I'm sorry, but if you deny you're gay and then five minutes later say "this one has a huge doll collection back home" they're just going to think you're in the closet. I'm not saying that's fair, but heteros in 2007 were not super adept at sexuality nuance. Antiquers indeed.
Supernatural’s thirty first episode is an atmospheric Gothic affair which unfortunately suffers from quite a bit of stupidity from several characters and ends up being a mess at the end. In its defence, the rules of ghosts were not quite set in stone at the time this episode was written and aired, but in hindsight it stands out like a things which should not stand out in the history of Supernatural’s ghost stories.
To briefly summarise the episode, after apparently searching for Ava for a few weeks and finding nothing, Dean and Sam go to investigate some strange deaths at a hotel in Connecticut. The hotel is family-owned and appears to be in the country and fittingly looks like it could be located in any upper middle class village in England. The proprietor is a woman apparently in her late thirties who is selling the hotel and whose daughter has an imaginary friend named Maggie. The brothers investigate and find that the Grandmother Rose in the attic has been keeping the spirit of her dead sister Margaret at bay for decades using hoodoo learnt from her nanny, but after suffering a stroke she was unable to maintain the spells keeping Margaret away. Once she was free to return to the house, Margaret started killing people involved with buying the house or selling things in order to try keeping her family there. When that failed, she tried killing her great niece to have a playmate, but Grandmother Rose offered herself in exchange for her granddaughter. The episode ends with the family moving out of the hotel with the ghosts of Rose and Margaret playing together under the watchful eye of a gallery of porcelain dolls.
With that out of the way, I can get into the true root of the problems this episode has: Grandmother Rose.
The biggest problem with her character is the fact that she apparently never passed on any of the knowledge of hoodoo to her daughter Susan, or even the paranormal in general. Sam noticed the quincunx straight-away and Dean knew a little about its usage in hoodoo spells, but Susan who had spent her entire life there was utterly clueless. Had Rose brought her daughter into the fold and instructed her, her own stroke would not have meant the hotel’s shields came down because Susan would have been there to maintain them. Susan also knows about her aunt Margaret drowning in the pool, but does not know that Rose had been keeping her at bay for decades. This is a huge oversight on Rose’s part which lead to three men’s deaths and the near death of her granddaughter.
This could be explained with Rose herself not having known what she was keeping at bay. She was young when Margaret died, and the hoodoo spells were almost definitely laid down by her nanny. It is possible the nanny did not tell Rose exactly what the spells were keeping at bay, but that raises too many questions, such as why cast the magic in the first place if she does not know what she is keeping out.
That in turn raises the question of why Margaret was kept away for so long. If the hoodoo was cast after Margaret’s death, what circumstances made the nanny feel it necessary to ward her off? It seems like most people’s reaction to the appearance of a recently deceased child as a ghost would be to try to help it pass on, or even to welcome it into the household rather than banish it to wherever. If I have understood correctly, hoodoo has a very healthy relationship to the dead whereby the dead are not confined to a grave in a plot of land and forgotten about, but rather they remain a part of the life of the living, with some people even having bones such as the skull of a dead relative in their home so that they are ‘still there’.
Whatever the reason, Rose did not pass on her knowledge and this is the main fault with the episode. Had she done so, the plot of the episode could still have happened, but another reason would have had to be found for Margaret causing trouble. If Susan were an adept hoodoo practitioner, Margaret would have met with much more resistance in trying to get into the hotel, but perhaps a combination of both Rose being indisposed and Margaret being such an old ghost could have combined to make the defences just weak enough and Margaret just strong enough to overcome them. It would also have been effective if Susan were trying to train Tyler now that Rose was close to death.
Which brings discussion around to Susan. Oh, Susan. Why, Susan? Susan being uninitiated into the world of the paranormal is not entirely her fault as discussed above, but she displays a surprising unfamiliarity with the home she and her mother grew up in. Surely anybody with an ounce of curiosity would have noticed the sigil in the flower pot and the vase upstairs, as well as whatever other instances there were elsewhere in the residence. It would also have taken an especially dense individual to not have connected them with the photograph of Rose with her nanny who had the same sigil on a necklace around her neck. Susan, however, seems to have joined none of these dots together in what one can assume is almost four decades of living within those walls. Dean found out more about the family and its history over one drink with Sherwin than Susan did in decades. Susan also clearly remembered the story of Margaret’s death, but did not seem to think it weird that her daughter acquired an imaginary friend named Maggie after Rose’s stroke and at the same time men started getting killed in her hotel. If I lived in the same house my mother grew up in and my son had an imaginary friend named Paul… yikes.
Even if she did not recognise ‘Maggie’ as a nickname for Margaret she must have seen that the two are similar. They are hardly as separated as Elizabeth and Buffy (which, funnily enough, was Elizabeth II’s mother Elizabeth’s nickname as a child). One could put this down to plot convenience, but Susan even seemed completely oblivious to the fact that the company buying the hotel off her intended to demolish it. Did she not think to ask about that earlier rather than leaving it until her signature was drying on the contract?
Anyway, Susan does not appear to have all her Moomins in the valley, as it were, and this is to the episode’s detriment. One wonders how much of a threat Margaret would have been in the first place had the adults in this family not acted stupid.
Lengthy preamble aside, the opening of the episode is effective and sufficiently ominous for a television horror show. A man has arrived at the hotel to collect some of Tyler’s old toys and he ends up falling down the stairs and twisting his neck about 180°, resulting in his death. Exactly the same thing happened to one of the dolls in Tyler’s dollhouse moments before the man’s death is shown. The implication is that the dolls are poppets or effigies of people in the hotel, and Margaret uses them to kill. The implication is then that either Margaret was a magic user before death, or that she has learnt some secrets since death. However, it seems the entire dollhouse hotel is one big poppet, because the doors, swings, see-saw etc all control their real-life counterparts. Who built the dollhouse hotel is left unanswered, but can we assume either Rose or her nanny somehow enchanted it?
One thing the opening also does well is very subtly imply that Susan cannot see or hear Maggie. Upon finding out that the man has come to take some old toys away, Maggie says ‘Son of a bitch’ to no reaction from Susan. However, Tyler repeats what Maggie says to which Susan tells her to watch her mouth. Tyler passes on the blame to Maggie, and the viewer is misdirected to believe Susan can see Maggie, but she is just indulging Tyler’s conceit and cannot see or hear her at all.
Before changing the topic to Dean and Sam, sharp-eyed viewers might recognise the building from Supernatural 8x19 Of Grave Importance as the house where the hunter Annie’s ghost was trapped. The Annie whom Dean, Sam, AND Bobby had all apparently engaged in coitus. Eugenie Ross-Lemming and Brad Buckner should have never been allowed to write an episode of this show after 1x13 Route 666.
but before I get too far off topic, this same building was also used in Smallville 4x13 Recruit as the sorority house where a load of vampy teens tried jumping Clarks bones when he clearly was not into it. Gross.
Dean and Sam end up at this hotel and set about investigating. Their initial recon does not turn up much at all other than a large porcelain doll collection and the knowledge that Grandmother Rose is recovering from a stroke. Dean goes off by himself to do research at the library and gets Sam to look stuff up on the internet. Whatever Sam did or did not find out is not revealed as that night an estate agent is hanged from the ceiling fan and dies. Maggie is responsible, but Sam decides that the middle of an investigation is the time to get blind drunk.
I should allow that Sam is a very young man who has just found out his dead dad told his brother to kill him, and who is also dealing with being one of Azazel’s soldiers-in-training, so I suppose I cannot hold getting drunk itself against him. The timing, however, I can, as well as his utterly self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-centred explanation of his drunkenness: his problem is not that the estate agent died, but rather than Sam could not save him, and if Sam cannot save people then he is not a good person. I alluded to this thinking pattern of Sam’s in 2x05 Simon Said, and here it is for all those who missed it. Bad timing and bad motivation, Sam. This would not be quite as bad if the show did not constantly insist that Sam is actually good and right and that we should be on his side. He is a child who barely functions as a main protagonist.
Dean on the other hand (oh, you knew this was coming!) is decisive and moves the action forwards in this episode. Sam might call him ‘bossy’, but in an investigation like this somebody needs to make choices and delegate work and Sam apparently is not up to the task. It gasts my flabbers when people insist that Sam is the protagonist of the show and that it is his story, not Dean’s, when Sam is mostly passive, reactive, and whiny and his decisions usually end up putting others in danger, RE: the entirety of 2x10 Hunted.
As if his self-indulgence were not enough, he then proceeds to make Dean promise to kill him if he turns bad. My own thoughts when watching this episode were that Sam should learn to fellate a pistol if he wants to save others from the monster he might become. This is essentially what Dean did with the Malak Box in series 14 because he saw it as the only option which would not endanger life on Earth.
Sam chose to burden his brother with becoming a fratricide rather than taking on that responsibility himself. This was both cruel and the coward’s choice, especially given Sam knew John had done the same. Sam has been watching Dean ‘tailspin’ for the last eleven episodes, and found out why in 2x10 Hunted. Rather than doing something to alleviate Dean’s spiritual malaise, he exacerbated it. This shows a flagrant disregard for Dean’s well-being and a total lack of empathy. If Dean’s going to be laden with all that horrific responsibility, I think it only fair that he be ‘bossy’ and that Sam be expected to duck when Dean says so.
Dean looked so relieved in the morning when Sam was suffering his vomity hangover (serves him right, too) and let Dean believe he did not remember the previous night. The final scene of the episode proved that Sam was not merely being drunk and rambling, as he reiterated Dean’s ‘need’ to kill Sam if necessary whilst he was completely sober.
The only good thing about the scene where Sam was drunk was that Dean got to call John as ‘ass’. Whether he meant ‘donkey’ or ‘rear end’ by that does not matter, but finally the viewer is beginning to see what Dean really thinks of John f*cking Winchester. People who have watched the entire show before might also notice that the opening scene of 2x22 All Hell Breaks Loose Part II mirrors the end of the drunk!Sam scene: Sam is lying on the bed while Dean sits on a chair beside it, tormented.
Their first scene in this episode was quite different. Dean returned from the shop to find Sam still trying to find Ava on the internet or something, and Sam admits it is time to move on to something else because the weeks-long search has brought up nothing. Which means we can forgot the plot of the show for a few episodes. Dean’s reaction to this is on the one hand completely accurate, but also a little inappropriate. He said – and this is not verbatim –: I thought there’d be more moody music and staring out the window.
I would be tempted to say this is ‘out of character’ is that were not a tired excuse for one’s favourite character being a bit of a douche. After all, I have heard somebody write off Sam’s horrendous behaviour in series 8 as ‘The writers just didn’t understand his character’. However, considering Sam lost Jess a year earlier and both he and Dean lost John a few months ago, this is rather douchey and seems like the writer trying to make a funny at the expense of character. Perhaps Dean is so disassociated from him emotional state sometimes that he does not always understand Sam is not, and the way Dean said that to Sam is somewhat reminiscent of how demon!Dean talks to dream!Dean in 3x10 Dream a Little Dream of Me. Observe, if you will, John Winchester’s A* parenting: his kids can be douches to each other because they are copying patterns of behaviour learnt from their abusive dad.
But Sam is the bigger douche. Bigger by a country mile. When Dean is a douche, he is the tiniest douche, but when Sam is a douche he is a King Kamehameha douche.
This would have been another great opportunity for Sam to say something along the lines of ‘So you’ve not stopped passing off John’s treatment of you onto me, then, have you, Dean?’ It would have been so easy, and it would have done a lot to fix their gross relationship, but alas. Dean did make a funny at the end, though: ‘That attitude is just way too healthy for me. I’m officially uncomfortable now, thank you.’
Whilst on the subject of Dean, I remember this episode as one of the ones which turned me off the show early in 2009. And as I have said before, it was Dean who did it. Funny, considering he is the reason I watch it now, but his apparent homophobia tired my 17 year old self. As in 1x08 Bugs and 1x18 Something Wicked, there is a hilarious incident at the hotel reception wherein Susan assumes Dean and Sam are a same-sex couple looking for antiques, claiming they ‘look the type’. How droll.
Dean’s reaction to this moments later is to say ‘Of course, the real problem is why do these people assume we’re gay’. Sam’s reaction is to make a comment which is probably just stupid snark but seems to bother Dean (more on that soon). My metre was almost filled up by that point, and I do not remember whether I even made it to the end of series three. Jensen and Dean were one of the main reasons I wanted to watch the show in the first place, but alas the writing for him made him occasionally resemble my bullies a bit too much
Some might say I ‘could not take a joke’, but people who say things like only do so in the context of things which have not been used as weapons to dehumanise, ostracise, and shame them. They do not have a clue what they are talking about, and in such cases, ‘take a joke’ is almost indistinguishable from ‘absorb our poisonous behaviour and don’t you dare try to make us feel bad about it’. I discussed stuff like this in more detail in my essay Top!Dean vs Bottom!Dean: Anal Sex, Shame, and Gay Trauma, so I will not go into more depth here.
My reaction on rewatch is different. I do interpret Dean’s behaviour as homophobic still, but I believe his homophobia is internalised, not externalised. What I mean by that is that he is not disgusted by homosexual activity and inclinations in other men, but is deeply uncomfortable with his own same-sex attraction. I think Dean has always known of his attraction to men, but has done his best to amputate and ignore that part of himself. Dean does not want to be seen as gay or bi, and does not (at this point in the show) want to consciously acknowledge his attraction to men because of the toxic mess of having been raised in a homophobic society which demands men not be certain things lest they be stripped of their status as valid humans.
There is also the conditioning: I once knew a guy in his early twenties who would happily watch homosexual pornography but was repulsed by the sight of men kissing for years, and hated the idea of going to a gay club. This is not a natural reaction, but rather the result of being exposed to certain attitudes, prejudices, and jokes all his life.
I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere, so I will not belabour the point. He presents himself as heterosexual, but it is almost always him (and Cas) who people make gay jokes about, not Sam. He must notice – as I notice every single time people use female-coded insults and language about me when they find out about me – and this clearly both feels like an attack on his identity and a message that people see through his presentation as heterosexual.
Some people laugh at his reaction (perhaps it is my neurodivergence speaking, but I do not understand the chuckles) but it reminded me very much of a scene from the show Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves (‘Torka Aldrig Tårar utan Handskar’) which is about a group of gay men in Stockholm and how their lives are impacted by the AIDS crisis. The scene I have in mind involves Benjamin, a 19 year old Jehovah’s Witness, and Paul, a flamboyant homosexual whom Benjamin meets one evening whilst spreading God’s word.
Paul invites Benjamin into his flat, talks to him for a while, then sends him on his way. As Benjamin is walking down the stairs, Paul rushes out of his flat and says (My own translation): ‘Just one more thing, sweetheart, to be sure I haven't missed anything. You do know you’re a homosexual, don’t you?’
Benjamin’s reaction is stunned silence, a state which continues in the next scene. He had tried so hard to present a certain image, but somebody had seen right through it. And if one person can see through it, who else can? And if one person acknowledges it, must Benjamin then acknowledge it?
(Yes, you can interpret Dean as heterosexual if you want to, that is fine. It does not contradict the text. But it is your choice to do so, not a given in the text. Here is another essay on this very topic: The Author is Dead: Long Live bi!Dean)
That said, I disagree completely that the most homophobic people are closeted gays. It is true that a few outspoken critics of ‘the gay lifestyle’ are actually closeted gays, but to claim they are the main issue is to conveniently absolve heterosexual homophobes of all responsibility in the issue. Where did those few homophobic closet cases get their homophobia from in the first place?
One last point before moving on: I still do not really understand what Sam meant by ‘You are kind of butch. Maybe people think you’re overcompensating’. Is Sam saying gay/bi men cannot be ‘manly’? Or that a straight-presenting man must not actually be heterosexual if he acts manly? I am not sure. What he probably meant was a joke that Dean ‘acting manly’ was because he was trying to hide something, i.e. that he is not ‘manly’ but actually ‘gay’. Perhaps it is my neurodivergence speaking, but I do not see the chuckles. Is this one of those déjà thingies?
Moving swiftly onwards towards some smaller points, this episode made two not-so-subtle reference to The Shining. The first was Dean and Sam being given room 237, and the second was the scene where Dean is in the hotel bar talking to Sherwin. The entire set up of the room, Dean drinking whiskey or whatever from a small glass whilst an elderly man talks to him behind the bar is taken directly from Stanley Kubrick’s film. The Overlook Hotel had its share of deaths just like the Pierpont Hotel in this episode, but the more interesting parallel is between Dean and Jack, the man tormented by both alcoholism, his traumatic childhood, and the spirits in the hotel trying to get him to kill his family.
After Dean did the legwork at the library and found Sam indisposed and useless, he visited Sherwin to get information out of him, a task which took him all of one drink. It is, therefore, hard to miss the fact that even though Sam was about as much use as a marzipan dildo for most of the episode, he still got to look like a hero at the end by swooping in to save Tyler. Not only that, but Susan hugged and thanked him specifically, whilst Dean received a curt nod, and then proceeded through force auteur to praise Sam for saving Tyler whilst receiving no recognition for any of the work he did himself.
The Hufflepuff energy is strong with Dean.
Another item on the list of stupid things in this episode is the fact that not a single person mentioned salt or iron to get rid of the ghost. This is very far from Dean and Sam’s first rodeo, so first on their list of priorities should have been to try the basics, even if only to rule certain things out. What also left me scratching my head was why nobody thought to look for anything which Margaret’s ghost might be attached to, such as the doll which is almost definitely meant to represent her. It was only 1x19 Provenance when they dealt with the ghost of a little girl who was attached to a doll made with her hair, so the little Maggie doll should have been on their list of things to burn. Alas, this did not happen. I think the issue here is a lack of oversight and communication between writers and the fact that Matt Witten only wrote this episode and 2x06 No Exit. That episode made use of salt and iron in fighting against a ghost, but those things are absent in this episode. It amuses me when people say that The Winchesters goes against Supernatural canon because Supernatural never cared much about its own canon anyway.
I have said before that 15x19-15x20 showed me that canon is ultimately meaningless, but the show’s magic systems and monster lore should at least remain consistent. ‘Fantasy’ and ‘horror’ do not mean that anything at all can happen: they mean that anything can happen within the rules established in the secondary world.
The porcelain dolls were ultimately a red herring in the episode, although the lingering shot of the Margaret doll at the end strongly suggests that she is tied to that. This raises the question of what will happen to the ghosts of Margaret and Rose when the doll is ultimately destroyed and the hotel demolished. Will Margaret be forced to move on to the afterlife while Rose remains behind? Will the two of them keep killing everybody who tries to sell or destroy the home? I have no idea, but whatever happens the ending of this episode is not a happy one.
A red herring they may be, but they did provide Dean the opportunity to embarrass Sam in front of the hotelier which he sorely deserved after almost getting Dean killed in 2x10 Hunted. I have listened to some other people discussing this episode and they raised the point that they thought Dean and Sam – two strange men – knocking on a door clearly marked ‘Private’ and then asking to come in was weird if not ominous. The people I listened to would not have been comfortable letting Dean and Sam in.
This did not seem like a pathological fear of men (which I am also used to), but if any two people regardless of sex turned up at my private door in a hotel and asked to come in to see the dolls, I would thing it weird, particularly given the recent spate of deaths in the building. That said, men collecting dolls or similar things is not too weird, even if it is always shown to be the case in media. Paula R. Stiles had this to say:
Huge life irony, here – my grandparents used to work in the antiques business and my war vet grandfather not only loved dolls…but had a huge collection of them.
I do not collect dolls, but I have something like eighty Funko pops and I might or might not have given Dean and Cas little woollen hats. Maybe I am completely divorced from reality, but if Dean and Sam came into my hotel and knocked on my door asking to see my Funko Pops… I would let Dean in without hesitation but request Sam wait outside.
On that note, here endeth the analysis.
Note: the actress who played Susan in this episode, Annie Wersching, died yesterday (29/1/2023) of cancer at the age of 45.
