Teen Wolf – Memory Found

By starrymag | January 31, 2017

By: Kim Olson

 

Beacon Hills is rapidly becoming a ghost town! Liam (Dylan Sprayberry) is trying to keep the Ghost Riders away from Scott (Tyler Posey) for as long as possible so Scott can open a new rift. Liam wants to bring all the Ghost Riders to him, distracting them, so they leave Scott alone. With no one else to turn to, except Noah Stilinski (Linden Ashby), Liam asks Theo (Cody Christian) for help. In a soon-to-be ghost town, there’s no room for trust or horsing around. Before Papa Stilinski lets Theo out of his holding cell, he asks him to tell him just one thing about his son. Theo says, “He was smart enough not to trust me.” While breaking Theo out of jail, the Ghost Riders show up and erase Papa Stilinski. All the Stilinski men are now gone! Liam and Theo only have each other. Liam grabs Theo’s hand and runs! They locate a police car and try to start it by finding just the right key in a box full of keys. “This isn’t even a car key!” exclaims Theo. Once they get the car up and running, Theo backs it up and runs over a Ghost Rider!

 

They drive to the hospital where they barricade themselves in the morgue. “The Ghost Riders go after the living, so we hide with the dead,” says Liam. This is how Theo’s recurring nightmare always starts! “I’m not getting in one of those,” he says, referring to where they keep the dead bodies. The Ghost Riders catch up to them anyway so Liam and Theo team up to take them down, forcing them to bond! Fangs out and eyes glowing, they charge at them and kick their asses! They shoot the Riders. Theo kills a Ghost Rider by cutting off its head, causing it to bleed out. Liam and Theo prepare to fist bump in victory, but…No. More Ghost Riders appear. When did the Ghost Riders grow in numbers?! There are at least six! They’re everywhere. They just keep coming! It never ends! Theo drags Liam back in the elevator, turns around and charges at the Ghost Riders, redeeming himself by being bait to save Liam.

 

To open the rift, Scott, Malia (Shelley Hennig) and Lydia (Holland Roden) need to remember Stiles (Dylan O’Brien). To get memories back, they’re going to freeze Scott in an ice chamber that will slow his heart-rate and put him in a hypnotic state. While under, Scott will have to concentrate on Stiles and find him in any memory. Good or bad. Deterring them is the fact that the ice chamber will get cold enough to kill Scott. It’ll freeze his core temperature past anything a human can survive. If he becomes unconscious they’ll lose him. If they fail, the Ghost Riders will erase all of them and they’ll be forgotten. No pressure.

 

Scott quickly gets lost in his memories. He hears Stiles’ voice coming from all directions. It’s just a whole lot of noise. “Why is it starting to feel like you’re Batman and I’m Robin?” “You have something, Scott. Whether you want it or not, you can do things that nobody else can do.” It’s too much information for Scott. He sees himself hugging Stiles at the hospital after Stiles learns he has frontotemporal dementia. Scott is getting buried under all his memories. He can’t focus. He hears Stiles say, “We always have a Plan B.” Scott can’t keep up with his memories! He even remembers the most random memories. He hears Stiles yell, “You trust everyone!” Scott is on memory overload! So much is happening! He hears Stiles say, “Seriously, I don’t understand how you survive without me.” Scott’s memories are literally going to kill him!

 

To help Scott, Lydia figures they’ll have to treat this more like actual hypnosis – use images to guide through memories. “Like a stairwell. The steps take you down through one year of your life to the next. That’s how they regress you back,” she says. She tells Scott to imagine he’s standing in the corridor in the high school where all the lockers are and all his memories are in the lockers. They’re locked away behind each one. Every memory of Stiles is in a separate locker. Scott opens a locker. He hears Stiles’ voicemail saying, “This is Stiles and you missed me.” Lydia tells him to find another memory. Scott is getting frustrated. He doesn’t think he can do this. He’s getting too cold and he can’t figure it out. There are memories, but he doesn’t know which one is the right one. Malia suggests maybe it’s not enough to simply remember Stiles. “What if it’s some kind of a connection he’s supposed to make because of a memory? Like an emotional connection?” she asks. Scott opens up another locker and picks up a flare. Flashback: Scott and Stiles are standing in the parking lot of Motel Glen Capri. Because his mind was playing tricks on him, Scott is standing in a puddle of lighter fluid ready to drop the flare and kill himself. Trying to talk him out of it, Stiles says, “You’re not a no one. You’re someone. You’re my best friend and I need you. Scott, you’re my brother.” Reaching for the flare, Stiles continues, “All right, so if we’re gonna do this then I think you’re just gonna have to take me with you.” With the flare in hand, he throws it to the side. Before he can remember the explosion that caused, Scott is pulled from the chamber because his heart rate dropped and he was going to die!

 

Looking around and seeing no rift, Scott is disappointed. “Nothing happened. It didn’t work,” he says. He insists on going back in. “It was working,” he says. “Something was happening. I could feel it.” But Lydia won’t allow it. “Nothing was happening out here. Nothing, Scott. All we saw was you freezing to death!” she says. It didn’t work because they wasted so much time trying to figure out how to do it. They didn’t know what they were doing yet. By the time Scott was getting somewhere, he was going to freeze to death so they had to pull him out. He was the guinea pig per say. Scott doesn’t want to give up now. Malia says, “We’re not. It’s my turn.”

 

Malia has plenty of memories of Stiles, too. He was her boyfriend. He lost his virginity to her. And if it’s all about connection, Stiles was the first person she connected with in a long time. Lydia opens the chamber for Malia and talks her through the hypnosis. She guides her to the abandoned library where books are strewn all over the floor. She tells her the books on the shelves are her memories, everything that’s ever happened to her. She tells her to find the shelf that has all her memories of Stiles and find a memory where she made some kind of connection with him. The first book Malia opens is when she first met Stiles and clocked him! “I definitely connected,” she says. Lydia tells her to find something else. Malia opens a book of Stiles leaving her while she’s dying. Stiles says, “I gotta leave for a few” and Malia asks, “You’re coming back, right?” Stiles says, “I’d never leave you behind.” The rift is opening, slightly.

 

While Malia is dying in her memory, she’s also dying in the chamber. She can’t breathe. She’s freezing to death! Scott pulls Malia out of the chamber and wraps her in a blanket. Lydia takes the option of the chamber off the table. “It’s too dangerous,” she says. “We’re not going to save anyone by freezing you guys to death.” But Malia is stubborn! She fights her, saying, “But it was working, wasn’t it? There was a light and strange noise.” “No Stiles,” Lydia says. “But I remember him now. I can see him in my head,” says Scott. “He’s more real now than he’s ever been. If we can bring Stiles back, we can bring everyone back.” “There’s a huge difference in being a vivid memory and an actual corporeal human being,” says Lydia, shutting down the conversation.

 

Scott and Malia aren’t done trying to open the rift. They insist Lydia give it a try. They say she needs to be the one to remember Stiles because she has the strongest connection to him! She’s going to be the one to completely open the rift that lets Stiles out! Scott tells Lydia, “It’s all about the connection. When I was remembering him, I was also remembering the two of you together. I don’t think anyone had a connection like you guys.” When they think of Stiles they think of Lydia. Literally, Scott’s first memory of Stiles was Stiles hurting because Scott kissed Lydia. He heard Stiles say, “You kissed her, Scott. You kissed Lydia.” In his memories, Scott saw Lydia being Stiles’ emotional tether. Not just someone to hold him under, but someone who can pull him back. Someone who, by definition, has a strong connection to him. He saw Stiles save Lydia’s life, from Eichen House. He even saw Lydia in the moment he and Stiles had their strongest connection. She was watching Stiles save Scott’s life. Even Malia has to admit she witnessed Lydia and Stiles’ unequivocal connection. It may break her heart and make her cry, but she can’t deny reality. When it comes to Stiles, Lydia is always the one who’s there. Lydia seems afraid to take a stroll down memory lane. Maybe she’s scared of what she’ll find if she does? She says if they’re going to attempt this, and that’s a big if, they have to do it the old fashioned way. They have to actually hypnotize her, because she won’t last two minutes in the chamber.

 

Bring on Lydia, who has so many memories of Stiles! Scott reads the induction script, leading Lydia into her hypnosis. In a soft, relaxed, clear voice he tells her, “Take a deep breath and look at the candle. Feel the muscles in your body begin to relax. Your hands relaxing. Your eyelids relaxing. As you relax, imagine you’re sitting in front of a TV. When you turn the TV on, it’s going to play memories from your life. The remote gives you total control. You can play any memory you want. All you have to do is hit the button.” Lydia imagines she’s sitting in front a TV in a classroom. She has the remote in hand and turns on the TV. The first memory she sees is of her lying on her bed, asking “What the hell is a Stiles?” when Stiles visits her in her bedroom just to make sure she’s ok. Scott tells her to try to find a memory of Stiles where she felt a connection with him. She goes deeper into her hallucination. On the TV, she sees Stiles ask her for a dance. “Pass,” she says. “You know what?” says Stiles. “Let me try that again. Lydia, get off your cute little ass and dance with me now.” “Interesting tactic,” she says. “I’m gonna stick with no.” In the real world, Lydia moves her hand like she’s actually clicking a remote. On the TV, she sees herself stepping out of the car and Stiles taking her hand to enter the dance. In the real world, she says the words from her memory aloud. In response to her memory of Stiles saying, “I’m the only one who knows how smart you really are,” she says, “Fields Medal…. Nobel doesn’t have a prize for mathematics.” Lydia keeps looking for Stiles in her memory. She finds him in one after another. She sees herself standing naked in the middle of the forest and he comes to her rescue when she asks, “Is anyone gonna get me a coat?” She hears Stiles tell her, “Sometimes… things you wouldn’t think would be a good combination end up turning out to be, like, a perfect combination. You know, like two people together, who nobody ever thought would be together ever.” She also remembers him being confident in her abilities, before she even knew she had any. “I’m not psychic,” she says. “You’re something!” he exclaims. She keeps watching the fanvid of her memories of herself and the boy she loves.

 

Lydia hears voices coming from somewhere in the school. She gets up from her desk, leaves the classroom and follows the voices to the locker room. There she finds herself sitting on the floor comforting Stiles from a panic attack he’s having. She hides and watches the scene unfold. She’s practically having an out of body experience, walking around and literally watching her younger self! In the memory, she tells Stiles, “Just try and think about something else. Anything else…. Happy things. Good things. Friends. Family….” She tells him to just try and slow his breathing, but he can’t. She shushes him and tells him to look at her. She grabs his face and kisses him! He stops focusing on his panic attack and kisses her back. When they pull away, he asks, “How’d you do that?” She says, “I read once that holding your breath could stop a panic attack so when I kissed you, you held your breath.” “I did?” he asks. “Yeah, you did,” she replies, coyly. In the real world, Lydia says, “That’s when it happened.”

 

It’s like the sun came out! “When I kissed him,” she says. “That’s when it all changed.” She fell in love with him. Lydia fell in love with Stiles. Lydia is in love with Stiles. That day was monumental for Lydia. She woke up stronger – a survivor. She didn’t feel the need to hide the fact that someone had tried to kill her and she survived. Then, later at school, she kissed Stiles and fell in love with him. That day changed her life! Everything after, she was in love with him. When she laid on his bed and he wrapped the red string of fate around her fingers? In love. When he held her and protected her? In love. When he saved her life, from Eichen House? In love. They were in love with each other junior year. They just never said it out loud!

 

In the real world, Lydia starts crying. Sobbing, she remembers the last time she saw Stiles. She says, “I saw him. I was there. I was the last person to see him. The Ghost Riders they… when they took him.” She remembers the last thing he said to her, when he said goodbye. “Lydia, look at me. You’re gonna forget me…. You will. Just remember… Remember, I love you.” Choking on her sobs, Lydia says, “I never said it back. I never said it back.” She was in love with him and she never said it back. Lydia makes the biggest emotional connection – love. She fell in love. She remembered falling in love, real love. She remembered the love of her life! Lydia kept her promise. She didn’t forget about him. Their love is going to save him.

 

Lydia’s memories and connection to Stiles create a GAPING HOLE in the universe! The whole room shakes and a big green light shines through. A rift has definitely just formed! Lydia runs to check out the commotion and sees someone stepping out of the rift. “Stiles?”

 

Best Lines:

• Malia: Think it’ll hold them off? Scott: Probably not. Lydia: Definitely not. Malia: You guys aren’t hoping I’m going to be the optimist are you?
• Theo: Please tell me that you brought the key card. Papa Stilinski: I also brought my gun. Theo: And your sense of humor. That is great.
• Papa Stilinski: I’ll put so many bullets in your head, God won’t even recognize you. Theo: I’m an Atheist. Fire at will.
• Lydia: This is my first attempt at trying to open a dimensional rift in space-time. So I’m kind of fumbling around in the dark.
• Lydia: My mother had a hypnotist who helped her quit smoking. She had me see the same one when I was 10. Scott: You smoked when you were 10? Lydia: No. I bit my fingernails.