One of the almost obstacles to Mcdanno shipping that I very much ignore is Danny's at times overcompensating heterosexuality. Of all the male characters he's the one who will metaphorically drools over models, comments on how a woman looks or buys sexy underwear as a gift. Yet sometimes I get the impression Danny clings onto heterosexuality like a confort shield. You can see this in his canonical straight relationships.

Danny clearly grew up in a loving but very traditional family. His father went out to work at a dangerous job as a fire fighter whilst his mother mostly stayed home and raised the kids. We know Danny is fearful and can be overly anxious and has been since childhood. One of his coping mechanisms seems to have been the power he gave his family life. A seemingly happily married mother and father was his safe space. So it was he came to cling onto that to the point where that relationship of mother, father and child or children became his trinity. He began to believe that the union of marriage was the thing to make people happy and safe. Like him. But he built it up into an ideal reality and perhaps his own feelings were never going to match.

Hi again, I try to answer your ask. I understand that you wish Steve would back Danny up, giving him support with what’s going on. Everyone would want him to stand up and tell Amanda not to be that rude. But it’s not his place to do so and this is not because Steve’s a bad friend. On the contrary, Steve’s a good friend and he knows when to back off and not to make things worse. He has learned to wait it out. He will talk to Danny later, I’m sure of that. And it’s not the time to jump up to defend Danny right there and then. I try to explain why. Because in this situation you can’t think like you, you have to think like Steve.

FYI: I’m lumping this question with a myriad of other questions I’ve gotten about who I think the beast is. People have asked if I think it’s Stiles, Scott, Allison and you know who…  :)

Danny | It could’ve fit. He’s had surgery and could therefore have gotten two sets of DNA and be a genetic chimera. I certainly would’ve enjoyed having Danny back, but this would come too much out of left field even for TW. New viewers might not even remember who Danny is. They’ll be dazed and confused if he showed up out of the blue. They want the reveal to be shocking, but at the same time make sense. Like you’d sit and gasp, jaw hanging open, but then think back on the seasons and go “yeah, I totally get it now. It makes sense, the signs were there.” 

There are no signs of Danny, not for seasons. He hasn’t been mentioned or seen since 3B. Having it turn out to be either Danny or Jackson for that matter,  would feel like a cheap cheat, almost a crack twist in my opinion.  

There’s this well-known dramatic technique or rule called Chekov’s gun, that is widely used in film, tv, books, games etc, that states if you want the gun to fire in act 3, it has to be mentioned in act 1 and seen in act 2. 

Stiles | The TW writers have been pretty good at keeping their twists under wraps the last couple of seasons. And I think they’ll go for a shocking twist this time and as well, and having for example Stiles be the beast, like I see many predicts now, would certainly fit - I can easily write up a meta with “evidence” to support this - but it wouldn’t be a huge shock. We’ve seen him with a dark arc, we’ve had Theo allude to void!stiles, we know he’s scared of the darkness in himself and that he feels he lost a part of him with Donovan. So in my book he’s the obvious suspect. He’s the red herring. 

Stiles also has had his big villain arc, I doubt they’ll give him another. In fact with Lydia saying “Stiles saved me” this last episode, I think we’re finally seeing the start of him “evolving”. He might need to die again to get there, like Derek did. In fact, Lydia predicted Derek’s death twice - she screamed for him once and “heard” his name as the cipher key for the deadpool (the other two were also dead people, aiden and allison) and wrote it down. She’s written Stiles’ name on a list of already dead people, and now she’s told him he won’t be alright and screamed at him. 

Derek was stripped of all his powers before his “death” and his resurrection into a full shift wolf and balanced powers. I’ve been saying for ages that Stiles is something, but he hasn’t admitted it to himself and he’s not accepted it as part of himself. I think his “death” might just bring that forward, and make him come into his own. But I don’t think the beast is a part of that. He’s hit rock bottom, and he’s now finally on a the rise. 

Scott | The only one that hasn’t really had a dark arc is Scott. And Scott is the protagonist, he’s “the hero” of the story, and he’s been spun as this amazing True Alpha, which everyone assumes is powerful and good. The most shocking twist - for the casual viewer mind you, the meta peeps have been predicting this for seasons, would be to have the main character turn out to be the “bad guy”. 

And we’ve had small mentions and reminders of Scott being changed, different since he died. We’ve had him see visions of big hulking beast shadows after the icebaths, he’s grown more fangs, he became almost demon wolfy in his shift in season 4 when he almost killed a hunter, and he’s died on the supermoon and he has a nasty non-healing heartshaped scar, when we know heart transplants were what made Theo a near success. 

So I think the writers are trying to set up Stiles as the suspect and then spring a surprise reveal that it’s actually Scott. They might even try to throw some suspicion on Mason who’s the only other human in the group aside from Stiles. I think the characters has gotten derailed by their own clever assumptions yet again. They’ve been looking for a human teenage chimera, someone with two sets of DNA, and in their haste they’ve totally forgotten that supernatural creatures can be chimeras too. Belasko was one. Who knows, maybe even Kate was one (I do think of all of these seemingly unrelated plots tie together). But at the moment they’re stomped because of this - they even discussed it this episode. 

Dr. Valack: This teenager, Lydia, is the last Genetic Chimera. A young man or a young woman, maybe even someone you know. A success where Theo and the others were failures. Lydia: But we went through the list of Genetic Chimeras. There’s no one else. Valack: There must be one you missed. Another way they could have two sets of DNA. If you could see the face of this teenager, discover its identity, then your friends would have a fighting chance. The mask can help you see.

Remember Theo didn’t have a record of having a heart transplant, the Doctors did that, perhaps to make him a viable candidate with two sets of DNA. His own and his sister’s. They’ve gone through all the official records, but that won’t help if the Doctors have hurried someone along. Maybe even a supernatural being. 

Also being a genetic chimera isn’t as rare as one might think. It’s just a bit hard to discover sometimes, unless you’re actually looking for it. It’s usually when two twin embryos fuse into one at an early stage in the pregnancy. This can lead to the baby being genetic chimera. 

Chimeras may also show, under a certain spectrum of UV light, distinctive marks on the back resembling that of arrow points pointing downwards from the shoulders down to the lower back; this is one expression of pigment unevenness called Blaschko’s lines. x

Clever writers are clever - they actually gave us a hint to the plot of season 5 in the very first episode with the werewolf named Belasko :) Good one. The Doctors also used UV light to check the chimeras for progress. Probably another nod to this. 

So whoever the beast is, can be the result of twin embryos fusing into one, which would not be on record either. Which kind of brings me back around to fetus experiments which is another thing the doctors have been up to. Busy gang.

Allison | Another possibility sure. She died, but who’s to say that the Doctors didn’t get hold of her and “resurrected her”. We do have Gerard referencing that the only person to defeat La Bete back in the day was a maiden with a spear or something like that, and we will get a flashback starring Crystal. Which if we think of Chekov’s gun will be like “seeing” Allison. Next week’s episode even shows the ice bath with Allison, so we’ll likely get a mention as well. 

I’ve rambled on about this before, in this post for example, that we now have Scott with a chest wound after dying on the supermoon. His heart stopped. We know Theo was the first step in the right direction with heart transplant. And we have indications the doctors have been doing stuff to Scott since 5x01, possibly preparing him for this. 

What if the heart in question is Allison’s? Would the heart of an ancestor to the one that killed the original beast, perhaps make it stronger, or even immune to the same kind of death? And we have Allison’s weird vision after the ice bath (which is references in next week’s episode) of her on the operating table, her chest open and heart removed by Kate, saying there was something wrong with it. Scott incidentally had visions of himself as a great hulking monster... Interesting, isn’t it. 

Or is it the other way around - that Allison has gotten Scott’s heart and is the beast? 

**

Out of all of these suggestions the most satisfying would be if it was Scott, but I can accept it being Allison as well, given the connection the Argents has to the history of the beast, and the fact that the memory of Allison and mentions of her is coming, which can make it plausible. I think Stiles might be suspected, but he’ll be the red herring. 

Yep, they sure did

We shouldn’t rule out Danny as another successful chimera like Theo. Theo might be the first like he said, but that doesn’t mean he’s the only one. And Danny could be a possible candidate with two sets of DNA. Perhaps he had a skin graft done in relation to his surgery that he tells Ethan about in 3x06. 

He was also targeted and poisoned by mountain ash, he’s been exposed to wolfsbane (he was in the bus when coach blew it all over), and I have been speculating now if wolfsbane is a sort of primer the dread doctor uses to induce supernatural abilities in people. 

the Oni was interested in him. He knows about the supernatural. I do find it plausible he could be involved in the benefactor arc, possibly handling the tech side of things (there is no way Brunski did that). 

No one has mentioned Danny for a couple of seasons now. We know he didn’t move away otherwise coach would’ve cried about it when he was bemoaning the loss of Jackson and Isaac. So where is he? Have the dread doctors made them all forget about him? Or is he just not on their radar now that neither Jackson or Ethan is around to bring him into things? Does that give him greater freedom to watch and orchestrate things in the background? 

(I must admit I do wonder if Theo had help in the 5x10 season finale - he was all over doing a million things at once).

i saw a post about Danny being the benefactor and it seemed to be really legit what do you think?

Two asks about the same so I’m combining. This was a huge thing we speculated a lot about back in season 4, and I still think it’s entirely possible Danny was involved in that. I hesitate to call him the benefactor because all signs posts to a team of people participating. The way I see it we still don’t know who set up the tech side of the deadpool. It sure as hell wasn’t Brunski with his cassettes, and Meredith does not strike me as an evil mastermind either. 

Let’s just think about it for a moment. A deadpool like that with lists and money and wire transfers and confirmations it’s a lot to organize. You need skilled people to do that. And even if they used the old IBM computer at Lydia’s lake house, someone still had to get that going, hook it up to modern technology, make it distribute the lists and encrypt it. And we know Danny is good at that sort of thing. He was arrested for hacking at a young age, Stiles called him to trace a text, Jackson got him to recover erased footage etc. 

What is also curios is how Danny disappeared from the screen when the deadpool season started. But he didn’t move away or quit school, if so coach would’ve moaned about it. Instead he complained about losing Jackson and Isaac. If Danny was gone as well, he would’ve mentioned it. It would be the perfect way to tell the audience Danny was out of the show. Instead we’ve hard nothing. No one have mentioned him in canon. It’s like he was never there…. 

Or did someone erase their memory of him? Could someone do that? Yes, I guess they can… 

So, Danny knows about werewolves. In fact I’m pretty sure he’s known the entire time. He was clearly eavesdropping when Stiles and Scott discussed supernatural business during class and rolled his eyes and shook his head. 

I’ve likened Danny to an observer when I rewatched the first seasons. He does overhear a lot of stuff and I’m sure he’s much more informed than he lets on. 

And there’s also his last name that means heavenly moonlight or something like that if I’m not mistaken. And moonlight and supermoon is very important this season.. 

And then we have another fun fact about Danny - his medical history. And I don’t know about you, but medical histories have all by warning bells going off like crazy these days. 

Danny: (talking about his scars) I have two of them, from a surgery I had to correct misshapen cartilage I was born with. I had a bar put in when I was 14. It stayed there for two years to support my sternum, so my heart and lungs wouldn’t be crushed.

We additionally see Danny in the hospital in 3A because he’s ingested mistletoe. Why would Jennifer want to poison Danny? Was he a threat to her somehow?

And he was also in the hospital after being paralyzed by Jackson. I’ve been saying most of them could be experiments, Jackson included. 

The Oni also showed interest in Danny but left him alone. Why? It was a black light party, so did they see something on him that convinced them to leave him be. Like the mark we see on the chimeras, or possibly mercury that also reacts to black light? And Danny also organized that black light party, perhaps to make sure they noticed a mark on him?

We were also introduced to telluric currents through a paper Danny wrote. Telluric currents are electromagnetic currents. Who’s using electromagnetism this season? Yep, the doctors. 

superhappygenki made a post not long ago reminding us about Danny and how he could still be important. I agree. I think we’ll see him again, and like genki I wouldn’t rule Danny out as an experiment, perhaps a successful one, that have been helping them along. Observing Beacon Hills and the elements that could be either helpful or harmful, aiding in the deadpool thing that I still think was meant to power up the telluric currents. 

And as for the deadpool, the whole thing seemed to be orchestrated from Eichen House. Meredith was the patsy, who thought she was the benefactor acting on Peter’s mad coma-ramblings, Brunski another person manipulated to help, but I suspect Valack might be involved somehow too with his creepy third eye who probably would see if people were dead or not (meaning a banshee wasn’t really needed at all, and I’m still not convinced Meredith is one)

A good point, that might be it. We have no indication that Danny has any connections to Eichen House.

The only thing I can think of that has him connected to doctors of any kind, are the operation he had when he was 14, that he tells Ethan about in 3x06

Ethan: What’s that? Danny: I have two of them, from a surgery I had to correct misshapen cartilage I was born with. I had a bar put in when I was 14. It stayed there for two years to support my sternum, so my heart and lungs wouldn’t be crushed. Ethan: Well, what if there was a way you could make them disappear? Danny: I don’t really want them to. They make me feel like a survivor.