S05.E18: The Maid of Gévaudan

[ahisma]

Scott, Stiles, Lydia, Malia, and Liam are trying to figure out how to defeat the Beast of Gévaudan that the Maid of Gévaudan, Marie-Jeanne Valet, faced in 1765. As Gerard Argent, recounts Valet’s story to Scott’s pack in hopes they can deduce the creature’s weaknesses.

[Lady Calypso]

So....we called it. It could still be a red herring, to be fair, but Mason is probably The Beast, and now Scott and Stiles know/suspect.

 

It was so great to see Crystal Reed last night. I miss her as Allison, but she did a great job as Marie-Jeanne. Well, that 'reveal' that she is an ancestor of Argent, and the first huntress, was not surprising. Like, you casted Crystal Reed, so obviously it's her descendant. And I knew it was the brother, because of Gilles Marini. 

 

It was mostly flashbacks, because of their seasonal flashback episode, but seeing Crystal again just made it for me. 

 

Oh yeah, and know it's confirmed the school knows Scott is a werewolf. At least, the kids in the library. 

[mac123x]

"She was our ancestor!"  Dun dun DUN!.  I expected Lydia to say "yeah... we already knew that didn't we?"  Because I thought we did.  When the Argents were introduced back in season 1, they revealed that the myth of werewolves being harmed by silver was based on their last name.  I'm pretty sure they also talked about the legend of the first Argent killing the Beast of [French Mumble].

 

I liked Lydia's rebuttal to their story.  "She didn't do it alone.  She had help."  I do wish she'd said more than "we need Parrish".  Could have included "and Scott and his pack".

 

I don't see how they're going to save Mason.

 

The whole "drink from the footprint of a wolf and become an uber-werewolf" thing seems problematic to this universe.  If it were that simple, why doesn't Theo just do that rather than concoct this elaborate scheme?  I get that the Dread Doctors were trying to concoct a better version (since Chimerae aren't affected by mountain ash).

[beee]

What a waste of an episode. I know Crystal Reed is a fan favorite but all that backstory was just eating up time that would have been better served with... oh, I don’t know, some plot maybe? The whole thing could have been told in three sentences. The episode was just a rehash of the dire Visionary, only worse because it didn’t deal with anyone we actually know.

 

Scott and Malia just outed themselves to the whole school. I suppose everyone will just turn around and go “it’s Beacon Hills, dude” like Danny did, because at this point the whole town knowing about the supernatural is the only thing that would make sense.

 

Mason being the beast must be the worst kept secret ever. Ah well, maybe it’ll turn out that it isn’t him. That would be a real surprise. I like it being him though because that means just killing it is off the table. Plus, Corey can do his thing this way.

 

I liked Lydia for a change, asserting herself against the Argents. And I’ll ignore Hayden and Liam making out – again – because it was mercifully short and it had Stiles in the background smiling like the proud pack parent that he is.

 

 

 

[LeisureTime]

I really struggled with "the internet is wrong" as the explanation for why the story of Le Bete Du Gevaudan changed from being about a man who's family was killed before he took it out to the maid. I mean, we SAW it come from an old book in S1 Heart Monitor (where it looked much scarier in an illustration). And sure, I suppose it's not really a big deal and at least they tried to explain the discrepancy, but it was still majorly distracting.

 

But again, I swear: If we get to the end of this season, and Scott never once goes full Alpha, I just might be done. He doesn't even get the forehead and ears anymore. He was more threatening as a season one baby and season 2 pseudomega/unofficial alpha.

[ahisma]

I liked the flashback story (and seeing Crystal). I liked the fight at the school. But. Too many questions, mostly of the type that won't get answered.
​
​So, Sebastian Valet. There's a werewolf running around French Canada, terrorizing nice French Canadian ladies in their cabins and also British Redcoats. Sebastian steps in a fur trap and falls face-first into the werewolf's pawprint puddle and licks it (okay, ew), becoming a werewolf himself.
​
​Well, does he become a werewolf, or was the print actually the print of a Beast, or is he like Jackson/kanima or Peter/crazyalphamonster or Kate/werejaguar and Sebastian's form is different from the get-go, just because of who he is inside?
​
​I guess Sebastian's alpha doesn't care about his new pup so Sebastian becomes an uncontrolled omega. Most people (like Scott and Liam), if they turn into werewolves and then hurt or almost hurt people when they shift uncontrollably, they feel terrible about it. Sebastian, who is beloved by his sister and also his boyfriend Marcel who protects him, does not feel terrible about it. Nobody noticed for three years that Sebastian is such a psychopath that even though he is secretly a monster he doesn't care about his child murdering? I mean, that definitely earns you a damnatio memoriae, but you'd think someone would notice you're a bit off.
​
Typical Argents that Marie-Jeanne gets all the credit for wielding the spear and Henri is a footnote, even though he's the one that had all the info about the mountain ash, wolfsbane, mistletoe, etc. that made her victory possible. Gender and sex roles may be backwards from usual, but it's still the hunter who gets the glory over the one with the witch/cook role.
​
​Come to think of it, the wolves are that way, too, with the Alphas getting all the glory and the druids in the background. Deaton is actually the one who comes up with 80% of the useful information on the show. He may like being in the background, but he himself gives a huge amount of genuine respect and credit to Talia and Scott. (Not so much to Laura and Derek, and look where his lack of support and knowledge got them.)
​
​Anyway, tangent.
​
​So a Beacon Hills teen (probably Mason. I'd love for it to not be Mason, but I think the Marcel/Sebastian - Corey/Mason parallel was very deliberate) is turning into the Beast at night without remembering. When the Beast remembers that he is Sebastian, the teen will be lost.
​
​The Argents are trying to recruit Lydia to kill the Beast. Why? The fact that Marie-Jeanne was female was the least important part of the story. Anybody with the skills (like Gerard and Chris) can forge the spearhead from steel, wolfsbane, and blood. They need, what, Sebastian's family blood? That's the Argents, again. Mason's blood? Gettable. Not Lydia's, though. Lydia could maybe use her scream to interrupt the frequencies the DDs have been using to call forth the Beast—that doesn't mean she's the spear wielder, though. She knows a little fu now, but Kira is the one with hand weapons training. The Argents, too. And why are the Argents ignoring that the Hellhound is the one fighting the Beast in the fresco? The only useful thing about their weird fixation on Lydia is that she won't want to kill Mason.
​
​Ugh.
​

[LeisureTime]

Yes, I was just coming back to say "what does it matter who wields the spear as long as someone is capable and competent enough to make it and do so.". And it doesn't even have to be the same person doing ether of those things!

[AudienceofOne]

Mason is the Beast!! Shock! Horror! Nobody saw that coming. But still there wasn't a #savemason or #masonisthebeast or #beastmason or #masonisthelastchimera hashtag by the torturers so maybe this is a misdirect!

 

If I tried to keep up with what passes for mythology in this show I would lose my mind. Just about everything about 'flashback world' made zero sense. So I have no clue why the Beast of French Mumble was the worstest werewolf in the world - I mean he was hardly more sociopathic than Peter or Kate. Nor do I know why he could only be killed by [insert convoluted blood ritual here].

 

Nice to see Crystal but I hate flashback episodes generally and have no clue why they burdened her with that accent. She sounded Irish half the time. Could have done without that.

[Scott]

This has moved beyond just "bad" to "gloriously bad".  It was nice to see not-Allison again, though.  And the entire hour was worth it just to hear Henri say "wehre-woolph" in his French faux-accent.  

[mac123x]

So, Sebastian Valet. There's a werewolf running around French Canada, terrorizing nice French Canadian ladies in their cabins and also British Redcoats. Sebastian steps in a fur trap and falls face-first into the werewolf's pawprint puddle and licks it (okay, ew), becoming a werewolf himself.

 

I don't think there were two wolves.

 

1. Sebastian fell into the mud and drank the footprinted water.

2. Next cut, he's sitting under a tree writing his letter to his seester.

3. Next cut, he and his buddy are trying to get into that cabin where the woman says "zhere ees a monster out zere"

 

I think some time passed between 1 & 3, during which Sebastian was wolfing it around the area, causing that woman to be afraid.  She didn't realize that the dude who burst into her cabin was actually the monster until he blew out the candle.

 

The entire flashback sequence could have been handled with a few lines of exposition.  "First person to kill the beast was our great-great-xxxx-grandmother.  She used the following items:

• ".

 

This reeked of "second unit episode"  most of the filming was with guest stars so probably occurred at the same time they were doing a different episode with the main cast.  Lydia's scenes were probably done while she was in Eichen House.

 

 

 

And the entire hour was worth it just to hear Henri say "wehre-woolph" in his French faux-accent.

 

I kept being reminded of that quote from History of the World Part 1:

 

"We do not even have a language! Just a stupid accent!"

"She's right! We all talk like Maurice Chevalier!"

Edited February 25, 2016 by mac123x

[LeisureTime]

You know, all the talk of drinking from paw prints and becoming a demon wolf had me wondering what the resident DEMON WOOOOOLLLF!!! has to say about his situation. The situation that is still...what exactly?

[Snarkette]

"She's right! We all talk like Maurice Chevalier!"

 

"Eet would have been better wit Marcel Marceau, non?"

[Terrafamilia]

They were throwing me a little by starting off in the French and Indian War in the colonies then shifting back to France. I wondered why they had bothered starting out in the Americas. Other than maybe trying to make a point about post traumatic stress disorder perhaps they are trying to lay out a reason why the Beast is such a different werewolf than Scott and the rest we've seen so far. My theory is that Scott, the Hales, et al. are Old World werewolves while the Beast is of a New World variety. That's why the different etiology of the lycanthropy, the ability to conserve one's clothing throughout the change, the smoking. Then again, the mountain ash works just as well though that could be because of its general efficacy against a range of supernatural creatures.

[AudienceofOne]

I don't know. Parrish somehow retains his shorts when he becomes a Hellhound and I doubt there's anything 'new age' about him. No that I was looking or anything