Here's another one of those things that I thought people understood
but that apparently people don't understand.
I've gotten a few comments this week about how weak Teen Wolf's full wolf form looks
compared to the crazy, season one Peter or beast of Gévaudan forms.
Duh!
Eight feet a GRRRR versus a lovable floof.
But evolved werewolves wouldn't use his form to fight because once you reach
this level you can tap all your werewolf strenth without transforming much at all.
Not to sound all boomer-esque but I lament pop culture's pervasive
belief that form always equals function and that the big scary is the ultimate goal.
Frieza: I'll be transforming before your very eyes
watch carefully now and keep in mind it's not my ultimate form.
The ultimate goal in Teen Wolf is to find physical and emotional balance and it is
a level of development that is prized by everyone within the werewolf community.
Gerard: there was an exceptionally powerful alpha who did live here.
The kind of person that they would go to for advice and guidance.
The full wolf form on Teen Wolf is not for fighting.
It is emblematic of a person's intelligence and their full mastery of the werewolf abilities.
If you were to pit evolved Derrick against season one Peter,
it's likely you would never see a physical confrontation at all.
Peter was crazy and working on rage and base instinct.
Derek would come at it with rational intelligence and patience.
With a full understanding and access to his werewolf abilities,
Derek would have an easier time tracking his sister's final movements and would have
figured out the situation with Peter much earlier.
Derek: Stiles get out of there right now! It's him, he's the alpha. Get out!
Peter: You must be Stiles.
Derek would then work to restrain Peter while he was bluffing in the
hospital or find some other way to thwart his plans without a physical confrontation.
Peter: You think you could shoot me up
with Wolfbane make me docile and weak and I won't find a way out?
How did Peter beat Laura?
This is another one of those questions that
answers itself if you give it just a little bit of thought.
The thinking of some fans goes like this - if Laura was the alpha and
Peter was just out of a coma - how did Peter manage to kill her?
The answer is really down to the element of surprise.
Laura believed her uncle was planted firmly in
a long-term care facility unable to communicate or even move very much.
Seeing him in the woods was the first surprise. The next surprise was that good
old uncle Peter was completely insane with an out of control werewolf form to prove it.
Here they have equal strength - crazy versus evolved.
How would Laura react with an out-of-control pack member in a full rage?
We have some experience with how her brother handled a similar situation.
Faced with two nearly out of control betas, Derek didn't put them down with extreme force.
He attempted to keep them from hurting others without hurting them in the process.
Scott did the same thing with Liam.
I think the Peter/Lara scene would have played out very much like this...
only without someone like Mason to interrupt.
Peter's rage and Laura's reluctance to bring her
full force to bear against her family member ended her life.
Born werewolves are basically human until they reach puberty?
Eli Hale in the new Teen Wolf movie seems to confirm at least
one thing about born werewolves, their abilities don't kick in until puberty.
Derek: If you can heal, you could play tomorrow night. You can help them win.
The first step to transforming is healing.
Peter: Even born wolves have to learn control on a full moon Derek.
Derek: Yeah I thought it was supposed to be easier for us. Why does it hurt like this?
Up until now we've seen this one scene of teenage Derek
having difficulty controlling his shift during a high school basketball game.
This looks exactly like what we saw with a bitten teenager on his very first full moon.
It appears that born werewolves don't go through these control issues until they reach their teens.
Derek: It's not working.
Peter: Did you bring it?
The purpose of this scene was to introduce a special control disc
that was Kate's "MacGuffin" in the early part of season four.
But it ended up cementing a pretty important piece of canon,
born werewolves don't start having difficulty on the full moon until puberty.
Derek: If you can heal, you could play tomorrow night. You can help them win.
The first step to transforming is healing but you've got to be willing to learn.
Now we come to the new movie and Derek Hale's son Eli.
Eli doesn't automatically heal.
He is in high school and his werewolf side hasn't kicked in at all yet.
Eli: I was in for less than a minute. I got the
ball for a second. I got knocked on my ass and I twisted my ankle.
It wasn't anything.
Derek: Eli. Eli: It was nothing.
This further supports that there's a delayed development of the werewolf spark meaning
that born werewolf children don't show any signs before they begin to mature.
Eli Hale's situation in this preview scene from the Teen Wolf movie is a
big canonical signal that born werewolves don't get really wolf-like until they reach puberty.
Derek: The first step to transforming is healing.
But you've got to be willing to learn.
What about Malia? She did a full animal transformation at age nine.
I've talked at length about how full panic - fight or flight - triggered
an involuntary transformation in Malia's very unique case.
But the other thing at play here is the fact that Malia is a werecoyote and a
born werecoyote takes part of a full-sized adult spark from their mother in the womb.
Corrine: What you do have is power, strength, speed, and the capacity to heal.
And do you know where you got it from Malia? You know where you stole it from?
Me.
Baby Malia gets a big powerful spark,
whereas baby Derek got a little baby spark from his alpha mom.
That little spark presumably then developed inside him growing stronger until Derek reached puberty.
Malia's development might have been quite similar.
She has a nearly full-grown spark right from the start,
but it stays dormant waiting for her internal situation to change when she reaches puberty.
The spark just sat there, didn't give her a bit of trouble until an
extraordinary situation triggered it into action.
Turns out I was wrong
about one aspect of mountain ash.
I've done quite a bit about Teen Wolf's go-to supernatural barrier builder.
But I messed up on one key point and viewers were quick to let me know about it.
I had contended that hellhounds and the Oni were the only creatures to defeat a
mountain ash barrier on the Teen Wolf TV show.
The hellhound because it literally heats up the air around the wood dust until it burns away.
The Oni because their corporeal bodies and
weapons are made from the same telluric energy as the barrier.
And if you apply enough contact, that energy will eventually synchronize.
But a bunch of y'all said the Ghost Riders could also break
a barrier and to that I said an unequivocal "NO."
In my defense, I said that because the big plan to capture a ghost rider in
the season six episode Heartless included a Faraday cage and a circle of mountain ash.
Scott: Go. Go.
But there is another mountain ash scene earlier in the episode Sundowning.
And that one features a Ghost Rider who does seem to physically break the barrier.
Liam: We can't let him get through.
Mason: Guys ?
My speculation on how it does this is pretty simple.
The whip is actually an interdimensional conduit
that sends people off into the wild hunt's way station.
Those flashes you see when the whip strikes the barrier are a visual representation
of the whip breaking through from our dimension into the wild hunt dimension.
It's the split second of being out of phase with the real world
that allows the whip to ultimately pass through and latch on to Gwen.
My only guess as to why this Ghost Rider didn't
try the same thing is because it did not have access to lightning.
Its energy source was blocked by the Faraday cage and the
whip had no way to cross the dimensional barrier.
The Teen Wolf TV show timeline could not be easier to follow.
It takes place over three years in-universe,
starting with the winter semester in year one and ending with the fall semester in year three.
Many times during the series' run,
many of the props on the show and even some of the dialogue just ignored this timeline.
But a few individual [ __ ] ups don't negate 100 episodes of solid canon.
Before we get into the timeline, here's how I'm
defining canon based on our practice over at the official Teen Wolf Wiki.
Canon is - as far as the site is concerned - the events that
transpire on screen during each episode.
It also takes into account past events as described by characters on the show
as well as some of the information relayed via props on the show.
The latter - the show's props - prove more often than not to conflict with prior established canon.
When a conflict occurs, we make note of it but give precedence to
the information provided via dialogue as this is more likely to convey the
writer's intent than would a prop they did not create themselves.
We know it's winter when the show starts because the Wolf
Moon happens in January and the very first episode is called "Wolf Moon".
But that's not the only hint we have.
We know only a couple of days pass between the end of season one and the beginning of season two.
Victoria: They'll be here in two days.
And then Lydia's birthday is in March with the Worm Moon as dead Peter Hale explains.
Peter: Do you know what they call the full moon in March it's called the worm moon.
We have solid block of non-stop timeline from the start of the show
to about three months in and that gives us a solid base for the beginning of year one.
Teacher: Have a great summer everyone.
Stiles: No.
Teacher: To the seniors I'll see you at graduation.
Stiles: No, no, no. That's it? What?
At the end of season 6A, Scott, Lydia, Stiles and Malia graduate in the spring of year three.
Then in 6B the story picks up at the beginning of a new school year in the fall of year three.
Mason: The point is summer is almost over. We're about to be seniors.
This is about to be the best year of our entire lives.
Teen Wolf the TV show is three years of time broken into six seasons.
All the history of the show and the upcoming movie
branch off in both directions - past and future - from these three years.
The movie takes place in 2026,
roughly 12 to 13 years since the last time we were all in Beacon Hills.
The movie will also take place in our future - from our perspective - as we're
watching it on Paramount Plus in January of 2023.
Going the other direction - into the canonical past of the Teen Wolf Universe - we have a pretty
clear picture of a number of important events that took place before Year One.
We know Derek and Paige were in high school more than 10 years
before Year One because the sheriff said it.
Sheriff: The records will be over 10 years old. I just need to look over a couple files.
We know the Hale House fire took place six years before Year One because
everyone - except a single on-screen reference - places the fire six years before Year One.
Derek: Six years ago my sister and I were at school.
Our house caught fire.
As explained, at the official Teen Wolf Wiki we trust dialogue over props.
But we also have to judge dialogue based on who said it and under what circumstances.
The perfect example of how to judge dialogue as non-canonical
is this Stiles scene where he says the fire happened like 10 years ago.
Stiles: That was Derek Hale. You remember right?
He's only like a few years older than us.
Scott: Remember what?
Stiles: His family, they all burned to death in a fire like 10 years ago.
But then we learned it was actually six because Derek said so.
Both of these cannot be right picking which one is canonical in this case is pretty simple.
Stiles was talking casually about an event that happened to someone
else when he himself was just a little kid.
Derek is talking about something that he experienced personally.
We believe Derek over Stiles.
Each contradiction like this has to be judged on its own merit within the context of the show.
Again, most of the bad props can never be saved but Teen Wolf does have a pretty
simple and straightforward timeline if you don't get bogged down in the minutia.