Teen Wolf season 5, episode 5 just finished airing! Check out our recap and discuss with fellow fans.
Teen Wolf season 5, episode 5, “A Novel Approach,” opens with Stiles fending off Donovan. They run into the school and Stiles heads for the library. Inside, Donovan tells Stiles about his father, who had been Sheriff Stilinski’s partner. While Stilinski was in the car calling for backup, his partner was in the middle of the shootout and ended up paralyzed from the waist down.
Stiles gets angry and it looks like he’s going to attack Donovan, but as he backs away, Donovan finds him and they struggle. Stiles climbs a piece of scaffolding, but Donovan grabs his legs. Stiles pulls a pin on the structure, and steel bars rain down on Donovan. One goes right through his chest, and he dies shortly thereafter.
Stiles calls 911, but he doesn’t say anything. Even when Malia calls, he ignores it. Instead, he runs out to his Jeep and starts to pull away. But instead of leaving, he parks and ducks down, watching while a deputy checks out the school. When he switches on his police scanner, though, Stiles hears that they didn’t find anything. After the cop leaves, Stiles goes inside and sees a nearly clean library — the only exception being a drop of blood to convince him he wasn’t hallucinating.
In bed, Kira is muttering Japanese again, but before Scott can ask her about it, he gets an alert that the alarm at the animal clinic was tripped. Meanwhile, Stiles goes to his board to work through what happened with Donovan. When Scott calls and says Tracy’s body is gone, that someone has been taking all of the bodies, Stiles’ theories are proven correct.
It’s then that we once again see Parrish taking the bodies to the Nemeton.
At school, Malia shows Lydia the book she found in Tracy’s room, and everyone is told to read it. The back summary reads like what’s happening in Beacon Hills, but there’s no ending to the book. This is just volume one, and there doesn’t appear to be a volume two.
“Is this a novel, or someone’s predictions?” Lydia asks.
Theo points out that the book is dedicated to Gabriel Valack, and then he reports back to the Dread Doctors to tell them everyone will be at Eichen House, just as planned. Well, almost everyone. Malia won’t be going because she knows Eichen is a “nightmare asylum of insanity and death,” but Stiles insists that he goes with Lydia anyway.
Before they head to the asylum, Kira must find her belt in Scott’s room. She asks Scott to look at her with his Alpha eyes, and when he does, he sees her surrounded by a fox on fire. It points to her belt, and Scott acts as if nothing is wrong.
When they get to Eichen House, Scott tells Stiles about Kira losing control the other night. Stiles is clearly thinking about Donovan when he says sometimes self defense can justify ending a life. “We shouldn’t be killing the people we’re trying to save,” Scott replies.
Inside the asylum, the creepy orderly from the premiere makes the group empty their pockets (and Kira has to take off her belt). He clearly has eyes for Lydia, but before Stiles can say anything, he notices the pin he pulled from the scaffolding was in his pocket. No one notices, luckily, and they’re led down to the basement and Valack’s cell.
Unfortunately, Kira and Scott can’t cross the mountain ash, and so Stiles and Lydia must venture forth alone. Stiles see the Sluagh in a cell (designed by a Teen Wolf fan!), which signifies he has seen a lost soul, according to Valack.
Valack is fairly open with details. He wrote The Dread Doctors as a tool designed to open people’s eyes to these monsters. The Doctors are not entirely human anymore, but they were once scientists who worshiped the supernatural. He won’t say anything else, though, until Lydia records her scream for him.
Scott and Kira talk while they wait for Lydia and Stiles, and Scott tells Kira about both of them before she knew them. He also admits that Stiles still likes Lydia, but it’s different now. Unfortunately, he’s interrupted by Kira, who is starting to spark uncontrollably.
As the lights begin to flicker, Valack realizes they brought a Kitsune with them. He explains that the Dread Doctors work with electromagnetic forces to prolong their lives, give them power, and make people forget they ever saw them. With Kira there, she’s bringing down the natural electromagnetic defenses of Eichen House, allowing the Doctors to stroll right in.
At the school, Theo offers Malia a driving lesson home after studying in the library. He slyly puts some moves on her, but as she continues to drive, she starts having flashbacks to her accident and loses control of the vehicle. She stops before they get into an accident, but she runs from the truck and collapses to the ground.
This is when Valack explains that the book literally helps you see the Dread Doctors, as suppressed memories surface. Lydia agrees to record her scream, but they’re down to the wire. The Doctors show up and Scott can’t move Kira because she’s still surrounded by electricity.
Back on the road, Malia sees that someone shot the car she was in when she was a child, and without a doubt she knows it was The Desert Wolf.
Despite the electricity hurting him every second he touches her, Scott takes Kira outside, where they fall to the sidewalk. He tells her he meant it when he said he loved her, and she holds his hand as he heals.
Stiles and Lydia hide from the Doctors while they take Valack’s third eye. “All of this, it’s on us. Everything that’s happened, everything that’s going to happen, it’s our fault,” Stiles says.
“It’s our responsibility,” Lydia replies.
In the final moments of the episode, a wounded Valack plays the recording of Lydia’s scream inside a cup pressed against the glass, which slowly begins to crack and give way.