Courtesy of MTV
A flashback heavy episode of Teen Wolf explores the origins of both Kira’s (Arden Cho) mother, as well as the Kitsune. Too bad it’s the worst episode of the season.
Let’s bitch it out…Wow. That was just not good. Like…not all at.
I enjoy a good back story as much as the next guy, but only when it is done well. ‘The Fox And The Wolf’ does not fit this bill: at best the flashbacks are exposition-laden, at worse they’re cliché and poorly executed. Since the entire episode hinges on the the details of what occurred at the Oak Creek internment camp (which is now the asylum where Dylan O’Brien’s Stiles spent last week), this makes for a disastrous, and frankly hokey, episode right when Teen Wolf should be ramping up for its season finale.
This episode reminds me of those laughably bad flashback episodes from The CW/WB/UPN (feel free to pick from The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Roswell, Dawson’s Creek, etc): the sets and period pieces look cheap, the dialogue is improbably modern and the story is overly melodramatic and paper thin. I mean seriously, did we really need an entire episode to learn that Kira’s mother (Tamlyn Tomita) called up the Kitsune because a few guards and a doctor were dealing in black market goods and incited a massacre? It’s not irrelevant information, but the length of time it takes to tell and the overwrought, manipulative manner in which it’s told is painful. Prime example: the scene when the little boy dies and the baseball drops from his dead hand. Could this have been any more heavy-handed and laugh out loud over the top? Answer: no. Throw in the terrible molotov cocktail/werewolf bit, the laughably inept narrow hallway sword play and the Titanic-esque forbidden love and this episode had me groaning all over the place.
Unfortunately because so much of the episode is dedicated to this series of flashbacks, everything else is overpowered. The modern day scenes of the B-listers suiting up to track down Stiles feels like an after-thought and only the scene when Allison (Crystal Reed) breaks down in front of Sheriff Stilinski (Linden Ashby) in the elevator has any kind of emotional heft. All in all, this episode feels like the definition of a filler episode.
Memo to Teen Wolf writers: Let’s agree to put all of this behind us and get back to the action, shall we?
Best Lines:
- Kira (as her mother’s story reaches a romantic crescendo): “Okay stop, stop! We don’t want to hear your Casablanca story.”
- Kira’s mother (describing how her lover, Reese, died): “The doctor, it seems, had stolen the morphine as well.” Ugh – so trite and overdone.
Your turn: am I being overly harsh on this episode or was it a dud? Do you think all of the ominous dialogue after the past repeating and learning from history are premonitions of things to come? Who’s right about the chess board message: the Sheriff or Argent (JR Bourne)? Sound off below.
Teen Wolf airs Mondays at 10pm EST on MTV