‘Teen Wolf’ Recap: The Hateful Eighties
Warning: This recap of the “Ghosted” episode of Teen Wolf contains spoilers.
In a world rife with darkness and deceit, it’s hard to know whom to trust. Friends, spouses, businessmen, gurus, foreign governments, local governments, feral children, sea mammals, Twitter eggs: Most wish us harm at all times and seek to turn our waking lives into little more than a nightmare gauntlet of violence and insults. That’s why it’s important to embrace every beacon of light we can in this dark and foreboding world by truly appreciating those rare few we can trust. And when it comes to Teen Wolf, nobody — and I mean NOBODY — has ever been more trustworthy than Theo. I trusted him.
See, some people you just trust on sight. When Theo, the clearly evil, mad-science-made sorta werewolf first transmogrified from a beast into a naked bodybuilding hunk last season, I think I speak for us all when my reaction was, “I trust him.” At the end of the season when Theo was dragged to hell by the ghost of his dead sister that he’d murdered, I had to admit: Karmic retribution or not, I still trusted him. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but he just seemed very trustworthy and throughout the season he did a lot of terrible things, yes, but when you trust someone, you trust someone. If Theo ran for president, I would vote for him. I trust him!
This is a long-winded way to announce that Theo, whom I trust, IS BACK. We all knew it would happen — trustworthiness never dies — but it finally happened this week in “Ghosted,” which also happened to be a truly weird and amazing episode of Teen Wolf for unrelated reasons (a ghost town, an evil child, Duran Duran). Let’s talk about it!
We began with Lydia goofing around in the girls’ locker room by sticking her hand into a damn mirror and then falling in!
Suddenly she was whisked away to a neighborhood block party where everyone had sweet ’80s hairdos and “Hungry Like the Wolf” was playing. On the downside, the children’s carousel was covered in blood and nobody seemed to mind.
Yes, we were in Canaan, the city that a purgatory-trapped Stiles had warned his friends about. Aside from the bloody carousel it seemed like a pretty normal place. But that’s when all the citizens began to evaporate into green smoke!
It was honestly pretty frightening. Though we couldn’t see them, this was definitely the work of the Ghost Riders, and it was safe to say they had ruined this block party! Just ask this lady:
She was the only person to not explode into green smoke, so Lydia walked right up to her and screamed in her face. Way to treat a survivor! Ugh, banshees.
Back in modern times, Mrs. McCall was VERY concerned about the festering, smoking, sizzling green wound that had been killing Argent ever since he got whipped by a Ghost Rider last Christmas. Clearly modern medicine was not going to save his life, so it was time for some extreme measures! Next thing we knew she was spiriting away her favorite grizzled hunk into the laundry room for some personal attention if you know what I mean. (I mean druid magic.)
Lydia ended up recruiting Scott and Malia to come with her to the modern day Canaan, and would you know it? It was STILL empty after all these years. In fact, it had disappeared from all maps since 1987, but one thing the Ghost Riders forgot to erase was, like, Waze. Because they just Waze’d it over there in about 10 minutes. But yeah, the town was real empty still, and if we’re being honest, it looked SO nice. Man, what I wouldn’t give to spend some quality time in an empty town for a little while or maybe a lifetime. Heck, I wouldn’t even mind the constant, violent hallucinations.
Almost immediately the teens began hallucinating their worst fears. In Malia’s case, she hallucinated the time Theo (I trust him) shot her at point-blank range with a shotgun and then she fell between the corpses of her dead sister and mother and they came alive and pulled her into some quicksand.
Yes, it was just an obvious hallucination, but Malia did NOT enjoy it. Scott also imagined seeing his mother walking around in a daze with a giant hole in the back of her skull. In other words, Canaan was a RUDE town.
Back at school, Liam and Hayden were plotting to capture a Ghost Rider and in doing so they accidentally encountered Mr. Douglas hiding out in a utility closet making a homemade taser. Normal physics teacher stuff, to be honest. But he admitted to them he knew about the Ghost Riders, and Liam had no further questions! They were now a trio, and they would have to work together to, uh, do whatever. It was on!
So, just when the empty daymare fiesta known as Canaan couldn’t get any creepier, the gang encountered THIS lady. She was nice enough to pour them some lemonade after they breaking-and-entered into her home, but she did NOT want to answer questions about where everyone in the town had gone, or why she was still living there all by herself with a ghost boy. Things got worse when she shouted at them and the whole house shook and then she didn’t allow them to leave. Then, when Lydia attempted to get in some one-on-one girl talk time, Malia and Scott attempted to hang out with the ghost boy, who currently lived in the basement with a VHS player and sopping wet carpet.
I gotta hand it to Teen Wolf, there is nothing more unsettling than an inch of water over carpet. Not even a ghost boy watching home movies of himself. Who’s gonna dry off that carpet!
Liam and Mr. Douglas decided that the only way they could trap a Ghost Rider was to force lightning to strike a certain area, but they didn’t think they could find anything strong enough for it to strike. That’s when they decided they needed to resurrect a dead hunk using a powerful weapon that doubles as a fashion accessory. Yes, I’m talking about Kira’s belt-sword, and no, Kira was not available to personally deliver it. (She was still hanging out with the Skinwalkers in some desert.) BUT on the upside, her extremely awesome mother met up with them in the sewers to hand off the sword, and next thing we knew, Liam had poked the thing into the ground and a dusty hunk popped out!
Theo was back, everybody!
Yes, it was slightly disappointing and very disconcerting that he was fully clothed, but trust is trust, and I trust him. The Ghost Riders will never stand a chance against his charms and trustworthiness!
Probably the trickiest part of modern medicine is when the wound you’re trying to heal is made of magic green foam. Fortunately Argent had a working knowledge of ancient Celtic herbs, so he attempted to blurt out a list of nine special herbs and spices that Mrs. McCall could track down and attempt to heal him via witchery. And after she figured out she needed to mix the whole thing with honey (which sounded delicious to me) she finally put her plan into action! She ripped off Argent’s shirt and slathered him with sweet, sweet fluid. He screamed a lil but you better believe he felt better after that. Argent was saved! But also, let’s get real, this is gonna be the romance of the century. If anybody used Celtic magic on me while I lay dying in a hospital laundry room, you better believe they will have my heart. Congrats, everybody.
Back in Canaan, the ghost boy did NOT want Malia and Scott to leave, so he forced them to vomit out tons of yellowish water, which did not seem like a good time at all. Some kids are such brats sometimes.
Upstairs in the living room Lydia discovered THE HARD WAY that this lady was some kind of banshee! And they immediately got into a banshee throwdown, which involved knocking each other across the room via screams. And then somehow they screamed at each other so hard Lydia got whisked back into the ’80s flashback again!
There she learned that the Ghost Riders had indeed stolen all the townsfolk and had left this banshee alone to mourn the death of her drowned child. I honestly may have missed it because Teen Wolf doesn’t tend to hold your hand when it comes to reveals (and I truly mean that as a compliment) but was there a chance this banshee lady struck a bargain with the Ghost Riders to give her back her son in exchange for the souls of her neighbors? And if so was that related to the sudden reappearance of Stiles’s mom somehow? Look, I don’t know.
But I DO know that Lydia got the sense from this visit that once the Ghost Riders left a town for good, all the trapped townsfolk were turned into Ghost Riders permanently. And this was why Stiles sent them here… This was all about to happen in Beacon Hills!
Down in the sewers, Liam convinced Theo to help them by, like, asking very nicely. Theo agreed mostly because he did not want to go to hell anymore. So then Mr. Douglas set up some kind of lightning wire and then they all learned together that Theo didn’t actually have the ability to absorb energy anymore. Whoops! Still, they trusted him, plus he remembered Stiles, so those were two great reasons to keep Theo around. (Also hopefully there’ll be another workout scene soon.) For his part, Mr. Douglas was nervous that Theo would recognize him from their days chilling in the Dread Doctors’ pad, and he attempted to get Theo swept to hell again. Relax, Mr. Douglas! Theo might be incredibly trustworthy, but his memory isn’t that great.
Unfortunately everyone else’s memories were still functional, and Scott and Malia were NOT thrilled to see Theo again.
This was understandable. Theo had pulled some rude stunts in his day, so people were not yet ready to trust him again. Like, I trust him and you trust him, but the rest of the gang were going to need some convincing. Stay tuned.
We ended with this creepy moment between Stiles’s dad and dead mom. Sheriff Stilinski was still kinda-sorta realizing that Stiles existed while also kinda-sorta realizing that his wife should probably have died from that rare brain disease she’d once battled. What was going on here? And that’s when he finally tugged on that mysterious wallpaper rip!
Something was back there! But what? Guys, that’s just going to wait until next week.
I always talk about how much I love Teen Wolf‘s dream logic and how scary it is when things don’t make sense. “Ghosted” was as good as these things get, starting from the environs of Canaan with its “why can’t anybody see this?” blood-stained carousel to the presence of the wet ghost boy and even Stiles’s wallpapered-over bedroom. This is a show populated by terrifying creatures, but Teen Wolf still regularly opts to find terror in psychological trauma and dreams and confusion. And the idea of the villains being able to wipe an entire town off the map without the outside world noticing? That’s utterly terrifying to me, seriously.
In what appears to be a season written around the fact that Dylan O’Brien has a movie career now, the writers have come up with a central conceit that is one of the strongest and most disturbing in Teen Wolf history. He disappeared! And we could too! All of us! Man, I am loving this season so far. I trust it almost as much as I trust Theo, which is A LOT.
What did YOU think of “Ghosted”?
Teen Wolf airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on MTV
