Monsters Within
How a show aimed at teenagers on a network about pop music featuring stories about fantasy monsters teaches us all about being better humans.
Yes, there will be spoilers. If you have never watched “Teen Wolf” on MTV, I strongly suggest you do so. It’s currently available on Amazon Prime. Further, I have no affiliation with the show, know not a single person involved with its production, and have never written a television script in my life.
Teen Wolf is a television series airing on MTV based (very loosely) on a premise and characters from a 1985 mostly-forgettable comedy starring Michael J. Fox. Pretty much all similarity ends right there.
I had probably the same reaction as you may be having when I heard Teen Wolf and MTV together in the same sentence. I had an even stranger reaction when I read that some critics called its third season among the best television of that entire year, so I decided to investigate and give this teenaged (and, let’s be honest, gay male) wet dream a try.
I am perfectly willing to admit that the reason I have taken to Teen Wolf so strongly is because it overcame my expectations to such a dramatic degree. Were it showing on HBO or FX, I might consider it a nice box of chocolates rather than a gorgeous fantasy feast.
It behooves me to tell you that a large draw to the series (both by the public and by me personally) is bound to be the parade of shirtless male pulchritude that manages each episode to show off their carefully sculpted abs, usually also wet for some convenient reason.
One might think that there are no more beautiful twenty-something actors left in Hollywood during the filming of the series, let alone the older gentlemen who must surely be spending at least twice the gym time to keep up.
A television series devoted in any way to the supernatural has to depend a great deal on suspension of disbelief. I’d say that’s equally true of any series created by Shonda Rhimes, but let’s set that aside for now. Supernatural elements used to be handled as little more than a joke to sustain the threadbare plots and hard-to-distinguish characters of such luminaries of 60's television as Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Nanny and the Professor, and to some extent, Gilligan’s Island (you explain to me how seven stranded castaways wore the same spotless clothes week after week and built cars out of bamboo without magic). Possibly the less said about these programs the better — regardless of my deep and abiding appreciation of Paul Lynde — but these typify the previous disregard that the genre held in entertainment.
The success of Star Wars in 1977 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the same year (yes, let your mind boggle on that one), and the rise and prevalence of a contingent of film directors intent on making science fiction and fantasy movies mainstream allowed nerds like me to emerge from the shadow of our low self-esteem and watch the world come over to The Dark Side.
Television, though…TV wasn’t ready.
Television by and large was determined to see itself as the poor cousin of film. As Addison DeWitt put it in All About Eve, “That’s all television is, my dear, nothing but auditions.” It was where stars and writers and directors went to make some money until their big break lead them to film. No one paid much attention or took the time to develop much of anything. Perhaps it was HBO’s commitment to quality and the budgets that were needed to command that quality that finally changed the game.
Which brings us, at long last, to Teen Wolf.
I wasn’t there, but I’ll wager you a whole dollar that MTV executives were gathered around their toy-strewn series development conference table and said to themselves, “If pipsqueek AMC can do it, so can we!” and what they set their sites on and started shopping around for was The Twilight Saga. That sparkly pile of vampiric dross was already in their demographic; it was hot, it was a phenomenon (regardless of its egregiousness and utter lack of intelligence — sorry girls, but it’s true), and it could be filmed relatively cheaply because it wasn’t period like A Game of Thrones or Mad Men — plus it could star young actors whose salaries were still viable.
But they couldn’t have the actual Twilight. They needed something familiar, but something cheap. And if it could be done with one forgettable teen flick about a high school hero with super powers, why couldn’t lightning strike twice?
I refer, of course, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the first and most obvious model to compare to Teen Wolf. The similarities are certainly striking. A rag-tag group of high school losers with a socialite and a jock-hole thrown in come together to fight a sudden explosion of supernatural evil in a small town. It had become a cult hit and turned its creator, Joss Whedon, into one of Hollywood’s hottest properties. Couldn’t that magic be recreated for MTV?
The Reality of Fantasy
It takes more than a premise to create a lasting impression. When you’re talking fantasy, you’re talking mythos. It’s important — in fact crucial — that there is a logic behind the fantasy to tie it into something you and I can relate to. None of us are werewolves (probably) and none of us will be faced with life and death decisions involving whether we need to kill our best friend because he has become inhabited with an evil Japanese Nogitsune demon. Probably.
This is called worldbuilding. A set of rules that define how the fantastic elements of your story work in order to, hopefully, ground them in reality.
Where Teen Wolf manages to take a further step is that it uses its world rules to establish its characters’ humanity, as well as their monstrosity. It has the same roots as several other pieces of fantasy fiction, including The Amazing Spider-man, the aforementioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the television series Supernatural, and the books and films based on the world of Harry Potter.
So let’s start there.
Both series take place in “our world” because they involve recognizable locales, landmarks, or people, and are occurring in the same relative time as you and I are living. If that’s so, and werewolves and wizards exist in apparently vast numbers, why don’t we encounter them?
Ms. Rowling takes the easiest way out of this dilemma possible: Muggles simply ignore magic. We (assuming that you, like me, are a Muggle) explain it away as “seeing things” or maybe you were drunk. Giant purple buses, dragons flying through the air, the Quidditch World Cup occurring in an arena at least as large as the Bird’s Nest in Bejing, yet we see none of it because we simply choose to ignore it all.
Teen Wolf faces a deeper challenge because characters within the story are expected to hide these things from other major characters also within the story. Harry’s adoptive parents know that Harry is a wizard from the get-go, they know of the wizarding world.
Harry is “The Chosen One” and so is Scott McCall (portrayed by Tyler Posey) in Teen Wolf. But whereas Harry keeps showing off exactly how special he is (youngest Quidditch seeker ever, parents left him a vast fortune, can talk to snakes) Scott struggles to understand how to behave and how to control what he has become — essentially struggling against himself and the truth of his being.
The Secrets That Define Us
As Teen Wolf’s chief wolf, Scott cannot tell his mother, his teachers, his lacrosse coach, or anyone but his best friend Stiles that he has been turned into a werewolf. For one thing, this would likely get him thrown into Eichen House, the local insane asylum (because doesn’t every small town have one?).
For another, a chief source of drama and tension comes from this need to hide. How much can he do without giving himself away? Did someone see his eyes turn gold? How does he explain the fact that he heals within seconds and has superhuman strength?
This angle, the secrecy and fear, the need to hide what and who one truly is from everyone around you, will resonate strongly for any teenager trying to fit in. But it will positively clang like a death knell for anyone who’s been trying to keep their non-heterosexuality a secret out of shame and fear.
This is a coming out story told over and over for each character who is given this secret identity, and was presented more boldly (and baldly) in Bryan Singer’s X2: X-Men United when Bobby Drake goes back home to come out to his parents as Iceman. It is no coincidence that both Bryan Singer and Teen Wolf’s developer and chief writer, Jeff Davis, are both gay men.
More importantly, Teen Wolf deals with sexuality in a straightforward and compassionate manner, which is not to say that it delights in showing a lot of horny teens getting sweaty between the sheets (there is plenty of hand-holding and passionate kissing, but sex occurs off-screen). Davis stated:
“One of the most important things to me when we were creating the show was to try to build a world where we weren’t actually talking about coming out and all the problems of homophobia. I wanted it to be an idealized world — one where being gay isn’t just accepted, it’s a part of everyday life.”
In reference to the “real world” of high school, proms, jobs, and parents, this is true. A minor character, Danny, and one of the werewolves, Ethan, carry on a relationship that involves more than two men hanging out and making eye contact (which is about all we can hope for in most on-screen gay romances), and allows them, on a show aimed at a teenaged audience, to kiss and, in one “mature audiences only” episode, make out together in a motel bed. Davis has instead managed to fold those feelings of fear and rejection into the characters who are dealing with their supernatural powers.
Whether this goal of treating gay and bisexual relationships the same as straight relationships — also known as treating relationships like relationships — has any meaning for the straight audience is hard to say. It is most certainly having an impact on young gay audience members, even if it remains “an idealized world.” But it is nevertheless important simply because it is occurring on a program available to nearly every American household (this is not pay-cable HBO setting out to shock an audience by having vampires ass-fuck each other while were-jaguars are tied up to beds and repeatedly raped, as portrayed in one of the seasons of True Blood) that’s aimed at teenagers.
These fictional threads are important, make no mistake. It’s been documented that Will & Grace did more to advance the cause of equal rights for homosexuals than two decades of ACT UP. If there is a popular television show depicting non-straight relationships as normal and loving, that goes a long way to making the entire premise that those relationships are by definition “different” and “wrong” proven to be the lie that it is.
More interesting to me, however, is one of the series’ mythological rules concerning the hierarchy and pack mentality of werewolves, and the manner in which they may overcome their basic, animal instincts and retain their human (and humane) qualities.
Rules Are Made To Be Adhered To
In the world of Teen Wolf, there are (at least) three ways in which someone may be granted the powers of were-creature. Yes, you may not be turned into a werewolf — at least not initially — which is a secondary fascinating twist on the usual werewolf fantasy.
- If you are born into a werewolf family, represented in Teen Wolf by the Hales, you are a werewolf automatically.
- If you are bitten by an Alpha wolf, you have a chance to survive the bite and become a Beta werewolf. This is Scott McCall’s entry into the world of fangs and fur.
- On rare occasion, the claws of an Alpha, if sunk deeply enough into the flesh, may also pass on were-qualities including full transformation.
One of the series’ overarching themes is the status of each wolf and the manner in which Alpha status is attained or, in Scott’s case, granted.
Alpha status confers some distinct advantages to a werewolf. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that we don’t know the full extent of those advantages and powers simply because Teen Wolf is a television show and not a self-contained and limited story like a film or a book. George R. R. Martin can provide a deep history of the land, families, royal lineages, god and monsters, and every other detail of his “A Song of Fire and Ice” series (on which A Game of Thrones is based) because he has already written it all out. He knows how it all ends (and that Lyanna Stark is Jon Snow’s mother because, c’mon, of course she is), even if he hasn’t told any of us, yet.
A television series, due chiefly to its primary on-going goal to remain in production and pay a lot of expensive salaries, has to evolve its fictional world to maintain interest, relevance, and entertainment value. In some sense, each season has to top the last one — or at least match it. Teen Wolf has so far done an excellent job of continually expanding the rules of weredom without falling into the trap of ignoring its own pre-defined rules with a new one.
But more than that, it is using its rules of fantasy to define what it means to be human.
A few more rules concerning Alphas from the Teen Wolf mythos:
- To become an Alpha, the most common method is to kill your pack’s Alpha and claim that status. Doing so will turn your eyes a glowing red and you assume command.
- Alpha status confers greater power — greater strength, greater supernatural abilities, greater respect — and allows you to turn humans into werewolves to join your own pack.
- Your powers increase as you increase the size of your pack, so you can fight off the advances of other packs and other Alphas trying to claim your power.
- There are Alpha packs consisting entirely of Alphas who are ruled by a Super-Alpha (as portrayed below by Deucalion from series 3.1).
- On rare occasion, and we’re talking once in a thousand years or something epic like that, a Beta wolf may ascend to Alpha — becoming a True Alpha — through sheer strength of will alone. This is what Scott becomes through the current four seasons and one big reason why he’s the constant target of the World of Were.
Scott’s True Alpha status is key to how this werewolf series is teaching lessons about being a good human.
The Human Animal
To ground a story based in fantasy, the story has to resonate with the reader or viewer. You need to recognize something of yourself or your experiences in the character’s desires and actions, and in the character’s abilities to overcome those desires and actions in due course.
You might want to be a werewolf and have superhuman strength and insta-healing and the ability to howl so loudly that you can wake the dead (though not literally…yet). But you’re probably using those fantastic elements as a coat of paint over your existing life. The “what if it was me” scenario. And that’s what makes a story compelling. Sure, there are exceptions to that rule, but particularly in television the way to capture and keep an audience is to have them care about the characters no matter how far-flung the plot strays from logic.
Teen Wolf uses Scott’s struggle for humanity as a guidepost to the monsters that inhabit that world, and to the monsters we all struggle against.
In series 3, episode 6, the school’s bus is delayed during a trip to a cross-country meet and our beloved characters find themselves staying overnight in a motel. Because this is Teen Wolf and nothing is ever as innocent as it seems, the motel happens to hold the record for the most suicides to ever occur in a single place in the state.
“Motel California” is an excellent episode of television.
Though “the haunted hotel” is hardly an original premise, that it is suicides rather than homicides is telling. What takes place within its rooms is not young innocents hiding from some maniac with an axe trying to kill as many people as possible within the viewing frame of the episode, it is instead young semi-innocents struggling with the things they have done and seen, and wanting to punish themselves for their actions.
Suicide is something outcast teenagers struggle with more than they should. They feel they cannot talk to others, and they feel bad, or dirty, or worthless, and that the only path out of that world is to end it.
As the episode progresses, things go from good (horny high schoolers are paired off alone in motel rooms) to really, really bad, ending with a despondent Scott McCall standing in the parking lot covered in gasoline and holding a lit flare. He feels there is no hope left for him because he believes he has caused the death of his sometime-mentor, Derek Hale. “Every time I try to fight back, it just gets worse. People keep getting hurt,” he says. “What if this is the best thing that I could do for everyone else?”
Scott laments what his life has become, the choices he has made, but more than that he laments how his life has adversely affected those he loves. It is up to his best friend Stiles to tell him in words that he is needed, he is necessary, and he is loved now for who he is. Stiles steps into the pool of gasoline with him.
Healing Properties
Another example of how Teen Wolf uses its mythology directly to illustrate the struggle of being human occurs in series 4, episode 12, “Smoke and Mirrors.”
Scott has been turned into a Berserker, which in the mythology of Teen Wolf means that he has been encased in an armor of bones and become a mindless killing machine. His first action is to attack and stab his girlfriend Kira, who recognizes who he really is behind the cattle skull by the tattoo on his arm.
Kira has been learning how to use her powers as a Kitsune. She has been left to die of her wounds so that she cannot reveal Scott’s identity as the Berserker so that his pack (his friends) will kill him.
She is slowly bleeding out, weakened and dying. One of her powers is accelerated healing, but she cannot manage to do so until her mother — another Kitsune — appears before her and asks, “You’ve seen wolves heal, how do they do it? How do they trigger it?”
“With pain.”
Within the mythology of Teen Wolf, a werewolf’s healing qualities are brought on by the pain, not the injury. As human beings, how are we expected to heal ourselves from (emotional) injuries we sustain? It’s not by ignoring the pain and concentrating on the injury. It’s by dealing with the pain itself — the result of the injury — that we heal.
This could have been a simple rule. You heal because you heal, it’s something special you get for being a supernatural creature. That’s the Harry Potter explanation for magic and witchcraft. Where does that derive from? Nowhere specific, it simply is, it is within you and you manifest it with potions or spells or a wand. Certainly Rowling has proscribed rules regarding the use and properties of magic, but the procurement of it is an either/or proposition.
Teen Wolf regularly goes beyond simple explanations to use its mythology to illustrate or amplify human struggles and weaknesses, as well as the manner in which we may prevail over our own demons. Whether you’re paying close attention or not, this is what grounds it in our reality and one of the main reasons why we care about the characters.
Acting Out
I don’t want to short-change the actors in the series by any means. It is an almost perfectly-cast ensemble where even the lessor roles (primarily Orny Adams as recovering alcoholic Coach Finstock, who takes a comic relief characters and injects him with humanity, Linden Ashby as Stiles’s long-suffering dad and the town’s anchor Sheriff Stilinski, and Melissa Ponzio as Scott’s mom, Melissa, whose reaction to seeing her son dead on a medical examiner’s slab was almost too real to watch) are fully colored-in and rounded-out.
Tyler Posey is a young actor playing an even younger character, and he’s growing more assured with each season, but he has been given very little to do other than gawk wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the next monster attcking him. His character, Scott McCall, needs to exemplify certain characteristics that could be considered boring, but he manages to convey enough innocence and compassion that we like the do-gooder he’s become.
More interesting and maybe more talented is Dylan O’Brien as Stiles Stilinski. The actor was considered for the part of Scott, but voiced a preference for playing Stiles, and the producers couldn’t have made a better choice in agreeing with him. Stiles is positioned primarily as comic relief for when things are getting too grim, but in series 3.2 Stiles has been possessed by a demon, and O’Brien sinks into the role of villain by playing it cool and reserved. He could have spent those episodes yelling and throwing his arms around and (literally) chewing the scenery, but his menace and scare tactics were held close to the vest. He used his face and his eyes to portray the evil within him — his threats were more real as a result.
Posey and O’Brien together make an excellent team, and there is evident chemistry and real friendship between the two young men that shines through in their performances together. Again, the harrowing moment in “Motel California” where Stiles must convince Scott of his value and necessity rang true — I believed that scene, it did not come across as maudlin or false. It was one true friend trying to reach his brother.
A Family Affair
An important piece of Teen Wolf mythology is its pack mentality. What defines a pack, where one stands within the pack, whether one joins a pack, and how that pack acts as a whole are all defined within the mythos.
At the beginning of the series, many of the main characters are from broken homes. Certainly there’s a practical explanation for this: it’s less expensive if you don’t have to hire two actors to play the parents of every teenager. But Teen Wolf uses the situation to explore the idea of family by questioning its very definition at the outset: Scott’s father has left him and his mother to fend for themselves; Stiles’s mother is dead; Jackson is adopted; Lydia’s parents are divorced.
Only Allison is allowed to have a “normal” family, but by season 2 she gets to deal with her own drama after her father helps her mother commit ritual suicide rather than succumb to Derek’s werewolf bite, thereby denying her the nightmare…of becoming like the very person that Allison is deeply in love with. (Not to mention that she was trying to kill Scott at the time.) So, yeah.
This theme continues throughout the series: Isaac is motherless and is abused by his father; Liam has a step-father who works at the hospital (and also happens to be black); Malia is Peter’s daughter and accidentally killed most of her adoptive family in a car accident.
Most of us are brought up to believe that our parents will protect and provide for us. That’s not always the reality we encounter, and with growing frequency this idea of what a family is “supposed to be” grows less and less realistic.
Even once Scott’s father reappears, it turns out that he is more concerned about the safety of others (he is an FBI agent) than he is of his own family. He has so much trouble adapting to the dynamic that Scott and Melissa (Scott’s mother) have established — as well as an overpowering guilt for an accident that occurred when Scott was a toddler as well as leaving (to be fair, Melissa told him, an alcoholic at the time, to leave) in the first place — that he decides to re-abandon them all over again before Melissa stops him.
In a sense, Scott’s surrogate father is Coach Finstock (Orny Adams) whose bluster and on-going consternation with his students and his LaCrosse team provide ample comic turns, but it is tempered with an honest concern and even-handed (if loud and very abrupt) advice to help maneuver these young men through the minefield of high school (life). It is Coach Finstock who, at the end of series 4, places the responsibility of freshly-turned Beta werewolf Liam directly into Scott’s hands, telling him and Stiles, “You boys are gonna stick together, you’re gonna look out for each other. You’re gonna have each others’ backs. You got it?”
That Scott loves his mother and that his mother loves him is without doubt. Scott’s pack leadership decisions will be greatly defined by the lessons he has learned from her, a nurse who dedicates her life to helping others, regardless of their own life choices (made clear in series 3.2, episode 3 when she interviews mass murderer William Barrow prior to his surgery). This matriarchal theme also travels through the show. Hunter families are lead by the women. The Hale family (before they were all burned alive) was also lead by a woman, much to the consternation of psycho Peter.
But it is not to his own mother that Scott turns when he is in trouble — it is to his friends.
What, then, is family? Is it only one mother and one father and their children behind the safe walls of their two-bedroom home? Or is it the broader collection of people you love and trust, and gather to you when things go bad?
Teen Wolf’s answer to this question is: It’s both.
Not to beat a dead horse, but this is a dynamic that will be familiar to many homosexual youths. They are afraid to tell their parents about this truth of who they are. They are as afraid to tell their friends, because they may not be their friends anymore once they find out. The truth of the situation is more commonly that their friends resent being lied to rather than the fact that, hey, you like girls, so what?
But if they are rejected, they begin to assemble their own family made up of the people who accept and respect them. They may maintain communication with their blood relatives, but it is to their new family that they pledge allegiance.
Scott and his friends (his pack (his family)) find comfort and solace with each other, and love for and reliance on each other grows stronger with every threat they encounter.
You never have to face your challenges alone. Your pack will always be with you.
Mythadventures
As we approach its fifth season, Teen Wolf is facing a problem. It’s a problem common to all television series, but it seems to afflict fantasy-based shows more broadly and noticeably. The problem hit great shows like The X-Files, Battlestar Gallactica, and, perhaps most egregiously, LOST. The problem is sustaining the thread of the bizarre within the story of the ordinary. The problem is where are you taking us, and do you even know where we’re going? The problem is finding a satisfying ending that remains true to the series’ mythology.
LOST, in particular, turned its back on its own mythology when the writers could not take all of the threads they had woven over the course of six seasons and provide a satisfying — or even logical — denouement. So many separate pieces of myth had been introduced, it seemed that they could not imagine a satisfying way to bring them all together and we, the audience, had to settle for a Dallas-style “it was all a dream” episode, except instead of a dream, one of the central characters was dead and everything — every last piece of cool and interesting wonder from the polar bear to the giant gear-wheel to turn back time to Charlie’s death/sacrifice in the season three finale were all — all — rendered meaningless.
LOST had mysteries without mythology. Why were things occurring? What set of laws or stories — even if they are not spelled out within the plot or by the characters — explained the reasons for whatever happened. Why was that statue foot over there? How did the Dharma Initiative’s various initiatives tie-in with what was happening on the island? Some of the myriad mysterious were explained or partially explained, but the final explanation made it all moot. If Jack was dead the whole time — if, in fact, everyone was dead the whole time — then nothing that happened to them after the first incident in the first episode (the airliner going down) had meaning. You could literally ignore it all and the ending made sense.
A mythology is only good for setting up the rules of the world. It doesn’t help with the story itself. We can already see Teen Wolf straining to find interesting things for the characters to do, and this is most evident in one telltale bit of development: Everybody is becoming extraordinary, and the non-supernatural characters are disappearing. Character flaws and drives are becoming focused on the struggle to retain one’s humanity, rather than the struggle of being human itself.
The show began with only Scott having special powers, and the story was about discovering what that meant for him and the people around him. By series 2, we began to expand the werewolf world, but the villain in question was still very much human. Psychopathic, sure, but the reason for their evil plot was still grounded in human emotions — anger, jealousy, rage—rather than supernatural threat.
As mentioned, series 3 (divided into 2 separate story arcs) expanded on the theme of worlds colliding in two separate threads, and also allowed the secret world to be exposed to the ordinary world in Beacon Hills were the story is set. By series 4, even this cozy setting was no longer enough for the story and we had to travel to Mexico for added threat level.
If we look at one of the protagonists from series 4, we can see that Teen Wolf is also struggling with its villains. It wasn’t enough to have someone to create and control the all-powerful and unstoppable Berserkers, they were controlled by the resurrected, were-jaguared, “Bone Woman” Kate Argent, who was “killed” in series 1 only not really, just like Peter Hale (Derek’s uncle and the series’ main, on-going protagonist), and in fact the two mortal enemies (like, literally mortal enemies in that they previously wanted to murder each other) end up working together to destroy Scott.
This has nothing to do with the mythology of Teen Wolf and everything to do with its story. Certainly the writers must also be worried about sustaining a series called Teen Wolf when its protagonist is getting older and will soon be a senior in high school with one more year of ‘teen’ left to him. I suppose College Wolf and Pre-Med Wolf and Business Major Wolf might be in the cards, but given that the series is on MTV and trying to appeal to that audience, I kind of doubt that.
Series 5 will roll at us this summer and MTV have granted the producers a 20-episode arc, rather than the 12-episodes it usually takes to get from the start to the finish of one complete asshole taken down a peg by our pack.
What needs to happen, in my opinion, is that Scott needs to kill someone.
There are precedents in place — seeds planted — that this would be a turning point for his character. The Hunters in Mexico are just waiting for him to do it. He has resisted doing so time and time again, even refusing to kill his arch-nemesis Peter Hale after everything he has done and will no doubt continue to do. It’s also been established that the werewolves see it as an inevitability, the manner in which a pack survives and an Alpha gains strength. As a character — as a human being — how will Scott handle becoming a killer, even if it’s “justified?”
Teen Wolf needs to continue to allow its mythology to drive its stories. It needs to explore what it means to be human rather than what it means to be a monster. And it needs to stop fucking resurrecting the dead characters and bring some new blood into the mix.
Just please, whatever you do, Mr. Davis? No vampires.
