Character Review MTV's Teen Wolf

Jackson Whittemore

Kanima

Jackson Whittemore: arrogant, self-centered, power-hungry, lonely, orphan, co-captain.

Jackson Whittemore, portrayed by Colton Haynes, is one of six original-main characters on MTV’s Teen Wolf. If this review is going to be honest, it’s best to start out by saying most Teen Wolf fans hate him. I both love and hate Jackson; I have never truly been able to make up my mind about him. But he was there at the beginning and he was there at the end so it’s only fitting that he should part of my character reviews for Teen Wolf.

I’ll start with his bad qualities, the most obvious being his relationship with Lydia Martin. In the pilot Jackson and Lydia are the power couple of the school, Jackson is the lacrosse captain and Lydia is the most beautiful girl at Beacon Hills High. Jackson was never quite nice to Lydia even in the pilot. To be fair, however, Lydia liked to beat Jackson down a peg every time he got too full of himself. But they were together, and along with Jackson’s best friend Danny Mahealani they were the most popular kids at school. Yet, the second Scott McCall is bit and becomes a werewolf things start going down hill for Jackson and he takes it out on everyone: Lydia, Danny, Scott, and Stiles Stilinski. From that point on Lydia makes it seem like she is in control of the relationship, but Jackson’s aggression told a different story to the viewers. When Lydia is attacked at the end of season one Jackson brings her to the hospital and that’s about as far as his concern goes, given that when Lydia goes missing Jackson does not do anything to help find her.

Despite all of this Lydia still loves Jackson and it saves him from his death at the end of season two. When Derek Hale becomes the alpha in the season one finale Jackson begs Derek to give him the bite. He wanted to go back to being better than Scott; a dream that was not and still is not a possibility. However, instead of Jackson being a werewolf he becomes a kanima. A kanima is a lizard like creature that is ruled by a master (the show says that when a person is turned they take on the shape of their personality, so it was not a stretch to think Jackson would become a murderous monster). Throughout season two Jackson has two masters: Matt Daehler, the one who turns Jackson into a murderer, and Gerard Argent. In the end Derek and Peter Hale momentarily kill Jackson to destroy the kanima. As Lydia cries over his body the power of her love brings him back to life and he becomes a werewolf (we learn in the final season that he is actually still part kanima). Jackson is then written out of the show until season six due to Colton leaving to pursue jobs outside of Teen Wolf.

To speed things up a brief list of Jackson’s other horrible traits: a tormentor to Scott and Stiles, he has little to no empathy for others (as showcased when he failed to report that Isaac Lahey’s father was abusing him), he uses people to get what he wants, and he rejects the help of others. 

A widely accepted theory (we still don’t know if it’s true since Colton left the show and the storyline was given to Malia Tate instead) is that Jackson was Peter Hale’s son. Peter, the season one villain and on-and-off again McCall pack member, has all the same personality traits as Jackson. During a episode Jackson notes that he remembers something awful happening to him as a child, and given that he was adopted/an orphan it seemed natural to place Jackson at the scene of the Hale fire that killed most of the Hale family. In season three it is revealed that Peter lost all memory of having a child; even though the father/child storyline becomes Peter and Malia, it makes sense that Jackson was originally supposed to be the son and that this is where so many of his issues stem from.

At the end of the series creator Jeff Davis made the decision to make Jackson bisexual. Jackson comes back to Beacon Hills to work with the rest of the pack in taking down the world-wide network of hunters. His boyfriend is revealed to be Ethan, a former half murderous alpha  twins turned Scott McCall’s beta, who by the way is Danny’s ex-boyfriend. We come to find out that Jackson’s relationship with Lydia has changed and they, seemingly, have mutual love and respect for one another. Either way Jackson and Ethan join the final fight and are shown to continue to fight for supernatural creatures in the final five minutes of the series.

These points make it difficult for me to make up my mind about Jackson. It appears that he changed as a person, but his former self works to show that people can grow so perhaps the fans should follow Lydia’s example and accept Jackson for who he is, faults and all...though now that I think about it I'm pretty sure I only like Jackson because he's an original.