Animal passions come to light, but the reality is a far different beast.
What They Say:
Pack Mentality – Scott and Allison end up in a group date; an animal attack has Stiles’ sherrif father on the lookout.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Scott’s life continues its ups and downs, which got pretty tense in the second episode with his being on the lacrosse team and changing to some degree in the middle of the game. He’s ma-naged to get closer to Allison while dealing with the fact that her dad is a Hunter, a Hunter that may actually have an inkling as to what he’s all about. Everything Scott is doing is playing with fire and he along with Stiles made the additional mistake of getting Derek put into jail when he’s actually the only one with a clue as to what’s going on and can offer advice on how to help. And Scott desperately needs help now because his body is doing things he doesn’t remember, and he has to remember if he wants to get closer to Allison and control himself.
While he has a really bad dream about being on a date with her, it freaks him out since it involved him disemboweling her to a large degree. That has him really concerned about going out with her but he can’t bring himself to back out of it because how many chances is he going to have with this girl. What freaks him out to a whole new level is when he goes to school the next day and discovers that the bus they were fooling around in the dream in is actually in pretty bad shape and covered in blood. While he thinks his dream may have been reality, the reality is something different indeed as a man was hurt badly in the incident and this gets Scott to admit he needs help and heads to see Derek.
Derek continues to be a mystery as he does offer him the help he wants, but requires a price to be paid in the future that’s unspecified. With Scott so desperate to go out with Allison, especially when they’re close to the point where she’s talking about just hanging out, he needs to make this work. The social side of Scott’s life is a lot of fun to watch as it does hew to things being fairly realistic, with its nods to his situation of course, but it works us into a small town where it’s not a completely clique oriented place nor does it seem like a back woods kind of town either. It feels like a normal place where people live and have their things going on. Fitting into that, Scott comes across well as a representation of it.
A good part of the episode deals with Scott’s date and time with Allison while establishing more his school rival. But the episode also puts a bit more focus on Derek as we see him getting stalked by Argent and his friends as they remind him of his place in the world. What they’re really after isn’t all the clear yet, but Derek does clue us in a bit about things when confronted by Scott. That he was here looking for his sister, only to find her in pieces as we saw before, has him realizing that she was bait set out to get him in the area. The why of it isn’t clear to him yet though, but it leads to a surprisingly good and well choreographed fight sequence between Derek and Scott combined with some very pleasing partial transformation designs. They’re trying to keep the budget in place here, using it sparingly, and the result is something that offers up some controlled transformations filled with anger and boiling with rage.
In Summary:
Teen Wolf has a lot of fun material throughout the episode but in the last couple of minutes it all comes together in a very strong way. After two episodes of basic teases and a third episode that starts to tie it all together, it makes a couple of big revelations right at the end here that establishes the setting even more. This is somewhat surprising but a welcome change of events as it changes the tone of the show even more. The darker and more focused supernatural aspect has been a big draw from the start and they’re building upon it very well here. I had spent months since this started showing promos wondering how they could make this work, but each episode only reinforces how well they’re doing it and how it’s becoming one of my most looked forward to shows each week. If you’ve been writing it off, because of its name and origins and the network its on, take a chance on it with the first three episodes with as open a mind as possible. You may be surprised.
Grade: B+