Teen Wolf 2-09: “Party Guessed”

Let’s check in with Lydia, who, as the only member of the principal cast who didn’t get to participate in last episode’s rave-centered mayhem, deserves some extra attention this time around. After having a nightmare about Peter Hale mauling her in front of a cheering crowd of lacrosse fans, Lydia wakes to find Ghost Peter lying in bed beside her, nattering away about how he swears her life will return to normal, just as soon as she does him one tiny little favor on the night of the full moon.

Ghost Peter, I have due respect for your entertaining brand of villainy, but non-corporeal or not, stop crawling into bed with traumatized high school kids.

Chris Argent disinfects Victoria’s bite and struggles to keep his cool. He tries to convince Gerard that maybe the bite isn’t that bad—she might not even turn into a werewolf!—but Gerard is having none of it. Gerard coldly tells him Victoria is already dead: “That thing over there is just a cocoon waiting to hatch.” Grief counseling is maybe not Gerard’s strong suit.

Allison drops Matt off at home after their unsatisfying and unsettling date at the rave (unsatisfying in the sense that there were no sparks between them even before Allison abandoned him to go squabble with her secret boyfriend; unsettling in that someone’s throat was torn out while a big gun battle raged outside). Matt leaves his camera behind in the car. Allison, who has no sense of personal boundaries, idly snoops through his photos… and discovers she’s the featured subject in most of them (it seems Matt, too, has no sense of personal boundaries). Some of the photos appear to have been taken through her bedroom window. When Matt returns for his camera, both Allison and Matt make a game attempt at pretending the entire situation isn’t disturbing and gross. Matt tries to pressure her to come inside with him; Allison shuts him down gracefully and beats a hasty retreat.

So Matt’s blandly affable Paul Ruddesque exterior hides something off-putting and unsavory. Not a huge surprise there.

It’s the first full moon since Derek formed his new pack, so he’s taking precautions to chain up Isaac, Erica and Boyd to prevent them from running amuck. Some of his shackles seem more, er, recreational than functional, but it’s nice that he’s being thorough.


Stiles and his dad comb through old yearbooks in search of a link between all the murdered graduates. Mr. Harris’s car, which features a bumper sticker with an Einstein quote on it, was spotted at several of the crime scenes, which makes him the most likely suspect; however, the murdered rave promoter was never one of his students. While flipping through a yearbook, Sheriff Stilinksi notices that all the victims were on the 2006 swim team… and Isaac’s murdered father was their coach.

Lydia corners Jackson outside the locker room after lacrosse practice to make sure he’s going to be at her birthday party later that night. Y’know, the chronology here is verrrry tricky to follow. In that last scene, Stiles and his father established that it’s spring break. And it’s already nightfall, or very shortly before, because Derek has already started to chain up his pack members in advance of the full moon. So… I suppose we should just assume the lacrosse team is having a night practice during spring break? A practice that team co-captain Scott plus teammates Stiles and Isaac all skip? And that Lydia showed up at the closed school just to talk to Jackson? I guess that works, sort of. Jackson is once again dead-eyed and spooky and clearly not in control of his body. As soon as Lydia touches his arm, he snaps back into himself. Panicked, he tells her she doesn’t want him anywhere near her party. Lydia, assuming he’s worried about social awkwardness since they’re no longer dating, reassures him it’ll be fine. Jackson, who is far more worried about compulsively slaughtering all her party guests, tries once again to warn her to stay far, far away from him. It falls on deaf ears.


As Lydia’s bizarre behavior has dented her social standing in recent weeks, Scott, Stiles and Allison are the only guests at her party. Scott browbeats the lacrosse team into making an appearance, while Stiles summons the slew of new friends he made at the gay nightclub a few episodes back, and before long, the shindig is in full swing. Jackson lurks in a corner, looking dead-eyed and malevolent while balefully slurping punch. In fact, everyone’s drinking a whole lot of punch. Which Lydia has, at Peter Hale’s behest, laced with copious amounts of wolfsbane.


At the party, Matt pulls Allison aside to explain himself. At first he downplays her concerns about the photos. He tells her, “Photographers call them candids,” in such a pitch-perfect, condescending, maddeningly douchebaggy tone that, for the first time since he popped up on the show, I sort of love Matt, just a little tiny bit. She tells him he’s behaving like a stalker; he responds by getting angry and abusive. When he grabs her arm, Allison knocks him to the floor and storms out of the room.

In the hallway, she hallucinates a hyper-competent crossbow-wielding version of herself, who berates her for being such a helpless ninny before shooting her in the gut.


And this pretty much kick-starts a whole deluge of punch-fueled hallucinations: Stiles sees his dad, dressed in funereal black and toting a whiskey bottle, drunkenly berating him for somehow causing his mother’s death.


Jackson has a disappointingly tepid hallucination about meeting his faceless real parents. A wolfsbane-poisoned Scott thankfully steps in and ups the kink level by hallucinating Allison locked in a passionate embrace with Jackson, who transforms into the kanima.


While her own damn birthday party pretty much explodes into chaos behind her, Lydia idly wanders off into the night.

Derek’s transformed pack members break out of their chains and gang up on him. Overwhelmed, Derek leaves a nervous voicemail for Scott asking him to drop by to help get them back under control. Derek, my love, you are a terrible, awful, horrible excuse for an Alpha. Luckily for Derek, Isaac gets his act together enough to help Derek pull Boyd and Erica back in line. Considering how Isaac can barely get through a day at school without attacking someone, it’s kind of surprising that he turns out to be the mature elder statesman of Derek’s pack.


Victoria Argent gets ready to commit suicide to prevent herself from becoming a werewolf. With assistance from Chris, as the light of the full moon hits her, she stabs herself in the heart with a butcher knife. I guess it’s sad? Kind of? I mean, apart from how her death would have been 100% unavoidable if the collective Argents weren’t such a gaggle of intolerant and viciously xenophobic drama queens?


Upon hearing the news of her mother’s death, Allison dissolves into hysterical sobs at the hospital as her father tries to comfort her. And, yeah, this part genuinely is sad.

Lydia’s midnight wanderings lead her into Derek’s lair. She casually strolls up to a confused and wary Derek and blows a huge whiff of powdered wolfsbane into his face, knocking him out cold.

Now that the hostess has abandoned her guests to their hallucinations, Lydia’s party descends into chaos. Someone tosses Matt into the swimming pool, which causes him to freak out on an epic scale. He splashes around and hollers that he can’t swim, until Jackson hauls him out. Remembering that the kanima is scared of water (whereas Jackson is the captain of the swim team), Scott and Stiles realize Matt is the one who’s been forcing Jackson to commit all the murders.

The cops arrive and break up the party. Everyone flees into the night. Scott trails Matt and sees Jackson, who has now transformed into the kanima, crouching beside him.


Lydia drags an unconscious Derek to the Hale mansion, where Peter’s burned corpse lies just beneath the pulled-up floorboards. She places Derek’s wrist in Peter’s charred hand, then lets the light of the full moon fall on them. Peter’s claws come out, his flesh heals and restores itself to normal, and he returns to life.


Splendid stuff. Nice to have you back, Peter.

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