Teen Wolf delivered the second episode of its last half-season, 6×12 “Raw Talent.” It was less than satisfactory, in many ways, most of them to do with the plot.
Recap
We open with Theo sleeping in his car in various places as police officers wake him up and tell him to drive away. When he is, for once, camping in a place where he isn’t disturbed, a spider begins to crawl over him. Then, as Theo watches, it continues inside his skin. Lesson for you, children: never just let spiders crawl over you. Theo stabs it with a knife and tears it out of his body. It evaporates. Theo goes back to his car and is about to call Scott, but just then there are people with rifles around his car. They begin to shoot.
Scott, Lydia, and Malia take a walk through a forest, and Scott has flashbacks to being hunted by the Argents. This results in him shifting when the local police finds him, and he almost kills Sheriff Stilinski. After calming down, he leads the police to the dead hellhound.
In the locker rooms, Liam and Mason get ready for lacrosse practice. Mason becomes my patronus once again when he pretends he can talk about sports. A team member who is the last left behind puts on a helmet and spiders rush into his mouth. The practice goes badly, even apart from this. Liam loses control and shoots the ball through the goal. The weird schedule lady picks it up with a very thoughtful look. The claw marks on it probably don’t help.
Scott and Malia search Chris Argent’s bunker for clues to where he is, since he doesn’t answer his phone. They crack his password, which, astonishingly, is Allison. It takes Scott absurdly long to figure it out. Also, any arms dealer who has passwords like this should be liable for prosecution, seriously.
Liam vents his anger on a locker, which bears obvious signs of it. He tries to hide it when Mason and Corey come to find him. It mostly works because they are distracted by a trail of blood and a mutilated body.
Lydia talks to Parrish about a sound she heard in her vision, and figures it was the card reader from Eichen House. Parrish points out that her going there is probably not a good idea, especially alone.
Weird schedule lady comes to talk to a guy she saw playing lacrosse, and poisons him with wolfsbane, assuming the suspiciously-far-shooting ball was his work. She then gets ready to kill him, but he cuts at her with his claws, because everyone is a supernatural in Beacon Hills.
Scott and Malia find Chris in the middle of an arms deal gone wrong. He tries to suss out who the buyer is by pretending to be army. Unsuccessfully. Both on the pretending and on the trying front. Scott also manages to lose the shell they found last episode, because he’s a champ.
Parrish goes to Eichen, and hearing a girl crying for help, lets himself be locked in the closed unit. He finds the whole unit dead in a bathroom, murdered by electricity, only the one girl remains alive. The guard who accompanied Parrish (and locked him in) comes and tells him it was him who killed all those supernaturals, and now he is going to kill him, too.
Liam and company find the boy full of spiders. Only they can’t tell he got full of spiders. He acts weird.
Scott and Malia are in the forest, where they have a weird maybe-flirting scene, then take Chris to see where the hellhound died. They find a bullet in a tree, and yeah, it’s silver. Chris explains how silver bullets don’t, you know, actually work. Except this one clearly did.
Lydia hears Parrish’s echoes from Eichen and goes to get him out. She has some flashbacks of her own, but ultimately succeeds in saving his life just before the crazy guard would have shot him.
The not-even-senior-now pack discusses the situation, pointing out that the common denominator of all that happens lately is fear. People are afraid of them, and when afraid, they will do terrible things.
Weird schedule lady is almost killed by the boy werewolf when she is saved by Gerard Argent, who recruits her. The boy werewolf runs away.
Review
The main thing I took away from this episode is that I bitterly miss the times when Parrish was the hinted love interest for Lydia. They are perfect together.
The other important thing: there is a saying that repetition is the mother of wisdom. Clearly, the Teen Wolf writers decided to follow it this half-season. Not that recurring villains are a new thing, but there is a point when it stops being interesting and starts being boring.
I said just last week that Gerard Argent was the second strongest villain of Teen Wolf after the nogitsune. It’s true. I hate him with a passion. But I’m not sure if seeing him again won’t diminish this significantly. If only because, well, how stupid would Chris and Scott have to be not to ensure that this precise thing does not happen?
Which brings me to the idiot plot. First, Parrish in Eichen. He should have seen being locked up in the unit from a mile away, given the way the guard acted. And then he should have been just a little more wary around the guy who just locked him in. I’m not saying he should have predicted he’d try to kill him, obviously, but not act like nothing weird was going on either. (By the way, did the guard kill all the other guards as well? Is he the only one working there? How come no one noticed that all the prisoners were dead?)
Then Lydia decides that the best thing to do is to go to Eichen alone. Lydia, dear, I’m sorry to tell you, but Parrish had a point about you and that place. If only because of the traumatic memories. And this case was textbook for when you should have contacted the Sheriff, since, you know, it was one of his people there and he would have believed you.
I also can’t help wondering why she was not with Malia and Scott when they were trying to find traces of Chris. For things like that, intelligent people are generally useful, so out of these three, that means Lydia. Come to think of it, why aren’t all of them working together? We always see the younger and older part of the group separately. They’re really bad at this pack thing.
Oh, and I definitely count Chris’ password as part of the idiot plot.
We also have the weird schedule lady, who simply assumes that the first lacrosse player she sees is the werewolf she’s looking for, and accidently happened to actually get one.
To be a little more positive, as irritated as I was to see Theo again, his scenes were actually good. Emotionally strong and with good tension build-up. I’m going to assume he survived since we didn’t see his dead body, but I wonder.
I also appreciated the twin theme of traumatic memories for both Scott and Lydia. It is nice to sometimes see that all the crap the protagonists go through has some kind of effect on them. I’m less appreciative about the death of tens of supernaturals we will likely never hear of again, though. That’s not the sort of thing that should be done casually. Especially as someone killing supernaturals was the entirety of one season’s plot.
I’m also not so sure about the dead in the showers. Especially after the train thing from the first half of the season. Am I being paranoid, or…?
The scene between Scott and Malia in the forest made me wonder if this is a pairing they are going for. To have the senior crew all nicely paired up with each other, I suppose? It makes me cringe a little. I don’t mind the idea of the pairing as such, but the notion of ‘we have four friends of two genders, let’s put them all neatly together’ is certainly offensive.
I assume Gerard Argent’s presence explains many things, like the mysterious arms deal. It sounds like his kind of thing to buy from his own son undercover. It also seems likely that the mass murder Derek is being hunted for was done by one of Gerard’s people. I hope to see either him or Stiles—or, ideally, both of them—next episode.
