Teen Wolf S4 Ep18 – Riddled

If we thought that last week’s episode was intense, “Riddled” raised the bar even higher. The episode starts out with a panicked call from Stiles in the middle of the night saying that he’s been taken, and the tension only rises from there. Even without seeing his face, hearing Stiles’ unstable voice got my heart pumping with anticipation for another roller coaster of an episode.

Stiles is able to tell Scott very little about where he is. He thinks it feels like an industrial basement, which isn’t much to work with—especially since Stiles is begging Scott not to get Stiles’ dad involved. As his phone is dying, I wonder why he’s not conserving the battery until the police could trace a call from it. Even if they couldn’t get an exact lock on the location, narrowing it down would be helpful. But this is Teen Wolf, so I digress…

Kira’s family is also proving to be increasingly important to the overall arc of the season. Aside from making Kira seem like a fleshed out character, it’s clear that they’re somehow connected to the kitsunes. When changing a light bulb, Kira’s mom displays the same powers of electricity that Kira does, which means Kira’s skills are likely inherited.

Lydia, being a Banshee, hears Stiles calling out for help and rushes to his house. Even though she seems to be losing her mind (who isn’t these days?), she’s also one of the voices of reason this episode. She decides they need to call the Sheriff, Stiles’ dad. Good job, Lydia.

Dylan O’Brien has another excellent week displaying his acting skills, and his scenes only get better as the episode continues. Crying out seeing his leg in trap, he sees some strange, demonic presence completely wrapped in bandages in the basement with him. The creature draws what appears to be a backwards number 5 on the wall, but a little research will tell you that it’s the Japanese kanji for the word “self.”

Back at Stiles’ room, Lydia discovers she can hear whispers in the vibrations of strings Stiles uses to connect various clues in his collage of all the pieces of the Beacon Hills mysteries. She hears whispers, leading her to believe he’s in an old mental health facility called Eichen House. (More on the potential relevance of that name later.) Lydia leads the gang to the basement of the mental facility, positive he’s inside, but nobody is there when they get in. She was wrong. These moments of failure are hard for Lydia as a character because she’s always been right. As the genius she is, she’s not used to being unable to trust her own knowledge, which is driving her as crazy as the other three. As they leave, the camera pans, showing that exact same kanji marking we saw earlier, in the exact same part of the basement. If that is indeed the basement Stiles and his kidnapper are show in, where are they?

Scott’s dad, Agent McCall, comes up with a theory of his own. He believes Stiles has been asleep this whole time, which would makes sense given his history of sleepwalking and the fact that he clearly isn’t in the basement he is seeing himself in. Inside the dream, Stiles’ kidnapper asks him many riddles, including “When is a door not a door?”–a riddle asked by Dr. Deaton earlier in the series. Most importantly, he riddles, “Everyone has it, but no one can lose it?” The kidnapper switches to shouting in Japanese before Stiles is awoken from his dream and found in the woods by the McCalls.

At the hospital where Stiles is being treated, Sheriff Stilinski thanks Agent McCall for finding Stiles, which is probably the nicest we’ve seen anyone been to Agent McCall all season. Mama McCall tells the kids to head home because they have school in six hours. I don’t know about you, but I would be taking a mental health day off from school after all that. As they’re leaving, Lydia hears a clear clanging sound, but ignores it. Seeing her beat herself up about being wrong is hard to watch.