REVIEW: Fourth season of ‘Teen Wolf’ disappoints long-time fans

SPOILERS AHEAD: If you have not watched through the end of season 3, this article will contain spoilers.

MTV’s supernatural drama Teen Wolf has never been “good” necessarily, but it has certainly been a whole lot better than its fourth season.

My fellow BHS senior and Teen Wolf junkie Marianne Dodson perfectly described the season as “an incredibly sad attempt at tying Japanese internment camps, Greek mythology, and mental illness into one coherent plotline.”

Teen Wolf started out as your typical MTV show, not good, but all of the actors are attractive, so you watch it anyway. The second and third seasons were the peak of Teen Wolf, when Stiles Stilinski (Dylan O’Brien) and Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) got new hairdos. The show really matured in these two seasons. The audience connected with the characters, and the writing hit a level slightly above teen drama.

The show received better than expected feedback which resulted in the writers trying to cram in a bunch of new characters and plot lines into the next season. They assumed that the audience wanted more, more, more, but the reason the show was so good in the first place was because of the familiar characters and easy-to-follow plot lines.

The fourth season introduced around four new characters and got rid of two of the best ones. Allison Argent (Crystal Reed) was killed off in the last episode of the third season, and at times in the fourth, it almost felt like she never existed. Isaac Lahey (Daniel Sharman) completely disappeared with no explanation. Granted, the actors did chose to leave the show, but it is the writer’s job to send them off in a way that makes sense. Lack of explanation became a common theme in the fourth season.

The storyline as a whole made no sense. The main characters discovered a list of names of supernatural creatures that were supposed to be killed. After many efforts to discover the maker of this list and put an end to the murders, the mystery was finally solved. But that was it. The maker of the list was revealed and then that storyline just kind of vanished. Then there was a new storyline brought up in the last episode, and by the end of it, I had no idea what was happening.

Another major downfall of the season was my favorite female character, Lydia Martin (Holland Roden) got really weird. She was introduced in the beginning as a snobbish, rich girl and slowly revealed her intelligence and kind heart along with supernatural powers. In the last season, most of her redeeming qualities vanished and she was portrayed as a disturbed, paranoid, fortune teller of sorts.

The only good thing remaining in Teen Wolf is beautiful, charming, and hilarious Dylan O’Brien.

Overall, the season was completely muddled, with none of the storylines making sense, and all of the good aspects (aside from Dylan O’Brien) of the show being thrown away. Hopefully, when the series returns for a fifth season this summer, the writing will venture back to the same quality of the beginning.