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"Teen Wolf" 3.16: Beacon Hills Homosexy Halloween Rave

Previously on Teen Wolf, a serial killer named William Barrow ate a bunch of flies in prison and escaped into the wild when he was rushed to the hospital for a tummy ache. Realizing that he was the ultimate danger to the teenagers at Beacon Hills High School, the cops and the FBI locked him inside Beacon Hills High School during the middle of a school day. Barrow used the time to creep on Kira, whom he later kidnapped during her sushi/pizza date with Scott, and tried to electrocute with a lightning wand containing all the electricity in all the city. She just absorbed the power right into her body, though, and caused a town-wide blackout. Derek had a chat with his dead mom. Aidan and Ethan enrolled in school again to try to get onto Scott's good side-- and into Lydia and Danny's pants, respectively. And a gaggle of Death Eaters attacked Isaac in Alison's bedroom.

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After messing up Isaac pretty good, the Death Eaters bounce to go Trick Or Treating because, hey, it's Halloween now! Isaac is cold and he is shamed, lying naked on the floor. Just kidding, he is only cold and shamed; not naked. Chris beats on him a little bit to trigger his werewolf healing mechanism and then excuses himself to do recon on the Death Eaters, a club he is very obviously a part of. He even has the mask and robes and the Dark Mark tattooed onto his forearm.

Down at BHPD, no one seems to know or care what happened to the fly-munching, teenager-murdering, bomb-building serial killer, but everyone wants to know what Kira and Scott and Stiles and Lydia had to do with the blackout. Also, do any of them know who scrawled out the Periodic Table cipher on the chemistry room blackboard, 'cause that thing was definitely a coded message telling Barrow to assassinate Kira. As usual, the Get Along Gang claims to know nothing. They were just hanging out down at the power plant doing their homework and taking quizzes in Seventeen magazine like regular teenagers and were as surprised as anyone when the power went out all over town.

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If Beacon Hills High doesn't call off school when a murderer is clomping up and down the halls, you'd better believe they're not going to call of school simply because there is no electricity. The main problem with the power outage is that Danny was going to throw a black light Halloween party that involved dubstep, body paint, and a whole lot of shirtlessness. Speaking of which naked pectorals: Ethan overhears Danny's troubles because he is eavesdropping on him because he is jealous as hell about him re-hooking up with his ex-boyfriend. He offers to help, but Danny blows him off and Aidan just giggles and giggles. He's all, "Why are you trying so hard to fit in here when you were born to be stand out in an ancient order of mythical manbeasts?" Danny goes, "My mouth is going to say that we need to act like human beings to get into Scott's pack but my eyeballs are going to follow Danny out of the locker room so my face is saying I'm less beast and more smitten kitten."

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Lydia's mom teaches biology now. RIP, Ms. Martin. We hardly knew you. But before class kicks off, Lydia explains to Aidan that she's had an existential revelation in the last eight hours. She helped saved Kira's life and it felt awesome because being a superhero is her destiny and I don't just mean because her face is otherworldly beautiful. But Aidan, see, he killed Boyd, which is the opposite of being a hero. So, anyway, she's done with bad boys and bad people, and since Aidan is both of those things, they won't be boning anymore. Aidan wheels around in his chair and "pssssts!" at Danny, all, "Fine, whatever, I know where you can have your gay Halloween bash."

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Since Kira is new to Teenage Monsters Club, she hasn't yet worked out how to compartmentalize the death-defying supernatural stuff and downshift into being just your average horny teenager. Scott tries to help her, but all she wants to do is talk about Scott's AT&T Nokia Lumia, which, as you've surely noticed by now, is season 3B's Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. She asks him to take a photo of her using Lumia's 41-megapixel PureView™, and he obliges, and in the photo she is surrounded by a glowing ether. She says it started happening a couple of months ago, so she traded up from her shitty iPhone to the Lumia and when that didn't help she realized something real weird is going on with her. Absorbing an entire city's worth* of electricity into her body only corroborates her theory.

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(*Stiles says the exact amount of energy Kira inhaled was 1.21 jiggawatts, which is a Back to the Future shout out of course, which only makes me love that guy and his perfect ridiculous face even more.)

Anyway, Barrow snapped a couple of photos of Kira with her phone when he was holding her hostage and FBI Special Agent McTwat definitely has her phone down at the precinct so she's going to need to get it back. Scott says he'll help. He and Stiles probably started breaking onto the police station when they were four years old.

Derek Hale is out running some errands. Buying milk and bread, picking up an antibiotic cream to stave off the infection from when his uncle stabbed him in the neck with his dead mom's wolf claws, you know, the usual. Some costumed kids accost him as he's getting out of his car, shouting "trick-or-treat!" The music acts like he's going to gobble them right up, but nope! He reaches into his car and pulls out a sack of candy — he was riding around town with Kit Kats in his car, y'all! for the children! — and doles them out. And then of course, he does a quick mini-transformation with his head: eyes and teeth and roaring, and chuckles when the kids run away screaming. Oh, you.

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But his fun is cut short with the Death Eaters apparate into the parking lot to menace him.

Once his dad is safely home from work with a solid alibi so as not to be incriminated in his latest round of shenanigans, Stiles helps Kira and Scott break into the BHPD station. He didn't steal the keys; he used an RFID emulator, which, OK fine, is technically still thievery, but it's smarter thievery. He tells them if they get caught they're on their own, which is a lie and we all know it's a lie because Stiles is Stiles and he's never going to abandon Scott. He sits in his Jeep and stares at this random key that showed up on his keychain sometime in the last 24 hours. He doesn't know: who put it there, why they put it there, or what thing it unlocks.

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He stares and stares and stares and then Agent McTwat shows up, so he speedy-quick zooms into the station to run interference — because Kira and Scott have been in there for 45 minutes, crawling around on the floor looking for a phone charger and browsing Maid in Manhattan screencaps on Scott's dad's laptop, which actually cracks this case wide open, if you want to know the truth. Maid in Manhattan: That movie where little Tyler Posey is the son of Jennifer Lopez who falls in love with Lord Voldemort? And now Tyler Posey is a teenager and Death Eaters have descended upon his town? And his show airs opposite the JLo-produced gay mama teenage drama The Fosters over on ABC Family? Hand me some blue yarn, Stiles, I am finally making some connections on your murder board.

Stiles bumbles and fumbles and manages to choke out a theory that maybe someone inside Beacon Hills High School passed along a message for Barrow to kill Kira. McTwat agrees. Sheriff Stilinski actually shared that exact same theory earlier today. Stiles needs to buy more time, kind of, but mostly being this close to Scott's dad makes him seethe with an anger we rarely see from him. He legit says, "Your real problem with my dad is that he knows the thing you don't want him to know, and guess what? I know it too." I'll bet you one hundred dollars it involves Stiles' (not)dead mom.

Scott and Kira finally erase the photos from her phone and tuck it safely away in the evidence bag, and now: PARTY TIME.

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Aidan and Ethan have co-opted Derek's loft on behalf of Danny. They explain it away by saying the owner is out of town and the space is so fetch, Danny can't say no to making black light magic happen here. It's everything you'd expect from a Beacon Hills Homosexy Halloween Rave: dudes making out with dudes, chicks making out with chicks, music making out with music at 400 kajillion decibels, fluorescent body paint, hundreds of half-naked teenagers, the Get Along Gang, aaaaaand Death Eaters flitting through the crowd, growling and scowling.

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A shirtless Ethan rips off Danny's t-shirt and coaxes him into getting body painted. Alison has to take off her own clothes and press a paintbrush into Isaac's hand and say like "nipple" a hundred times to get him to stop talking about Scott. Scott uses his Alpha eyeballs to spot Kira in the crowd and she's definitely gold-glowing in the dark. Lydia wanders aimlessly through the writhing bodies, completely unimpressed. And then this weird thing:

Caitlin, who you'll remember as the lesbian whose girlfriend was murdered by fireflies when they were scissoring in a tent back in season 3A, runs up and kisses Stiles on the mouth. He follows her to a less crowded corner and tries to ask how she's dealing with her girlfriend getting killed, and the answer is: She's drunk and bisexual now. She tries to make out with his face some more and then they have this exact conversation:

Stiles: I thought you liked girls.

Caitlin: I do like girls. Do you?

Stiles: Absolutely.

Caitlin: Great!

Stiles: So you also like boys?

Caitlin: Absolutely! Do you?

Stiles' face: [I ... don't know.]

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I'm super conflicted about this whole thing. My instinct, because I am a lesbian who has been writing about gay lady visibility for six years, is to wince at the fact that Jeff Davis introduced this character as a lesbian and then re-introduced her as bisexual or sexually fluid to suit the whims of his story, which is an infuriating and damaging trope as old as time, especially when you consider that she [seems to] come back to the show with a different orientation to act as nothing more than a catalyst for a dude's character development. But, on the other hand, she never expressly identified as a lesbian in the story, so maybe she was bi all along, and anyway, queer teenagers are really pushing back against this hard label-enforcing dichotomy the LGBT community loves so much.

My other conflict is: Fanbaiting or actual dialogue about bisexuality? One thing Teen Wolf has always gotten right is that it doesn't trip into NO HOMO! territory ever. There's no gay panic. Sexual orientation isn't played for giggles. But Stiles has walked a pretty thin line between full acceptance of his gay buddies and genuine curiosity about gay stuff. He wants to know if he's attractive to gay guys, made some very good drag queen friends at a gay bar, seemed to at least half-consider Danny's offer to sex him when all the virgins were dying all over town. So that contemplative look when Caitlin asks him if he is into boys too, it reads like maybe that's a thing he hadn't stopped to consider, and yeah, maybe he is. Maybe he hadn't really explored the possibility that liking girls doesn't exclude you from also liking boys.

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We've been really lucky with bisexual female characters on TV in the last few years. We've got Bo Dennis on Lost Girl and Kalinda Sharma on The Good Wife. We had Maya St. Germain on Pretty Little Liars and Brittany S. Pierce on Glee. And, for the most part, their stories have treated their bisexuality as a non-issue. They don't hit those gross tropes about how bi women will do anyone so they'll also do anything. Their stories are really about how some people just love who they love, regardless of gender.

But you know and I know that TV is aimed at a straight white male audience more often than not, so sexualizing queer women is no big deal. It's a sexy fantasy for straight dudes if it's straight up lesbian characters and it's a sexy fantasy in which straight dudes can participate if it's bisexual characters. Either way: Straight dudes win! But sexalizing bisexual male characters? Where do the straight dudes fit into that fantasy? No where, that's where, and so there has been an absolute death of bi guys on TV.

Unlike Glee, which cuts away from even closed-mouth gay kisses in a nanosecond, or has Kurt and Blaine brushing each other's hair more often than making out, Teen Wolf has never shied away from the sexual part of Danny's sexual orientation. He's a gay teenager and he wants to have sex 'cause that's life, dude, and there's nothing weird about it. And while that is laudable, Danny is a supporting character we only get to see about three times per season. Stiles, though? He's everyone's favorite. They've laid the groundwork already for him to realize he's bi. And there isn't a TV audience on earth that would embrace a character's sexuality exploration more than this audience. So, like, I love the little shoutouts to the Tumblr generation; they make great GIFs. But at this point, I'm actually going to call chickenshit if we don't get to see Stiles explore his obvious queer leanings.

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Alas, that night is not tonight. Caitlin giggles about how there's phosphorus on his cryptic key and even though her scientific explanation — that it came from some chemicals somewhere — gets him going, he has to peace out because he has to go check to see if the thing he absolutely hopes is not true is actually true. But not before he gives her a whole bottle of water and tells her to drink it all.

Stiles gets out just in time, really. As soon as he's gone, the Death Eaters mount their attack. They squeeze the banshee scream right out of Lydia's throat and beat the heck out of Ethan in the snack supply closet. They tattoo the number "5" behind everyone's ears, which is also what they did to Isaac back in Alison's bedroom and Derek in the parking lot of Target. When Derek wakes up, he rushes home and shuts the Halloween rave right down by smashing the DJ's turntables. When the party-goers are gone, it makes it a lot easier to spot the Death Eaters, who attack Aidan even though there are half a dozen werewolves in their way. They tattoo him with a "5" also.

Finally they turn there glowing eyeballs onto Kira, who is figuring out that Scott wasn't freaked out by her ethereal glow because he has red eyeballs and fangs and claws and stuff. But before the Death Eaters can jump her, the sun comes through the window and evaporates them and all the whole Get Along Gang just stares at each other like, "... the eff?"

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Allison actually knows half of what the eff, so she calls her dad to tell him she's going to dime out his Death Eater ass to her friends, but before he can answer his phone, he passes out in the hallway of his penthouse, covered in his own sexy blood.

At school, Stiles opens up the chemistry classroom with the mystery key on his key-ring and watches in horror as his hand writes out the murder order for Kira in Periodic Table code. The call is coming from inside his own brain!

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Next week: Aidan tries to make up for being a psychotic murderer by enrolling in clown school and learning how to make balloon animals. Danny installs a black light in his bathroom and invites Ethan over to help him wash the glow-in-the-dark paint off of his hard-to-reach places. Isaac tries to write some love poetry to Alison but fails because it's just so much easier to find words that rhyme with Scott. And Lydia spends five hours Instagramming photos on her Nokia Lumia, the world's most innovative smartphone, on AT&T, the Nation's Fastest and Most Reliable 4G LTE Network.

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