Damn, Agent Arsehole is still not dead! Can someone eat
him already?
Agent McCall (the arsehole) has teamed up with Sheriff
Stilinski (who still needs a first name) to noisily and dramatically deliver
someone to Melissa’s hospital (yes, I’m calling it Melissa’s hospital – she may
be the only medical professional we’ve seen in 3 seasons – who didn’t die
anyway). Melissa is playing with a jack-o-lantern so may have completely
cracked and think it’s Hallowe’en. Apparently there’s a big bad criminal who
needs surgery and every other hospital has torn up their Hippocratic oath
(insurance probably doesn’t cover it) leaving only Melissa’s.
Amusingly, they need a pre-op interview and Agent McCall the Arsehole (who still isn’t dead) asks who normally does that. Melissa. Of course it’s Melissa. I’m still not convinced it wasn’t Melissa’s clone who’s pushing the gurney. Apparently asking a heavily restrained prisoner questions requires super-dramatic music.
Agent Arsehole (still not dead) tells us the prisoner,
Barrows, is a bomber who plans to repeats his crimes once he’s not tied to
gurneys, in prison et al. Since he is lacking convenient explodey supplies,
perhaps we can tone down the dramatic tension? When they talk to him it turns
out he also thinks Hallowe’en is in January – and he killed a schoolbus full of
kids because their eyes were glowing. This could mean they were werewolves –
but the man who rants and raves is not exactly a very credible witness.
Stiles and Scott are playing practical jokes on the Coach
because… what you need a reason? (other than the fact they also think it’s
Hallowe’en) It’s coach! The man freaks out in the most perfectly dramatic,
overwrought ways over anything and everything!
The next day at school, Ethan and Aidan apply to join
Scott’s pack - no longer being Alpha
they’re looking for an Alpha to follow. Considering they slaughtered their last
pack, recently hit Scott in the face repeatedly in the guise of helping, were
followers of Deucalion and were instrumental in the killing of Boyd - their resume
for this position is somewhat lacking. Scott turns them down.
Plan B – Aidan suggests going back to school (since they never finished high school), though Ethan is not a big fan; they’re desperate for a pack because before they became Alpha they were Omega – the lowest of the low, tormented by all werewolves. And now they lost their Alpha-ness and have a list of enemies and no pack to protect them. Ethan still thinks highschool is a worse choice – but is convinced to go when he sees Danny.
Inside, Scott’s eyes are instantly drawn to Kira and even
Stiles can’t fail to notice – he encourages Scott to ask her out with the most
bizarre pep talk ever (which is even more confusing to poor Isaac who arrives
half way through.)
To the coach – I just love this character. It being
Mischief night and his birthday, the Coach is used to all kinds of shenanigans
and is extremely paranoid. He checks everything, including the present on his
desk. He opens it and finds it full of screws – totally inadequate, he isn’t
impressed. So lifts the box – and half his office falls apart, all wired to the
box. And his chair collapses.
His cursing is noted with amusement by his class – and Lydia
is plagued by an invisible fly.
Back to the hospital and, zomg actual doctors who are not
Melissa! The surgeon makes a joke about killing the patient which does Not
Amuse Melissa (watch it, mister, remember whose hospital it is). Cutting into
him they find something black and bulging that… pulses. Then explodes into a
cloud of flies. That’s just unhygienic. While everyone is distracted by the
suddenly horrified cloud of flies, Barrows gets up (despite being
anaesthetised) and stabs the surgeon with a scalpel before scarpering, leaving
the surgeon to bleed in Melissa’s hands (there can only be one doctor in Beacon
Hills!)
Melissa brings the Sherriff up to date and they worry
about the werewolves they know with a man who kills those with luminous gazes
on the run – especially since the ambulance he stole is spotted near the
school.
At the school Aidan and Lydia have a gloriously
self-aware reunion, though their plans are ruined by the coach’s office being
wrecked. Probably a good thing because Burrows is hiding behind the door and
that would have just been nasty. Speaking of nasty, he uses a stapler to fix
his stomach.
Sheriff Stilinski tells his son what’s happening and Stiles passes it on to Isaac, Alison and Lydia – Lydia making the fly connection to her invisible insect problem. Scott isn’t present because he’s moping after Kira who is all lonely and sharing her loneliness with her father (and breaking Scott’s heart by saying she just wants friends not a boyfriend). Less teen angst, more mayhem please – aha, Stiles arrives to confuse Scott and Lydia warns them that Barrows is definitely in the building, despite the leaving cops, because the buzzing is getting louder. I have to say, as super powers go, serial killer detector isn’t great.
Stiles rushes to tell Sheriff Stilinski who is confused – isn’t Lydia one of the normal kids? Nope, Banshee! Sheriff Stilinski, who always seems on the edge of his supernatural tolerance, decides he simply has to go with the eye witness who has spotted Barrows elsewhere, rather than Banshee senses.
Melissa and Scott have a better plan – with Barrow’s old clothes they can use werewolf senses (including recruiting the twins). Isaac isn’t thrilled but Scott’s clear that letting them help isn’t auto-membership. The twins, meanwhile, run into Danny and his new boyfriend – which Aidan thinks is hilarious, Ethan, not so much. Meanwhile, Lydia, being a bit smarter than most, wonders at the idea of a plan that gathers all the glowing-eyed-wolves together in one place. In one blast radius, in a boiler room which is easily explodable.
One fire alarm evacuation is called for – and of course poor Stiles is caught by the Coach and dragged out by his ear – still no sign or smell of Barrows, despite the fact he’s hiding in the library (where Coach had to collect Kira who didn’t even hear the alarm over the music – that was definitely me in high school).
Anyway, serial killers on the back burner because Mr. Yukimura
has decided to help his daughter’s loneliness by inviting Scott to dinner.
Awwww, Kira, your father means well. They sit down to a meal of sushi while
Kira’s mother brags about what an awesome chef Mr. Yukimura is. Scott has never
eaten sushi before, is worried about raw fish and doesn’t know how to use
chopsticks. Kira gets to train him (and catch what he drops with lightening
reflexes) while her mother looks on with a complete “uh-huh ‘just a friend my
ass!’” look. We get some exposition – Mr. Yukimura is Korean and took his wife’s
name because her family name is very important (they didn’t double-barrel or
keep his name because of Japanese law) and this is
not-very-subtle-foreshadowing because her antecedents are mentioned multiple
times in a short conversation. And Scott eats wasabi like it’s guacamole which
is a very very bad idea.
The talk of family names leads to Scott calling his
mother and, between catching up, ask why she never changed her name back to
Delgado after divorcing Agent Arsehole McCall – she wanted to keep the same
surname as her son. Followed by pizza with Kira, the sushi a bit much for
Scott; which means these abominable kids turn their nose up at sushi in order
to eat pizza that has been defiled with pineapple. That’s it, call Deucalion
back, they all have to die. It would spare us Scott’s goo-goo eyes.
Lydia and Stiles are having a night of murder
investigation – and lamenting both their lack of real clues and Lydia is sad
because her Banshee powers have failed her – and got Stiles in trouble. He
rejects that – Lydia has never ever been wrong and he has every faith she was
right this time as well. Which calls for a midnight visit to the school. Without
backup
Awww, guys, you two are supposed to be the smart ones.
At the school they visit the unlocked chemistry lab –
which should have been locked – and realise that all the chemicals are pretty
good at masking scent. Finding evidence of Barrow’s self-doctoring they realise
he is definitely there so run for help – hah, no, of course they don’t, they go
searching all alone! Where they find a code on the board (a geeky chemistry
code) that Lydia translates: Kira.
Isaac drops in on Allison, trying to use the standard
werewolf visit of entering through a high window – only she’s electrified them.
And didn’t bother to tell him and yes this amuses her (and this scene would
have made Twilight 8 bazillion times more amusing). Now they can both research
from the latin bestiary despite neither of them actually speaking latin. They
stop pretending to research and get to the flirting – when Allison announces
she would never ever kiss a werewolf again and she totally doesn’t want to –
then Isaac takes of his shirt and that resolve is well and truly shattered –
HELLO TORSO! I’m sure unleashing the torso is against the rules. Which is when
Daddy Argent enters – to find half naked daughter with half naked werewolf
He is not amused – though his concern (and mentioning of
his guns) seems to be more that his daughter is getting it on with ANOTHER
werewolf, rather than her getting it on with a guy.
At the end of the evening Scott and Kira say goodbye and Kira
is all touched that Scott remembered her name (uh-huh, because women who look
like Kira are completely forgettable to heterosexual men, yup, sure). And
Burrows comes up behind Scott and smacks him on the back of the head.
He wakes to find Lydia and Stiles hovering over him and Kira missing. They turn to Lydia’s banshee senses but she doesn’t know how to rev them up – it makes her incredibly frustrated and just want to scream: hey she’s a Banshee, Stiles tells her to go with it. One epic scream later and she hears the buzzing – and realises it’s electricity and not flies
Barrows is holding Kira at an electrical substation where
he takes pictures of her, carefully showing off every feature of his phone’s
camera for some of the most blatant product placement we’ve seen since… since
Scott dropped his phone in a puddle and he drew attention to how it was
completely undamaged. Having completed the advertising portion of the show, he
begins his rather unhinged rant about glowing eyed children
Scott rushes to the rescue – and gets knocked down and paralysed with a big electric wire. Barrows then advances on Kira with this sparking wire. He touches her with it – and the whole place goes up in showers of sparks; Barrows falls dead and Kira absorbs all that glowing white power into her hands. That’s a whole substation, the whole town goes dark – yes, Kira is not human
And Isaac, who never has the best luck, finds himself in
Allison’s room with spooky, masked shadowy figures – and the door won’t open.
Poor Isaac.
Over to Derek the mopey performing amateur surgery on
Peter’s severed finger and examining the box
they took last week. Inside it are claws – Derek’s dead mother’s claws
(Peter rightly calls this morbid). Derek wants to use the claws to communicate
with his dead mum, Talia. Of course, Peter doesn’t do anything altruistically
and he wants to be paid – he wants the claws (no-one believes it’s for
sentimental value for his sister). Peter stabs the claws into his fingers
(well, Derek hurries things along). It also occurs to me that Peter also has
blue eyes because of tragedy/murder – does any werewolf in Beacon Hills
actually have the standard golden eyes.
Using his newly clawed fingers he does the neck-stabbing-of-exposition
thing to Derek (taking great pleasure in it hurting since having his fingers
stabbed wasn’t fun). In exposition land, Derek sees the Nemeton and his wolfy
mother, Talia, with Alpha red eyes.
We don’t actually hear the conversation, if any, he has
with Talia, but when he returns to reality he gives Peter a Very Unfriendly
look.
We have a lot of storylines happening now – and I’m kind
of interested in them all – keep it up Teen Wolf! (Though the three couples
being couply less so). Ok dubiousness - what was Barrows? Because he was presented as an unstable and paranoid human - but with the flies and his immunity to anesthetic there's clearly more there
I was ready to snark about Mr. Yukimura serving sushi for
dinner as a blatant (and inaccurate) stereotype – except when Kira mentions that
they have lasagne. This isn’t what they normally eat, this isn’t how they
normally live. This is Mr. Yukimura’s terrible, awkward, yet sweet, desperate
attempt to impress the boy his lonely daughter with no friends likes. It’s awkward,
it’s cringeworthy, it’s more than a little silly and desperate and flawed – but
then, so has everything else Mr. Yukimura has done to try and help Kira.
Scott’s conversation with his mother is, to the best of memory, the first overt acknowledgement of Scott being Latino.
We got a brief visit from Danny who showed up, was a bit
of a joke and then disappeared. I’m probably being naïve, but I really hope
with Ethan and Danny being characters that maybe they will have some presence
in the second half of this season and actually give this show some inclusion to
come close to matching the ridiculously excessive hype.
What happened to Brayden? Has she returned to the plot box with Deaton? Is Cora even in the plot box?
