The slow but steady approach pays off for the Dread Doctors.
What They Say:
A Novel Approach – In hopes of learning more about the Dread Doctors, the pack goes into Eichen House.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While teasing a bit more of the Dread Doctors in some interesting ways the last time around, Teen Wolf has been mostly a smaller focus series so far this season and especially in the previous episode. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion because I rather like the cast and the interactions when it comes to their normal lives amid all the supernatural. The Dread Doctor’s themselves aren’t all that well known yet as to what their real motivations are, but some of the clues have been decent and the results have been creepy, which sets the stage well with some good tension and unusual movements. I do miss some of the simpler times of the werewolves themselves from the first two seasons, but the expansions to other areas of the supernatural have largely been fun for me.
Picking up from where we left off with Stiles being attacked, it all has the right kind of creepy since the kid has the whole teeth in the hand thing going on, something that has an old school kind of horror about it. Naturally, the sequence leads them into the school with the chase, one that ends up in the library. It goes for some tension as Stiles does his best to hide, but it also goes for a little background as Stiles learns a bit of their related history as his father was partner to Donovan’s father, who had been wounded and had his spine shattered, causing him to be paralyzed from the waist down. Suffice to say, there’re some real anger issues going on here that’s been made worse by the Dread Doctors. It’s a good mix of talking and action to advance things that end up going horribly violent in a way that the show sometimes feels like it’s a bit out of place but really isn’t.
Where it takes a curious turn is when Stiles calls it in to the police, not talking of course, and they send someone out to investigate it. There’s some great tension as he sits in his jeep panicking over what’s to come and how it’s going to play out while he tries to basically hide, but when the cop calls back in that he didn’t find anything it just gets even worse. Considering the things that Stiles has experienced before with visions and hallucinations, going back into the school and finding nothing there – but some evidence that things did happen with Donovan, well, it just sends him further into a spiral. The stress aspect of it definitely ramps up well and seeing him trying to cope with it through his analytical side works well as he tries to piece together what happened so that he can convince himself that he’s not crazy.
What helps to ease his mind a bit, though it doesn’t in other ways, is when Scott calls him to tell him that someone is grabbing the other bodies as well, such as from the hospital and the animal clinic. While we know that Theo is involved, it’s not a surprise because he’s been skirting around the edges and showing up in different things for the season as a whole. Where we do get a few answers though is with the way that the gang starts working with the Dread Doctors book, a first volume of a series that never had a second one published. What surprises them is that in the credits there’s some praise given to Valack, who has been placed in Eichen House for some time now. Considering their overall experience with Valack, having all of them go is definitely the smarter choice, especially with how Lydia was nearly killed there.
Eichen House continues to be a conflicting place as it’s the Arkham of the series mythology here with some real bad issues for several of the group. What makes this trip worse as it goes on, deep down in the bowels of the place, is that Kira and Scott can go only so far because of some of the defenses put in play. There’re some interesting things in cells down there until they can get to Valack, which leaves you wondering what they may be seeding. Valack certainly plays up his role well here, one that has Theo and the Dread Doctors orchestrating for this visit, and it’s not exactly an info dump but it does bring out Valack’s role in it all as the actual writer. Revealing that he wrote the book in order to get the truth out there of what he knew existed, but not wanting to ruin his own reputation, essentially what’s in the book is real and it certainly jives with what we’ve seen so far from them with their experimenting. Valack’s willing to talk things out, but he wants something in return – the recorded scream of her banshee side. And you know that’s going to come back to haunt her at some point.
Where things go off the rails though is when the time spent here cracks open the defenses in the system. Since Theo was working with the Dread Doctors to get them to get Scott and his friends to Eichen House, having Kira there as well causes it all to be thrown into chaos as her energy side of it throws off some of the defenses. And it basically unlocks the whole place for the Dread Doctors to come in, which puts Valack in a bit of a panic. It’s amusingly surreal with the Dread Doctors come walking through the front door and make their way through the place now that the window is open. The show gives us some decent reveals here with Valack and his attempt to find others that experienced what he did and we see that Lydia may be one of those. But it can go only so far at the moment since the Dread Doctors are changing the game with their entry here though even that goes only so far by the end.
In Summary:
Teen Wolf again stretches things out and it feels like that over the five episodes we’ve had so far that there’s been maybe three episodes worth of material. A lot of what they’re doing is just setting the tone and mood of it all as the Dread Doctors make their moves, which part of their culminates in here with them arriving in Eichen House to get what they’re after. There’re a lot of smaller things going on and I continue to enjoy the cast and what’s going on here, but the bulk of what’s important here is what Valack brings to the table with the book that the gang has now and what potential reveals are in there. It’s moving along at a decent pace but still feels like it could be tightened up and strengthened better.
Grade: B
