Teen Wolf: The Rewatch

As I mentioned in passing in that massive Teen Wolf Squee Post, my first attempt to get into the show failed rather miserably when the opening episodes did absolutely nothing for me. Now that I’ve cleared that first hurdle and established for my own record that the show not only improves past its rocky beginnings, but improves out of motherfucking sight, it occurred to me it would be an interesting scientific exercise to go back to those opening episodes and see whether they looked any better in retrospect, now I’ve done such a thorough job of biasing my reactions in their favour. There’s precedent for this sort of thing – back in the days of my brief and only mildly embarrassing fannish fling with Smallville, a couple of weeks of mainlining every Clark/Lex fic on the web with the fervour of the newly converted transformed my reactions to episode 1 of the same series all the way from the original ‘meh’ to ‘yeah, it’s still cheesy, but heeeee people really weren’t kidding about the amazing chemistry Lex has with, like, everything, yowzah!’ Would Teen Wolf go the same way?

As it turned out, even on a rewatch, the first three episodes are... not good.

( Some elaboration on that point, which perhaps inevitably turns into more rambling about how Teen Wolf STILL grows into a better show than anything else in the same genre I have seen since I don't know when. )