In every season, after watching Teen Wolf characters we love suffer for ten or more
episodes, there are few things more satisfying than seeing the villains of the season meet
a gruesome end.
Gerard: Kill them.
Gerard: 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.
I’m Paul Rea and today I’m exploring the most satisfying Teen Wolf villain endings.
-foreboding music-
Before we get into the stomping of villains, I have to acknowledge a channel milestone
that I wasn’t expecting to happen for several more months.
Welcome to all the new subscribers!
There’s an orientation video you should watch in case you want to unsubscribe.
I’ll throw up a card here and at the end so you’ll know what you’re getting into
on these weekly journeys back to beacon hills.
Now – the most satisfying villain stomps from Teen Wolf which is an idea I stole – er
– borrowed from our Teen Wolf Fandom App – did you guys know we have an app?
I’ll put a link in the description – sorry I’m a little distracted today.
10 thousand subs?
Wow.
Back to the list.
At the bottom - as my least satisfying villain end - is Tamora Monroe.
I think this is why fans still hate her soooo 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 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 5, 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.
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 one, two, 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?
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.
So 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 connects to anything until Season 4.
Overall, three stomps, little satisfaction for me in the end of the darach.
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 succeeds in his mission only to then be told that he is too old and too mutilated
to be loved in return.
Sebastian: Marcel, if this is what immortality looks like,
Sebastian: I think you might have been misled.
Marcel: 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 didn’t redeem Marcel – but Marcel’s minion Theo
got a full redemption arc after his initial stomping which 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!
I guess that makes me kinda 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.
Then we get to see him fight alongside Liam and the rest of the pack and that just strengthens
this feeling that he did his time and is working hard to make up for all the evil.
They ended Season 6 with him taking that one step further, while he did not end the run
as a full-fledged hero in my opinion, he is very close to it.
I should mention here that they tried to redeem both Gabe and Nolan in the end but neither
arc was really satisfying to me.
I mean, Gabe was a little shit and watching him pummel Liam made me want to violate parole.
I’m kidding, I’m not on parole.
Or am I?
It really came down to how fans felt about the actors playing the characters here so
you’re mileage on whether this was a successful redemption will likely vary.
Next to the redeemed villain 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 asshole.
Matt: What are you looking at?
If I ever do my most hated Teen Wolf villains - man-child Matt will top the 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 didn’t 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 little 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 a few 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.
Now we’re getting into a group of the most satisfying beatdowns Teen Wolf had to offer.
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 anti-climax.
I mean it worked and was emotionally charged 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 shit 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 call irredeemable.
There is, perhaps, nothing more arrogant and irredeemable than actual Nazi running around
killing people and eating their pineal 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, that is priceless.
The same is true of Doctor Valack – trying to control Lydia’s powers got his head blowed
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, she deserved to suffer more but still,
after all her grandiose hunter bullshit, the arson and torture porn, I take great satisfaction
in how easily she is taken out by Peter.
It was like yeah, you don’t matte. Bye.
With Gerard, I can’t imagine a better stomping than the end of Season 2.
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 that and boy did Jeff and the writers deliver.
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 1.
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.
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 because it eats a field mouse.
The riders also didn’t get beat in the end.
They got saved when the Wild Hunt was allowed to move on.
Also not on the list, the Anuk-Ite.
My thoughts on the Anuk-Ite have been unexpectedly controversial with folks.
I see this pitifully weak creature trying desperately to avoid capture and using its
only defenses instinctually 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 Anuk-Ite needed to be
punished for just trying to survive.
Thanks for watching.
And if you’re part of the 90 or so percent of folks who watch my videos but haven’t
subscribed, you should think about getting on board with more than ten thousand of your
fellow teen wolf fans.
Hit subscribe and the bell so you’ll be notified of our next journey back to Beacon Hills.