While Teen Wolf gave us scary monsters, memorable characters, and relationships worth fighting over,
one thing the show was never good at was telling time.
The Hale House fire was 10 years before Season One or maybe it was four years later.
Malia is just 13 or maybe she’s 15 or maybe18?
Claudia Stilinski died when Stiles was 9 or when he was 7 or something.
The Alpha Pack formed in 2002 or was it 2000?
Matt Daehler was the oldest looking 15 year old you ever saw. Okay, so that last one
isn’t so much a timeline problem as it is a casting problem, but you get the picture.
Teen Wolf can’t tell time.
But really, the most glaring and obvious failures of the show’s internal timeline could have
been easily avoided.
And today I will, before your very eyes. fix all of those timeline issues with a magical
tool called photoshop.
---X-Files Theme---
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Teen Wolf’s wonky relationship with its own internal timeline started innocently enough
in Season One.
They just didn’t think about it at all.
They kept telling us the date in phone messages and other on-screen props.
But it wasn’t until Kate’s funeral that they solidly established that it was indeed
2011. In fact, they etched it in stone.
Kate’s tombstone is a time check that matters and it’s really the easiest to fix.
Just don’t put the years on it at all.
Tombstones on TV often just have things like, loving daughter and sister, which in this
case would have been a lie, but at least you’re not establishing a year that you’re then
going to spend 90 episodes ignoring.
There. It’s fixed and now there’s no established base year and the writers can
pretend it’s any year they want to while Toyota and AT&T can have their latest models
on display and it won’t seem weird.
Just don’t mention a specific year again and we’re all set.
---Indistinct whispering---
What’s that?
---indistinct whispering---
The class of 2006?
Stiles: Okay, this is it. Class of 2006.
Oy.
I get it.
You wanted the yearbook thing to be a major clue as to the victims of the Kanima in Season 2
So you made a yearbook prop and slapped 2006 on the cover.
Yeah, but all the victims are 24 when they die in 2011, so five years ago they would
have been 19, almost 20 during their senior year in high school?
There’s another problem with that math.
Matt: I didn't know they had just won state and Lahey is letting his favorites come over to have a couple of drinks
to celebrate. Who cares if they're 17, right?
Who cares if they're 17, right?
So, they’re 17 in 2006 and 24 in 2011?
Yeah.
No they did not age 7 years in the span of 5.
For those numbers to be right, it would need to be 2013 in Beacon Hills. That would
be almost a year AFTER they filmed this episode.
To make this time check even worse, Ms. Morrell says in Battlefield that Matt was only 9 years old
when he drowned in 2006.
Morrell: Can you feel sorry for the 9-year-old Matt who drowned?
That would mean this fully grown is just 14.
You not only have to suspend disbelief; you have to take your disbelief out back of the
barn and shoot it with a .45.
---gunshot---
Once again, all you have to do is remove the year.
It doesn’t fix the script or the casting choices but at least you don’t give curious
fans a reason to pull out the calculators.
Season 3 hit us with a couple of unnecessary time checks including the fact that the formation
of the Alpha Pack came more than 10 years before.
Sheriff: The records would be over ten years old. I just need to look over a couple of files.
Okay, that’s cool and all but, you see,
at this point in the internal timeline it was still 2011 so when they show the date
on Jennifer’s file (marking the last victim of the Alpha Pack formation) as 2002 … that’s
less than 10 years not more than 10 years.
We can erase the date here too but the Teen Wolf production is three seasons in at this
point, they know they have a problem and it’s obvious they just didn’t care which is why, I guess
they kept doing stuff like this - including this file folder a few episodes later when
we’re told that Claudia Stilinski died in 2004, seven years prior to the current date
in the show.
That would be fine except the sheriff had just told us a heartbreaking story months
earlier placing her death more than eight years ago.
Sheriff: There was a night eight years ago, the night my wife died.
Also, while we’re never actually given an age for Stiles on screen,
if we assume, as everyone does at this point, that he was 16,
this 2004 date would have meant he was 7 when she died.
Of course, if we follow the stated logic of the writers - that the show exists in the
year in which it’s being written - he could have been as old as 9.
Again, erase the dated prop and all those issues go away.
It’s a really dumb mistake when you think about it, but of course it wouldn’t be the
last super dumb mistake we saw with Teen Wolf.
Peter: Want to talk about it, see a family counselor?
Season four’s big reveal that Malia was Peter’s daughter was completely overshadowed
by this terrible piece of prop work.
It places her date of birth late in 1998.
In the internal timeline of the show, this episode comes in winter of 2012
which would make Malia 13.
If we go by the writer’s conceit that the year on the show matches the year the episode
is being written or filmed, Malia is 15.
Both of those are contrary to the facts established when Malia’s character was introduced in
Season 3.
Sheriff: There's one case in particular that I can't get out of my head. Eight years ago
when I was elected Sheriff of the county, my first official duty was
to tell a man that not only had his wife and two kids died in
a car accident, but, a best we could tell, the body of his
nine-year-old daughter had been dragged from the wreck by a coyote.
She was nine years old, eight years ago.
I don’t think you can get around the math here.
Malia was 17 when they found her and returned her to human form meaning at the point in the story
when they showed the birth certificate, she would be 18 having had a birthday in November
during Season 3.
This is also an excellent example of why this type of internal timeline is not just important
to Teen Wolf super fans like me.
It matters with a show like Teen Wolf because the differences between age 13 and age 17
have moral, legal, and psychological implications to your target audience.
Malia: You didn't accidently walk into the girl's room.
They had already shown Malia in a sexual situation with Stiles in the fall of 2011.
According to this prop, she would have just turned 13 at that point as her birthday would
have come about a month after the Halloween episode Illuminated in Season 3B.
I don’t think I’m being a prude when I say that 13 is inappropriate for this type
of activity on television.
But if we fix the birth certificate to show the character’s real age, no one even blinks
an eye at the Eichen House make out session.
In light of those big ones, the other timeline mistakes on the show seem trivial.
The fact that Sheriff Stilinski had calendar pages from a year in the future doesn’t
really hurt the story nor does this bogus driver’s license of Derek’s from Season 1.
But again, even these trivial mistakes could have been avoided by simply removing the dates.
Thanks for watching.
Let me know in the comments if I missed a timeline goof and do all the other youtube
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