Things have officially picked up on Bitten. Some major shit went down on the third episode of Syfy’s
“werewolves plus fucking” show, and with it some surprisingly real
consequences. Plus, all the werewolves went to dance clubs!
We left the last episode with the pack finding a werewolf-mauled
little boy right on their property. The hunters find them almost immediately
and start a pissing match, I guess because the Stonehaven land is full of
wolves (more specifically, wolf tracks), which leads the redneck hunters to
believe the family are pro-child murder. After Elena freaks out one of the
hunter’s dogs and Clay gives a hunter a gentle pistol whip with his own gun,
they back off. Jeremy calls the police.
Elena decides to stay, obviously, and Jeremy forms
everyone’s plan of attack: Elena and Clay will return to the city to hunt the
Mutt, while Logan, Nick and Pete are sent to go find a Mutt named Karl Marsten,
who supposedly is up-to-date on Mutt goings-ons (but more up-to-date than Elena’s
files?! Madness!). Later, Jeremy takes Elena aside to show her that her boring
boyfriend, whose name I’ve forgotten and I can’t even be bothered to look up, has
sent her flowers, which Jeremy has hidden because Clay apparently can’t handle
knowing about them. But since Clay is a werewolf, he can smell them, and he can
also overhear Elena’s conversation with Dullard even though he’s outside. It’s
actually a well-done scene, with no dialogue, where a clearly consternated Clay
turns on his truck’s radio really loud.
This is when all the werewolves hit the clubs. Elena and
Clay, after randomly driving around town, find a flier for a club and decide to
go there, and, of course, the evil Mutt is hanging out. Meanwhile, Nick, Pete and
Logan head to Nick’s club to meet Marsten, who is suspiciously easy to find
(which, happily, was the show’s intention and not just bad writing). Let’s
start here; basically, Marsten is supercilious and clearly hiding something,
and he tells them he’d be glad to help as long as Jeremy thinks about letting
him have some territory.
Meanwhile at the other nightclub, things quickly get more
interesting. First of all, Elena and Clay hatch a plan where Elena enters the
club and herds the Mutt through the back, where Clay will be waiting; this is
neat because 1) it’s a sensible plan and 2) it does give us some proof that
Elena and Clay can be an effective team together.
Of course, this immediately goes to hell when Elena
confronts the Mutt, the Mutt essentially tells her to fuck off, Elena refuses,
the Mutt grabs her, and then Elena grabs the dude’s heart with the help of some
werewolf claws. She starts to threaten him, but before she really gets anywhere
the sensation of having five sharp claws jammed into his chest makes the Mutt
freak out a little, and he starts to transform — Elena barely manages to
toss him in an office in the back before he wolfs out.
So while it’s entirely Elena’s fault for mismanaging the
situation, this is a damned interesting conflict: Elena is charged with keeping
werewolves secret, but now there’s one transforming right behind her, and the
only thing between it and a crowd of dancers is Elena and a none-too-sturdy
door. Also, the Mutt is super-interested in killing people. Which, after
bursting through the office’s ceiling to get to the rafters and the balcony
level, he does.
He mauls two victims before Elena and Clay chase him
outside, where the cops have arrived. The sheriff shoots him a little, but then
a truck hits him — I have no idea where it comes from, who was driving, or if it
was even intentional — and splatters him everywhere. And then is when I learned
werewolves in Bitten do not regenerate.
All that’s left is for Clay to find the victim who was
bitten but hasn’t died, notice he’s a heroin addict, and then smother him
against his manly shoulder (it’s a weird way to kill a grown man). Elena is
upset, but Clay says he never would have survived the transformation process,
and he just saved the dude days of agony. To its credit, Bitten makes the
decision seem like it could go either way — Clay wanting to end the suffering
of some poor dude, or Clay somewhat remorselessly keeping the Pack clean of
ne’er-do-wells like heroin addicts.
All’s well that ends well! Kind of! Because now that the
crisis is over, Elena and Logan immediately book it for their home in Toronto, where
they discover their significant others have arranged a dinner date for the four
of them, which is super-boring but in which we learn members of the Pack are
apparently horribly shitty liars — a drunk third-grader could have sounded more
convincing than the two of them trying to get their story straight. Meanwhile,
Pete heads off to join his band on tour again, and Nick and his dad Antonio
decide to track Marsten and figure out what his deal is.
That leaves Jeremy and Clay, who are sad that Elena left;
admittedly, Clay is more the brooding, shirtless, going for a wolf-run sad.
Which is when Elena and Logan get a call telling them to come back. Because
when Clay went on his sad run, he found Pete. Dead. It’s ain’t over. Which is
sad for them, but great for us, because seriously, everything that happens in
Toronto is boring as shit.
Assorted Musings:
• Everyone seems super-worried about the hunters being on
their land, but they can control when they change into wolves and they can
control what they do as wolves. They don’t have to go out. What’s the problem?
Sure, it’s kind of annoying, but it’s not really a danger, is it?
• Elena and Clay knew where the Mutt lived. Is there a reason
they didn’t go back there and wait instead of wandering aimlessly around town
and hitting random dance clubs?
• There’s a scene somewhere in there of a dude meeting Dullard
to have him make a presentation to convince his business partners to sell
vodka. I assume this will lead to something somewhere down the line, but as it
stands, it’s the most useless, boring bit of television I’ve seen in some time.
We’re right in the middle of a werewolf murder investigation, on multiple
fronts, and all of a sudden we switch to some personality-less dude who’s asked
to help make a Powerpoint or something.
• In my notes I had actually written “Nick, Pete and Logan
make a good trio together.” Oh well.
• I also liked the scene where Elena tells Clay he can’t go in
the club because he’ll inevitably lose control and expose them, and Clay tells
her off because it’s completely unfair that she thinks he can’t control
himself. Not only is it a subtle indication of how much Elena still blames Clay
for burning her into a werewolf, if Clay was going to be nothing but a
perpetual hothead he was going to be almost as boring as Dullard (at least he
turns into a wolf sometimes, though).
• “International Mutt of Mystery.” I’m warming to you, Bitten. Don’t fuck it up now.
• That said, Bitten,
I’m very glad you had the dignity to have Elena say “It feels good to be home”
during her reunion sex with Dullard, instead of the more obvious and more awful
“It feels good to come home.”
• Werewolf Shit We Learned: Any bite from a werewolf can turn
you into a werewolf, as long as you aren’t mauled so badly you die of your
wounds naturally before you can turn. Although this will probably kill you
anyways.
• Werewolf Shit I’m Still Confused About: I thought following
the Pack rules made you a member of the Pack, but Marsten is clearly abiding by
Wolf Law and yet is still considered a Mutt. Also, is the Pack the same as the
family? Aren’t there more law-abiding werewolves out there than just these
guys? Because it sounds insane that there would be like six Official Werewolves
all living in upstate New York, but the Bitten novel’s Wikipedia page seems to
indicate it’s true.
• Philosophical question: If these guys can’t turn into
anthropomorphic wolf people can only turn into regular wolves, and can be
killed by anything a wolf can be killed by, are these guys really werewolves,
or just people who turn into wolves? Discuss.
