This episode generally feels like a wasted opportunity to me. A third Winchester brother is introduced which causes some drama, but the brother actually turns out to be a ghoul pretending to be the brother who died several weeks earlier before Dean and Sam ever knew he existed. A bit of a let-down, sullied further by the knowledge that Adam will be used as an excuse to strip Dean of his plot later in series five. However, it is otherwise a good episode, with a return to the grimmer aesthetic of series one and two as well as some genuine horror, a rarity for the show.
John's actual presence was minimal on this show, but it cast a long shadow which hangs heavy over the three brothers. While I cringe every time the characters speak well of John, and every time the show tries to ret-con or justify how he treated his sons, at the very least it was gratifying for Dean to use John to insult Sam at the end of the episode. John does not need to be redeemed, and like Sam I would have less issue with the character if the show did not try to downplay or dismiss his mistreatment of his boys.
This is a problem in The Boys, Kripke's other show. Characters are given redemption arcs they do not deserve, and characters conveniently forget things that e.g. A-Train did because the writers want him to be redeemed so they can pretend he had a character arc. ...All this while Kripke continues thinking men being sexually assaulted and violated is hilarious, of course, but returning to the matter at hand...
The plot of this episode is that Dean gets a call from Adam, a brother he had never heard of and who claimed to be John's son. This leads him to Windon, Minnesota, where John worked a body-snatching case in 1990. and where Adam's mum has gone missing. In the end, the man Dean and Sam believe is their brother is revealed to be the ghoul who ate and killed Adam (in that order) and assumed his form in revenge for John killing the ghoul's dad in 1990. His missing mum is dead, and the ghoul's sister/brother has taken on her form. In the end, Dean escapes from an underground crypt and single-handedly ganks both ghouls and stops Sam bleeding to death. Thereupon they give Adam a hunter's funeral (one wonders what they did with the corpse of Adam's mum and John's erstwhile colleague Joe) and Dean bitch-slaps Sam by saying he (Sam) is exactly like John. Sam, being an idiot, takes this as a compliment.
First, this episode is aesthetically dark. The colours are mostly washed out like episodes in series one and two, and the tone of it matches. Horror vibes are back where the show has been moving towards dark fantasy or urban fantasy with occasional little bits of horror here and there. As such, this is a welcome change. In addition to the aesthetics and tone, this episode contains several types of body horror, such as bits of corpse in the air vents as well as the real Adam and Mum's partially-eaten corpses in the crypt. Dean also has to crawl through a rather claustrophobic passageway between different parts of the crypt, and then climb his way out (showing impressive upper-body strength while doing so). This episode would have been very much at home in series one or two.
This episode also has the only scene in the whole show which has ever made me feel a bit icky and fragile, and that is Sam being bled to death at the end. Nothing in Hannibal, The Walking Dead, or American Horror Story bothered me all that much, but the sound as one of the ghouls cut Sam's wrist open grossed me out. It sounded like a zip being opened. That followed by them licking his blood out of his wounds and the blood dripping into the bowl felt too intimate and violating.
Surprisingly, the results of Dean hammering ghoul!Adam's head to smithereens were not shown, the focus instead being on Dean's face as he brutally murders ghoul!Adam. Almost like a film noir.
The episode also begins with Dean and Sam's morning routine after having slept in the car. This more than the motels they sleep in shows me their status as members of an underclass, and it really is a shame the show did not do this more often.
Moving on, American houses are creepy. The air vents in the walls give me the willies. The idea that there could be such large passageways in the walls and under the floorboards in my own house is deeply unsettling.
In my flat in Finland, I have small air vents in the walls which allow 'fresh' air to circulate around the whole building, but they are very small and narrow. I do not like this because it could be a vector for rodent infestations, and even without the rodents I can still hear what my flatmate is doing in his room on the other side of my flat, as well as hear my neighbours fairly clearly if they raise their voices just a little. But big spaces like in the house in this episode would be a deal breaker for me, not least because every time I look at even the small vent in my own bedroom, I am reminded of Eugene Victor Tooms from The X-Files 1x03 Squeeze.
I also think of him every time I am on an escalator. And I am also reminded of the fact that the same actor played the prison guard who did not wet the sponge in The Green Mile and caused Eduard Delacroix to burn to death in the electric chair.
The long, rambly point is I do not like air vents, but apart from my own distaste for them, they raise a few questions. How did nobody smell Adam's mum's remains in the air vent? Those places would get very hot, especially as they are intended for transmitting hot air around the house, and therefore smelly. I assume ghoul!Adam did not report his missing mum to the police, but did nobody notice that a whole woman went missing one day? Was there no police investigation of any kind?
And speaking of the ghouls themselves, Paula's review raised some good points: the ghouls in the episode were the children of the ghoul John killed in 1990, and were seeking revenge for their dad's murder. How did they know who was responsible? And how did they find out about the relatives?
Anyway, my earlier comment on Dean insulting Sam by saying he is like John precipitates a discussion of why this is the case. The discovery of their half-brother causes very different reactions in Dean and Sam. Once he has accepted Adam is who he says he is, Dean wants Adam kept far away from the hunting life. Ostensibly this is to 'respect John's wishes', but Dean is also motivated by the fact that Adam has not yet been dragged into the Otherworld and can possibly have a normal life away from monsters and demons. Dean believes this is impossible for himself and Sam, and wants Adam to have the life which Dean believes he can never have.
It must also be remembered that the hunting life is physical and mental trauma stacked on top of each other which a high likelihood of dying young and bloody. Dean, understandably, wants Adam – his little brother – spared that if possible.
Sam on the other hand wants to get Adam involved in hunting, at least long enough for him to get revenge for his mum. Sam also seems excited about meeting his new brother, to the point of being a complete arse-biscuit and rolling his eyes at Dean's precautions against demons and shapeshifters. Really, Sam was an idiot at the beginning of the episode. More to the point, he seemed excited about having a younger brother, perhaps as a new hunting buddy. Commentor Ann Emress pointed out that Sam has never had a younger brother and is intrigued by the prospect. However, his motivations are a little more complicated, though, and as each motivation gets stripped away to reveal what is actually beneath, the viewer sees that that the heart of it is spite and selfishness.
Both Dean and Sam are jealous of the life John let Adam have, but Sam's becomes a desire to drag Adam into the Otherworld with him and make him suffer the Sam as he does. This is revealed in Dean and Sam's conversation in the hallway before Dean goes off to investigate the crypt more thoroughly. In response to Dean wanting Adam to have a normal life, Sam pissily retorts 'What makes him so special?' which tells us all we need to know.
I noticed Sam's selfishness when watching this episode, i.e. he did not care that getting Adam involved would endanger him because Sam wanted to get the case solved and Adam could help. In her review, Paula noticed Sam's spite, or his desire to ruin Adam's life just like Sam's own was ruined. If Sam does not get to have a normal life, why should Adam? This is as basal and puerile as a child smashing his brother's sandcastle because a wave came and ruined his own.
In her review, Paula discussed her dissatisfaction with the writers making Sam a douchebag. Why is he not allowed to be actually heroic and likeable? I see the point, definitely, but my own complaint is that the show does not properly hold Sam accountable for his actions but rather tries to justify or downplay them, or present them as Dean's fault actually. I think I discussed that last time, so do let us not flog a dead horse...
Anyway, the point of this was to illustrate the different reactions Dean and Sam have, but funnily enough I agree with Sam a bit more than Dean here. Dean has the best intentions of saving Adam from a life of misery, but ignorance of the supernatural world provides no protection against it. Keeping Adam in the dark would do no good, especially since his mum had already been taken and it definitely looked like the ghouls were after him (in fact, the ghouls got to him weeks earlier). At that point, he had to know. However, this is not the same as dragging him out of his normal life: nothing was preventing him carrying on as best he could in his normal life when the case was over.
This is a case where both brothers were right (even if for the wrong reasons), but as the same time both were wrong. This is about the extent of my agreement with Sam in this episode, meaning it is now time for the discussion to move on to the jealousy.
Both Dean and Sam's jealousy is completely understandable, both wishing they could have had the life Adam had. Dean is also angry where Sam is spiteful, but whereas Sam's spite is directed at Adam (an innocent), Dean's anger is mainly directed at John. Of course Dean hates the idea that his brother got to have a better life than him, but he does not blame Adam: he blames John, in spite of his airs of respecting John's wishes. If you remember e.g. 1x18 Something Wicked, Dean was the parentified child left alone for weeks with no money or food and with full responsibility for Sam. Dean was also held accountable for John's failures. In 1x12 Faith (the episode where Dean got a gay man's heart) John did not even try to get in touch with Dean when Dean was dying. We also have John's bullying of Dean in 1x20 Dead Man's Blood to show that John seriously mistreated Dean, starting from early childhood.
Moreover, Dean was a tool to John (and not one John held in high esteem), a secondary concern who ranked far below Sam. For him to them find out that not only was Sam the favourite, but a third brother got to have a better life than him and got taken to baseball games on his birthday must have felt like an insult and an injustice. Adam also seemed to actually like John, meaning Adam got to see a side of John which was actually likeable. That was rubbing salt in the wound. While Dean was practicing shooting, burning werewolf corpses, and exorcising the ghosts of gay nuns on his birthday, Adam was a normal baby having a normal, boring life. To pull a quote from Paula's review:
Dean is convinced until quite late in the day ... that Adam is some kind of fake or imposter, that John would never have compounded his abandonment of his two sons in grotty motel rooms by then running off once a year to play happy families with a third son – a normal, non-dysfunctional son. Dean, as John’s eldest, always tried hard to be John. His openly expressed belief in season one was that he was the “good” son that John loved best. But season three’s “Dream a Little Dream of Me” showed that to be a lie. Dean’s secret fear was that John loved Sam the best of the two and didn’t even think his eldest was human, just a weapon to be fashioned against the enemy and not even a sharp one, at that. So, to be confronted with a son that John treated well and played baseball with…is it any wonder Dean was enraged to the point of being willing to fill the kid with silver bullets in broad daylight in a busy diner?
Dean, however, never directs the resultant anger at Adam. In one scene when the three are in a motel room, Dean and Sam tell Adam about the supernatural, something which Adam readily accepts (raising Dean's suspicions, which turn out to be warranted). Sam then wants to get Adam involved with the case, but Dean objects, wanting to 'respect John's wishes' as discussed earlier. Sam's refusal to listen gets Dean angry, but rather than hang around and make a negative atmosphere, he storms out to do something proactive and makes important discoveries that help solve the case. That was smart and grown up.
If people who were angry and shouty just walked out of the room and went for a walk when they started getting angry, I would be fine with that. ...As long as there is no weak-ass passive-aggressive bullcrap upon returning from the walk, accompanied by an apology and maybe a pizza or something. Anger is a valid emotion and should be given space. All of this is to say that I do not really get people saying Dean has anger issues. I have seen anger issues, and Dean does not really fit the bill. He gets angry, yes, like everybody, but excessively, uncontrollably so? I think not.
This brings me back around to John, whom Dean implies in 5x17 actually did have anger issues, possibly including beating Dean. Later in the current episode when Dean and Sam are discussing Adam and Sam says 'What makes him so special?', Sam makes a lot of claims about John which, frankly, are complete ignorance at best and historical revisionism at worst.
Considering the fore-fronting of Sam's selfishness in this episode, it is no stretch of the imagination to conclude that Sam is trying to justify his own single-minded disregard for Adam's safety by using John as a precedent. Laughable as the claim may be, 'John did right by us' is an attempt by Sam to vindicate his own callousness. It is the equivalent of 'never did me any harm', which sometimes is actually a coping mechanism to avoid facing the actual harm which was done.
Things were bad for Sam when he was a child. He never knew a stable home, never had a reliable parent, and was frequently abandoned for weeks. 11x09 Just My Imagination showed that when Dean was old enough to join John on hunts, Sam was left alone so much that he made an actual imaginary friend. However, he was shielded from the worst of John, and the shield was Dean. Sam's childhood was no dance on roses, but he escaped the worst of it. 'So we didn't have a dog or a white picket fence', he says, and I wonder whether that really is the extent of it in Sam's mind.
Perhaps it is. Remember that Sam was not aware of the existence of the supernatural until Boxing Day 1991, but was not even exposed to it until later. Perhaps Sam genuinely feels the extent of his deprivation as a child was his lack of a normal life. But the cherry on top of this turd cake is really when Sam said John was right about everything.
It is safe to conclude Sam knows next to nothing at all about whatever it was exactly that John did to Dean, but that does not make his hubris and arrogance any less cringeworthy when he bristles and pissily snaps 'You think I'm wrong' (about John being right). I am stunned by the obliviousness.
To summarise: Sam is indeed as selfish and ruthless as John was in achieving his goals, to the detriment of the people in his life whom he abused in one way or another. For Dean to comment on this likeness is therefore anything but a compliment, something which Sam of course missed entirely. Besides that, the writing for Sam in this episode gave me whiplash: up until now, he has always run away from family and responsibility, even putting family members in danger repeatedly due to his dereliction of duty. But now he is apparently all about family? Yeah, he is spiteful, and has been acting like a douche for along time, but this was a fast switch all the same.
But before moving on from dissecting characters, both Paula and the commenter Ginger on her review bemoaned this episode trashing John's character. They were displeased with the show adding on stuff to show John in a bad light, the case in this episode being both abandoning Dean and Sam in crappy motels to go and play happy families with Adam once a year. But also taking issue with the idea of John having sex with somebody when he was so dead-set on revenge for Mary. Shamangr1 even claimed that series four was going out of its way to rewrite John's character. 'Retroactive damnation', she called it.
Paula did not do her reviews in chronological order, so perhaps this one was written before she took a magnifying glass to 1x18 Something Wicked where she is condemnatory of John, calling his actions evil.
Paula's review and comments also contained a discussion about Heart of Darkness and a comparison of Dean with the African priestess. Dean – like the priestess – might seem savage and primitive to an outsider (in HoD, a European, and in Supernatural, the viewer) due to his capability for brutality, as well as his shamanistic necklaces, rings, bracelets and such things. However, the Otherworld to us is a strange, savage land, but to Dean it is just his back garden, and in his back garden the rules are different. Dean's brutality – as shown by his vicious ganking of both ghouls in this episode, for example – is necessary in his back garden because that is how things work there.
More noteworthy is his capability to show compassion and care, and is far from being a brute. His desire to keep Adam out of the Otherworld came from caring for his little brother and wanting him to be safe and happy. This is not what we would expect from a 'savage'.
Sam, on the other hand, is supposed to be the civilised one, but his own 'heart of darkness' is exposed in his desire to use Adam to achieve his own goals, regardless of the possible cost to Adam.
This discussion also led on to a discussion of Dean's role in the show compared to Sam's, and the idea that Dean is usually correct about things and Sam usually wrong. This is unusual as Sam is Kripke's insert but Dean is the sidekick/womaniser/idiot who Kripke seems to see as disposable. Why would the writers not allow Sam to be right most of the time, and Dean wrong, if this is the case? Commenter Ann Emmess said:
But now that I think about it: yes. All of Dean’s constant perfections are geared to show that he fits seamlessly in his Super-natural world. The morality of Supernatural will wrap itself around anything Dean says to make him right. Dean cannot show bad morals or terrible judgment because SPN will not allow him to do so. (This is very easy to swallow if you are a Dean fan and generally agree with him, and a truly bitter pill if you are not.)
...And yet this holy savage stuff also explains why all this power landed on the not-Kripke guy. Because it makes Dean a magical/natural character who is supposed to be in service to the civilized guy who has the really interesting dilemmas.
While this analysis is not 100% accurate (Dean does not have 'constant perfections' and is indeed wrong about some stuff), it is also far from being invalid. The long and short of it is that Dean is the magical negro of the show, his purpose to be in service of Sam and Sam's journey through the Otherworld. This being the case, it is perhaps less surprising (yet no less galling) that loads of Dean's storylines are taken away from him and given to others, or simply forgotten. It also seems to be pretty much how Jared sees Dean, and why the ending did not bother him nearly as much as it bothered Jensen (and a huge proportion of the audience): Dean was never supposed to have his own story, but rather be an instrument in his brother's story.
And after almost 4,000 words, it is time to draw this to a close. Given Dean's plots are always taken away from him, it pleases me when an episode like this lets him take the lead. Dean does all the work and finds all the important information, climbs out of a claustrophobic underground crypt where the rotting corpses of his brother, brother's mum, and Joe are lying, then ganks both ghouls while Sam bleeds to death. While the plot of the episode was nothing to write home about, it was a very good episode for Dean. Except for losing rock, paper, scissors. I am aware this is supposed to be a running gag, but I struggle to believe a real person would be stupid enough to always choose whatever one it is Dean chooses every single time. It might be worth a cheap laugh, but I view it as bad writing because it pulls me out of the story and reminds me I am just watching a show.
Here endeth the analysis. You can read more of my analyses here:
Series 1
Series 2
Series 3
Series 4
Sundry
You can read Paula's review here and Demian's here.
