Has Teen Wolf perfected the art of the flashback? After reflecting on last week’s 1700s setting, we count down our top five favorite moments when Beacon Hills went back in time.
Last week’s Teen Wolf took us back to 1760s France to discover the ancestry of a major character — Allison Argent — as well as the origins of this season’s major monster, the Beast. It got us thinking: was it Teen Wolf’s very best flashback episode? We count down our top five Teen Wolf moments in which we got a glimpse of the past.
#5 — Unpacking the the Pack’s childhood trauma in ‘Required Reading’
In “Required Reading,” the Pack turns into a book club, coming together to read the novel written specially by Dr Valack as a tool to understanding Teen Wolf’s ongoing season five villains, the Dread Doctors. However, this has sinister consequences, causing our heroes to relive the most traumatic events of their childhoods. In the previous episode, Malia, who already finished the book, almost drives off the road as she remembers her mother, the Desert Wolf, shooting at her and her adopted family. For Scott, who starts suffering again from the asthma that werewolfdom should have cured, he recalls being hospitalized from a bad asthma attack after his dog was mauled to death in front of his eyes. In Stiles’ flashback, we learn more about his mother’s illness — her frontotemoporal dementia caused her to forget her son and become paranoid and aggressive towards him, and Lydia remembers witnessing the aftermath of her grandmother’s suicide attempt — or was it a trepanning experiment? — in Eichen House. Our poor babies.
#4 — Learning about Lydia’s grandmother’s power in ‘Perishable’
Speaking of Lorraine Martin, Lydia finds out that her beloved grandmother played a part in season four’s Benefactor mystery, and that her banshee powers run in the family. Lorraine had a premonition of the death of her wife, Maddy, and spent decades trying to work out what had happened and where this power came from, using science, the occult, and everything in between. We saw how she speculated with sound and voice recordings, mediums and psychics, and eventually found Meredith, the banshee who was, at the time, a psychiatric patient at Eichen House. Lorraine experimented with Meredith’s power and the voices she heard until Meredith truly went insane. Lydia initially believes that her grandmother may have been the banshee who created the list of names on the Dead Pool, but it actually turned out to be Meredith. “Perishable” was a great episode in terms of learning a bit more about Lydia’s power and what it has the capability to do — including the risks — and also in terms of fleshing out some of Lydia’s personal life prior to the start of Teen Wolf.
#3 — Discovering the tragedy behind Derek (and Deucalion) in ‘Visionary’
“Visionary” is one of the most crucial episodes in Teen Wolf’s earlier era, as it explores two questions that were some of the fandom’s first persistent obsessions: what makes different werewolves have different colored eyes, and why is Derek Hale so miserable all the time? Peter Hale tells the Pack about his nephew and the first love of his life, a girl named Paige. Derek, as a young teen, was conflicted about whether to tell Paige that he was a werewolf, and although Peter is an unreliable narrator, the flashback shows us that he manipulated Derek into organizing for Paige to get bitten by an Alpha so she could join him forever. Unfortunately, the bite doesn’t take, and Derek is forced to kill her in order to end her suffering. Her death activates the Nemeton, and it also changes Derek’s eyes from gold to blue — the mark of one who has taken innocent lives. In the same episode, we also see the origins of the Alpha Pack, when Deucalion — then a pacifist — meets with Derek’s mother Talia about calling a truce with the hunters, and becomes a vengeful monster after Gerard tricks and blinds him.
#2 — Meeting the very first Argent hunter in ‘The Maid of Gévaudan’
Last week’s episode should be vivid in your mind, but just in case you need a refresher: as the Pack tries everything to figure out how to find and fight the Beast, Lydia discovers the origin story of the original Beast, the one the Dread Doctors are trying to resurrect, from Gerard Argent. The Beast of Gévaudan is a legend that Teen Wolf has tied to the Argent family since season one, so it’s fitting that Crystal Reed returned to the show to play Marie-Jeanne Valet, a real historical figure attached to the Gévaudan mythos. It’s the furthest back in time that Teen Wolf has ever flashed, showing us the Argent origins in 1760s France, and the story of how the brave and skilled Marie-Jeanne became the first Hunter, tracking the Beast for three years and eventually killing it — even after she discovered it was her brother.
#1 — Reliving Noshiko’s Nogitsune romance in ‘The Fox and the Wolf’
“The Maid of Gévaudan” was great, but if we’re talking Teen Wolf period pieces, nothing beats “The Fox and the Wolf,” the beautiful episode in which Kira learns the truth about her mother and the origins of the Nogitsune are revealed. Noshiko, a 900 year old kitsune, was held at an internment camp with other Japanese-American citizens during WWII. She was in love with one of the soldiers, Corporal Rhys, but when it’s discovered that the more corrupt officers are selling the camp’s medical supplies on the black market, a riot breaks out and Rhys is killed. Noshiko tries to invoke a Nogitsune to inhabit her, so she can get revenge for all the wrongs done, but the trickster spirit chooses to inhabit Rhys’s corpse instead. Noshiko is helped by a werewolf, Satomi, and together they take down the Nogitsune that used to be Rhys. As far as flashbacks go, this one’s the winner in terms of story, performance, cinematography and the recreation of a past era. Teen Wolf at its absolute finest.
So that’s our top five Teen Wolf flashback moments — but there’s one we still really want to see happen in the future.
+1 — A history of the Hale family, including the infamous fire
The Hale legacy still hangs over Teen Wolf like a strange, sad shadow. They’re still tied in some way to most of the current characters, and there’s so much about them that we are still desperate to know. What was it like in Beacon Hills, with a respected hereditary pack as long-term residents? Did they protect the unknowing townsfolk, as Scott does now, or did they keep to themselves? What’s it like, growing up werewolf? What was the dynamic like between the human and wolfy members of their family? What was Laura like? What on earth happened to Cora after the fire? What were the circumstances surrounding Malia’s birth? How else do werewolves measure age, if not in years? Just how much in love with Talia was Deaton, and what did Derek’s dad think of that? Teen Wolf should do an episode that’s a retrospective on the family, which brings back all our favorite Hales shows us some big moments in their history, including more about how things worked in Beacon Hills with Talia as the Alpha, Peter’s relationship with the Desert Wolf, and of course, Kate setting the Hale mansion on fire and how the hell Cora escaped. While it would be fun to get something like a flashback to the childhood era of Scott and Stiles, a Hale flashback episode could really serve pretty much any plot they ever chooses to do, and it could be an opportunity to slip in answers to a lot of the mythological minutiae that people are still curious about. That family, in one way or another, is still the catalyst for nearly everything that’s happened in this show, and any plot involving them could always feel relevant.
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