Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 4: “Phantom Traveler”

Directed by Robert Singer
Written by Richard Hatem

Supernatural hits its groove now. The pilot set up the backstory of the Winchester trauma and the reunion of the two brothers, on a quest to find their missing Dad. Episode 2 delves into the quest for Dad, and what it means to both brothers, and focuses mainly on Sam’s letting-go of the life he had and accepting the life right in front of him, both for practical and emotional reasons. Episode 3 delves into the nature of trauma and grief, seen mainly through Dean’s eyes and what he witnessed as a child. The quest to find Dad is still present, but the trail has run cold. The brothers are now forging their own path.

Episode 4 introduces a concept which hasn’t been there before (or at least not named) but will become huge in the series as a whole: demonic possession. The pilot showed us how Mary Winchester died, burning up on the ceiling, but we don’t know “what” killed her. Now, of course, Sam’s girlfriend is dead, too, in the same horrifying way. But what is it? And what does it want? Why is it targeting them?

Beautifully, Supernatural does not even begin to answer those questions until Season 2, Season 3. The show has great patience.

The Demon concept is in its infancy in Episode 4 but it’s amazing to see how consistent the show is in its mythos, in its set-up. Not much has to be changed in later episodes.

Here, the story of Supernatural seems to REALLY start. Episode 1 was backstory, Episodes 2 and 3 were mainly character development, focusing on one and then the other brother. Episode 4 introduces the seed that will blossom into a gigantic snarling tree that will encompass the show for seasons to come.

Robert Singer directed “Phantom Traveler”, and of course, as a writer and a producer of the series, he is very important to Supernatural‘s success. He’s directed some of my favorite episodes. He has a delicate style, sensitive to subtext and humor, and he is excellent with actors. In one of the commentary tracks, Singer referenced an episode he directed, “Monster Movie”, which I am not sure I can express how much I love, with its black-and-white homage to old Warner Brothers monster movies, and all of its cinematic references, including Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, even in some of the shots chosen. It also occurs to me that Belle popping out of the wall in Beauty and the Beast was one of the inspirations for the whole Beautiful Women Pinned to the Ceiling motif in Supernatural.

Anyway, Singer referenced a bit of directorial advice he gave to a young actress appearing in one scene in “Monster Movie”. The girl is being interrogated, and she slurps on a Big Gulp straw. Singer relates that he told that actress: “Your whole performance is about the soda.” !!! Singer understood how monotonous these “Winchester brothers questioning witnesses” scenes could get, and he always finds a way to undercut or make comedic. Directors don’t always know how to talk to actors, and they don’t always know how to help them. Singer is clearly not in that category. He knew what he wanted, and he know how to tell it to the actress in terms of something she could DO. Smart.

Richard Hatem wrote “Phantom Traveler”, and it’s awesome in terms of the relationship between the brothers, and showing their vulnerability (especially Dean’s, who basically falls apart in “Phantom Traveler”). Hatem also wrote “Asylum”, another episode later in Season 1, which also focuses on the brothers, in one devastating scene especially in a secret room in the abandoned asylum. It’s a powerhouse scene and it pays off, with interest, as the series unfolds.

Let’s get down to the re-cap.

Teaser
Supernatural loves placing characters against fake backdrops creating an illusion that we are somewhere else. It happens countless times in the crappy motel rooms where Dean and Sam stay, where one wall is covered with a forest scene or something, and the brothers sit at a grimy formica table in the foreground, but the illusion is given that they are in the woods. Perhaps the most famous example of this cinematographic trick is here:

That striking and famous moment was included on some of the posters. It’s de-stabilizing. It’s hallucinogenic.

“Phantom Traveler” starts with a beach scene, accompanied by Hawaiian-type music. Then a head comes into the frame, and whoever he is he looks like shit and he is clearly not on a beach. Sometimes reality is just a matter of tromp l’oeil, which could be said for the entirety of Supernatural as a whole.

This is George Phelps (Paul Jarrett). He goes into the men’s washroom and splashes water on his face. As he leans over the sink, we see a stream of little black granules pouring into the room from the grate, keeping their formation. There’s a hushed creepy-ass distorted whisper in the air, seeming to emanate from the swarm. George looks up and notices them, and before he can flee, the black granules pour into his eyeballs.

The “reality” of demons gets set in stone early, and here, in Episode 4, it’s the first time the team is introducing it and they’re still finding their way. Demons, in their un-human form in the rest of the series, are whirling concentrated columns of black smoke, phallic in nature. And the demons’ “way in” and “way out” of the human beings they possess is NOT through the eyeballs, like it is here, but the mouth, which is more sexual, especially when you see these poor people standing there, mouths wide open, with a huge column being poured inside them, or pouring out of them. It’s sick, disturbing, and looks like sexual assault, and I suppose you could say that yeah, along with the whole being-possessed thing, it IS sexual assault. Something is forcing their way inside of you, through your mouth, which, you know, you use during the sexual act. Hopefully, anyway. Heh. Supernatural consciously co-opts sexual images and turns them into something gross, disturbing, violent.

Suddenly George’s whole posture changes, straightening up, flying right, and his eyes suddenly go entirely black.

The whole black-eyes things becomes a really fun motif of the show. I like it when the demons “click” the black-eyes down, like a little shield, or like sunglasses. There’s even a “click” sound, which, for whatever reason, satisfies me.

A word on the color scheme of the episode, which, as always, is a shout-out to the art department, the props department, the lighting team, and the DP (Serge Ladouceur). Since each episode of Supernatural takes place in a different setting, it being a “road trip” series, not each episode has the same look, feel, color palette. Eric Kripke always knew that he wanted each episode to be a “horror movie of the week”, and he wanted the series, low-budget though it was, to FEEL high-budget and cinematic. Episode 3, “Dead in the Water”, was mournful and solemn in dark greens, blacks, and pale whites. Episode 4 is colder and more clinical, perhaps reflecting the fact that the episode is focusing on machinery, airplanes, with their fluorescent lights and dark blue seats. The look here is high stark contrast: blacks against whites, the suits the brothers wear, the bright white outside light and the black Venetian blind shadows. Episode 4, where we first meet a Demon, where we first get a glimpse that something bigger is going on here, something above the brothers’ pay grade, something calculated and enormous, and something having to do explicitly with them, the light goes chilly, stark, high contrast, the motif being one of cold blues, and black and white.

Just a couple of examples:

George Phelps boards the plane, freaking out the flight attendant (Jaime Ray Newman) who gets a glimpse of his black eyes. She tries to shake off what she knows she just saw. Once airborne, George makes chit-chat with his seat neighbor asking how long they have been in the air. She says, “About 40 minutes”, and he says, “Time really does fly, doesn’t it.” She seems uncomfortable, and I relate to her, demons notwithstanding. I’ve sat next to chatty-Kathys on flights, and that is the reason that God invented iPods and ear-buds. He gets up and strolls around the cabin, making eye contact with a male passenger, who also sees the black eyes and does a horrified double-take. Then, Mr. Black Eyes goes to the emergency hatch and stands there for a bit, all as the male passenger looks on in dawning horror. With a grin, Black-Eyes yanks open the emergency hatch and flies out into the air.

The plane begins to plummet down through the clouds and it is total chaos within the cabin. The air pressure is screwed and things fly through the air. People scream. The flight attendant, Amanda, staggers screaming towards a seat, grasping at the oxygen mask. Screen goes to black.

1st scene
In the very first post I did about Supernatural, I talked about this next shot, which is a slow pan up over Jensen Ackles’ sleeping body. I go into the objectification trope of Supernatural and how it approaches objectification in a gender-bending way, something that both actors are completely complicit in. Everyone knows what they are doing here. It’s deliberate.

But I wanted to talk about something else, which is, I realize, super-granular and esoteric and sometimes completely subtextual, but what’s the point of doing these re-caps if I don’t take the opportunity to babble about the things that strike me?

You can skip over this next part, if tangents aren’t your thing.

Dean Winchester and Sleep is a very important relationship. Well, it’s important to all humans. Maybe the whole Sleep Thing in Supernatural really resonates with me because of my own battle with illness and how key Sleep has been to recovery. I have had to learn a lot about sleep. I have had to focus on it. Learn how to do it properly. Sleep is how the brain re-charges itself. There’s a reason sleep deprivation is one of the most effective torture techniques on the planet. Deny someone their sleep, they will cave to you in three days. Sometimes I think of what the great Nobel Prize winning author Elias Canetti wrote in his brilliant book Crowds and Power that sleep is such a vulnerable act to humans, putting us in such peril, that it is amazing that somehow evolution did not whittle our need for it out of existence. Cro-Magnon man had to sleep, prehistoric women needed to sleep. Manic Pixie Dream Girls need to sleep, and so do Worldclass Heavyweights and Navy SEALs. It is non-negotiable. Like I said, my perspective on this is heightened because I have been so focused on Sleep this past year, under a doctor’s care, and reading books, and trying to re-program my weary body into needing 8 hours of sleep, as opposed to 5.

Some spoiler-y stuff here:

The whole Sleep thing becomes explicit in Season 6 when Sam, it is revealed, never sleeps. This freaks Dean out. It’s also explicit elsewhere, when Castiel and Dean have a phone conversation, and Castiel has information to impart and says he will be “right there” and Dean moans that no, “I’m a human being. I have stuff I have to do, like sleep. Give me four hours”. Dean Winchester may be self-destructive in a lot of ways, but he prioritizes sleep in a way that is healthy and uncomplicated: anything his body needs physically, be it food, sex, or sleep, he gets that need met. Shovel that food down, get naked with some willing broad, fall in bed fully clothed and crash into sleep before he hits the pillow. If no woman is around, and more often than not there isn’t, then Dean is an unembarrassed platinum member at all kinds of porn sites, so fire that laptop up, visit his favorite sexy porn friends, jerk off, go to sleep. He doesn’t even bother hiding the porn thing from his brother, and it becomes a running joke. Sam is more discreet, and is embarrassed at Dean’s lack of shame. Dean couldn’t care less. Porn serves a purpose, it fulfills a need. The need is biological, and getting his biological needs met keeps him sharp, and it keeps him human. In Supernatural, that’s a big deal, and it sets him apart from the creatures he hunts, as well as other hunters who are all traumatized tough motherfuckers who can’t ever show “weakness”.

There are many more references to sleep through the series, it’s everywhere once you’re tuned into it. So much heavy metal music, too, which makes up the soundtrack is about nightmares, and dreams, and insomnia. Hell, Metallica’s most famous song features a child intoning “Now I lay me down to sleep”, and the “Sandman” there is freakin’ terrifying. Sleep is used humorously, sometimes, when Dean wakes up and Castiel is sitting on the edge of the bed staring at him, God knows how long he’s been there. Castiel doesn’t sleep. But somehow, in his angelic brain, through observing humanity throughout history, and being barked at by Dean, Castiel knows that he needs to let Dean sleep, but he sees nothing wrong with sitting there, staring at Dean, waiting for him to wake up. Dean, after all, is his responsibility. They have a “profound bond”. Dean is, for justifiable reasons, freaked out by Castiel sitting there while he is asleep and has to keep setting boundaries with Castiel, explaining why that behavior is not cool. This is also referenced, slyly, in the “Twihard” episode, when Dean picks up a YA vampire book and looks at the cover image, which shows a hot Robert Pattinson-esque vampire staring at a girl sleeping. Dean says to Sam, totally skeeved out, even a little pissed, “He is watching her sleep. How is that not rapey?” He takes it personally. He’s not just pissed off on the girl’s behalf, he knows how weird it is to have someone do that to you. Castiel doesn’t realize he’s being rapey. But still: don’t stare at me without my consent.

This also dovetails with the objectification theme, especially in regards to Dean Winchester. The show puts that on the table in almost every episode, and Dean himself is aware of it. People/monsters are always up in his grill, threatening sexual violence, leering at him, musing how good he will taste, and etc. When he’s in a hookup situation, and consenting to it – “consent” being central to Supernatural, he enjoys it. But 9 times out of 10, that objectification is coming at him like a threat, it’s unwelcome and violent, in the way that women more typically experience in the rounds of their everyday life. Men, typically, don’t walk down the street and have people shout sexual come-ons at them in aggressive ways, bringing sex into non-sexual contexts in ways that seem dangerous. Women deal with this every day. In Supernatural, this inversion with Dean is deliberate. It’s one of the most fascinating subtexts of the show, rich with possibilities. I wrote in the Episode 2 recap about how Dean sexualizes moments constantly, with men, women, angels, monsters, it doesn’t matter. The world he walks through sexualizes him to an exhausting degree, and he responds in kind. Sam, as handsome as he is, doesn’t get leered at nearly as much as Dean does. There is something accessible in Dean, something feminine, that leaves him open to attack. These are charged concepts, I realize. He meets one of the Campbell hunters, a female, who sizes him up, stopping him in his tracks, thers’s something not friendly in her cold gaze, and instead of saying, “Hi, nice to meet you,” this female hunter says, assessing him, “Such delicate features for a hunter.” Delicate. No one in their right mind would ever call Sam delicate. And it is not a compliment, although it is a sexualized moment. Dean is put in a precarious feminized position merely from the vibe he gives off, and he can’t help that, it’s who he is. Even with how tough he is! That’s what’s so fascinating in Jensen Ackles’ and Kripke and team’s conception of this character. “Don’t objectify me,” pouts Dean Winchester to Bella in “Red Sky at Morning”. So Castiel sitting there watching Dean as he sleeps is part and parcel of the daily meal of objectification that Dean Winchester has had to deal with since he hit puberty probably. He is leered at constantly. Almost everyone treats Dean Winchester in a “rapey” way. Men, women, monsters. He’s HAD it with the rapey stuff. (LAYERS. Supernatural is all about LAYERS.) So I think it’s fair to say that Sleep is used in interesting ways in Supernatural, and I haven’t even touched on the “dream” episodes.

The second element of this, and I swear I’m almost done, is Jensen Ackles’ almost otherworldly sensitivity to material and what it suggests. We’re only in Episode 4 now, and he would have no way of knowing how sleep would factor in to the warp and weft of the show. But you could also say that it was there from the get-go, since becoming a hunter is like willingly entering a nightmare, strolling into the borderline between waking life and unconsciousness, and dealing with monsters that civilians only see in dreams. Also, it has already been established that Sam has been having nightmares ever since Jess was killed, and Sam will continue to have sleep problems throughout the series. So, for contrast, of course Dean would be a great sleeper. Whatever the case may be, I glory in Jensen Ackles’ “sleep work” and I realize how silly that sounds but good acting is made up of details. When I see Ackles’ body language, face, and waking-up behavior, I 100% believe that he was actually just deep asleep. I am sure that in a crisis situation, Dean would be awake in a flash with a gun or knife in his hand, but when the pressure’s off he eases himself awake. Waking up is vulnerable. Your hair looks a mess, you’re not fully conscious yet, and, hell, you may actually be feeling cuddly, and what the hell are you gonna do about that? Jensen Ackles does all this waking-up behavior which is so excellent, so specific. You feel tired just looking at him. You can tell his breath stinks, that’s how much HE believes that he has just woken up. Watch actors pretend to be asleep. It’s quite obvious, more often than not, that they are pretending. Jensen Ackles, on the other hand, appears to be truly BLASTED OUT in sleep, like a bomb has exploded in his brain destroying his body tension for good. He looks soft and pliable, a huge contrast to the tense gruff guy he is when he’s awake. And when he wakes up, he rubs his eyes with the back of his hands, looking like a 4-year-old after a nap, his hands sort of hang in mid-air as he stretches, vulnerable and floppy, he grunts as he moves or rolls over, sometimes twisting his body around in the bed like a damn pinup girl or Venus on the halfshell, getting back into his body again. Unselfconscious. I’m talking so much about the sleep thing now so I won’t have to do it every single time it comes up. I’ll just link back to this and try to spare everyone the repetition.

Dean Winchester is an alert warrior. He has eyes in the back of his head. His reflexes are world-class. He can kill a moving target. And when he sleeps, he is a floppy unembarrassed rag-doll and it takes him some time to let the sleep world go when he wakes up.

I had a 9 o’clock class in undergrad. It was always filled with fellow students who were sheer WRECKS of human beings due to the early hour. A friend of mine, who shared my major, would always show up with his hair messy, indentations on his face from his damn pillow, and would be inhaling coffee as though he was about to burst into tears. He was so TIRED. And the head of our department, whose class it was, said to him one day, dryly, “Christian, it is not necessary to make a Spectacle of your Lethargy.”

Dean Winchester makes a Spectacle of his Lethargy and that is all because of Jensen Ackles. His talent, suggestibility, accessibility, and general Knowing the Job of Acting As Well As Anyone thing. He has done his work. He focuses on the right things. He does not ignore the details. He can improvise. He can get lost in the reality. But he has already asked the right questions in his alone-time studying the script. He made the intuitive choice that when Dean Winchester sleeps he fucking SLEEPS.

Work this detailed rarely gets congratulated because it is based so much on commonsense and invisible building-blocks. It is work that can’t be SEEN, it doesn’t call attention to itself, it does not WANT to be congratulated.

Sleep Lecture Over.

Back to our first scene. Where was I? Oh yes.

After lingering lovingly for a while on the Spectacle of Dean’s Lethargy, the camera moves up to the doorway, seen through the frosted glass of the partition. The music is eerie and ominous, for no reason other than setting a mood, and we see the shadow of a human being coming through the main door of the motel. Sam emerges around the corner, holding two coffees. The room is dark and the window is dim with dawn light. Sam wakes Dean up, and Dean is resentful and babyish, what time is it??, and etc. He’s still asleep, dammit. Jensen Ackles does all this Lethargic Spectacle stuff as he reluctantly sits up in bed. His face looks puffy, his hair is every which way, and he looks strangely vulnerable in shorts. Through the haze of sleep, he realizes how early it is, and that Sam is rarin’ to go, which brings up troubling questions for Dean. Dean asks Sam if he is still having nightmares about Jess, and Sam says yeah. Dean tells him he has got to get some sleep, and stop staying up all night watching George Foreman infomercials. Sam doesn’t want Dean to cluck over him like a mother hen, it’s infantilizing, but Dean makes it clear, still reeling from being AWAKE, he is STILL ASLEEP, that he relies on Sam to be there for him, and he needs him “sharp”.

Look at this body language. Doesn’t he look like a grumpy 13-year-old who nearly wants to weep because it’s time to get up and go to school?

Sam has troubles, his troubles are weighing on him, similar to what was happening in Episode 2, although now the troubles are settling in a bit more, becoming his Reality as opposed to just this brand-new circumstance brought on by trauma. He’s worked three jobs with his brother now, they are no closer to finding Dad, and it’s as though Stanford never happened. He’s a bit disoriented. So is Dean, drinking coffee, with his puffy face.

They talk about the job and Sam confesses that he had forgotten how it gets to him. Dean says, “Well you can’t let it. You can’t bring it home like that.” Sam looks at his brother, still wrapped up in his Sleep World, and says, “You’re never afraid?” Dean says, “No.” Sam reaches under Dean’s pillow and pulls out the gleaming knife that Dean has stashed there. Dean says, “That’s not fear. That is precaution.” I’m with Dean on that one.

It is then that Dean’s cell phone rings, startling both brothers. At this point in the series, separated from Dad, they are extremely isolated. As the series goes on, their world becomes heavily populated with other hunters, and regular people like Bobby, people who check in with them, they are social in their own way. But early on it’s just them, traveling around with the huge absence of Dad sitting beside them. So when the phone rings, they’re both alarmed. Who could that be? Dad?

Dean answers and it’s a guy named Jerry, who says: “You and your dad helped me out a couple years back.” Dean’s desperate gulps of crappy coffee have helped ease him (gently! gently!) into being awake, and he thinks for a second, and then says, still with sleep fuzzing and slurring his voice (again, kudos to Jensen Ackles: I get that this is what the acting gig is all about, and the good ones always work this well and this deeply, and without wanting to be noticed/congratulated for it, but I still need to call it out when I see it), “Oh, right, that poltergeist thing. Is it back?” Jerry says no, but it’s something else, and he thinks it might be worse.

2nd scene

The boys hit the road, and there’s this stunner of a shot of the Impala hurtling through the landscape.

3rd scene
Brian Markinson plays Jerry, who heads up the airline of the plane that crashed in the Teaser. It’s yet another great example of how important it is to get serious people with some serious skillz in these small guest spots. Markinson creates a certain type of guy, practical, wary, with a mechanical mind, who also is open to the possibilities of the supernatural because a poltergeist damn near tore his house apart. But there’s that practical underside. You can see him getting along really well with John Winchester. Both no-bullshit men.

Jerry, Dean and Sam walk through the airplane hangar. It’s an important scene, and we actually get some more shadings of the missing John Winchester here, which I’ll get into but I’d like to point out that the entire scene through the hangar is done in two long one-shots. These are complicated shots, involving extras walking back and forth, the three actors strolling forward, the camera on a dolly track, and the actors all having to just play the scene out. “Doing it in one” is cinematic. You can understand why television doesn’t often indulge in such techniques, there simply isn’t time, and it’s best to just cut from face to face to face, rather than set up this long scene where everyone walks towards the camera, and all the actors have to memorize a page of dialogue and blah blah blah … but such one-shots help the show seem extremely high-end. It looks like there’s more money on the screen than there is, in other words.

As they walk, they talk. Some of the surrounding mechanics sometimes throw in funny lines, and Jerry will toss back a retort, giving a three-dimensional feel to the world of the hangar. Again, you only believe Supernatural because of the commitment to such details. Jerry casually references “your Dad”, and he obviously doesn’t know what a hot topic it is with the brothers and doesn’t see the glances they exchange behind his back. Jerry met Dean before, but Sam was off at college, and Jerry is pleased to finally meet him, saying, “Your Dad was real proud of you. He talked about you all the time.” Sam looks like he doesn’t know how to process that information at ALL, seeing as he left on such bad terms with his father, and Dean holds his tongue. Jerry said that he had been trying to get a hold of John and Dean lies, saying, yeah, Dad’s all wrapped up in a job right now.

Jerry leads Dean and Sam into the darkest office in the world, in order to listen to the cockpit voice recorder of the plane that went down.

It’s a moody space, with crazy dramatic Venetian blind shadows, and everything plunged in darkness. The contrast is stark. Everyone looks glamorous, for sure, but it’s a kind of cold and clinical glamour.

Jerry plays the recording for them, and there’s a very weird screeching sound at the end of it which pricks up Dean and Sam’s ears. There were over 100 passengers on the plane that went down and only 7 survivors, including the pilot. Dean wants to look at the wreckage, and Jerry says the NTSB has it on lockdown and he doesn’t have that kind of clearance. Dean’s reaction, a kind of flat, “No problem” is hysterical, because he is so clearly up to no good.

4th scene
Dean emerges from copy store proudly wielding two badges marked Homeland Security. Naturally, though, he has to take a moment to double-take the girl entering the copy store as he’s walking out. Tiny moment, again, not even half a second long, but it keeps our thru line going, it keeps the character consistent in a way that we are starting to really understand him. Dean is never too On Topic to forget that pretty girls are there to be gawked at. Dean, remember how it feels when everyone and their Grandmama gawk at you? Well, never mind. Sam, still clinging to his law school respectable days, is a bit taken aback by Homeland Security. “That seems really illegal, even for us,” says Sam, a comment that makes me laugh. Dean brushes it off with: “Well, it’s not something people have seen a thousand times. It’s something NEW.”

I love that because it is already a meta-commentary on the show itself, something Supernatural will delight in again and again. How are we going to handle this Fake Badge Motif without it getting monotonous? I know, let’s throw Homeland Security at ’em!

Dean and Sam sit in the Impala and Sam pulls up the voice recording that Jerry had forwarded on to them. Sam had stripped the Who-see-whatsit out of it, using a Doohickey of some kind, and he found something buried in all of that weird noise. Dean and Sam listen and you hear, frankly, a terrifying screech-whisper sneering, “Nooooo survivors.”

You can believe that if I actually had to listen to such a recording I would curl up into a ball and become pre-verbal. But Dean wrinkles his brow, totally another day at the office, and says, “What the hell does that mean. There were seven survivors.”

Now we get the obligatory “what are we dealing with” and “Here is what the lore says” scene, which somehow never gets boring although it must be boring as hell to play these scenes, especially for poor Jared Padalecki. Dean is not a dumbbell and he knows his job but Sam has a mind for encyclopedic details and pattern-perception. The two haven’t worked together in years. Sam fled the family at age 18 to go to college, leaving betrayal and hurt feelings behind. Dean has bucked up on his own, playing second fiddle to Dad, and probably acting as an emotional (and sometimes actual) punching bag for Dad. Sam had been the buffer between them, and without Sam it had to be pretty Call of the Wild. Dean knows how to go to the library, he knows about the history of the evil things, he knows how to kill them, but it sure is nice to have backup. Especially backup that won’t make you feel like shit about yourself every other second.

I love the energy between the brothers in this episode. They seem very in sync. Lots of eye contact, and telepathy. And when Dean finally falls apart (as he does, spectacularly), Sam is there to both support him and also smack him out of it (as well as realize that his big brother is basically whimpering and it is definitely ammo for future use!)

Sam and Dean discuss the voice on the recorder. Spirit? Ghost? Haunted plane? Sam mentions the lore of the “phantom traveler”, and Dean nods, thinking that must be it. Dean is then saddled with a rather long sentence about Flight 401, and the crash, and the parts going on into other airplanes, which then crashed as well. Ackles delivers it well, in a sort of meditative, “Oh, that’s right, I remember that” tone, which helps elevate it from stilted backstory. Clearly, due to the title of the episode, they lean towards the “phantom traveler” theory, which exists in all cultures, in all times, Sam footnotes it all for us.

Sam thinks they should go talk to Max Jaffe, one of the seven survivors.

5th scene
The gleaming Impala sits parked beside a sign that informs us, helpfully: Riverfront Psychiatric Hospital. Max (Kett Turton) was the guy we saw in the teaser, who witnessed George Phelps aka Black-Eyes, open the emergency hatch. He has checked himself into a psychiatric facility because he basically knows what he saw, but he can’t believe in what he saw, and nobody else believes him either so clearly thinks he is losing it.

Dean is not very sympathetic to the whole madness thing (that will develop in super interesting ways over the course of the series). He sees things in reality that are worse than what these lunatics see in their heads. He only believes in what he can see right in front of him, which is why he doesn’t believe in God. So these people going crazy … for seeing things that he sees every day? Contempt. Sam treats Max with gentle sympathy, and Dean is impatient. He gets the guy’s name wrong and Max corrects him. Dean basically shrugs, Joffe, Jaffe, who the fuck cares, this guy is a nutbag.

Sam gives Dean a couple of “please shut UP” looks, giving an awesome “good cop/bad cop” vibe to the interrogation, which happens outside in the main yard, with other patients in the background, taking walks, playing chess. Sam gently asks Max to relate “what you thought you saw”. Considering the number of times that episodes take place in or around insane asylums, not to mention Sam’s entire journey in Season 6, it’s nice to see it all introduced here with a very gentle touch. There’s more to be said along these lines, but we’ll get to it.

Sam, in his questioning, asks Max if the black-eyed man he saw had disappeared and re-appeared, “it would look like a mirage”. Max looks at Sam and says, “What are you, insane?”

It’s a funny moment, but it’s also a harbinger of things to come in the series, for both of them at different times, when that boundary-line is not so easily discernible, when Dean and Sam can’t really be sure that what they are perceiving is real.

6th scene
Dean and Sam pull up in front of George-Black-Eyes house, and stand talking for a bit over the gleaming top of the Impala in a classic Supernatural framing. They never get sick of finding variations on this shot.

The brothers still have no idea what they are dealing with. A human being clearly would not have the strength to open an emergency hatch on an airplane. But would a monster live in such a nice house as the one they are staring at? What the hell is going on here? And why would a monster target airplanes?

Pretty stock scene follows (albeit art-directed and lit beautifully, dark and solemn) where the brothers question the widow.

One tiny flash of a moment that I love. Sam, leaning in to the widow’s grief (he is not uncomfortable with her emotion, whereas Dean, sitting upright, seems visibly uncomfortable) speaks in the most soothing voice imaginable, asking her how long they had been married. She replies, with visible pride, mixed with tears, “13 years.”

Please watch Dean’s silent reaction to that bit of information. The brothers are both in the same shot, and it’s a full-body shot, so this is clearly just Jensen Ackles being alive in the moment (i.e.: it’s not a planned closeup, it’s not a moment that is a pointed “button” on the scene). Sam remains intent, staring sympathetically at the widow, and Dean hears her say “13 years” and his face sort of lights up in a “That’s cool” expression, but he seems very unsure about whether it is cool or not, and also unsure of what he should be doing anyway, and the whole thing makes him seem totally insincere and awkward, not to mention inappropriate, and, face frozen that way, he glances over at Sam, like: “Is this how I’m supposed to be reacting? What are YOU doing right now so I can copy you?”

It happens in half a second, gone before you know it, but it makes me laugh.

Boom, the guys are now back out on the sidewalk, and both agree that George seems to be a dead end. He wasn’t a monster, emergency hatch notwithstanding. Something else is going on. Dean, all competent business now (now that he is out of the presence of, you know, an actual grieving human being), says that they need to get into that NTSB warehouse and check out the wreckage. Sam doesn’t disagree but says, “If we’re gonna go that route, we better look the part.”

7th scene
“Paranoid” by Black Sabbath blasts (which is from Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut album which, weird, has just hit the North American charts again, due to the Black Sabbath catalog being published on iTunes. Forgive me for knowing this. I love Black Sabbath.) It’s a perfect choice, because of its hard and driving sound, mixed with the helpless surrender of the lyrics (which is often the case with real heavy metal stuff – these guys are tough macho mo-fos and their songs are all about what it feels like to be helpless. I wrote about that a little bit in my Ebert review of the Metallica movie.) We are now on a sidewalk outside a men’s dress shop, and Dean and Sam emerge, in black suits, black ties, white shirts.

The whole suit thing becomes rote, as rote as the fake-badge thing, they’ve got the FBI bureaucracy blue suits/red ties, and the grey detective suits, but here is where they first invest in suits consciously, and it is at Sam’s suggestion. You certainly can’t show up flashing a Homeland Security badge wearing ripped jeans and flannel. Dean is embarrassed, and pissed off. He is looking down at himself, and whines (yes, whines), “Man, I look like one of the Blues Brothers.” Sam isn’t any less awkward, trying to adjust his tie and everything, but he does look Dean up and down and says: “No you don’t. You look more like a 7th grader at his first dance.”

Which is funny because it’s true. Being a Blues Brother is still cool, you can still be a badass. But a pimply 7th grader? And Dean’s body language here is totally 7th grade. At one point he sort of shrugs his shoulders, to get the shirt/jacket a bit loosened, or at least off his skin so he can’t feel it and he looks miserable, put-upon, humiliated.

Black Sabbath still jams, and jams us into the next moment.

8th scene
Dean and Sam, poker-faced, in their Blues Brothers suits, flashing Homeland Security badges in the face of a slightly suspicious security guard at the warehouse. But if you were faced with this kind of energy, you’d have to be pretty brave to get in the way of it.

Dean and Sam walk into the warehouse and I am sorry, but this is one HELL of a shot of the destroyed airplane.

I mean, seriously. That is magnificent.

Dean and Sam stroll among the wreckage, we see them through the wreckage, through the darkness of the space in gorgeous evocative shots like this one.

This scene brings us the first appearance of the fabled “EMF”, which picks up on electro-magnetic frequencies in the air caused by spirits/ghosts/ghouls/bad things. The way this scene is written is really to let US in on what an EMF is, which could have been awkward because both Sam and Dean have had EMFs in their lives since they both sucked their thumbs. But the writers/actors manage it gracefully and actually make a great moment out of it, my favorite in the episode. It’s non-verbal, so you’ll just have to cue it up to glory in the schtick.

Sam asks what Dean is holding, and Dean, proud, says, “It’s an EMF meter” and then rattles off a short description of what it does, perhaps thinking his rusty brother needs a refresher course. Sam is furious, and at this point in the series when Sam gets mad he gets condescending and sarcastic (but look out, that will change!). I think he’s still a bit intimidated by his big brother, whose temper is on a hair-trigger and who can bulldoze right over him bossing him around. So when Dean explains to him something he already knows, it’s infuriating. Sam says, “I know what it is, Dean. But why does it look like a busted walkman?” Dean says, “Because that’s what I made it out of.”

The moment following that line is my favorite moment in the episode. It is yet another symphony of sometimes conflicting silent expressions going across Jensen Ackles’ face. Dean is SUPER proud of what he made, first of all. He smiles up at Sam proudly, and we never see him smile that way, that big, that free. Then he sees Sam’s sarcasm, and the proud smile drains off of his face as though air is being let out of him. Following that, he gets a tiny bit hurt, because Sam is dissing what he made. He glances down at the EMF, almost protectively, and then seems to realize he’s been insulted and so he looks back up at Sam with an offended expression.

The moment is small but also so broad. When Dean is taken aback, he wears it all on his sleeve. You’re almost embarrassed for him.

The EMF starts to buzz when they approach the emergency hatch, or maybe it’s a propeller, I don’t know, it’s too damn dark. Dean notices some residue smeared on the metal, and reaches out to rub his finger on it, wondering, what the hell is that? Sam pulls out a knife to scrape some off, and while he does so, Dean casually wipes his residue-dirty finger on his brother’s jacket. It’s so stupid and it’s also so funny and real. I’m not getting my new cool Blues Brothers jacket dirty. I’ll just wipe my finger on Sam’s back. That’s what he’s there for.

Meanwhile, in DOH! land, out front two actual Homeland Security guys also flash their badges at the security guard, causing the poor guard to laugh and say, “What? You already have a team of two guys in there right now.” What?? Suddenly we see the men, along with cops and others, holding guns, running down a hallway towards the warehouse. We cut back to Dean and Sam scraping off the residue into a little baggie. Cut back to the guys running towards the door, guns out. But once they arrive in the warehouse, the place is totally empty. Sam and Dean, with supersonic hearing apparently, have fled the scene just in time.

Outside, near the runway, Dean and Sam peek around the building, see the coast is clear, and start walking towards the parking lot, when the alarm suddenly goes off. Sam and Dean both start running, and, again, with my obsessively detailed eye: If they were in their civilian clothes, you know that they would have run at top barreling speed. But in their suits, they feel self-conscious and like they probably need to LOOK like they belong there, should anyone be watching, so we get a beautiful moment of Sam and Dean running, while trying to look like they are not running. They climb up over the locked gate, and race off towards the Impala. It’s a hot moment, frankly. They both look hot as hell.

9th scene
I do believe that right about now it’s time for someone else to die.

Back in the airport, we see a dude who we soon learn was the pilot of the crashed airplane. From Jerry, we know that his name is Chuck and he is traumatized by the crash and fearful of flying again. So this will be a trial run, in a small two-seater, and he’s got a friend there to pep talk him through it. But Chuck is not looking good. He is grey-faced and clammy, sitting in the airport, with the runway out the window behind him. It is at this moment that the Demon Black Granule Brigade streams out of the vent above him and flows into his eyeballs. Uh-oh. Chuck’s gone all Black-Eyes on us now. And we’re not even halfway through the episode yet, so we know Chuck is dunzo.

10th scene
Dean and Sam have taken the residue back to Jerry, who peers at it through a microscope in his glamorous dark dramatic office. I just have to point out that Sam’s collar is open which makes him look like an extra in Saturday Night Fever.

If you are a Supernatural fan, then you already know what the residue is, and you know that the show, even now, in season 9, has to have the guys fill us in when they come upon such residue. How many times has either Jared Padalecki or Jensen Ackles had to sniff the yellow stuff, look around, and murmur “Sulfur” to themselves? I mean, really? 75 times? I’m at the point where if I came home and I saw yellow residue on my doorknob I’d move to another state and change my name. Seriously, guys, we KNOW it’s sulfur, you don’t have to tell us 75 times.

But this is the first appearance of sulfur. And Dean and Sam’s confusion by it (although they know what it signifies) tells us that something is shifting, in the world they inhabit. Something is changing. Jerry says it is sulfur, no doubt about it. Dean and Sam exchange worried glances and then, beautifully, a moment of humor: we hear a guy off-camera start to throw a tantrum, and Jerry, flat-faced, says, “If you fellows will excuse me, I have an idiot to fire.” The writers obviously needed to get Jerry out of the room for the brothers to have a pow-wow, but what an artful funny way to do it.

Dean and Sam are confused and worried. They talk about it. “There’s not many things that leave behind a sulfuric residue.” “Demonic possession.”

But it still doesn’t make sense to these experienced men (and it doesn’t make sense to us either since we don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about anyway). Dean is almost pissed because he is confronted by something he doesn’t understand. A demon possessing someone in order to take down an entire airplane? Neither of them have seen anything like this before.

And because Supernatural wants you to revel in the visual, let’s revel in this shot.

11th scene
Back to Demon Chuck who strides fearlessly towards the little plane on the runway, all raring to go. Fear vanished. Up in the plane, his friend is being supportive, not yet realizing that his friend has been raped in the eyeballs by Demon Granules. Chuck then says, and we flash back to the Teaser: “How long we been up?” Friend replies, just as the woman did, “Almost 40 minutes.” And Chuck replies, with the same lame joke George used: “Time really does fly.” Then, his eyes fully black and cray-cray, he plunges the plane down through the clouds. His friend starts screaming. We see a farmer driving his tractor near a field below, looking up because he hears the approaching roar. The scene is beautifully edited, going back and forth between the plane and the ground, giving us a horrifying sense of the plane’s fast approach. Then there’s an awesome effect of the plane coming in to crash, and nicking the telephone wire, causing an enormous shower of sparks.

The scene goes to black and we hear the crash. Supernatural, with its low-budget, is incredibly good at suggesting things to us, things they couldn’t afford to show, like a big plane crash, through NOT showing things, or showing us just enough. Hell, they gave us a sense of the actual Apocalypse merely through a windy day with paper flying through the air and televisions filled with news of floods and tornados. So well done.

12th scene
Sam and Dean are back in their pitch-black motel room, on the laptop, books spread out, images taped up on the wall.

Sam has been studying up on the lore (because, of course). Dean seems distracted, maybe even disturbed, as he pores over books on the bed, but he’s listening to Sam, trying to keep an open mind. Sam babbles on about how all world religions and cultures have some lore on demon possession. And in Japan, there is a lot of lore about demons being associated with events, like disease outbreaks or earthquakes. Dean isn’t buying it. “Plane crashes, though??”

Sam, who seems more and more comfortable now not only in his role as researcher but back in the groove with his brother, asks Dean what the hell is the matter. Dean is now up and pacing. He says, almost helplessly, “This isn’t our normal gig.” He doesn’t know what is going on. He knows demons, and “demons, they don’t want anything, just death and destruction, for its own sake.” Sam doesn’t argue. He knows that’s true too. Then there’s a fascinating moment, simple, where Dean puts his head down, scratching his head (look at how beautifully he’s lit:)

And says, with no anger, no resentment, no worry even, just a pure desire for some help and insight, “I wish Dad was here.” Sam, so different from “Wendigo”, when he Alpha Dogged all over the place, bristling with resentment about missing Dad and needing to find Dad, responds, openly, “Yeah. Me too.”

And they aren’t talking about finding him to clear the air, or get “closure … or whatever”, or even to fight it out. They need help and guidance in the job he taught them to do. It’s a strange and intimate little moment, and it is also a glimpse of where we are going with the whole demon mythology. The brothers will soon become experts, without Dad’s help. But here, they both seem very young and helpless.

Jerry then calls with the news about Chuck Lambert’s plane going down. Jerry tells Dean that the plane went down “in a town called ‘Nazareth'” and Dean says, “I’ll try to ignore the irony in that.”

So will we.

When Dean hangs up he tells his brother the news, and says they now have to drive to “Nazareth”, and the town-name strikes Sam, just like it strikes Dean, and there’s a small moment where they smile at each other, wordlessly, sitting in the irony of the whole thing.

I just want to point out that Jared Padalecki’s performance is beautifully modulated throughout this episode. Dean is the scene-stealer, his behavior is more obvious and he gets more attention. But without Jared Padalecki’s presence, the series would be way out of balance. Sam’s journey is almost more interesting than Dean’s, because he is working under a secret that he doesn’t even know yet. We will understand much later. And at this point, Jared Padalecki wouldn’t have known at all where his character would go. But he’s a sensitive actor, and is able to suggest deep landscapes of un-knowability and mystery, which will serve him well as the character develops. Sam got some stuff out of his system in “Wendigo”, and he saw his brother in a new light in “Dead in the Water”. Both of these events have changed Sam, and you can see the result in “Phantom Traveler”. He is settling in, almost physically. He is formidable in his own way.

13th scene
Rush’s “Working Man” (brill) blasts as we see the Impala shrieking towards a column of black smoke, with a sign saying “Nazareth 3”.

End of scene.

Now THAT is efficiency.

14th scene
Jerry huddles over the microscope in his dark office confirming that the residue that the boys clearly found at the second plane crash is also sulfur. The energy between the brothers is coiled with unspoken anxiety, and we don’t get it yet, but they’ll let us in on it soon enough. They discuss that perhaps Chuck is the connection somehow. He was the pilot on both flights. Pissed-off spirit? But the residue is telling another story.

Sam brings up the connection that both flights went down exactly 40 minutes in.

Jerry senses that something big is happening and asks what that means.

Dean says, almost glumly, “It’s Biblical numerology. Noah’s ark, it rained for 40 days. The number means death.”

Sam, fully in Nerd-Google glory, tells the guys he did some research and there have been six plane crashes over the last decade that went down at exactly 40 minutes.

So maybe Nazareth wasn’t ironic after all.

Suddenly Dean gets it. The screech-voice on the recording said “No survivors”. Dean says, “It’s going after the survivors. It’s trying to finish the job.”

15th scene

Classic Impala scene, with Dean driving, and Sam on the phone, pretending to be an employee of the airline calling survivors to take a survey (but really to find out if they are planning on flying any time soon). Sam sounds peppy and cheery and customer service-y, in direct contrast to the pitch-black gloom and intensity filling that car. Sam has discovered that the only survivor flying soon is the flight attendant Amanda Walker. He has already left her three voice mails and she hasn’t responded. She is set to fly out of Indianapolis at 8 p.m. that night. Dean’s got a bad feeling. They’ve got to go stop her. Sam protests, that it’s a 5 hour drive, that’s cutting it close, “even with you driving”.

Sam: “We’ll never make it.”
Dean: “Oh, we’ll make it.”

16th scene
Sam and Dean charge into the airport. This was filmed in a real airport in Canada. Being on location gives the series its reality. Location scouts, you have my admiration. Amanda’s flight is leaving in 30 minutes and the flight is already boarding, but Dean has an idea. They run to a courtesy phone and Dean asks to speak to Amanda Walker, she’s at gate 13. Naturally. 13.

I love how this scene plays out, because Dean is so certain and so sure of himself (at least when he’s doing his job), that he acts impulsively, and sometimes it works out and he gets to be triumphant and even MORE certain of his awesome-ness, but sometimes, like now, it doesn’t work out at ALL, and when that happens, Dean is completely baffled. He’s a horrible liar. He’s a horrible bluffer. I can’t help but think that Sam would have done a better job with this phone call.

Amanda comes to the phone. Dean plays an unethical card, telling her he’s a doctor at the emergency room and her daughter has been in a “minor car accident”.

As the phone conversation goes on, and as Dean goes into a cold sweat of bluffing and lying and being busted, he turns around a couple of times (and Amanda, on her end, is also turning a bit, and the camera moves for both scenes are circular, giving the scene a flow, and connecting the two locations.) As Dean twists in the wind, watch Jared Padalecki jam himself up against his brother, trying to hear what Amanda is saying through the phone. It’s great behavior.

Amanda is at first shocked about her daughter, but then is suspicious. She just got off the phone with her daughter five minutes ago. She’s at home studying for mid-terms.

Dean’s improvisational rejoinder is a flat, “What?”

Back at Gate 13, as Amanda deals with this ridiculous and harassing phone call from a stranger, we see the passengers boarding, and oh God, the Demon Bits come pouring out of the grate above.

Dean bluffs and stammers, all as Sam jams his head into Dean’s neck, trying to hear the conversation. Amanda hangs up on him, and Dean says, “Dammit. I was so close.” Dean, you were not close. Not for one second were you “close”.

Sam now takes over. That plane is going to take off and there is probably a demon on board and they need get onto that plane, find the demon and exorcise it. Sounds like a plan. Only Dean is suddenly having a very strange reaction to this new plan. He seems a bit frozen, first of all, and you can see pinwheels spinning in his head. We have seen a lot of sides of Dean, through these first episodes, but this is new. For Sam and for us. It is so strikingly obvious that Sam has to address it. “Are you okay?”

And Dean replies, after a strangled pause, still sort of frozen, “No … not really …”

Sam has no idea what is happening and the clock is ticking and why is his brother frozen like a clammy wild-eyed statue all of a sudden? Dean, hating every minute of it, but he’s too panicked to lie about THIS, comes clean and says, “I have a little problem with …” and he can’t even finish the sentence, just does a lame gesture of something “taking off into the air”. Kinda like how I can’t say the name of a certain horrifying creature and prefer to refer to them as “s”s. Even the word holds a phobic power.

Sam fills in the dead air, “You’re afraid to fly?” Dean, pissed, panicked, still frozen in horror, says, “Why do you think I drive everywhere?”

Jared Padalecki is so awesome here and through what follows. He has to keep a couple of balls in the air. He has to keep the brothers on track with the “case”, which now is a one-man job because his brother has checked out of it, and he also has to manage Dean. But beneath all of that, and you can feel it swirling, is the glee of a little brother who idolizes his older brother who now sees that said older brother is not perfect, and he now has something on him. In many ways, this may be the best day of Sam’s life.

Sam says, “You’re joking right?” and Dean barks, “Do I look like I’m joking?”

No. You don’t.

Sam offers to do this one himself. He’ll get on the plane, he’ll handle it. Dean, through the panic, knows that he can’t let his little brother do that, and he can’t shirk his responsibilities, but the thought of boarding an airplane is completely destroying him. For the rest of the episode we see him wading through the wreckage of his own peace of mind and self-control.

Dean knows he is gonna have to get on that flight with his brother. This is the worst day of his life.

17th scene
The camera moves up the aisle of the plane (and of course it is dark and glamorous, with black shadows, dark blue seats, and white lights) and we see the brothers in their seats, and Dean is urgently reading the safety manual, which I can’t even look at without laughing out loud. This is a man who never wears his seat belt, who scorns seat belts. This is a man who always is in the driver’s seat of his own car, and that sense of control, him and his “baby” (the Impala) is precious to him. Jensen Ackles does not sell his character out. Now what do I mean by that? A lesser actor would have over-played the panic, to show that he, the actor, was above it, distant from it, that HE would never act so ridiculous. Actors have all kinds of defense mechanisms built in place, just like other regular people, and there are “tells” in performances that they are trying to distance themselves from what they are portraying, telegraphing to the audience, “I’m not really like this.” Jensen Ackles doesn’t give a shit about that. He says that when he got the script for Episode 4, he was so psyched to see that Dean was afraid to fly, that we were finally getting a “chink in the armor” and that he was “gonna have some fun” with it. His comedic sensibility knew the potential here, and everything that follows is legitimately hilarious, but we also seem to be looking at something quite real. Ackles is not protecting himself, and that lack of protection is WHY it is so funny.

Every sound from the plane makes Dean start in panic. What was THAT? They aren’t even in the air yet. They’re sitting on the runway.

I can’t even imagine what the out-takes must be like on the following couple of scenes between the brothers in their seats. What is happening is so funny, and what Jensen Ackles is doing is so funny, but they have to play it dead serious.

Sam murmurs, comfortingly, “Just try to relax.” and Dean hisses, “Just try to shut up.”

Dean struggles to put on his seat belt, dead fucking serious, and Jared, at one point, has to look away, because he starts laughing. The plane takes off, with all of those random bumps and sudden bursts of speed, and Dean white-knuckles the whole experience. He starts humming, with a crazy dead-eyed look on his face, and when Sam asks if it’s Metallica, Dean whispers, “It calms me down.” and keeps humming.

Five minutes into the flight and Dean appears to have totally forgotten that they have a job to do and they only have half an hour to do it. Dean instead is lost in panic-mode, humming, and clutching the safety manual, and it’s hysterical.

Sam leans into his brother, talking to him firmly and urgently, and yet softly so as not to make things worse. They must find the demon and they must do it now. Dean snaps back, dimly, to their mission, and grasps onto it, desperately. They don’t know who the demon is possessing and it’s a crowded flight so how should they go about this? Dean, still clutching the sides of his seat, says that demons look for people with a “chink in the armor”, some weakness that allows them entrance. “You know, some sort of addiction or emotional distress,” says Dean who is currently an emotional wreck.

They decide that Amanda, the flight attendant, is probably the best candidate. Dean is sent back to talk to her in the back of the plane, where she is visible in the kitchen area preparing the food tray. He has a crumpled bottle of holy water in his bag, and he is planning on tossing it in her face, which is such a funny image. Dean has stood up fearfully and Sam takes the holy water from him and says that if Amanda is possessed by a demon she will flinch at the name of God. Dean, miserable and shaky in the knees, nods, and starts off, and then comes the “ba-dum-ching moment” of Sam calling him back to the seats twice. All of this is in whisper-hiss so they don’t make a scene (which, honestly, is already too late).

Sam: “Say it in Latin.”
Dean, furious: “I know.” He starts off again. Sam stops him again.
Sam: “In Latin it’s ‘Christo’.”
Dean, enraged: “Dude, I know. I’m not an idiot.”

As he makes his way to the back of the plane, we see him from the back. There is a bit of turbulence, just a tiny bit, which jolts the plane, and, Dean stops in his tracks (we don’t see his face), as though he has been shot, and then, FURIOUS at how out of control he is, slams his hand down on the back of one of the seats. Ahhh, details.

18th scene
Dean comes into the back area and starts up a conversation with Amanda. He is clearly not working at full capacity and his whole behavior seems stilted, and awkward. He tells her he doesn’t like to fly, and she says, comfortingly, that a lot of people feel that way. Trying to find an opening into her “emotional distress”, he says, “Of course, you being a stewardess …” he says.

The correct term is flight attendant, Dean.

She says that she’s sometimes afraid too. Dean asks if she’s ever considered another profession? He’s flailing. She looks up at the handsome awkward guy standing right there, and she says, straight up, “Look, everybody’s scared of something. I’m not gonna let it hold me back.” This is our only real dovetail, so far, with the Monster of the Week theme and the Family Drama theme. In a way, what she is saying to him could be seen as a message. This goes back to the conversation at the beginning of the episode, when Sam admits that the job gets to him, and Dean advises him to “not let it”. It’s all there.

She seems so calm though and Dean can’t find a way in, so, in one of those symphony of awkward-behavior moments that Jensen Ackles is so good at, he stands there, not speaking, looking around, looking down, before finally muttering, “Christo.”

Dying. She knows he said something but it seems strange and she has no idea if she was supposed to hear it and so she says, “Did you say something?”

Dean, who will cringe looking back on this moment, looks up at her, gives her a helpless smile, and says, tentatively, “Christo?” With the question mark, it’s one of the funniest moments in the episode. He looks NUTS.

She stares at him. She doesn’t flinch. Dean sees she’s clearly not possessed and without another word, without even a “thanks for this talk” gesture or expression, he turns and walks back out into the plane.

He’s such a weird person.

19th scene
Back in his seat with his brother, Dean fills Sam in on what happened. He is pissed off because she is the most “well-adjusted person on the planet”. She went through a plane crash and there she is, all calm and philosophical, while he, who never flies, is practically shitting his pants. He hisses, “There’s no demon in her. There’s no demon getting in her.” The plane then jolts with a small bit of turbulence and Dean shouts, alarmed, “Oh, COME ON. THAT IS NOT NORMAL.”

The scene that follows is brilliant both schtick-wise and character-wise. Dean is even worse now than he was when he first boarded and Sam takes the firmest hand with him we’ve seen so far. Dean is having none of it.

“Sam, this plane is going to crash, stop treating me like I’m friggin’ four.”
“You need to calm down.”
“Well, I’m sorry, I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“Dude, the touchy-feely self-help yoga crap is not helping.”
“You’re panicked. You’re wide open to demonic possession so you need to calm yourself down. Right now.”

Please glory in the screen-grabs and the expressions.

Sam’s warning about how Dean is leaving himself vulnerable to demonic possession gets through, and that’s the only thing that does. Dean doesn’t want anything “getting in him”, so he does a shaky little meditative breath, breathing in, breathing out, barely able to do it, but glancing over at Sam for validation. Sam soothingly says, “That’s right.” I love Sam. Once Dean gets into the groove of his Lamaze breathing, however much he hates having to do it, Sam brings out Dad’s journal and says he found an exorcism in here that is difficult but he thinks will work.

20th scene
Dean strolls up the aisle of the plane with the EMF held out in front of him. Yeah, that’s not suspicious at all. He has a moment of eye contact with a chick who is clearly from his world. She is covered in tattoos, all up and down her arms, and she is listening to music on ear-buds and the music is so loud and heavy that you can hear it in the cabin. It’s just a glance. She looks up at him like, “Who are you? And why are you waving your walkman near my head?” Sam comes up behind Dean and puts his hand on his brother’s shoulder and Dean nearly jumps out of his skin at the touch. The EMF is not getting a reading at all. They have 15 minutes left before they hit the 40-minute Biblical mark. They’re running out of time. Maybe there’s no demon on the plane after all? But then, the co-pilot steps out of the bathroom up near the cockpit, and the EMF starts buzzing with red lights. Both Dean and Sam look at the back of the co-pilot as he goes to the cockpit, and Dean murmurs, “Christo.”

The co-pilot stops, as though stabbed in the back, and turns around to look at them, in full-on Black-Eyed Freak-Show Mode.

21st scene
We’re nearing the final confrontation now, and we have invested in the comedic possibilities of Dean freaking out, but now it’s time to get back to the Monster, so the mood intensifies and the editing cuts come faster, showing that time is speeding up. Now that they know where the demon is, they go back to talk to Amanda. The next scene is one of those mini-masterpieces that requires everyone, camera, actors, lighting, all of it, to bring their A-game. The scene pulses with urgency, and yet neither Padalecki nor Ackles ever allows it to get general. The urgency they both feel is specific to this specific case and this specific set of circumstances. The show so easily could have forgotten those details, and could have become formulaic almost instantly. But nobody allows that to happen. Sam maintains his calm, which is even more entrenched and strong right now because his brother is so out of it. Dean feels the time ticking and acts accordingly, all while he is also managing his overwhelming terror at being 30,000 feet in the air. His whole body language is different, hunched over, tight. The three characters are basically on top of each other. The lighting is gorgeous. I mean, hell, it’s like a Vermeer.

They need her help and they don’t have time to explain. They bring up the flight that crashed, the one that she was on, and her whole face changes. Now she’s afraid. Who the hell are you guys? I mean, imagine if you were her. These guys now seem like flat-out terrorists. She tries to leave, and Dean stops her. It’s a bit intense for a second, and she pulls back from him, and he says, “I’m not gonna hurt you but listen to me …”

I wrote a piece a long time ago about a guy I dated who (in looking back on it) had many Dean Winchester-ish qualities. He was macho, gruff and usually cranky, and moved with certainty and power. He was kind of a nightmare. Let’s be fair, so was I. But he was awesome. There was trauma in his past, trauma we were not allowed to discuss. He was so much stronger than me, and it’s hard to make me feel like a delicate flower, but sometimes he did. I got an almost physical sense of how he would hold back from his true strength, because he could be overwhelming. He was sensitive somehow to how much strength he was allowed to use, with me, and with others. It’s a hard thing to describe but I got into it in that piece.

That’s what I see in Dean Winchester in that “I’m not gonna hurt you” moment. Dean Winchester can be overwhelming and he knows how to fight to kill. But a frightened stewardess (flight attendant) needs to know that she is safe with him, that he is not scary, and that his strength is reserved for things that deserve it. You can see this when Dean interacts with kids, too, which the series explores again and again. Dean is tough every day of his life, and his whole life is about hurting evil things. But you have to be able to turn that off, too, if you’re going to stay sane. You can’t bring that stuff to the table when you’re dealing with a child, or an innocent woman, or a girlfriend. You have to be able to turn it off. This is one of the things that the Campbell hunters scorn in him. Dean seems soft, BECAUSE he can turn it off. But his “soft”-ness is just indicative of a little thing like a moral compass, as well as an understanding that his strength is to be used only in violent confrontations with monsters, NOT with his fellow humans. This comes up again and again.

The “I’m not gonna hurt you” moment is not dwelled on, not at all, it’s gone before you know it, but it’s an important character element. It shows self-awareness of how he must come across to outsiders. And it’ll become very interesting when Sam starts “bulking up” and using his strength in ways that his brother definitely does not approve of.

Dean and Sam, talking in tandem, trying to keep her back there with them, fill her in that Chuck is dead, a fact she did not know. She’s shocked. They want to know if she saw anything on that original flight, and something about their intensity gets through and she tells them that she thought she saw a man with black eyes board the plane. She has no idea what’s going on. Now that she’s up to speed, the brothers turn their spotlight onto the co-pilot and tell her she has to go up there and ask him to come back to the cabin so they can talk to him. She doesn’t want to do it. She could lose her job. Dean says, still managing his own panic, says, “You could lose a lot more than that if you don’t get him back here.”

Amanda walks up to the cockpit, and we see her from Dean and Sam’s point of view, peeking through the dark blue curtains in the back. The camera floats a bit, not stationary, giving us a sense of the plane’s movement. We can’t hear what she says to the co-pilot but whatever it is gets him to come back with her down the aisle. Sam and Dean pull back, together, without a word, and Sam gets out Dad’s journal, and Dean pulls out the bottle of holy water. Warriors silently preparing.

Co-pilot steps through the curtain and Dean and Sam wrestle him to the ground in that tiny space, putting duct tape over his mouth. Dean pours holy water onto the guy’s torso, and wherever it lands the water sizzles and burns. Amanda is horrified. What happened to “talking” to the guy? Co-pilot, now fully a demon, struggles mightily on the floor, and Amanda is getting in the way with her protestations. Sam, kneeling on the floor, holding onto one of the demon’s arms, handles it: he speaks sharply to her, to snap her out of it. “Amanda. Amanda. AMANDA.” He tells her to stand outside the curtains and don’t let anyone come back here.

Filming in such a tiny cramped space is a challenge, one that the Supernatural team met with gusto. Everyone is literally on top of each other. Dean sits on top of the guy, struggling to hold him down, as Sam pulls out the journal and starts reading the exorcism in Latin. (Small side note: the Supernatural team has a “Latin person” on call, a professor, to help both actors with pronunciation.) Once the demon hears the Latin words, he freaks out, and his strength of gesture knocks Sam back against the wall. Sam keeps reading. Sam is such a BADASS. The demon knocks Dean off him too, and once his arms are free, the demon rips off the duct tape and sneers up at Sam, in a terrible inhuman voice, “I know what happened to your girlfriend.”

And there it is. The big connection. The thing that is somehow looping all of these events together. This isn’t a random demon. This demon knows them, and Sam is stunned, as though he’s been slapped. Dean is now back on top of the demon, shoving the duct tape over his mouth. Sam, still stunned, goes back to reading the exorcism. The demon freaks out yet again, writhing and kicking (he’s a big guy), and he kicks the journal out of Sam’s hand and it goes catapulting back out into the airplane proper. At this moment, the body starts to convulse, and the Demon Granules come pouring back out of him and fly back up into the vent overhead. Damn.

The demon is now obviously controlling the airplane, which begins to plunge downwards through the sky causing absolute mayhem. It’s an incredible scene, especially when you consider that what you are looking at is a stationary set, and the people are stationary too but are flinging themselves around. We get some shots of the plane plunging down through dark thundery clouds.

The air fills with the screams of the passengers. Sam crawls back out into the plane to retrieve the journal to finish up the exorcism. He crawls down the aisle, his hand stretched out, fingers feeling for it. Finally, he grabs ahold of it, and then, kneeling in the aisle, screams out the final Latin phrases into the air. He is such a total badass and I love that he is a badass because he is shouting in LATIN. I love you, Supernatural.

Meanwhile, what has Dean been up to during all this chaos?

And I’m dying laughing.

After Sam roars the final Latin phrases of the exorcism up at the demon now coursing through the plane’s walls, suddenly the plane steadies itself, recovers itself. The crisis is over. The demon is back in hell. Everyone is alive. And Dean, curled up in a corner in the kitchenette in the back, is completely traumatized and there’s a moment where he shrugs with his face. It’s not convincing, you can tell that there is nothing to shrug about, and he can’t force his shoulders to shrug, but he’s trying to regain his cool so he shrugs with his face.

22nd scene
The airport is dark and crowded, filled with cops and EMTs questioning the passengers. We hear the co-pilot say he doesn’t even remember getting on the plane. (An important detail about demonic possession.) There’s some sentimental music happening, and there’s a moment of eye contact between Sam and Dean and Amanda, filled with telepathic understanding and gratitude. No words. Supernatural is great at leaving stuff unsaid.

Dean, back to his gruff self, but clearly running from the scene of his own panic, he cannot get out of that fucking airport fast enough, starts off for the exit and Sam follows. But now that the crisis is over, Sam is back to HIS self as well, and he is filled with troubles and something even like fear. He stops to think it out for a second, and Dean, still looking harried and harassed, stops and asks his brother if he’s okay. Sam says, “It knew about Jessica.”

And Dean knows that that is weird, too. He knows that something else appears to be going on here. But his automatic response is to comfort and dismiss and fix, so he says, “These things … they read minds. They lie. That’s all it was.”

23rd scene
A fascinating button to the whole episode, which will now launch us into the next episodes, and brings back Dad in a way that we need. Dad has “been here” in this episode, but here we get another piece of the puzzle, given to us by good old Jerry. Sam, Dean and Jerry stand near the Impala at the airport, and they are saying their goodbyes. Jerry, a kindly guy, says, “Your dad’s gonna be real proud.” Dean asks Jerry how he got his cell phone number. He’s only had it for a couple of months.

Jerry’s reply is like a slow and gentle and yet shattering bomb exploding: “Your dad gave it to me. Or, not really – I called his number and his voice message said to give you a call.”

We get that mournful violin theme again, which we’ve heard before in other episodes (“Dead in the Water” mainly) and we will hear again. It connects the present-day events back to the childhood trauma and the anxiety of the search for Dad.

Jerry’s information is troubling. Upsetting, even. Dad seems to have, what, retired? Passed the torch on to Dean? But why wouldn’t he have let them know? Is he dead?

Last scene
On a road by the airport, it’s suddenly bright blue sky and a sunny day. Dean and Sam sit on the hood of the Impala, and Dean calls Dad’s cell phone. This is all done in one-shot, and as they listen to the message from Dad, a plane flies in from overhead. They had to time this shit, and if they didn’t get it right they’d have to wait for the next plane. It’s a great shot, and feels very feature-y, not television-y.

The body language here is so brotherly, it’s close and intimate, the two of them leaning their heads together, listening to the same phone. They look vulnerable to me. Sam has said how confused he is: he has already tried to call Dad a hundred times and the phone has been out of service. Now suddenly it’s back in service? This is not a good sign.

Dean and Sam solemnly listen to the outgoing message John Winchester has left on his own phone: “This is John Winchester. I can’t be reached. If this is an emergency call my son Dean. He can help.”

It’s pretty brutal.

When the message ends, the brothers don’t speak. Dean is serious, and Sam is in tears.

No dialogue. We don’t need it. I applaud the boldness of that choice, and applaud everyone for understanding that silence is sometimes best.

The Winchester brothers climb back into the Impala and drive off.