There's only one real cure for the werewolf bite, but we saw Derek impart this false bit
of lore to Scott back in season one.
Scott: I need you to tell me the truth.
Is there a cure?
Derek: You have to kill the one that.
Yeah, that whole "the cure is to kill the one that bit you" piece of fiction is directly
from 1987's "The Lost Boys.
Sam: Look it says here that if you kill the head vampire, all half vampires will return
to normal.
But again, there is only one cure.
Scott: Is there a cure?
Fenris: For what?
Scott: You said there's differences between werewolves who are bit.
Can they be cured?
Fenris: Yes.
Cut them in half.
Death, cures, all ailments.
Look, I'm sorry.
I researched this for 15 years.
I've never heard of a cure.
People like to act like Teen Wolf is all "black and white" with "good and evil" themes.
But it's actually kind of a dingy gray color with just a few black and white spots.
Season two is probably the best example of this.
You literally had multiple villains all with different motivations and end-goals,
all operating at the same time.
And Derek Hale was actually the first and
the worst.
Derek: What if I told you that all of this could
go away, the side effects, the symptoms, all of it.
Starting off the season manipulating and destroying lives.
Derek: She failed the test.
Scott: Lydia is different.
Derek: I know.
At night she turns into a homicidal walking snake.
Scott: I'm not going to let you kill her.
Derek: Who said I was gonna do it.
Derek Hale justified his bad behavior as recruiting in order to combat some unseen threat, but
when you break down his behavior he took vulnerable people and used them for his own reasons and
eventually got two of them killed.
Derek: It actually happened.
Deaton: Don't worry.
I was actually scanning through footage for another video when I ran across this scene.
Deaton: You're still an alpha.
But, as usual, not a particularly competent one.
It's only like two seconds but it made me laugh out loud because I'd forgotten that
it wasn't just Tumblr and Reddit that was calling out Derek on his incompetence as a
pack leader.
This happens right after Peter came back and Derek was off in that naked liminal space
of his unconscious.
Derek: It actually happened.
Deaton: Don't worry, you're still an alpha.
But, as usual, not a particularly competent one.
It's literally a throwaway line, but it cuts right to the heart of Derek's bad leadership.
I mean Peter actually summed it up better.
Peter: Quite a situation you've got yourself in here Derek.
I mean I'm out of commission for a few weeks and suddenly there's lizard people, geriatric
psychopaths, and you're cooking up werewolves out of every self-esteem-deprived adolescent
in town.
But there is something about Deaton's matter-of-fact delivery that's just really got me.
What about Derek’s father is something I hear all the time.
Derek’s father doesn’t exist.
I mean, he probably does exist but he’s never
been canonically mentioned and that means
he’s currently in a state of fictional quantum flux.
Y’all know about Schrodinger's cat?
You put a cat in a sealed box with a radioactive element or an explosive or a vial of poison
and a hammer.
Whatever you put in the box might or might not kill the cat.
Now, according to the theory, the cat is immediately in a state of quantum superposition
although I prefer the term "quantum flux".
Then all the science types say: That doesn’t
mean
what I want it to mean.
And then I say: Don’t you bully me nerds!
Anyway, the cat in the box is both alive and dead until you open the box and observe it
in one state or the other.
That’s mangled elementary school explaining but it serves the purpose.
Currently the writers of Teen Wolf have Derek’s father in a box that no one has ever opened.
He is a Schrodinger's character and could literally be in any state imaginable.
We can speculate endlessly on what might have happened to Derek's father, but no one will
know until
Jeff Davis or future writers open the box and settle the question.
What did Derek gain from killing Boyd?
The answer to this question is more complicated than it seems at first blush.
We're told that if you kill someone that you have turned into a werewolf - as an alpha
- you'll get a boost in abilities.
The alpha pack built their entire philosophy around that concept.
Deucalion: I want you to kill one of them.
Do that and I won't have to ask you to kill the others.
You'll do it on your own.
I did it.
Ennis did it.
Tell him what it's like Kali to kill one of your own.
Kali: Hmm, liberating.
But while the basic act of retrieving that werewolf spark that you previously gifted
to someone would logically add that power to your own spark, that's not how it seems
to actually work.
I've been over my reasoning on why I don't see much special about the alpha pack.
Despite all their big talk and hype - when it came to physical activity - they never
showed much more than the average or even those novice werewolves that they faced off
against.
And what little advantage they seem to have is just as likely from more developed skills,
longer life experience, or some special physical trait like the merged twins and their obvious
size advantage.
With Derek and Boyd, we do see a physical sign of the spark transferring from Boyd back
into Derek.
This returning spark is stronger than the little spark that Derek initially gave Boyd
when he bit him.
We know it's at least a little stronger because we know that the werewolf spark is enhanced
by the human soul over time.
I mean that is how Scott became an alpha.
He enhanced his own werewolf spark up to alpha level.
For Boyd, he had been a werewolf for less than six months at this point and for at least
half of that time he'd been locked away in a weakened condition.
But still, his spark was at least slightly enhanced by his own morality, his strong loyalty,
and his strength of character.
the spark that Derek took back from him was stronger than it had been, so initially Derek
certainly would see a little boost to his spark.
But the other proven fact about all of those abilities granted by the werewolf spark is
that human emotions can dampen and even completely block all those abilities.
In Frayed, we saw guilt almost kill Scott.
Allison: Scott?
Scott?
In light of all of these facts, any spark boost that Derek got from killing Boyd would
instantly - 100 percent - be negated by his guilt over killing Boyd.
I would suggest that killing his friend, someone he had come to love, would actually make Derek
weaker.
In the finale of Teen Wolf Season 4, Derek Hale died, of that there is no doubt.
But Derek did not stay dead.
He came back from the dead much like his uncle, his abusive
ex-girlfriend, his fellow werewolf Scott, this guy, these guys.
Yeah, there’s a lot
of coming back from the dead among the Beacon Hills crowd.
Derek’s death seems to have resulted from Kate Argent kidnapping him, taking him to
her Aztec temple and reverse aging his body through
some unknown means involving a tomb.
She did this in order to get a mentally younger Derek
that still trusted her because he didn’t
yet know that she had killed his entire family.
Kate needed this brain scrambled Derek to gain possession
of this thing that supposedly would help her control her newly developing jaguar side.
Brain scrambled Derek is confused his body is apparently unstable.
After some comedy
with Stiles and Scott’s dad, some age-inappropriate smooching with Kate, and a couple of punches
from a Berserker, Derek was back in all his fully-bearded glory with only one significant
difference.
His eyes switched from guilty blue back to gold or yellow.
The eyes were just the beginning, Derek’s special sense of smell, his hearing, his strength,
they were all gone by the midpoint of Season 4 without any real explanation.
Everyone believed the loss was tied to whatever Kate
did to him in Mexico.
The loss of his abilities didn’t slow Derek down though, he became detective Derek with
Sheriff Stilinski and Braeden, doctor Derek with Satomi, Melissa and Deaton, and
father Derek mentoring Scott with Liam and even teaching Malia a few tricks.
He was basically Batman without the cape.
But he was also mortal and within seconds of arriving in Mexico for the final confrontation
with Kate,
Derek got boned by a Berserker.
No, literally, he got stabbed repeatedly with a sharpened bone.
He lingered on the battlefield for a while before quietly dying with Braden and we all
thought that was that, until it wasn’t.
Derek came back as a big black wolf with glowing
blue eyes.
He immediately wounded Kate and morphed back into his naked self.
He then
cracked the skull of a Berserker to show that all his strength was back.
Derek says his
loss of power and the whole death thing were part of his “evolving”.
We still don’t
know exactly what that means but it’s a big deal.
Kate: You were dead.
Derek: No.
I was evolving.
This was definitely one of the more dramatic scenes from the season four finale, but what
exactly did Derek mean that he was "evolving"?
We only had the evidence of what they showed us to go on, but I can make an educated guess
as to what helped him find that perfect balance between man and monster that is necessary
before you can go full wolf.
Whatever Kate did to him in the tomb scrambled Derek's memory and his shape-shifting ability
causing him to appear as a teenager and forget about the Hale house fire.
Derek: What happened to my house?
Where's my family?
Where's my mother?
Just a few smacks from a Berserker was all it took to shift him back and recover his
memory.
The process somehow began to sap his werewolf abilities one by one.
Derek: This doesn't make sense.
Sheriff: No kidding.
Derek: That's not what I mean.
I should have caught the scent before we walked in.
His sense of smell and hearing and eventually his shape-shifting, strength and eyesight
- all of it was gone by the time he died.
Braeden: Derek.
I believe it was not only the loss of these abilities but the pattern of that loss - feeling
them go one by one and recognizing the shape of each of his missing parts - taught him
to fully understand each one and how they fit together.
In other words, it was the loss of the wolf that allowed him to fully embrace the wolf.
If there's one thing, Teen Wolf fans can agree on.
It's the fact that we all wanted to see more Derek Hale.
I mean, yeah, but also we wanted more time with his character.
Well, as it turns out, Teen Wolf creator, Jeff Davis did too, and came up with an entire
new storyline for Derek that we never got to see.
[phone rings]
Jeff Davis: Hey, Paul.
Paul Rea: Hey Jeff, how are you?
Jeff Davis: Good.
How's it going?
This would've been at the midpoint of season six.
We used to do these canon-heavy calls just to make sure all our stuff at Teen Wolf Wiki
is on point,.
In the course of our conversation that night.
I hit him with a question about what might have been.
Paul Rea: Um, is, is there something that you wanted to do with the show, but never
did and now never will?
Jeff Davis: Oh god, that's a good question.
Um, yeah, I did.
there was a, I wanted to do a whole storyline with Derek Hale's character, uh, and the return
of Jennifer Blake.
And I wanted it to be like Vertigo.
Paul Rea: Okay, so you all remember Jennifer Blake?
She was the former druid turned dark druid that captured Derek's heart in season three,
while at the same time, murdering a goodly portion of the Beacon Hills virgin population
so she could seek revenge on the alpha pack who pretty much killed her many years earlier.
She'd been known as Julia back then and had an entirely different face that got damaged
during the course of her almost death.
Turns out killing all those virgins did wonders for her complexion.
And so she was presenting as this, when Derek met her.
Jeff Davis: Part of the idea was that the darach couldn't just create a face out of
thin air.
She had to take one.
Derek finds this woman who looks exactly like Jennifer Blake sort of.
Vertigo and it starts to drive him insane.
This is where the vertigo stuff comes in.
In case you're not familiar with 1958 Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart is in love and watches
her fall to her death.
It breaks his mind.
And when he recovers, he's still obsessed with her and thinks he sees her everywhere
until one day he actually does see her, but it's not her it's just her face on another
woman.
In this case, Derek would've been the obsessed, Jimmy Stewart and Jennifer Blake.
Would've been the mysterious Kim Novak.