written for @teenwolf-meta's prompt "bardo"
I know I'm not the first to suggest this, but I like the headcanon that Alicia was taken by the Dread Doctors the last time they were in town--the same time that they took Theo.Â
The timing works, since Boyd's voice in the flashback could conceivably be a fourth grader's. It would also explain how Alicia disappeared so suddenly, around "plenty of other people" (3x06), since the Doctors could have grabbed her unnoticed, and why Boyd can't remember when he saw her last, since the Doctors can mess with people's memories.
It also fits so nicely with the visual parallels between their narratives about their dead sisters. Boyd's attempt to kill himself at the Glen Capri and Theo's dreamscape in bardo can be taken as complementary narratives that can inform each other.
Alicia disappeared at the ice rink, and Tara died in the freezing water, details which inform their appearance similarly. Alicia stares up at Boyd from the ice and calls out to him. Later, Tara stares up at and calls out to Theo from the cold water, and will eventually climb out of the ground soaking wet to grab him.Â
Both boys are haunted by their sisters' deaths. Boyd now works at the ice rink: with every shift, he returns to the site of her disappearance.
Soon after he's poisoned with wolfsbane, he breaks through the glass of the vending machine to get what he paid for, an action that foreshadows his attempt to get Alicia out of the ice: if he could just break through, he'd find her.Â
But what really haunts Boyd is the mystery of how she disappeared. He has no idea how she disappeared, or even when he saw her last. He remembers himself asking is it my fault? He repeats the question to himself before he trudges barefoot to the tubâthe same way Theo will later wander barefoot through the hospital.
It's striking to me that Boyd chooses to drown himself when, only a few episodes later, Scott, Stiles, and Allison will all drown themselves to access bardo. For them, bardo is about revelations: that the nemeton is responsible for Scott's tattoo; that it was close by when he was bitten; that Allison was there that night. It gives Scott a greater understanding of one of the most traumatic nights of his life. I don't think the writers intended this but it fits so well that Boyd is, on some level, attempting to access bardo by similarly drowning himself. His attempted death is definitely about his sense of guilt, but I think it's also about Alicia's death as a question Boyd would do anything to answer.Â
Boyd wants to process his sister's death, but without the answers to his questions, it's impossible. It makes it all the more tragic that he dies the next episode with no answers about his sister, not even an answer to what happens to a werewolf during a lunar eclipse. In a universe where he survived, it would have been so interesting for season 5 to give him an explanation for Alicia's disappearance and, finally, an answer to his question: it wasn't his fault.
If Boyd is desperate to find Alicia, Theo is eager to keep her locked away, but he's similarly haunted. Like Boyd at the ice rink, Theo goes to the bridge where Tara died, smelling like grief (5x02).
Later, when Kira sends him to bardo, he's faced with his sister. Theo's dreamscape, like Scott's (4x08), is shaped by his own subconscious; Tara is there because subconsciously, Theo has decided to see her there, even though his conscious reaction is to run away from her.
I've argued before that Theo's dreamscape isâthough informed by guiltâultimately about grief. He's attempted to lock it away so tightly that his journey in bardo is simply to face it: that it's there, that he can't escape it, that it hurts.Â
Theo does face it, though. One of the things I like about Theo's return is that his time in bardo doesn't magically change who he is. He comes back still angry, cynical, and defensiveâbut now openly grieving, which will prove crucial to his eventual changes.
It makes me think again about a version of the show where Boyd lived and went on a journey to bardo himself: what he might have seen there, and what he might have been like afterwards.
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