Bardicvoice's Supernatural Descant

Okay, folks: I've posted my latest contribution to our buddy panns' wonderful Supernatural Un-Book Club site! I took on what I call Family in Four Parts: Dead Man’s Blood, Salvation, Devil’s Trap, and In My Time of Dying.

My focus had three parts: Daniel Elkins, the Colt, and the Winchester family dynamic. Hope you enjoy!

Some of you know from various comments I've made that from 2000-2006, I took big road trip vacations with my sister on her Harley, with our Mom (who was 76 when this fun started!) in the sidecar. I kept a journal of each trip which got sent around to family and friends, describing the things we saw and did while crossing America on three wheels.

I've posted the trip journals here in my LJ, and if you have any interest in a somewhat unusual American travelogue, I invite you to drop on by and read them. Be warned, though: the journals reflect my passion for detail, so none of them are short! Hopefully, though, they might make you feel as if you've been along for the ride ...

Variety reported this morning that our buddy Eric has secured a two-year exclusive production development deal with Warner Bros. Television. Under the deal, he will continue to produce and showrun Supernatural, while also developing new series ideas.

Variety even enjoys speculating a bit slyly on what might be in the offing, or not: "There's no word if one of the new titles might be a Supernatural spinoff; Kripke has said in the past that he's interested in doing a prequel of sorts that takes place in the Old West and centered on the show's mythology."

This is cool news because it's a vote of confidence by one of the industry majors for our favorite magnificent bastard (always said fondly, that!). It must be noted that this is not a guarantee that Supernatural will get its fifth season, however: that still relies on the CW (a) surviving and (b) renewing it again. {I have every confidence in the latter!)

Here's the source and full article.

When I was a kid, my Dad was my hero. Now that I’m all grown-up, he still is. Not because he was perfect – he wasn’t – but because he loved his family, he did the best he could for us, and he treated other people with generosity and respect no matter who they were. When he got angry, it was most often because of stupidity, injustice, or unfairness, and I never saw him take his anger out on people. He loved to laugh. My family memories of growing up with Mom, Dad, and my two older sisters are overwhelmingly ones of love and joy.

It wasn’t until I was in high school and spending time in my friends’ homes that I realized my family was unusual. While less idealized, ours was more like than unlike the harmonious TV families in shows from the 1950’s and 1960’s. Mom and Dad never fought, and they never, ever, yelled at us. Oh, they disagreed from time to time, but Dad’s temper always stayed on a checkrein, under control, and Mom had a way of bending like a willow, letting upsetting winds pass but remaining firmly rooted in what she knew was right. Dad talked about whatever made him angry, Mom listened appreciatively and occasionally interjected something mild, and by the end, Dad usually talked himself around to where Mom was and the anger was long gone and forgotten. I never remember being spanked or yelled at. For me, the worst punishment for doing something wrong was simply knowing from the look on his face even before he said a word that I’d disappointed my Dad, and I did my best not to go there. I had the advantage of seeing his reaction to my older sisters making their mistakes, and immediately resolved not to repeat them. (Of course, I simply made my own … *wry grin*)

My Dad worked for the same company for 41 years. For most of that time, he was a foreman in a shop that built electrical controls. We sat down to family breakfast every weekday morning at 6:00. He left home at 6:30 every morning and got back at about 4:30, just in time for family dinner. He would talk about what happened at work, and then all of us would chime in with what happened during our days. I’m glad that I grew up when that was possible.

He didn’t have much time to spare during the week, but he gave himself to us on the weekends. Saturday was chores day, when we did housecleaning and projects, but Sunday was the best. Sunday morning after church, once he’d had a chance to scan the newspaper, Dad belonged to us kids. While Mom started Sunday lunch – which for us was the big meal of the day – Dad would take us out to the park or to the zoo in summer, or sledding or to a museum in winter. We’d always call home from wherever we were to find out when lunch was ready, even though it was always going to be ready at the same time. Sunday afternoons, we’d go to the library as a family to get our books for the week. That latter thing, I can prove, because a photographer for the city newspaper found us there once when I was two and took our picture. We made quite an impression since all three of us kids were wearing matching coats – Mom made most of our clothes, which saved a lot of money – and all of us had matching smiles. I was sitting on Dad’s lap while he read to me from The Little Engine That Could.

Mom had worked before the three of us were born, but stopped working outside the home once we kids started to arrive. When I started grade school, she experimented with going back to work, taking a part-time job that let her be home by the time we started coming back from school. When that looked as if it was working, Mom and Dad sat us all down for a family conference to learn how we all felt about Mom going back to work. We all supported it, and so it continued. One job led to another, and eventually to my Mom running her own business as a tax practitioner and real estate broker. Dad laughed that when he retired, she could take over, but the truth was – and we learned this, because as we got older, Mom and Dad sat us down with them, talked about the family budget, and showed us precisely how they’d planned and saved for our home and our futures, including being able to give us college tuition – that Mom’s business had outstripped Dad’s salary even before Dad retired. I think it made Dad feel a little funny, given that he’d been raised in a time and a culture when the husband and father was supposed to be the breadwinner, but he learned to accept and even appreciate it. After he retired, he insisted on taking over doing the housecleaning during tax time, leading to Mom’s clients wondering if they could hire him to vacuum their carpets and wash their floors!

My Dad retired the summer before I started law school. He’d been looking forward with great enthusiasm to all the things he could do once he was retired, but when the first day of his retirement actually rolled around, he had so many options to choose from that he was paralyzed and couldn’t figure out where to start! Mom teased him to just pick one project, any random one, and get started, but it took a couple of days before he actually managed to settle on one thing. From that point on, though, there was never any question of what he would do. His days were always full, many of them with helping out other people. He and Mom always had a habit they passed on to us of being neighborly, of doing things for others without any expectation of reward. A neighbor’s gate was broken? Dad would fix it. An elderly friend needed help shopping, or a lift to the doctor’s? No problem; Dad always had time. Someone needed woodwork done? Dad was happy to oblige. Between Dad and one of his older brothers, our family had a complete woodworking shop available, and Dad loved being what he self-deprecatingly termed a “wood butcher.” He’d built all the woodwork in the house I grew up in. I still have two of his hand-crafted bookcases in my dining room.

He taught us to use his tools, too. It truly didn’t matter to him that he’d wound up with three daughters and no sons: he told us we could do whatever we put our minds to, and he thought we should have practical skills. I remember the day he taught me to change a tire, and stood back watching me struggle with the lug nuts, both giving pointers and teasing me to pit my strength against nuts that just wouldn’t give. When I was frustrated to shamed, embarrassed tears but still refusing to give up, he stepped in – only to discover that he couldn’t budge them with sheer muscle-power, either. We both laughed, he pulled out his power tools to crack the barrier, and then let me get on with the rest of the exercise, with one added pointer to the lesson being, It’s no shame to have to call AAA for help when your lug nuts were tightened by machine. My middle sister really became his shadow, learning over the years with his tutoring to use every single one of his power tools for high-quality woodworking. Dad always loved playing with his “toys.” I remember when we got our first big Ariens snowthrower, and Dad started it up one morning to tackle the first big snowfall of the season – lunchtime rolled around and Dad was nowhere to be seen. We tracked him down following the sound, because he was using the snowthrower to clean off every one of our neighbor’s driveways!

There was a lot about us kids that Dad never did understand or figure out. I baffled him sometimes because I loved science fiction, fantasy, and mystery books and became passionate about television and theater, and because I wanted to write. He never understood what people saw in stories, whether in fictional books, television, movies, or stage plays, precisely because they weren’t real. Once we kids were old enough to read our own books, I never saw my Dad reading unless it was a newspaper or something to do with woodworking or plumbing or something else practical. He was a man of his hands, and unimaginative unless it came down to how to build or do something. But even though he didn’t understand why I passionately cared for characters who weren’t even real, he was button-popping proud when something I wrote came back marked with an “A” or got printed in a school publication.

The only anger I remember my Dad ever nursing – and the only thing about him that ever made me hurt because I felt that he was wrong – came from some of my oldest sister’s life choices, things that went against his rigid Catholic upbringing. He couldn’t approve of them and couldn’t understand them, and it took years for him to mellow out enough to accept them and get past the sense that something about them was intrinsically wrong just because they weren’t fully traditional. (At my sister’s liturgically creative wedding, for example, Dad even asked my cousin the Catholic priest, who had officiated at the ceremony, whether they really were married! He was only half-joking …) In later years, when he was reassured that “different” didn’t mean “damned,” he gave up that festering resentment and threw himself wholeheartedly into helping out, even if he still did disagree with some of her decisions. That just turned into hilarious teasing – like the Christmas when he found, cleaned up, and made her a present of an old-fashioned potty chair when she and her husband decided not to build a bathroom on the first floor of their new home!

The only time I remember Dad ever actually being angry with me was when my Mom went in for surgery once. Dad was a wreck in the waiting room because he was terrified down to his toes that something would go wrong, and he berated me for not caring about Mom because I wasn’t scared and wasn’t worried. I had the hardest time getting him to accept that I just had a firm feeling that everything was going to be just fine, and thus couldn’t worry myself into a frazzle – and that Mom wouldn’t want either of us to be worrying that way, because she was convinced everything would be fine.

My Dad had a heart attack in 1992, and then suffered a stroke during bypass surgery that left him unable to speak and partially paralyzed on one side. My sister built a wheelchair ramp onto the front porch and she and Mom equipped the first floor to facilitate his recovery, but a few months after he came home, he suffered a second stroke and passed away peacefully in his sleep. At his funeral, a lot of people turned out and all of us laughed a lot, remembering my Dad. We buried him in the plot he’d picked out near the edge of the cemetery by the railroad tracks, where he’d laughed he could hop a train and go anywhere he chose.

I haven’t been back to the cemetery because he isn’t there. He’s here out East with me, and back in the Midwest with Mom and my sisters, and out West with his grandson, and living around the world in the hearts of every single person he ever helped. I hear his voice teasing me sometimes when I get passionate about fictional characters, or when I’m trying to make a decision about household maintenance. I hear his laugh behind my own, and in every train whistle. And I know he’s always going to be there.

This time, I’m writing about a real character. Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

(I promise I'll get back to Supernatural again soon. I started to write about John Winchester, but today, instead, I simply had to write about my own Dad ...)

SPOILER WARNING!! This class contains speculations arising in part from season four spoilers revealed by Eric Kripke in his interview with TVGuide.com on 29 May 2008. If you are staying entirely spoiler-free, do not attend this class!! (Note: Lack of attendance at spoilery seminars will not reflect adversely on any student.)

I can’t resist thinking about Dean and Sam, and by extension, about Lilith, Ruby, and the war, and that leads to a speculative mythology exploration of demon powers, demon motives, and demon deals.

I've been having a few interesting computer problems today (I hate Word!), so the full class is posted over on my LJ, here.

The only spoilers I do are the ones directly from KTMB, and he has some lovely ones out here on TVGuide.com this morning!

And I should have a new Supernatural University class up this weekend ...

3.16 No Rest For the Wicked: We Are Not Gonna Make the Same Mistakes All Over Again

No more deals, no time.
Sam shrugs off Lilith’s best shot;
Dean’s soul screams in Hell.

Episode Summary

Waking from a nightmare of hellhound pursuit and attack with only thirty hours remaining on his contract, Dean learned that Bobby had figured out how to locate Lilith. Sam attempted to reassure him with the promise that he wouldn’t go to Hell, but Dean’s momentary hallucination of Sam warping into a demon hellhound made that ring hollow.

Bobby’s spellcasting located Lilith in New Harmony, Indiana. Sam was ready to move out immediately, but Dean raised practical objections about relying on Bela’s intel, which was the only indication that Lilith was his contract holder, and pointed out that even if they cornered Lilith, they had no way to kill her, which they would have to do in order to void the contract. Sam advocated summoning Ruby both to confirm that Lilith was the right target and to obtain her demon-killing knife, but Dean refused point-blank, even overriding Bobby’s support, protesting that Ruby had lied consistently. Saying that just because he had to die didn’t mean that Sam and Bobby had to die as well, he insisted that they find a different way to save him, and not rely on Ruby.

Sam ignored his order and summoned Ruby anyway. She confirmed that Lilith was Dean’s contract holder, and said that she hadn’t told him before because the brothers would have gone up against her unprepared and would have died. Ruby said that he was ready now, and that the time was right because Lilith’s guard was down and she was taking some time to enjoy herself. Sam confirmed that he and Dean still had the hex bags she’d given them during Jus In Bello that would prevent Lilith from knowing where they were. But Ruby refused to give him her knife, telling him that the knife wouldn’t matter, and that he had the power within him to destroy Lilith. She said that his psychic abilities were only dormant, not gone, and that she could help him unlock all of them, not just the visions. She told him the powers were why Lilith was afraid of him. When he challenged her about why she hadn’t mentioned this before, she pointed out that he wouldn’t even have considered it until he was desperate enough. She claimed never to have lied to him, only to Dean.

Dean interrupted them, refusing to let Sam consider accepting her training. When Ruby insulted him, he hit her, triggering a brutal fight that left him in possession of the knife and Ruby caught under a devil’s trap that he’d painted on the ceiling some time earlier, fully expecting Sam to summon her. The brothers left her there. Sam argued that he should at least learn what he could do, but Dean maintained that there was a pattern in everything that had happened with both John’s deal and his that prompted each of them to sell their souls for the other, and he refused to let Sam consider following their example and sell himself for his brother. Dean confessed that Sam was his weak spot and noted that he was Sam’s, and said that the demons were using that against them. He advocated refusing to play the game any more and just going after the demons the way John had taught them.

Lilith, meanwhile, was enjoying herself by terrorizing a suburban family. Possessing a ten-year-old girl, she forced the girl’s parents and grandfather to do whatever she wanted and pretend to be happy, killing the family pet, her elderly babysitter, and her grandfather along the way for being mean to her or trying to get help from other neighbors.

Bobby disabled the Impala to ensure that the boys couldn’t leave without him. Dean argued that it wasn’t Bobby’s fight, but Bobby insisted that family didn’t end with blood, and challenged that the boys needed him because Dean was further handicapped by the hallucinations that came with being pursued by hellhounds. Dean had hidden them well enough that Sam was surprised, but once Bobby put it out in the open, he admitted to them. On the road to Indiana, with Bobby following in his Chevelle, Dean refused any emotional discussion, but diverted Sam into a Bon Jovi sing-along, their last light-hearted moment. Nearing New Harmony, a cop pulled the Impala over for a burned-out taillight, but Dean, looking at the cop, saw his real demon face below the human one, and killed the demon with Ruby’s dagger. With Dean approaching Hell himself in only five hours, they realized that he could now recognize other Hell creatures for what they were.

Despite creeping Dean out, his new talent came in handy as they cased the place from an empty house up for sale across the street, because he could identify Lilith in the little girl and the demon guards possessing various neighbors. Sam and Bobby both said that the little girl host would have to be sacrificed because Lilith absolutely had to be stopped in order to save everyone, not just Dean, and Dean finally reluctantly agreed. Dean drew out the postman and next-door neighbor guards, and Sam used the dagger to kill the demons and their hosts. Bobby meanwhile turned the water supply for the lawn sprinkler system into holy water. As the boys headed to the house, Ruby waylaid Dean, demanding her knife, but Sam stopped her. Dean got his first true look at Ruby, seeing through the host’s beauty to an ugly spirit within. Ruby maintained that they were too late, that Dean was dead and she didn’t intend to let Sam die too. Dean pointed out that they’d attracted the attention of all the neighbors, who were all possessed by demons. They bolted for the house with the demons in pursuit, and Bobby turned on the sprinkler system to prevent the guard demons from reaching the house. Unfortunately, the demons were between Bobby and the boys, so he had to retreat again to the vacant house and couldn’t help or even reach the brothers.

Inside, the three split up, with Dean knocking out the innocent father and taking him to safety behind a salt line in the basement while Sam and Ruby went upstairs, checking different rooms. Sam found the bedroom where the mother lay rigid in fear beside the daughter she had read to sleep. Terrified, the woman begged Sam to kill the girl. He struggled against his reluctance, but finally struck as the girl awoke and screamed – but Dean caught his arm at the last moment, saying that Lilith wasn’t in the little girl any more. They got the mother and daughter safely into the basement with orders to stay there no matter what they heard. Sam told Ruby to tell him what he needed to do in order to save Dean, and Dean again refused to let him consider it, telling him instead to keep fighting and remember what he’d been taught by John and Dean.

Midnight struck, and Dean saw a hellhound approaching. They fled into another room, slamming the door and lining the door and window with goofer dust. Ruby again told Sam to give her the dagger, saying she might be able to fight the hound, but Dean realized that the entity in Ruby’s body wasn’t Ruby any more, and she flung Sam up against a wall and laid Dean out on a table. Lilith in Ruby’s body opened the door to the hellhound and sicced it on Dean. The invisible hound ripped and mauled Dean to bloody death in front of Sam’s horrified eyes, and then Lilith raised her hand and flung her power against Sam – but when the white light faded, Sam was still alive and unhurt. Sam stood up, picked up the dagger, and would have killed her if she hadn’t abandoned Ruby’s body in a cloud of black smoke. Weeping, Sam knelt beside Dean’s still body and mourned, cradling his head.

And somewhere behind Dean’s dead and staring eyes, his soul hung suspended on chains in a murky crystalline emptiness criss-crossed by flaring energy lines, attached by hooks embedded in his bleeding body, crying out for help and screaming Sam’s name.

Commentary and Meta Analysis

Two days before this episode aired, I told a friend that even though “Carry On Wayward Son” by Kansas had become a tradition with Supernatural finales, I wasn’t expecting to hear it this time precisely because it promises hope – there’ll be peace when you are done – and given that I expected Dean to die and go to Hell, there’d be precious little peace to promise to either of the Winchester brothers. Curiously enough, when I heard the opening chords of Kansas kicking off the recap after all, I felt obscurely comforted not because I believed that Dean wouldn’t die and Sam wouldn’t be left bereft, but simply because the song still promised that despite it all, there will be peace when we are done. That may not be for at least two more years (I hope!), but I still feel that it’s a promise not only to us, but to the Winchesters.

I have a lot to say about this episode, enough that I’ll wind up saving some of my brother discussion for the hiatus. But I definitely want to spend some time now with Dean facing his fate, and with observations and speculation on Ruby, Lilith, and Sam.

Dean Winchester: Playing For Keeps

Nightmares were always Sam’s forte during the series, not Dean’s, but Dean’s opening nightmare of fleeing in panic from nothing only to confront and be brought down by a hellhound gave evidence of Dean’s increasing terror. Dismissing it and teasing Sam about taking a fun run to Tijuana, even if it was only a half-hearted attempt at humor, spoke just as eloquently to his determination not to yield to his fear. His hallucination of Sam’s face morphing into something demonic and then returning to normal – the same effect we saw in Crossroad Blues when the doomed doctor looked at the motel manager and when Evan was saying goodbye to his wife – disturbed him profoundly, but he kept his game face firmly in place for Sam successfully enough that Sam was surprised when Bobby asked Dean about experiencing hallucinations.

Despite his steadily growing fear of Hell as he approached death, Dean stayed firmly in big brother mode, determined to watch out for and save Sammy no matter what, even – perhaps especially – from himself. Dean knew all too well from his own example what guilt and grief and love could do, and tried desperately to keep Sam, just this once, from following in his big brother’s footsteps.

For all that Dean has never been given to introspection, it was very clear that he’s given a lot of thought to his situation over the past year, and when he pushed Sam to see things his way, he pulled out all the stops. When he refused to consider letting Sam summon Ruby for help, his explanation was an eerie echo of what the Trickster had told Sam in Mystery Spot, warning that Hell is using the brothers’ love and need for each other against them for its own purposes. Dean followed the progression to its logical conclusion and refused to allow it, determined that the sacrifices would stop with him. He saw what he had done in bringing Sam back as him having fallen into the same trap that had snared their father when his own life had been on the line. He’d had no choice but to accept what John had done for him, and he was willing to accept the consequences of his own action, but he wasn’t willing to let Sam follow his example and give Hell a Winchester trifecta. His own sacrifice would have meaning only if Sam survived and remained Sam, and he concluded that Sam following a demon’s advice or seduction could lead to as much a forfeiture of soul as its outright sale.

I would posit that he was particularly concerned precisely because Hell has always shown a particular interest in Sam, and would likely play the game most subtly with the prize it most wanted to achieve. Dean’s and John’s deals had been overt and outright, predictable for someone who knew how to push their buttons. Dean feared that Sam’s would have been less obvious, a temptation to do seemingly right things for right reasons, putting him on the slippery slope of power corruption without him even realizing it. He said as much: Ruby’s just jerking your chain down the road. You know what it’s paved with, and you know where it’s going. That would be the road to Hell, paved with good intentions.

Dean obviously thoroughly learned the lesson he acknowledged in last week’s Time Is On My Side, that he can’t force Sam to do or not do anything, and he acted on it this time. Knowing that Sam would be stubborn and insist on summoning Ruby on his own, contrary to his brother’s orders, Dean clearly took stock of their surroundings, figured out where Sam would likely try it, and took his own steps, painting a devil’s trap on the lower barn ceiling without Sam’s knowledge and well in advance of Sam’s summoning spell, probably while Sam and Bobby were otherwise engaged. Suckering Ruby into the devil’s trap by engaging her in a fight in which he was totally outclassed was a quintessential Dean maneuver, and he played it to his advantage. His weary, wounded triumph as he walked up the stairs and left her trapped held a satisfaction that her curses couldn’t dispel. Similarly, his later glee when the sprinkler trap worked momentarily overrode even his fear of his approaching fate.

Enroute to the battle, Dean wouldn’t let Sam dwell on what was coming. Instead, he turned aside the “misty goodbye speech” with his impromptu Bon Jovi sing-along. Belting out rock, he could pretend to be carefree, and teased Sam into pretending right along with him until both of them were howling with full hearts. Sam started singing only to humor him, but then it became real for both of them, just brothers together in the moment, sharing laughter and silliness and joy in each other right up until it came home to Dean that this really was the last such open laugh he and Sam would ever share. He still savored the moment, but it turned bittersweet.

Knowing that he couldn’t force Sam not to pursue the knowledge that Ruby had offered, Dean nonetheless did all that he could to make Sam realize how adamantly opposed to it he was even as the time ran out, and tried at the same time to absolve Sam of any guilt he might feel over failing to have done absolutely everything that might have been possible to save him. I’m sorry. I mean, this is all my fault. I know that. But what you’re doing – it’s not going to save me. It’s only going to kill you.

Dean smiled reassurance for Sam even as the clock struck midnight, even as they both knew it was over. His mauling death was horrific, and that Sam was forced helplessly to watch as he screamed and died made it all the worse; Dean would never have wanted him to see that and be scarred by it. And this was the second time Sam had been forced to stand by and watch Dean be tortured, the second time Dean couldn’t spare him.

In the aftermath of his death, we saw Dean suspended in continuing agony, crying for help, screaming for Sam. I found it telling that the necklace Sam gave to Dean all those Christmases ago is so much a part of Dean’s self-image that his consciousness is wearing it even in Hell, or whatever place of torment he’s currently suspended. No matter what, he’s still got his brother’s love, and everything else that necklace represents. And maybe next season we’ll finally learn what mojo it carries.

Sam, Ruby, and Lilith

Somehow, I don’t think Sam will ever be the Antichrist Superstar. He may go to some very dark places to bring his brother back, but he’s a Winchester, and his father and his brother taught him well. I have to believe that his humanity will triumph in the end.

I have always shared Dean’s distrust of Ruby. I don’t doubt that Ruby wanted Lilith dead, but for her own purposes. I wasn’t surprised when Ruby proclaimed that Sam had the power to defeat Lilith, if he would only let Ruby teach him; nothing else explained Ruby’s persistent interest in him. Still, whether his psychic abilities are humanly innate or were generated by the demon blood Azazel fed him when he was only six months old, giving another demon the keys to them seems a spectacularly bad idea.

All season, Ruby pushed Sam to become more ruthless, to kill without hesitation. Some of that lesson has taken; witness how viciously Sam took out the demon guards with Ruby’s knife. But at his core, Sam still remains Sam; witness his struggle to bring himself to kill the little girl, even after having been the one to advocate doing it in the first place. Sam lived what he could become in Mystery Spot; he hasn’t forgotten the horror of that.

Ruby also tried to make Sam trust her the best way she knew how; she told him the truth whenever she could, but selectively held out information she didn’t want him to have. She wanted and needed him to be desperate not only to overcome his distaste and fear of being different, but to get him to listen to her, and not to Dean. All season, she did her best to separate them, playing on her knowledge of both of them to sow secrets between them, understanding precisely how divisive secrets can be. She used Dean to manipulate Sam more than once, while also relying on him to keep Sam safe until she could use him.

Ruby had more in common with Azazel than with Lilith. I was grimly amused that Sam used the same incantation to summon Ruby that John had used to call Azazel in In My Time of Dying, just using a different sigil inscribed on the floor and none of his own blood. Both Ruby and Azazel wanted to use Sam and his gifts; Lilith simply wanted to destroy him. I would posit that Ruby saved the brothers when she could only because she wanted to use Sam when the time was right. And I would submit that Ruby showed her true feelings for Dean in the curses she heaped on him for trapping and leaving her, saying that she wanted to see him suffer.

Ruby’s escape from the devil’s trap shouldn’t have been surprising. We’ve seen other demons able to affect the world beyond the confines of a trap – remember Meg in Born Under a Bad Sign, saying that she’d learned some new tricks and cracking the plaster of Bobby’s ceiling to break the integrity of the design, and Casey in Sin City trying a similar trick, but only bringing down the basement stairs, not succeeding in cracking apart the floor where Dean had laid his trap. My guess is that Ruby managed to crack one or more of the barn boards on which the ceiling trap had been painted. I don’t think that she needed any assistance to get out; she clearly had resources beyond the usual run of ordinary demons.

And so did Lilith. Lilith managed to sneak out of the little girl, evict Ruby from the body she was possessing, and masquerade as Ruby until Dean’s doomed soul-sight unmasked her as an imposter, all without any visible sign. Most of the times we’ve seen demons possess or depart from hosts, they’ve done so in a noisy and obvious cloud of black smoke – but not all possessions have happened that way. Remember the bystander and the fireman in Devil’s Trap, who were possessed without any obvious outward sign. I would suggest that demons operating in a hurry or under stress can’t waste time and effort on being subtle, but that an old power like Lilith can be more circumspect when she has the opportunity.

I further suspect that, while Lilith was ostensibly having fun torturing the suburban family, she was actually laying a trap all along, one that Ruby either fell into or chose to lead the boys into as still being her best bet. Considering the number of neighbors possessed by demons acting as her guards, Lilith didn’t strike me as being on shore leave. I think she was waiting for an attack, inviting it, even, and was thus very ready to undertake a bodyswap at the first sign of an infiltration. I’ll confess to a bit of surprise at Lilith being able to ambush and replace Ruby in utter silence, but we haven’t seen every demon power on display yet. And I think it’s clear that Lilith outweighed Ruby in a one-on-one: Ruby never demonstrated anything to match Lilith’s white-out killer power.

Sam surviving that power blast was the most certain demonstration we’ve seen of the power he contains. He had no opportunity to learn how to summon what he has, and whatever happened this time used the same simple repetitive unconscious triggers of ultimate shock and horror and no and stop and Dean as his telekinetic breakthrough in Nightmare. Unlike the situation in Devil’s Trap, where Sam was trying deliberately to summon the Colt to him and failed, this time, as in Nightmare, there was nothing specific in his mind; just pain and need and negation. He was as surprised to be alive and unhurt as Lilith was to see him that way, and his further immunity to her usual demon power to throw him up against a wall meant nothing more to him than the chance to kill her for what she’d done to Dean. Her hasty departure – in a noisy, roiling cloud of black smoke scrambling for survival, how inelegant – left him with nothing but his overwhelming grief and loss, no awareness of new power.

We’re left to wonder what will happen when Sam emerges from his first crushing experience of Dean’s death to realize that he’s changed in more ways than he knows, and to chance what that may mean in terms of getting Dean back. I’m certain that speculation will rage furiously all summer until we learn what Kripke has in store.

I’m also betting that we haven’t seen the last of either Ruby or Lilith. Lilith may have flipped Ruby out of the body she wanted to take, but somehow I don’t think she had the time to send her all the way back to Hell, or if she did, Ruby may be ready to take advantage of Dean’s presence again. I believe that Lilith, on the other hand, won’t be looking for a head-on confrontation again any time soon, not after what Sam did in negating everything she threw at him. I think that Lilith will pull back and regroup.

Production Notes

I’ve had “Wanted Dead Or Alive” on my Supernatural mood playlist for a long time. I’m a little Dean-like in that there’s nothing I enjoy more than tooling down the road in my beloved convertible with the top down and the rock music cranked, uninhibitedly singing along. But yesterday, for the first time ever when my iPod tossed up “Wanted Dead Or Alive,” I choked up and started crying two-thirds of the way through, when we hit the verse the brothers had sung. I have a feeling that’s going to happen to me a lot over the next few months. And what that tells me is that this episode achieved its goal perfectly.

Eric Kripke’s script hit all the right notes for the brothers, and succeeded in defying expectations at the same time. I know that a lot of people were expecting Sam to go darkside in order to save his brother, and weren’t expecting Dean actually to die. I’m glad that he didn’t go the predictable route. And I’m not even going to try predicting how he’s going to manage to bring Dean back in Jensen Ackles’ lovely body, after killing him so thoroughly!

Kim Manners brought the emotion with his direction, as always, and his collaboration with director of photography Serge Ladouceur is magnificent. I loved the “hellhound vision” pursuit shots and camera work in Dean’s dream. All of the emotional exchanges between the brothers were spot-on in tone, timing, and look; I will never forget the singing scene in the car, with the light and the darkness on the boys’ faces. And for some reason, I really enjoyed the moment in the house when Dean spun and grabbed the father. It was a stunt shot that just really worked.

A tormented Dean chained and suspended with steel hooks embedded in his shoulder and left side in the midst of a nothingness laced with chains and shot with thunder and lightning remains one of the most disturbing images I’ve ever seen. Whether that represents his lonely Hell or a prison constructed of his own mind, I’m not even going to guess. I thought his gruesome, savage, agonizing death by hellhound was bad enough to see, but the aftermath, with him crying out to Sam for help, was hideously inspired.

Jay Gruska’s underscore brought back some of my favorite musical themes, including the haunting musical depiction of Dean’s love for family that we heard back in the cabin during Devil’s Trap, this time playing under his “Eye of the Tiger” speech. I want recordings of his scores released, along with the ones by Chris Lennertz!

I don’t know who was responsible for making the cop car number 54 – Jerry Wanek, I suspect! – but it made me laugh on a rewatch when I noticed it as Sam, Dean, and Bobby were hiding it under branches and suddenly heard, Car 54, Where Are You? in my head! (Yes, I’m old enough to remember that …). And although I suspect that budget was the primary reason we didn’t get to see what Dean saw when he looked at demons with Hell-sensitized eyes, I think that leaving his Hell-vision to our imaginations, with just Dean’s expressions and reactions to go on, was inspired.

The most important notes for me were on the performances, which were all stellar. Jensen Ackles absolutely sold Dean’s desperation, resolution, courage, love, agony, and terror. Jared Padalecki matched him with Sam’s fear and determination, and his horror, denial, and wrenching grief at Dean’s death. The brothers singing Bon Jovi, with both Jensen and Jared deliberately hamming it up off-key, created an unforgettable moment of mingled transcendent joy and inexpressible sorrow. Jim Beaver’s Bobby, getting in Dean’s face about family not ending with blood, echoed Dean’s passionate determination to save Bobby in Dream a Little Dream of Me, and cemented Bobby’s role as a surrogate parent for the boys.

Katie Cassidy also demonstrated what she could do. Her flip into Lilith, when Lilith’s masquerade in Ruby’s body was revealed, demonstrated more range than she’d displayed while just portraying Ruby. Seeing Lilith’s spoiled little girl mannerisms translated into Ruby’s adult form was creepy in the extreme, and Katie’s delivery was a total departure from her tone and manner as Ruby. She managed to look and sound totally different, and establish Lilith as a new persona. And the look on her face at the end, the stunned surprise at seeing Sam still alive and unhurt, followed by the fear of realizing that her powers no longer worked against him and that he was going to kill her, were genuine.

I loved this episode, every heartbreaking moment of it. Going into it, I had no vested idea of what would happen. I didn’t anticipate or favor any one theory over another: Sam turning dark in order to save Dean, Sam taking Dean’s place, Dean going off on his own to keep Sam out of what would happen. Not being invested in any one concept, I was simply captivated by the way the story unfolded, and what it said about Sam and Dean. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here, and what more we’re going to learn about the Winchester brothers as it does.

And no matter how hard it is to believe right now, with those last searing images of Sam’s grief and Dean’s agony, this I have to believe:

There’ll be peace when we are done.

This ends the third season commentaries, but Supernatural University will be in session during the hiatus – beginning as soon as I recover enough to be able to write again!

3.15 Time Is On My Side: We’re Trying to Do the Same Thing Here

Immortal doctor
Tempts Sam with deal-breaking hope.
Bela meets her fate.

Episode Summary

Abducted from the parking lot of his health club, a plastic surgeon in Erie, PA later staggered into the emergency room of a local hospital, collapsed, and died, missing his liver.

Elsewhere, trying to learn who holds Dean’s contract, the Winchester brothers interrogated a demon only to learn that the demon was more afraid of the contract holder than of being exorcised and sent back to Hell, and that demons were looking forward to Dean’s arrival for some payback. Sam exorcised the demon and Dean buried the dead host. Intrigued by the report of the man with the missing liver, Sam posed as a cop and did some further checking, to discover that the man’s body had been covered in bloody fingerprints belonging to another man who had died in 1981. Sam presented the information to Dean as a possible zombie hunt, irresistible bait for Dean’s love of hunting, and although Dean didn’t entirely buy Sam’s explanation, given that Sam had been obsessively focused on saving Dean and a zombie hunt when Dean had only three weeks left didn’t ring true, the brothers headed to Erie and posed as detectives to interview the coroner. Discovering that the dead man’s liver had been surgically removed, not ripped out, however, put paid to any theory about zombies being involved. Finding a survivor of another organ theft whose wound had been packed with maggots and sutured with silk, medical practices common in the early nineteenth century, Sam pulled out John’s journal and pointed to the account of his hunt of Doc Benton, who supposedly discovered the secret to immortality in 1816 and had sustained himself by stealing replacement body parts when his own wore out. The brothers realized that although John had hunted Benton down and removed his heart, that evidently hadn’t been enough to terminate him.

As the boys started their hunt, Benton abducted another healthy, athletic young man, and extracted his heart. Not knowing about the latest victim, Sam narrowed the search down to a series of isolated cabins in the woods near a stream, Benton’s preferred location for a lair, but as they prepared to check them out, Bobby called Dean with the first lead he’d gotten on the whereabouts of Bela since she stole the Colt. A reclusive former hunter and occasional dealer in supernatural supplies named Rufus Turner in Canaan, VT had responded to Bobby’s feeler, reporting contact by a British woman using one of Bela’s known aliases. Dean immediately resolved to pursue Bela and the possible retrieval of the Colt, over Sam’s protest that she had probably sold it within days of stealing it. Sam pleaded with Dean to remain and finish the Benton hunt, admitting that he’d hoped from the start that Benton was involved and maintaining that the secret to Benton’s immortality could save Dean by making it impossible for him to die, thus negating the contract. Furious at Sam’s manipulation and adamant that he wouldn’t do anything that could be considered welching on the deal, given the clause that would forfeit Sam’s life if Dean reneged, Dean insisted on going after Bela and the hope that she still might have the Colt. Sam refused to go with him, intent on pursuing Benton, and Dean reluctantly struck off on his own, asking Sam to be careful.

Sam located Benton’s cabin, discovering the body of the involuntary heart donor and also a young woman who was still alive, her flayed forearm covered with maggots. Sam rescued the girl even as Benton arrived, and ran down Benton with his rental SUV when the doctor tried to stop them from leaving. On his own hunt, Dean forged an uneasy bond with Rufus Turner over a pricey bottle of scotch whiskey and obtained from him information on Bela’s past, which revealed that her parents had died in a suspicious car accident when she was fourteen, leaving her to inherit millions. Dean caught Bela by surprise in her hotel room and further surprised her with his knowledge, but searching her belongings failed to turn up the Colt, which she maintained she had sold across the world shortly after acquiring it. Dean was tempted to kill her, but as he held her at gunpoint, he noticed a strange herb tucked above the doorway, and walked out on her, declaring that she wasn’t worth it. Once he was gone, Bela smoothed out the hotel receipt that she had picked from his pocket, and then made a call, saying that Dean had found her as planned, but that Sam hadn’t been with him – but she knew where they were staying.

Driving back to Erie, Dean called Sam to report his failure, and learned that Sam had found Benton and escaped with his lab book, including the formula for immortality. Sam excitedly reported that, while he couldn’t understand it all yet, it didn’t seem to rely on any form of black magic at all; that it just seemed to be very weird science, and he really believed that using it could save Dean. While they were talking, however, Benton chloroformed Sam, and the younger Winchester woke up strapped to Benton’s operating table, his eyes taped open. Benton revealed that he knew who Sam was and what he owed the Winchesters, because he’d read John’s journal. Maintaining that he wasn’t a monster and had never done anything that he hadn’t had to do in order to survive, as witness that donors like his kidney patient had survived, he told Sam that his chances of surviving were very high – and then moved in to scoop out Sam’s eyes with a serrated melon baller. Dean arrived in the nick of time and shot him, but the bullets had no effect on Benton, who tossed Dean casually aside and then advanced on him. Dean stabbed him in the heart with a knife, but even that didn’t faze him – until Dean revealed that he had dipped the knife in chloroform, which was spreading through Benton’s body with every frenzied beat of his stolen heart. Benton collapsed, and woke up strapped to his own table. Begging for his life, he promised to share his formula for immortality. Sam wanted to use it to gain time to learn how to save Dean permanently, but Dean refused point-blank, saying that he’d rather go to Hell than become a monster like Benton. He vowed to deal with Benton, and Sam reluctantly cooperated. They buried Benton alive, chained inside an old refrigerator, with his lab book sharing his grave.

In Erie, Bela snuck into the boy’s hotel room at night and unhesitatingly shot the bodies under the covers in the beds, only to discover that they were blow-up dolls. When the room phone rang and she picked it up, she heard Dean on the other end in a reverse of their respective positions in Jus in Bello, when she had betrayed them to the police. Dean revealed that he had felt her pick his pocket and figured out what was going on when he saw the herb in her room, a protection against hellhounds, and checked the records of her parents’ deaths; he realized that she had made a demon deal that was coming due that very night. He guessed that she had stolen the Colt in an attempt to buy her way out, and she admitted that he was right, but the demon had changed the deal and wanted her to kill Sam. She told him that she knew about his deal because the same demon held their contracts, held every contract: Lilith. Dean told her he’d see her in Hell and hung up – and hellhounds bayed and growled in the Erie night.

Commentary and Meta Analysis

This episode contained an embarrassment of meta riches, from the differences between the brothers as Dean’s deal approaches to another glimpse at the hunter world to the juxtaposition of Dean and Bela. I’ll touch on all of them.

Brothers Down to the Wire

With only three weeks to go on Dean’s deal, we saw the stress on the brothers mount. The vicious demon interrogation at the beginning was telling and frightening. In contrast to his reluctance in Devil’s Trap, Sam was as invested and harsh as Dean, beginning the exorcism on a simple exchange of glances without even consulting a book or altering his casual posture. But when the demon professed eagerness to join his demon pals in looking forward to Dean’s arrival in Hell, Sam hesitated. Demons lining up for payback obviously meant more agony for Dean later, and Sam’s soft, Should I …? expressed his concern about making things worse. Dean’s reply – Send him someplace he can’t hurt anyone else – combined with the sick look on his own face that Sam didn’t see, said louder than words that he understood and feared what he was doing to himself, but that he’d rather accept the burden than chance having it fall on innocents. As Kripke said in LA, Dean is the hero.

Sam’s phone call after the exorcism subtly changed everything. Looking back, it’s clear that Sam was hoping from the outset that he was on the trail of Doc Benton. He led Dean to conclude that zombies were involved in order to get him invested in the hunt – not hard, knowing Dean’s delight in hunting anything film-legendary! – but clearly didn’t believe it himself, judging from the smile that crossed his face when Dean wasn’t looking. His delight in having his guess confirmed by the coroner and the kidney victim was palpable. Suddenly he saw a way to save Dean, and the potential costs and consequences were far from his mind in the rush of certainty that he had found an answer to the immediate fear of losing his brother.

Hope altered Sam’s behavior. Having hope lightened his step and made him more likely to laugh than we’ve seen him in a long time, certainly since Mystery Spot. The scene in the motel room where Sam deliberately tried to gross Dean out while he was eating was not just a delightful return to the brotherly teasing of earlier days, but a reflection of Sam’s newly restored hope.

When Dean got the phone call from Bobby that set him on the trail of Bela, everything abruptly fell apart. Dean immediately wanted to track down Bela and the hope of the Colt; Sam discounted the idea that the Colt might be reachable, and wanted to continue pursuing the nearby hope of making Dean immortal in order to defeat the contract. Dean immediately realized what Sam had done by deceiving him into the hunt and dismissed the idea that the Doc Benton solution could apply to him, reacting instead to the overwhelming fear that Sam was going down a prohibited avenue that would get him killed by having Dean weasel out of the contract by not being able to die. Sam proposing to take the same step in order to avoid that clause as well prompted Dean’s dismissive pop culture reference of the night to Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and his junkie girlfriend Nancy Spungen, whose self-destructive mutual need relationship resulted in both of their deaths.

This episode saw the boys doing yet another character reversal, mirroring their respective positions in last week’s Long Distance Call. In Long Distance Call, Dean was the one desperately grasping at straws of hope extended by the sound of his father’s voice, while Sam stayed grounded sadly in reality and tried to let Dean down gently. Here, Sam was the one chasing hope beyond reason, again through a connection with John, while Dean clung to practicality despite its flavor of despair.

The fight between the boys in the motel room with Dean adamant about leaving and Sam insisting on staying to pursue the Doc Benton hunt carried things to a new level. Dean ordered Sam to leave with him, and when Sam refused, came up against the realization that neither of them could force the other to do anything. They could guilt, tease, or dare each other into doing things, but it always remained the individual’s choice. Dean may have been able to force his will on Sam when Sam was younger, but he silently acknowledged here that Sam was a man, and his own man, and that Dean couldn’t make him toe the line any more. It also marked the first time I can recall that Dean walked away from Sam on his own initiative. Sam had left Dean before to go to Stanford in pre-show days, to hunt Dad in Scarecrow, and to hunt for his destiny in Hunted, but Dean had never been the one to initiate a walk-away, and usually gave in to Sam’s pleading puppy eyes. But not this time, not with his clock ticking down.

That entire exchange broke my heart with the realization of the maturity that’s grown between them as Sam has come into his own, and as Dean has admitted both that Sam can take care of himself and that Dean himself won’t be there to take care of him in the future.

Dean: Now, you coming or not?
Sam: I’m staying here.
Dean: No, you’re not, because I’m not going to let you wander in the woods alone to track some organ-stealing freak.
Sam: You’re not going to let me?
Dean: No, I’m not going to let you!
Sam: How are you going to stop me? [beat] Look, man. We’re trying to do the same thing here.
Dean: I know. But I’m going. So if you want to stay, stay. [opens door, looks back] Sammy, be careful.
Sam: You, too.

The flip side of that argument played out again when Doc Benton had been defeated and strapped to his own table. He offered immortality as his ransom, promising that he could help Dean, and Sam was the one begging Dean to consider it. Dean’s flat refusal shut Sam down with the realization that he couldn’t force Dean any more than Dean could force him. And while Dean has become more tolerant of some supernatural entities over time – as witness his helping Lenore’s vampire family – when it comes down to his own existence, he won’t willingly adulterate his own core humanity. If it’s stripped from him in Hell against his will, that’s one thing, but his willing surrender of it isn’t in the cards.

Sam discovering Benton’s journal was quick to accept and be delighted by the idea that Benton’s formula for immortality contained nothing overtly evil, and to overlook the knowledge that even if attaining immortality itself wouldn’t be vile, maintaining it as Benton had would have been monstrous. In most instances, Sam has been the one to question easy answers and look deeper for truth – but whenever Dean’s survival has been concerned, that concern has gone out the window. Sam’s attitude here reflected his approach in Faith, where he didn’t want to look the gift horse of Dean’s miraculous healing in the mouth, fearing that something too good to be true might turn out to be hideous. When he learned that a stranger had died to enable Dean to live, he seemed less horrified by the idea than Dean himself was, because no matter how it had come about, he couldn’t regret that his brother was alive. Similarly, in In My Time of Dying and its aftermath, Sam wasn’t inclined to look too closely at Dean’s miraculous recovery even though it was pretty obvious that Dean’s life and John’s death were two sides of the same coin. Mystery Spot further showed us that the fear of losing Dean reroutes his thinking as nothing else could, and that includes clouding his normally acute moral judgments.

In the end, both brothers gave in to each other. Dean let Sam have his solo hunt, pursuing the quest for immortality even though he didn’t believe in it, and Sam accepted Dean’s refusal to consider immortality and reluctantly helped him bury both Doc Benton and the immortality formula in his journal. Sam also acceded to Dean’s plan for dealing with Bela.

Along the way, both brothers reacted differently to the hunts. Given Sam’s single-minded focus on saving his brother, Dean instantly doubted his motives for the proposed zombie hunt, but was happy to focus on the hunt as a way to gainfully occupy himself while also distracting himself from his impending fate. As soon as Bobby provided word on Bela’s location, however, Dean abandoned the seemingly random hunt in favor of trying to save himself, his uncharacteristic selfishness an indicator of his deteriorating state of mind. Sam, meanwhile, had only one interest in the Doc Benton hunt, but when he discovered the injured young woman, he reverted to Winchester form and rescued her with care and consideration for her pain and fear. Unlike the experience in Mystery Spot, his compassion for a stranger remained awake and intact despite his focus on his brother. And despite his own slipping moral course concerning wanting to make Dean immortal, his relief that Dean hadn’t compromised his own Winchester moral code by executing human Bela was tangible.

Finally, when speaking of the brothers mirroring each other, I couldn’t help but think of Hunted as I watched Sam having to listen helplessly to Dean fighting Benton, the same way that Dean had been forced to hear Sam’s fight with Gordon, neither able to see what was happening, both fearing more for the other than for their bound selves.

Rufus Turner – What Future Does a Hunter Have?

Dean’s encounter with reclusive former hunter Rufus Turner added another dimension to the world of hunters. According to Bobby, Rufus had been a hunter who was now mostly a hermit, doing a little selling on the side. Rufus had the customary cabinet full of guns, but there were also award plaques on the wall near his computer and bowling or discus trophies on his mantel with his cross. His security cameras scanning front and rear would suggest that those awards and trophies were part of his pre-hunter past, because his present was laced with the same paranoia we’ve seen in other hunters’ homes, and flavored with bitter anti-social messages discouraging any casual contact.

Rufus was a character I’d love to see again, a man who “knows things.” Somehow, he knew about Dean’s deal, at least that Dean had made one and that his time would be up in three weeks. He had contacts in law enforcement who were able to obtain Bela’s files from England; perhaps he himself was a cop before turning hunter, a hint of the talents Henricksen might have brought to bear, had he survived Jus in Bello. He held up another dark mirror to Dean, describing himself as Dean’s future, if Dean somehow managed to escape his deal. Folks like us, there ain’t no happy ending. We all got it coming. I’m what you’ve got to look forward to, if you survive. Which you won’t. The world of hunters has been painted as a dark and lonely one, with no way out once you’re in. Bobby Singer, Pastor Jim Murphy, and Ellen Harvelle have been the most successfully socialized adult hunters we’ve met, and with the exception of Pastor Jim, even their social circles consisted mostly of other hunters. Most hunters in our experience have been very closed in, and not expecting to live to a ripe old age or be happy.

I have to wonder how much that image of a bleak future figures in Dean’s thoughts about his own lack of a future, and his speculations about what kind of life he could have if he did manage to survive. He never really seemed to think about his future until he no longer had one, and dreams now have no meaning beyond the desperate wish not to die and go to Hell.

Dean and Bela: Flip Sides of Demon Coins

We finally got Bela’s (excuse me, Abby’s) backstory in two very concise flashbacks. We learned that she had been born into a very wealthy family, was abused by her father, and had made a classic ten-year deal with a demon to have her parents killed when she was fourteen years old. Dean didn’t learn quite as much, not being privy to the abuse that led to her making the deal, but he learned enough to put a new spin on lines we’d heard or reactions we’d gotten from Bela along the way, including her We’re all going to Hell, Dean; might as well enjoy the ride comment in Bad Day at Black Rock, and her snide response to Dean’s What, did Daddy not give you enough hugs or something? comment in Red Sky at Morning. Looking back, Bela’s surprise at Dean’s agreement with her Hell comment made pretty clear that she didn’t know about his deal at the time of the rabbit’s foot incident.

To me, the most interesting aspect of her backstory is the way in which Bela provides a negative of Dean. Bela made her deal to destroy her family, while Dean made his to save his brother. Bela had everything material and nothing emotional, while Dean had nothing material, but love and to spare. Bela used the evil that happened to her as a child and the evil in her own response to it to justify doing more uncaring evil to others throughout the rest of her life, while Dean, however scarred by the evil that destroyed the happy life he had known, adopted a moral code that made saving others his highest priority no matter the cost to himself. Bela thought nothing of killing others casually in pursuit of her goal, while even at the last and despite his loss and loathing, Dean couldn’t bring himself to kill her in cold blood when she wasn’t directly posing an immediate threat to him or to Sam.

I would posit that family made a huge difference in their development. However much John’s choices and actions unintentionally injured his boys as he tried to juggle being a fumbling single parent while also becoming a hunter, there was no question that John loved his sons, and that John’s love and innate decency had a lot to do with shaping Dean into a strong and moral man who provided a capable second good example to his younger brother. The Winchesters had an advantage over Bela there, as well as in their heart-strong brother bond. What her father did to Bela, along with what her mother presumably failed to do to protect her, definitely affected who she became, particularly including her ability to trust and care about others.

I don’t consider that Bela’s past justified her subsequent actions, however. I don’t mean to trivialize child abuse and the impact it has on a developing individual, but I’ve always believed that nothing that happens to us excuses the choices we later make freely for ourselves. I can understand Bela without condoning her choices or her actions. She was very young and very damaged when she made her deal, when the demon first approached her with the seductive idea of being rid of her abusers. I can pity her for that. I can further pity her because it didn’t appear as if she had summoned the demon, but that the demon was being opportunistic and tempting her, like the one in Crossroad Blues who stayed at the bar and made more deals than just the one she’d been summoned to fulfill.

However, I suspect that once Bela grew old enough to really appreciate the enormity of what she had done at least in terms of putting a finite limit on her own life and guaranteeing that it would end in Hell, finding a way to alter her deal was probably what drove her to become a purveyor of supernatural artifacts. I would guess that she was always looking for information and artifacts powerful or rare enough to buy her more time or a different fate, and that while the money angle of it was enjoyable, the real driver was a calculated bid to escape her contract. She admitted to Dean in the end that stealing the Colt was a bid for escape, not for monetary gain; I suspect that many of her other acquisitions were the same. And in pursuit of that goal, she didn’t care whom she hurt. Poor pretty little rich girl, who ultimately cared only for herself and in the process came richly to deserve her poor and ugly fate. Knowing her own motives, she couldn’t accept that anyone else viewed the world differently; knowing herself damned, she couldn’t accept that other people weren’t, that they actually could be noble.

In the end, Bela and Dean effectively demonstrated Aesop’s fable of the scorpion and the frog, which posits that we can’t overcome our natures even when following our natures isn’t in our best interest. You know the story: a scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a stream, and when the frog hesitates, points out that it wouldn’t be in the scorpion’s interest to sting the frog along the way, because then both would drown. Nonetheless, halfway across the stream, the scorpion stings the frog, and when the frog asks why, sadly notes before they both die that it’s in his nature to sting.

Bela made a good scorpion. It was in her selfish and untrusting nature to lie, steal, cheat, and kill. In dealing with the Winchesters, her best interest would have been to tell the truth and appeal to them for help, as she eventually did in Red Sky at Morning when her plans went awry. As Dean noted, the bitch of it all was that if she had come to them, it would have been in the nature of the brothers to try to help her even at the risk of their lives despite all that she had done to them. Instead, she followed her nature, and made it impossible for them to help her by stealing the Colt and pursuing her own agenda to within minutes of her contract coming due. She stung them and she drowned, and because of her sting, they lost their best hope of saving Dean.

The sad joy of the situation was that Dean also stayed true to his nature by electing not to kill Bela even after he’d made up his mind to do so, to get revenge on the woman who’d tossed his last real hope of life away. Yes, he saw the Devil’s shoestring charm and calculated her probable fate, but even without that, I don’t think he’d have been able to pull the trigger on her when she wasn’t posing an immediate threat to him or to anyone else; it would have been too much a denial of his nature, even with as little time as he has left. Leaving her alive wasn’t in his best interest, as witness her subsequent attempt to murder both Winchesters, but killing her would have left him feeling soiled and guilty, and been a step toward making him think that he might deserve his fate.

But Dean had it right in Dream a Little Dream of Me. He doesn’t deserve to die, and he doesn’t deserve to go to Hell.

Bela deserved both.

Production Notes

I obviously loved this episode on many levels, but the silliest one had to do with Rufus Turner’s furniture: I used to own his dinette chairs! No lie: they’re a dead match for the dinette set I bought new back in 1979, and donated to a secondhand thrift store in the late 1980’s. Given their cheap mass-produced nature, it’s unlikely in the extreme that the ones the Vancouver set dressers found were the actual ones I gave away in Virginia, but I laughed out loud when I saw them! The table was different, though – mine had considerably less, ah, character.

Sera Gamble’s script served up a tasty smorgasbord of creepiness, gore, laughter, just desserts, and angst. I thought it a particularly neat twist in her story that Doc Benton’s immortality formula – at least as much of it as Sam could understand – didn’t rely on black magic or evil at all, making the formula itself morally neutral. Hearing that from Sam over the phone actually made Dean consider it, if only for a moment, before realizing that the hideous price of maintaining it was the fly in the ointment.

I’m sure creator Eric Kripke was in transports of delight over the maggots, the heart extraction, and the melon baller threat to Sammy’s puppy eyes – he may have a new set of favorite scenes to trump even his “hand down the garbage disposal” from the pilot!

My one story note (we’ll ignore how Doc Benton found Sam, and how Dean figured out which cabin was Doc’s, okay?) was that I wondered why John, with his penchant for thoroughness, would have settled for heart surgery and not have dismembered, salted, and burned Doc Benton. And then I thought, maybe he did, and that explained all the railroad-stitched skin grafts on his face and the Frankenstein-attached fingers and hands, as well as why Dean didn’t bother with the customary salt and burn routine, opting for living burial instead.

Chris Lennertz did some fun things with the musical underscore to this episode. I bounced in delight when he reprised a musical theme from the pilot as Sam reported on his research, just before Sam pulled out John’s journal, which we first saw in the pilot and have long missed since. Nice continuity! The sound guys also get a happy Kripke mention for letting us hear why the nurse freaked out in the teaser opening, even though the Standard & Practices people probably wouldn’t under any circumstances have let us actually see the liver donor’s intestines squishingly hitting the floor. It appears that Doc Benton didn’t bother suturing up the donors he figured were goners anyway …

Both of the boys nailed their performances, as usual. We’re spoiled with the caliber of their acting; we expect them to be great, so it simply doesn’t strike us when they are. But watching Jensen Ackles convey the physical sickness of Dean’s fear during the demon exorcism, the reluctant pain and pride of his realization that he couldn’t force Sam to go with him, the sorrow and fear of arguing with Sam and leaving him alone, and the determination to remain true to himself no matter the price just reinforce the conviction that Dean is real. Jared Padalecki did equally well with Sam, conveying his initial deliberate deception, his repressed excitement and joy at the prospect of coming up with a way to save his brother, his increasing confidence, conviction, and relaxation with the developing idea that his plan could work, and then the crushing loss of realizing that it was all for naught. Oh, boys.

Lauren Cohen did beautifully with Bela particularly in her confrontation with Dean, refusing to show weakness by offering a reason other than greed for killing her parents, and in the last phone conversation, when she finally broke down in her fear and desperation. The look on her face as the hellhounds bayed was ultimate desolation and total loss. Dean can cling to his conviction that he doesn’t deserve his fate and to his knowledge that his father eventually escaped Hell; Bela had nothing, and Lauren made that real. I’ll confess that I won’t really miss Bela – I think she was unfortunately over-used, getting the better of the boys too easily and too often, and while I appreciated the character, I didn’t want to spend time with anyone so callous, arrogant, and self-centered – but I will miss the spark that Lauren brought to the role.

The guest stars did yeoman work, especially Steven Williams as Rufus and Billy Drago as Doc Benton (whoops – I almost wrote “John Bly” – shades of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.!). I hope that we will get to see Rufus again sometime; I’d love to see his deadpan reaction to Dean walking the earth after his contract came due (because I firmly believe that no matter what happens, Dean will survive somehow, or make it back again despite everything!), and I eagerly anticipate watching him split a scene with Jim Beaver as Bobby. I appreciated his “Mr. X” in The X-Files, but he seemed to really enjoy getting into Rufus. Billy Drago has his own patent on playing creepy characters, and a wonderful turn with delivering creepy humor: This whole eternal life thing is very high maintenance; What part of “immortality” do you not understand? And a special cheer goes to whoever cast the young Bela; the resemblance was amazing!

Sam’s line, We’re trying to do the same thing here, really did capture the essence of this episode. Sam and Dean were both chasing their own ways to keep Dean alive … and Bela and Doc Benton were doing the same, trying to preserve their own lives. The differences came in how they chose to try to accomplish their ends, and what they were willing to give up – or not.

Dean doesn’t deserve to die. He doesn’t deserve to go to Hell. But with the clock ticking down and hope in short supply, I fear he may do both.

Postscript

This week, the third season will end with one last episode, number 16 instead of number 22. I can’t wait to see it, and don’t want it to be over; the season was too short. I understand why the writers felt the need to strike, and I supported their decision, but I regret all the things we lost as a result. Even though most of the lost episodes would have been of the stand-alone monster-of-the-week (MOTW) variety, we know that the thread of Dean's deal would have been woven through them all in little tiny moments that we would have treasured – seeing Sam hiding what he was doing, hearing throwaway comments about ideas that didn't pan out, seeing the steadily increasing stress in both of them about the days ticking off with nothing to show for them, feeling the ultimate dissatisfaction even with successfully concluding a hunt because it wasn't the hunt that mattered. Every MOTW episode always made reference to the overarching story, always – and I miss all of those moments and desperately wish we had them.

But I give earnest thanks for everything we got.

3.14 Long Distance Call: You’re All So Connected, But You’ve Never Been So Alone

Desperate for hope,
Dean obeys his father’s voice:
Just crocotta lies.

Episode Summary

A man in Milan, Ohio received pleading, persistent phone calls from a former love begging him to come to her, and when the calls didn’t stop even after he yanked the phone cord out of the wall, he shot himself. Because the man had complained of strange household electrical problems during the week before he died, possible signs of a demon or spirit, Bobby called Dean to have the boys investigate. Worried about time running out on Dean’s deal, Sam was reluctant to take any other case, but Dean observed that all of their attempts to get information had come up empty, and that until they could find something, he’d like to do his job. When Sam insisted that they try to summon Ruby for help, Dean refused, and finally told Sam what Ruby had admitted to him at the end of Malleus Maleficarum – that she couldn’t save him. With that tension still between them, they went to Ohio.

Interviewing the dead man’s widow and checking over the scene, the boys found a strange number on the telephone’s caller ID – SHA33 – from a call just before the man’s death. After some coaxing, his widow reported hearing him on the phone some days earlier, talking to someone named Linda, but said that when she jealously picked up the extension to listen in, she heard nothing but static on the other end. Searching for a “Linda” with a connection to the dead man, Dean found a memory page on the internet dedicated to the man’s high school sweetheart, who had died some years earlier in an automobile accident. Following Sam’s research into the phone number lead, the brothers posed as headquarters telephone company troubleshooters and duped Stewie Meyers, a sloppy, porn-obsessed telephone company technician, into tracing the number. Apart from recognizing the number as being over a hundred years old, he couldn’t determine its origin, but identified ten houses that had recently gotten calls from the number, and the brothers split up to investigate them. Both of them found more people receiving calls from dead loved ones … and then Dean’s phone rang, and the voice on the other end was John’s. The call dropped before he’d said much more than Dean’s name.

Dumbfounded by the idea and unsure what to believe, the brothers argued, and Dean walked out. When he returned three hours later to find that Sam had learned nothing new, he dropped his own discovery; a tourist brochure for the local Thomas Edison birthplace museum containing the curious tidbit that Edison’s last invention had been a “spirit phone” to communicate with the dead. The brothers took the tour, but the device proved innocuous, giving off no EMF readings or any other indication that it was responsible for the rash of local conversations with the dead.

Back at the motel, while Sam slept, Dean stayed awake with his phone at hand. When it rang again, the voice identified itself as John, berated Dean for having sold his soul, and then said that there was a solution to Dean’s deal that would save both brothers: that the demon holding Dean’s contract was in town, and if the demon was killed, the contract would be void. He recited an exorcism ritual that he said would work to destroy a demon, and promised to call later with the demon’s location. Meanwhile Lanie, the teenaged girl who had spoken to Sam about getting calls from her dead mother, started getting instant messages on her computer from a user ID identical to the caller ID, and the messages continued even after the girl, in a panic, had turned the computer off.

The next day, Dean reported to Sam that he thought John was right and that the demon not only was in town, but had been following him for the past couple of weeks, based on internet reports of electrical storms happening every place they had been. He dismissed Sam’s uneasy comment that he didn’t remember any electrical storms, and when Sam questioned the ability of an exorcism ritual to kill a demon rather than simply banish it, Dean pulled out more of his research documenting that the ritual dated back to the 15th century. Sam agreed that he and Bobby had also researched the ritual and found the same thing, but cautioned that there still was no evidence it could kill a demon. Having promised the terrified Lanie that he would stop by, Sam left Dean alone, pleading with him not to go anywhere until he got back.

Lanie eventually admitted that the messages from her mother had instructed her to kill herself so that she could come to her mom, and that clue finally led Sam to understand what they were dealing with: a crocotta, a nasty supernatural scavenger that lured people into the dark where they could be killed by imitating the voices of dead loved ones saying, “Come to me.” Having failed to attract Lanie, the thing played the same game with her little brother, calling on a toy phone and directing the boy into the street. Sam saved him from being run over by a truck, and then called Dean to report his discovery. Dean made the connection between the crocotta reportedly living in filth and Stewie’s fly-infested basement room at the telephone company office, and Sam immediately changed direction. Arriving at the phone company and seeing his target, he called Dean for help, but only got his voicemail and left a message. He attacked Stewie in the parking lot, but as Stewie begged not to be killed, Clark, the middle manager who had introduced them, revealed himself as the monster, knocking out both Sam and Stewie with a baseball bat. Dean, meanwhile, had not gotten Sam’s calls, but did get one of his own directing him to the house where the demon would be. Finding the house empty, he prepared a trap, spray-painting a devil’s trap on the floor beneath a rug and prepping a gallon jug of holy water.

Sam woke up tied to a chair to hear Stewie pleading for his life, and the crocotta killed him and then fed off of his soul. Sam realized that he’d been trapped, that his last phone call with Dean had actually been with the monster instead, and the crocotta gleefully observed that once he’d pegged the boys as hunters, it had been easy to find all the information it needed to use to set them both up – their phone numbers and John’s, emails, voicemails. It tapped the network again to complete its trap for Dean, calling a distraught father in his murdered daughter’s voice to say that her killer was waiting in their house. Sam broke his bonds and fought the crocotta even as Dean faced off against the man he thought was possessed. Sam managed to kill the crocotta. When his opponent walked free of the devil’s trap, Dean realized that he’d been duped and the man wasn’t possessed, and he stopped short of killing, admitting his mistake.

Reunited, Dean apologized to Sam, admitting that he’d been wrong because he’d been so desperate to believe that there was a way out of the deal, and he confessed openly that he was scared. He said he realized that he couldn’t expect anyone to save him with a last-minute miracle, that he was the only one who could get himself out. Sam chimed in with, “And me.”

Commentary and Meta Analysis

Long Distance Call was what I was waiting for: a story with the focus squarely on the brothers, with relationships and Dean’s deal front and center, and with a monster of the week tweaked in truly unique Supernatural fashion. In this commentary, I’ll focus on the relationship issues and the deal, but I’ll play a bit with the monster first.

I’m starting with the monster just because there were some plot holes amidst the goodness and I want my “no-prize.” For those of you not familiar with the comics world, Stan Lee started an amusing tradition in the Marvel comics universe many, many years ago of awarding “no-prizes” to readers who spotted errors in the comics and suggested plausible explanations as to why they weren’t actually errors at all. They were called “no-prizes” because they didn’t actually consist of anything tangible, just a little applause and recognition in the letters columns. “No-prizes” weren’t awarded for nit-picking or grumbling complaints, but only for creative solutions that transformed an error into something clever. I always thought that was a really cute and positive way to deal with inconsistencies that otherwise might interfere with my enjoyment of a story, so my usual approach to dealing with plot holes or factual errors in something I truly like is always to find a way around them and award myself a virtual “no-prize.”

The crocotta is a case in point. I loved the way that Supernatural tweaked the monster lore here. We’re presented with a very traditional monster, a skulking thing known for hundreds of years to lurk in the woods and shadows on the outskirts of communities and try enticing people out to it by imitating the voices of their beloved dead. The twist is that this monster has learned to adapt to modern technology, and figured out how to use our communication tools of telephones and computers to deliver its luring messages to many more people than it could ever have reached in the old days by the old ways.

But how could it make disconnected phones and toy phones ring, and put words and images on a turned-off computer screen? And if it needed to be close in order to feast on the soul of its victim, as it did on poor Stewie, what benefit did it get from using the telephone system?

My explanation? I figure that the essence of the crocotta’s ability is partially telepathic in nature and relies on the victim’s mind supplying all the details of the communication once it’s made an initial connection. It used to have to wait until victims came close to it to forge that connection by whispering its “come-hither,” knowing that they would hear the voice they most wanted to hear. Evolving to be able to make a connection by targeting a victim through a phone line didn’t change the telepathic nature of the message; it just changed how people perceived the message. My basis for that leap is the widow saying that she heard nothing but static and her husband when she picked up the phone while he was talking to Linda. Her husband had an entire conversation with the crocotta posing as Linda, but his wife heard only her husband’s part. I take it that Linda’s part of the conversation happened only in the man’s mind, altering the static to the sound of her voice delivering the message the crocotta wanted to say. Similarly, Dean heard his father speaking of the terms of the deal, chiding him as John surely would have for making that choice, and then promising what he most earnestly wanted – a way out of the deal that would both keep him out of Hell and wouldn’t forfeit Sam’s life. The crocotta wasn’t a demon, so how would it have known the details of Dean’s internal torment unless it could simply turn loose the concept, hear the voice of the dead person you most loved, and hear them promise you your heart’s desire if only you do as they ask, and let its victim’s own mind do the work?

And if the crocotta’s ability had a telepathic component, then who’s to say that once it established and solidified an initial connection, it couldn’t continue the broadcast even after the physical link – the telephone or electrical connection – was broken? It wouldn’t matter then that the phone was unplugged or the computer turned off. And if the crocotta used the network to troll for and initially connect with victims, it could have chosen to get close physically once it knew or sensed that a victim was weakening and approaching the point of yielding, so that it would have been close enough to feed. We didn’t see Clark anywhere near Lanie’s house, but that’s not to say that he wasn’t there. And perhaps he was close enough to put the message directly into her little brother’s mind, to make him think that his toy phone rang with a call from his mom. And with many more potential victims to devour in a year, the thing probably wasn’t fazed by occasionally missing out on a meal by being too distant when the suicide moment came, or – as in the case of its trap for hunter Dean – when an arranged murder set-up paid off.

What do you think – “no-prize” time? *grin* I’m happy with it. And I remain delighted in any case by the whole idea of updating an old monster by teaching it new technological tricks.

Dean’s deal is my next topic of discussion. The crossroads demon added a nasty clause: But here’s the thing: if you try and welch or weasel your way out, then the deal’s off. Sam drops dead, he’s back to rotten meat in no time. The terms of that clause put Dean in mortal fear that any attempt to circumvent the deal would lead to Sam’s death. He made clear when he first admitted to the clause in The Magnificent Seven that he not only wouldn’t take any action on his own behalf, but that he would stop any attempt by Sam as well, because he didn’t want to risk Sam’s life again.

Things have changed since then, with Dean finally acknowledging in Dream a Little Dream of Me that he doesn’t want to die and doesn’t deserve to go to Hell, and with Sam having demonstrated by his summoning and execution of the Crossroads Demon in Bedtime Stories that there’s apparently more leeway in the terms of the deal than Dean had believed. Still, it was jarring to see Dean accepting “John’s” blithe assurance that attempting to kill the demon holding his contract wouldn’t be considered trying to welsh on or weasel his way out of the deal, and acting seemingly without the fear that he might be killing Sam by doing so.

All I can think is that his desperation and his cruel hope blinded Dean to everything else, including Sammy, for the first and only time ever. He was so scared and wanted so badly to believe in a way out that he didn’t let himself think, didn’t let himself doubt; he just threw himself into action, the very same way that he made the deal in the first place. As it chanced, nothing the crocotta arranged had anything to do with the deal, and nothing happened to Sam to punish Dean for the attempt, but I wonder if Dean will reconsider this kind of action in future, fearing what might have happened to Sam had the situation been real. The brothers have killed or exorcised plenty of demons along the way, so demon-slaying itself clearly doesn’t contravene the terms of the contract, but deliberately going after the demon holding the contract specifically in order to void it might be a different matter entirely, at least when the real demon becomes the target.

And that brings me to the relationship part of the discussion. I loved everything we saw here. But as the crocotta observed about humans and our technology, while the brothers are closer than ever before, they’ve each also never been more alone. Throughout the episode, they constantly came together and then moved apart both physically and emotionally, right from their opening scene on the univ