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There’s a heartbreaking moment in tonight’s episode of Teen Wolf, ‘The Overlooked’ where in the midst of this ongoing chaos the full emotional onslaught of his situation starts to break Stiles down. He’s alone in an ambulance with Cora Hale who’s not long for the world at the rate of tar-like black vomit she’s hacking up, at least when she actually is conscious enough to do so. A sudden storm has overtaken Beacon Hills and turned the local hospital into a warzone of the first degree as the nearly empty environment plays host to a cat and mouse series of showdowns involving our heroes, the Alpha pack, and Jenny the Darach. Yes, Derek even knows and she’s still alive to saunter around but let’s get back to Stiles before I go off about that. With tears in his eyes and the closest thing he’s likely felt to a sense of defeat in his heart in a while, Stiles tells Cora that maybe she was right about him and about the others--maybe they really only do show up in time to find the bodies.
In that moment it’s clear that Stiles is referring the most about himself than he is anyone else in their group. Scott the werewolf, Allison the hunter, Lydia the banshee, and now and forever Stiles the human. A situation like his kidnapped father would have served to make Stiles feel helpless enough, but tonight he and the others were coerced by Darach Jenny into helping her get out of dodge before she would reveal the location of Sheriff Stilinski or help heal Cora.
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So Stiles tried to keep up his never say die spirit we know and love even as his world threatened to fall apart entirely. I don’t think there’s a better visual metaphor for how Stiles felt tonight than when he took his baseball bat to the Alpha pack twins’ mega wolf...and it splintered into wooden shards upon impact. At that moment, it’s understandable why Stiles lost hope alone with a dying Cora that he couldn’t do anything about either even as he tried to resuscitate her. It was understandable to think that the humans in this show are always going to be cannon fodder for creatures that are more powerful especially when Melissa McCall runs into Deucalion and briefly winds up his hostage.
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But then something powerful happens in the last moments of this episode. In a moment of wonderfully-staged action sequences we see the heretofore unstoppable Alphas get their asses handed to them and all by the actions of human characters. Kali is ambushed by the Argent father-daughter duo all arrows flying and guns a blazing. But the best part is when recent hostage Melissa gets her own ‘get away from her, you bitch’ moment by frying the shit out of Ethan and Aidan in their once unbeatable mega wolf form. The way the sequence plays out to see one kickass moment after another portrayed by the human characters of this series was a wonderful way to affirm that it’s always really going to be human characters like Stiles that come through as long as they just keep fighting. The title of the episode refers in-dialogue to the Emissaries, but to me it’s the humans that are the true overlooked and various forces will pay for that underestimation along the way.
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Of course, after all that we do still see Melissa McCall in the clutches of Jennifer Blake as she winds up trapped alongside Sheriff Stilinski, bound in a root cellar that comes to mean a great deal to the mythology of this show. But that wasn’t Melissa’s fault, no this is squarely on the shoulders of the Darach in her grand bid to be the real Big Bad of season 3A. Unfortunately, we were subjected to nearly an entire episode’s worth of her attempts, and by her I mean Jeff Davis, to get the audience on her side even partially. This is what writers do they introduce characters that frequently do bad things and then the challenge is to get fans to accept the shades of the character along the way.
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When this is done successfully you get popular characters such as Peter Hale who will do bad things and yet rarely will he lose the audience’s sympathies and this is mainly because this particular character won’t apologize afterward or pretend he doesn’t want to do such things in the first place. Peter Hale accepts his darker tendencies and the fact that people have been harmed because of him. Ian Bohen’s charm goes a long way to the audience accepting Peter Hale’s reality so this is in instance where this character being around still is acceptable. Plus, he’ll stab himself with a massive dose of epinephrine in order to gain enough of a boost to go after the mega wolf for harming a member of his family. Any kind of loyalty is always a plus on this series when trying to gain audience empathy. Maybe that’s part of the reason why every single attempt this episode made to get us on Jennifer’s side failed so spectacularly.
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From the very first moment as she ran into Derek’s loft and flung herself into his arms stuttering out a ‘frightened’ bold-faced lie about how his friends are suddenly so mean to her and they shouldn’t be believed about her being the evil witch thingy--I knew it was going to be a long night with this one. It didn’t help that after she saw Scott and Stiles had arrived first she did that annoying and obvious ‘oh well’ smirk. I’ve tried to find reasons to not completely loathe what’s going on with her storyline, but the mediocre acting choices aren’t helping. From this point on the audience is treated to a plethora of tropes ranging from I’m not bad I’m just drawn that way, the reluctant evildoer, the jilted lover (possibly?), the tragic backstory and each was worst than the last.
The character of Jennifer Blake is meant to show how awful the Alpha pack really can be so that we accept any and all targeting of its members. Frankly, they showed their prowess just fine by killing Boyd and Erica but I digress. It’s impossible to argue that Blake isn’t doing way worse and all in the name of her own vengeance. Typically, when a werewolf kills on this show their victim was usually already wrapped up in some part of the supernatural world of Beacon Hills. Jennifer Blake is murdering many complete outliers and she’s doing so with a fair amount of enjoyment I would argue. Basically the entire episode consisted of Jennifer trying to show Derek why she was doing this but with zero want to stop before the ritual was complete even as she tried to get sympathy out of her former lover.
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Her backstory was that of Kali’s emissary Julia Baccari and during Kali’s rise to Alpha pack power there was no choice for her but to kill Julia along with the rest of the pack. But she didn’t, instead she left her near-death and walked away because she just couldn’t bear to finish the job. There’s more than slightly a fem-slashy overtone to their story as well when Kali tells it. With her final bits of strength, Julia was able to drag herself to where Paige bled out and so Derek Hale’s teen angst bullshit has a circumstantial bodycount by helping to empower Julia again. Kali never wanted to hurt her and wouldn’t have on her own and there’s real regret and pain in her voice when she explains to Deucalion what happened between them.
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Those humanizing moments go a long way toward getting us on Kali’s side of things, not on Blake’s. Kali would have died and it’s just as likely her pack still would have anyway being linked to someone that denied the orders of Deucalion. Jennifer truly doesn’t care who has to bleed as long as she can be powerful and she can destroy. If you think it’s going to end with the Alpha pack then you’re as naive as Derek Hale because even though he did nothing but listen to her poor me tale he still wound up with his body laid up unconscious in the elevator when she made her getaway. The character she’s trying the most to win over still winds up bleeding on the floor, that should tell you just about how much you can trust her.
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I don’t think there are enough words to express how much this show will change if even one of the remaining Guardians dies because of that literal two-faced hypocrite. Melissa being in danger is bringing Scott ever closer to the dark side. But the added combo of peril for both Melissa McCall and Sheriff Stilinski is an absolutely toxic scenario for Stiles. If Melissa dies, then he may well lose his best friend forever to the ways of Deucalion. If his father dies, ugh I still can’t think about a world where Stiles has no parents, no anchor in his life at all. So while the words of the script were trying to get us to care about Jennifer’s ‘tragic’ backstory let’s also keep in mind that she could help Cora Hale heal but won’t, she’s the reason that nearly a dozen deaths happened to many innocent people this season all for her own gain, and that she wants to murder the beloved parents of our lead characters. Explain to me why I don’t want Kali or someone else to finish the job again, show?
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Now that the final pieces of the ritual are in play and our lead hero is working with a villain to stop it, it really does feel like it’s mid season finale time. The episode played to the strengths of Teen Wolf with its danger in single darkened location, growing amounts of angst toward the nature of what’s truly the right thing to do in a bad situation, and several stand-out moments for favorite secondary characters like Peter Hale and Melissa McCall. Just two episodes left this summer and all I can really say after everything is hash-tag #KilltheDarachPlease.
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