Teen Wolf S05E11: "The Last Chimera"

We all live in a chaotic, busy world full of constant emergencies and distractions and blaring fax machines and pagers going off and electric typewriters malfunctioning and tape decks spitting out our Color Me Badd cassingles. Sometimes you just need to get away from it all, but not ALL of us are rich like the people in Hollywood movies and can afford luxurious vacations in, like, Sacramento. That's why whenever I need to relax lately I simply pay a drifter to drill a hole in my head and then I lie down for a while. It's a semi-permanent solution to temporary problems and I am FINE with it. Virtually nothing good or productive ever happens within this soft skull of mine, so I'll take all the brain damage I can get. You know?

I'm going to be frank with you just kidding my name is Price and all my jokes are original. But the thing is, I am having a hard time remembering everything that happened in the first half of this season of Teen Wolf. Did last summer even happen? I have hired a private investigator to find out. In the meantime, my feeble attempt to jog my own memory came up with this: Stiles killed a monster in self-defense and then Scott got mad at him for it; Liam's girlfriend died from science so Liam beat up Scott until he died (temporarily); Malia's birth mom was so mean that Malia decided to dump Stiles; Kira skidded out of town as fast as her Prius could take her; Isaac and I eloped finally; Brett became a bisexual; Colton Haynes came out; Deputy Parrish's clothes kept burning off; uhhhh what else? Cenobites? It's all getting blurry now. I think the thing I remember best was my sense of disappointment in the finale for the main reason that it wasn't actually a finale. It was a MIDSEASON CLIFFHANGER. This was my fault. I should have known. It's not Teen Wolf's fault that I had assumed 5A and 5B would be distinctive storylines in the same way that 3A and 3B were. So the finale was a victim of expectations.

All that being said, this week's premiere of 5B (or, really, just 5x11) cleared up the half-dozen cliffhangers the best it could! There was honestly a lot going on—seemingly every character was running around with some kind of individual task—and I wasn't fully clear on most of their objectives. The main thing was Stiles' dad was dying and they needed to track down the chimera that had injured him. But where the chaos of the finale left me slightly confused, the chaos of this midseason premiere felt taut, suspenseful, and scary. With so many heroes and protagonists it was like a big hot stew of insanity, and you all know I LOVE some hot insanity stew. So yeah, "The Last Chimera" was kind of a blast. Man, I had missed this show. Let's talk about it!

The episode began with another of Teen Wolf's patented surrealist nightmare cold open imagery... a lady's feet walking over riverstones.

It was Lydia! And she was having the kind of dream that usually means you're wetting the bed. Fortunately in this case it was just a lobotomy dream.

Yes, Lydia had had a literal hole drilled into her head!

The culprit was Doctor Valack (who had found some very convincing putty to spackle over the hole in his forehead). He claimed that the lobotomy was actually going to "enhance" Lydia's banshee powers, which I guess explained how she was throwing around Hadoukens in the season premiere. But for now he just wanted answers about who Theo was and what he was even about. (Who WASN'T thinking about Theo at this point?)

In Lydia's dream she encountered Theo's dead sister in the river, and it turned out she'd been murdered and had her heart literally stolen!

From there it had been transplanted into Baby Theo, turning him into the Dread Doctors' first ever chimera. It must've been beginners' luck because Theo is obviously a masterpiece and almost every chimera they created after this was a sputtering, sad mess.

And that's when Theo and his gang of newly resurrected chimeras arrived at the institution. They needed Lydia, or at least they needed Lydia to quit doxxing Theo so much. This was not gonna be good! I trust him though.

Sheriff Stilinski had been attacked, mauled, beaten up, and insulted by an unknown chimera and now he was dying of some kind of venom. Guess who wasn't very thrilled about this?

Stiles was ticked! But mostly it was because he was trying to work out the insurance information with the dum-dum at the front desk. Ugh, what is worse, a possibly fatal monster mauling, or figuring out a co-pay? We may never decide.

Scott had died for a sec, but he was fine now. (Well, except for the gaping chest wound that wasn't healing and kept ruining all of his henleys). But after his mom had pep talked him into getting his pack back together, he tried to psych himself up in the mirror to go out and take care of BIZNESS. But it didn't last long.

Thus marked the first of several moments during this episode in which main characters simply collapsed for a few Zs. I honestly very much related.

Then I flipped over to Cinemax for a minute and saw this wonderful shower scene with Parrish rubbing his wet body in several dozen close-ups, only to be joined by a busty banshee with filthy feet. They kissed a lil, but it turned out this was just a dream—a horny dream—in which Lydia was trying to alert Parrish to where her unconscious body was.

It was very concerning to me that Parrish was having sexy shower dreams while driving a moving car, but luckily he did not end up having a head-on collision in the parking lot. Then he phoned his co-worker to tell her that he needed to find the girl from his sex dream and she did not seem too enthused about his work behavior lately.

Oh, Parrish, you literally hot rascal.





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