The start of senior year may mean the end of Scott’s pack.
What They Say:
Creatures of the Night – On the eve of the start of senior year, Scott and his pack are challenged by the arrival of a new enemy.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The fourth season of Teen Wolf was a rough one in a lot of ways as it felt like it wasn’t sure how to get to its big story from the start but knew where it wanted to end. After a third season that I liked a lot, it left me conflicted with what it did. But it had the positives that worked well for me with the Kira and Scott relationship and I liked the way things were growing with Stiles and Malia. Add in the growing adult cast and some of the other fun moments and it did a lot the I liked to help balance it. With this season, getting another twenty episode season split into two sets of ten, I’m hopeful about the lessons learned from the fourth season so they can move in some stronger directions this time around, especially as we’re in a senior year frame of mind.
The prologue to the episode is one that puts us in an unknown situation with Lydia being stuck in Eichen House in a catatonic state where she’s juts going through the motions with it all. It’s quiet and eerie as you wait to see what the deal with it is, and when she does snap to life with her banshee scream, we see that she’s using it quite well, taking out one of the attendants and making a pretty good physical escape from the main facility. It’s upped a bit with her making attacks against the security guards outside in the rain and we get a better look at the level of control she has over her powers. But as close as she getse to getting away, she’s stopped at the last minute. But not before getting out a final statement about having to get to her friends because she knows they’re all going to die.
The series essentially moves us six months past where we left off in the fourth season outside of what Lydia’s going through and that gives us a taste of what’s to come. Stiles and Scott are talking about their college plans a bit and how they’re going to try and stick together as best as they can, and it’s a good bit about some of the challenges they face in the coming months as they move into senior year. But we also get a little bit about the mood where Scott is largely waiting to see which way the fates are going to go, whether it’s going to get better all around or whether things are going to get darker and dangerous. Considering the nature of the show, it’s easy to know which way it’s going to go, particularly since Lydia let that cat out of the bag right from the get go.
That darker side is revealing itself rather quickly here as we get to see Parrish, who has been busted down to grunt work for awhile now by the chief, is sent off to deal with a noise complaint. The building is pretty much abandoned, but when he ears thudding noises in the basement, he goes to rescue whoever it is that may be behind the concrete wall down there. The mistake is in his trying to break him out as with the second or third hit, the wall begins to bleed. So when it reveals a pretty dangerous werewolf behind there that’s out for Scott and is intent on getting it, Parrish gets taken down pretty hard and brutally. Which seems to be his special skill when you get down to it.
The show does a good job of building tension through the first half with the various events going on throughout Beacon Hill, with phone reception weakening, power troubles in some areas and seeing the big bad of the episode hunting for Scott in different places as he tries to track him down. With most of the senior kids making their way to the high school for the Senior Scribe event, it gives them all a bit of drive to get there even if we don’t know the actual reason for it at the start. Tying all of this together with the storm that’s rolling in adds to the overall sense of dread with what’s coming and that’s definitely appealing as it goes old school in setting up the atmosphere for it, particularly as Scott heads out to try and bring Kira back in time as he’s starting to worry about what happened to her when she went to New York City for awhile and he thought he left things in a good way but may not have.
The final act does bring a lot of these things together, with Scott and Kira having a pretty kissy-faced reunion and Malia understanding some of Stile’s anxiety about what senior year represents and the way that they may lose touch afterwards, something that really frightens him. It does shift to some good action material as well with this weirdly powered werewolf coming to kill Scott and absorb some of what he is, and that makes for a pretty good bit of drama with the cinematography and set design for it, but it really goes to the next level with Scott being taken down hard by this mystery werewolf. At least for a moment, before it’s made clear that Scott really is on a whole other level. That’s been talked about several times over the seasons in different ways, but it’s definitely shown clearly here that he’s fully in charge.
We also get a surprise arrival in a new character named Theo, a blast from the past that used to be friends with Scott back in the fourth grade. He’s a werewolf as well and one that was drawn back to the area after learning that Scott was not just an alpha here, but a True Alpha in the bigger sense of the word and what it means. It’s all rushed, but it fits in with the way the show works its final acts in most episodes by making sure that big things are thrown at the characters. It’s all so upbeat from Theo that you really find yourself being incredibly wary of him, especially with the timing of it all. It’s a definite balancing act with what they do, but it usually works pretty well for me, even when it gets kind of silly and contrived.
In Summary:
Teen Wolf kicks off the new season by doing its best to bring everyone back together while also reminding us that we do have a paired down cast again for the most part. Growing it naturally is what it wants to do, but it makes some good nods towards those that were lost while looking towards the future and the anxiety that comes from it. The big bad of the season hasn’t truly revealed themselves yet, though we’re definitely getting something creepy in a wholly different way here with what the group is going to face, if you go by the bookend aspects of the episode with what Lydia is going through. There’s plenty of blunt foreshadowing going on here, especially in the final moments, but you know it’s all a matter of perspective. Suffice to say, there’s plenty of threads to tug on this season and see what the reality of it all is.
Grade: B+
