Written for @teenwolf-meta Meta May Monday's May 19th topic: Beast.
As Coach might say, let's do a pop quiz! What's the connection between the scene pictured above the scene pictured directly below?
The simple answer is that the people involved are all part of the Argent family, but there is more to it than that. The sacredness of family ties is important to Chris Argent, and that can be traced all the way back to 18th century France. Let's look at Chris Argent's speech to Derek Hale in that scene in Pack Mentality (1x03).
Chris: Nice ride. Black cars, though. Very hard to keep clean. I would definitely suggest a little more maintenance. If you have something this nice, you want to take care of it, right? Personally, I'm very protective of the things I love. But that's something I learned from my family. And you don't have much of that these days. Do you? There we go. You can actually look through your windshield now. See how that makes everything so much clearer?
It would be easy to think of this scene as Chris Argent displaying another example of his weird intimidation techniques, threatening Derek to keep him in line. In fact, that's what we are meant to believe when we first watch it. As threats go, however, it seems to be based on cruelty and doesn't paint Chris in a very flattering light.
However, as the show progresses, we see more and more how important family is to Chris until we get to the story in The Maid of GĂ©vaudan (5x18). We watch La BĂȘte's rampage found the Argent clan of hunters. They took the mantle upon themselves not only because Sebastian Valet was a serial-killing demonic werewolf, but also because he was family. Sebastian would have been a monster wherever he went, but he purposefully came back to GĂ©vaudan, to the community where he and his sister lived. He wasn't going to stop killing, so this betrayed his family's history there, destroyed the roots that the Valets had. He went so far as when Marie-Jeanne vowed to stop him, he stated his intention to kill her as well.
Thus we learn the reason that Marie-Jeanne established a code in which if a hunter is bitten that they have to take their own life. Lycanthropy, embodied by the Beast, corrupts and destroys that sacred bonds that we see were extremely important to Marie-Jeanne and to her descendants.
Sebastian: You won't catch me. And you won't kill me. We're family, Marie-Jeanne. We're family.
Chris, for his part, will turn on his father and start working with werewolves when he realizes that family, in the end, means nothing but a source of power for Gerard, to be tossed away or replaced if it is not serving its purpose. After Chris realizes that Victoria, Allison, and Kate are all, in their own ways, victims of Gerard's actions, he discards the idea that lycanthropy is a requirement for betrayal. This revelation, at first, makes him try to protect his family by giving up hunting in Frayed (3x05):
Chris: There's a saying for these kinds of situations, the kind you have to navigate carefully. It's called, "threading the needle." It's finding a safe path between two opposing forces.
Allison: Sounds like saving your own ass.
Chris: They're not your family.
But Chris, as much as he wants to protect what is important to him, never forgot why the Code exists in the first place. He can't help but follow it, even after it push him to help his beloved wife commit suicide. He learn slowly that there's nothing wrong with valuing family, even to the point of trying to get Kate and Gerard to renounce their behavior simply because they should be horrified that it requires a betrayal of their family. He even goes so far as to take the blame for his own betrayals, such as when he suggestion he didn't "take care" enough to stop Kate in becoming what she did.
So what's the ultimate connection between these scenes? At this point in Pack Mentality , Chris must think that Derek is the one who killed his sister, Laura. I'm sure if Chris had proof, that conversation would have taken a more violent turn, but when the confrontation begins, Chris has no reason to believe that Derek isn't the only werewolf in town. After all, Chris or Victoria never mention Peter in the hospital, and Kate doesn't check the place out. (It seems Laura made sure he was safe from them in the facility.) It's not until the next episode when Kate reveals to the family that there's more than one werewolf.
When the hunters box in Derek's car in that episode, what is happening is that an Argent hunter looks at a werewolf and sees not a victim, but a monster whom the hunter believes has betrayed their own family as well as the community in which they lived. An Argent hunter who is very protective of the things they love. On the surface, Chris is warning a werewolf to tow the line, but on another, more emotional level, Chris is remembering the story of how his family came to hunt werewolves. He looks at Derek then and he sees "nothing but a Beast."