The following contains spoilers for the season finale of Teen Wolf
by Kylie Klein:
The Season finale of Teen Wolf has just aired, and by now we know what some of us have been keeping quiet about for the past few days: Derek Hale has left Beacon Hills. The Alpha is no more.
Despite rumours that heart throb Tyler Hoechlin will be back for the second half of the season, with the way season 3A of Teen Wolf ended, it certainly looks like Derek Hale is gone for good.
Having lost his Alpha powers to save his sister and with presumably nothing left to keep him in the sleepy NorCal burg, the final moments of “Lunar Eclipse” see Hale supplanted as top dog by “True Alpha” McCall, packing up his life in a carry-all and getting the hell out of dodge.
“I honestly don’t know if he’s ever coming back…” Scott says over scenes of Cora and Derek closing the door on his loft.
It should be a moment of triumph for a character who has suffered so horribly since the show began. But, thanks to a patchily written, plot hole riddled season, I’m not sure I’m ready to say farewell to Beacon Hills’ resident bad boy with a heart of jello.
The troubling nature of the teenage Alpha narrative aside, Teen Wolf’s season 3A was brutal for Derek, a character creator Jeff Davis has repeatedly and gleefully said he enjoys making suffer.
In ep2 “Chaos Rising” Derek discovers his beta, Erica, dead.
In ep3 “Fireflies” Derek is mauled by his deranged sister Cora and his unhinged beta, Boyd.
In ep4 “Unleashed” he is staked through the heart and threatened unless he agrees to kill his own pack.
In ep7 “Currents” he is forced to murder Boyd against his will
In ep8 “Visionary, we see that Derek’s beta blue eyes were a result of killing his first love, Paige, an act of mercy that has scared him for life.
And in the final three episodes, “The Overlooked”, “Alpha Pact” and “Lunar Ecllipse”, Derek discovers the one bright spot in his grim life, his girlfriend, is the psychotic mass murderer who’s been plaguing town since the beginning of the season, brought to life by blood he spilled killing Paige years before. Adding insult to bloody injury, bratty sidekick Stiles Stilinski taunts him for it.
That’s 9 out of 12 episodes of suffering right there, thanks Jeff.
And yet, as Derek slides closed the door on his loft at the end of “Lunar Eclipse”, it’s as if all this pain was all for nothing.
Why?
Derek is a character cut from the same cloth as Buffy’s Angel, Professor Snape, and even Rebel Without a Cause’s Jim Stark – a direct descendent of Byronic anti-heroes, men who have suffered and who either seek redemption for their sins, real or imagined, or have given in to them, wallowing in their dissolute natures. They glower and loom, lurking in the dark, romantic corners of our bedrooms, waiting to offer us all manner of vile caddery. And we bloody love them for it.
From the start Derek was positioned as this kind of character – in “Pilot” (ep1, S1) he has Scott’s inhaler, suggesting he is responsible for the dead girl in the woods. He continues to loom, leer and lurk his way through the first season, a constant source of violence and threat.
But we just knew he couldn’t be a killer. Mostly on account of his unfeasibly attractive face. But also because of the moments when he’d step up to the edge of kindness.
When he reveals the dead girl is his sister and he’s here to find her killer, it’s all over. He’s got us in the palm of his furry paw.
Despite knowing he’s secretly a good guy, Derek’s baggage – the stuff we don’t really learn about until Kate appears in ep 4, season 1 “Magic Bullet” and then hear more about later, in “Visionary” – always rears it’s many-horned head and gets in the way, though.
Derek can’t trust anyone (at times, not even himself), he makes terrible choices (A pack made up of teen aged misfits? Biting Jackson? Seriously?) and nothing really changes for him.
But after the shocking final of season 2, “Master Plan” where Derek’s bodily agency is taken from him and he’s used a catalyst to poison the season’s Big Bad, change does seem to come for Derek.
When Derek makes his entrance in ep 1, season 3, “Tattoo” he doesn’t loom out of the darkness as a threat, he is instead the rescuer, Scott’s saviour in fact, claiming his Alpha status and dishing out some pretty fierce smackdown on the interloper before putting Scott in his place.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” He asks Scott, every inch the wolfy pater familias.
It’s a far cry from season 1, ep 5, “The Tell” where he asks Scott if he’d rather do his homework or not die, as if school is little more than a petty distraction to real life.
As season 3 begins Derek is framed as a hero, someone dependable who, as he searches for his lost Betas, is looking to set his past mistakes right.
So what’s Davis’s purpose for setting Derek up this way? It’s no secret that Jeff Davis likes his mythology – season 3 plays with Norse myths of druids and ritual, while the werewolves’ symbols come from ancient Celtic folklore. This love of folklore seems to extend to the new role Derek takes at the start of season. Only, here Davis’ arc for Derek is a medieval one – the Knight Errant, who having found his cause, also finds himself.
Think St George and the Dragon, or Perseus slaying the Kraken, this is a story in which the hero takes a journey, defeats a monster, finds “love” and is finally free to go about his life. It’s a metaphor for overcoming the self in order to find meaning and peace. It’s also a religious metaphor for the soul searching for God. Derek’s story fits the ancient pattern well.
In ep 3, “Fireflies”, Derek literally goes into the monster’s den – the underground cavern hiding horrors or path to hell represented by the boiler room in which his deranged progeny are trapped. There’s even a damsel in distress represented by teacher Jennifer Blake’s pounding heartbeat.
Derek goes into this place to subdue the monsters (who are also innocent victims) and rescue another innocent, seemingly in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Derek uses his Alpha strength – something only he is capable of – to defeat the raging werewolves. In this scene the camera makes much of Derek’s apparent suffering to control the betas (I consider Cora a cipher for Erica here, as it’s likely would have been Erica in her place if the actress Gage Golightly had stayed in the role.) – this the hero facing his demons and over coming them. The betas were his responsibility, and he’s taking it.
Their attack on him is a scouring. His pride is literally flayed from him.
Derek goes through unimaginable pain and physical distress at the claws of two people he loves – their lack of control is his burden to bear and it leaves a bloody physical mark on him. By the end of Derek’s night of suffering he is a shadow the haughty Alpha we saw rolling his eyes at Chris Argent at the start of the episode.
Now the hero is clean enough to receive his reward – according to mythology, it’s the favour of the damsel he’s rescued, and the “crown” that comes with her. (This is a an old fashioned cliche, and not very deftly handled here.)
The episode ends with Derek literally claiming Jennifer Blake’s hand and beginning their relationship, having saved the day – or in this case, night.
But the “crown” that comes with Miss Blake’s hand is a pretty thorny one.
After this the season seems to fall apart. Having positioned Derek in the role of hero, Davis tears him down again by letting the character fall back on old habits.
Derek stops communicating again, stops trusting, and by ep 4 “Unleashed”, Derek is severing ties with his pack, kicking Beta Isaac out (to protect him from the Alpha threat) and turning his back on Scott.
It’s tiring, tedious and above all frustrating when we have already seen Derek begin his ascent to the Alpha throne.
It’s a result, of course, of the wider story in which Miss Blake is a villain, using Derek to confront her tormentors.
With this unfolding around him, and the ‘growth’ of other characters taking centre stage, it’s as if Davis doesn’t know what to do with Derek other than tear him down.
In the wider scope of the show there are too many top-dogs, and with the Alpha as evidence of how badly that can go, something needs to give.
Naturally, it’s Derek.
In a grim echo of his scouring at the start of the season, Derek again faces his demons, this time in the form of Jennifer Blake. They fight, with Jennifer gaining the upper hand until Derek has no choice but to kill her or die himself.
However, rather than “slay the dragon”, this Derek takes a noble step back.
“..Something my mother told me,” he says to Jennifer. “I’m a predator, I don’t have to be a killer.”
If he cannot slay the dragon, what’s the point of him?
In the final scenes of the last episode of the season, Derek is seen packing his bags and leaving town, possibly, Scott tells us, for good.
His “crown”, his Alpha status, has been sacrificed to save his sister, passed to Scott, a child who seems ill-equipped to lead (despite the best attempts of the writers to convince us otherwise).
Derek, framed as a knight errant at the start of the season, has become a travelling Ronin in the last ep. A kind of littlest hobo, off to find his next big adventure, having left the children of Bacon Hills in safe hands.
It is as if his tragic storyline this season was a slave to all Davis’ favourite tropes and characters, ending up a hot mess of ideas that simply doesn’t ring true. If leaving was ever an option for Derek, why is he only leaving now?
Of course, the writer is a slave to the whims of actors too. After three seasons, it’s not unimaginable that Tyler Hoechlin might wish to try other roles (at the time of writing, Hoechlin’s status in the cast has not been confirmed), but it seems a pity that Derek wasn’t given a nobler end, more fitting of his role as Knight Errant – death at the hands of his lover, perhaps, making the ultimate sacrifice for the lives of his pack.
DarkMedia contributor Kylie Klein covers Teen Wolf. She’s passionate about pop culture – from classic Doctor Who to the DC Multi-verse and everything in between. In her spare time she wrangles gore and produces movies with Typhoid Films. Follow her on Twitter at @KokoKabana and check out her blog at tiny.cc/popassassin.
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