jmtorres: Loki in dog form. Text: Yes? (Loki)
jmtorres ([personal profile] jmtorres) wrote2012-08-09 02:06 am

this fandom makes me meta like no other



Derek's claws Derek's killing face
Allison wearing the necklace Sheriff Stilinski discovers the necklace on Kate



Let’s talk about the fragile truce.

The way Derek killed Peter was deliberate and hugely theatrical and there was never a chance in hell he was going to let Scott kill the alpha, not once he knew for certain the alpha was a Hale. Because this was Derek’s offering to end the war.

Derek killed Peter in front of Chris Argent. He did it with absolute control. His killing face is completely human; he transforms his claws as a weapon, but there’s nothing else he lets slip, because he’s not doing this in anger, he’s doing it as a statement; because he is performing his control for Chris Argent to see; because he is killing the beast Chris Argent has been hunting for him.

I caught that one first time around, that it was a massively performative set piece staged to end the war. I mean, there were other reasons Derek killed Peter. Because Peter lacked control, which made him a threat both directly to those he’d hurt and indirectly, as one werewolf without control is going to bring hunters down on all werewolves, regardless of control. Because Peter wasn’t going to stop with Kate, he was going to kill Allison, who was innocent of any association with the Hale house fire; Peter was going to extend the vendetta, not end it. Because Derek once told Scott there was a rumor, to get him to help, but the cure for lycanthropy was a story where the transference of pack leadership was an empirically established fact, one proven in the very recent memory of Laura Hale’s death and probably throughout Hale family history, and there was no way Derek was risking letting Scott—teenage, untried, poorly controlled, a made werewolf rather than a born one, and occasionally just a little bit stupid, Scott—become alpha over him. Because Peter had just been set on fire and at that point it was practically a mercy killing. But it was also a deliberate offering to the Argents, to Chris Argent, to end the war.

What I didn’t catch until I was rewatching the episode tonight—because you only see the symbol, not the act of placing it—was that Kate’s body was the reply, Chris Argent’s offering to Derek, to end the war. It wasn’t an accident that necklace was Kate’s body when the police found her; she wasn’t wearing it when she died. You can see, after her death, when Chris and Allison are watching Derek kill Peter, Allison’s still wearing it. At some point after that Chris took the pendant off her and laid it on Kate’s corpse. I can’t decide if he was acknowledging her role in the fire (would he have known the police had tied the necklace to the arsonist? Stiles knew, but is that something he would have said?) or just trying to bury family history with the dead.

More than the necklace, though—Chris Argent left Kate’s body in Hale house. He left her for Derek to dispose of as he would. It wasn’t as if they just abandoned her body, got the hell out of dodge with no time to stuff her in the trunk; no, he went into Hale house, walked up to her body, knelt down, lifted her head to slip the chain around her neck, and then left her there on the floor. Or maybe he took Allison inside, maybe he told her to take her necklace off and made her put it on her aunt. That sounds like an Argent-style lesson in something but I hope, I hope that’s not what he did, I hope Chris Argent put the pendant on his sister himself. He is the sanest of the Argents, and he always wanted to protect Allison, so maybe he really did do it himself. Either way, that was a deliberate offering, ever so much so as Derek’s killing of Peter was.

I think Chris Argent honestly expected Derek would actually dispose of her though. Just, do something with her. Rend her into pieces or poetically set her on fire or, fucksake, just bury her in the backyard. I don’t think he thought Derek would leave her for the police to find, and I don’t think it was just for the reputation of the family that he didn’t expect or want her murder (that committed against her, and that she committed against others) made public. Because Gerard came for the funeral. If Derek had done something with her body, there wouldn’t have been a funeral, she would have just been MIA. “He’ll be here in two days,” Victoria says of Gerard, while Chris looks at the newspaper; and Chris gets angry. I don’t think Chris and Victoria wanted Gerard there, anywhere near their little girl. They wanted Allison out of it, they never wanted her in it, so truce was Chris Argent’s choice. Pity it broke so quickly, when Gerard declares war again in season two. Chris Argent made his peace with Derek that night and would have let the whole thing be over, if Gerard had stayed the hell out of it.

So my conclusion is Derek. Baby. I know burying women in the backyard didn’t work out so great for you last time but jesus fucking christ, it would have been better for you than this.

originally posted on tumblr
scy: (bad moon rising)

[personal profile] scy 2012-08-10 05:24 pm (UTC)(link)
I agree. Independent of Gerard and Victoria, Chris and Derek were ready to make peace. Now, Derek didn't dispose of Kate's body, for various reasons, I think. He knows that burying a body on his own property - outside the house! (WTF, burying Peter under the floor?) didn't work last time.

And frankly, he seemed a bit unstable when Jackson came looking for him. We don't know when the police arrived- Jackson and Stiles threw some incendiary devices, it's possible that somebody heard them, saw a fire and reported it.

Perhaps there wasn't time and Derek just said 'screw it' and let the police close the case so they would perhaps, leave him alone. We know that he went to ground directly after that, so he wasn't going to simply trust that there was a peace in place. He's been conditioned not to expect it, no matter what gestures were made.