enness2000

In no particular order: Danny, or at the very least an explanation of what happened to Danny For this Mason plotline to involve him asking, and getting answers to, any number of pertinent questions about the mythology of the various shapeshifters that no one in the show has ever bothered to ask (like "Why is Malia a werecoyote and not a werewolf?", "What even is a werecoyote?", "Why does everyone, including Kira, know nothing about kitsunes when her mother is/was a kitsune for 900 years?", "Relatedly, is her mother still a kitsune? Actual answer please", any questions that clarify the beta/omega thing and any/questions that may arise around this season's Big Bads which would normally go unanswered) For the gang as a whole to morph from "Superpowered people who keep just kinda stumbling across various bad things, or investigating problems that happen to them or their immediate family" into a more Scooby Gang situation, where they use the fact that they're superhumans who know about all the potential dangers out there to proactively help people who need helping A better ratio of "dead straight white men" : "dead people who don't fit at least one of those characteristics" Some kind of front-burnered non-heterosexual romance, because seriously, it's been two years since Danny/Ethan, and that was at best a D-plot in any given episode

Ah - that would be a neat little explanation for that. I figured we were just meant to take Deaton's "maybe the rules aren't as rigid as I once thought" to be a pre-emptive handwave for anything that breached established canon, but that would be a neater explanation. It would also explain why Tracy's eyes didn't turn blue after her first kill. I cannot put into words how uninterested I am by Even Younger Teen Wolves, or the girl from history class who Liam has some grade school beef with and her mysterious healing arm. Even having them repeatedly fall into holes in the ground isn't enough to make them worth watching. Although I am vaguely curious if we knew before that Liam's old school rival [brett?] was a born wolf whose parents died in a fire. Are we meant to see foreshadowing for a (*sigh*) Hale family connection? Or is it just that "died in a fire" is one of the few ways to effectively kill off a werewolf family? I'm glad that Kira (partially) won a fight (possibly the first time since 3B that she's been remotely effective against an enemy?), but it really does make her look useless when the last pre-commercial scene involves her chopping off Tracy's tail and the next time we see her, Tracy has abducted Lydia's mother and Kira's just uselessly sitting there while Lydia bleeds out. Also, whoever (a) writes those godforsaken hashtags and (b) determines their placement in the show needs to be destroyed. As do all the people who, for some reason, actually use them.

Whatever about the banshee screams, it's kinda mental that Lydia has apparently become Black Widow in the time between this episode and the flashforward scenes. Especially when it could have been handwaved to some extent here by saying "Oh, Parrish has been training her in basic self-defence in the six-month season gap, because one of these damn kids should learn some actual fighting skills at some point". Agree with everyone above that Kira needs to get her damn lightning on. Or any other Kitsune-specific power, really - honestly, anything to make it meaningful that she's a different kind of super. Instead, everyone bar Lydia has the same generic "strength, speed, healing" template, with a few as-malleable-as-the-plot-requires werewolf-specific bits. Part of what I really loved about season 3 was the branching out into less common mythologies - the darach, the kitsune, the banshee. Reeling that back in to "everyone's a fighter, and Lydia also sees stuff sometimes" is disappointing.

For me it's less age and more life experience. Yes, Lydia's highly mature, and yes, she's been through far more than most juniors, but she's in high school and he's far enough out of high school to have served in a war. I think I'd find it less weird if she were as old as the rest of the cast, but had skipped a few grades and was out of school, and he was the same age but had just hung around town since graduation - the gulf would seem less gulfy. But it's totally a mileage thing. You know, I'd almost like if this was it, and they were doing it that intentionally. Having Scott be uber-protective of Kira to the point of making her less effective as a fighter, and having her be his weakness (so this week, for example, if he had had the upper hand on Kate but stopped fighting/let his guard down because Kira was getting her ass handed to her by the Berserker) would be both entirely understandable (given that his first girlfriend died in battle, like, 5 weeks ago in show-time) and could be some source of conflict or drama between them - the "baggage everyone brings from their old relationships" trope but with a monster-y layer. It'd still feature her as a device for his character, so still not ideal, but compared to having her get smacked around repeatedly for no obvious reason, and there'd be at least some potential for her to exercise some agency or express some wishes of her own, instead of being a blank cutout marked "Girlfriend (We think she's good with swords, or something?)".

He's a war veteran and she's a high school junior, and their first conversation was in a tunnel to a secret wendigo corpse fridge, and most of their conversations since then have also been about murder, so I'm going to go with "everything". Totally agree with both this and the comments about Kira's lack of curiosity about her own power. Even for a normal human, the charge needed to stop/restart a heart isn't insignificant. Mostly it's that she isn't even trying - in 3B she was smart, curious and motivated. Now that she's officially the Main Character's Love Interest, she seems to have lost that. The closest she's come to a plot point of her own in 11 episodes is joining the lacrosse team, which seemed to be trying to show something about her ability to fit into a team/control her abilities, but then just disappeared.

This episode just left me seriously grumpy; short of a really excellent finale, this is going to be an incredibly weak season when considered as a whole. A few unconnected thoughts: * I know the show has never been explicit about what makes a Berserker, but is it really as simple as "shove a bear skull on someone and call it a day"? Assuming that they're going to have to compress "Scott turns crazy and attacks his friends" and "Scott is saved by the power of love/being Werewolf Jesus" into 42 minutes next week, it seems like it's going to be pretty flimsy no matter what. I quite liked the early bits of the Benefactor plotline, and didn't hate the resolution, but if it means that the main conflict of the finale is going to be this rushed, that's a real problem of storytelling. Compared to the slow burn of the nogitsune taking over Stiles last season, this is wildly abrupt. * So Kira's power is basically "Can be flashy-yet-wildly-ineffective with literally any weapon, and also lightbulbs"? I get that she's still not used to what she can do, but she has a 900-year-old kitsune living in her home that she can learn from, seems pretty on board with the whole "Let's save lives and be heroes!" schtick, and yet has actually backslid in terms of her usefulness in a fight this season, going from electrocuting an assailant and taking on multiple Oni at once in 3B to getting knocked out every week so the male characters can come to her aid. Relatedly: * This show needs a show bible with some idea of power tiers in the worst possible way, or at least to be more consistent in how strong everyone is/how their victories come about. Kate beating Scott because she's spent longer fighting and/or is smarter and/or is more vicious I can buy. Kate straight-up out-punching an Alpha just doesn't work. * The "Deer!" "Pizza. She likes pizza." bit really annoyed me. Like, I'm on board with the Malia/Stiles 'ship, and I like the bits of her character that are informed by spending years as a coyote, but stuff like having Stiles talk over/for her that much really grates. It's not like people don't also eat deer - just buy the girl some damn venison! * It feels like some bits of the Deaton/Lydia plotline got seriously chopped up. I wonder if any of those scenes mentioned that Deaton has a sister who works in Eichen House? (Also, with the almost-definitely-cut scenes it makes the whole thing seem bizarre - Lydia is the only one who knows where Deaton is, and by the end of the episode she's holding his hand to comfort him? Combine that with her being the one who jumps to volunteer to look after teen-Derek overnight at the clinic and you've got something that pushes Lydia/Parrish into second place in the "Creepiest crack ship between a high school junior and a grown adult" rankings)

I figured it was kind of a "last straw" thing. I mean, between her time in the ward with Peter and Stiles appearing in Eichen House, she had basically been locked up with minimal contact with the supernatural. When Stiles first appeared the voices tried to get her to help him; when she did break out to help the gang in "Insatiable", it lead (however incidentally and inadvertently) to Allison's death. The supernatural taking the life of another human, with her involvement, could definitely have been enough to push her over the edge, especially since she seemed to have some level of link with Lydia even then (given that she could tell Lydia didn't want to be found) and would have felt, to at least some extent, Lydia's anguish. I mean, I think the fact that Meredith included herself on the list is telling; the guilt of being a banshee, and the fear that you're not just predicting the deaths but somehow helping them on their way, must be pretty smothering. You're basically talking about every emotional issue Lydia's dealt with in the past season-and-a-half, all the frustration and anger and guilt, but in someone who has no support network and far less capacity to rationally deal with those feelings*. Not that I think the show did a very good job of explaining any of that, but I can see it holding together if you reeeeeeally want it to. *ETA, which might be why Lydia's so sympathetic towards her. Lydia knows from crazy, and given how many banshees seem to have been killed in Eichen House, is presumably well aware that her power may land her there someday.

How frickin huge was Satomi's pack in the first place? There seemed to be at least 10-12 of them who died from the Chemist's poison, and she still has half a dozen that need protecting in this episode? If Alphas are meant to draw their strength from their packs she must have been insanely powerful before this season, even if her pack seem wildly incompetent. On which note, I loved Derek 'explaining' to Scott that these werewolves have claws but are utterly incapable of fighting (with the implication of "Unlike you, Scott"), as if Scott or any of the other protagonist wolves we've seen on the show have ever demonstrated (a) any training whatsoever in any kind of martial art or werewolf-attack-skills or (b) any tactics, skills or competence in fighting beyond "run at things and wave your claws around wildly". One other thing - am I mis-remembering, or did Peter imply quite strongly to Malia that he didn't know who the Desert Wolf was and had only turned up that name in very vague reference to Malia's adoption? 'Cause here (in a flashback, but still post-memory-wipe) he knows her well enough to know she's an assassin, and to have a bit of a chuckle to himself at the thought of hiring her. I guess we can add that to the ever-growing list of things Peter's being wildly sketchy about.

Not least because he's 16. As in, just turned 16 this week. Refreshing though it is in many ways to have a high school freshman played by someone who could actually be a high school freshman, I really don't want to end up on any watchlists. I miss Danny. Not that he could act or had a personality or anything, but he's pretty and age-appropriate, and that's really all I ask. The fact that they didn't mention him this week (when it would have been as simple as adding "Danny" to the list of players who've left the school) gives me hope that his absence was just budget/availability related and that he'll pop up later in the season.