Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 10: “Asylum”

Directed by Guy Bee
Written by Richard Hatem

Dark and almost unremittingly gloomy, “Asylum” spends the majority of its time within the walls of a dilapidated mental asylum.

“Asylum” introduces the device of mental illness for really the first time in the series, and it will be a landscape they visit again and again (sometimes explicitly, sometimes opaquely). There are multiple levels of meaning with “madness”, and (fortunately), Supernatural is interested (as always) in examining it through a prism (rather than either a microscope or a macro-scope – which would be unnecessarily reductive, especially with such an important and upsetting topic). By that I mean; Sam and Dean operate in a world where they regularly see things that would put them into a psych ward if they ever made the mistake of telling anyone. Supernatural actually deals with that reality. Many of the witnesses/victims they come across are in mental institutions for telling the truth about what they saw. In one episode, Sam and Dean get themselves admitted into a mental hospital in order to investigate a possible spirit. (I found that particular episode tremendously upsetting, triggering even.) This is a personal issue for me, and the treatment of mental illness in our culture (either through commentary or its representations in film and television) is often appalling.

A tangent before we begin. Feel free to skip.

Tangent
I will say this, and it’s a tangent, but it’s important, and it comes up a lot with Supernatural: Demanding “sensitivity” in portraying certain things (people/events/conditions) is admirable, perhaps, but not necessarily a good idea on the whole. Or, it’s good in theory, and the culture can always do better to include diversity, especially in casting. Supernatural is very good at that, all things considered. They never made the mistake (for example) of assuming that demons/angels were all white males – the supernatural beings run the gamut, they switch genders, they’re old, young, they really do exist in a landscape where race/sex is irrelevant. The casting folks have a ton of fun with casting! What freedom, to be able to cast ANYONE. But sensitivity taken too far means you demand that certain items are checked off a checklist, and in so doing the kinks/darkness/dysfunction that often helps create art are homogenized, policed, silenced. (I covered my thoughts on this in much stronger language when discussed Wolf of wall Street, using one episode of Supernatural to back up my case. I believe in being responsible as artists, but I also believe in free speech, and I believe in free speech MORE. There are certainly blind spots in casting directors, and those NEED to be addressed. There is no excuse for not including women in crowd scenes, for not opening up your mind a bit to non-traditional casting. Geena Davis does a great job of breaking down that particular issue.

Art does not take place in a Utopia where everyone is equal, and everyone treats each other in a lovely and sensitive manner. And thank God, because that art would be the most boring art in the world. Art takes place in the dreamspaces of the creators, those who have something to say about how they see the world, those who fear things, love things, dread things, whatever, it runs the gamut. And how people see the world is often dark, primal, terrifying. It’s a fantasy. You can certainly stand back and judge someone else for their fantasies, if that floats your boat, but I am so against doing that that if I were in Charge of the World, I would make it illegal.

Now. There are obviously gradations here and I don’t want to make too strong a case for my side, because that would not be an accurate description of how I see it. If you “reduce” people into cliches, if you use shorthand to connote character, then you are probably a bad artist. (There are exceptions to this as well. But let’s move on.) William Shakespeare didn’t write his plays in a post-modern “tolerant” world, and yet he gave us three-dimensional women characters, three-dimensional minority characters, even three-dimensional villains.

I am talking about this because mental illness comes up a lot in Supernatural and there’s a lot to talk about there. People are terrified of “going crazy”. It’s a legitimate fear. That terror often shows up in how it is portrayed onscreen. The problem comes when you make conclusions about a person, based on one defining characteristic. That happened with Silence of the Lambs, where we had a villain who was mad/evil/crazy BECAUSE he was a man who wanted to be a woman. It was an A to B correlation, and the LGBT community was rightly pissed off about it. In a world where there was almost zero portrayal of transgender characters, when that grotesque monster was the only representation going at the time … then you’ve got Bad News City.

When you make a conclusion about someone, i.e.: He is in a mental institution. Therefore, he is evil, or: He puts his penis between his legs and pretends he has a vagina; therefore, he is clearly a psychopath -then you will certainly have my contempt. You’re suffering from a lack of imagination, you have eaten ONLY cliches for your diet and it SHOWS. Supernatural, as I said, doesn’t go that route. Both Sam and Dean skirt the periphery of madness, in their outer reality (they deal with werewolves, zombies, ghosts, on an everyday basis), and in their internal reality (Dean’s link with Sam’s destiny is so strong that he barely has a self outside of it, Sam has something supernatural working ON him and he is not even aware of what it is, at first). They distrust secrets to a pathological degree. If one brother withholds information from the other, it leaves the withholder susceptible to attack.

And that’s terrifying. Because we need secrets in life. I have plenty of fantasies and a couple of secrets that I ain’t sharing with anyone, even a boyfriend, and that’s not a betrayal, that’s being a grown-up with proper boundaries. But the Winchesters don’t live like that.

Supernatural taps into the primal fear of having something wrong inside of you, to have your actual brain – and how do you separate your brain the organ from how you THINK – start working against you. If you’re not terrified of that, then
1. consider yourself lucky
and
2. you should be.

Supernatural considers the possibility that some of the people locked up are not actually “crazy”. They have seen things that cannot be explained by the mainstream “sane” culture, and therefore they are locked up for it. If you look at the history of visionaries, saints, mystics, many of these people were locked up, killed, silenced (poet Christopher Smart being a prime example. But Camille Claudel as well – I reviewed the latest film about her, starring Juliette Binoche, for Ebert). Supernatural doesn’t fetishize madness, but it also can’t stop itself from looping back to that territory. And the prism reveals different facets, wavelengths, shadings, depending on the angle.

Here in “Asylum”, the ghost is a mad scientist doctor who did terrible experiments on the patients under his care. “What he was doing makes lobotomies look like popping Aspirin,” says Dean at one point. And the terrifying spirits of the patients want to communicate. They have something to tell. They have a Secret they need to share. The episode is filled with references to Sixth Sense, a film that took a similar attitude to the supernatural. It’s compassionate, in other words. These people may have been sick, and even violent, but nobody deserves to be treated in the way they were treated. The spirits are pissed off and they have a right to be so.

Teaser
Roosevelt Asylum
Rockford, Illinois

Two cops on the beat walk through an abandoned asylum at night looking for some teenagers who thought it would be hilarious to camp out there and scare themselves silly. The cops split up. One finds the kids. The other returns from his search, and he seems a bit different, especially when he gets back in the car, and we can see blood dripping from his nose. The situation is made awfully clear when he goes home and shoots his wife and then shoots himself.

The fear being worked out in this episode is twofold: something is inside of you, inhabiting you. That is awful in and of itself. But what is even worse is that that something highlights the abysses in your relationships, widening the gap between you and your loved ones. It is heartless.

1st scene
The Winchester brothers are holed up in a motel and let us take a moment to sing the praises of the location scouts. Because honestly this is a piece of Edward Hopper-esque poetry.

This motel is filled with a dark deep red colors, red blankets, red hangings on the wall. It’s womb-like. The red is plush and deep, almost like velvet, and everything is surrounded by thick black shadows, highlighting the brothers’ faces, almost like old oil painting portraits.

They have just had the experience in Kansas, and missed picking up the Dad trail again. “Asylum” launches us in medias res to that experience, the aftermath. Sam has been calling all of Dad’s friends (Bobby not one of them – he hadn’t been created yet, but still, it’s weird!). Dean is looking thru the journal, for any clue, any lead, anything that might help explain just what the hell had gone down in Kansas, what they were actually searching for, and where Dad is. It’s a curious little moment, because Dean, laughing a little bit, says, “I love the guy, but he writes like friggin’ Yoda.” It shows Dean’s spiritual closeness to Dad, that he even feels comfortable saying something like “I love the guy”. You don’t get the sense that Sam would say something like that, even though, obviously he loves his father. But Sam needs to assert his separateness in a more strident way. Dean doesn’t. Not yet. That’s what this episode will be about. Dad is the background, but he is only background here. What is happening between Sam and Dean is about to take center stage in a big way, and it will carry over into “Scarecrow”, where it comes to a head.

They are both clearly still reeling from going back home to Lawrence, and arguing about what they should do about Dad. Is it their responsibility? What does HE want them to do? At one point, Sam says, “He could be dead for all we know” and Dean draws up short, alarmed, and barks, “Don’t say that” and you ache for the guy. He can’t deal. Not even theoretically.

In the middle of their discussion, Dean’s phone rings, and he struggles to find it in the piles of clothing lying on his bed. When he finally gets the phone, he sees that he has been sent coordinates by an unknown number.

Sam seems strong here in this scene, logical, grown-up, and willing to look at the tough stuff in order to plan accordingly. Dean is flailing a bit. He clings to only one possibility: Dad is alive, they just need to hang tight. And so the coordinates are like a Godsend. Now he knows who he is: Dad has given them an order. His relief is almost palpable. Sam is pissed, though. This is exactly the kind of shit that drives him crazy about Dad. The opacity, the mystery, the only giving them tidbits, the withholding. Dean, though, gobbles up the crumbs from Dad’s table. Sam refuses. He wants the full meal or nothing at all.

Dean looks up the coordinates, while Sam argues (strangely) that Dad wouldn’t be sending text messages. “The man can barely work a toaster.” Sam’s argument doesn’t really withstand scrutiny: Dad was a mechanic, Dad knew machines, his whole life was machines. Of course Dad can work a toaster. It’s a dismissive comment, and I can’t help but think that it’s a passive-aggressive way to poke holes in the Dad mystique, not just to annoy Dean, but because he thinks Dean needs to grow up and see Dad as fallible. Because this “dropping everything when Dad texts us” is bull shit. Dean, on fire with purpose now, pulls up the local paper with the item about the cop who killed his wife and himself. He did this after a shift at the abandoned asylum, an asylum that Dad ear-marked as a potential problem spot in the journal. Sam is skeptical, resistant, and pissed.

Look at the beauty of this shot. God, these people know what they’re doing.

You can see Dean automatically go into work mode. Dad wants us to go here. So everything makes sense now. Sam can’t believe that Dad is sending them coordinates to work a job, when the man is MISSING. Dean says to Sam, “Maybe we’ll meet up with him there” and he looks up at Sam in a child-like hopeful way, a Dean expression when he needs Sam’s validation, especially when it comes to parental things. It’s briefly heartbreaking. The argument is fast and intense, and Dean, used to getting his own way through sheer bullying-power and certainty, shuts it all down with: “Dad’s telling us to go somewhere. We’re going.”

It is a pre-cursor of the really huge argument that will be coming in the next episode. It starts here. When they argue in the car in “Scarecrow”, they are basically continuing up where they left off in “Asylum”. That argument in “Scarecrow” is so big because it is cumulative. Ackles and Padalecki have to track all that, and they do.

Visual beauty alert, because I can’t help myself:

Dean is wearing a deep red shirt, and Sam is wearing a grey shirt. When they stand off against one another, Sam has the windows as his background (white curtains, which shimmer grey in the darkness), and Dean has the red-ness of the walls behind him. So they both blend into their respective surroundings, an interesting and evocative visual choice. They are chameleons, literally here, blending into their backgrounds. Both brothers are amazing adapters, it’s part of the job. They can fit in anywhere. And yet, somehow, they are cut off from fitting in with one another. If Dean stood next to Sam, his shirt wouldn’t match the background, and vice versa. They are holed up in their individual ways of seeing things. That emotional truth is reflected in the costume/background choice.

Sam hates being talked to in the way Dean just talked to him. It’s so domineering, so disrespectful. He doesn’t say anything at the time, but the look on his face is what will come roaring out of him at the end of the episode, all those thoughts and feelings, about Dean being bossy, of not taking his point of view into consideration, of not being treated like an equal.

2nd scene
I love this bar scene because we see the brothers tag-team the surviving cop (Tom Pickett), and they use a strategy that they never use again: Dean starts asking the cop questions in a slightly brutish manner, and Sam, pretending he doesn’t know Dean, intervenes, pushes Dean away, thereby getting on the cop’s good side. I like to see their inventiveness with investigation, how they decide that this would be the way to go in this particular situation. I also like it because they have a fake fight, but in that fake fight some real stuff comes out. Sam lets off some of the anger that he has been feeling in his real life, and Dean is right there to be shoved around, but hey, I’m just playing a part, I’m just “acting”, so it’s not really dangerous, is it? Good scriptwriting all around.

Dean introduces himself to the cop as “Nigel Tufnel with the Chicago Tribune”.

I would love to see this gentleman out on the reporter’s beat.

Sam bursts over, pushes Dean away, who stumbles back into the pool table.

It feels real. There’s real aggression there.

Cut to Sam coming outside into the dark wet night, the hood of the Impala gleaming in the foreground, and Dean leaning up against the car. Waiting. Pissed. He knows something’s going on. “You pushed me kind of hard in there, buddy boy.”

Sam and Dean talk over the Impala, as they often do, with Sam filling Dean in on what he learned from the cop. That asylum appears to be bad news.

3rd scene
Sam and Dean climb over the asylum fence and Ackles does this crazy leap over the top, twisting his body around in mid-air before falling to the ground, landing on his feet. All in one shot. The show obviously uses stunt guys when necessary but, in general, Ackles and Padalecki do all their own stunts. They are both very impressive physically, athletic, and agile, and also brilliant enough to time their fake punches and fake reactions to getting punched to the millisecond. It’s an art. They both have it down. And watch Ackles clamber up that fence and launch his body into the air, upside-down. Hats off, pal.

The color scheme in this episode is dark blue and black. The asylum looms to the side, a mighty ruin. The production design of that entire asylum set is magnificent. I will be including a ton of screen grabs because I think it is one of their best sets ever. The sense of detail, the sense of SPACE, you really feel that they are moving their way through an endless building. The production team outdid themselves. The graffiti, the medical debris, the lighting, dusty and stark and dramatic … the whole episode is so dark you can barely see what is happening, and it creates an overall gloomy evil mood that is just masterful.

As they walk down a dark hallway, Dean starts joking about Sam’s “ESP thing you got going on.” Dean calls him “Haley Joel”. It’s obnoxious, it’s big-brotherly, and Sam is an easy target because he gets pissed off, and Dean laughs at the reaction. It’s also a way to deal with his anxiety. If he makes fun of it, maybe it won’t be a serious matter? Maybe he can make fun of it out of existence? Sam says he just gets “weird vibes” and Dean’s response couldn’t be ruder: “Yeah, well, don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Dean can’t stop: “Who do you think is a hotter psychic? Patricia Arquette, Jennifer Love Hewitt, or you?”

The brothers rarely are at ease with one another (and it is so delightful when they get in sync; the show really makes you wait for it, yearn for it). Sam is sensitive about his visions, they are brand new to him, and they also are wrapped up in the death of Jess, and they freak him out. Dean goes for the jugular by equating psychic abilities with weakness and femininity. All part of the “you’re a girlie-man” thing the brothers do with each other.

As I said before, it took a couple of episodes for the series to find its stride, in terms of lighting their two lead guys. There are obviously issues in terms of skin complexion, height, and face angles: especially when these two guys are in the same shot. The lighting required for Jensen Ackles is different than what is required for Jared Padalecki, and vice versa. They are so often in the frame at the same time, and it’s just delicious to see how the lighting team/production team/cinematographer figured it all out. Natural light was the way they wanted to go, often plunging the entire screen into darkness that is almost total. I mean, Jensen Ackles is gorgeous, and photogenic, and this is how they choose to light him, more often than not.

It’s startling, eye-catching, and SUPER effective, in terms of look and feel, but also in terms of establishing character. There are depths of unknowability in the Dean Winchester character. As well as in the Sam Winchester character. Both characters keep secrets from each other, and also from themselves (although Dean is far more extreme in that second one than Sam). If they had been lit in a more typical television way, with lots of lights, we would not have gotten so much visual information about the mystery at the heart of these two guys.

The asylum is a terrible space, with a terrible vibe. Dean is creeped out just walking through the place, imagining having to live here. Even if you were crazy, you wouldn’t deserve this.

Dean says, “Man. Lobotomies. Electro-shock. They did some twisted stuff to these people.” And then, suddenly, we get a Jack Nicholson impression – a pretty damn good one, although totally out of place, inappropriate, and stupid: “Kinda like my man Jack, in Cuckoo’s Nest!” (Is he “your man”, Dean? Stop it.) When he does the impression, he throws a look over at Sam, waiting for a laugh, a response, something. He’s giving it his best shot, he’s being funny, the look says: “I’m being funny, Sam! See me being funny??” These moments of vulnerability make you almost embarrassed for Dean, which is an awesome vibe for a show to take towards one of its lead characters. If the show idolized him, it would be awful. You’d want to gag. The show gives us a hero – he is undoubtedly a hero – and then through his subtle gifts as an actor, all of these layers of complexity are added. So we are forced to acknowledge our complicated feelings about heroes, about what “good” looks like, about what we expect from our heroes.

Sam leaves Dean hanging in the wind with his little joke, and Dean is awkward, standing there. Nothing worse than trying to be funny and getting a deadpan response. Dean’s reaction makes him look like a gangly eager-to-please 14-year-old.

Dean recovers from his awkward moment of failure by asking Sam what he thinks – “What do you think? Ghosts are possessing people?”

I find it interesting that Dean would ask a question in the moment following Sam blowing him off. He doesn’t grab the reins of the moment and assert his dominance. He asks what Sam thinks. This is the great GIVE in Dean Winchester’s character, the great susceptibility and vulnerability, that is the key to who he is and how he operates. It makes him open to attack. It also makes him someone we love. Sam’s “version” of Dean is that Dean is bossy. And Dean really is bossy. Especially when he is terrified or worried. Part of being a hunter is learning how to control uncontrollable things. Dean does that automatically. But he is also not a mindless grunt, he is NOT what his father thinks he is. He has a mind, he uses it, he looks at evidence, he reacts accordingly. He is best when he is thinking things through, and he needs Sam for that, but that doesn’t make him weak or dumb, it makes him smart. But the worry that he may not be smart, and Sam’s (perhaps) sense of superiority over his brother because he chose to go to college, will return in the final scene of the episode. It’s all there.

Sam isn’t sure it’s a ghost. He thinks maybe it’s like “Amityville or the Smurl haunting“. I was obsessed with both Amityville and the Smurls when I was a teenager. It scared the crap out of me.

Dean considers that theory, and agrees: “Spirits driving them insane.” Then, because he can’t resist, because he is a glutton for punishment, because he MUST try again, says: “Kinda like my man Jack, in The Shining!” Throwing it Sam’s way, hoping this time for a positive reaction to his awesomeness. Poor Dean. Sam doesn’t react, but it is the opening for him to bring up a deeper issue. Which, obviously, does not go over well.

“Dean. When are we gonna talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
“The fact that Dad’s not here.”
“Oh. Uh. Never.”

Dean’s point is that Dad wants them here, let’s work the job, we’ll try to find him later. Sam says, “It doesn’t matter what he wants”, blasphemy in Dean’s world, it makes zero sense to him to think like that. But instead of flying off the handle, he makes a joke out of it: “See, that attitude right there? Is why I always got the extra cookie.”

I love that line. Because there were no “extra cookies” in the Winchester childhood. There were no cookies, and Dad didn’t “reward” Dean for doing what he thought Dean should be doing. Dean had to suck it up or get punished, or deal with the fact that Dad was disappointed in him, didn’t love him. (Because make no mistake: when a parent withholds approval in the way John Winchester withheld approval from Dean – that IS withholding love. Try telling a 7 year old child the difference. And good luck.) So no, John Winchester did not reward Dean for being a good and obedient son. But he DID punish him when he messed up. And Sam? As we learn later, Sam was the one Dad “doted” on. What a painful thing for a child, but so common. The rebellious son, the son who doesn’t do what is expected, becomes the “favored” child, leaving the obedient son angry and resentful.

Can you say Cain and Abel?

I know you can.

But I love that Dean makes a joke out of what is a serious matter to him, Sam showing that rebelliousness again, Sam not buckling down under Dad’s orders. Dean probably spent his whole childhood WISHING he got “the extra cookie”, doing whatever he COULD to get an extra fucking cookie from Dad. That cookie never came. Dean doesn’t do self-pity, though. Dean does not reflect. Dean does not dwell. The problem with that attitude (which is the survivor’s attitude) is that the Past will come to claim you, whether or not you decide to deal with it. And that’s where Dean is headed. Sam, too, but Dean more so. Because Dean has a fantasy of what his childhood was like. That fantasy has served its purpose, as fantasies often do. That fantasy has helped him to make sense of his own chaos. But slowly … that is getting chipped away. Sam is chipping away at it.

Sam tries to make Dean understand where he’s coming from, and he is met with a blank bossy wall: “He’s given us an order, Sam”, and Dean’s whole voice and demeanor changes. It flattens out. It’s tough as hell. But there’s a moment of uneasiness that comes, when Sam says, “We always have to follow Dad’s orders?” Dean says, “Of course we do” and that comment just sits there in the dark musty air between them. Dean himself seems to have a moment where he doesn’t like what he just said. The implications of it shimmer there between them. Dean knows he is strong and tough, but … the obedience of that last comment doesn’t sit well with him.

The moment passes. It’s too hot to handle, they put it off. They won’t “handle” it until “Scarecrow”, the next episode, when it explodes.

Dean picks up an old plaque, which has the doctor’s name on it: Sanford Ellicott.

They have to do some research on the South Wing. Something bad happened here.

4th scene
How convenient that a local psychiatrist also has the last name Ellicott, and is the mythical Sanford Ellicott’s son! The brothers’ plan here seems unnecessarily complicated: Sam makes an appointment with the guy, pretending he wants psychiatric help. It seems he might have gotten further if he pretended he was a historian, writing about the history of Roosevelt Asylum, yes? Here, he has to PRETEND he wants psychiatric help and then, while in session, try to get the psychiatrist to talk about the history of the asylum?

HOWEVER. That beef aside, what is great here is that Sam is put in the position of asking for mental health help. Something that, you imagine, would be anathema to both boys. They come from tough stand-up people, they come from a military dad, working-class people, who take care of their own problems. Even Sam, who is more conversant with “dealing with stuff” isn’t really an “ask for help” kind of guy. In the “wraith” episode, when Sam and Dean are in the mental institution as patients, there is a fascinating scene between Dean and a psychiatrist (one of my favorite scenes in the entire series). It’s amazing to watch both of these guys out of their comfort zones, talking to a professional, who asks them questions in non-judgmental ways about things that are FILLED with internal drama for them: family, your relationship with Dad, your relationship with your brother … You really get the sense that these guys are so holed up in the confines of how their relationship operates, it is the only thing they know, that even letting a little bit of air into it – is TOTALLY dangerous to their understanding of the world’s foundations. This happens in psychiatry all the time. You have to face the things you fear. And talking about Family is often filled with fear, monsters or no. But it MUST be done.

FACING things is super important in “Asylum”, as will become evident.

I love how the scene opens: Sam is sitting in a waiting room reading a magazine (“Men’s Health”, a great detail). But how we are looking at him is through a potted plant, and we’re looking into the light, so Sam shows up in almost black silhouette. It is an incredibly eerie shot, as though Sam is in the jungles of ‘Nam or something. Which, in a way, he is. Psychologically.

The doctor and Sam sit down for Sam’s session. Jared Padalecki plays this scene beautifully. He is pretending to need psychiatric help. He also has to weave in questions about the asylum and the doctor’s dad. He does all of this with a clear “friendly” vibe, Sam pouring out his own natural charm and affability. Not in the same Batting-Eyelashes way that Dean would use, Dean who throws his sexuality around like a weapon and a shield, hoping it will work, throwing it away when it doesn’t work, and then busting it out again for another try. It’s compulsive with Dean. Sam instead seems almost unfettered here, open and almost vulnerable, without the inhibiting presence of Dean. I’ve said before that how freeing it must be for the brothers to meet up as men, and go hunting, without Dad there. Even though they want to find Dad, he certainly inhibited openness between them, he would always be the focal point in any room. And now we see that Dean has inadvertently taken on that Dad role with Sam. We can only see it in contrast, when Sam operates without Dean. That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air, and Padalecki keeps it specific and simple. It’s a lovely piece of scene work from him. Because what it also suggests is that even though the entire thing is a ruse, there ARE things to talk about psychologically, there ARE things on his mind. And the circumstance (being in a doctor’s office) works ON him, almost without him noticing. He tries to keep on track with his questioning: “Didn’t something happen out at the asylum? I’m kind of a local history buff …” but the psychiatrist, as psychiatrists will do, will always bring it back to the patient. That’s their job. They’re not there to chit-chat. They’re there to listen to what ISN’T being said, to the subtext. And Sam’s subtext couldn’t be louder.

Here’s an older man asking him, “How are things?” and this older man really wants the truth. He wants to KNOW Sam. There is nothing Sam could say here that would alienate this man. He could say, “I’m so angry at my brother” or “I’m furious at my Dad” and the doctor wouldn’t blink an eye. But Sam can’t go there, not at first. He has too many secrets. He says, “Things are good – I’m on a road trip with my brother – we’ve met some interesting people.” As someone who is in treatment myself, I know that saying “everything’s great!” when things are clearly NOT great is a very common thing. You feel like if you say it, it will be true. In a way, both Sam and Dean are doing that, in their own ways: it is that “rigid” thing I keep mentioning, that rigidity in the Winchester creed and way of life, and how rigidity manifests in the brothers, sometimes looking like strength, sometimes looking like weakness. The lines are blurring now.

Sam keeps bringing up the asylum and finally the doctor says, “Let’s cut the bull. You’re avoiding the subject.”

Who talks to these tough scary guys in that tone? Nobody, that’s who. Sam is taken aback. “What subject?” The doctor says, “You.”

In later episodes, and throughout the series, it seems that it is Dean who needs to “face himself”. He faces himself in a dream. He faces himself in the future. He faces himself in the past. We don’t really get a lot of that for Sam. Sam having to “face himself” is really the long grappling he must do with what was done to him as a baby, and what that means for him, how he can work with it, incorporate it. In other words, Sam’s “facing himself” is practical and physical, and Dean’s is almost entirely existential.

The doctor is so quietly Alpha in how he grabs control of the session that Sam doesn’t even think to fight back. Both guys, so Alpha themselves, respond to power of that kind. They recognize the hierarchy of strength, their Dad drummed it into their heads. Even Sam, the one who bucks against authority, doesn’t buck against this guy grabbing control. Maybe it’s from a vague sense of not wanting to be impolite, but I think it’s deeper. I think Sam WANTS to talk. The doctor says he will tell Sam all about the “riot” at the asylum, if “you tell me something honest about yourself. Like, this brother you’re road-tripping with. How do you feel about him?”

And look at Sam’s reaction.

5th scene
But best of all: we don’t know what Sam said. The next scene, Sam walks out of the medical center and meets up with Dean, and Dean asks what the hell he was doing in there for so long. So we are left only to imagine what Sam said in that session. I love that. I think Sam sat up there with that doctor and talked about his brother. I think he opened up about how it felt to be bossed around so much, to not be considered, to have his brother take over his life. I think he shared a lot. It’s almost a rehearsal in a safe place for what will come out later.

Sam doesn’t share what just happened, but something obviously just happened. (This is echoed in the “wraith” episode, when Dean, before he even knows what is happening to him, opens up to a psychiatrist. When he meets up with Sam later in the hallway, Dean looks positively beaten up. Crushed and smudged in the face. Sam says, “What the hell just happened to you?” and Dean says, pained and confused, “I just got raped.” I laugh every time I see him say that line. He looks ravaged. Sam has just been through a similar experience in “Asylum”, although he has a better game-face on. Perhaps he doesn’t have that smashed look on his face because he doesn’t ignore his subtext/subconscious QUITE as much as his brother does. Dean is shocked at what he learns about himself when he is asked to share. Sam KNOWS what is going on with him inside, he is not shocked about its existence at all – he KNOWS it exists.)

As Dean and Sam stroll to the car through a rainy bleak morning, Sam fills Dean in on the riot back in 1964, the riot that caused the asylum to be shut down afterwards. The patients in the South Wing were the psychotics, the criminally insane. And one night they attacked the staff, attacked each other. Patients died, staff died. Many of the bodies were never recovered, so the patients obviously stashed them somewhere. Both brothers are beautifully framed here, their faces highlighted by the blurred-out grey background. You can feel the cold air, the rain, in that light. Broken record: I miss Supernatural looking like this.

6th scene
We are only 16 minutes in, and we will spend the entire rest of the episode inside the hospital. It’s a different and more focused structure from some of the other episodes, where the real “standoff” in the final location doesn’t come until about 15 minutes before the end of the episode. Here, Sam and Dean enter that dark world and stay there for the next 30 minutes. Like I said: the episode is unremittingly gloomy. By the time they finally leave the asylum, you too feel like you have been trapped in that dank awful place. There is no escape from it, no trips to libraries, no diner breaks, no quick showers back at the motel. The patients couldn’t escape those walls and neither can we.

We see flashlight beams cutting through the blackness, and it’s not Sam and Dean, it is a young couple exploring the asylum. Gavin (Nicholas D’Agosto) thought it would be a fun “date”, Cat (Brooke Nevin) is terrified and resistant. Gavin wants to go explore what is behind a mysterious door. He says, “You can wait here” and goes off by himself which makes him a World-Class Douche. She waits in the hallway, and there’s a weird whooshing sound, almost a whisper.

The door squeaks shut on Gavin, seemingly on its own, and he doesn’t even seem to notice, which makes me wonder, what is this douche’s problem. His flashlight flickers out, but unfortunately he is not a Winchester and does not know that that is a bad sign. In the ensuing darkness we see a female figure silhouetted in the open door behind him. It looks sort of like Cat. But we know it’s not. It’s a hell of a shot.

The following scene is masterful, in its use of horror movie tropes. So simple, so spare and perfect.

The figure walks towards him, and puts her arms around him, drawing him into a passionate kiss. We have already seen the couple in action together, briefly. She seems irritated, he seems clueless. The passionate kiss immediately seems “off”, like it has come from out of left field. He responds enthusiastically, because who wouldn’t.

But then, AWFULLY, we hear the real Cat calling from the hallway: “Gavin?”

In a flash, Gavin realizes that whoever is kissing him is not Cat. He draws back, and looks at the figure. Whatever he sees, we do not. The scene cuts to black. Supernatural is confident enough in its mood and style that it knows it doesn’t have to show us everything. Of course they chose this way to go due to financial concerns, they don’t have a huge budget for special effects and makeup. But typical of all classic horror, what you DON’T see is often worse than what you DO.

The fact that Cat is being “aped” by some spirit is a dovetail with what happens later with the brothers, when Sam is NOT Sam. But I am a bit confused: the cop in the teaser was attacked by a spirit, which then infiltrated him somehow, and he then went home and killed his wife. Gavin made out with a spirit, and while he is understandably freaked out, his personality has not been impacted. I wonder why that is.

7th scene
Flashlight beams at the same doorway we saw Gavin and Cat come through, only now it’s Sam and Dean.

Dean’s rockin’ the EMF and Sam is holding up his video camera (nerdy comment from Sam: “This place is orb-ing like crazy.”) They assume that they are looking for multiple pissed-off spirits. They work under the same assumptions that the culture does, that those who are locked up are dangerous/violent/scary. The nice switcheroo that the episode brings us through is to let the “crazies” off the hook and put the blame on the sadistic doctor where it belongs.

A figure whooshes by behind them and they turn but it’s gone. It’s all very Sixth Sense. They move on down the hallway but the camera swoops away from them, into a dark corner, where there is a terrible image of a man in a strait-jacket thrashing back and forth underneath a filthy bed. So awful.

Sam is confronted by a horrifying specter, an old wild woman with a bloody protruding eye socket. Sam calls out for Dean, Dean appears, orders, “Sam, get down” (another one of those “Sam! Drop!” moments which thrill me, showing how good Dean is in a crisis and how awesome they are as partners). Dean blows the spirit away, but something about the encounter stays with Sam. Something about how she looked at him, and moved towards him.

It is my theory that only Sam would pick up on the nuances of a spirit in the way he does here. Only Sam would see the spirit as anything OTHER than violent. If you think about what goes on in Season 4, no less, when Sam, dealing with the “demon blood” revelation, starts to try to talk to the monsters. He wants them to know they have a choice. He can no longer separate himself from the job. He is just as much of a “monster” as the things he hunts. So perhaps if he can see them as creatures who have a choice, then maybe there is hope for him too. Dean, naturally, doesn’t want to go that route. The job is black-and-white and that is why he loves it, and that is why he almost misses Purgatory once he returns home. Grey areas are what destabilize Dean. He can’t STAND them and he clings to the job for its black-and-white clarity. But even this early on, Sam recognizes that that horrifying creature did not attack him, did not seem threatening at all. Dean will grow to embrace the grey areas, mainly through the Gordon Arc, and how he stands by his brother in the face of Gordon’s rigid unshakeable ideology. Dean understands through that experience that there are grey areas, and you must privilege the grey area, OVER the black-and-white. His encounters with angels, and the rebel Castiel, also solidifies his cautious acceptance of grey areas. Anyone who is too black-and-white is a dick. It’s quite a turn-around for him. But in embracing the grey areas, he embraces Free Will and its importance. He always said he didn’t believe in destiny, he believed in choices. In and of itself, choices involve nuance, the grey areas. But Dean has a journey to take in accepting that. And Sam, especially in Season 4, has to accept the black-and-white areas, that there are some monsters who cannot change, that the job still exists, that things still need to be killed.

It is at this moment that they come across poor abandoned Cat, huddled behind a filthy overturned bed. And Dean, once he sees her, says the line that always touches me, for multiple reasons, whenever it comes up in its various guises: “It’s all right. We’re not gonna hurt you. It’s okay.”

Dean knows what he must look like to the civilians he encounters. He realizes how frightening he seems. And he wants to be frightening – but only to monsters. So he adjusts, when in the presence of scared human beings. It shows his sensitivity with his own strength – he actually can turn it on and off. It’s part of the job.

Interestingly enough, the writer of this episode also wrote “Phantom Traveler”, which also showed Dean putting on the brakes – HARD – on his own frightening-ness to reassure a human being not to be scared of him. That shows self-awareness. He introduces themselves: “I’m Dean, this is Sam” and his vibe is “totally normal, we’re safe, we’re normal”.

She tells them she heard Gavin scream. She tells them “I’ve seen things.”

Dean, like a fireman, like a soldier swooping into a bombed residence, takes charge, grabs hold of her and tells her Sam is gonna get her out of there. She refuses to leave without Gavin. Dean and Sam share a brief look, have an entire silent conversation, and then Dean says, fine, they’ll split up and go look for Gavin.

Just the ANGLES of this episode, the set dressing, every detail.

No wonder the majority of the episode takes place in the asylum. It would be a shame to waste such a gorgeous set on only one scene.

Dean stops Cat and gives her a stern talking-to. “You’ve seen a lot of horror movies, right? When someone says a place is haunted, don’t go in.” Dean and Sam have to deal with jackasses who think these very real things are just “pretend” and get themselves in trouble. His frustration is palpable.

Sam comes across Gavin, lying on the floor. Sam wakes him up and he seems freaked out but basically un-harmed, and certainly the same guy. Gavin tells Sam what he saw, and what happened. He’s embarrassed to tell about the kiss, but Sam barely trips over the detail: “But she didn’t hurt you.” “Dude. She kissed me. I’m scarred for life.” That brings a laugh from Sam, but you can tell that he is already working on a theory on what is going on here. Things are beginning to make sense.

Meanwhile, Dean and Cat make their way down a hallway. Dean’s flashlight flickers out, and he’s pissed and annoyed. Cat, hanging behind him, says, “You’re hurting my arm”, which is a terrible moment because Dean isn’t touching her. He turns to look at her, they meet eyes, and, terrified, she glances down, seeing a blackened hand gripping her arm. She is then hauled by some invisible force into a nearby room and the metal door swings shut. Dean desperately tries to open the door but can’t do it. She is inside, screaming in terror. Brooke Nevin does a hell of a job. Dean starts jamming at the door with a crowbar, while Cat stands in the middle of what is surely the most awful room on the planet.

Sam and Gavin come running up. She is inside, with a giant looming creature, and Sam yells that it won’t hurt her. “You have to face it,” he yells – which has multiple meanings that will echo throughout the entire series. Dean thinks Sam is nuts, but Sam knows he’s right. The spirit wants to tell her something. She has to face it and just LISTEN. Again, this is exactly what happened in Sixth Sense. The spirits seem scary, but they are not. What happened to them was scary, how they died was scary, but even the scariest spirit just has a story to tell, about what was done to them, the wrong that was done to them. (Edgar Lee Masters “Spoon River Anthology”, where the dead people of a small town tell their stories as they sit in their graves, often has people begging to be heard, begging that their story, their secret be known. It’s agonizing.)

And when Sam screams, “You have to face it,” Cat, inside the room, screams back, “YOU face it”, which is an example of how well Supernatural connects its Arcs. When it fails to make the connection, it’s bad. When it makes too NEAT of a connection, it feels pat, and a little too much “we all have learned something today”. But that small exchange feels realistic, and the subtext is there, but not underlined or telegraphed. If you were told to “face” a scary monster, it is not inconceivable that you would shout back, “YOU face it.”

But without even knowing it, Cat, the innocent bystander, is stating Sam’s entire Arc, his entire Spine. What is in him must be faced, head-on.

But it’s done so elegantly it’s practically invisible.

Brave Cat turns to face the Quasimodo-type spirit looming in on her, and then we don’t hear anything from her for a tense couple of seconds. The three guys hang outside the door, waiting, Silence inside. Suddenly, the door swings open on its own – and it’s slightly slowed-down, which is also a direct nod, visually, to one of the most frightening scenes in Sixth Sense.

Cat is now stunned and quiet. She faced it. And she lived. She tells Sam and Dean that the creature whispered “137”. Dean and Sam have a quick conference. Clearly these creatures are not violent. They only want to whisper things to the living. So what are they after? Dean goes off by himself to find Room 137 and Sam escorts Gavin and Cat to an entrance. Right as Dean walks off, he does this little eye-roll to himself and to them, one of those classic detailed Jensen Ackles touches, which suggest so much. He manages his stress well in these situations. He is on high-alert. But in that one moment you can feel the weariness that might be affecting him, a sort of “Is this night over YET?”

Sam slowly leads Gavin and Cat back through the maze of the asylum. Cat asks how they know about all this ghost stuff, and Sam says, “It’s kind of like our job.” She thinks about this. Asks, “Why would anyone want a job like that?” Sam laughs (he’s in darkness, you can’t see him) and says, “I had a crappy guidance counselor”, which is almost more of a Dean-like response than a Sam one.

Then Cat asks, and it’s the funniest line in the episode, and also the most important: “And Dean. He’s your boss?”

In her two seconds with those guys, she picked up on the hierarchy of power.

Sam looks down at her for a moment. He doesn’t seem pissed. He just says, simply, “No.”

But it’s a great script detail, a great way to drive home what really is the POINT of the episode.

Meanwhile Dean goes to that pesky white door which we saw one of the cops go through in the teaser, and pushes his way in. There are chairs up against the door, suggesting something doesn’t want anyone to enter. There is a feeling of endless creepy space, revealed by the beam of Dean’s flashlight.

Sam gets to the exit door and finds that it is locked. The windows are barred. “Something doesn’t want us to leave,” Sam says. Gavin is panicked, and Cat looks thoughtful, almost troubled. She says, “Those patients…”

I like that moment because it shows her quality of character, even with what she has experienced. Gavin is useless in a crisis, she has risen to the occasion. She is wonderful. It’s one of those small moments that the good script-writers of Supernatural give to us, when they are at their least-cliche-ridden best. The girl is the one who becomes an inadvertent hunter. She is the one that can be relied on to do the tough stuff, really face the danger. It’s not made too big a deal of, but it’s there. Supernatural is often criticized for its treatment of women. I don’t see it. At least not as some sort of endemic issue. They sometimes get it wrong, as shows often do, especially long-running ones, but it’s not malignant to the degree that I am alienated so much to stop watching. All the girls Dean fucks? Please. He leaves them smiling. Lisa, 8 damn years later, still refers to her sex with Dean as “the best night of my life”. Nobody’s getting used there. If anything, Sam’s more of a user. In the “siren” episode, Dean is slightly surprised Sam’s not going to go say goodbye to the doctor he banged. “Love ’em and leave ’em, huh, Sammy?” Dean leaves, but he usually tries to have a nice goodbye and the women wave him off with a smile on their faces. We need more sex like that on the planet, not less.

All of this is to say that small moments like Cat suddenly showing her stuff as a hero is part of how the magic happens on Supernatural, the magic of the unexpected.

Sam automatically takes Cat’s comment into consideration, conceding that she has grown in stature in his eyes, but he doesn’t think it’s the patients. It’s something else.

Dean, in room 137, looks around through the debris and finds a satchel containing the doctor’s “patient journal”, hidden in a cupboard with a bunch of other junk.

The journal is an extraordinary prop. The journal was actually created by the prop team and it looks like a “found object”. The detail!

Dean sits down and starts reading through it. He murmurs at one point, “All work and no play makes Dr. Ellicott a very dull boy.” I love that because it mixes his two Jack references from earlier! And when Dean is by himself, he always has an appreciative audience for his clever-ness. As he says, repeatedly, at other times, “I think I’m adorable.” “I’m hiLARious.” “I think I’m special because of my perky nipples”. And etc.

The camera angles shift, suddenly, peeking at Dean from behind a corner, a clear horror-movie choice suggesting he is not alone in that awful room.

Sam returns to Gavin and Cat having checked all the entrances. Really? That place is enormous. You checked them ALL, Sammy? Everything is locked. Gavin, again, shows his uselessness by panicking, all as Cat stands off to the side, quiet, basically waiting for orders from this impressive Ghost-Hunting giant who has taken charge of her life. At this point, Sam’s phone rings and we hear Dean’s urgent voice telling him to come to the basement.

Sam hangs up and says to the couple, “Can either of you handle a shotgun?” Gavin, true to form, laughs in astonishment and answers for the both of them, “What??? NO.” But then Cat says, “I can.” Gavin throws her a shocked look and she says calmly, “My dad took me skeet shooting a couple of times.” Sam hands her the shot gun, explains about the rock salt and how it works as a repellant. She says Okay, because she is AWESOME, and Sam runs off. Maybe my favorite shot in the episode is the one that ends this beat: little blonde Cat, standing there with the gun, looking freaked but holding it together, Gavin is now irrelevant to her, and, holed up with herself, getting ready for what is to come, she pumps the shotgun like a pro.

Sam is sent off on what is a voice-throwing wild goose chase, wandering through the Boiler Room, shouting for Dean. He goes into that same room with the creepy symbol on the door. His flashlight flickers out, par for the course, and at the same moment, the inner door swings open of its own accord.

There is a great and spooky shot from within that room, looking back out at Sam. The glimpses we get of that space are not encouraging: it appears to be a lab, with an operating table, tile floors, an old scale, scary-looking surgical instruments rusting all over the place. Some places soak up the horror of events that went down there.

Look how far back the space goes in the frame. Details like that matter. It could have been pitch-blackness. But seeing doorways, and other spaces, and dim light, gives the unbearable sense of space yawning above and below them, space that could be filled with anything.

Sam turns around and is confronted by the gruesome blue-faced evil spirit of the doctor who experimented on these people’s brains. He grips Sam’s face, and there’s blue electricity coursing from his fingers into Sam’s noggin.

The doctor says to him, “Don’t be afraid. I’m going to make you all better.”

So let’s talk about that.

Sam opened up to the psychiatrist (we can assume) about what’s going on with his brother and how he feels about it. I would imagine that that actually felt good. Psychiatry/talk-therapy serving a purpose, something even Sam, totally unaccustomed to the mental health profession, would recognize. But “feeling better” in some universal way? Could that be possible? For either Winchester?

Remember the word “freak”, which is used often in the show, and quite pointedly. Sam admitted to Dean that he didn’t “fit in” at Stanford, and we assume it’s because of his weird childhood. Of course we learn more about it, eventually, and that Sam will never “fit in”. Even more so than Dean, who is clearly a very bizarre individual in many ways, but also has the chameleon’s instinct for survival and adaptation. Things may suck iNSIDE, but Dean doesn’t really care about that, not at this point. So Sam feeling like a “freak” is more painful for him than it would be for Dean: Dean lived so in his father’s shadow so much that he never felt the need to question anything, develop his own thoughts/feelings/opinions/taste. Sam, even though he “got out” of the family, never fit in in that outside world either. You might think he would. But he didn’t. He found a safe haven with Jess, but even that is tainted because she never knew the real truth about him. So Sam is as deep as the Loch Ness. And it’s murky and DARK in there. And what you don’t know actually CAN kill you. So the evil doctor zaps him in the head, which, in the 50s, 60s, was a way of basically exhausting the frayed neural pathways of the brain, bringing a sense of calmness in the patient (electric shock has developed into a much more delicate science, it still exists, and it does help people who need it).

“Feeling better”, as the doctor says, sounds quite ominous in this context. It taps into any fear anyone might have about being institutionalized and having your agency taken away from you. And one of the themes that comes up, particularly in Season 4, is that FEELING is better than NO feeling at all. Feeling is a sign you are alive, a sign that you are human. Dean’s slow road to admitting that he feels “pain” about what he remembers about Hell is a huge part of him actually recovering from that experience. Pain is the clue, the red flag, that he has NOT been destroyed. It’s awful and unbearable, but it’s hopeful. It’s one of my favorite parts of Supernatural as a whole, that it embraces pain as a valid part of experience. The fear around electric shock therapy is that it will erase your capacity for emotion, even negative emotions. It is the Cuckoo’s Nest nightmare: Let us iron out that which does not fit in. Let us make it so that these people only have happy smiley-faced reactions to the world.

If that’s what it means to “feel better”, then no thank you.

9th scene
Cat and Gavin wait for Sam or Dean to return. Gavin paces, and Cat crouches against the wall, holding the shotgun. I’m proud of her. She didn’t want to come into the ruin in the first place, but now that she’s here, she does what has to be done. She has come to some conclusions about her life as well. Danger has a way of doing that. She says to Gavin, calmly, “If we make it out of here, I am so breaking up with you.”

Wise choice.

Unfortunately for Dean he does not announce his arrival on the scene, and Cat nearly blows his head off with rock salt. Dean ducks out of the way just in time, and Cat calls out, wincing, “Sorry!”, another funny moment that makes me totally love this girl. Dean, meanwhile, is baffled on multiple counts. Where the hell is Sam and why are these two bozos still here? When he finds out that he supposedly called Sam, summoning him to the basement, he tells the two kids to watch out for themselves, and charges off into the darkness.

10th scene
Dean walks through the worst basement in the world, calling for Sam, who appears in front of him, seemingly from out of nowhere.

And consider this: In “Skin”, Sam automatically knows that that isn’t Dean, when they meet up on the corner. But here, Dean doesn’t seem to pick up on it. There’s one line a bit later which suggests that something told him Sam was “off”, but he didn’t listen to that voice in the same way Sam did. In a way, it’s eloquent of who these two guys are. Talk about being brave enough to “face it”. In “Skin”, Sam was brave enough to point a gun at the monster who looked like his brother. Sam was brave enough to “face” that his brother was no longer his brother. Dean, with all his commando-style courage, may not be brave enough to “face” the very same thing. He still can’t help but see Sam as an extension of himself. But there are deeper shadings of this, a flip-side – there is always a flip-side in Supernatural. But we’ll get to that.

Sam, calm, cool, still, is CLEARLY not really Sam anymore. Or, he IS Sam, it’s just that he is a Sam who has all of his NERVES removed.

Dean tells Sam about Dr. Ellicott’s creepy journal and what he read inside. The patients rioted against the doctor, and it is probably the doctor they are hunting. “You haven’t seen him, have you?” asks Dean. And Sam answers, without blinking an eye, “No.”

Dean tells Sam that Dr. Ellicott (he refers to him as “Dr. Feelgood” a.k.a. Dr. Robert!) was doing experimentations on the patients, “awful stuff”, one of the things being “extreme rage therapy”. By whipping the patients into a fit of rage, it was thought the rage would dissipate, when it actuality it had the opposite effect. Now I am sorry to nerd out, but this is an actual real thing, which was very big in the late 60s, 70s, and went under a bunch of different names, and was used mainly to try and help children thought to be suffering from autism. There was almost no statistical evidence that making suffering children act out rage did any good at ALL, and yet the treatment caught on. The treatment was actually featured in, of all things, an Elvis movie, called Change of Habit (his last film), where he played an inner-city doctor. Don’t laugh. He’s excellent in it. It’s a good movie. Mary Tyler Moore is in it too. But there’s a whole strange section where he holds a little girl in his arms and asks her to express her rage, and she thrashes about, while he holds her down, until finally the “treatment” works and she calms down, and whaddya know, starts speaking and communicating. There was actually a consultant who worked on the movie, an “expert” in “rage therapy”, and he is credited in the credits. It’s one of those psychiatric fads that come and go, and it has now morphed into what is known as “attachment parenting”. If you look into the history of “attachment parenting”, it really began as a possible way to “cure” autism, through this “rage reduction” type therapy. Anyway, I’m not a historian, but I do know a little something about something, so when Dean talks about “extreme rage therapy”, popular in the 1960s and 70s, that is what he is talking about. And what he describes, the “rage therapy” having exactly the opposite intended effect (patients getting MORE violent after the treatment) is exactly what went down in real life.

The “rage reduction” therapy would explain why the poor cop in the teaser suddenly went home and killed his wife for no reason. And it will also explain what happens next.

Dean heads off to find the lab room where the mad doctor would “work on” his patients, and Sam holds back, watching Dean down from his end of the hallway, and there’s a look on his face that would, to quote Coleridge, “thick men’s blood with cold”.

Sam joins Dean in the room at the end of the hallway and there’s an edge to his voice when he says, “I told you. I looked everywhere.” Dean is either ignoring the red flags or he is incorporating it into his understanding of the moment (“Sam’s being bitchy, oh well.”). This Sam is close enough to the real Sam that it’s hard to tell. What Padalecki is tapping into is the underlying rage at being treated like he’s the “little brother”, that he hasn’t done his job well enough, that Dean has to swoop in and check his work. And when Sam gets angry, I get scared. He’s scarier than Dean, no doubt.

As Dean starts for one of the doors, having heard something, Sam holds up his shotgun. Dean doesn’t notice yet. Padalecki does not play this as “Look at me. I am suddenly Psycho”, which would be condescending and obvious. It’s on a lower boil than that, and there is some sense of internal struggle, perhaps because the “real Sam” is still in there, and horrified at what is going down. And, in a way, that is what “being crazy” actually feels like. In looking back on some of my own “episodes”, I think: “My God, was that me doing that?” But of course it was. I was there. And what I was doing made total sense at the time. But once you “get better”, a lot of it starts to seem like a dream. Or a nightmare.

When Dean glances behind him and sees Sam there, holding a gun at him, everything gets very quiet, very tense. Similar to Brando in the famous taxi cab scene in The Waterfront, where Brando’s brother pulls a gun on him, Dean does not freak out, or scream, or yell. He stares at his brother, and says, calmly, totally logically, “Sam, put the gun down.”

Sam’s comment is chilling: “Is that an order?”

The scene work done by both these guys here is excellent. It isn’t over-written (like some Supernatural Third Act scenes are). It’s crisp, clear, and devastating. The monster is irrelevant, finally. What matters is the relationship between the brothers and what is being revealed. Jensen Ackles, in his brilliant way, tries to deal with new Sam in myriad ways, all of which last only half-a-second each:
— he tries to reason with him
— he tries to laugh Sam out of it
— he then gets arrogant and braggy – “What are you gonna do, Sam? Shoot me?”

Wrong thing to say, because Sam shoots and Dean, blasted in the chest by rock-salt, falls backwards into the hidden room.

The first time I saw the series, this particular scene was terrible for me to watch. I was already so INTO the brothers and their dynamic. It was totally traumatic to see it so shattered. I realized, after “Asylum” that examining the brothers’ relationship from all possible angles was what the series was interested in, ultimately, that this was its main concern, and I remember the thrilled feeling I got when I made that realization (mixed with the queasy sensation that this was gonna be some intense television).

Dean, wind knocked out of him, struggles on the floor as Sam literally looms over him, blood dripping from his nose, an angel of doom. Dean gasps that once they burn Ellicott’s bones “you’ll be back to normal.”

That word. “Normal.” Sam hears it. Sam runs with it. The words now come out, in a flood, he’s been wanting to say these words since, what, he was 9? 10?

I am normal. I’m just telling the truth for the first time. I mean, why are we even here? Cause you’re following Dad’s orders like a good little soldier? Cause you always do what he says without question? Are you that desperate for his approval?

And beautiful Dean, trusting Dean, loving Dean, hears all of this and says, “This isn’t you talking, Sam.”

That part of Dean will come up again and again and again throughout the series. Sam will be challenged with it as well, and recently had to face it with Kevin Tran, who said a similar thing to him. “It wasn’t you doing those awful things. I forgive you.” To be able to forgive someone who really IS your brother for doing HORRIBLE things, to be able to separate out what is Sam and what isn’t … it is one of Dean’s greatest gifts. He rarely says “I love you” but in such moments … well. That really IS love, isn’t it. And to be able to do so in the heat of the moment … not everybody could compartmentalize like that. But Dean can. His loyalty runs that deep. He is an extraordinary human being. He is willing to ignore his own alarm at what his brother is saying (words that are true), and is willing to let “the real Sam” off the hook for it. Because he knows that Sam, in this state, is not responsible for his actions. This isn’t just bull shit for Dean, he really knows how to do this. It is one of his greatest gifts. It is also his Achilles heel, but that just makes him a part of the human race. Our greatest assets are also often our greatest flaws. It could go either way.

Sam isn’t done though. And what he says gets worse.

That’s the difference between you and me. I have a mind of my own. I’m not pathetic. Like you. I am sick of doing what you tell me to do. We’re no closer finding Dad today than we were six months ago.

Dean takes out his gun, the real one, and hands it to Sam. It’s a powerful challenge. Because Sam throws down the shotgun, and points the real gun at Dean. He would actually go through with it. He is not bluffing. Dean lies there, below his brother, kind of stunned by the reality of what is happening, even though he knows in his heart that this is “not Sam”.

“You hate me that much?”

He goads Sam to pull the trigger. And Sam actually does. Click. No bullets. Naturally. Because you know why? Dean is a smartypants not a dumby-dumb.

Dean then pulls Sam down, and punches him out. At last. The brothers haven’t come to blows yet, and what goes on here pales in comparison to some of the fights they have later. But I’ve never been so glad to see Sam hit in my life. Sam is crumpled on the floor, and Dean staggers over, back to normal himself, saying, as though he can’t believe Sam is so stupid: “I’m not gonna give you a loaded pistol”. Then Dean punches Sam out AGAIN. Best capper moment, though, is Dean, still in agony from the rock salt in his chest, leaning down and sort of patting the knocked-out body of his brother, comfortingly, a little reassuring pat, saying, “Sorry, Sammy.”

Dean needs to get the job done. He can’t get dragged down in psychology and fake Sam’s issues, they are a distraction. They AREN’T a distraction, obviously, but they are in that particular moment to Dean. All is forgiven Sammy, sorry for clocking you in the head twice, but I gotta burn this douche’s bones and you’re getting in the way with all your Emo problems.

Ackles is so good physically. He’s awesome at fights, he’s awesome at gesture, he’s great at suggesting pain, and his pain always specific. He just got blasted in the chest with rock salt, and it’s still hard for him to breathe. His torso hurts. He’s still suffering through the rest of the scene. You don’t just “pop back” from something like that and Ackles knows that. He tracks his injuries very very well in the series. It’s important, it gives us continuity, and it also reminds us of the man’s ultimate frailty. He’s not made of iron and steel. He is made of flesh and bone, and shit HURTS.

Dean snoops around, looking for where the enraged patients may have stashed Dr. Ellicott’s body, and his investigation takes him through what looks like a medical room, with a cot, and a curtain, and it’s awful and grimy and dark and flat-out EVIL-looking. Dean finds the rotting skeleton of the doctor in a cupboard (Dean, looking at it: “That’s just gross.”), and pours salt on top of it, almost gagging at one point. Classic. Meanwhile, his flashlight is flickering, and he really should be paying attention to that! Suddenly, the filthy cot springs into action, knocking Dean over, and the rotting Doctor pounces on Dean, shooting electricity through his poor head. I love the effect, though, of having a lightning bolt ricocheting around inside Dean’s mouth. Like, how much fun did the effects people have creating THAT?

As the doctor continues to zap electricity through Dean (it makes me think of the horrifying opening of “Faith”, two episodes from now: Foreshadowing!), Dean reaches out with one hand for his lighter, and, of course, struggling mightily to grasp onto it (it takes forever), he finally tosses the lighter onto the bones. Dr. Feelgood releases Dean, and sort of solidifies into what looks like a big column of black powdery soot, which then falls to the ground, crumbling. (I love how each spirit dies in a different way, Mirror Girl shattering into shards of glass, Hook Man erupting into flames, etc. The effects team has fun imagining these things out.)

11th scene
In what is clearly the light of a cold dreary dawn, Dean and Sam send Gavin and Cat on their way. The piano music that starts up underneath is dreamy and slightly sad. The brothers are together, but separate. There’s so much to talk about. Neither of them know how. Sam, as always, is the one to bring up that which is not being said. He apologizes for what he said back in the asylum. “I didn’t mean it.”

Dean considers Sam. He doesn’t look upset. Just sort of sharp-eyed, alert, and a tiny bit hard. “You didn’t huh.” Sam is taken aback by Dean’s tone and expression, and says, “No, of course not.” Sam’s behavior has been obvious to anyone watching – to us in the audience, to the psychiatrist he talks to, and to Cat who asked if Dean was his boss. It’s okay to have resentment towards your brother, and it’s okay to admit to it, like he clearly did to the doctor, but when confronted by his sharp-as-a-tack sharp-eyed brother, he blinks. Of COURSE I didn’t mean what I said. It’s interesting. To watch Sam fool himself. To watch Sam try to fool Dean. Sam, because he’s Sam, asks Dean if they need to “talk about this”, and Dean, a closed door, hard, says, getting into the car, “I’m not in a sharing and caring kind of mood.”

12th scene
The camera pans above the brothers lying asleep in bed, back at that deep-red womb-like motel. The camera moves over Dean, past Dean, over the nightstand, and over to Sam. Eye-candy alert: Dean isn’t wearing a shirt. Still wearing the necklace, but no shirt. We almost never see his body. It’s always covered in layers. Here we get a glimpse, but briefly. The show teases us. While the eye-candy factor is undeniable, what is also being shown here is simple human vulnerability. Dean usually sleeps in his clothes with a knife and a gun under his pillow. Sam does too. They need to be ready to leap out of bed and GO. So to take off your clothes … it’s vulnerable in their world. They do it rarely. When are they naked? In the shower and when they bang their various lady friends. They don’t hang around shirt-less. Ever. These guys aren’t lolling about at the beach or going to take a sauna at the gym. They’re too much on high alert for that stuff, and their bodies are vulnerable. They feel that vulnerability. So yes, my Lustful Self is thrilled when I get a glimpse of shoulder, or bicep, but on another level (and this is where Supernatural really works) I think, “Dude. You need to put some clothes on. You’re too fucking vulnerable right now.” In other words: It makes me want to tell a hot man to cover himself up. And THAT is messed up and awesome.

The phone lying on the nightstand is ringing. Sam tries to wake Dean up because it’s Dean’s phone. Dean is dead to the world. Sam answers, listens briefly, and then sits straight up into the camera.

“Dad?”

The next episode will start right here, picking up where we left off. It’s a great cliff-hanger ending.

Things are about to get real real interesting.