Teen Wolf 2x11: "Battlefield".

(Previous Teen Wolf episode reviews can be found on the Teen Wolf tag, along with Teen Wolf 101.)

This week's Teen Wolf is messing up my life in a very real, logistics/scheduling type way. I'm at the Edinburgh Festival at the moment and have a very tight timetable of work and Fringe shows, but how can I keep up with all that if I'm too busy hand-carving an Oscar statuette for Dylan O'Brien?? Seriously, let's all open up a WikiHow tab right now, look up "How to make an Oscar", and then build that shit out of tinfoil and glitter glue or whatever the hell fake Oscars are made of. THEN MAIL THEM ALL TO DYLAN O'BRIEN.

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Battlefield: a disjointed episode, deserving of the disjointed review it's going to receive thanks to my overly busy schedule. We all tend to complain when one of our favourite characters (LYDIA) doesn't get enough screentime in any particular episode, but this ep proved that it's no longer possible to include everyone and set out a coherent plot at the same time. While there was just as much melodrama as any other episode of Teen Wolf, Battlefield fell into all the predictable pre-finale traps: it focused on a rather silly premise -- the portentious lacrosse game of doom -- and was mostly just setup for whatever happens in the finale. It would've been a lot better to split the multiple Lacrosse Night arcs into a two-parter because in this episode there was just way too much going on, and not in the usual "too much awesome happening at once" kind of way. So many of the main characters have gone through major life changes in the past few eps that their reactions are mostly taking place offscreen, resulting in Allison and isaac both seeming like they've had complete personality transplants during the unscreened moments between episodes.

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The betas
I understand that the three betas are going through a lot right now, but wasn't Isaac a grade-A douchebag just last week? Why is he the one who is suddenly glomming onto Scott as his moral inspiration while Boyd runs around in the forest with Erica? Especially since Boyd was the only one who previously exhibited any signs of maturity or thoughtfulness, whereas now he's apparently 100% onboard with this rather baffling idea of joining a pack of complete strangers. Although I did appreciate how Boyd didn't attack Allison when she shot him, even though I'm pretty sure he'd been given ample opportunity to put a claw through her throat.

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The Isaac we saw in this episode seemed totally different from the angry, dickish Isaac I remember from before. I definitely buy him (and the other betas, for obvious reasons) as a person looking for a leader/parental figure, but it just seems so unlikely that he'd pick Scott. With Boyd, I get the impression that he has a little more self-confidence than Isaac and Erica, and the reason why Boyd was OK with following Derek (for a while) was that Derek was the most practical option: he was the only person who knew how to be a werewolf. More than all that, though, the Three Betas subplot has been one of the things that's suffered most from their lack of screentime, mostly because we've seen so little on the subject of how becoming a werewolf has changed their lives. At the beginning of season 1 Scott had Stiles for backup, not to mention having several months to adjust to his werewolfhood, but Isaac, Erica and Boyd were thrust into the middle of a gang war almost as soon as they were bitten.

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Stiles
With Teen Wolf you can talk about the female gaze (gayze?) until the cows come home because of the way every single episode must by law have at least one gratuitous shirtless scene and/or lingering shot of Tyler Hoechlin expressing emotion via his deltoids. With this episode, though, I've just gotta talk about that very first scene. Every time I think the camera people at Teen Wolf can't possibly be caressing Dylan O'Brien's face any more, they zoom in so the entire screen is taken up by Stiles' 492 trembling eyelashes. The idea of a scene where a character a) talks explicitly and honestly about their feelings (to a school shrink!!), and b) helpfully exposits about what happened since the last episode... well, basically it rebels against everything I think of as good writing. AND YET. AND YET. Dylan O'Brien is such a talented actor that he totally carries it off.

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I've been trying to work out how Teen Wolf fits into the post-Buffy TV world, and I still haven't quite worked it out. Joss Whedon's writing is 100% genre-savvy, with the characters in things like Buffy, Firefly and Cabin In The Woods all either subverting or directly challenging genre tropes. Buffy and Xander especially were very aware of their respective roles as stereotypes of characters found in teen horror movies, and acted accordingly. Teen Wolf, on the other hand, has a full cast of people who act like horror movie idiots. Stiles is the only really genre-savvy one, although that might not so much be a geek-culture thing (ie, like Xander or Peter Parker) so much as the fact that he has excellent intuition. Stiles just knows stuff, and not in the sense that he "just knows", which definitely would be bad writing -- it's more like he's the only character who pays attention to everything going on around him, and then at some point a Sherlock Holmes moment happens at the back of his mind and he realises Oh shit, this is what's been happening all along. Not only is Stiles the "smart" one, the researcher; he has this impressive faculty for finding the truth without actively looking for it. Which is kind of what happened throughout this episode, producing a very effective feeling of foreboding.

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Five solid minutes of Stiles having a breakdown is horrible to watch for two reasons: Dylan O'Brien SELLS IT, and seeing Stiles upset is like seeing your mother upset. I mean, yeah, Stiles Is The Pack Mom is funny because it's true, but the scene with the school counsellor was one of those moments where you realise that Stiles really doesn't have a support base of his own. He is the support base. He's going through hell; he's the only kid in the show who is reacting "normally" to the horrors they've all experienced (probably because he's the only character who is mature and thoughtful enough to process it all), but he's also the only one who has literally no one to turn to. For that reason I can believe that he might speak to the school counsellor, plus the fact that this scene works on another level that acknowledges the audience and allows us to share his feeling of nameless dread. Right from the beginning he clearly knows that something is going to happen to him, and because we're genre-savvy (and we know that Stiles Is Always Right) we start freaking out along with him. But the thing is? For once, Stiles doesn't "know" anything -- because his perceptions are totally skewed by trauma -- but that doesn't stop us knowing, especially when we see Stiles more-or-less saying goodbye to Scott before the lacrosse game. By the time Stiles does the unthinkable and actually participates in the game, I knew that something was going to go horribly wrong. My only consolation is that there is zero chance of Stiles being killed off because he's the fan favourite and the entire Teen Wolf production team are 100% aware that Dylan O'Brien is a future superstar. 

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Allison
Fans like us, the ones who spend too much time on Tumblr and write and/or read review blogs like this one -- we've probably thought quite a lot about why Allison acts the way she does. But what about the average 16-year-old watching this show? I'm not so sure that they're going follow such a swift transition from the relatively peace-loving Allison of three or four episodes ago, and the Allison we just saw remorselessly shoot a teenage boy in the chest. I don't mean that to be patronising, rather than just to point out that you really have to think about Allison's backstory and family relationships to even remotely legitimise such a swift turnaround. Yes, Gerard is a psycho and an expert manipulator and, basically, a lifelong cult-leader, and yes, Allison is a vulnerable teenage girl whose mother just died, but have we really seen much of either of those things in conjunction with one another? I don't think so. Given the extended time of a two-part episode I believe this issue could've been solved, but as it stands I found it quite out of character for Allison to shoot Boyd. Of all the hunters, surely Allison is the most equipped to cut through the anti-werewolf bigotry that made Gerard and Kate so evil, so why does her murderous rampage include harmless highschool students rather than just Derek? Allison's drastic step towards hardline anti-werewolf violence also makes me concerned for the future of the show's writing in a more general sense, because Scott can't be the "good guy" and be in a relationship with someone who is willing to kill an innocent person in cold blood, and Allison can't be redeemed over a short stretch of time. We're meant to believe that grief has sent her over the edge into the kind of unhinged violence that Kate loved, but that's just a reason, not an excuse.

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Anyway, the TL;DR version of this is that I can't judge yet whether Allison's characterisation is inconsistent or not, but whatever happens the show will need to acknowledge that she is Doing Bad Things. At some point I want to write a whole post all about the Argents, when I have time for writing again.

Derek and Peter
Derek vs Peter = eternal torment because Peter Hale is an expert at feelings and power-struggles and Derek has the social skills and self-awareness of a breezeblock. To be honest, picking Peter up and throwing him against stuff  is the only workable solution because there's no way in hell that Derek is every going to defeat him in a battle of wits. Of course, violence doesn't really work either because in addition to having precisely zero ethical qualms about killing people to get what he wants, Peter doesn't seem to care if you try to kill him. He's like the Joker in that respect. His only flaw in this episode was that since his return to the land of the living, he's decided to grow a goatee and buy some douchebag jeans. Change out of the douchebag jeans, Peter! You're like forty years old! You don't want to look like a Coldplay dad.

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Like the showrunners of Revenge, Jeff Davis likes to luxuriate in his ridiculous supervillain dialogue. Here are some of my favourite Peter Hale lines from this episode:

1. "I'm out of commission for a few weeks and suddenly there's lizard people, geriatric psychopaths, and you're cooking up werewolves out of every self-esteem-deprived adolescent in town." <--- accurate.
2. "I'm not a total psycho." 
3. "Right now, Jackson's identity is disappearing beneath a reptilian skin." <--- SERIOUSLY. Can you even imagine him and Gerard having a conversation with each other? I can't.

JUST THINK HOW MUCH FUN IT MUST BE TO SAY THOSE LINES.

Misc. (See, I told you this review would be pretty disjointed.)
One thing that didn't ring true for me was Peter's claim that only one person can sway Jackson through the Power Of Love, and that's Lydia. I mean, really? Firstly -- and perhaps this is just down to the nature of a fast-moving show like Teen Wolf, where it's easy to forget which characters know each other on a personal level -- how does Peter knows this? I would've thought that most of what he knows about Jackson was originally viewed through the lens of Lydia's own perceptions. Lydia and Jackson are both lonely, but it's never really been clear whether they actually love each other or not, particularly Jackson. The "she's his kryptonite!" thing works with Scott and Allison because it's so patently obvious, but the only person Jackson ever interacts with in a positive manner is Danny. In fact, before the game he was warning Danny to stay safe, not texting Lydia or anyone else. The best thing about Jackson as a person is his friendship with Danny, a friendship that seems astonishingly functional, affectionate and trusting considering how much of a dick Jackson can be in every other facet of his life.

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DOES ANYONE NOT SHIP THIS?? Although really, my OTP is Parents/More Screentime. They both delight me because they seem to exist on a different, slightly more realistic plane than the younger generation of characters, a fact that is particularly entertaining during moments like the locker-room scene when Scott's mother is the only person who notices how incredibly weird Coach Finstock can be.

Teen Wolf realism rating: Can someone please explain to me how Scott leaves the messages on Allison's car window? Because that's been bugging me ever since it first appeared on the show, and I suspect I may just be idiotically missing something? Like, how are the messages on the inside of the window? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to be on the outside?? My other minor logistical qualm is about the Hale house, whose state of disrepair seems to vary with every episode. I don't think we've seen anyone actually stand on the stairs yet because everyone tends to jump or get thrown all the way over them, but in this episode we saw Peter get flung against some wooden balustrades that would surely have been burned down years ago. (No, I don't know why I noticed that, either.)