| “ | Lydia: "[Caleb]'s mom [Lenore] conjured him to fill the void she left after the Wild Hunt passed through Canaan. Mom... What if Sheriff Stilinski is filling a void? What if he's filling it with Claudia?" Natalie: "You think Claudia's dead? No, I-I just saw her." Lydia: "So many things don't make sense. She had a fatal disease, but then she's fine. She says her Jeep was stolen twenty years ago, but its Stiles'! Oh, you should have seen the look on her face when I peeled back the wallpaper. She wasn't just angry-- she was scared. Like she was protecting a secret." |
” |
Claudia Stilinski (née Gajos) was a character who was first mentioned during Season 1 of MTV's Teen Wolf, but who did not make her first on-screen cameo appearance until Season 3B. She was the mother of Stiles Stilinski and the wife of Sheriff Stilinski. Though she died of frontotemporal dementia eight years prior to the start of the series, a projection of Claudia appeared in the first half of Season 6, having returned as a phantom summoned by the Ghost Riders using her husband Noah Stilinski's pain; as a result of being conjured specifically as a distraction, she acted as a minor antagonist whose presence was meant to prevent Noah from remembering Stiles, as Stiles' relationships with his father and pack prevented the Wild Hunt from fully erasing his life, and being remembered would interfere with their plans to expand their numbers. This mainly worked because her son, Stiles, was greatly traumatised from witnessing her die and this can be seen throughout the series.
Prior to her return in the final season, Claudia appeared briefly in the background in Season 3B's Echo House, which was expanded further in a deleted scene during her son Stiles' stay at Eichen House, and she was also present in a flashback-hallucination experienced by Stiles in Season 5A's Required Reading.
In Season 6, Claudia mysteriously returned shortly after her son Stiles was erased from existence by the Ghost Riders of the Wild Hunt. Though her presence seemed unusual to the members of the McCall Pack and their allies, they did not know the fate of the original Claudia due to their altered memories. It wasn't until after Scott McCall, Malia Tate, and Lydia Martin visited the ghost town of Canaan that Lydia realized that Noah Stilinski had been so affected by the void caused by the loss of Stiles to the Ghost Riders that he actually conjured a version of Claudia to replace him with, along with help from the Hunt, who sought to recruit the entirety of Beacon Hills into their ranks and who wanted to prevent Stilinski and the pack from interfering in their plans.
As a result of this, Claudia was resistant to any efforts to remember Stiles by her husband or the pack, as she knew that if they did so, her conjured self would vanish. Despite her efforts to prevent this by reminding Stilinski of false memories of their life together, he ultimately chose to remember the son who was still alive at the cost of the wife who had been dead for almost ten years, causing Claudia to seemingly vanish. Claudia returned when the dimensions were in the process of merging and tried to kill Stiles, seeing him as the only barrier in her ultimate goal to live happily ever after with Noah as they had been for months. Despite her attempts to maintain their fraudulent life, Noah took advantage of Lydia Martin's Banshee scream to weaken Claudia enough so that he could shoot her with his sidearm.
Early life[]
Little is known about Claudia's early life, except that she was originally known as Claudia Gajos, the daughter of Mieczysław Gajos and an unnamed mother, who attended Beacon Hills High School in the same class as Natalie Martin. ("Relics") At some point, she met Noah Stilinski and was engaged to him while they were still in college. In 1995, they gave birth to a son, named after her own father and nicknamed Stiles after Stilinski's father, Elias Stilinski. ("Sundowning")
However, in 2003, Claudia was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a fatal disease that caused her perception of reality deteriorate rapidly. She soon began suffering from insomnia, an inability to distinguish dreams from reality, sleepwalking, sleep paralysis, irritability, and paranoia. This put a great deal of strain on both Claudia herself and her husband and son, especially when the dementia caused her to believe Stiles was trying to kill her. ("Required Reading") She ended up dying in 2004 with her young son Stiles at her bedside while her husband, Stilinski, was dealing with a car accident victim at work; though the victim, a Banshee, warned Noah that he needed to leave right then if he wanted to be with her when she passed, he was a skeptic about the supernatural at this time and guessed that she was just delirious. When he returned to the hospital, he found Stiles sitting in the hallway with his face in his hands, indicating that Claudia had in fact died while he was at the crash site, just as the Banshee had predicted. ("Alpha Pact")
Throughout Teen Wolf[]
In Lunatic, Claudia was mentioned for the first time by Stiles Stilinski, though not by name; when Stiles' best friend Scott McCall began having a panic attack on the day of his second full moon, Stiles encouraged him to use his inhaler as though he were having an asthma attack in hopes of tricking his body into calming down. He then admitted that he used to have panic attacks a lot after his mother's death and agreed that they were not a fun experience.
In Co-Captain, Claudia came up in conversation with Stiles and Noah Stilinski while talking at the Stilinski House. Stiles had been coaxing his father into drinking whiskey in hopes of getting him drunk enough to give him information on the Derek Hale case, which was ultimately successful. Near the end of the night, Stilinski sadly stated that he missed talking to Stiles like this, and he missed Stiles' mother, leading him to reach out to pour another drink, though Stiles, just as sad, stopped him.
In Alpha Pact, Claudia was mentioned by name by Noah Stilinski, who was being held captive by Jennifer Blake along with Chris Argent and Melissa McCall, the three of whom were intended to be her last trio of "Guardian" sacrifices in her ritual. Stilinski had just joked that he was beginning to feel left out of the "club" due to being the last one to be read in on the supernatural world's existence, but Argent, who had met Stilinski years before, argued that deep down, he knew something was up when he questioned him on a case.
Stilinski agreed that he had seen a lot of things that couldn't be explained, but that the most significant one was eight years earlier. A call had come into the station near the end of his shift one night when he was still a deputy. He went to the scene of the crime, which was a bad multiple-vehicle accident out on one of the roads that caused one of the cars to be overturned. Stilinski went on to explain that they had to wait on the paramedics in order to try to remove her from the wreckage, and they knew deep down that she wasn't going to make it.
Not wanting her to die alone, Stilinski reached into the overturned car and grabbed the victim, a young woman barely out of her teens, by the hand to comfort her while they waited for the paramedics. However, she, too, seemed to know that she was going to die as well, and she interrupted his attempts to soothe her by telling her the medics were en route by squeezing his hand so tightly that he felt as though she was going to break his bones. She then looked Stilinski straight in the eye and calmly stated, "If you wanna be with her, go now."
Stilinski, tearing up at the reminder of the story, admitted that he knew the young woman was talking about his wife, Claudia, but the "rational" part of his brain took over and told him that there was no possible way that this stranger could have known about Claudia, so he stayed at the scene, watching the woman be pulled from the car and eventually dying of her injuries despite the medics' attempts to save her. Afterward, he finally made it to Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital, where he found his eight-year-old son Stiles sitting in the hallway with his head in his hands, having been there when Claudia finally passed away from frontotemporal dementia. Stilinski implied that he still beat himself up for not believing in the supernatural to this day, as he could have been there with Stiles when Claudia passed away rather than seeing through a hopeless situation elsewhere.
In Echo House, Stiles, who was currently possessed by a dark Kitsune known as the Nogitsune, hallucinated that he saw his mother wandering the halls of Eichen House right after he was admitted in order to protect his loved ones from harm.
In Required Reading, after Stiles had read The Dread Doctors novel by Gabriel Valack, he began experiencing flashback-hallucinations while he was wandering around Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital. When he made it onto the roof, Stiles hallucinated a memory of Claudia hiding on the roof and a younger Stilinski following her up to console her.
In the memory, Stilinski kindly asked Claudia what she was doing up there, and Claudia admitted that she had to get out of her room because she didn't trust the young Stiles looking at her the way that he was. When Stilinski tried to protest, Claudia argued that Stiles was trying to hurt or kill her and she didn't care if he believed her or not. Stilinski managed to talk Claudia off the ledge and reminded her that the dementia gives her delusion and makes her paranoid, and she has to remember that it's the disease talking and not her. Claudia maintained that the way Stiles looked at her implied that he wanted to kill her, even after Stilinski argued that he was only ten years old.
Suddenly, Claudia noticed the present-day Stiles standing behind them and began screaming at her son, accusing him of looking at her in a certain way and that he was trying to kill her. This escalated until Claudia was literally clawing and slashing at Stiles, who had been knocked on the ground before realizing that it was all a hallucination and that he was actually being attacked by the rabid Chimera Josh Diaz.
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In Superposition,
In Sundowning,
In Relics,
In Radio Silence,
In Ghosted,
In Heartless,
In Blitzkrieg,
In Riders on the Storm,Personality[]
Original[]
Very little is known about the original Claudia's personality, as most of what was seen of her in flashbacks was when she was overwhelmed by delusions caused by her frontotemporal dementia. However, by all accounts, she was a kind, compassionate woman and an excellent wife and mother who was beloved by both Stilinski and Stiles and trusted by her friend and former classmate Natalie Martin.
Projection[]
The projection version of Claudia seemed to have genuine feelings for Noah Stilinski, her formerly living counterpart, and was happy and kind whenever Stilinski "followed the script" (i.e. didn't ask questions about his missing memories). However, when the people around her and Stilinski began questioning who was missing from their memories and began wondering if it could be Claudia and Stilinski's son whom the Ghost Riders erased from reality, Claudia's demeanor became much more harsh, and she did whatever she had to do to prevent people from looking further into it, even if it meant making them feel crazy (as she did for Lydia Martin, and later, Stilinski himself when he discovered Stiles' hidden room). It got to the point where she went so far as trying to kill Stiles after his return from the Wild Hunt, as she wanted to have a happy life with Stilinski and knew it could never happen as long as Stilinski believed in him, forcing Stilinski (with help from Lydia's Banshee Scream) to kill her projection for good.
Physical Appearance[]
Claudia is an attractive middle-aged woman with pale white skin, dark brown hair, and brown eyes. She dresses casually in blouses, sweaters, and jeans, and wears very little makeup.
Etymology[]
- Claudia: Claudia is the feminine form of the masculine Latin name Claudius, which was originally a family name that was possibly derived from the Latin word claudus, meaning "blind," "lame" or "crippled." It was the name of a patrician family that was prominent in Roman politics, and their ancestor was said to have been a 6th-century BCE Sabine leader named Attius Clausus, who adopted the name Appius Claudius upon becoming a Roman citizen. Variants of the name in other languages include: Klavdiya (Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian); Klaudija (Croatian); Klaudie (Czech); Claude, Claudie, Claudette, Claudine (French); Klaudia (Polish, Slovak); Cláudia (Portuguese); Klava (Russian); Klavdija (Slovene); Gladys (Welsh).
- Gajos: Gajos is a Polish surname derived from an old Slavic term gaj, meaning "grove" (a kind of forest).
- Stilinski: Though this surname is implied to be of Polish or otherwise Slavic origin, it appears to be a made-up surname with no known etymology.
Appearances[]
Season 1[]
- Lunatic (mentioned; unnamed)
- Co-Captain (mentioned; unnamed)
Season 3[]
- Alpha Pact (first mention by name)
- Silverfinger (referenced)
- Riddled (mentioned)
- Echo House (mentioned)
- The Fox and the Wolf (mentioned; unnamed)
- Required Reading (flashback)
Season 6[]
- Superposition (first present-day appearance; as phantom)
- Sundowning
- Relics
- Radio Silence
- Ghosted
- Heartless (confirmed to be a phantom)
- Blitzkrieg (vanishes)
- Riders on the Storm (illusion from the Wild Hunt)
Trivia[]
- Judging by Claudia's maiden name, Gajos, and the fact that her father's name is Mieczysław, it can be assumed that she is of at least partial Polish heritage.
- Because the closest Stiles could get to pronouncing his true first name was the word "mischief," Claudia used it as a nickname for Stiles, believing it was an apt name for a child as mischievous as he is.
- According to Noah Stilinski, Stiles' Jeep was formerly Claudia's, who intended it to be part of Stiles' inheritance after her passing.
- She shares her birthday with Meredith Walker and (possibly) Theo Raeken.
- Her funeral occurred in a flashback in The Last Chimera.
- In a deleted scene in Echo House, Claudia is portrayed by Gina Holden
Gallery[]
References[]
See also[]