7 Things About Teen Wolf That Still Make No Sense

When it first debuted in 2011, MTV’s Teen Wolf was a bit of a phenomenon. Fitting neatly into the supernatural genre of television that was popular at the time thanks to shows like The CW’s The Vampire Diaries, the Jeff Davis-created series soon amassed a devoted audience and remained popular through six seasons. Following high school student Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) who ends up becoming a werewolf after being bitten by an alpha the night before his sophomore year of high school and ends up (along with his friends) protecting his California town from all manner of supernatural threats, the series was popular enough that, six years after it ended, it even got a film continuation.

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But despite being popular, Teen Wolf had a lot of problems. With the series now streaming on Netflix, it’s easier than ever to look back at the supernatural teen drama and, well, have a lot of questions. Nearly a decade since the series concluded, there’s still a lot of things about Teen Wolf, its characters, and the mythology and lore the series sets up that still have us scratching our heads. Here are the seven biggest.

7) Kira’s Mom’s Age and Timeline Just Do Not Add Up

The back half of Teen Wolf’s third season introduced Kira Yukimura (Arden Cho), a new love interest for Scott who also happens to be a kitsune. Kira joins up with Scott’s pack and just in time as they find themselves dealing with a particularly challenging threat in the Nogitsune. Arden’s mother, Noshiko, is also a kitsune is a key part of the story given her history. That history is explored a bit in “The Fox and The Wolf” which outlines her time in a Japanese internment camp during World War II.

However, that’s not the only part of her past that we learn. It turns out that Noshiko is actually 900 years old and it’s not until the past 50-70 years that she goes from looking like she’s in her 20s to looking like a middle-aged woman. While the series establishes that various supernatural creatures age differently, it just seems weird that this one kitsune would look youthful for nearly a thousand years and then just suddenly… not.

6) Peter’s Resurrection

If we’re being honest, there’s a lot about the whole Hale family that is just weird, but Peter’s (Ian Bohen) resurrection is one that we’re still trying to understand. The primary villain of Season 1 (and the alpha that bites Scott to turn him into a werewolf), Peter dies at the end the first season but we’re not done with him. Season 2 sees Peter attaching his spirit to Lydia — whose Banshee abilities he trigged when he bit her — and then uses that to resurrect himself using a ritual that involved a Worm Moon and a blood sacrifice.

There’s just a lot about the whole thing that doesn’t make sense. How did Peter’s bite suddenly make Lydia get her Banshee powers? How was he able to manipulate her using a psychic connection? What happened to that connection once he managed to use her to bring himself back to life? And maybe the biggest question: if it was that easy to bring someone back from the dead, why weren’t they doing it more frequently? The whole thing is just puzzling.

5) The Beacon Hills High School Staff is Extremely Problematic

It’s pretty much a requirement for every teen drama that the adults in the series be as useless or problematic as humanly possible, but Teen Wolf takes that to an entirely weird level with just how awful the entire staff at Beacon Hills High School ends up being. First, there’s how easy it was for Gerard Argent (a hunter that happens to be the grandfather of a major character) to just roll up and become the principal but then there’s the whole thing where he was hunting and killing students who happened to be supernatural creatures. Two of the teachers were pretty homicidal themselves, particularly Miss Black who turned out to be an evil dark druid that sacrificed both students and teachers as part of her rituals. Mr. Douglas wasn’t great either, as he turned out to be a Nazi werewolf and serial killer. The guidance counselors weren’t great, either, with Miss Morrell trying to kill Scott, Derek, Cora, and Boyd when she worked with the alpha pack and Miss Monroe turning out to also be a hunter like Gerard.

The one that takes the cake, however, is Mr. Harris. He was just honestly an awful person who went out of his way to bully Stiles because he was frustrated with Stiles’ father, Sheriff Stilinski. We find out later that he was also working with Miss Blake and helping her with her sacrifices, though he ended up missing himself, only to re-appear in the movie seeking revenge. Seriously, someone needs to do better background checks on people working at this high school.

4) Jackson And His Changing Supernatural Classification

Jackson Whittemore (Colton Haynes) is probably the most confusing character in all of Teen Wolf and he was only a series regular for the first few seasons. When Jackson discovers that Scott has become a werewolf, jealous that Scott now has incredible athletic skills and is outshining him in lacrosse, he ultimately ends up going to Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin) to get the bite so that he could also be a werewolf. Except it doesn’t work. Jackson ends up becoming a Kanima, some sort of reptilian-like creature that is sort of explained as being a situation where werewolf transformation goes wrong because of emotional issues. In Jackson’s case, his issue is related to him being adopted after the death of his biological parents,

Jackson ends up briefly dying and is reborn as a Kanima/Werewolf hybrid but even that is confusing. How does a werewolf transformation go so wrong that someone turns into a reptile shifter? And then, how does dying briefly switch things up and turn him into a mix of both? It’s just a weird bit of jumbled lore that only works if you don’t think about it at all — but there are a lot of issues with lore in this show to distract you anyway.

3) Inconsistent Lore

Inconsistent lore is a huge issue in Teen Wolf. You have the whole Jackson and kanima issue, but there are other big questions as well. There’s also Kate Argent who, despite being scratched by the werewolf Peter Hale ends up turning into a werejaguar that is somehow connected to the Aztec legend of Tezcatlipoca. We still don’t understand how a scratch from an alpha werewolf can turn someone into an entirely different kind of were-creature (especially when you consider a jaguar is a kind of cat. There’s also the issue of Derek and his evolution. Somehow, Kate is able to age regress him back into being a teenager, he then ends up losing his powers only to be fatally stabbed and then come back from the dead now as a fully evolved wolf — meaning he can shift not only into his “werewolf” form but literally can be an actual wolf. There’s no actual explanation for why any of that happens. It’s all just sort of nebulously connected.

And none of this even gets into why so many wild and weirdly varied different kinds of supernatural creatures seem to have a reason to be in Beacon Hills. Literally none of it makes any sense. There are just too many things all crammed together.

2) Dr. Valack and His Changing Powers

Season 4 of Teen Wolf introduced the evil Dr. Gabriel Valack. A mad scientist of sorts, Valack was a patient at Eichen House who may or may not have performed trephination on himself to reveal his third eye and, thus, give himself the power of extrasensory perception. In Season 5, he starts drilling holes in other people’s heads as well to enhance their powers, which ends up killing them.

At some point in Season 5, his third eye is stolen and we then see him totally healed, but able to sort of shapeshift and disguise himself as other people. He ends up dying when Lydia (Holland Roden) unleashes a powerful Banshee scream and literally blows off half of his skull, but we still don’t understand how he goes from having a third eye to being able to disguise his appearance. Or how drilling holes in people’s heads amplify powers, for that matter.

1) Literally Everything About Malia

Introduced in Season 3, Malia Tate (Shelley Hennig), Malia Tate ended up becoming a major character through the end of the series but her entire story is confusing and makes no sense. She’s introduced as the long-lost adoptive daughter of Henry and Evelyn Tate and is believed to have died in a car crash along with her mother and sister. However, it’s discovered that Malia didn’t die and, instead, shifted into her coyote form because of the timing and the stress of the crash. That’s right: Malia is a werecoyote. She was stuck in her coyote form for eight years before being discovered by Scott and Stiles and returned to human form. We later see her going to high school pretty much as though nothing happened.

There is a lot to unpack here. First, we have her convoluted origin story as the daughter of Peter Hale (werewolf) and Corinne (werecoyote). We find out that she was placed for adoption by her aunt, Talia Hale, because Corinne resented her own daughter. However, the really questionable part of it all is that Malia goes from little girl who shifted into a coyote and lived isolated in the wild for eight years to being a pretty much fully adjusted teenager with seemingly little issue. The series sort of passingly has her have difficulties with math, but for the most part she just goes from being raised by wolves, metaphorically, to being normal. It’s weird and it still doesn’t make any sense.

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