In every season, after watching characters that we love suffer for 10 or more episodes, there are few
things more satisfying than seeing the villains of the season meet a gruesome end.
Gerard: Kill them!
Kill them all!
Jeff Davis and the Teen Wolf writers' room came up with truly fitting punishments for a number
of the big baddies while sending others down an equally satisfying path of character redemption.
Uptight British AI: Because he's a glutton for punishment and loves being disagreed with on the internet,
Paul has started a second channel called TV Addicts Synonymous. Yeah, it's a dumb name,
and you'll likely change it because it's a dumb name. But for now, that's where you can find Paul
pontificating about the various other TV shows he's watching or whatever it's his adddled brain
to chat about in a given week. It's basically the same old shite you get on the main channel,
but about different TV shows. Check it out and subscribe if you're so inclined.
At the bottom - As my least satisfying villain end.
is Tamora Monroe. I think this is why fans still hate her so much to this day. She got away with
horrible crimes and is still at large without ever even getting a single satisfying punch in
the face. You know, you just want to punch her. I mean, I guess you could argue that Monroe suffered
enough when the Beast left her for dead in that pile of bodies on the bus back in Season Five,
but that's a little too nuanced for me. I mean, she survived a horrible experience, good for her,
but I still want her to suffer for what she did after that horrible experience.
Now, somebody who I would have liked to see escape into the night is Jennifer Blake. Like Monroe,
Teen Wolf's Darach survived a horror and returned to take her revenge. Unlike Monroe,
the writers made her suffer not one, not two, but three stomps in quick succession.
Stomp One: Derek tricks her into weakening herself right before she kills Deucalion.
Derek: Jennifer!
Derek: He doesn't know!
Jennifer: Know what? What you really look like. Derek: What you really look like.
See, right there I would have said 'Yeah? Well he can get a good look at my face in hell!'
and kept right on bashing his head into the concrete.
Then she loses again when
Scott pushes through the mountain ash barrier]
And finally after making it all the way to the Nemeton, we get this weird scene with Peter
that never really gets connects to anything until Season Four.
Overall, three stomps, little satisfaction for me in the end of the Darach. [Music]
Speaking of complicated and nuanced punishments, consider Marcel. He was simping for a serial
killer for 300 years, he mutilated his own body, and killed countless teenagers as the leader of
the Dread Doctors. He did all this just to bring his unrequited love back to life. He then succeeds
in this mission only to be told that he is too old and too mutilated to be loved in return.
Sebastian: Marcel, if this is what immortality looks like. I think you might have been misled.
Marcell: For you.
I don't know about you, but I don't like having mixed feelings when a bad guy gets
killed. They're bad, they deserve to die, and I should not have to empathize with them. Unless...
Okay, I shouldn't have to empathize with a villain unless the writers are planning
to redeem the character. They did not redeem Marcel, but Marcel's minion Theo got a full
redemption arc after an initial stomping, which I have to say was very satisfying.
Kira: Your sister wants to see you.
Seeing this man dragged to Hell after having
watched him chew the scenery, break up the pack,
and kill Scott was one of my absolute happiest moments watching Teen Wolf.
Theo: Scott help me! Help me Scott!
I guess that makes me kind of twisted, huh? Anyway, if Theo's story had ended there,
I would have been fully satisfied. Watching what happened to him after he went to Hell
complicated things, which is exactly what those scenes were designed to do.
It's a clever bit of writing to repeat this death loop as many times as they did. At first,
you're all like, 'Yeah, you deserve to get your heart ripped out because you're bad.' Then, a few
reps in, you're like, 'Okay, little dead girl, you got him good. You can stop now.' And by the end,
you're feeling like Theo has suffered enough.
Liam: What are you doing?
Theo: Being the bait. Liam: No!
Then we got to see him fight alongside Liam and the rest of the pack, and that just strengthened
this feeling that he did his time and is now working hard to make up for all the evil.
They ended Season Six with him taking that one step further,
and while he didn't end the run as a full-fledged hero in my opinion, he is very close to it.
I should mention here that they kind of tried to redeem both Gabe and Nolan in the end, but neither
arc was really satisfying to me. I mean, Gabe was a little [ __ ] and watching him pummel Liam made
me want to violate parole. It really came down to how fans felt about the actors playing those
characters, so your mileage on whether this was a successful redemption will likely vary.
Next to the redeemed villains, we have one that was ruled not to be responsible for the evil he
caused. Jackson did a lot of killing while he was the Kanima, but he is instantly
forgiven for all that because the real evil was this little [ __ ]. What are you looking at?
If I ever do my most hated Teen Wolf villains, Man Child Matt will be at the top of that list.
Part of this is the fault of the writers. I just could not understand this character
on any level. It's like, 'okay dude, you almost drowned because you couldn't swim,
and you got saved, but then you got yelled at and that means people have to die!'
Of course, the fact that I didn't believe his motivation did not lessen my enjoyment of him
drowning to death at the hands of some old dude. This would have been the most satisfying of the
villain stomps if the motivation thing hadn't been so unbelievable. Or, I should say, if I
had personally bought into it more. As it was, I just had to think of Matt as being seriously
mentally ill, which kind of makes my enjoyment of his epic stomping a lot more questionable.
Victoria: I can't do this myself.
Another motivational problem I had was with Victoria Argent. Her going
from dedicated Hunter matriarch to psycho overprotective mom seemed a
bit abrupt and more transactional than transformative to me. But her descent
into evil did give us some fun scenes.
Victoria: Are you having sex with my daughter?
In the end, though, all my feelings about her death were wrapped up in how it affected Allison
and Chris and very little about her getting what she deserved for being bad.
This one is satisfying only in that the villain here was so arrogant. To be honest,
Void Stiles getting bitten and run through with a sword was really kind of an anticlimax. I mean,
it worked, and it was emotionally amped up because the stakes at this point were so high with Stiles
actually dying at the time. But judging it on its own, a bite and a stab is just kind of meh.
However, given the arrogance and smugness of the Void Spirit, the 'I'm a thousand years old and
you can't kill me,' seeing this arrogant [ __ ] stain get taken out in such a simple way is satisfying.
And there's no mixed feelings here either because his whole thing was hurting people and messing up
the world just for fun. The Nogitsune is what they would call irredeemable.
Douglas: Gentlemen...
Of course, there is perhaps nothing more arrogant and irredeemable
than an actual Nazi running around killing people and eating their pituitary glands.
Add to that his taking out of this adorable puppy of a man, and Mr. Douglas is as close
to pure evil as Teen Wolf ever came. Douglas getting beat by the pack was satisfying. His
then being consumed by the very thing he sought to control, priceless.
Valack: A success...
The same is true of Dr. Valack. Trying to control
Lydia's powers got his head blown up by Lydia's powers. That is justice.
The top of my list includes the recurring villains that got multiple stompings over
the course of the series. It's kind of a three-way tie, really, between Gerard,
Kate, and Peter. But in all three cases, their first stomping is the most satisfying to me.
Kate's first death could have lasted longer, I guess. I mean, she deserved to suffer more. But
still, after all her grandiose hunter [ __ ], the arson and torture porn, I take great satisfaction
in how easily she's taken out by Peter. It was like, 'Yeah, well, you don't matter. Bye.'
With Gerard, I can't imagine a better stomping than the end of Season Two. I mean, this guy,
what can you say about this guy? It's like he wasn't even human. He beat up Stiles just
to send a message. He manipulated Allison and threatened Scott's mom. He deserved
to suffer long and hard for all of that, and boy did Jeff and the writers deliver.
Now, the mountain ash black goo finale is hard to beat. But there's something
especially satisfying to me about how Peter got stomped in Season One. I guess it's the kids all
coming together. Lydia's science skills, Stiles and Jackson throwing the things, and Allison's
bow work. With that final kick in the balls from Scott, it was all just so Scooby-Doo.
After six seasons, this one is still my favorite. It's satisfying on a couple of levels. It was fire
that drove Peter to become murderous, and it was fire that eventually took him down. But also, this
grouping is Teen Wolf in its purest form. Scott's friends all working together to save the day.
Now, there are a couple of villains not on this list. The Ghost Riders aren't here because they
are a force of nature. They aren't motivated by anything. It's like saying a hawk is evil
for eating a field mouse. The riders also didn't get beat in the end. They actually
got saved when the Wild Hunt was allowed to move on. Also not on the list, the Anukite.
My thoughts on the Anukite have been unexpectedly controversial with folks.
I see this pitifully weak creature trying desperately to avoid capture and using its
only defenses instinctively to survive. It's not evil. It just brings out the evil that's
already inside people. So encasing it in mountain ash was good because it stopped
it from making others do bad things. But it wasn't all that satisfying because
I never believed the Anukite needed to be punished for just trying to survive.