Teen Wolf S3E18 - "Riddled" Recap

Scott receives a call from a panicked Stiles who says he is injured, cold, and unable to move. He begs Scott to come find him but not tell his father. Scott hollers at Isaac to come in and help him.

Lydia and Aiden are in the school and Aiden is getting cheeky, wanting to model nude for her while she's drawing him. Before things can get saucy, Lydia hears Stiles' voice calling for help out of the radio. Weird.

Kira is in bed studying and goes to turn on her lamp, but the bulb is out. She attempts to remove it, it begins to glow, and then it explodes. Her mother comes in and changes the bulb and it briefly lights up when she touches it before she has screwed it in all the way.

Scott, Isaac, Lydia, and Aiden are all in Stiles' room and find a pair of scissors stabbed into his bed, with all the red yarn from his board of unsolved cases tied to the scissors. Lydia chides Scott for not having called Sheriff Stilinski so while she and Aiden agree to stay and look for clues, Scott and Isaac head out to fill the Sheriff in.

Stiles is shows in be lying on the ground in a basement and his foot is caught in a bear trap. Stiles spots a man covered in bandages drawing the "self" symbol on the wall with chalk. The man disappears and when Stiles says the word, "self," the symbol smokes and disappears.

Scott and Isaac follow the sheriff who locates Stiles' jeep at the hospital but it's dead and abandoned. Derek has joined the search party and he and Scott go up to the roof of the hospital where Stiles' scent is particularly strong. Derek coaches Scott on how to read the scents and they can smell that Stiles was on the roof stressed from struggling with himself.

Lydia discovers that she can hear voices whispering when she touches the red strings in Stiles' room. Through this newfound ability, she learns that Stiles is in the basement of a mental asylum that William Barrow, the Shrapnel Bomber, was committed to.

The bandaged man begins speaking in Japanese but quickly switches to English and tells Stiles he's trying to save his life. The gang and the Sheriff show up at the asylum and head inside to search for Stiles. They don't find him and Lydia is distraught that she wasn't right about where Stile was. The viewers see that the "self" symbol has been scratched into the wall.

Melissa visits Agent McCall and together, they go in search of Stiles together. McCall has a theory that Stiles is still sleepwalking and called Scott while asleep. It turns out they're right and they find Stiles in a coyote den and he won't stop screaming and crying when they first wake him up. All the awards to Dylan O'Brien who has stepped up his performance level tenfold in this arc.

Allison finds that her phone is off though she never turned it off. She receives a message in Japanese that she doesn't understand. Aiden tells Derek that he thinks Stiles might be the nogitsune. Derek finds the idea ridiculous at first but then he begins to think that the idea's not so crazy after all. At the hostpial, Sheriff Stilinski thanks Agent McCall for finding his son and as Scott and Lydia are leaving, Lydia hears some banging but denies hearing anything, now feeling insecure about her powers.

At school, Kira calls out to Scott but he is walking around dazed, and Derek tells her to not worry about it. He tells her to tell him what happened at the power station, then says that he wants her to show him. They find Stiles' bat magnetised and it sticks to a power generator. Derek tells Kira to tell him everything about foxfire.

Sheriff Stilinski tells Scott's mother that he wants to run some test on Stiles and it's evident he's worried that he's suffering from the same ailments as his mother did. Allison brings the message to Mr. Yikamura to translate. He tells him that it's a message about Japanese internment camps set up in America during WWII but the message is fake. It's talking about a camp called "Oak Creek," but there was no camp called "Oak Creek."

Lydia is having difficulty with the sounds at school, as everything is amplified. She heads home, saying she isn't feeling well. At the hospital, Stiles is about to have some tests run on him and he confides in Scott that they're searching for signs of temporal dementia, which is what killed Stile's mother. Scott assures Stiles that he'll do what he can to save him if they find anything. They hug before Stiles has the tests run. Derek and Kira arrive at the hospital and Derek heads inside to tell Scott that Barrow used Kira's foxfire to jumpstart the nogitsune powers inside of Stiles.

Lydia sits in her cars blasting music to try to drown out the banging sound. When Derek speaks with Scott, he says that when he spoke to his mother, she told him that the Hales didn't only live in Beacon Hills but they protected it as well. This leads Scott to realise that Stiles was struggling to protect them. They return to the rooftop and discover a bag of tools that lead them to believe Stiles was going to do something similar to what Barrow had tried to do. Lydia is still in her car and and screams. Viewers are able to figure out that the banging sound she has been hearing is the sound of the MRI machine that is running tests on Stiles. Is this hearing another branch of her powers or could this be a symptom of a strengthening bond between her and Stiles? (Aiden had commented earlier that Stiles really "likes" Lydia, after he found one of her drawings in his room).

Stiles' brain is showing signs of atrophy. Sheriff Stilinski is devastated. Stiles becomes agitated inside the MRI machine and finds himself transported back into a dream state. The bandaged man tells him that they're going to destroy everyone. He then gives Stiles a riddle to solve: "Everyone has it, but no one can lose it. What is it?" Stiles tells him if he figures out the riddle, then perhaps he won't kill everyone he loves. Stiles solves it: a shadow. It is then that we see who is inside the bandaged man once the bandages are removed: it's Stiles.

A power surge happens in the hospital that even Derek and Scott witness on the roof. During the chaos, Stiles slips away and he appears to have been taken over by the nogitsune. Mrs. Yukimura shows up, looking like a badass action hero ready to kick butt while wearing leather. She confronts NogitsuStiles and says that she will kill an innocent boy if it's the only way to stop him. She summons the oni, but NogitsuStiles is not afraid of them - understandable after seeing how he disposed of them in the last episode. She tells him that if the oni can't stop him, she knows someone who will but neither NogitsuStiles nor we the viewers know to whom she is referring.

In the final moments of this episode, we see an electrical cord shooting sparks that comes flying down from the roof, headed straight for Kira.

Teen Wolf airs on Mondays on MTV at 10/9c.