Having been at this for more than a few years now,
I find the questions on this channel come in cycles.
For some reason we're now in a kanima cycle again.
I feel like I've answered all these questions before but let's get more specific this time.
I did a big thing on healing and yellow wolfsbane earlier
this week and that led to questions like these.
The answer is pretty simple, the kanima is nearly indestructible in its full form.
We saw it take a whole lot of punishment including an arrow
to the head which it just popped like a pimple.
In my mind this is all down to the full body kanima transformation.
First, it gets the tough scaly skin. And if you can get past that,
it's supernatural metabolism is off the charts fast, producing copious
amounts of venom and healing just about any injury instantaneously.
You also can't really dose it with drugs for very long.
Jackson (Matt): I'm here I'm right here with you.
I believe that regular werewolf healing has a lot to do with the ability to shapeshift.
It seems like simple logic that if you can grow claws and prick
up your ears then regenerating cells to repair a cut or scar tissue is a given.
And we saw Jackson's entire body transform. All the skin completely replaced by scales,
same for hair eyes and a newly elongated spinal column that forms a prehensile tail.
He saw a complete physiological transformation. It changed every cell in his body. That's a hell
of a lot more than growing some Eddie Munster ears and 70s porno sideburns.
The kanima-level of shape-shifting power is shown
by no other creature in the entire Teen Wolf universe.
The only thing that came kind of close to another example of what's happening
inside a fully transformed individual is when Kate turned back the clock for Derek,
his metabolism was off the charts too.
Lydia: That looks like it healed really fast. Deaton: unusually fast.
It's barely a comparison, I know. This episode does provide a direct link
between full body transformation, rapid metabolism and healing.
This train of thought leads me to the conclusion that an incredibly powerful
shape-shifting ability would have an equally powerful healing ability.
That suggests that the crazy big boys and the fully evolved wolves probably
also come with more-rapid-than-usual healing,
which could explain why Sebastian was so hard to kill unless you had that one sharp stick.
It also suggests, since it had the most radical of all transformations,
you probably can't kill a kanima at all when it's in its full form.
And before you start talking about how powerful and cool that all sounds,
keep in mind that these gifts come at a heavy price.
You are not in control of that power at all. Any
man-baby with a grudge can make you do absolutely awful things.
And that amazing metabolism - even though it is powered
by a God's curse - can't burn that brightly for very long before something has to give.
In the case of the kanima, when you reach a certain level of hit and recovery points,
you die and then you devolve into a monster.
Derek: He's turning into that? That has wings. Peter: I can see. Look, somebody actually
made an animation of it. Maybe it's less frightening if we...
Nope. Not at all.
I fictionalized how that sad kanima evolution might go in
this video which almost nobody watched.
To set the scene - we're at the Palace of Versailles in France in 1767. This is about a
year after Jeanne Marie caught up with her brother and dispatched the Beast with the sharp stick.
She and Henri Argent are together now and are
called upon to deal with a kanima that was sent to kill King Louis.
It stayed that way for approximately three months before the man was found dead.
While obviously deceased and declared so by a court physician, Henri Argent demanded that
the body be returned to the cage and locked inside.
Within a day, the body began oozing a clear viscous liquid.
According to the journal the room filled with smell of cinnamon and rotted wood.
When the third day dawned, the liquid had hardened into a full body cocoon and was pulsing
with an inner light.
After a week, the cocoon opened with a thunderous crack.
So yeah, I hear you all saying that being a winged snake monster would be
really cool, but again, you're not in control if you're in that form.
The winged kanima answers to no master, but it also has no ability to reason for
itself and it shows no higher brain functions. It's just an animal.
The part of the story that I could not work into that video was that it flew off
north toward Belgium because that's where the man that became the kanima was from.
In the end this creature, their only coherent thought was to go home.
Anyway, back to Jackson.
He avoided that awful fate by some unknown method. Maybe it was the
fact that his new master Gerard was so strong-willed or because
the killing blow was self-inflicted since he didn't want to hurt anybody.
Either way, Jackson recovered, fully transformed, detransformed, was killed
again while he was a human and eventually finished his transformation to werewolf.
And because he kept many of his kanima shape-shifting traits after reaching
werewolf, it follows that some of that rapid healing remained with him too.
Do I need to explain the part about how he changed from kanima to werewolf?
Here, just just watch this or skip ahead a couple of minutes and I'll
get into what healing is like for Jackson now that he's no longer strictly kanima.
Jackson: Okay you got what you wanted.
Now it's my turn to get what I want.
Derek bites Jackson.
The little spark Derek gave to Jackson is a werewolf spark.
It turned Jackson into a werewolf.
Unfortunately for Jackson - and all of those people from the class of 2006 - his soul was
so screwed up and carrying so much baggage
that the werewolf transformation got screwed up too.
Morrell: Kanima.
Do I have that right?
Allison: Yeah.
Morrell: Like the wolf, its power is greatest at the moon's peak.
Sounds like a werewolf.
Now we called this screwed up werewolf
transformation a kanima.
But it's still just a werewolf,
a malformed werewolf.
There are no kanima running around in the wild.
Kanima only happen when werewolf bites go wrong because all kanima are just malformed
werewolves.
The closest I've come to explaining why Jackson's current state shouldn't be considered a hybrid
is that butterflies and moths are not hybrids. Okay?
They're not hybrids even though they might still have similar antenna and coloration
and show signs of carryover memories from back when they were a caterpillar.
The butterfly and the caterpillar are the same creature.
It's an imperfect analogy because not all werewolves go through a malformed kanima stage,
but the result is the same.
Jackson is just a werewolf with a few signs of his earlier malformation left over.
Ethan: You should've used the yellow wolfsbane.
Regular wolfsbane won't work on him because he's not just part werewolf he's part kanima.
Jackson: And both parts are pissed.
The question of why Jackson is not as affected by purple wolfsbane as
the regular werewolves should be clear.
If he can still make a tail out of his spinal cord, which we saw, then he kept some of that
full transformative ability he had before, which means he still has some of that hyped-up
metabolism and healing ability, which helps cure damage like one would get from wolfsbane.
The reason the yellow wolfsbane is allegedly more effective is that it apparently goes directly
after the spark, meaning it is attacking the very thing that powers the healing process.
At least that's what they made it seem like since I believe it was ongoing spark rejection
that was fueling Gerard Argent's black goo factory and the only way to stop it was
to stop the spark from trying to transform him, which they did with yellow wolfsbane.
Anyway, the yellow stuff didn't always live up to the hype but it
was rare in-universe so canonically there wasn't a lot of extra supply laying around.
So nothing for clinical trials and no one truly got to gauge what all
it could do and which doses are more effective.
But in Jackson's specific case, these Hunters would have better luck with the yellow stuff
since his enhanced healing ability, which comes with his enhanced kanima shape-shifting leftovers,
allow him to shake off the effects of purple wolfsbane more quickly than a normal werewolf.