Teen Wolf was the first television show I ever wrote about, back in its first season, and it's still a series that I look forward to. If you've never seen it, I can promise you that it's not what you think it is. Let's face it, ever since MTV stopped caring about music and became a reality channel, its motto has been "Stupid People Doing Stupid Things." The rare exception has been some of its scripted series, like Awkward and Faking It, and of course Teen Wolf, which follows the adventures of Scott McCall and his pack of high-school misfits, most of whom are endowed with some kind of supernatural powers. While the show's first two seasons wallowed in a bit too much teen beefcake (lots of scenes of hunky lacrosse players in the shower,) over the course of four seasons, the show's consistently delivered first-rate supernatural thrills and suspense, even if it's never quite received the critical acclaim of other gothic hits like American Horror Story or the popularity of the CW's Supernatural.
Scott's pack includes a young werewolf (played by Dylan Sprayberry, promoted this season to a full cast member,) a banshee (who can predict death,) a kitsune (with ninja powers,) and a were-coyote (who spent most of her childhood in animal form and is having problems catching up in school.). The one exception is Scott's best friend "Stiles" Stilinsky, who was possessed by a demon in one season but otherwise remains quite human. He's also turned into a very perceptive detective (his dad's the county sheriff, after all.)
New this season is Pretty Little Liars hunk Cody Christian, who plays a childhood friend of Scott and Stiles who returns to Beacon Hills as a werewolf who wants to join Scott's pack. Scott, as Stiles complains, wants to give everyone the benefit of a doubt, but Stiles is immediately suspicious. Something about this guy isn't quite kosher. And while Scott, his pack, and Stiles' father doubts him, Stiles is usually right about these things.
The first episode opens with a harrowing scene in which Lydia, the show's banshee, has been imprisoned in Eichen House, the local insane asylum. Apparently catatonic, Lydia suddenly explodes with one of her banshee screams, and then uses previously unseen super powers to nearly escape. She's stopped by Max Carver's Aiden, the surviving member of a pair of werewolf twins the pack tangled with in an earlier season. As Lydia is dragged back to her cell, she screams that she has to reach her friends and tell them that they're all going to die.
Well, that turns out to have been a flash-forward, because when Scott and his friends show up for the first day of their senior year, everybody (including Lydia) is just hunky-dory. Scott even ponders to Stiles that things never stay okay for very long; they'll either get very good or very bad very soon. And since this is Teen Wolf, it's a no-brainer which way things will go. Scott's looking forward to senior year and thinking about college, but Stiles seems obsessed with making long-range plans to make sure the pack stays more or less together. "Nobody gets left behind," he says, and that even includes his dilapidated old jeep, which has played an integral role in several of the team's adventures.
Sadly the jeep seems on its last legs and that's only a tiny problem compared to what a student named Tracy (newcomer Kelsey Asbille) is going through. She's having night terrors, visions of some black-garbed creatures (henceforth to be known as Dread Doctors) sneaking into her room at night. She's also having visions of black crows. When she meets with the guidance counselor (a job now held my Lydia's mom) and shares her dreams, she winds up vomiting up gallons of black goo... and a crow feather.
Lydia agrees to look into Tracy's visions and enlists the aid of Deputy Parrish, whom we know is also some sort of as-yet-unidentified supernatural creature himself (and apparently invulnerable.) When Parrish looks on Tracy's roof, through a skylight that had supposedly been sealed, he sees dozens of dead birds on her roof, and offers to stake the place out.
Meanwhile, the Dread Doctors - horrifying demons in steampunk goggles and rubber suits - stalk Tracy through the halls of the high school in what appear to be blackout visions. That's until they turn out to be real, and spirit Tracy away to some spooky laboratory, where one of the goggled creatures injects her with a serum that seems to turn her into a werewolf. Soon after, Parrish follows a lead and is confronted by one of the monsters, who winds up mangling him with horrific talons. Scott also has an encounter with one of these monsters, that sort of looks like a werewolf but has an eagle's talons. What that thing is and where it will fit into the season's storyline remains to be seen.
As for that new guy, Theo, well of course Stiles is right. In the second season, we see him not only transform into a real wolf (not a werewolf-boy like the others) as well as break the hand of his supposed dad for screwing up a forged signature on his transfer papers. (That signature, which differed from the signature on an old traffic citation, helps raise Stiles' suspicions.)
This season starts out without a few of Teen Wolf's regulars - most notably Tyler Hoechlin as Derek, the older werewolf who mentored Scott, but also Ian Bohen as Peter Hale, Derek's uncle and one of the series' recurring bad guys, and JR Bourne as Chris Argent, the wolfhunter who was also the father of Scott's murdered girlfriend, Allison. But Dr. Deeton, the kindly vet who also has a doctorate in the supernatural, is back, and with Cody Christian pumping up the hunk factor, the series should be fine. You needn't have watched the first four seasons to get into season five, but you really need to watch the first two episodes, because Teen Wolf traditionally throws a ton of confusing images at the viewer early on and then slowly uses subsequent episodes to unravel the puzzle.
Teen Wolf airs 10 p.m. Mondays on MTV.
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