Teen Wolf S05E01 "Creatures of the Night"

Time is a made-up concept we invented to help separate past from present and we mark it by seconds, hours, days, or in my case discarded Starburst wrappers. But time is useful in that we can use it to measure to the exact minute how empty our lives have been without Teen Wolf. No offense to every single other show, but if your name isn't Teen Wolf, get out of here. It is pretty much the only show that matters. To be fair, Teen Wolf must shoulder at least A LITTLE of the blame for abandoning us and ruining our lives since the end of Season 4, as it had just given us like 36 new episodes with very little hiatus in between and then suddenly BAM! A grueling 9 months of nothing. We could have all gotten pregnant and given birth to babies since Teen Wolf was last on! And we all did give birth, to babies named Sadness. Well, it's time to leave Lil Sadness in a basket by the firehouse because Teen Wolf is finally BACK and we can get on with our lives, much like the teenage monsters of Beacon Hills.

The concept of time loomed over Teen Wolf's Season 5 premiere "Creatures of the Night" in that the episode was all about the beginning of senior year, and what that means for the kids. College applications, acceptances, and relocations are all imminent, and several of our heroes were openly stressing about whether their circle of friends, their pack, could survive such a shift. Meanwhile, they'd all been marking the days since their LAST descent into unfathomable horror and noting that another unspeakable villain was due to arrive any second. But time also moved slowly as the episode took place over the course of only a few hours, and time also tricked us in that the beginning and end proved to be flash-forwards. Also there was the malfunctioning clock. And at one point everyone was reading Time Magazine. Just kidding. But anyway, "Creatures of the Night" was a sensational hour of television bursting with creative thought and emotion and was a huge, huge return to this incredible world we've come to know and love. Let's talk about it!

We began at Eichen House, which is German for the Mental Hospital That God Forgot. Things were not going great at this particular facility, which we could tell by the ominous crow chilling on the signage. But things got worse when we learned the episode's first twist:

Lydia had been institutionalized! And not only that, but she was surrounded by evil staff members who apparently had HAD IT with banshees and were NOT buying her supposed catatonia. (Thanks A LOT, Meredith.) She was in a bad state, in other words. As far as I could tell she was not being kept in the secret wing with all the supernatural creatures, so there were no Peter Hale cameos in this episode, sorry.

Then one of the doctors was like, "Don't worry I'm the nice one," and then started repeatedly stabbing her in the arm with a syringe like he was getting off on it. We were only two minutes in and this was already my worst nightmare. Thankfully Lydia finally WOKE UP.

And not only did Lydia wake up, she made a hospital escape so awesome that even Sarah Connor would've been like, "Damn." Uh, first of all, did you know that Lydia's banshee powers are like 1,000 times stronger than before?

She was seriously running around throwing scream-fireballs at everybody and knocking chumps to the ground right and left. Not only that but she seemed to have picked up some basic kung fu along the way. The fact that I laughed and clapped the whole way through this sequence should not surprise you, because you probably did too. Banshees get RESULTS now!

But just before Lydia could make her final escape into the rainy night, a familiar face arrived to inform her that she wasn't mentally well yet. It was my second-favorite werewolf twin, Aiden, and he raised a good point about Lydia's sanity in that she was seeing Aiden and he was extremely dead at the moment. So unless there was some serious werewolf voodoo going on (which was not out of the question), she was probably imagining things. But before the guards could taze her into submission, she had one last prophecy to mumble:

UH-OH!

Cue the new opening titles! Same incredible song (the best TV theme song of all time) with a few new noteworthy changes. Like, the absence of Tyler Hoechlin (sadface), but the addition of THIS guy:

It is official, that is his actual name. And, of course, the best and most evocative image was saved for the Jeff Davis title card, as always:

I meannnnnn. Hope we all like nightmares! That room must smell awful.

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