Teen Wolf - 3x18 - Riddled - Recap/Review

BY MELISSA CAVALLO (@melissacavallo)

Wow, Teen Wolf sure does know how to confuse and amaze their audience at the same time. This episode of Teen Wolf “Riddled” dove straight into the craziness of Stiles and gave some answers but mostly left us waiting for more answers in next week’s episode.

The episode started with a phone call from Stiles, that woke up Scott, saying he thinks he is in some sort of basement and doesn’t have any idea where he is or how he got here. After several phone calls Stiles tells Scott that his leg really hurts and he can’t move or get up and he thinks he is in a basement of a warehouse or something and smells something really gross and he is whispering all of this because he thinks there is someone in there with him. Scott obviously gets super scared at what Stiles is telling him and calls Isaac to help him find Stiles.

Meanwhile, Lydia and Aiden are at high school and Lydia is drawing Aiden, while listening to music and Aiden tries and seduces her by striping but then Lydia has her weird banshee episodes and starts to hear Stiles’ voice through the speaker and knows something is wrong.

The next scene Kira is shown and her light bulb goes out and she calls for her mum (who we haven’t met yet, only her embarrassing but cool dad we’ve met.) Kira then goes to grab the bulb and some sparks fly and she bursts the bulb. Her mum walks in and is angry at her but when she places the bulb on the lamp she also has sparks coming out from her hand into the bub. (Weird must be a family thing)

Okay jumping back to the crew trying to find Stiles, Lydia, Aiden, Scott and Isaac all meet up in Stiles’ room and Lydia explains how she heard Stiles’ voice in the speaker. Well tries to explain no one really knows how she has these supernatural like powers. The guys take a look at Stiles’ room and like usual there are ropes all pointing to different cases and clues to them, and as Lydia points out he uses red for unsolved cases, all of them are red! Lydia makes the smart decision to tell Papa Stilinski about his son’s disappearance and phone call. While Scott and Isaac head to the station, Lydia and Aiden stay in Stiles’ room looking for something that might tell them where Stiles might be.

Now to the creepiness, we see Stiles for the first time and it looks like he is in a basement of some kind, in the dark with an animal trap jammed on his leg. (jeez they sure do like their animal traps closing on people’s legs in this show.) Stiles is using his phone to look around the places to see if he can see anything or anyone. When he moves his phone around he sees someone crouched down and writing the backwards 5 that everyone has behind their ears on the wall then the number disappears, person or thing seen doing it disappears but looked like he have bandages wrapped around him like a mummy but even creeper.

Papa Stilinski hears the news about Stiles and turns full cop mode to trying to track down Stiles car, they find his jeep parked at the hospital but no signs of Stiles. Derek and Scott track his scent on the rooftop of the hospital; they can tell he was there and they can sense they he was stressed and was struggling with himself.

Back at the sheriff station Agent McCall first hears about Stiles’ disappearance and wants to know more about it, while Lydia and Aiden are still in Stiles room trying to find something about where Stiles could be. When Aiden flicks one of the strings Lydia hears whispering and she thinks this is a clue about where Stiles might be, she flicks the strings and again and hear voices and looks what picture the string leads to, which is a mental health centre and Lydia thinks that is where Stiles is.

Back to the beloved missing Stiles, and the creepy person with him, Stiles is still trying to get the animal trap off his leg and hears the person walking around again and the person starts to talk in, I’d say, a Japanese accent and in another language. Also we get to see his face (kinda) all wrapped up like a mummy but with sharp teeth, its great!! It is very difficult to understand the mummy guy because he is either speaking in another language or is mumbling. But want I got from it was this creepy guy was trying to get in Stiles’ head and it worked. The trap that was on his leg moved to his right leg all of a sudden, it was kind of like when you are in a dream and if you think of something and it usually happens. Also the creepy person thing kept referring to Stile as ‘we’ so it seemed like they had a connection.

The police have all headed to the mental house on Lydia’s words. While Agent McCall is focusing on the exact words that Stiles used on the phone with Scott, with him smelling something bad and his eyes were watering. When police reach down to the basement Stiles is not there but it looks like the place that Stiles was shown in previous scenes, it also has the backwards 5 scratched into the wall but no one sees that.

Meanwhile, Agent McCall is telling Mama McCall he thinks that Stiles is still sleeping and dreaming and believes he can find him. Jumping back to Stiles and the mummy guy they have some more confusing conversation. The creepy thing talks about riddles to Stiles and mentions the riddle spoken about in previous epsidoes ‘when is a door not a door, when it’s ajar’, but the riddle that Stiles doesn’t know the answer to is, ‘Everyone has it but no one can lose it, what is it?’, while the creepy thing is yelling at Stiles to answer the riddle, he is jolted awake from agent McCall and mama McCall. Stiles is found!!! YAY!!!

Hmm for this whole episode Allison hasn’t been in it, they have tried to call her but she hasn’t been picking up so Isaac comes to her house banging on the door and when she answers she has no idea what has been going on, she’s been sleeping. When she goes to check her phone, it’s turned off and she finds that really strange because she never turns off her phone. (I guess we all never turn off our phones, only when they die) When Allison turns on her phone she sees all the missed calls and messages and asks about Stiles. She has some unexpected voice message from an unknown number that appear to be speaking in Japanese, which makes no sense to anyone, like I said confusing episode.

Aiden and Derek have a talk about how Aiden overheard Stiles telling Scott that he thinks he wrote the message on the board to kill Kira. And Derek makes a joke saying “you think Stiles, skinny, defenceless Stiles, is the Nogitsune, the powerful dark spirit.” Both Derek and Aiden is confused why the powerful spirit would go for a weak body but Derek stops mid-sentence taking about Stiles having power and thinks about electricity.

The crew is shown in the hospital and Stiles is fine, sleeping it off. Lydia is very upset because she was so sure that he was in the basement but he wasn’t. She hears a noise which she ignores because she thinks it won’t help anyone if she goes on wild goose chases all the time.

The next day at school Derek goes to Kira wanting to know everything that happened at the power station with William Baroe. While Stiles is still in hospital, and papa Stilinski realises the connection between his late wife and Stiles’ behaviour and symptoms and they need to run some tests.

Back at the power station, Derek and Kira are looking for answers, and they find Stiles baseball bat on a high voltage box and it is stuck to it like a magnet, Derek tells Kira that he wants to know everything she knows about fox fire.

Allison and Isaac go to visit Kira’s dad to help translate the voice message left on her phone, he tells them that it is Japanese and is speaking about the World War Two, but believes it is fake because the names said in it are wrong, again weird!!!

Lydia is back on school with Scott and she is super sensitive to the sounds around her, lockers, doors even people walking past her. She said she is fine to Scott but walks away in a haze. The doctors are preforming a MRI scan for Stiles to test if his symptoms are the same as what his mother had and Stiles knows what they are testing for and he is scared. Scott and he have a bromance moment, crying and hugging it out. The scene was really touching for both of them.

Derek goes in the hospital to tell Scott that Baroe might have used fox fire created by Kira to jump start the Nogitsune powers inside of Stiles. Kira was meant to come with him but she feels like she is to blame and she thinks that Scott will be upset at her. Derek and Scott realise that before when Stiles was on top of the roof of the hospital when he was struggling with himself he was trying to protect them by not doing something the evil spirit was making him do.

We find out that Stiles does have the same problem with him as his mother did, and while his dad and Scott’s mum are sad by this, Stiles falls asleep again and sees himself in the hospital room with the creepy mummy guy and he asks Stiles if he has figured out his riddle get. As he is constantly repeating the riddle with no right answer he starts to unravel the bandages on his head, at the last second Stiles realises the answer and says “a shadow“ and when he turns around the creepy man reveals his face and it is no other than Stiles himself.

When Stiles wakes up it’s not his usual happy self the evil shadow form has taken root in him and he can control the power in the hospital. Up on top of the roof the power box explodes and sparks and wires go everywhere and everyone in the hospital start to panic and run out while Stiles is slowly putting his shoes on and walking out of there, he sees Kira’s mother and she threatens him by saying she doesn’t care the choice of his host she will still kill him and as she says this the Oni (the demons things that were going around and marking everyone) appear behind her, however Stiles or the evil spirit in him are not threatened and he walks away causally but then Kira’s mother says” if the Oni cant defeat you, I know someone who can”. And in the last scene Kira is shown in the hospital car park and a wire that is sparking goes straight for her. End episode!!!


Wow!!! When I finished this episode, I wanted the next episode to come now!!! But I guess I have to wait patiently for next week. I just want to say that Dylan O’Brien’s performance as normal Stiles and evil Stiles is amazing!!! He did a fantastic job and I can’t wait to see more of what he can do!! Until next week!!