Sarah Michelle Gellar, Werewolf Hunter?

I, a deeply devoted Sarah Michelle Gellar fan, have been waiting months for the premier of Wolf Pack! I wasn’t sure what to expect, but in the interest of entertainment, I kept my expectations low.

Gellar is a delight to watch, when she’s good (Buffy), evil (Cruel Intentions), mechanized (buffy bot), and also charming as Kendall Hart, yelling at Susan Lucci. So it is a delicious mystery that by the end of the pilot episode of Wolf Pack, we don’t know which side Gellar (Arson Investigator Ramsey) is on, how much she knows about werewolves, etc…

Wolf Pack makes us wait nearly 30 minutes into the episode for SMG to appear. The show punctuates her arrival by a strong and powerful resonant chord, the likes of which we hear nowhere else in the episode. Is it the chord of a competent civil servant doing their job? Or the sound that announces the arrival of a mystical force to rival the pack? I hope it’s both!

So far ,“the pack” is four teenagers, all with deep familial issues like loss, neglect, etc. I was happy to see our main she-wolf sporting acne, and then equally pleased that her lycan transformation clears up her skin! A noxema nod to teen angst as metaphor for alienation and hell!

Ok, so we’ve established that Investigator Ramsay is important, and are left to guess at her relationship to “the pack”. Though she seems to know something about the mystical, she won’t come out and say it. She informs our hero (Everett) that she knows someone committed arson, and that it’s likely a teen who watched the world burn from inside the bus. She refers to the arsonist as responsible for the deaths of many, but as a viewer, the chaos seems more nuanced than that, not originating from one single point but from a confluence of forces.

And what of the connection between arson and werewolves? We are shown the scene of a previous forest fire from 18 years ago, the night park ranger and sexy dad (Rodrigo Santoro) found his adoptive wolf pups, the now teen wolf twins Luna and Harlan. Do werewolves play with matches? Does the big bad wolf only appear as a phoenix, under command and sway of both fire and the moon? Will there be complex meaning making and symbolism regarding wolf pack, their transformations, the lens they present for us to examine our humanity, or will we just delight in the teens achieving clear skin and great abs? Either way, I’m excited for more Arson Investigator Ramsey, epic metamorphosing scenes, and the Fire.