Synopsis: The gang reunite for their senior year, but they’re greeted by a new enemy: a werewolf that has the ability to drain his victims’ power with his claws. In the future, Lydia is institutionalized in Eichenhouse and predicts the deaths of all her friends.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Okay, why you gotta keep torturing my favorite female characters, Teen Wolf writers?
First you kill Allison (#neverforget; way to twist the knife with that later this episode, btw), then you make Scott stab Kira, and now you’ve institutionalized a catatonic Lydia? Really? If this takes a turn for the Game of Thrones, I am *out*.
This season opens in Eichenhouse; there’s a girl standing motionless in the shower while an orderly shouts at her to finish up and quit ignoring her. She doesn’t respond. The camera pans to the girl’s side; there’s a scratch or bite wound on her skin.
The orderly gets increasingly frustrated and pulls the girl out of the shower: it’s Lydia. Back in Lydia’s room, a second, more evil, orderly repeatedly stabs the crook of her arm with a needle (thanks for the close-up of a needle puncturing skin; I didn’t really want to sleep anyway) before preparing to stab her violently in the neck. Just as he draws his arm up, Lydia screams, fights off the orderlys, and escapes from Eichenhouse.
Outside, a vision of Aiden appears, and a distracted Lydia lingers long enough to get captured; she’s hauled back inside and foretells the deaths of all her friends.
After that ominous opening, the episode flashes back to the gang’s last day of summer before senior year. Stiles is freaking out because he wants to keep his friends together after they graduate and go to different universities in California, and both he and Scott are trying to get everyone to the high school for an event called the Senior Scribe.
Scott talks about how no one’s tried to kill them for six months, and because everything ‘regresses to the mean,’ either something really good or something really bad is coming their way. It’s a very broad, inaccurate construction of mathematics, but he’s not wrong.
On the other side of town, Deputy Parrish begs off desk duty to answer a noise complaint. He gets more than he anticipated when he frees a bloodied werewolf from a concrete wall and gets impaled by his glowing claws. Like every other villain in this series, the wolf is after Scott and his friends.
Parrish ends up getting rescued by the Sheriff, but not before having a steamy vision of Lydia saving him. Yaaas.
Meanwhile, Kira and Scott reunite after she spent the summer in New York with her family, only to be interrupted by the Evil Glowy Wolf Whose Claws Apparently Leech Power. The trio fight and the wolf stabs Scott. When things are looking particularly bleak, Scott activates his True Alpha powers and sends Evil Glowy Wolf running back to his masters. Which are creepy robots in some sort of makeshift mad-science lab.
In other random episode news, Malia learned that she passed junior year, Scott and Liam had a cute mentor/mentee moment where Scott praised Liam for learning to control his wolf change, and we meet supercute new character Theo, a werewolf Scott knew from the 4th grade who wants to join Scott’s pack.
The episode closes with the Senior Scribe. The students take all the old yearbooks off the library shelves and write their initials on the empty shelf space. Each main character scribbles their initials, and Scott pauses after his initials to write “AA.”
This is when all of our hearts collectively break for Allison Argent. Who never got a funeral. Forever bitter.
The episode closes with another look at institutionalized Lydia, who sees flashes of all her friends’ deaths.