4.5 I.E.D. There are still teenager concerns to be dealt with, but most of this week’s episode of Teen Wolf is about situations most teenagers will hopefully never have to deal with, like learning how to handle your homicidal rage and claw powers or how to communicate with the spirit world to crack a high-tech code to find out out which of your friends is on a $117 million dollar hit list courtesy of The Benefactor. Even in the relative safety of the sports field, no member of the McCall pack is safe from murderers within their midst, particularly when those murderers have wolfsbane-coated knives hidden in their lacrosse blades. Jennifer Lynch is a great addition to the show’s directorial line-up and she brings some great visual style to the proceedings that both fits in well with Russell Mulcahy and Tim Andrew, but is also subtly different. She seems to favour strong close-ups, at least in this episode, and she does some great things with those tight, intense shots, particularly all those of Lydia as she stares at the record in the soundproof white room or the clean white paper of her drawing pad while trying, and failing, to find out the second of the three cyphers to unlock the second half of the dead pool. There’s a heartbreaking vulnerability there in Holland Roden’s face that Lynch captures perfectly, and the shots are framed in such a way that even when Lydia has company around her, like Malia, it’s clear that she’s on an island on her own and none of her supernatural friends, for all their skills and powers, can help her. The voices line, from Angela L. Harvey’s script, is one of the many great lines this week. Most of them were joke lines, but not all of them were obviously funny. Some were comical on the surface, but revealed deeper pain (such as Sheriff Stilinski’s line about once being a rational human being). Others, like Araya Calavera’s line about Mexican stand-offs just being called stand-offs where they’re from, are comedy lines that are presumably aimed at people, like myself, who watch too much television and know entirely too much insider lingo—though the Mexican stand-off might be a well-known term at this point, I don’t know what the kids have learned from Tumblr these days. Either way, it’s another clever, funny, and surprisingly adept show that continues to be all those things and more with every passing episode. That the show can maintain such steady quality four seasons into its life is a bit of a surprise, though perhaps the cast churn helps keep things fresh and gives familiar characters new people to play off. However, it’s the new wrinkles for familiar characters, like Scott’s growth into an Alpha with a pack of his own while Derek watches like a proud papa or how Sheriff Stilinski and Stiles are more alike than anyone could have guessed in their general attitude and impressive cleverness, that have kept Teen Wolf interesting. Read Ron’s review of the previous episode, The Benefactor, here. US Correspondent Ron Hogan is glad to see not every assassin haunting Beacon Hills is supernatural, and not every supernatural in Beacon Hills is directly related to the Hale family in one way or another (just the interesting ones). Find more by Ron daily at Shaktronics and PopFi. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
