Paul Rea: Okay, how much is left of the book?
I mean, if people read the book and then they go into this series, are they going to recognize
it or are they gonna feel oh this is an alternate universe?
Jeff Davis: They'll recognize it, but they'll also know it's an adaptation.
The book was written for a very young audience.
It was actually written for - I believe - 9 to 12 year olds.
So, in in adapting it to TV, it was mostly I had to take ideas from it - be more inspired
by it - than based on it.
♫ Try to resist.
Try to hide from my kiss.
But you know, ♫
♫ But you know that you can't fight the moonlight. ♫
For fans of the book this is definitely...
This is definitely a more adult version of it.
♫ Can't fight the moonlight.
Can't fight the moonlight.♫
Paul Rea: The special effects, I particularly enjoy the eyes.
You went bigger and you gave them more depth.
Is this a concerted effort to make them look not only different from Teen Wolf but you
also make them look more animal-like or is the progression different with these werewolves?
Jeff Davis: It was purely to make it look more animal-like, more wolf-like in fact.
And also I wanted to make them all the same color so they're all yellow eyes.
It has to do with them being a pack.
It has to do with partially them coming together finding each other and their eyes glowing
the same color.
And basically we wanted to go different from Teen Wolf.
Every question on this show was "Okay how can we make it different from Teen Wolf?"
Teen Wolf had all these multi-colored eyes.
They looked almost like lightsabers for the characters.
Talking to VFX, our VFX guy John Gross said, "Well, what if we make them bigger and they
overtake more of the whites of the eyes?"
When he first showed it to me, I was like, "That's beautiful!
Let's do that!"
One of our editors actually said, "Shouldn't it be smaller?"
I said no.
We're going different.
Paul Rea: It's gorgeous.
It's absolutely beautiful.
It stopped me dead in the trailer when we got to that
shot of Blake in bed.
It just stopped me dead.
Even after all the insight we're given in the finale,
some folks seem unclear on Baron's story from the first season of Wolf Pack.
Up until the most recent fire, Baron was living his best life
as a wolf-shaped werewolf in the vast forested areas of Los Angeles County.
They showed us this when he was taking this little trip through the pack's memories.
When Baron sees his shadow as a wolf, that shadow is not the visual metaphor, that's him.
Baron is a wolf and he's been in that wolf shape all his life.
We saw him in this form when Harlan was like ten.
And in that form,
Barron recognized the human Harlan as being like him.
Baron: Wait I know you.
You're like me. We're the same.
Then comes the most recent fire, and while they showed us Baron burning in his human form,
he actually got caught by the flames as a wolf-shaped individual.
What followed probably went down very much like what Malcolm described happening
to the male werewolf he and his fellow firefighters encountered 17 years ago.
Malcom: Till we saw its arms grew longer.
The Wolf started to stand up on his hind legs which all of a sudden were twice as long.
But whereas that original monster-form wolf was lost,
killed or maybe just blocked by that collapsing ridge 17 years ago,
Monster Baron is able to escape the fire line and burst out onto the freeway.
In this form Baron's memories and personality are completely buried inside the monster.
And despite the fact that we see him in human form through Everett's mental connection,
as far as we know, there was never a human-shaped Baron.
He was abandoned as a wolf pup, his father lost,
his mother turned human to pursue his father's attackers and to protect the pack.
His packmates are rescued by Ranger Briggs.
Baron grew up completely as a wolf and that's all
he ever was until he turned into a monster in the fire.
Now he stayed that rage-filled monster all the time there was no
shifting back and forth for him he's always the monster
right up until the cold kills him in the freezer.
It's why Everett was the only person to ever see the human-shaped Baron and
why he could see Baron while the monster is already in the pool at the kick back.
This version was always just an illusory representation of Baron's thoughts that
only Everett was connecting with, while Baron remained lost inside the monster.
I freely admit that I am the most pedantic prick when it comes to canonical cataloging
– but some of the folks in my comment section are attempting to out nitpick me when it comes
to Wolf Pack.
This has come up twice now from apparently two different accounts.
One of those resulted in a massive comments section thread that gave me a huge headache
so I figured I would put all my thoughts into this and just link the video when it comes
up.
Ramsey: Only a pack could make him human again.
They don't quite trust me yet.
Baron: And neither do I.
The question is – how did the former wolves know how to talk once they turned into humans?
The long thread was about Baron.
It’s my contention that Baron lived his life as a wolf alone in the woods.
That’s all we’ve been shown to date we saw him meet Harlan when they were kids.
So that is the canon we have to work with.
The querulous questioner in that case insisted that if Baron had lived his life in wolf form
– he shouldn’t know how to form words – even inside his head.
Later I got the same question about Ramsey.
For Ramsey – we don’t know her life.
We don’t know if she can ever switch back to full wolf form – so we don’t know if
she ever lived as a human before we met her as a wolf.
But since we don’t see her speak until 17 years after we watched her become human – it’s
not really a pressing question – not like Baron’s instant linguistics.
To that point - one thing we know about him is that he and his apparent siblings and those
he bit are all connected by a very strong mental link.
Fear, panic, lust – it all flows through this link at different times.
Baron: I can't
remember my name.
So my first thought when confronted with a talking wolf boy is that he knew how to talk
the same way he knew Danny smacked Blake and upset her.
Baron was fully immersed in the thoughts of four other people – possibly five if mother
was in on it - he got everything he knows through the mental link.
And while the link was not the strong force we saw once the pack reached a number of critical
mass – one can easily imagine that Baron, his mother, and his siblings shared some basic
thoughts throughout their early lives together.
He’s likely been hearing people talking in his head his entire life.
Once his body rearranged itself in a way that could form those sounds – he already had
the knowledge necessary to do it.
We know mother's story and what happened to Baron.
But could father still be alive on Wolf Pack?
Lots of people - including me - like to think there might be a second monster lurking in
the hills of Los Angeles now that Baron is himself again.
The last we heard about father was from Malcolm's account of the forest fire from 17 years ago.
Malcolm: The wolf started to stand up on its hind legs which all of a sudden were twice
as long.
Maybe the fire took it from one shape to another.
The next thing we saw, a 50-foot oak tree came crashing down on it.
The whole ridge collapsed and everything got swallowed up by the fire.
So presumably pops was buried under tons of flaming wood rocks and dirt.
But from what we've seen and been told - none of that should be deadly to the monster wolves
in this universe.
So while father would definitely be trapped, perhaps even unable to move, he should still
be alive regardless of how much crushing weight was applied.
That means little by little he could probably wiggle his way out of this.
Who am I kidding?
When these things get mad, they tear through stuff.
It would be ripping and clawing at the earth for as long as it took to get himself free.
Of course, by that time, we have to figure Ranger Briggs has found Harlan and Luna.
And mother - once she recovered from her transformation and killing all those firefighters - returned
to where Baron and father had been only to find it buried under tons of rocks dirt and
burned trees.
I still wonder where Baron was hiding and how he escaped getting buried or burned.
And if father is alive, why didn't he go find Barrett?
Or did they find each other and that part of the story remains to be told?
Or once you go big and monstrous., do you lose touch with all the information you had
before and just run off as a beast?
See - Paramount Plus has to give us a season two - there are just far too many questions
about this family's backstory and I need to know.