Kids should never read books.
What They Say:
Required Reading – After following Dr. Valack’s advice, Scott and the others begin to experience strange things.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Though I get the point of Eichen House, it continues to feel like a crutch for the show in order for it to do unusual things as needed. But even with that we can get some very fun scenes, providing you don’t look for logic. Teen Wolf threw in-show logic out the window awhile ago, as did I in order to keep enjoying it, but there was a lot of fun in getting a little deeper into the Dread Doctors the last time around – even if the gang should have read the book before going to the facility. What the last episode needed was a lot more Malia, and not “look at me trying to drive” Malia but rather the badass who can handle herself well. The shows expansion with the Dread Doctors has been interesting overall but I keep hoping for some sort of hook that will cement why it’s truly important here – and for it to start doing more with the cast on hand rather than playing with them for too long
After hoping for some more Malia time this episode, we get some right from the start at the hospital as she basically steps in to save Scott from the Dread Doctor that’s attacking him pretty hard. It lets her really step up and showcase some good skills. Of course, as a cold open it works well because it’s all about the uncertainty of how we got here from the previous episode. With Scott finishing it out by saying they never should have read the book, it certainly raises the stakes in terms of anticipation with what the episode will be like – and what the others may be going through as well since it’s expected that they all read it. The group certainly knows how to have a good time.
The show doesn’t take us right back to before the book is read, or at least the copies that exist, and that puts us in a place where they’re trying to figure different things out. While we get some amusing sexual tension between Parrish and Lydia as he teaches her to fight, we mostly get the gang as a whole trying to figure out the connections between the chimera’s that they’ve dealt with so far. What’s interesting is that we see that Lydia’s likely more involved than she realizes because of the memory she had from during her surgery, and that puts her in the potential of being used by them in a bigger way. Of course, the real fun is just in watching a group of teenagers sitting around reading and basically struggling with it. There’s some decent little tension that comes from it, especially with Stiles lying a bit about some of what’s going on recently to Malia, something she can figure out easily enough with her heightened senses.
Going with everyone passed out on the floor, except for Theo who happens to record some of what Kira is saying in her sleep in Japanese, the show opts to move forward where you can pretty much guess that most everything is a dream. That’s not a bad thing since it goes for some creative moments and it has you questioning everything that you see. One of the moments has Lydia helping another student that’s losing her hair because of stress and that takes her back to her childhood when she saw something pretty disturbing that she’s repressed for a long time. With the idea that she’s one who may be a prime candidate, it’s a tease of something that could connect her to what the Dread Doctors are up to.
Scott’s encounter is one that causes him to start having an asthma attack at school when he’s trying to drop out of the AP bio class of all things, and that brings us full circle to where we started as he ends up in the hospital. But it brings him the flashbacks to his childhood, similar to what Lydia went through, though it does it all with him going through it in a nearly catatonic state. What helps to shake him out of it though is the arrival of Liam with an inhaler as he uses a bit of his wolf-voice to get things moving. It’s something that also plays well with the ongoing Hayden/Liam storyline that’s been bubbling slowly this season. While we get a look at what the two of them went through in the sixth grade that caused them to go into her hating him. But it is admittedly fun seeing the two of them showing off and showing up each other while wrapping that up with Liam basically saving Scott, which ends up impressing her. It may be simple and predictable, but it has that small taste of truth to it that many cliches do hold.
The final act of the episode once again moves things forward a bit, first with Stiles getting caught up in a sequence nw that can certainly mess with his head considering his time being institutionalized. It has a pretty creepy feeling about it that definitely works well to set the tone, especially for someone like Stiles. Bringing him back to some of the pain with his mother when she was hospitalized and what he and his father had to go through just adds more pain to the wound though. Revealing that as this unfolds that there’s a chimera chewing on the power generator on top of the building almost feels like overkill, but it provides a nod towards the bigger threat that the show has to deal with.
In Summary:
While I’m not a fan of the device of ending the episode where it started for the most part, they do manage things well enough here to explore some of what’s going on now that they’re reading the book. There are some decent little moments to be had here, such as Theo trying to use Malia to join the pack, and I liked Malia once again overall here with her action sequence and just her general character. A lot of what we get here is more exploration of the pasts of some of the characters, though not all of it may be their own pasts, which could certainly be interesting angles to work with. The chimera issue itself is a bit roundabout when you get down to it, but overall the general expansion here is decent and they’ve even gotten me to like he Hayden and Liam material, even if it’s obvious how badly it could possibly end.
Grade: B
