here because you're never going to trust me?" Stiles just hilariously chirps, "Yup! Glad we had this talk." Unfortunately for Stiles, Theo has got his number with regards to how he feels about family, so he brings out the big guns.
THEO: "You know who you remind me of?"
STILES: [sighs] "Theo, I don't care."
[Stiles rolls his eyes, but you can tell Theo's word are starting to get to him]
THEO: "My sister. She was smarter than everyone, too. And a pain in the ass, like you. But, she always looked out for me... the same way you look out for Scott." [Stiles looks guilty but says nothing] "You know, I was the one that found her body. She'd fallen into a creek and broken her leg. They told us she would've been okay if it wasn't one of the coldest nights of the year... if it wasn't for the hypothermia. And when I found her, all I could think was that I should've known. That I should've been looking out for her."Stiles, whose guilt over how much of a dick he's been to this guy who just keeps admitting personal stories to him is starting to eat at him pretty badly, cuts him off and asks him why he's telling him this, to which Theo hits his message home. "I'm telling you because even if you don't trust me, and even if you don't like me, I'm still going to be looking out for you... the way I should have been looking out for her." Damn, Theo, you are like a professional con-man. This would have been a really sweet sentiment, too, if we didn't get to see the flashback of when Theo found his sister in the woods. She looks as though she was about ten or eleven, and she's laying in the creek with her broken leg, her skin starting to turn blue from the cold of the water out of which she couldn't move. She sees eight-year-old Theo standing on the bridge, right where he dropped the lilies back in "Parasomnia," but despite her still-unnamed sister crying out for Theo to help her and reaching her hand out to him, he just stands scowling on the bridge above her and watches her as she dies. Sooo, if Theo is going to be looking out for Stiles in the same way he looked out for her, then Stiles is most certainly a dead man. (Unless, of course, Theo manages to turn him, which is another possibility that I'll be discussing later.)
Apparently Melissa is off the clock now for the first time all season, because she's now at the station with Sheriff and standing in his office while they look through all of the hospital records they pilfered. She notices the diagram taped to Sheriff's cork board that is titled "Phases of the Moon" and points out that there's a full moon coming, which of course there is, because again, once the last four episodes of a season/half-season start, literally everything bad that can possibly happen happens all at the exact same time. So, I'm guessing that the Doctors will be using the full moon to their advantage, either by creating more of them, or setting loose the ones they have to run even more rampant than they already are.
Anyway, Sheriff explains that he put the diagram up when he realized just how much bigger his job has gotten since he learned about the supernatural, and when he trails off and looks back at his crime board, where he stares at Donovan's mug shot, Melissa notices where his mind has gone and gently states, "You don't think [Donovan]'s still alive, do you?" Sheriff sighs and admits that he doesn't, although he does wish that he did, which surprises Melissa, considering that Donovan literally threatened to kill him on multiple occasions. However, even Sheriff is smart enough to know that there was more to Donovan than met the eye. "Yeah, but he was just a kid," he argues. "More than anything else, a victim of circumstance. The day his father was shot, Donovan jumped on his motorcycle to get to him. He was hit by a car two blocks from the hospital. So, when his father was finding out that a bullet had severed his spine, Donovan was being wheeled into surgery for internal bleeding."
Okay, I really wish we either knew how old Donovan was when he died, or how long ago this shooting happened, because I guessed it was before Sheriff was sheriff, since he doesn't really need a partner to run the station, you know? So, we know that Sheriff's first task after being elected was informing Papa Tate that Malia and her mother and sister died in the car accident, which was eight-nine years ago, which means that Donovan's dad had to have been shot before then, and Donovan himself would have to have been at least sixteen then in order to drive a motorcycle, which would make Donovan around twenty-five now, more or less the same age as Derek.
I thought the Dread Doctors only wanted teenagers? I mean, twenty-five is still young, obviously, but there's a shit-load of growing that happens between eighteen and twenty-five, so that just seems really weird. Ugh, why do I keep obsessing over this timeline when I know that it's a pointless endeavor? Someone take away my number and time fixation, pleeeeeease. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is hard. Anyway, Sheriff's story about Donovan gives Melissa an idea as she's skimming through Donovan's medical file, and when she remembers that Sheriff mentioned skin grafts, she asks him about it. Sheriff, confused, explains that it was Tracy who had the skin graft, which they learned after Deaton examined her body and found the graft on her shoulder. Melissa starts rifling through Donovan's file for a moment until she realizes that he, too, had a skin graft after his accident. Ohhhhh shit! Finally, we're on to some damn answers!
Back at the school, Hayden is looking at herself in the mirror over one of the sinks in the locker room, and Liam, knowing all too well what his newly returned friend is going through, assures her that she shouldn't worry too much, because she'll learn to control it. "I'm not like you," Hayden replies glumly. "I wasn't bitten by a wolf. I was... somebody's science experiment." She continues looking at herself in the mirror and proclaims this situation to be "so bizarre," which is the understatement of the century. It's clear that Liam seriously feels bad for her and everything she's gone through without her consent and though he agrees that yeah, it is pretty bizarre, he also promises her that she'll be okay. After a moment, Hayden looks at him and quietly asks, "What am I?" which breaks my heart into even tinier pieces than before, because what a horrible question to have to ask! And while Liam has no idea what exactly she is (obviously she's part-werewolf, but they have no idea what other characteristics she possesses), he still manages to give the perfect answer with the most beautiful smile in the world-- "You're Hayden." This response is so sweet that even our vengeful goddess Hayden can't help but smile and giggle at him with freshly-activated heart-eyes fresh eyes for a moment before replying, "By the way-- if you get me out of this, I'll forget all about the sixth grade," which gets a giggle out of Liam himself.
LIAM BETTER BE RIGHT, THOUGH, OR I AM MARCHING TO LOS ANGELES TO BOP JEFF DAVIS IN THE NOSE, HAYDEN-STYLE. For the record, IMDB says that Victoria Moroles is set to be in the rest of 5A and all of the episodes of 5B except for two, but it also said that Daniel Sharman/Isaac was returning in this episode, which clearly didn't happen, so I have a hard time believing it 100%-- I still can't help but worry that she's going to get killed off in some devastating fashion, and that is the exact opposite that I want. She's like the Allison to Liam's Isaac, which may be a bad comparison given how few people actually shipped them together, but it's true-- their relationship started off rocky as hell, but then they ended up bonding over their shared experiences and grew closer as their connection developed from a friendship into a romance. Besides, I think it would be great to have a reformed chimera in the pack, you know? They can use all the were-creatures they can get, and Hayden has the potential to be very powerful in her own right once she learns the extent of her abilities/identity and how to use them.
Across the room, Scott is sitting on a bench and watching his baby werewolf son and his best lady talking and giggling, and he gets this wistful and sad look on his face. If I could guess, I'd say it's mostly guilt over the whole "using Hayden as bait" thing, but I think the Allison and Kira parallels are probably smarting a little as well. Either way, it's literally soul-crushing to see. He's broken out of his reverie by a weird slithering sound coming from nearby, which understandably startles him, given who they're waiting to show up.
When he gets up to investigate, he sees what looks like a leather strap of some kind is being dragged along the floor and out in the hall, leaving what looks like a smear of blood behind, like some gross, horrifying slug. Before he can see what it is, Lydia rushes over to him and distracts him by bringing up a problem she just realized while she was brainstorming-- since they can't use their phones, they also can't check in on Stiles and Theo, nor can those two call them if there's trouble, either. Scott sighs and admits that he didn't even think about that, and he is only very minutely comforted by the fact that Lydia didn't, either. "So, we're standing here waiting for guys in masks and breathing tubes to show up," Lydia continues. "But who-- or what-- are Stiles and Theo waiting for?" Excellent question, Lydia, although considering the answer is your newest romantic endeavor, you might not be pleased by the answer you get.
Speaking of Stiles and Theo, they're still sitting in the Jeep, keeping an eye on the smart watch with the video feed of inside the clinic's exam room. After a moment, Theo breaks the silence caused by Stiles aggressively ignoring him by bringing up the fact that he saw Donovan's teeth that night he went after Stiles. "He was a, uh, wendigo, wasn't he?" Theo asks, which is a nice touch of acting, considering he actually saw Donovan in the Dread Doctors' lab after they yanked all his teeth out (still scarred for life by that, to be honest) and then set him loose to go after Stiles, but okay. Stiles confirms that he was, indeed, a wendigo, so Theo continues to play dumb while he gets Stiles to engage in his ploy to get information so subtly that Stiles doesn't even seem to realize what he's doing.
THEO: "That's the cannibal one, right?"
STILES: "Native American. The myth says that if you ate human flesh, your punishment was to turn into a creature that constantly craved it."
THEO: [gives Stiles a look] "That's a pretty judgmental myth."
STILES: "Well, I didn't make it up."
THEO: "What if it was the only way to survive? I mean, you ever hear of the Donner Party? I'm pretty sure they didn't turn into wendigos."
STILES: [annoyed] "Well, they didn't live in Beacon Hills."That's an interesting take on the wendigo lore! I was wondering how one becomes a wendigo-- supernatural wendigos, anyway, and not the man-made wendigo hybrids the Dread Doctors were cooking up-- and though we still don't really know what the answer to that question is, it is neat to at least learn about the foundation of it all. And Theo does bring up a valid point re: their survival, which is an argument that comes up all the time when it comes to stories about supernatural creatures. You have characters who are put into situations where they're forced to either be turned into werewolves, or vampires, or wendigos, or whatever other versions of monster there are, when then they're hurt, dying, or otherwise have no choice if they want to defeat their enemy, etc.
We've seen it in Teen Wolf (Scott giving the bite to Liam to keep him from falling to his death or at the very least grievous injury, the debate over whether or not to turn Stiles when he was possessed by the nogitsune and they thought he had FTD), The Vampire Diaries (pretty much how everyone was turned into vampires, and, in the case of Tyler Lockwood, being forced to trigger his werewolf gene to survive Kai's blowout), The Originals (Hayley turning into a hybrid, Klaus feeding Father Kieran his blood before he died to buy Cami more time to say goodbye to him, Marcel turning his entire squadron in World War I to prevent his brothers from dying from mustard gas after the military didn't give them the gas masks they needed), and probably a dozen other different supernatural dramas. In the end, people are scared of dying, so they'd rather be beholden to the moon, or forced to feed on the blood or flesh of the living to survive, than to die and have to deal with the unknown afterlife, if one even exists. I know this has little to do with what is currently happening, but Theo must have brought it up for a reason, and I hope it's just Theo trying to turn Stiles to his side, and not some sort of awful foreshadowing.
Anyway, Theo references Stiles' comment about the wendigos being punished for their dietary choices before turning it around and asking what the punishment for killing a chimera is. "You spend five hours in the car with Theo Raeken," Stiles snits, which makes Theo chuckle for a few moments before Stiles finally gets serious and confesses that he already knows what his punishment will be-- he's going to lose Scott, his best friend. I mean, I get why Stiles would be worried, given what we know about Scott and his policy against killing, especially when it is someone like Tracy, who never asked for any of this and who couldn't control what she was doing. However, wasn't it literally only five episodes ago in "Parasomnia" that Stiles was talking about Scott being too trusting and too forgiving? So, why doesn't he apply in this case?
As I've said in pretty much every recap since it happened, I highly doubt Scott would have turned away from his brother-in-arms if he had just been honest from the jump about what happened-- Donovan attacked him and threatened to eat his legs off after already having threatened his father's life on multiple occasions, and Stiles was so in fear of his life that he tried to incapacitate him long enough to get away by dumping the scaffolding stuff on him, which accidentally killed him. Stiles is a human, and even if Donovan wasn't intending to kill him, the injuries Donovan would have inflicted upon him could have ended up killing him anyway, or at the very least seriously handicapping him for life. Scott doesn't hold humans to the same standards as supernaturals who have the strength, speed, and healing to neutralize their foes instead of outright killing them. However, now, not only has Stiles been lying to everyone, Scott and Malia included, about Donovan and his death for days/weeks, but he also lied about Theo killing Josh because of that fear of his lies coming out. And we all know the lies will be coming out, and Scott (and probably the others) will end up being seriously upset by it, not necessarily by what Stiles did, but the fact that he didn't come straight to them. UGH, THIS IS GOING TO BE SUCH A DISASTER.
Over at the Yukimura house, Noshiko, now in her pajamas and a bathrobe, walks into Kira's darkened room to check on her, only to gasp in horror when she sees the bed. She shouts for Ken, who rushes in and gets the exact same scared expression on his face as the camera turns so we can finally see what they see-- Kira's bed is empty, indicating that she's flown the coop, and all of the acupuncture pins that were in her back have now been arranged on her headboard to spell out a number-- 115. At first, I was wracking my brain to try to come up with the significance of this, since the 5 kind of looks like the jiko kanji for "self" that the oni were branding on everyone they checked for the nogitsune, but nothing was making much sense until I reread my recap for "Creatures of the Night" and realized that 115 is the state route that Kira and Theo were on at the beginning of the episode when they were stuck in traffic.
And-- SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT-- in the promo for the next episode, we see Kira being pulled out of the moon roof of the Yukimura's car by the Dread Doctors on that same road where she's wearing the same clothes from that episode, so I think her kitsune spirit (who seems to have a mind/will of its own) has figured out that Kira was experimented on by the Dread Doctors before Scott got there, and the Dread Doctors just made everyone forget that it happened. Kathleen thinks it had to have occurred in between when Kira left to walk to the school rather than wait for traffic to clear up and when she got back in the car, or maybe it was before we even first saw the family in the premiere. Either way, I'm seriously worried-- it looks as though they're doing something to her eye, and it makes me wonder if they're managing to control her with it, or if her kitsune spirit is getting wild out of anger that they would dare mess with her, or what, but consider me terrified for our thunder princess. And, if they managed to do that to Kira, then what are the odds that they've done similar things to Lydia, Scott, and/or Malia? THIS IS SO SCARY.
Meanwhile, in the school, Scott and Lydia are still in the locker room with Hayden and Liam, who are sitting on the floor side-by-side while they leaning back against a row of lockers. After a moment, Hayden starts to get sleepy and rests her head on Liam's shoulder, and you can just see his heart start to pound in surprise and excitement at how affectionate she's being. He's clearly surprised by it, but at the same time, the seriousness of their current situation overpowers any happiness he might have had about it. Of course, that's when he notices the bag that Scott brought and set on the bench, and though he obviously doesn't want to move, he eventually scoots out from under Hayden in an attempt not to disturb her before getting up and looking inside the bag. What he finds is quite a few lengths of chains, and when he pulls them out, Scott and Lydia both realize he's found something they weren't exactly eager for him to find and rush over to do damage control. Liam asks them what they're planning on doing with those, so Scott vaguely replies that they brought them just in case, and at first, I figured they were worried about Hayden getting violent or something, because do they really think that a bunch of chains could hurt those clockwork assholes? I'm going with "no."
Liam isn't buying that excuse either, so he asks "In case of what?", causing Lydia to sigh before she patiently explaining that they were hoping they might have a chance to catch one of the Doctors. "If we can't make the school a fortress, then maybe we can make it a trap," Scott continues, trying to back Lydia up, but Liam isn't an idiot, and points out a pretty obvious design flaw in this plan-- since the Dread Doctors are coming for Hayden, that pretty much means she's the bait in this so-called trap, right? Hayden, not at all thrilled by that statement, looks at Scott and Lydia in horror, and they both look at each other. To Scott and Lydia's everlasting credit, you know that they don't like this plan any more than anyone else does, but they've been in this game a lot longer than Liam has, and they definitely have more than Hayden has, so they know that sometimes the things they have to do to defeat their enemies, or to protect their fellow Beacon Hills citizens, aren't exactly the safest, the most thought-out, or even likely to work. But, as Scott will say in a few-- are there any better plans out there, aside from running the hell away from Beacon Hills like their asses are on fire? Not really.
Outside in the bus bay, Jordan has moved inside his SUV to do watch in a less conspicuous and more comfortable position, and is looking really tired and bleary-eyed as he looks around to make sure that no one is approaching from any direction. Suddenly, he looks down to find a playing card laying face-down on the floor by his foot, and, as expected, when he picks it up, he finds that it's the Queen of Diamonds card with the illustration that looks eerily similar to Lydia. According to Wendy, the card thing is a reference to the movie Manchurian Candidate, but I've never seen it, so I'm going to have research into it more/hash it out with her more before I can really get it, I think.
Before he gets the chance to process where the hell that card came from, he looks over to his right and finds Lydia, in a totally different outfit from the one she was just wearing inside the school (before, it was a really pretty royal blue floral dress; now, it's a gauzey teal top and presumably a skirt that I can't really see since she's sitting down and only visible from the chest up). She's uncharacteristically quiet, and just looks at him demurely as she grips Jordan's forearm, almost massaging it as she makes her way up his arm to his biceps. I feel you, Hallucination!Lydia-- Jordan has great arms and shoulders, it's totally true. Jordan looks at her with confusion, and seems to both not understand what the fuck is happening while also being so overwhelmed by it that he's completely forgotten that he's there to guard the school to protect the kids.
They stare at each other for a long moment before not-real!Lydia leans over and caresses his face with both hands before pulling him toward her so they can make out. She then wastes no time tugging off his shirt, and Jordan is so into it that he quickly and easily rips her shirt down the front like it was tissue paper. They get back to making out, even more passionately this time, but while they're pawing at each other, Lydia scrapes down Jordan's shoulders and chest with her fingernails, revealing burning flesh that quickly turns to ash trailing down his abdomen. Jordan, feeling a little weird about this, pulls away to find what is apparently his worst nightmare-- hurting someone (especially Lydia) with his powers. When he looks up at her, he finds that Lydia has been completely burned, and you have to give it to both the makeup people and Holland Roden, because she 100% sells this creepy-as-fuck scene. Her hair and clothes have been burned so badly that parts of it have melted to her skin, which is cracked, dry, and blackened in many places. She cups Jordan's face in her painfully-burned hands as Jordan looks as though he's about to pee himself from fear, and despite the fact that he's clearly not into it anymore, Lydia starts making out with him even harder this time, even as he tries to pull away. Eventually, all he can do is just brace his arm against the windshield and hope this nightmare passes quickly.
Sure enough, we cut inside to the main hallway, where Malia has heard the sound of a car ignition being started before it speeds away like a bat out of hell. "Parrish?" Malia mutters to herself under her breath. "Where's he going?" She turns and walks toward the main entrance to go out to see what the fuck is happening, but before she can, a humongous animal trap pops out of the linoleum tiles of the floor and clamps down hard on Malia's ankle, causing her to let out the most bloodcurdling, soul-crushingly awful scream I have heard since the time Kate turned Scott into a berserker in "A Promise to the Dead." Seriously, just rewatching this scene to write about it is almost causing me physical pain. Malia is so overwhelmed by the pain of the long teeth of the trap impaling her ankle that she is unable to stop herself from falling backwards, where two more perfectly-placed traps burst out of the floor and snap onto her wrists, causing her to be splayed out in a pose that almost looks like a crucifixion of sorts. Malia, now in even more agony, starts to shriek at the top of her lungs when another trap underneath her head shoots out a spike that impales her right through the throat! NOOOO, NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!
Just then, the Dread Doctors show up, and the three of them march down the hall with that slow lock-step that they do that reminds me a ton of the oni, revealing that they can, in fact, enter the school despite the convergence of telluric currents. Unsurprisingly, when they pass by Malia on the floor of the hall and pay her absolutely no attention whatsoever, we can see that Malia isn't stuck in animal traps at all, she just thinks that she is, because somehow, whether by some kind of hallucinogenic gas like the one the Scarecrow uses in the Batman Trilogy, or their own electromagnetic mind-wiping powers, they've managed to convince Malia that she's being attacked by her own worst fear, which, as it turns out, is being caught in traps like the ones Papa Tate set up all around the woods when he was trying to kill her in her coyote days in "More Bad Than Good." Also, it seems like the Doctors also have some sort of power that gives them invisibility? Or otherwise some sort of power that just distracts or compels people into not paying attention to what they're doing, because it seems like they've done a lot of stuff around people that no one else has noticed except for the McCall Pack kids, and Malia is literally wailing from excruciating agony and none of the others can hear her despite the fact that most of them have enhanced senses. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THEM?
Back at the station, Melissa and Sheriff are poring through the medical records they've dug up regarding the chimeras they know of, but Melissa has determined that there is nothing in Lucas' medical history that suggests that he had a skin graft, so he doesn't fit the pattern. Sheriff insists that it can't be a coincidence and asks her if there's anything of interest in the file, so she brings up the fact that Lucas was born with congenital glaucoma, but that has nothing to do with skin grafts. Uh, I'd still say that's pretty relevant, because when Sheriff asks her what the treatment for glaucoma is, Melissa explains that according to the chart, Lucas had a cornea transplant several years ago, which was probably around the same time that Hayden got her kidney transplant, I'm guessing? "It's a fairly routine outpatient procedure," Melissa continues. "It was an allogeneic transplant taken from a recent donor."
This triggers something in Melissa's memory, and when Sheriff tells her to spit it out, she reminds him that Tracy's skin graft was allogeneic as well. All it takes is a few additional seconds to skim through Donovan's file to find that his transplant was also allogeneic, and all of them were taken from outside donors rather than using their own skin to transplant it elsewhere, so, DUN DUN DUN, all of the now man-made supernatural chimeras were already genetic chimeras before they were made, because they had the DNA of two separate beings inside them. I knew that AP Bio lecture about genetic chimeras in "Parasomnia" would be relevant to their current supernatural drama soon enough! Yay, look at Mrs. Finch actually being helpful in her own weird, rude way. I'm so glad that at least this part of the puzzle has finally been solved! Now, if we could just get answers to the other 345,234,098,345,902,834,509,823,092,409,234 questions I have, that would be amazing.
Back in the high school's locker room, we finally come to the point where I realized that the earlier heartbreaks were nothing compared to what is about to happen in this scene. Lydia has her best grown-up voice on, and tries to calm Liam down by channeling her inner Natalie Martin and assuring him that they brought Hayden there to protect her, but Liam's just, like, "Yeah, I can tell by the fact that you're making her the cheese in a Dread Doctor mousetrap." When Hayden asks Scott if she's really the bait, Scott insists that no one is the bait, though he does end up adding, "But we can't be bodyguards to everyone every night," which, really, is an excellent point, and one it's taken Scott a really long time to learn. Scott is constantly working to make sure everyone around him survives whatever new threat has popped up, which is a great quality, and one of the billions and billions of reasons why Scott McCall is one of my favorite television characters of all time, but it's not something that can be sustainable for longer than a couple of days-- eventually, they're going to run out of places to hide, people to protect the chimeras in danger, and luck to keep them all safe.
However, Liam is still a kid, is still new to the supernatural, and is too overwhelmed by fear to fully understand how well and truly fucked they are, and I honestly can't blame him for that. They're all literally just a bunch of teenagers who are always in terrifying, dangerous situations and are just doing whatever they can do to get through it, and sometimes, that means arguing about what the fuck they're supposed to do, which is exactly what happens next.
LIAM: [frustrated] "Then why aren't we talking to Stiles' dad? Why aren't we doing something better than hiding in a school?"
SCOTT: [defensively] "Because we still don't know anything about them or what they want, okay? They're winning, and we don't even know what the game is!"
LIAM: [points at the jammer] "What if they come in here and those things don't work? What if you have an asthma attack again? What are we gonna do?"
SCOTT: [defeatedly] "I don't know."
LIAM: [angrily] "This plan sucks!"
SCOTT: [loses his temper and raises his voice] "You got a better one? Kids are dying!" [He points at Hayden] "And she's next! So, somebody has to do something! Somebody has to save everyone, so somebody's got to be the bait!"OUCH, MY HEART, MY SOUL, MY ENTIRE EXISTENCE, IT HUUUURTS. The second those last words leave Scott's mouth, you can tell he instantly regrets them, both because of the fear they caused Hayden, judging by the terrified look on her face, along with the fact that he's never once raised his voice to any of his friends, especially not Liam, not even when he was wolfed out and trying to kill him. Conversely, Liam is both hurt by the tone of Scott's statement and also scared because if Scott is being pushed to the edge like this, then things must be way, way, wayyyy worse than anyone thought. Lydia, too, seems to be pained by the tension, because she just closed her eyes and sighed as though this were something she was afraid was going to happen.
Yikes! So, yeah, everyone is wound up so tight they're about to snap, and it's no bueno. Liam and Scott both take a moment to compose themselves, but before Scott can apologize, Liam takes a step toward Scott and looks him in the eyes. "Scott... Promise me you'll do everything you can to save her." The look on Scott's face when he hears this kills me, because you can tell all he wants to do is make that promise, but he knows better by now than to assume that he has the power to save everyone every time. But, when Liam stares even more determinedly into Scott's eyes and repeats, "Scott-- PROMISE ME," Scott is powerless to say no to him. "I'll do everything I can," Scott replies solemnly with a nod. "I promise."
Unfortunately, shit's about to go downhill quickly-- Hayden, who apparently started digging around her bag as distraction from the tense argument in front of her, has just realized that she forgot her anti-rejection medication, which I totally forgot about in the flurry of drama that has happenednin the last two episodes. You'd think that her super-enhanced chimera healing would make the drugs unnecessary now, but there's not much that her cellular regeneration can do to trick the immune system into thinking that the transplanted kidney she received from a donor has been hers all along. I wonder if the Dread Doctors know or care about the risk of her body rejecting the kidney if she doesn't have access to her medication, considering Hayden never does end up finding her pills, if I recall correctly, but who knows? For doctors, they don't seem to be particularly concerned about infections, considering all the gross tools they use to do surgery in a gross basement lab. Anyway, she tells the kids that she's got a spare bottle in her locker, which is smart, but when she offers to go get them herself, Scott, having just made a serious promise to his werewolf son to keep her safe, blurts out, "I'll get them. What's your combination?"
Lydia and Scott end up moving the row of lockers from in front of the locker room door so they can leave, and Lydia hisses at him to hurry while she keeps watch. Scott then hesitantly makes his way down the hall to where Hayden's locker is, but you can tell by the background music that something totally fucked up is about to happen. Once he starts to put in the combination, he's distracted by that slithering sound again. When he turns to find the source of the sound, he sees the bloody leather strap from earlier-- which we can now see is Roxie's leash from Scott's hallucination in the previous episode-- being dragged down the hallway and into the science lab, leaving a smear of blood trailing in its wake.
Just like Parrish earlier, Scott completely forgets what he's supposed to be doing and instinctively starts following the leash, because the Dread Doctors are really good at pinpointing fears and using them against people. I mean, look how easily they managed to completely incapacitate the four guards so they could do their kidnapping without interference! You gotta give them props for that, no matter how horrible they are. Anyway, once inside the lab, Scott frowns in confusion as he makes his way to the aisle between the two columns of workbenches to try to look for whatever was attached to the leash. Just as Scott stops at the front of the room, he's stabbed right through the chest from behind with the now familiar-looking blade of Kira's katana belt and groans in pain, because SURPRISE! Scott's worst fear, at least at the moment, is Kira getting out of control and hurting him. "Kira?" Scott gasps as blood begins to drip from his mouth, but hallucination!Kira has no mercy whatsoever for him. Her kitsune eyes are blazing sunset orange in the dark classroom, and her mouth is twisted into a sneer as she yanks the sword out of his chest and wraps the leash she used to lure him into the room around his throat before yanking it tightly toward her.
GODS, this is giving me major flashbacks to two different episodes with similar themes, and it hurts my soul. The first is from "Anchors," when Allison had the sex dream about Isaac that turned into a dirty Kate strangling Isaac with a garrote and telling Allison that they should "do him together," which will forever creep me out. The second is when Scott got stabbed in the abdomen by one of the oni in "Letharia Vulpina," and Nogitsune!Stiles knocked Kira out before torturing Scott with the sword. Do you remember what he said? "Oh, you really have to learn, Scott. You really have to learn not to trust a fox! Hmm-mmm. No, 'cause they're tricksters. They'll fool you. They'll fool EVERYONE."
Honestly, now that I'm thinking about it, Scott's hesitation with regards to Kira and her growing powers starts to make a lot more sense. Especially since we still don't know much about kitsune and their morality (or lack thereof.) Eep! Anyway, Scott grunts in pain and struggles against her, Kira speaks in a super-distorted voice, "You know who I am!" He begs her to stop, but Kira just strangles him even harder and adds, "I am the Messenger of Death!" as she tugs the leash even tighter around his throat and full-on growls at him like a wolf! As glad as I am that this isn't our Kira, it's also really great to see Arden Cho flexing her acting muscles, you know? She does evil trickster really well.
Meanwhile, Lydia is still standing watch at the locker room door and waiting for Scott. When several moments pass with nothing from him, she starts to get worried, and calls out for him as quickly as possible while she has a momentary internal struggle between whether she should stay or go see what's going on with him. Finally, she groans and starts walking down the hallway to see what's going on with him, completely distracted away from her job as a guard and leaving the locker room door open and unfortified. Yes, that will certainly not bite anyone in the ass later! (I'm not hating on Lydia, by the way-- she was affected as badly as the others! It just sucks to see the pack once again completely knocked on their asses pretty much from the start. EVERYTHING IS SO AWFUL RIGHT NOW).
When Lydia makes it to the staircase, the camera work gets all crazy and makes it look like she's zooming backwards as she gapes in shock at who she sees at the top of the stairs. It's Tracy! She's wearing the exact same outfit she wore in "Parasomnia," with the cute little cropped-leg jeans and the red and white jacket, and Lydia is so relieved to see her alive and seemingly well that she forgets that, hello, Tracy is dead, and instead just rushes up the stairs to go see her. "Lydia? Thank god!" Tracy exclaims in relief as she sees Lydia approaching her. "I need your help." Of course, she has a bit of a complex about not being able to save Tracy, just like Malia does, so she doesn't even take the time to think about it. "What do you need?" Lydia asks urgently. "What can I do?" Tracy's voice goes cold, and she gives Lydia the evil eye before she sneers, "I need you to scream."
Man, if Lydia had a dollar for every time someone said something this to her, she'd be able to pay for her pricey, Ivy League undergrad and graduate degrees in mathematics upfront and in cash It's seriously ridiculous. Before Lydia can even react to this request, Tracy jerks her arm toward Lydia so quickly you can barely see it, and Lydia gags as Tracy straight-up reaches into her mouth and rips out her tongue! Oh my gods, I'm literally going to throw up. Blood starts pouring out of Lydia's mouth, and her knees buckle beneath her, causing her to tumble backward down the stairs and fall into a puddle of her own blood while Tracy watches and smirks from behind her.
As Lydia continues to gag and sputter from the involuntary tongue-ectomy we just witnessed, the Dread Doctors walk down the stairs and pass Lydia without even a second glance, and when we pan back to Lydia, we see that she's totally fine, aside from the fact that she's hallucinating her own worst fear-- not being able to help someone, and losing her powers, however unreliable they may be. GODS, THIS IS TOO MUCH. None of them ever stood a chance against the Dread Doctors, honestly, and with how easily they were all overcome by these hallucinations, it just makes everything feel so hopeless, don't you think? How the fuck are our heroes going to get out of this? And if the Dread Doctors are still supposed to be around for 5B, then how the hell is this season going to end? I'M NOT READY. On the plus side, the lady Doctor (the Geneticist, I'm pretty sure?) has really awesome looking black platform boots with tons of buckles that I really want. I love stompy boots.
Over at the animal clinic, Stiles and Theo are still on stake-out for the body-snatcher, and Theo is still trying to low-key interrogate Stiles without him even realizing it. "If Scott really gave up on you for some piece of crap like Donovan, then he wouldn't be a True Alpha, would he?" Theo asks exasperatedly, but Stiles has clearly thought about this before, because he immediately replies, "Or maybe that's the definition of one-- someone who doesn't put up with murder." Theo can't help but chuckle in frustration and point out that the pack really needs to look up the definition of justifiable homicide, and Stiles' response made me crack up so hard-- "Did you seriously just say that to the son of a cop?" WORD. Stiles has probably had the entire California legal code memorized since he was ten years old. Theo's next argument comes from a mythological standpoint, and he reminds Stiles that werewolves' eyes are supposed to change color when they take an innocent life, flashing his still-gold eyes at Stiles to prove that they haven't turned blue. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that when Theo's werewolf eyes flash, they don't make that ringing sound effect that usually happens when Scott, Liam, or Malia, etc flash their eyes-- instead, it's like a rattling noise, not exactly like the Dread Doctors' skittering noise, but definitely wayyyy too similar for comfort.
This has been a point of intense debate in the fandom ever since they realized how weird it was that Derek's eyes were blue as a Beta, and so were Jackson's when he was turned from a kanima to a werewolf, but everyone else who was a Beta had gold eyes-- what do the different eye colors mean? In Season 3A's "Visionary," we learned from Peter that a Beta's eyes go from gold to blue when you take an innocent life because it takes something from your soul or some bullshit, but many in the fandom think that it's actually guilt that changes a Beta's eye color, and not the actual death itself. Now, of course, because of what Stiles is about to say, the fandom seems to be taking it as confirmation that that theory was correct, but I don't know, you guys-- just because a character says something doesn't mean it's true. Characters get wrong information all the time and believe it to be true, only to learn later that it was actually incorrect, and this could just as easily be one of those times.
I don't know, I just don't think that an off-hand comment by a character who is purposely trying to prove Theo wrong means that blue-eyed Betas are absolutely ones who feel guilty about their kills and that there are golden-eyed Betas out there who have killed and didn't feel guilty. I mean, we saw that Derek's eye color changed from blue to gold and back to blue after Kate did some weird werejaguar magic-mojo on him, and I don't think it had anything to do with him feeling guilty or not guilty about Paige's death; likewise, Peter's eyes are blue, and I highly doubt he has ever felt even the tiniest bit of guilt for killing anyone he's killed, either. I know some people suggested that Peter feels guilty about Laura, but I don't think so-- he may wish that it didn't have to come to having to kill his own niece, but since he wanted the Alpha power to help him finish healing and create his own pack to take on the people who started the Hale fire, I have a hard time believing he's ever regretted it, or felt guilty about doing it.
My personal theory regarding the eye-color debate is that Theo isn't a supernatural werewolf (or at least not fully one), but is instead a successful chimera. We saw with Tracy in "Dreamcatchers" that she had gold eyes even after she killed her father and her psychiatrist, instead of turning blue as you would assume, and I think it has something to do with the fact that the chimeras aren't "natural" supernatural beings-- they're made by science, not magic, and it kind of changes and/or breaks all of the rules that govern the supernatural world and its creatures. I don't know, or maybe the Tracy thing was a continuity error, or it really is a guilt thing and Tracy's eyes didn't change because she wasn't aware enough of her actions to feel badly about killing her dad and her shrink. You never can tell with this show! Hopefully we'll be getting more details about this soon, though, for the sake of all of our sanity.
Anyway, so Theo insists that both Stiles and himself only killed out of self-defense, but Stiles just retorts, "Or maybe you just don't feel all that bad about it? You can't say one life is objectively less innocent than another one. What if they turn blue 'cause you feel guilty?" Honestly, I think it's all about intentions-- Donovan was intending to hurt and/or kill Stiles, who didn't do anything to Donovan or anyone, really, to deserve such a fate, and Stiles wasn't even actually intending to kill Donovan, he just wanted to hurt him badly enough to buy him some time to get away. Theo's situation with Josh is a little trickier, because we know he's working with the Dread Doctors, who created the chimeras in the first place, si it's possible/likely that Theo only killed Josh to try to win Stiles' trust/the trust of the pack as a whole. But, since Josh was fighting Theo and attacking Stiles, it could still be argued that since Josh was intending to do them harm, and Theo was intending to protect Stiles/possibly himself (regardless of motive), it's kind of the same deal. So, Theo asks him if he really thinks that the eye color thing is up for interpretation, and Stiles confirms that yeah, maybe he does, so Theo doubles down.
"Okay. Then here's my interpretation of what happened with you and Donovan-- not guilty." Stiles looks as though he's really having trouble believing that, which does not escape Theo's notice, so he decides to pull on that thread and see where it leads. "Did you feel bad about it?" he asks quietly, and when Stiles gives him a confused look, Theo clarifies that he's not talking about right now, but right after Stiles dropped the construction materials on him. "What were you thinking the moment you knew he was dead, and there was no saving him?" Stiles thinks about this for a moment before slowly replying, "One word... Good." Stiles can't even make eye contact with Theo after this confession, which is a good thing for Theo, because he starts grinning like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. WHAT IS THEO'S DEAL? Is he trying to turn Stiles bad? Is he just pumped to get even more information to use to break up the pack? I'm thinking it's the latter, but I still can't get a read on this guy, and it's driving me bananas.
Anyway, after a moment, Theo frowns and takes a deep breath through his nose, and when Stiles realizes that he senses something, he asks him what's up, and Theo admits that he caught a scent-- smoke, like something's burning. Stiles eyes widen in alarm when he sees something out the passenger window, but he's not fast enough to warn Theo before a strong, flaming fist is thrust through the open window and punches Theo so hard in the face that Theo projectile-spits about eight ounces of blood toward Stiles, which ends up splattering all over his face, since you can't put Stiles in a dangerous situation without his face getting soaked in blood. Stiles immediately throws up his arms to protect his face, but it's too late-- Theo has been rapidly pulled out of the car before their assailant walks around the back of the Jeep, lifts it up by the bumper, and fully flips the car over and onto its hood!. As the car flips, Stiles' now-unconscious body flops onto the ceiling of his beloved Jeep, and a pretty substantial fire starts to burn around the scene. Uh oh, we know what that fire means...
It's Jordan, who is once again in one of his flaming trances that compels him to steal bodies. He pops into the clinic just long enough to grab Josh and throw him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry before walking back out of the clinic and into the night. PARRISH, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? He's about to totally regret it at some point, because as he walks away with Josh's body and presumably heads to the Nemeton to torch it there, he passes by the smart watch, which fell out of the driver's-side window and is still functioning, which means that Jordan also didn't notice the camera inside and will have most certainly been recorded as he stole a chimera's corpse from inside the clinic. SHIT SHIT SHIT. I mean, it's a good thing that everyone will be knowing what he's been up to soon enough so they can figure out what the hell he is, but I'm still worried for him, especially if the reaction to Kira's issues is any indication about how they're going to be treating him. Yikes!
Also, is this confirmation that Jordan has super-strength? Because I speculated about it in my pre-Season 5 speculation post that, like Malia and Kira with their own respective powers, Jordan seems to have always possessed enhanced strength-- or at least since whatever creature he is was awakened inside him-- but it was just laying dormant and waiting to be actively triggered so it could be used. For example, when he initially tried to free Chris in "A Promise To The Dead," he couldn't muster up the strength to bend the rebar that was impaling him, but once he and Chris gave themselves something to focus on, Jordan's eyes flashed orange for the first time (that we'd seen, anyway) and he seemed to be able to tap into that supernatural strength.
It's not unprecedented, either, since we have learned throughout the series that born supernaturals have a different run of it than bitten/turned supernaturals, and their powers often require them to consciously activate them rather than being a passive ability-- for example, Kira and her healing in "Smoke and Mirrors," or Malia saying that she could be really strong when she focused in "Echo House." Just a thought! I mean, Jordan's a buff guy, but not buff enough to flip Stiles' ancient-ass Jeep with no assistance, supernatural or otherwise. Also also, it almost looks as though the fire that starts around the Jeep starts up just as Jordan is walking past it it into the clinic, so it's possible that he not only has an ability to cause himself to burst into flames, ala Firestorm from DC Comics/The Flash TV show, or Johnny Storm from Marvel Comics/Fantastic Four, etc, but can also cause fires elsewhere without making contact with it? Unless that punch caused Theo to catch on fire, which then spread elsewhere, but that seems less likely since Theo's burns were localized to his face and his clothes seemed fine.
Over at Sinema, yet another old-school horror movie is playing the projectors as little Corey the cutie from earlier is drinking his sorrows. Wait, if he really has enhanced healing, can he even get drunk? I thought it was established that werewolves can't get drunk? Though, in fanfic, I've seen it work if there's a little wolfsbane in the booze, or if they do it on a lunar eclipse. Anyway, he's in the middle of sipping a vodka tonic or something through a straw, but eventually just says fuck it and chugs the whole drink down, grimacing a little as the liquor burns his throat. Mason chooses the perfect moment to arrive to check on him and see how he's doing, but when he hesitantly approaches Corey and asks him if he's okay, the little dude just slurs that he's never been better before accidentally dropping the glass onto the floor.
Regardless of his healing ability, he's looking a bit like a messy drunk right now, I can see that much. He starts to lean closer to Mason to try to kiss him, but Mason, who is the smartest of all of the characters on this show, knows this is a terrible idea and backs away before changing the subject to something more relevant to the current circumstances. "It healed, didn't it?" Mason asks, and though Corey is visibly shocked by this question, Mason gently grabs his hand and pulls up the sleeve of Corey's jacket to reveal that the scorpion sting he got from Lucas only days ago has totally vanished without even a scar to show that it happened. WHOA! That's alarming. I'm wondering if Scott pain-draining him/possibly venom-draining him with his powers helped him heal better than he normally would have? Or maybe he wasn't even a chimera yet until he got hurt by Lucas in the first place?
Back at the school, Liam is startled by the sound of heavy, wheezing breathing and the rattling sound of their clockwork armor that pretty much now screams "TROUBLE IS HEADED YOUR WAY" and immediately asks Hayden if she heard it. She understandably starts to freak out and correctly guesses that the Dread Doctors are there in the school, which leads Liam to unwisely walk over to the door to call out for Scott and Malia. Of course, their guards are too busy wrestling with their subconscious fears inside their minds at the minute, allowing the Doctors to appear in the doorway undeterred so they can confirm Liam and Hayden's suspicions.
As they stomp into the room, Liam instinctively puts himself between them and Hayden, but the Doctors just keep walking toward them until Liam and Hayden are backed into a corner and given no choice but to stand and watch whatever happens to them. The Surgeon takes his sword cane and uses the handled end (which, weirdly enough, looks like the head of a regular old hammer) to swipe the frequency jammer off the top of the gym lockers and onto the floor as the two kids gape at him in fear and anger for torturing them like they have been the last few weeks. "We're on a frequency you can't possibly imagine," the Doctor says cryptically in his robotic voice as they lunge for the kids. NOOOO, LEAVE THOSE PRECIOUS CHILDREN ALONE!
We cut back over to the animal clinic, where Stiles is still laying unconscious on the ceiling of his overturned Jeep. I don't know if you guys have ever been in a car that has flipped over before, but it's scary as hell-- this happened to me a couple years ago when my former roommate and I were on a roadtrip cross-country, and we accidentally hit some black ice while she was driving and slid off the road and down into a ravine. It was so steep that we flipped two and a half times and landed upside down, and my back hasn't been the same since. Anyway, I'm getting sympathy muscle aches for Stiles right now, especially after Theo uses a fire extinguisher he must have gotten from the clinic to put out the flames around Stiles before pulling him out of the wreckage. YIKES! Fortunately, Stiles doesn't seem to be having any spinal injuries, and being pulled out of his burning Jeep is just the amount of movement needed to wake him up and cause him to start coughing up all the smoke he just inhaled. Before Stiles can say anything, Theo, whose face is burned on the right side and bleeding from his nose and a wound at his hairline, grimly informs him that Josh's body is gone. Welp! Wonderful.
Over at the school, Scott is still struggling against hallucination!Kira's strangle-hold, and hallucination!Kira is still snarling and growling at him as she pulls the leash tighter and tighter until finally, a relatively deep cut opens up on Scott's hand from thumb to wrist. Scott immediately screams in pain and reflexively jumps to his feet, realizing a second later that he's suddenly been snapped out of his hallucination. In the real world, he finds a panicked Mason standing in front of him in the science lab with a bloody scalpel in one of his hands, both of which are raised in a non-threatening pose.
"Sorry! Sorry!" Mason yelps anxiously. "I was trying to help. Liam said pain-- he said it makes you human." OH MY GODS, MASON, YOU ARE THE SMARTEST, LOYALIST AND MOST PRECIOUS PERSON IN THE WORLD. He's only been around for twenty episodes and he's already made such a great addition to the pack, I cannot get over it. Never ever change, Mason! Scott, realizing how fucked everything is, frantically asks Mason what happened and what he's doing here, so Mason quickly explains that he found another chimera named Corey. Of course, this reminds Scott of the chimera they've already found, and he instantly demands to know where Liam and Hayden are. The two rush over to the locker room, where they find a forlorn looking Lydia and Malia. "They're gone," Lydia says sadly. "Hayden and Liam are gone." NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE. I HATE ALL OF THIS.
Speaking of Hayden and Liam, the latter has just awakened on the floor of the creepy Dread Doctor lab, where he finds his right arm tightly bound in a leather and metal brace from wrist to shoulder that is meant to keep his elbow straight so the long tube full of a dark fluid that has been inserted into one of his brachial blood vessels isn't disturbed. NOOO, DON'T YOU DO ANYTHING TO MY TINY WOLF PRINCE! I can't really tell if it's putting fluids in or taking his blood out, but it seems to be attached to a smaller tank next to the large one with the disgusting body floating in it; the smaller tank is also pretty gross, with a brackish liquid inside with weird floating stuff that kind of looks like algae. It doesn't seem very sterile or hygienic, I'll tell you that.
Anyway, when Liam looks up, he sees that Hayden has been strapped face-down to the exam table, and is looking both scared and paralyzed as the Doctors all surround her. Liam, still weak from whatever they're doing to him, tries to tell them to stop, but his voice isn't loud enough to catch their attention. The Surgeon picks up what looks like a rusty, old pair of gross scissors and gets ready to use it to cut into Hayden's side. "No, no, no!" Liam shouts. "Don't! Don't hurt her! Hayden! Hayden!" As the Doctors do that weird thing they do where they move around the table like they're playing musical chairs before starting their experiments, and the Doctors start chanting her name like they did earlier in the episode before starting to do some sort of test or operation on her side. "Hayden. Hayden. Hayden. Hayden." NOOOOOOOOOOO!
Finally, we return to the McCall house for a short time as we follow Melissa inside after what I assume was a long shift at the hospital. However, as soon as she walks into the front door, her hands fly up toward her face and flail around as she shrieks at the top of her lungs in terror. When the camera spins around, we finally see what the source of her bloodcurdling scream is-- there is the body of a red-haired lady chimera with long, black claws the diameter of pins laying sprawled on her back on the kitchen table. However, the most noteworthy observation of the scene is the murder weapon: a familiar katana with a perforated blade, which was stabbed through her chest, pinning her to the table. NOOOO! KIRA!
Next episode: Scott, Malia, and Mason go on a rescue mission, while Stiles, Theo, and Lydia seek out answers regarding where the Dread Doctors' are doing their experiments. Meanwhile, Kira is in some serious legal trouble, and the Sheriff loses his damn mind.
NOTES/SPECULATION/QUESTIONS:
-Fashion reruns: Kira's camo varsity jacket was first (and most recently) seen in Season 3B's "Letharia Vulpina," and the teal blouse Lydia wore in Parrish's hallucination was the same one she wore in her flashbacks in "Frayed," when she was making out with Aiden in Coach Finstock's office. Oh, Coach, I miss your antics.
-WHAT THE HELL WAS UP WITH THAT CHIMERA AT THE MCCALLS? Like, who is she? What is she? Where did she come from? Did she break into the McCall's house, or was she brought there? Also, I know I brought this up on my Tumblr, but I'm still not fully convinced that Kira killed this person. First off, Kira said twice in the episode that she thinks she lost her katana-belt, so the possibilities seem to be either that A) she's telling the truth and she truly lost it; B) she's lying, and she didn't actually lose it (seems unlikely); or C) either she's purposely hiding it from her kitsune self, or her kitsune self is purposely hiding it from her. We already know that her kitsune spirit can at least sort of think independently, because when Scott was looking at her aura with his wolf-eyes, the aura pointed to where Kira's belt was laying under the bed after Kira wasn't able to find it herself.
Like I said earlier in the recap, the last time we saw it was when Kira had to surrender it to go inside Eichen House, so it seems the most likely that she really did lose it, meaning that someone else could have taken it and used it to kill the chimera. My first instinct is to say that Theo is framing her, because he seems to be wanting to break up the pack, and the fact that this happened just one episode after Scott admitted to him that he wasn't sure if he could trust her just seems too convenient. Kathleen also has a hunch that the Desert Wolf did it, which could be interesting, especially if her theory that the Desert Wolf is actually a Dread Doctor chimera is true ends up panning out as well. Either way, it makes for an interesting story, but I just need answers already!
-Jordan, like Kira, seems to be under the control of someone or something else. In Kira's case, it's by her inner kitsune spirit, which has been thrown out of balance with her human body, and for Jordan by something-- I'm thinking the Dread Doctors basically calling him harmless is leading me to think they're not the ones manipulating him into stealing the bodies of the failed chimera test subjects, so we're back to Jordan being controlled by his own supernatural spirit (*prays to the Gods* pleasebeahellhoundpleasebeahellhound), the Nemeton, or some other entity we're unaware of at this time. (*prays to the Gods* pleasebetheMorríganpleasebetheMorríganpleasebetheMorrígan)
-In "A Novel Approach," we established that, as far as we know, the Dread Doctors have created eleven total chimeras based on the ten holes they found dug in the woods and on the lacrosse field and the few failures they had run into already. So, before this week, we had Belasko, Tracy, Lucas, Donovan, and Josh, plus we now have confirmation that Hayden and Corey are also both chimeras, along with the dead body left on the kitchen table at the McCall's, which means that we've met eight of the eleven, leaving us with three more to meet. Plus, of course, the Doctors could always just create more, though with only three episodes left, that might be tricky. We also don't know for sure that they haven't messed with the various pack members, either, so the potential number of chimeras could end up being way higher.
Speaking of chimeras, we also have a pretty substantial body count. Kira may or may not have killed one, and Stiles and Theo have definitely killed one each, leaving Belasko, Tracy and Lucas to be killed by the Dread Doctors themselves. Yikes yikes yikes!
-Here's the music in this episode that I haven't already talked about in the recap itself.
"Blush" by SBCR, Elisa Bee & His Majesty Andre (Scott outlines the plan for Stiles and Kira as we cut to Liam, Hayden, Clarke, Lydia, and Jordan in turn)
"Drexler" by MADE IN HEIGHTS (Noshiko performs acupuncture on Kira's back and explains the imbalance of power between her kitsune and human halves)
"Get Back Up" by The Unknown (Scott, Lydia, Malia, Jordan, Liam, and Hayden set up the frequency jammers and get into position to guard Hayden from the Dread Doctors at the high school)
"Holland" by Glass Face (Liam and Hayden talk about Hayden's new supernatural identity, and she promises to forgive him for the sixth grade if he gets her out of this situation."
"Pleasure" by Wurk Insoxx ft. K-Mi (Mason finds Corey drinking at Sinema and questions him about healing from his scorpion stings)
[*hugs*]
ReplyDeleteTheo - I think he's bad news, but I'm pretty convinced he didn't get this way on his own, that someone manipulated and twisted him into this very screwed up kid. I don't think he has a soft spot for Scott, I believe he wants to take over his life more or less. But it should be interesting to find out why.
ReplyDeleteTheo's eyes and their sound effect - now this is an interesting observation. They're using the rattling sound for Kira and Parrish turning on their eyes, which adds to the idea that Theo probably isn't a werewolf at all, but some other kind of shapeshifter, and possibly a spirit. (Depends on what Parrish is, I guess, but it seems at least likely that having the same sound effect means they're similar beings, no?)
How the Doctors caused the hallucinations: I've seen the idea that it wasn't airborne drugs, but a sound that the Doc we saw projected into the loudspeaker system and Parrish's car radio. It's probably more likely, even though I'm sad to lose the idea of drugs(!) yet again. *sniff*
Manchurian Candidate: let's hash it out! Basically some characters in the book/movie get brainwashed, one of them to become a sleeper agent. The trigger to turn him from his normal self to the sleeper self is a playing card, the Queen of Diamonds - as soon as he sees that, he does everything he is told, and when he's finished, he forgets everything that happened. (So if it's the same here, Parrish wouldn't even remember making out with Lydia or Burnt!Lydia - nor would he remember taking the bodies, etc. He'd probably still have the Burnt!Lydia trauma, though, so - non!yay.) In the movie the character's ex-girlfriend dresses up as the Queen of Diamonds at some point and accidentally triggers him - since on the show the card looks like Lydia, I think she's most likely the trigger herself, because she doesn't seem like a "normal" hallucination to me.
Superstrength: I agree about Jordan needing to learn to turn it on like Malia and Kira did (same for his healing in 5.01, too). Depending on whether whoever is in charge when he is switched off, his creature part either know how to work it instinctively, or the person controlling Jordan knows how the powers work.
Fire on the ground: I suspected that the jeep had spilled gasoline, and when Jordan walked past, it caught fire because he is so hot (sorry). Then again, from next ep he is apparently able to heat up stuff, so who knows. I don't think the point was to endanger Stiles and Theo, though, just to keep them out of his hair for a moment. (And give Theo yet another opportunity to save a pack member. *side-eyes*)
Who is controlling Jordan: I've thought about this a bit (more), and given the parallels between his storyline and Lydia's storyline in S2, there would have to be an equivalent to Peter here - and the only one who fits that pattern is Belasko/Glow Wolf. So, all my Gwyn ap Nudd theorizing aside, I'm suspecting the character based on that parallel alone.
The pack losing - well, I guess the Empire Strikes Back comparison is quite apt for this half season... I still believe that some of their behaviour is due to something influencing them - the Nemeton? The black goo? Getting hit by Tracy? - and due to being constantly manipulated by Theo. And they're not the only ones behaving somewhat extreme - think of the Sheriff insisting on protocol even in the most bizarre situations, or of Natalie outright refusing to acknowledge Tracy's supernatural aspects. I'm sure there is stuff going on here that we don't quite grasp yet, and as soon as that's out - they'll fare better.
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