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TEEN WOLF 6x14: Face-to-Faceless/TEEN WOLF 6x15: Pressure Test

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TEEN WOLF 6x14: Face-to-Faceless/TEEN WOLF 6x15: Pressure Test

Ahhh! Sorry for the delay, all. I traveled home to Wyoming to watch the totality/day drink at my friend's distillery, and only just got to watch this past weekend's doubleheader, which MTV very uncoolly only just announced like three days before that would be happening at all. MTV! WYD!

Anyway, while MTV's scheduling and promotional plans make zero sense, Teen Wolf itself is still bringing the woke anti-prejudice, anti-racial purity, anti-genocide HEAT. Like, they literally included the word genocide in their dialogue, and Gerard Argent was figuratively turned into Humanity's Grand Wizard in a moment so stark, anyone waffling on whether or not maybe there were SOME "very fine people" in Charlottesville or anywhere similar will hopefully have immediately realized NO. 

Loud enough for the rooftops: EFF. ALL. RACIAL. SUPREMACY.

Okay! Let's talk wolves!

PREVIOUSLY ON TEEN WOLF

Gerard Argent skulked through the Beacon Hills Preserve every night until he stumbled upon BHS' newest guidance counselor, Tamora Moore, training herself to genocide supernaturals. After some light Sun-Tzu fueled stalking, he officially brought her under his age'd, malevolent wing, and together they straight up MURDERED Buddhist wolves/Liam's oldest lacrosse frenemy and his siter, Brett and Lori. Liam was two seconds too late to stop it, and two minutes too late to stop revealing himself in all his wolfy glory to every human suddenly gathered around that usually extremely abandoned nighttime intersection. Whoops!

Melissa and Chris, meanwhile, investigated a skinless corpse that turned out to be radiating #terror and also not actually be a corpse or human at all, while Stilinski and Parrish investigated the unlikely and terrifying murder of an ancient Hellhound by (they do not yet know) Tamora, while Scott, Malia, and Lydia investigated what came out of the Wild Hunt with Stiles that this ancient murdered Hellhound had been so hellbent on guarding that he built Eichen House a hundred years ago, while crazy-eyes Nolan investigated how Corey and his weird invisibility might make him different from other humans by stabbing him in the hand as Mason looked on, horrified. Things in Beacon Hills are great! SO SO GREAT!

6x14 AWARDS

THIS WEEK'S WOLF PACK PUPPY

OMG Liam, you are not my favorite, but you are a legit fucking hero.

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Clark Kent just WISHES (I don't read Superman, don't @ me).

Runner-up: Linden Ashby, who made his directorial debut on this heartbreak of an ep!

BEST REACTION TO SOMETHING SUPERNATURALLY RIDICULOUS

Nolan using a handful of…chalk dust??…to reveal Liam from his hiding place in Mason's wake/Corey's lent invisibility.

Or maybe it wasn't chalk dust, considering it passed right over a black kid wearing a black jacket without leaving one speck on him. Maybe Nolan is actually a malevolent sorcerer??? You hate most in others what you hate most in yourself, they say…

WEEKLY REMINDER THAT BEACON HILLS IS ON A HELLMOUTH

The endless brutality of threatened white male human feelings.

AKA, l'enfer, c'est les autres.

REIGNING PRESIDENT OF THE SCOTT MCCALL FAN CLUB

Melissa "I'll NEVER tell him to run" McCall, DUH.

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Runner-up: Chris "I want Scott to run and LIVE" Argent. Shit's complicated! All parenting love is good parenting love, in this case!

BEST PRODUCT PLACEMENT

This week brought to you by LIAM'S Beautiful Toyota!!! But also, thanks again to the reminder from the After After Show: Throwing Up Spiders!

THIS WEEK, TAKE ONE

Scary Movie MCMXVII

Aaron's back! Friends!! AARON'S BACK!

I am not okay. Nothing is okay. Aaron, slumped and staring, lifeless, into the camera, is DEFINITELY not okay. My ardent hope as this scene first played out was that Melissa would at least find him later and we would get to see that the spider fear demon had only been possessing him, and that he was totally alive, but then Melissa DID come back later with Stilinski and Parrish after Parrish nearly had a terror-induced Hellhound heart attack in the middle of the station seeing the skinless body stalking him (why they weren't called in or at least *alerted* to the terror-inducing inhumanity of the body after Melissa and Chris figured it out last episode is beyond me) and found the morgue—and morgue drawer—completely empty, and not one mention of Aaron from any of them, so honestly who knows!!!

Aaron is probably dead. Chalk another human loss up in Tamora's blame column, I guess.

Speaking of Tamora's blame column, there's a new wolf in town! There are so many wolves in town, and how they all end up in Beacon Hills without True Alpha Scott knowing a damn thing about them is as beyond me as Melissa and Chris not calling in the local supernatural constabulary at every new supernatural discovery. ANYWAY, mirroring that Season One scene in which Kate Argent was introduced as a surprise Hunter after her car was suspiciously stopped in an adandoned alley in the dark, Beacon Hills' newest werewolf, Quinn, is introduced the exact same way! At fault for her car trouble, though, is not another wolf, but a pack of neo-Hunters who very rudely spiked her tires with neo-Hunter arrowheads.

"Have you ever seen one of these?" one of the hulking brute dudes menaces as Quinn is surrounded by other, even more hulking brute dudes and every woman, girl, and non-hulking brute dude in the audience shivers from fearful and lifelong innate sympathy. "Yes," Quinn says, before wolfing out and summarily kicking their asses, one by one. But don't cheer too soon! She is still technically outnumbered, and who knows what kind of backup they all have. Thankfully, at that moment a sheriff's deputy pulls up, headlights glaring, and Quinn swings around to her, grateful and un-wolfy and bloody. But her pleas for help are for naught, as the deputy is the same one who saw Scott freak out in the woods. She lifts her gun, aims it straight at Quinn's face, and fires.

Captains of Blame, Captains of Fear

Next thing we know, it's the Monday morning after Brett and Lori's murder/Liam's self-outing. Time for Liam to go to school! Which, naturally, he has negative interest in doing. People SAW him. With his WOLF teeth. I have no idea if he knows about what happened between Nolan and #Morey, but even without all that, everyone's terrified of Liam, and being at school with all of them is the last thing he both wants to do and thinks is smart.

Scott isn't about to let him off the hook, though. For one, Scott successfully navigated high school by consistently and willfully refusing to acknowledge any of the supernatural weirdness that chased him down every hallway and lacrosse game, and so like every adult in the history of time, he is convinced that his experience and strategy will translate exactly. Also, though, his True Alpha nature means he will always focus on the most optimistic outcome of any situation, so the possibility of Liam failing to overcome this one unfortunate incident basically doesn't cross his mind. "You are like Clark Kent!" he exclaims, pulling Liam's comforter off him like the True Alpha Dad he is, "who, if his glasses fall off, just picks them up and puts them back on and says, I'm still Clark Kent!"

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What's amazing is that this has been proven to be NOT the dumbest wolf pack ever to exist.

Scott is…not good a metaphors. Or pop culture. It is moments like this in which Stiles is most acutely missed.

As much as we know Liam appreciates Scott's faith in him, he isn't moved a bit by the speech. Even if he could just "put his glasses back on," it wouldn't matter. Unlike Clark Kent, he explains, first to Scott there at home and later to Mason and Corey in the halls at school, he isn't a superhero. He's a monster, with claws, who people are afraid of, no matter how heroic those monster trait have allowed him to be.

Case in point: everyone at school is talking about what a literal monster Liam is, and the lacrosse team, spurred by the increasingly manic-looking Nolan, is pumping themselves up to beat him down. We know this in part because Liam's wolf hearing catches every whisper of it, and in part because Corey, whose supernaturalness Nolan explicitly proved, but whose supernaturalness no longer apparently matters, has been lurking around school to confirm. "You'll be fine!" Mason insists. "You literally won't be fine," Corey reports. "But it was dark, and late, and foggy!" Mason argues. "It was clear out, with a full moon, in a well-lit intersection," Corey corrects.

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Liam, I know you're in trouble, but I've just got to take a moment to say: ugh, these two. I LOVE THEM.

While Liam et al are just trying to get through their morning, Scott, Malia, and Lydia have rendezvoused with (Chris) Argent in his underground bunker/office to discuss the "Gerard is back and fomenting war" development. "We thought it was just the new Hunter, alone," Scott starts, "but all that know-how in the tunnels…" It all points to Gerard, Chris acknowledges. Which in turn points to him, who let Gerard go. "You couldn't have done anything," Lydia says, reassuring him. Malia is baffled by this line of reasoning. Couldn't have DONE anything?!?!? "He could have killed him," she states baldly, completely unaware of why anyone would NOT acknowledge this. Lydia and Scott are shocked, but Chris just shrugs in agreement.


Scott and Lydia try to argue that they aren't executioners, but Malia is having none of it: you are if you're at war, she argues back. "That's why we're going to make peace," Scott says earnestly. Which makes it Lydia's turn to be baffled at having to state the obvious: "with GERARD?!?!?!?" Yes, with Gerard, Scott says. They'll set up a peace summit, Scott says. It will be fine, Scott says! "The last time Gerard agreed to a peace summit, he blinded Deucalion and killed his own men," Lydia reminds all of us. Gerard is truly the spawn of Hell. Still, Chris offers to go and make the proposal. "He won't kill me," he reasons. Um, bitch, he might.

He doesn't, but not out of an abundance of loyalty towards his human blood relative. No, actual Grand Wizard Gerard only deigns to keep race-traitor Chris alive in order to deliver a message to Scott: RUN. There will be no peace. "Then what will there be?" Melissa asks anxiously, as Chris rushes home to her (!!!) right after. "Genocide," Chris says. And then he tells her to tell Scott to do just what Gerard said, and run. He doesn't want Scott and everyone else to die, doesn't want Melissa to have to watch Scott die (again), and as crazy and armed as Gerard is, that's the only ending Gerard sees.

Thankfully, Melissa has never told her son once to run from trouble and people who need his help (not true, for the record, but we can forgive her for her former moral judgment errors, as they were rooted in shock). She's not about to start now. "But what if this is the one fight Scott can't win?" Chris fires back.

"There doesn't have to be a fight," Scott says. How does he know? He just got a call from Liam, who himself just uncovered Tamora as the mysterious neo-Hunter when he stumbled into her office while trying to hide from a violent lacrosse posse (sidebar: please read this as lacrosse-y posse) and she had mysterious supernatural books on her desk and mysterious claw scratches on her neck and a mysterious obsession with the kids who are bullying him (new recruits!) on her mind. Now that they know who the green new Hunter is, Scott reasons, they can target her to set up a peace summit. And so, they send Lydia off to her mom's office to try.

It does not go well. Tamora is completely uninterested in considering Lydia or anyone else in Scott's pack as equivalent to human, and no matter how fervently Lydia argues about how nothing good ever comes of highlighting differences, and how Tamora didn't become a guidance counselor to hunt people, Gerard's new shadow remains unmoved. She gets up to go, and Lydia, out of options, unthinkingly snatches at her arm. "Is that how you get your visions of who's going to die next?" Tamora breathes, as unnaturally worked up at seeing the supernatural in action now as she was when Brett's gash healed before her eyes, and as Nolan was when he watched Corey's stab wound disappear before his.

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It isn't, of course, which Lydia tells her. But also, THERE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE A NEXT! Lydia has never relished this power, and if Tamora had the eyes for it, she would see that burden all over Lydia's face. But spoiler alert!!! TAMORA WANTS THEM ALL TO DIE, so she doesn't cotton on to one bit of Lydia's unhappiness.

Still, she apparently agrees to the summit after all, as the next thing we see is Scott rushing through his house to meet with her, alone, in the middle of the trap-infested tunnels. "It is obviously a trap!" Malia shouts at him, but what is he supposed to do, NOT go? Yes, obviously. But also obviously, Malia can't make him agree to that. Anyway, he knows it is a risk, but he also knows that it is a risk he can take—he wouldn't go if he didn't think they couldn't handle themselves without him. "We need you," she says, meaning I need you, but Scott doesn't get it, and Malia won't (or can't) spell it out, and so off Scott goes.

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These two dummies. THESE TWO DUMMIES.

Everything is a Trap

It is a trap, obviously. Malia totally called it! Scott gets down into the tunnels, and there Tamora is, flanked by a whole clutch of hulking brute neo-Hunters and also Gerard. She isn't even trying to pretend it is a trap, is how venomous her resentment of Scott and his ilk is. "Honestly," she smirks at him, "I can't believe YOU came alone."

Joke's on you, lady! Thanks to Malia and Lydia knowing what is actually up (i.e., not being blinded by Scott's True Alpha optimism), they followed Scott from the beginning, and just hung out in the nearest tunnel waiting for their opening.

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BAMF

So now there's a true standoff, but Scott just gets right back to work trying to make peace. #NotAllWerewolves are violent and bad, he argues. She is new to this world, he argues. She doesn't know all the nuances of things from the supernatural side of the story, he argues. She doesn't, and tbh SHOULDN'T, just blindly follow Gerard, he argues. But now it's Scott's turn to be the butt of the joke, because turns out? No one is following Gerard; everyone is following Tamora. She's the brains of the operation. Gerard is just the mentor.

So what happened to Tamora to make her hate supernaturals so much? Scott wants to know. "No, what happened to make me hate YOU, Scott," she corrects, then launches into a harrowing story of having been leaving BHHS late one night during Season 5B, only to be caught up in one of Scott and Parrish's standoffs with the rampaging Beast of Gevaudan, who mauled every last one of her colleagues. Tamora only survived by pulling her friend's corpse on top of her, and then waiting until hours later when Stilinski and the rest of the non-Parrish deputies came to look for survivors. Did it even OCCUR to Scott to look for survivors???

No, admittedly, which fact clearly tears Scott up. But also, Scott, buddy! You were still fighting the Beast. You can't be a fighter AND a first responder, not always! Like, take this for the learning moment it is, but also recognize that there is still only so much a single person, True Alpha or not, can accomplish at one time.

Anyway, the skinless terror body is down in the tunnels with them, and chooses this moment to start amplifying all their anger and fear. Malia and Lydia figure it out pretty quick, but by the time they do, the neo-Hunters are so caught up in the terror that they start shooting their automatic rifles at shadows/each other. Scott pulls himself and the girls out of the way down a side tunnel, but with the fear monster still in the tunnels, that is no assurance. Just then, a manhole opens from above, and down drops a flare, followed by a familiar Hellhound body. "Backup," Lydia breathes, and Parrish races with his flare straight for the fear monster, sticking it in the chest and holding it tight until they both explode in a ball of fire.

He, of course, escapes with the shorts on his butt. So do the Hunters. The fear monster is down, but considering it wasn't alive to start with, there's not saying it's actually dead.

Back at the high school, meanwhile, things are only getting worse for Liam. After a full day of everyone avoiding him in the halls and in class—everyone was so united in their fear of him in AP Science that they collectively agreed to take a failing grade rather than volunteer one of their own to be his lab partner—Nolan and now Gabe have wrangled the lacrosse team to block all the exits at the end of the day to try and force Liam into shifting right there in public, for all to see.

This plan seems bad, and not least because Liam already shifted in front of everyone. Like, what more does Nolan want!

But crazy knows no bounds, and so, after un-invisibling Liam and Corey in the halls, Nolan and Gabe and the rest of the senior class push him into an empty classroom and just set to pummeling him. It is so bloody, and so awful, and Liam is so. very. good. at keeping his rage in check. His eyes flash a few times, but he doesn't shift, not even when the science teacher shows up and immediately backs right back out, explaining to a horrified Mason that "sometimes it's best just to let the students work it out." LADY. GROW A PAIR.

Gabe and Nolan are only stopped from actually crushing Liam's head in by Coach Finstock, who appeared briefly earlier in the day during Liam's first standoff with the lacrosse posse, but only to let Liam stew in his own decision to back off being captain in order to appease Nolan. Now, though, Finstock is back, and he is FURIOUS. He screams at every student watching that their faces make him sick, and physically hauls Nolan and Gabe by their necks off Liam's broken body before kneeling down and tenderly helping Liam to his feet and into Mason and Corey's waiting arms.

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Look, Finstock can be a real bully on the field/in the economics classroom, but he is not a bad man. He is a very, very good man who has no patience for physical abuse or hateful prejudice of any kind. Remember how he protected Meredith against that abusive Eichen House nurse way back in like, Season Three? Or how he just pulled Kira onto the team, not one word of gender bias clearly even crossing his mind? He wants his students to be BETTER, and is pretty rude about how he tries to accomplish that, but he doesn't want anyone to hurt. Coach: thank you for being on our team.

As Mason helps Liam limp to his Beautiful Toyota, a bit later, he tells him he knows why he took that beating. "You think you deserve it, for what happened to Brett and Lori," Mason says, "but you don't." Liam isn't so sure, but Mason channels Stiles in full and refuses to back down in telling Liam how wrong he is. "You took that beating," he says again, "but you didn't deserve it."

Fear Itself

Back in the neo-Hunters' bunker, Tamora is shaken from what happened in the tunnels. "Why me?" she wants to know—why did Gerard pick HER? Well, one: talent. But also, Gerard is crazy, and sees the same crazy in her (they do not use these words), and he knows that SHE knows that this world, it isn't for anyone but whites humans. (Sidenote: having the Hunter zealotry manifest in a young black woman is either very canny on the show's part, or very thoughtless, given the direct corollaries the entire storyline draws with reality.)

Back at Scott's, meanwhile, the elder pack has found a surprise visitor: ISAAC!

JK (so far). It isn't Isaac, but rather Quinn, the girl we last saw facing down the barrel of a terrified Beacon Hills deputy. Her brow is bloody and she is pale, but she is very much alive. And she knows it was a deputy who shot her. They have everyone, the pack realizes. The fear-afflicted neo-Hunters now have everyone.

Okay, buckle up for 6x15

6x15 AWARDS

THIS WEEK'S WOLF PACK PUPPY

This is a genuine first (since I didn't start recapping until well after the early seasons when this would have been the obvious weekly answer), but, SCOTT. 

He is our hero and he will almost certainly find a way to avoid this in the end, but that is only because television can land on ideal, peaceful solutions. The real world rarely works out that way. But if anyone can figure out how to give us a model to work from now in this, our present moment of cultural pressure so intense it almost daily feels like war is just one more free-speech-sanctioned white supremacy rally away, it's Scott McCall. Pup! I wish you the very best!

BEST REACTION TO SOMETHING SUPERNATURALLY RIDICULOUS

Theo, his self-serving chimera teeth being pulled to prove he's got the pack's back as they gear up to walk out the station's front doors to take the Hunters head on.

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Not dead and NOT loving it.

Get you a reluctant chimera who can do both (villainy and heroics).

WEEKLY REMINDER THAT BEACON HILLS IS ON A HELLMOUTH

REIGNING PRESIDENT OF THE SCOTT MCCALL FAN CLUB

Mmmmm Malia. MALIA.

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BEST PRODUCT PLACEMENT

Literally nothing about this episode was good!!! Officers of the law = corruptible. FBI = way too little, way too late. Buddhism = ineffective. Anger management training = also ineffective. But that, at least, is temporarily keeping Theo's salty attitude in line, so, I guess that?

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THIS WEEK, TAKE TWO

Scary Movie MCMXVII

Theo's not dead!!! THEO IS NOT DEAD. I am so relieved, and also so horrified at being so relieved, because do you not remember him torturing the entire pack just two seasons ago? Scott DIED and now I'm RELIEVED that Theo, whom Price trusts, is not dead. What. A. World.

Anyway, Theo is wet and being electrocuted by the ex-orderly so evil and maliciously abusive even Eichen House, whose head doctor straight up murdered three dozen people, was like, "whoa, dude, maybe too much???" fired him.

WHY is Theo being so thoroughly tortured (and also electrocuted)? Because he got swept up somehow in a neo-Hunter raid on escaped wolves from Satomi's stacked stone Buddhist pack who may or may not have been responsible for the murder of a few of their fellow neo-Hunters and are now tied up next to him being tortured to out themselves as the killers. 

They refuse to break, but Theo refuses to break even harder—in fact, whenever they all get out of this, he's going to kill them for putting him throught it all. Oh, Theo. Give the machismo a rest for a hot second!

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He eventually does, literally. Seeing that the constant electric shocks are melting the plastic around Tierney's wrist next to him, he eggs the sadistic ex-Eichen nurse on, eventually getting the idiot to send through such a shock that Theo is able to bust through his bonds. The shape of his revenge? Freeing Tierney and Jiang, and tying the ex-Eichen nurse up in their place. He *does* elave the electrocution box face down to continuosly shock the neo-Hunter on their way out, but he immediately kills exactly no one. Theo! You big softie! You really are working to redeem yourself!

Unfortunately, he still has a lot of karma to work out: the trio doesn't get halfway through the parking lot before they are stopped by none other than Sherriff Stilinski himself, there to arrest the three of them for murder.

Druid, Please

You know who else is back? Deaton is also back! And, incomprehensibly, so is Eichen House. YEP, Deaton is back, he's all up in Eichen House, and despite the fact that no one seems to have been even thinking of working with him to investigate the mystery Wild Hunt escapee/dead Hellhound/new Hunter, he's investigating! Specifically, he is investigating the holding cell the dead Hellhound had been frozen in/Parrish had almost died in, which has in subsequent weeks started radiating the same terror Argent and Melissa felt coming off the body-that-is-not-a-body. According to the last living orderly who works there, no one has managed to last more than 30 seconds even in the hallway outside the cell, so good luck, Deaton, lasting long enough IN it to get any good intel!

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That's how I handle all my loose stone tablets, too.

Little does the orderly know: Deaton is an effing druid who's faced down mobster Oni, Deucalion's sociopathic Alpha Pack, and every emo mood Derek Hale has ever lashed out from. He knows from terror! Thus, he is more than able to last long enough to tear the cell's cinderblock wall apart with his bare hands and rip an etched stone tablet from the second wall the cinderblock was covering up. Because magic! I guess!

She Fought the Law

The "she" in this case is changeable. One "she" who fought was Quinn, who survived being shot in the head by one of Stilinski's deputies, but remembers nothing about the incident except that it WAS a deputy who shot her. I.e., not who, which is what would be super helpful at this particular juncture. The second "she" is, of course, Tamora, who has taken the opportunity of her cover being blown by every supernatural in town to just up and hold the sheriff's station hostage, threatening to storm it and kill anyone in their way if Stilinski/Scott's pack refuse to hand over Tierney and Jiang, who are currently hanging out in lockup with Theo.

Both Quinn and Tamora present imminent threats, but Tamora's is the only one with concrete facts to back it up, between Tierney and Jiang's identities and the arbitrary midnight deadline. Thus, Quinn's mystery Hunter-deputy issue is pushed to the side, as Stilinski and Scott each try to strategize their own way to get out of this particular mess.

Here is what happens: Scott and Stilinski both agree, full stop, that no one will be handing Tierney and Jiang over to be killed. Whether or not they murdered any Hunters (they did, Scott discovers, after True Alpha roaring them into showing the murderous blue of their eyes, at which point they admit to turning around and stalking the first Hunters they could find after being stalked for weeks after their pack was killed, by those Hunters or others), Scott and Stilinski refuse to accept any kind of vigilante justice in response.

After that, though, their strategies diverge. Stilinski wants to wait, hoping they can negotiate different terms and/or call in bigger guns for backup, the town's supernatural secret be damned. Scott wants to get his pack, along with Theo (now free from charges of murder), Quinn, and Tierney and Jiang, out of there. At Lydia's urging/Malia's terrified reaction to the skinless fear monster that has shown up in the station again (somehow managing to target one person at a time), Scott agrees to lead his pack out through the front door to fight their way through the neo-Hunters.

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They ready.

Before they can storm the lot, though, the traitor in their ranks drops a smoke grenade and Nolan rolls in through the back door. He is immediately caught. Initially, it looks like he has made a huge mistake and screwed up the first mission he was sent on, getting caught trying to steal Tierney and Jiang under cover of chaos, but actually his being taken was all part of the plan. Left handcuffed to a bench in the lockup room, Nolan quickly breaks free, and is about to shatter a vial of wolfsbane in Tierney and Jiang's faces as Liam sees him on one of the station monitors and races in to stop him.

Nolan is moved to one of the side offices and re-handcuffed, whatever tool he used to pick himself free apparently also taken away. One deputy is left to guard him, while everyone else returns to the main room to discuss how Grant shooting a bloody #7 jersey piece through the station window is intended to rattle them/Liam (7 was Brett's number). Unfortunately, this is when the fear monster reappears, now targeting the deputy left behind with Nolan. He hangs himself, and Nolan is stuck watching it happen. Then, when Parrish and Stilinski race in to help after Nolan starts screaming, the traitor deputy follows behind and is also targeted by the fear monster, shooting herself in the head in order to escape the worse end she is convinced is inevitable, and they are ALL stuck watching it happen.

There is nothing good or okay about any of this, but Scott and Stilinski do still try to make the best of it, using Theo's intel about who came and went from their torture bunker (no one except Eichen guard) and attempting subterfuge by using the two deputies' bodies as decoys, trying to convince Tamora et al they are Tierney and Jiang, who died in an effort to escape.

Unfortunately, while Tamora truly doesn't know what Tierney and Jiang look like, she does know they have Satomi's pack tattoo on their wrists. Scott's pack doesn't have tattoos, so he never stopped to consider this. It finally looks like the jig is up and Scott/Tierney&Jiang/Stilinski are all in for it, when BAM!

And the Law Lost

Scott's no-good absentee FBI-bro dad shows up!

And, like, did Scott ever tell him "everything" like he promised? Because if so, is his dad immediately leaving and never once checking back in sort of the ultimate dick-human move? And if not, what good does it do to call him in now, when a very specific and complex question of lives is on the line? IDK this is all so weird, but whatever, hi, Dad! Hope your complete lack of situational insight doesn't end up killing anyone Scott is trying to protect!!!

Narrator: it did. The driver of the official FBI van Scott's dad so persuasively and bloodlessly "convinced" Tamora to "let" him take Tierney and Jiang away in? The driver was a neo-Hunter, and he drove two blocks away before stopping and executing the two wolves in ice cold blood, much to Tamora's—and Grant's and Nolan's—smug satisfaction.

The Promise of Anog-Ite

While it seems like all of Beacon Hills AND the FBI have been locked in battle at the sheriff's station this episode, there's been stuff happening elsewhere! Namely, Corey and Mason meeting up with (…okay, breaking into the animal clinic and then being FORCED to meet up with) Deaton to work together to solve the next step of the WIld Hunt monster mystery.

Both #Morey and Deaton determined that to solve the mystery of what came out, they needed to go to the beginning, which in this case, meant wolves—specifically, the wolves that died of spider infestations at the beginning of the season, which, I guess, have been chilling in the animal clinic ever since. Do animal clinics generally have morgues? Apparently in Beacon Hills, they have to!

Anyway, as the trio stare down at the still laughable stuffed prop wolf carcass, they start putting pieces together. This is where Mason and Corey's trail runs cold, but Deaton has the stone slab with half a face etched on it to show them. "IDEK," he says, hauling the thing out. "You want to see the other half?" Corey asks. Yep! There is another half hidden on the un-etched half of the slab's face, which Corey's invisibility powers let him see. He traces it out, and the moment Deaton sees that it is a mirror image of the half-face already visible, he's like "DUH. ANOG-ITE." Yeah! Duh!

Anyway, Anog Ite is also known as Two-Face and is a woman with two faces, one beautiful and one hideously disfigured, who feeds off paranoia and fear and discord. From a myth written up as part of the NPS's maintenance of Wind Cave in South Dakota (a very good cave I highly recommend!), in which a wolf basically plays the part of the serpent in Eden:

There were two spirits who lived on the surface of the earth: Iktomi and Anog-Ite. Iktomi, the spider, was the trickster spirit. Before he was Iktomi, his name was Woksape — “Wisdom” — but lost his name and position when he helped the evil spirit Gnaskinyan play a trick on all the other spirits. Anog-Ite, the double face woman, had two faces on her head. On one side, she had a beautiful face, rivaling the beauty of any other woman who existed. On the other, she had a horrible face, which was twisted and gnarled. To see this face would put chills down anyone’s spine.

Iktomi and Anog-Ite had only each other for company. Iktomi spent his time playing tricks on Anog-Ite, torturing her and never allowing her to live in peace, but this pastime soon bored him. He wanted new people to play tricks on, so he set his sights on the humans. He knew he needed help for this trick; he asked Anog-Ite, promising he’d never bother her again. She agreed to these terms and began loading a leather pack.

Aside from the possibility that, given this monster comes from Lakota myth, maybe Kira will return from HER native-myth journey to help in the final hour, Tamora is definitely Anog Ite, right? Her other face hidden in her fantastic hair? I suppose it could also be disfigured druid Jennifer Blake, who was also part of the Deucalion season when Gerard double-crossed everyone, and who had one beautiful human face and one disfigured monster face and sowed fear and paranoia for fun, and who I *think* I saw in a flash in one of the season's frenetic trailers?? But she was turned evil by modern circumstance, and this Anog Ite has ostensibly been hidden in the Wild Hunt for over a century, so I'm going, with Tamora as the Anog Ite—or at least as having been possessed by the Anog-Ite somehow after her run-in with the Beast.

Regardless, as useful as naming the fear monster is, part of Scott's dad's negotiation with Tamora and her neo-Hunters was that every supernatural in Beacon Hills would hie on out of there—Corey *very* much included this time. And so, he and Mason have to say their goodbyes. They do NOT have to say them in the BHHS lacrosse locker room, but then again, don't they???

Locker room background and also Mason's kinda-not-humanity notwithstanding, this goodbye is incredibly sad. Mason is in tears, he wants to go with Corey and everyone to protect them, but no—Corey is standing firm. Mason has always protected him; he wants to be able to do this one thing, this one time, to protect Mason for a change.

via*

Mason and Corey are the high school couple we all deserve.

Hands on chests, they say goodbye, then Corey walks out of Mason's life forever.

So Smart, So Stealth

And so Mason is left to return to the halls of Beacon Hills High alone, the last pack human standing, not a single one of his friends or him pausing to consider that maybe Tamora Moore, lone survivor of the Beast of Gevaudon's school bus rampage, might be holding an extra hot irrational grudge towards him, who was literally the physical vessel for the serial killing monster. This is not me calling out Chekhov's human: I genuinely think not one person inside or outside of the show stopped to consider this detail.

ANYWAY, former reincarnated French serial killing super wolf or not, Mason has been left alone at a school that barely knows how to school, and he is not doing great! Without Corey, without Liam, without the promise of investigating supernatural shenanigans ever again, the world has lost its color. Nothing matters. Math? WHO NEEDS IT. He can't even open the exercise book when he's supposed to be writing his problem on the board. But then, where there was nothing, a message appears! ANIMAL CLINIC it says in giant letters even Greenberg in the back could read. NOW it reads, after Mason whips around to look if anyone else has noticed. grin it reads, now in front of Sydney, who smiles back as Mason flees the classroom like a boy on fire.

via*

Sydney is a stealth gift.

Cut to: Deaton's animal clinic, the animal clinic where Scott has worked and half-lived since Season 1, the animal clinic where every supernatural threat has had a pivotal narrative turn. Mason comes running in, sure of nothing except the possibility that Corey might be there, and, SUPRISE!!! IT IS EVERYONE. ALL OF SCOTT'S PACK. EVEN THEO. NO ONE COULD POSSIBLY HAVE ANTICIPATED EITHER THIS TWIST, OR THE LOCATION IN WHICH IT OCCURRED. THE HUNTERS WILL DEFINITELY NEVER FIND THEM THERE.

"We had to make everyone believe we were actually leaving," Scott explains. What did Mason think they were going to do, though? Run?!

LOLOLOLOLOL. No. Duh. Scott is a flippin' HERO. And #Morey are back together. Between those facts and the VERY GOOD Ethan/Jackson teaser this week gifted us, things are finally starting to look up…

NEXT TIME

…isn't until September 8 (VMAs were this Sunday, yo)!! But when we get the show back, oh boy, do we GET. IT. BACK.

 

<-- Teen Wolf 6x13: After Images

Teen Wolf 6x16: Triggers -->


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