'Teen Wolf' Recap: Stiles, Scott And Allison Get Over Their Fears To Close The Door And Save Malia

Scott, Allison and Stiles face their inner demons to close the door to their subconscious while helping to save Malia in Teen Wolf’s “More Bad Than Good.”

Derek And Peter Are Rescued

The second episode of 3b picked up with Derek (Tyler Hoechlin) and Peter (Ian Bohen), strung up on the chain link fence being electrocuted. A man and an older woman torture and question them, “Where is the she-wolf?” they ask, cutting off Peter’s finger as an incentive. Derek and Peter either don’t know the answers to their questions or are refusing to talk. Later in the episode, they are rescued by the mystery girl who saved Isaac from the alpha pack at the beginning of season 3. Turns out, she’s a gun for hire and has been hired by Deucalian (season 3a’s big bad) to save Derek, and only Derek (HA), but she sets Peter free as well. Before they leave, they need her to recover something of theirs covered in mountain ash so that the werewolves can’t get to it. The girl riffles through the ash and takes out a box with the Hale family symbol (the one Derek has tattooed on his back) carved in.

Scott And Stiles Try To Save Malia

Back over in the forest, Scott (Tyler Posey) and Stiles (Dylan O’Brien) continue investigating the woods near the car crash that supposedly killed Malia, her sister and her mother. Scott runs off in search of the werecoyote he believes is Malia, but with her in full coyote form and Scott too afraid to change into a full-on wolf, she gets away from him. Back at the scene, Stiles investigates Malia’s coyote den. The clothes Malia was wearing on the night of the crash are strewn across the ground. Stuck at a dead end, Stiles and Scott decide to call in Stiles’ dad, Sheriff Stalinski (Linden Ashby), for reinforcements – it is a crime scene, Scott reasons. Scott and Stiles tell Sheriff their suspicion that Malia has survived all these years in coyote form and they even have a theory about the crash: what if, on the night of the full moon, Malia shifted for the first time, scaring her mother and inadvertently causing the car crash. Having no idea what is going on or how to control it, Malia freaked out, resulting in the maiming of the bodies of her mother and sister, and ran away, staying in coyote form out of some sort of guilt. The sheriff is skeptical at best, but either way, Stiles doesn’t have much time to convince him before Agent McCall (Matthew Del Negro) shows up with Malia’s angry father in tow to identify objects found in the coyote den as Malia’s. Sheriff is furious that McCall just casually brought the man to the scene of the crime, but Agent McCall brushes him off and tells him, in his most condescending voice, that he should start digging in the coyote den and find the bones of a nine-year-old girl.

At school the next day, Kira (Arden Cho) awkwardly gives Scott a stack of Internet research on Bardo before History class, taught by her father, begins. To start the class, Kira’s dad calls on Stiles to get up in front of the class and read from the textbook. Stiles gets up, but when he looks at the page, the letters start to shift and fall out of place. He can’t read. Stiles looks up, but everything is out of focus, and he looks like he’s about to pass out. Scott comes to his rescue and gets him out of the classroom and into the locker rooms. Stiles is convinced this is a dream, and he wants to wake up. Scott is able to calm him down and convince him it’s reality by having him count his fingers. (Stiles says that in dreams, you have extra fingers and toes.) When Stiles recovers, he is defeated. They can’t help Malia, he says. Scott is afraid to transform into his full wolf self for fear he won’t able to turn back, Allison (Crystal Reed) has lost her perfect aim and, as for Stiles, he’s “straight up losing my mind.”

After history class, Kira notices that Scott and Stiles haven’t come back for their backpacks so she decides to bring the bags to them. Somehow, Kira ends up alone in a very dark hallway with the bags. That’s when she sees the coyote. Malia, in r were coyote form, has come, and she goes straight for Kira. Kira drops the bags as she hides in the locker rooms. Just as it seems the coyote is going to get her, Scott appears and pushes a few lockers down, scaring the coyote away. When Stiles arrives, he says he knows what Malia was looking for: the baby doll they found in the car wreckage. Unbeknownst to Scott, Stiles took it from the scene the other night and stuffed it in his backpack.

After having somehow heard of the attack, Malia’s crazed father bursts into the school in a rage. When Sheriff Stalinski asks him to leave, he sees that Malia’s father is carrying a gun. Though he has a permit, that permit doesn’t extend to school property, and the Sheriff asks him to leave. Obsessed with the idea that a coyote killed his family, Malia’s father orders the Sheriff to find that animal, grabs the baby doll out of Stiles’ hands and goes home.

Fearing that Malia’s father will get too trigger-happy with the coyote and kill his own daughter, Stiles and Scott go to Deacon for help and come up with a plan. With help from Isaac (Daniel Sharman), Allison and Lydia (Holland Roden), they are going to try to track Malia’s scent through the woods, find her, and try to force her to shift – something she may not know how to do by herself. To get her to shift, Allison will have to shoot the coyote with a tranquilizer and Scott will have to try something he’s never done before: an alpha roar. It was Peter’s alpha roar that got Scott to shift unwillingly once, so he knows it can be done, he just needs to learn how. According to the ex-alpha pack twins, the only way Scott is going to be able to do it is if he lets go and unleashes his inner alpha. So, for the plan to work, both Scott and Allison will have to face their fears of their passage into limbo.

Stiles, Scott And Allison Close The Door

The next morning, Sheriff Stalinski pays Malia’s father a visit after a jogger almost walks into a coyote trap hidden along the hiking trails in the woods. The sheriff is not happy, and he tells Malia’s father that he better go with him and disarm every single trap he has set. Before they can leave, they realize that the coyote is in the house. Meanwhile, the group is out in the forest getting ready to set their plan in motion. Malia’s father shoots at the coyote and misses. Startled by the noise, Derek and Isaac go running into the forest to Malia. Isaac gets caught in a coyote trap, and helps Allison breathe through her fears and shoot Malia’s father with a tranquilizer to keep him from shooting his own daughter. Malia stands still in front of her father, with the baby doll at her feet. When her father is disarmed, she runs.

In the woods, Stiles gets a call from his father who warns him about the traps and tells him that the wolf came into Malia’s home and took the baby doll. Stiles puts two and two together and realizes that the doll belonged to Malia’s sister and Malia has been leaving the doll at the crash site as a memorial. He calls Scott and tells him that Malia is headed to the crash site, and before he can do anything else, Lydia freezes – she steps in a coyote trap. It’s a pressure trap, so if she steps off of it, the trap will close up around her leg, and she won’t heal like Isaac. Lydia tells Stiles to look for the Warning label on the side of the trap. There should be directions as to how to disarm it on the label. One problem: Stiles can’t read. Lydia, though clearly terrified, tells Stiles that he just needs to figure it out. Stiles always figures it out, and he doesn’t need directions to disarm the trap. Stiles gets it together and disarms the trap long enough for Lydia to jump out of harm’s way, and into Stiles’ arms.

Now, it’s up to Scott to save Malia. Seeing Malia, Scott begins to turn and ends up cutting her off at the crash site in full werewolf/Alpha form and roaring. It works – not only is Malia subdued into her human form, a body completely foreign to her, but Isaac also gets a shot of strength from the Alpha call and pries the coyote trap off of his leg with his bare hands. Malia is returned to her father, and Sheriff Stalisnki has closed the case he always wondered about.

Allison, Scott and Stiles may have closed the door in their minds, but someone is not going to let them live in peace for long. A mysterious figure, wearing black leather gloves, approaches the nemeton and rips out a weed from a crack in the stump. With the weed gone, strange fireflies start emerging from the stump – an entire swarm. As they come into the night, they form dark figures circling the stump. Deacon said that the nemeton acted as a kind of beacon for supernatural creatures. Could this be calling supernatural beings to Beacon Hills?

Teen Wolf airs on Mondays at 10 p.m. on MTV.

– Olivia Truffaut-Wong

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