WOLF PACK – Season 1 Episode 1 – SPOILERS

For personal reasons, high school student Blake Navarro (Bella Shepard) insists on being without a phone, or a computer, or email. When a forest fire delays her school bus, she asks a girl named Phoebe (Bailey Stender) if she can use her phone to call home. Phoebe (quite unreasonably) refuses, and (curiously) Blake asks no one else. An impatient classmate called Austin (Rio Mangini) tries to bully bus driver Renata (Olivia D Dawson) into letting everyone off the bus, threatening to post a recording of her refusal online. He is prevented from posting by Blake, who tosses his phone out the bus window causing Austin to go after it. It is not clear whether Blake tossed Austin’s phone out the window to help the bus driver, or because she really didn’t want her location to be posted online. One wonders why Blake is such a private person. One also wonders why Phoebe doesn’t want Blake to look at her phone.

Just then, a mixed herd of fire-crazed animals pours from the flaming woods, everyone who followed Austin off of the bus panics, and several die from animal attacks. Blake pulls Everett (Armani Jackson) from the path of a flaming vehicle, then both she and Everett are bitten by what Everett will later describe as a wolf. Blake heads home on foot, and Everett ends up in hospital. As Blake approaches her house, the neighbour’s dog Diesel barks at her like he always does.

We get to meet some of Blake’s family. Her stepfather Roberto (James Martinez) is preparing her autistic younger brother Danny (Nevada Jose) for evacuation.

In the episode’s best scene, Blake suggests a motel because it’s only $40/night and easier to get to than the evacuation shelter. Asked how she knows that, she tells her father: “I used my fake ID to get Danny and I a room when you and mom were fighting for six hours and didn’t even notice we were gone, and still didn’t notice after she left and you got drunk. When we got back in the morning, you also didn’t notice because you were passed out and hungover.” One does not wonder why Blake’s mother moved out. One wonders why Roberto, who seems financially challenged and not terribly competent, has custody of the children.

At the motel, Blake, who started the episode with acne scars, discovers that she now has perfect skin, and goes into the loo to figure this out. She collapses, then has a vision (in the bathroom mirror) of Everett in his hospital bed talking to his parents. Her vision does not come with audio, but the video goes both ways. Everett seems to see her as well.

Everett’s wound is healing quickly, and he is upset that a nurse called his parents (though when they arrive they seem friendly enough). Later, when he is alone he gets a phone call on the hospital’s land line, and a male voice cautions that whatever it was that bit Everett will try to kill him before the next full moon (which is in two days) and that he should leave the hospital immediately.

After Everett takes the caller’s advice and leaves, Fire Department Investigator Kristin Ramsey (Sarah Michelle Gellar) gives him a call on his cell. “I need your help,” she tells him. “I need you to help me figure out who’s responsible for the deaths of several people. That includes some of your friends who were on that school bus…I know for certain this fire was caused by arson. And I can tell you I’m certain of one other thing. The arsonist is a teenager. Might even be someone you go to school with. In fact it’s quite possible that teenager was on that bus with you.” Everett does not reply, hangs up, and goes to Blake’s house. He will arrive there shortly after she does and when Blake arrives, she is surprised to find him there, so they don’t seem to be telepathically connected.

This time, Diesel does not bark at her, and when the shadowy creature Blake saw at her house earlier in the day returns to threaten her, the dog tries to protect Blake. Diesel is tossed aside by the creature, but seems uninjured. Everett finds out that he can punch through a wooden beam blocking their path, and he and Blake leave. The beast does not follow.

The beast has been seen three times, always with Blake present. Why is it drawn to Blake? Why did it avoid harming Diesel? The beast (werewolf?) only attacked the first time it appeared, so perhaps there are two of them.

Blake and Everett are inexplicably drawn to a clearing where they meet classmates Luna and Harlan Briggs (played by Chloe Rose Robertson and Tyler Lawrence Grey), who have similarly been drawn there. (Everett calls them the “twins from school”.) All four have noticeably glowing eyes, and Luna says that’s because they’re “all together, here, under the moon“. Blake reluctantly joins Everett in the conclusion that they both have become werewolves.

It seems that werewolves reinforce one another’s abilities, which might explain why they are all mysteriously brought together in the woods Since Blake and Everett were bitten, Luna’s sense of smell has greatly improved, Harlan’s hearing is similarly enhanced, and Everett has put on “twenty pounds of muscle”.

All we find out about the twins is that they were rescued from a burning forest eighteen years previously by Park Ranger Garrett Briggs (Rodrigo Santoro). They were wolf cubs when he found them, and from the message we hear Ranger Briggs record while trapped by the fire, it seems their adoptive dad might have done something recently to help them find their pack. The connection between forest fires and werewolves is unclear.

Showrunner Jeff Davis told Noah Dominguez of CBR why he created the show: “What drew me in, eventually, was the ties to environmentalism, the whole idea of placing it against the backdrop of a California wildfire and the struggles that teens are dealing with today — and people in their twenties — with anxiety, depression and lack of connection because of social media and technology…I always gravitate towards genre in order to tell these deeper, more meaningful stories…[that] not just scare you, but cut in the psychology behind the fears.”

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WOLF PACK can be streamed on Paramount Plus.