Hello there.
I’ve been struggling this week to come up with a topic that interests me enough to do
a video.
It’s one of those creative lulls that come every once in a while, usually after a video
that I worked really hard on and was very proud of – flops like a dead fish and doesn’t
get much audience support.
This week I’m delving into something that you all seem to want to know more about.
The Alpha Twins are two of the most searched characters over at the official Teen Wolf
Wiki.
It’s unclear to me what new information folks hope to glean about the pair since their
entire story, everything we know about them, happened on screen.
But today I’ll dig into that story and put it all together so it’s a bit more cohesive
than the version we saw spread out over more than a half dozen episodes.
I’ll also take a look at one of the most talked about scenes in Teen Wolf’s run: the
infamous flesh wound that killed Aiden.
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and hit the notification bell.
I’ve been told when you hit the bell, a little piece of candy appears on your pillow
Of course, that might just be the effects of that special gummy I ate.
I think it’s kicking in.
When we meet the twins for the first time, Ethan and Aiden are chasing Isaac trying to
recapture him and return him to the vault with Boyd and Cora.
The first thing you notice about these two, besides that fact that both of them got
the cute-boy gene, is that thing where they can kind of shove themselves together
into a single, very large, werewolf.
I’ll get to that in a second, but first let’s take it back to before they met Deucalion.
Ethan explained that they were the lowest rung in their pack back then. They considered
themselves the Omegas of the pack.
Ethan: You don't know what we owe them, especially Deucalion.
We weren’t like Kali and Ennis when we met him. We weren’t Alphas.
Scott: What were you?
Ethan: Omegas.
In actual wolf packs, the Omegas are the scapegoat, the last to eat, the one who has to take the abuse
from the rest of the pack.
Just a quick correction: current science suggests there’s no such thing as an omega
wolf in wild packs.
The concept of the low wolf or the odd man out within a pack only applies to wolves thrown
together in captivity.
Natural wolf packs are mostly family units and work together as a collective.
Okay – where was I?
Yes, the “omegas” of the pack meaning, in the words of that great naturalist and
philosopher Stiles Stilinski -
Stiles: You were the Bitches of the pack.
And according to Ethan, their pack was the absolute worst.
Ethan: They were killers. I mean, people talk about us as monsters.
They were the ones who gave us the reputation. And our Alpha was the worst of them.
We don’t learn much more about their pack until Season 5 and then the information we
get is from an unreliable narrator.
Theo, as part of his fake backstory of becoming a werewolf, claims that it was the twins’
alpha that bit him.
His fictional version of the twins’ alpha is pretty bad ass though.
He apparently came to the skate board pool already bloody.
What’s that about?
Anyway, this is all apparently happening just before Deucalion met the twins.
At the point when bloody claws shows up in Theo’s fake backstory, the twins knew they
could merge but according to Ethan they couldn’t control it.
Deucalion taught them to control the merge and the rest, as they say is history.
Ethan: Then we fought. We took down the pack one by one. And by the time we got to our Alpha, he was begging for his life.
And we tore him apart,
literally.
And conveniently for Theo’s fake backstory, the twins were on their killing spree right
around the time he got bit so that Alpha that bit him was killed before he could return
to claim Theo for his pack.
Theo: Met another one of his pack a couple of weeks later.
He told me the alpha that bit me was killed by two of his own betas. They were twins.
A couple of things about the merged form -
Stiles: Voltron Wolf, you know?
Yeah, what he said.
It turns out that in the entire Teen Wolf universe, Ethan and Aiden are the only two
twin werewolves to ever exhibit this ability.
Teen Wolf creator Jeff Davis tells me they are unique.
The other thing about the merged form is that he was the Alpha.
While Ethan and Aiden both got the red eyes, it was the combined creature that absorbed
the alpha spark.
Whenever the two were separate individuals, they were basically half an alpha each.
It’s one of the reasons they could feel each other’s pain.
Scott: What's wrong? You hurt?
Ethan: Not me. My brother.
We saw the effect of this arrangement when Jennifer killed Voltron Wolf.
That merged being actually died and the alpha spark was lost.
The individual twins survived but they could no longer merge because the merged form was dead.
And they’re no longer alphas because, again, the merged form was the alpha
and the merged form is dead.
So, that's their story.
They were always able to combine bodies but didn’t know how to control it until Deucalion.
They learned how and killed their pack and became alphas.
They were killed by Jennifer in the combined form and while the individuals were saved
Voltron is no more.
What else?
Oh – that stupid fatal stabbing at the end of Season 3.
Now, let me be clear on this point, Aiden’s death scene was one of the most emotional
scenes in a season full of emotional scenes.
Ethan: Aiden!
It is beautifully written and acted from the moment Ethan realizes what’s happened to
Lydia burying her head into Stiles' chest.
I absolutely and unreservedly love everything about this scene.
Aiden: Does it hurt you as much as it hurts me?
Ethan: Yeah.
But
how we got to this point, the wounding, the stabbing in the gut was a series of mistakes that almost
ruined the moment and is still a topic of fan discussion all these years later.
That's for one simple reason: Aiden should have survived this wound.
Yes, wounds caused by Oni swords don’t heal until the Nogitsune is down but even with
that fact, Aiden’s werewolf healing should have been enough to keep him alive until that
point.
We saw all the other wounds begin to clear up immediately.
But his, a simple stab to the gut, was fatal.
Here’s what I’m told happened behind the scenes.
This wound was supposed to be higher, with the blade piercing the lungs and heart cavity.
That would have been a believably fatal wound.
But somehow the desired effect didn’t get translated to the crew properly and on the
day they shot the scene they did the simple knife in the gut effect.
They actually caught this in editing and, if you look closely, you can see that when
the knife goes in, the werewolf glow in Aiden’s eyes flickers and dies.
It's kind of an attempt to suggest that his werewolf abilities were somehow lost in this moment.
But it wasn’t enough to cue the audience who are accustomed to werewolves walking off
this kind of wound every day.
Hell, Scott had had the exact same wound from an Oni sword just a few episodes before this
and in that case Void Stiles actually twisted the knife to make sure it did damage.
No, as it is presented, this wound should not kill Aiden. But what are you going do?
I mean, mistakes happen and like I said it’s still a hell of a scene.
Thanks for watching.
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I’ll see you next time we go back to Beacon Hills.