 |
| Courtesy MTV |
It’s Mischief Night in Beacon Hills. This involves toilet paper and eggs, and a lot of them. More importantly, it’s also Coach’s birthday. I've missed Coach. Stiles and Scott have a little birthday tradition of pranking on poor Coach every year. They continue this year by rigging all of his furniture to fall apart. In typical Coach fashion, he is not amused.
There are a few new faces in town today as well. A mass murderer of children is brought to the hospital for surgery. Barrow is one creepy character. Scott’s mom gets the dubious honor of doing his pre-surgical interview. She can’t help but ask him why he killed those kids. He cackles maniacally that they had glowing eyes. That’s interesting. We know a few kids with glowing eyes too. Guess what they find when they do the surgery? He has a tumor full of live flies in his stomach. It ruptures, spewing flies everywhere. As everyone screams, Barrow sits up on the operating table, and very calmly stabs the doctor with a scalpel. He then presumably traipses off with an open hole in his abdomen. Don’t worry though, Sheriff Stilinski and Scott’s dad are on the case.
Ethan and Aidan show back up as well. They stop Scott in the high school parking lot trying to convince him to let them into his pack. He, Stiles, and Isaac all remain suspicious of them, and decline their offer. What else are two lonely werewolf boys to do, but decide to go back to high school? They’d like to think it’s a way to get Scott to trust them, but it’s really for dating purposes.
Where would be the first place you would hide if you were an escaped mental patient? It sure wouldn't be high school, but I guess that’s why Barrow is crazy. Lydia and Aidan decide to get reacquainted in Coach’s office. Fortunately the devastation wrought by Stiles's prank makes them decide to try the Guidance Office instead. As they hastily leave we see that Barrow was behind the door, stapling himself closed with a staple gun he found on the floor. However, Lydia displays her amazing banshee powers all day by constantly hearing the buzzing of flies. Soon the Sheriff and posse show up to search the school for the escapee.
With the school crawling with the Sheriff’s people, Allison manages to sneak home to peruse the Bestiary for information on flies. While, the teen wolves all go on the hunt for Barrow throughout the bowels of the school. This leaves Lydia and Stiles upstairs. They decide that Barrow is going to use the boiler to blow up the school. So, Stiles decides to pull the fire alarm and evacuate everyone in the school. A week of detention doesn't stop him from breaking back into school that night though. He and Lydia discover that Barrow was hiding in the chemistry closet. That would be why the wolves couldn't smell him. They also discover that Barrow was after Kira all along. Hmm. Curious.
As if the day wasn't weird enough, Kira’s dad invites Scott over for dinner on the pretext of thanking him for saving her from the coyote. To me, it seems a little weird for a dad to be trying to get his daughter a date. There is one thing that we learn during dinner; Kira’s mother has a very long important Japanese lineage. She also has family in the area. We also learn that Scott has never had sushi and doesn't know about the joys of wasabi. After he chokes down dinner, he retreats to Kira’s bedroom where she brings him pizza. Pizza is the best way to anyone’s heart if you ask me.
As Kira walks him out to his motorcycle they exchange shy smiles. Scott then gets on his bike and Barrow runs up behind him and knocks him off it again with a tire iron. You have to admit, the man has timing. Scott wakes up to Stiles and Lydia hovering over him, and they shortly chase after Barrow and his captive. Now what would a crazed electrical engineer want with a poor awkward high school student?
Barrow hauls Kira off to an electrical substation he used to work at. While he is wasting time until our heroes can show up, he tells her about a movie called "Village of the Damned." Like the evil children in the movie, he’s convinced that there are children with glowing eyes walking among us. They have ‘paralyzed’ everyone and that’s why no one listened to his warnings. He decides to ‘galvanize’ everyone into action by electrocuting Kira. He takes a very large sparking cable and waves it at the terrified girl.
About this time Scott shows up just in time to blindly walk into the room. Barrow knocks him down again and advances toward Kira with his sparking cable held aloft. He ignores Scott’s protestations and touches the girl with the live cable. Sparks and a big explosion throw him backward, where he appears to be unconscious on the floor. As Scott watches, all the sparks and lightning arcing around the room slowly coalesce around Kira and are drawn into her hands. She looks a little worried. That’s the last we see of her though, as all the power shuts off all over Beacon Hills.
During all of this drama, Allison and Isaac have been studying the Bestiary for clues about the flies. As is prone to happening in these situations, they both end up shirtless. Thankfully, Allison’s father walks into the room and puts a stop to that. I fear it won’t be for long though. He calls Allison into his office where we hear him scream, “Another werewolf?” He has my sympathies and I like Isaac. While they leave him alone in Allison’s room to think about things, the power starts to flicker. As the last bulb goes out, three masked figures appear and the door slams shut. Allison and her father beat on the outside of the door as the sounds of Isaac being beaten continue. That should teach him not to hit on the ex-girlfriend of his pack Alpha.
Have you been wondering about Derek and Peter? Well, you can keep wondering. They have managed to make it back to Beacon Hills at least. They’re back in Derek’s warehouse loft opening the artifact they recovered last episode. Inside the canister, are Derek’s mothers claws. They are supposed to be the only part of her that survived the fire that killed his family. Eww.
Anyway, Derek needs to ask her a question, and is going to use Peter, the claws, and some hocus pocus to do it. Whatever his mother tells him, doesn't look to be good news from the expression on his face, but hopefully we will find out next episode. It is curious that Peter has not shown any Alpha powers after claiming he had them when he killed poor little Jennifer last season. I guess Peter will stab someone in the back when it suits him.
The next episode of "Teen Wolf," “Illuminated” airs Monday, January 27 at 10 p.m. ET on MTV.