Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 13: “Route 666”

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Directed by Paul Shapiro
Written by Eugenie Ross-Leming & Brad Buckner

I won’t argue that “Route 666” is a great Supernatural episode, because it has a lot of problems, but the reason it fascinates is because it is character-based. We are 13 episodes in now. We feel we know the brothers. We do, in many respects. Sometimes we see things through Sam’s perspective, sometimes Dean’s. Since their lives are so narrow, and we don’t see them in a lot of different contexts outside of hunting, and we only see them with one another, we make assumptions on them based on what we see. “Route 666” tells us that maybe our assumptions are wrong. It tells us there will always be more to discover.

That’s what the episode is REALLY about. The entire thing is an excuse to deepen Dean’s character, and to basically “sting” us out of thinking we know him. Supernatural, in almost every episode, has those two levels going on: the monster of the week, and how it reflects/comments on the brothers’ relationship. Sometimes those connections are handled subtly and beautifully, almost invisibly, and sometimes it’s awkward. I don’t think “Route 666” is awkward, not necessarily. But its real interest is seeing Dean in another light, messing with our expectations of him, and getting an unexpected glimpse into his past. Because that storyline is so compelling and fascinating, the Monster seems almost incidental, a distraction from our REAL interest – and that IS awkward, because the monster here has to do with the violent history of race relations in America. So, you know, making that important topic seem like a “distraction” is not, perhaps, the best look.

But never mind. Who gives a shit about the monster in this episode? It’s about Dean. It makes for a totally uneven episode, with the whole Cassie storyline being so huge that it threatens to overwhelm the entire narrative. No, it doesn’t “threaten”, it actually DOES overwhelm the whole narrative.

My reaction when I first saw the episode was strictly based on what it revealed about the character of Dean Winchester. I realized I had under-estimated him. I realized I had labeled him. I hadn’t expected him to have a Cassie in his past. I just assumed that the way Sam saw him (my slutty older brother) was actually the truth. Part of the fun of the episode, actually, is all of the FANTASTIC reaction shots from Jared Padalecki, who basically helps that entire narrative land.

Both of these writers are still heavily involved with Supernatural, unlike, say, the writers for “Bugs”. Uneven or not, it has a compelling power all its own, totally separate from Monster Considerations. I’m not surprised both of these writers are still around.

I said in my first post about Dean Winchester that the guy is like an erotic muse. He lives his life like it’s a burlesque act. And he is treated by everyone in the same way. So it’s a two-way street. He reacts to what he is getting, and puts it back out there. People always want MORE from him than he is willing to reveal, or they just keep LOOKING at him, and he doesn’t know what they want. He clamps down on huge aspects of himself, and prioritizes the sexual, because he can control that, and also, sometimes some good comes out of it and he actually gets laid by someone he wants to lay. So there are positive byproducts of being a walking erotic figure. But it is also a way to deal with the fact that, for whatever reason, he has no privacy, and he never even knew he could ASK for privacy. He grew up living in a motel room with his dad and his brother, all in the same room. Privacy is suspect. If you were dating Dean Winchester and you kept a journal, you had best put an unpick-able lock on it and bury it in your backyard, because Dean would be reading that shit every time you left the house. The burlesque act thing is important, too. A burlesque act is a slow reveal, and it’s a purposeful tease. Dean doesn’t set OUT to live his life like it’s a burlesque act, but it’s one of the ways he can control the information he gives out, and the information he receives. Dean does not withhold in order to draw people to him. He’s not manipulative like that. Dean withholds because everyone is always up in his grill and he needs some privacy. Even his DREAMS are public events. (Dean to Sammy, when Lisa appears in his dream: “Stop looking at me.”)

Film critic Richard Schickel said, of Cary Grant:

Cary Grant, when playing his most famous characters, isn’t playing hard to get. He is hard to get.

Dean doesn’t play hard to get. He IS hard to get. And it’s a struggle for him, because he is seen as “get-able” by everyone. That’s where a lot of the armor comes from, an acknowledgement that his boundaries suck for some reason, and people/monsters are always wanting to get “in there”, and so he really tries to limit access to himself.

And in “Route 666”, what we see is how Dean has crafted his persona, in many ways, to fit his role as protector/caretaker of his little brother. His little brother looked up to him (well, he doesn’t anymore, man is gigantic), and needed to be taken care of. So Dean crafted his personality towards Sam accordingly. He knew what to do, he was strong, he could cook and clean and do a load of laundry at the age of 9, probably, he could also handle being Dad’s second-in-command. These weren’t just things he did. They were who he WAS. Seen through Sam’s eyes, his older brother is an absolute MARVEL. Even now. Even now, it’s hard for Sam to stand up to Dean, and when he does, like in “Asylum” and “Scarecrow”, the whole world trembles on its axis. The power shift is noticeable and painful. It is a huge changing of the dance steps.

Sam thinks he knows Dean. In “Route 666”, we see him realize that he doesn’t really know his brother, that he has to re-adjust his opinion of his brother, that he now has to incorporate this new information into how he views his brother. That’s the fun of the episode, the guts. There is some great behavior all around, from both actors. As Dean realizes he is being revealed in a new and vulnerable way, and as Sam realizes what he is seeing, the tectonic plates shift. Dean hates it, Sam loves it. It humanizes his brother for him. It brings out a softness in Sam’s dealings with Dean. As far as Sam knows, his brother has been whoring around since he was in his late teens. That’s a true part of Dean, and (in a way), his most human part. It’s how he survived. Sex is fun, sex is relaxing, sex is a place where you can forget your troubles and actually be vulnerable. You can take off your many layers of clothes and be loved on and cared for. It’s crucial that Dean has that, and Dean knows it. It’s why he prioritizes it and makes time to go out and get laid if he wants that. Sam sublimates. Sam represses. I am actually concerned about both guys right now in Season 9, because they aren’t having enough sex. Or any sex. I know, right, there are other things to worry about, like the Mark of Cain and Abaddon – but I’m like: “Dudes, get laid. Please. Do yourself a favor. You’re miserable because of your broken relationship and because of Abaddon, but you’re ALSO miserable because you are not having orgasms as often as you should.” I know I’m ridiculous. I don’t care. I went on a week-long road trip to Memphis with a good friend and four days in we both got cranky because we were thrown off our schedule. We joked about it. “You want me to take a walk when we get back to the hotel room?” “Yeah, that would be good. I can’t take it anymore.” So that’s where my mind goes. Judge me not. Or judge me, I don’t care!

Sam had four years of “civilization” in college, when he dated one person and thought about engagement rings. As far as he knows, Dean’s life has been a string of one-night stands. As far as WE know at this point, that has been Dean’s life.

“Route 666” has so much fun with the burlesque act of the revealing of Dean in this episode. As Sam realizes the depths of what happened with Cassie, so do we. We’ll never look at Dean the same way again.

There are issues here, which I’ll get to. Maybe at this early stage in the game, the creators didn’t really anticipate the level of continuity they would eventually achieve with their other guest stars. At this point, Sam and Dean are the ONLY regulars (well, there’s Dad, but we never see him). There is no Bobby. There is no Rufus, or Garth, or Pamela, or Ash, or Ellen, or Jo, or Lisa, or any of the other many many characters who keep returning. In Season 1, it is totally the Sam and Dean show. So maybe at this point, they thought that a one-off relationship, handled in one episode, would be the feel of the show, as it is with other episodics. You know: in the course of 45 minutes, a lead character meets someone, has a full romance, and walks away at the end – and it’s never referenced again. That’s what happens here. It really stands out. Cassie is never mentioned again. It’s an enormous FAIL, in my book. Even just one reference, thrown in casually, to show that they remember, that the show actually is cumulative, would help. The only time Cassie is referenced again (that is, if you don’t count the similarity to the name Castiel – and you certainly could make an argument that these two people are the most important outside influences in Dean’s life, therefore their names are similar, go for it if it floats your boat) is in “The Monster at the End of This Book”, and that’s obliquely – when Dean is reading the book version of “Route 666” and gets shy and horrified that there’s a graphic sex scene in the book. “It shows me having sex,” he says to Sam. “I’m full frontal, dude.” (Hysterical. But also yet another example of Dean’s boundaries being compromised against his will. Dean can have no expectation of privacy, even in his most private moments.)

It is understandable why Lisa would be the one he would run to, when he finally does get out. Her son is a big draw. It’s an immediate family. He would understand his role better in that context. And the relationship would be kid-focused, which would be relaxing for him, and something he would understand. But you can’t just set up something as powerful and as effective as the relationship Dean had with Cassie, and who she was to him, and never reference it again. It’s not that kind of show!

Ah well. Mistakes were made. Moving on.

In “Route 666”, the monster is a big mysterious black truck, with no driver. This truck is also, apparently, racist. Because that’s what happens. Of course. There are a couple of interesting cinematic connections with this type of storyline, used visually throughout the episode. The main ones I can think of are:

Steven Spielberg’s Duel.

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The Hitcher with C. Thomas Howell and Rutger Hauer

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and, of course, Christine.

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There are legends of phantom vehicles, as well as the Flying Dutchman. So there is a connection to actual stories that are floating around out there.

What any of this has to do with the ugly history of racism in America is a mystery best left to the experts.

None of it matters.

The Monster is really beside the point here, way more than in any other episode. The whole point here is to peel back a layer of Dean Winchester’s history, and show us another side of him. That is what the episode is interested in. So if you’re on board with that, those are the scenes that matter, that is the Arc that has resonance.

Teaser
Cape Girardeau, Missouri

Dude driving along a two-lane-blacktop at night. He futzes with the radio. He hears a weather guy announcing that there is some unseasonably cold weather going on. I’ll say. It’s, what, May now? Below zero temperatures? I wonder if they added that later because it’s freakin’ snowing two scenes later. The radio starts pulling in some static. At that point, the gigantic headlights appear in the dude’s rear view mirror from seemingly out of nowhere. A chase ensues. Small side note: there is some really great stunt driving in this episode. With as much screen-time as the Impala gets, it’s not really a car show. There aren’t a lot of chases. We get long shots of the Impala barreling through the landscape, or we see them pull up to the curb, all that, but it’s not a chase kind of show. “Route 666” must have been a lot of fun for the technical team, albeit a huge pain in the ass. You have a bunch of car crashes, two huge chase scenes, and it’s all quite effective. Like this shot, from the Racist Monster Truck’s perspective.

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Anyway. Dude is run off the road, car flips through the air, crashes. The truck, practically snarling like a dragon, looks on from a distance, and then dematerializes into thin air.

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At a ratty little gas station, Sam stands with a map on the roof of the Impala, looking for ways to bypass construction, and talking out loud about it to his brother, who stands behind him on the phone. Dean is listening to a message, stoic and still. The brothers are trying to get to Pennsylvania, and I love that we never know why they are going there. There are hunts we don’t know about, there are stop-offs we don’t hear about. Life goes on for them, even when we are not watching.

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Dad is referenced only casually in this episode, connected to Dean’s memory of when he met Cassie. After the emotional mind-blower of “Faith”, things appear to have retracted a bit. Maybe they felt they needed to get back to whatever normal might be, even if it was only for a week. Dean almost died. Twice. Sam sent out an SOS call to Dad and never heard back. So maybe tracking down a lead about a spirit in Pennsylvania is their version of taking-it-easy. I like that we don’t know.

Sam isn’t noticing how engrossed his brother is with listening to his voice mail. Dean hangs up and walks with purpose to the driver’s side, saying, “We’re not going to Pennsylvania.” Sam, naturally, needs to be caught up on what the hell has changed in the last 20 freakin’ seconds. Dean says he just got a call from an “old friend” (and already, your spidey-sense tells you: “You have an old friend, Dean? You??”), whose dad died, and “she thinks it might be our kind of thing.” So when he says “she” more spidey-sense. Wait, you have an old friend who is a she? We want to know everything. And the way Sam is staring at Dean over the hood of the Impala, wanting to be filled in, wondering what else he isn’t being told … Sam is us.

Dean isn’t biting, though. He is ready to go, and as he gets in the car, says to Sam, “She never would have called – never – if she didn’t need us.” And it’s that repetition of “never”, and how much he fills it with history and backstory, that is the hook.

Digression: A bit more of the same, but there’s more to say
Dean walks around like the Star of his own Private Movie (well, we all do, but some do it more than most), and he is in control of the narrative, he is in control of what he shows us (and Sam). You only get to know what I want you to know. It’s one of the only ways he gets to patrol his own boundaries. The man is such an open book, and everyone (strangers, family, demons) think they know him, at a glance. People size him up instantly, and either write him off as weird/too much/inappropriate or lick their chops wanting to swallow him whole. His persona is so strong. But he has personal secrets, and by withholding them, he gets to keep some control over his own damn narrative. There’s also the fact that he cannot really incorporate pain and loss into his understanding of life; his confidence in the goodness of life was shattered at the age of 4. So any pain on TOP of that original pain frays him, flays him, destabilizes him utterly, and must be buried. It’s like he got “tapped out” at the age of 4, and every pain that comes after that is trying to seep into an organism that is already full-on saturated. Trauma can do that. You can’t let anything else in, because you’re all full already, thankyouverymuch. There is indeed a straw that breaks a camel’s back. So Cassie is a painful memory, because she dumped him. She rejected him when he opened up to her. Dean will always course-correct with these problems in a dramatic way: Okay, you hurt me? I will never let anyone in again ever again. If she hadn’t called him, he would have taken her memory to his grave and nobody would ever have known she even played a part in his life.

There is power in withholding. Men use it and women use it. It looks different, depending on the gender. Dean withholds, and he does so out of self-protection, because everyone is all up in his grill at all times, looking at him, wanting stuff from him, assuming things about him, wanting a piece of him. Okay, fine, but you can’t have THIS. And NOBODY will hear about the panties. That is MINE. It’s almost feminine, what he’s doing. (And I’m using the stereotypes only because it is helpful when discussing story, especially mythic type stories that use archetypes, like Supernatural). Men who withhold do so for various reasons: they don’t want to seem weak, they don’t want their families to worry, or they are trying to control others/lure them in to some kind of web. That last brand of withholding is the Territory of the Sociopath, which clearly does not apply to Dean. If you withhold, never giving of yourself, certain types of women will be drawn into that web, trying to crack you, get close to you. That’s how you “do it”. Dean is not like that. He is an open book, and when someone gets under his skin, they lodge themselves there for all time, and so damn STRAIGHT he is careful about who he gets close to.

All of this, though, is only fully explicable after seeing more of the series. In looking back on my first time seeing “Route 666,” I thought: “Wait a second … wait a second … SHE dumped HIM?”

In a beautiful way, I was implicated because I had under-estimated him too. I had made assumptions about him based on the Burlesque Act he had been throwing my way. I had bought the smokescreen. It is VERY effective. It is ALL Jensen Ackles.

Of course people want Dean to be integrated, and healthy, and happy. But, you know, you don’t get to 9 seasons on seeing a Happy Character being all Happy. It is the unresolved stuff that is the engine of the show.

And finally, to reiterate: Dean does not withhold to draw people in. He withholds to keep people out. He is not PLAYING hard to get. He IS hard to get. He is wrapped up in that dynamic with himself, and so when Sam shows fascination that Dean would have had a serious relationship – Dean is … baffled. Wait, who the hell do you think I am, some cold douchebag? Why are you acting like me being in love is the weirdest thing in the world? Are you saying I’m not human? Why are you fucking excluding me from that circle? You think you’re the only one who can fall in love? In other words: he is not fully aware of the effect the burlesque act has on others. Especially not Sam. He set that dynamic up early, when they were kids: Sam should only see him in a certain light because Sam needed to feel safe. But now they’re men, and Sam is treating Dean’s love life like it’s a fascinating biology project under a microscope, and Dean is like, dude, get OFF me, so I was in love, it’s what people do, why is it weird, just stop, stop, stop.

Dean only knows what it is like to be himself. And when he thinks of Cassie, he is still hurt. Every scene he plays with her comes from that place of hurt. Not anger. But hurt. The fact that nobody (Sam, or the audience) would guess that about him is a testament to how well he has crafted his self-protective persona, but also how much it has isolated him. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “Route 666” would come after “Faith”. In “Faith,” Dean faced death. He is still not a believer, but something about Layla has made him maybe re-think that, and his connection with her has opened him up. Once you start opening up, it’s a process that can’t be stopped, even if it’s scary and you don’t WANT it. Dean was left blasted-open at the end of “Faith,” and “Route 666” is a logical next step.

2nd scene
Dean drives, and he is a completely blank wall. Sam sits in the passenger seat, and has probably been mulling over all of the questions he wants to ask for 2 hours or so, and finally gets the courage to broach the subject. It’s not easy with Mr. Stoic over there. Sam takes a tone that is a mistake. But you certainly don’t blame him. He sees his brother in a certain way. Dean sleeps with women all the time and never sees them again. Dean was rude to Jess the only time he met her. Dean doesn’t seem to need love. He probably speaks of it in a scornful way. He scorned suburbia in “Bugs”. “Honey, I’m home!” Dean wants to put a gun to his head. He likes being an outlaw. It suits him. So Sam, in asking questions, is teasing Dean, not realizing he’s poking at a painful memory.

It’s a dynamic I love. Both actors play the hell out of it. Watch how Dean withholds. Watch Sam’s reaction. He is loving seeing his brother in a different light. Wow, Dean is actually … off his game! What the hell??

Dean says, casually, that he met Cassie a couple years ago while Dad was working a job, and “we went out for a couple of weeks.” He says it with no “tells”, it’s a straight-up fact. But Sam says, “You dated someone. For more than one night.”

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Dean doesn’t like being teased, and he also doesn’t see himself the way others see him. He is NOT a cool cocky love-em-and-leave-em guy, at ALL. Why would someone be SHOCKED that he dated someone? What, is he so … weird … that Sam couldn’t picture it? Who the hell does Sam think he is anyway? He gives Sam a look eloquent of all of that. And then says, “Am I speaking a language you’re not getting here?” I love that. Other people get to say “I dated someone” and they don’t get this huge weird reaction. Maybe with Cassie, for the only time, Dean felt like he was “inside”, no longer on the outside, no longer isolated with his family. He got to hang out with her, and take her out, and make out, and do what normal people do, and it was awesome for him. He doesn’t realize how strange he seems to most everyone, how difficult it is to picture him in any context other than at the wheel of the Impala, with guns in the back. The Burlesque Act has worked too well.

Padalecki often has to react to wordless cues in “Route 666,” making huge transitions of understanding based only on Dean’s silent behavior, and he does a great job with these transitions. He is on Dean like a HAWK, which makes Dean squirm and twitch. Too much attention, stop looking at me. Dean is so taciturn in “Route 666,” that Sam has to wade through non-verbal cues to get the information he wants. (Reminder: Dean isn’t PLAYING hard to get. He IS hard to get. Huge difference.) Sam is curious as to how this mysterious Cassie person, whom he has never heard of, even knew to call Dean when she was in trouble – how does she know what they do? Dean doesn’t respond, at all. He doesn’t even look over at Sam. Awesome! Sam puts it together, silently, in that big-forehead-ed noggin of his, and explodes, “You TOLD her. The secret.”

It’s outrageous. He lied to Jess the entire time he was with her, because it had been drilled into him by both Dad and Dean that you do not tell people anything about what they do. He dated Jess for a YEAR. It was hard to keep that secret. (Although it would be harder for Dean: we’ve seen what a bad liar he can be. Sam is a MUCH better liar. So of course Dean would fall in love with someone and have to tell her. He couldn’t do it any other way, Love would not be possible without Truth and Openness. And of course Sam would be able to be legit in love with Jess, and never tell her anything, and he could have had a decades-long relationship with her and never told her. Which is super messed up, if you think about it. Don’t brag about being a good liar, Sam. Dean is the healthier one in this regard. Although the whole situation is so twisted that nobody is enjoying life or feeling healthy, no matter which way they go. They’re effed, either way.)

Sam is so pissed off that Dean, who had probably scolded Sam a million times about keeping the family secret, broke the pact, that he drops the Cassie questioning and goes to a very dismissive tone, “You go out with this chick in Ohio a couple of times and you tell her everything?”

That dismissive tone will come up again and again with the brothers when they have romantic interests. “You didn’t look for me in Purgatory because of some girl?” And etc. You can count on one hand the times the brothers are semi-normal about the other one having a love life. “Route 666” is one of them, and even there there are darker shadings, like using a phrase like “this chick” to dismiss an entire human being. But Dean doesn’t get offended. He barely reacts. He knows he probably deserves it, he regrets telling her the secret anyway, because that is how he lost her. He deserves to be yelled at, maybe. Or who gives a fuck. Yell away, Sammy. Dean doesn’t even realize how he is creating more mystery by withholding so strongly, the desire to withhold is a moral imperative here, and says, in response to Sam’s question, “Yeah. Looks like,” and hits the pedal to the medal, the roar of the Impala as it speeds up cutting off any further communication.

3rd scene
We’re with Sam at this point. Who the hell is Cassie? Dean has given us nothing, except for that eloquent second “never”, which speaks to a painful ending of some kind. The next scene, we meet up with Cassie, before Sam and Dean actually arrive. Which is kind of a cool thing, structure-wise. We get to see her in her own element, before Dean and Sam stroll into the picture. We get to see her in operation outside of her relationship to Dean. That doesn’t often happen with romantic characters, women in particular.

Why I like Cassie:
— She is a specific person. She is not generic.
— She has a whole life outside of her romance with Dean.
— She has a job, and she is passionate about her job. She works hard at it.
— She is part of a community, and she loves that community. She understands the community’s violent past, and its poor history in terms of racism, but she works to make things better. She’s not gonna move. This is her home.
— Sam says to Dean in private that she seems “fearless”, and we can see it. She is a fighter. Maybe Sam is still so intimidated by Dean that he can’t see how anyone could have the guts to break his heart and walk away from him. He can’t picture Dean getting in a fight with a woman, arguing stuff out, being called on his bullshit, whatever, all of the stuff that happens in relationships. He has completely limited his conception of Dean. I think he likes Cassie because she is a substantial person. And it makes him see Dean differently. When Dean fell in love, he chose a good one. You can tell a lot about a person based on the mate he chooses for himself. We need to re-adjust our thoughts about Dean, based on the character of Cassie. It is a welcome shading of character.

So. These are the many reasons I like Cassie. And I like seeing Dean in that context with her. He’s not shacking up with floozy drunks and nightmares, although he’s certainly banged many of them. But the ones who get inside his heart are substantial quality women. And, even more startling (seen through Sam’s eyes), this clear woman of quality loves Dean. Dean attracted someone like her? Wow.

When we meet Cassie (Megalyn Echikunwoke), she is standing with the editor of the paper, a man named Jimmy (Alvin Sanders) and another man in what is clearly a newspaper office, filmed all noir style, with giant shadows on the wall of Venetian blinds and the paper’s name. I love the look. Supernatural used to go all out with the Mood.

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It’s an informational scene, and what we get is: Cassie, whose father was the guy in the teaser, clearly works at the paper and wants to do some investigative reporting. Her colleague, standing beside her, says that two black people were killed on that same stretch of road in the last three weeks, and it would be irresponsible to not investigate the connection. The white guy in the scene is the Mayor (Gary Hetherington), who asks for discretion in whatever they report. Cassie is having none of it. They all obviously go way back. It’s a small town.

Jimmy and Cassie obviously see the murders in a racial context, and why wouldn’t they? The Mayor says, kindly but firmly, that grief is “clouding her judgment”.

As they talk, Dean and Sam enter. It’s beautifully lit, once again turning the brothers into silhouettes, as the series often does. They are not lit full-on. They are part of the shadow-world, the underbelly, the underclass, the invisibles. They are heroes, but they aren’t lit that way. The show would be insufferable if they were. Best to undercut it as much as possible.

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The Mayor and Jimmy walk off, leaving Cassie alone, and thoughtful. She turns and sees Dean. Her whole energy changes. And Dean is so vulnerable you think he might fall over. There is no defense. No hurt, even. Not yet. Just dealing with the fact that here she is again and dammit he is finding it hard to breathe. Slowly, almost as if she’s in a dream, a dream of her own past, she walks towards them. Her face is sad and surprised. Whatever went down between these two individuals was powerful. She was not “some chick” in Ohio. Sam picks up the vibe immediately and he stands there, looking on, his head not moving, but his eyes going from his brother to Cassie and back, downloading EVERYTHING. Like I said, he is us. We’re as new to “this Dean” as he is.

Everything here goes soft. Almost tentative. There is almost no language (one of the great strengths of Supernatural which can often be a very talky show.) But you don’t need language here. Not with actors playing a scene the way they all are playing it.

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Sam doesn’t want to break the moment, and he also feels like maybe he shouldn’t be there, that whatever is going down is far too private. But what the hell, he’s THERE, so while he’s THERE, he takes it all in.

Something about Padalecki in this scene makes me almost choke up. It’s love. Maybe it’s because I have siblings, and we care for each other and want the best for each other. Dean probably hates every second of it, it is all so revealing, and maybe his status with Sam will somehow be changed because Sam is seeing him go all mushy, but he’ll worry about that later. It’s Sam’s reaction shots that help land this scene. He needs to be there, as a witness.

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All Dean and Cassie say is something along the lines of:
“Dean.” “Hey, Cassie …” (Long silence.) “Sorry about your dad.” (Long silence.) “Me too.”

Time stretches out, slows down. And Dean and Cassie are triangulated by Sam. It’s beautifully put together.

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4th scene
Cassie serves Dean and Sam coffee in a darkly lit clearly genteel parlor-type space. The house is an old Victorian-style house, with a wraparound porch. We learn later it’s Cassie’s moms’ house and she’s been staying there with her since her dad died. Her mother is freaked out and afraid. Dean and Sam sit on the couch (it’s really more of a settee, and both of them look totally out of place, all gangly and super male in that delicate frou-frou female environment.) Cassie enters the room, and walks towards the camera, and I just have to applaud this actress for the complicated business she has to do with this damn coffee serving. It’s a freakin’ full ballet. She enters the room with a tray, holding a teapot, two cups, saucers, and, I don’t know, the Dead Sea Scrolls, there’s so much shit on that tray it’s hard to tell. She stands right in the camera, with Dean and Sam visible behind her, and she pours out the coffee into the two cups. Then she walks back into the room, over to the little end-table, where there must be a bowl of sugar cubes, and puts some sugar cubes into both cups. Stirs with little spoon. Hands a cup to each brother.

She has to do all of this as she is talking. Non-stop. And hitting her marks on the floor. And being a real character. And playing the subtext.

This shit is not easy.

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Cassie fills Sam and Dean in on what her dad told her: he swore he was being followed by a big black truck in the week before he died. Another mystery is that there was a big dent on his car, but no tracks other than his own. Her dad owned a car dealership and always drove a new car. No way was he driving around in a dented car.

Meanwhile: Cassie FINALLY hands the coffee mugs to Sam and Dean.

A small moment ensues, which isn’t even half a second long. But I like to point these things out. It helps to understand the actual job of acting and what it entails.

One of the most important things an actor has to do with any given script is justification. Justification involves the actor asking questions, not to the director, but just to himself as he goes through the script. If you do NOT justify your behavior, you get a very GENERAL performance. And specificity is the name of the game with good acting. Actors sometimes justify the big stuff (“I murder my uncle because he murdered my father …”) and forget to justify the small stuff like why they don’t light the cigarette, or why they don’t drink the cup of coffee they just poured, or whatever. Everything must be justified, even if it’s not in the script. Why do you choose a certain cup to drink out of? Does it have sentimental value? Is it the only clean one? Are you a creature of habit? Make a choice, a decision, so you justify everything. There is no piece of behavior so small that it doesn’t need to be justified.

So Dean has a moment here, when Cassie hands him the cup, which is a lesson in justifying. And he didn’t have to agonize over how to justify it. I’m sure he didn’t spend hours tormented at night, thinking, “WHY don’t I drink the coffee???” But he knew he had to have a reason. So he found one. And a good one. A character-based one.

When Dean is handed his cup of coffee, he glances down at the cup and the saucer and the little spoon, and his brow wrinkles a bit, maybe intimidated by the sheer DETAIL in that cup of coffee, and he feels out of place with it in his hands, and he glances over at Sam quickly to see how Sam is dealing with it (Sam has no problem with the cup of coffee, and looks totally at home holding it), and then Dean quietly puts the coffee mug on the table beside him without taking a sip.

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That’s the end result. That’s what we see. But WHY this needs to happen is that a confrontation is coming up with Cassie, and Dean can’t be holding a coffee cup when that goes down. He needs his hands free. He, the actor, needs to clear the way for that moment. But Dean can’t put the coffee down for that reason because Dean doesn’t KNOW he’s going to have a confrontation with Cassie in about a minute. He has to have another reason for putting it down. This is how good Ackles is. He knows how to justify everything. Otherwise, he’s just an actor putting his cup down because he knows he has a confrontation coming up and he needs his hands free, and that’s not how Life works, that’s not how human beings react: “Hmmm, I may be having a fight in about 2 seconds and won’t want a coffee cup in my hands for that.” Being able to portray emotion is extremely important for actors. But being able to justify everything is even more important.

I wrote this in a comment elsewhere, I’ll just paste it here. So here is the process of Ackles’ justification, as I see it, seen through his practical eyes, and then through the experience of the character, post-justification:

Jensen Ackles’ thought process: “I cannot be holding a coffee cup during this next moment with Cassie. I need my hands free. But I have to have a reason to put it down. Because human beings have reasons for everything they do, however banal. So why does Dean put the coffee cup down?”

Or, more likely, it went something like this: “Need to get rid of coffee cup. Why do I put it down?”

Jensen Ackles does his justifying beforehand, so that then we get Dean’s thought process: “Hm. This coffee is way too complicated and girlie for me – sugar cubes and saucers and a little spoon and I don’t know how to drink it – what the hell – how is Sam drinking it?” (quick glance over) “Oh, Sam looks normal drinking it … but … I’m also nervous because Cassie is right there, and it’s all a bit much for me, I can’t deal with complicated coffee rituals right now.”

If I were teaching an acting class, I might point out that moment as how specific you have to be in every choice you make. Take NOTHING for granted. That level of specificity separates the men from the boys in a successful acting career.

Cassie is baffled and upset about what is going on. She has just lost her father. She is a logical person, and when Sam mentions a “vanishing truck”, she rolls her eyes at what she has become. It’s awful, to not be able to explain what you think is going on. And considering how she basically threw Dean out on his ass when he told her what he did in his life, it took a lot for this fiery independent woman to reach out. You can tell, in her almost shame-faced response here. She can’t really look at Dean, not directly, because what she is talking about is what they fought about. She says, hesitantly, “I’m a little skeptical about this … ghost stuff … or whatever it is you guys are into.”

Up until now, Dean has been listening quietly (albeit confused about his complicated coffee cup), and perhaps a little bit overwhelmed being in her presence. But that comment breaks through, that comment touches on the original hurt, and he reacts, without thinking. He laughs. “Skeptical. If I remember I think you said I was nuts.” It’s bitter. Sam looks over at Dean. The wheels click-click-clicking … Of course Sam assumed that Dean was probably a jackass, afraid of intimacy, maybe cheated on her, you know, the usual … but something else is going on beneath the surface.

More triangulatory editing of close-ups: Cassie looking at Dean, Dean looking at Cassie, and then Sam, looking at both of them. Sam has to intervene, keep things moving, break the tension, get everyone to focus. Because there is a racist truck on the loose and there’s no time for a love spat. Or something like that.

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Cassie’s Mom comes in, and she is played by Kathleen Noone, whose career goes way way back. I remember her from a Quantum Leap episode back in the day (which also, coincidentally, had to do with racism). Sam and Dean stand when she enters. They may be all fucked up but at least they have manners. Cassie is solicitous and gentle towards her mother, and tries to introduce Sam and Dean, but her mother is shocked and lost in a private world of grief and fear. She is not interested in meeting Sam and Dean and she is hurt that people are in her house in this time of mourning. That’s all there in her behavior. She’s a wonderful actress.

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Dean is meeting Cassie’s mom for the first time. Cassie has not introduced him as her ex or anything like that, just a “friend”. But he had probably heard a lot about her, and a lot about what it was like for Cassie in her childhood and all that. Cassie is pretty forthcoming. She does not soft-pedal her anger about racism, and she has experienced it, and Dean would have heard about it. It would have come up in their “getting to know you” talks in their relationship. There’s a quiet acknowledgement of all of that in some of Dean’s reaction shots later in the episode. He’s not put off by her anger. He gets it. But it’s weird: you’re meeting the mother of the woman you once loved, and you can’t even really acknowledge it or enter into it the way a normal person would. Dean is on the outside again. He says quietly, to Cassie’s mom, that they’d like to talk to her for a minute, and she is completely affronted by this request, and almost physically recoils from him out of the room. Nice moment.

5th scene
We have a long and excellent panning shot of a just-crashed car, wheels still spinning, a bloody guy in the driver’s seat, and the Racist Truck snarling up on the road before dematerializing. We don’t see another chase. Just the end result. And the long panning shot is efficient, elegant, and very complicated – took hours of planning and execution. But it’s worth it.

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6th scene
The next morning, we see Cassie and the Mayor out at the crime scene of the crash, with yellow tape fluttering in the foreground (I love how they use yellow tape in that way, it’s a motif). There’s the crashed car and an ambulance and EMTs and it’s chaos. And again, we see Cassie alone, without Sam and Dean, not yet. The show is prioritizing her, highlighting her status, her personhood, which is why it is disappointing they didn’t realize you had to at LEAST call back to her, once, twice, at LEAST reference that the damn woman existed. Hell, in Season 6, for God’s sake, Dean references “Missouri” from “Home” in Season 1. It helps give the show continuity. It lets us know that they remember what they have created.

The Mayor is trying to be comforting, he knows she’s upset. We learn that the guy in the crash was Jimmy, the editor, the guy in the first scene. Poor Cassie. She is demanding that the Mayor do something about this, show the community it matters to him, that the fact that three black men were killed on the same stretch of road is a high priority to the community.

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Surrounded by chaos, and obviously that unseasonably cold weather, Cassie reads the Mayor the riot act, all as Sam and Dean quietly approach from behind, looking on. She clearly is handling the situation.

The Mayor will not close the main road in town, not for this, these were accidents.

Dean looks around at the wreckage, throwing a glance at Sam. Once again, there were only one set of tire tracks. Cassie is still on the warpath, and goes for the jugular, “Would you close the road if the victims were white?” They choose to do a quick cut-away to Dean hearing this comment, and then glancing at the Mayor for his reaction. I mentioned those cut-away shots earlier, and it helps bring the past back to life, a past we never saw: he has history with that part of her, he knows it well, and he was understanding about it. He definitely knows something is not right here, and the pattern is black victims. Dean doesn’t believe in coincidence.

The Mayor balks at her comment. He says he is not a racist and she should ask her mother about that, SHE’LL tell you I’m not racist. It’s a curious comment, and everyone reacts to it, silently. What the hell are you talking about, white boy.

7th scene
Motel room alert! Although this doesn’t look like a motel room. It seems that Dean and Sam are staying in a dilapidated rooming house straight out of a Tennessee Williams play (speaking of Missouri). It looks like some old Victorian B&B that hasn’t had a paint job since 1912. It’s fantastic.

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What the hell is that wooden bird doing there?

God, I love this show.

Next comes a super hot scene of Dean and Sam looking in the mirror, wearing suits, putting on their ties. I love men, especially when they put on ties in the mirror. Not sure if I’ve mentioned that. It makes me go weak in the knees.

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Dean is quiet and stoic and doesn’t even know he’s withholding. Inside it may be a clusterfuck, and he’s losing control of the situation, and he was in love with that woman, and now he is remembering why, did you see how she laid into the Mayor, she was awesome, but he’s not gonna “share” to Sam about that. Get outta here. Sam, however, is on the trail. And because Dean ain’t talking, Sam can’t stop talking.

Sam joins his brother at the mirror, saying, “I’ll say one thing for her. She’s fearless.”

Maybe Dean will say something? Something that will help Sam put the mystery together?

Dean doesn’t even look over, just keeps focusing on his tie, murmuring, “Mm-hm.”

Sam, having the time of his life, says kiddingly, “I’ll bet she kicked your ass a couple of times.”

Dean throws Sam a slow dead-eyed look. It’s really warm and welcoming.

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Sam keeps babbling, and teasing, putting on his tie, saying, “What’s interesting is you guys never really look at each other at the same time. You look at her when she’s not looking, she checks you out when you look away…” Dean is not amused. This is an infringement on his private personal space. Get OUT of there. Stop LOOKING at me. Let me BE.

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Being faced with such silence, Sam sums it all up, musingly, putting the finishing touches on the knot in his tie: “It’s just an interesting observation in an observationally interesting way.”

hahahaha

Dean has had it and says that maybe they have more important things to deal with right now. And Sam says, all innocence, “Hey, if I’m hitting a nerve.”

Dean walks out of the room.

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It makes me love them both.

8th scene
Dean and Sam go to question some of Dead Jimmy’s friends at a fishing joint along a river. Dean looks like a big kid in his suit, they don’t fit him the way they fit Sam, and his tie is wonky. I love that. Ackles himself looks great in suits: this is DEAN not quite being able to pull it off.

Two old geezers sit at a table outside, peeling shrimp, and Sam and Dean present themselves as reps from Jimmy’s insurance company.

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They happened to film this scene on a day with spectacular natural lighting: heavy grey clouds and a gleam of light at the horizon. So it’s probably 5:30 a.m. when they’re filming this. No wonder everyone looks sleepy and cranky and vulnerable. And there is an amazing reaction shot of Sam with a fishing boat slowing going by in the background. There’s no do-over for a moment like that, you have to capture it the first time.

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Dean asks if Jimmy ever mentioned seeing a big black truck. The white guy says, “What the hell you talkin’ about?” But the black guy has a silent reaction, before saying, “A big scary monster-looking thing? I have heard of a truck like that.”

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The black guy tells them that back in the 60s a series of black men were killed, “and the story goes” a big black truck was involved. (There are some dreamy-nightmare-y flashbacks sprinkled throughout the episode, sudden visions of the truck roaring along in the dark, headlights blaring, or scenes of what went down back then.) The guy says, “I’m not sure they even really looked for whoever did it. There was a time when this town wasn’t too friendly to all its citizens.” His comment is a small but sharp rebuke to his skeptical white friend, who gets uncomfortable. He has been schooled.

Dean and Sam nod, and walk off. The plot has thickened.

Great scene here, technically: it’s a great example of matching the script to the visuals. Some scenes need to be cut up in chunks, you need those eloquent close-ups for the emotional information. But some scenes are best played out in one. It’s preferable that the audience doesn’t notice these things explicitly. You can be too much of a showoff with your camera moves. But here is a great example of how it works when it works really well. The camera is obviously on a dolly track and as the guys head to the Impala, the channel behind them, they walk to the car, the camera following. In the foreground, we see fishing nets hanging, big barrels, the detritus of a fishing dock.

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As they walk, they talk. Both Padalecki and Ackles have spoken about how much they love it when the show goes this way, when they get to do a big chunk of text in one fell swoop. It’s like doing a play. Not breaking up a scene into little chunks is a great way to breathe life into a scene, especially a moment like this which is potentially boring – where they are just discussing the Lore. It also places them in a larger context of the world they have entered into: fishing boats, row boats, a trash can with a flickering fire, people strolling by behind them holding fishing poles. They are not isolated in their own closeups. They are part of a larger world.

So anyway, they throw around ideas about the truck. Maybe it’s being infused by a spirit, same way as the Flying Dutchman (which will come up later in “Red Sky at Morning”). Sam notes that the victims were all black men, but Dean goes deeper: it’s more than that, they are all connected to Cassie.

The mere mention of Cassie puts Sam on the trail again. It’s basically driving him crazy that Dean isn’t opening up to him. He wants to know what went down, and he wants to know how Dean feels about it. He never would have put Dean with someone like Cassie, and he never would have incorporated “heartbreak” or “intimacy” into his understanding of his brother. Sam says that Dean needs to go “work that angle”, the “why are the killings connected to Cassie” angle, and Dean’s all business, “yup, on it”, and Sam is not able to resist talking about it. Because he idolizes his brother, he has him on a pedestal, and what is happening with Dean right now is FASCINATING to him. He can’t resist poking the bear. Which goes over as well as you might imagine.

Padalecki has to create all of his transitions here for himself, because Dean has almost no lines. Sam has to assess the behavior in front of him, and adjust. Hard, and Padalecki makes it work. Dean is about to get into the Impala, when Sam says, “Oh, and you might want to mention that other thing.” Dean stops and looks at Sam, and you can see: he literally has NO idea what Sam is talking about. It is a great example of Dean being completely clueless about what he is actually feeling – because he doesn’t have emotional language in his vocabulary and therefore it doesn’t exist for him. He doesn’t even think he IS hiding anything. That’s how dumb he is about himself. He needs Sam. He doesn’t even know it. His expression is: “Wait, what else am I supposed to talk to Cassie about?”

Ha.

Sam says, as though he is talking to a toddler, that Dean needs to address “the serious unfinished business,” whatever it might be.

Dean goes inward for a second, thinking about it. He knows Sam is right. But what the hell is he supposed to do about it? The whole thing hinges on the fact that Cassie dumped him. He’s not pissed at her, not at all. He’s HURT. Everything that happens between them is from a place of HURT, not anger. Dean can deal with anger. But hurt? No. No. No. It doesn’t even exist. Sam doesn’t know that that’s there: he assumes that Dean probably ran away, dumped her when they got too close, and is now regretting it. That’s the only context in which he could understand his brother in a relationship. This show is good at messing with our assumptions about the character of Dean Winchester. It says: “Do not think you know everything about this man. You don’t.” It’s STILL doing that. Think of “Bad Boys” from Season 9. I had assumed that Dean was precocious sexually. You know, racing to lose his virginity, maybe Dad paid for a hooker for his 16th birthday, who the hell knows, something along those lines. “Bad Boys” added another angle of the prism, and we saw Dean’s sexual innocence. He was 16, 17, hadn’t even kissed anyone yet. It was amazing, great nuance, made total sense.

Dean’s reaction to Sam’s questioning is so silent and agonized and filled with refusal to open up, that Sam addresses it directly. No more teasing. “What is going on between you two.”

We then are treated to a symphony of behavior from Dean. He wants nothing more than to vanish into the nearby river and avoid this conversation, but Sam is not giving up, so he concedes, “Okay, maybe we were a little bit more involved than I said.” Then there is a very funny symphony of response from Sam, who nods, quickly, says, “Oh.” and then gives Dean a look like, “And?” Sam seriously looks like a gossiping housewife trying to get deets out of her friend over the bridge table.

Dean can’t escape that look, and concedes more ground, saying, “Okay. A lot more. Maybe.”

Next up comes a shot I ADORE: the camera moves back and forth between Dean and Sam, line to line to line. You get whiplash, it’s a tennis match, there are no cuts, but it’s great! It requires great timing on the part of both actors, within the millisecond. So we see Dean, and he looks pretty haggard, truth be told, wrinkles in his forehead, staring up (and up) at his brother.

Back, forth, back, forth goes the camera. Supernatural doesn’t use this technique often. It makes me excited when they do.

Dean says, “I told her the secret, about what we do. And I shouldn’t have.”

Sam is not getting it, and is being all soothing and supportive, saying “Look, man, everyone’s gotta open up to someone some time.”

Dean says, “Yeah, well, I don’t. It was stupid to get that close. I mean, look how it ended.”

This is totally new ground for the brothers. It’s awesome. This might be my favorite scene in the episode, the walk to the car, then the back-forth-back-forth right here.

Sam then gives Dean a huge smile, which … I mean, I would feel trapped if someone was looking at me like this.

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I would say “back the fuck off” when confronted with such a knowing understanding smile. Poor Sam! He’s just trying to figure it out and trying to be there for Dean.

Dean feels the pressure in that look, it’s way too much, too much focus on him, enough, enough, and he pleads (yes, he PLEADS), “Would you STOP?”

There is then a big silent stand-off, with Sam waiting for more information, and Dean waiting for him to back off. Dean says, “Blink or something.” But Sam now gets it. Or he thinks he does. He’s not sure why he didn’t catch on before.

He says, “You loved her.”

Best part is, Dean rolls his eyes, says, “Oh God,” and moves to open the door.

This is even MORE information for Sam, so he pushes in, saying, almost accusatory, “You were IN love with her. But you DUMPED her.”

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Dean can’t even respond, because Sammy has it so wrong and he doesn’t know how to correct it. He just sort of stands there and squirms, in abject misery. And Sam finally has the whole picture. (See what I mean, about Padalecki having to basically have a conversation with himself? But Ackles is giving him so much in all that behavior.) Sam looks like he’s been slapped across the face. He can’t believe it. He says, “Oh wow. She dumped you.”

Dean barks, “Get in the car.”

I don’t blame Dean for wanting out of that conversation. Also, there’s that subtle dark twistiness in it: Dean’s role was set for him by his Dad, and he played it out obediently. Sam’s assumption that Dean must have been the dump-er doesn’t come from out of nowhere, but you can see how it would be hurtful to know your brother thinks you’re such an asshole that OBVIOUSLY you dumped this amazing woman. And it doesn’t even matter that Sammy got it all wrong. It’s the perception that’s out there, the low estimate of Dean’s abilities.

9th scene
Cassie sits at a desk in her mom’s study, with blue light showing through the slats in the shutters (it’s gonna be a common look throughout the episode, blues and blacks.) There’s a knock at the door, and she opens it, seeing Dean standing there.

She lets him in and you can see him kind of hunch his body inwards so that they won’t touch. Once Dean is touched, he means business. He can’t deal with it otherwise. They both are awkward. She tells him about putting together a tribute for Jimmy at the paper, and she is “trying to find the words”. Again, I like that she has a job, a life, and is doing that stuff when Dean shows up. She’s not doing something generic like cooking, or watching television, just waiting for the knock to come. This shit matters. It grounds us. Cassie tells Dean a little bit about Jimmy’s history. When he started his career, the local paper had a “whites only” policy and Jimmy worked to change that, and didn’t stop until he became editor.

Dean listens, propped up against a wall. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, his body, his hands, the way he takes up space, and he needs to stay far away from her physically. He is basically about to spin out into space. She says to him, friendly, almost hopeful, “Where’s your brother?” (Is Sam arriving soon to save us from our awkward silence?)

So. Even though Dean pleaded with Sam to “STOP” back at the car, he heard what Sam said, he heard Sam’s advice, and he knows he is going to take it. He has to. He doesn’t know how to address it. But he is aware now that he MUST address it, and it completely changes what he looks like, practically. A couple expressions flicker over his face in this particular scene that we never see from him again. Ever. It’s a loss. Because in those looks of uncertainty is also possibility.

We know how Dean feels about being the center of attention, and being the center of someone’s attention is part of being in love. It’s strange. So Cassie bringing up Sam is meaningful: it takes the pressure off for a second, lets out the air of the moment, as though Sam is in the room with them. Dean says he’s trying to find a connection between the victims. His voice is soft, not his normal cadence.

They are standing across the room from each other, shown in a great shot inserted into the middle of the scene. Could they be more far apart?

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No matter what they say, they return to their awkward silence.

So Dean, brave Dean, even though every cell in his body resists, brings it up. He makes himself the center of attention, in other words. And watch Ackles play the scene. Watch how he is operating from hurt, not anger. Even when he gets angry, it’s BECAUSE he’s hurt. It changes everything, it changes the playing of the scene to have that “hurt” being the motivating factor. Otherwise, it would all be yelling, self-righteous yelling.

Dean, clinging to the wall basically, says, “So, just then, why’d you ask where my brother was?”

She says it’s nothing and now that he’s started talking he has to go on with it, and all things considered, I think he does a very good job. He says, “Could it be without him here it’s just you and me, and not you me and Sam which would be easier?”

Cassie is defensive, she’s not sure what he’s getting at, retorts, “It’s not easier…”

There is then a quick reaction shot of Dean, real quick, and much of his stuff can’t really be captured in screen grabs because you lose the fluidity, the change of expression, but whatever goes on in his face in that quick reaction shot is vulnerable in a way we haven’t seen. He’s almost smiling. That’s the adrenaline. The feeling of stepping into someplace New, brand new. He has ZERO idea where they are going right now. And he started it.

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Cassie tries to reach out and explain further, and Dean cuts her off, chickening out, and he’s friendly about it, but he’s shutting everything down. He finally is able to move, over to the desk, he can’t look at her right now and he needs to put more distance between them (justify your blocking!). He says “Forget it, we’ll keep it strictly business.” and he says it in a “Yup, we totally understand each other” tone. He’s basically saying it as though agreeing with something SHE said which is bogus and manipulative.

She calls him on it, saying all this typical woman stuff, stuff from the angry-woman playbook: “Any time we get close, you shut the door on me, you crack a joke …” It is her version of what went down, it is what drove her crazy about who he was. But that’s not how Dean remembers it, and that is actually not what is going on right in front of us right now. She’s being unfair and she knows it.

The tone here from him, as the argument intensifies, is one of HURT. He’s almost pleading with her. Listen to his voice placement on “I was totally up front with you,” and how desperate he looks. A less sensitive actor would have just shouted in her face. Ackles always goes for the more vulnerable choice. He also plays the cover-up of the vulnerability, but that vulnerability HAS to be present, or we got nothing. He goes on and on about how she “shut the door” and then “buried the key” and I love how she says “Are we done with this metaphor yet?” It’s such a WRITER’S thing to say: that’s good character writing.

The argument is heated, fast, and still awkward. It’s tough because here is where we learn what went down, that he told her he hunted ghosts and she reacted badly. She thought he was crazy or looking for a reason to dump her. Dean can’t believe what he’s hearing. YOU dumped ME. Don’t cast yourself as the hurt party here, sister. That’s NOT how it went down. You HURT ME, is his subtext, in every single line. Vulnerable. Not a lot of actors want to show that part of themselves.

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So naturally, as the argument gets more heated, they get closer to resolving things by mauling one another’s mouth area. This is usually how these things go.

I like this dialogue:

“I thought it was what you wanted.”
“Well, it wasn’t.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Well, you did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.”

It sounds very real to me. It’s not graceful, it’s not eloquent. It’s not well-spoken. It’s real.

The kiss has been there between them from the second she opened the door. Dean doesn’t move in where he’s not wanted. He likes SAFETY, above all else, even in sex, especially in sex, which is one of his main comfort zones. He likes to be comfy, safe, taken care of, and in an atmosphere where he can lose himself in his own pleasure and giving her pleasure. This is a stereotypically feminine standpoint for sex. But here we are, seeing the supposed womanizing Dean, in this light for the first time. I don’t think Eric Kripke originally conceived of this guy in this way. This is all brought on by the suggestibility of Ackles’ acting, his sheer vulnerability, and his clear star quality. The writers were sensitive to what he brought to the table as a leading man. In the pilot, Dean is somewhat generic. A “type”. No more.

It’s important that she kisses him first. It says a lot. I’ve written about it before, I won’t beat a dead horse any more than I’ve already beaten it. Once Dean knows he’s safe, and she wants him, boy can let the panther out. But not until then. Or not until he is a vampire. Either one. She pulls back from the kiss, and now that he knows he’s welcome and this is where they’re going, he moves in on her.

And then all hell breaks loose. When Dean decides being touched is okay, he really decides.

Cut to them falling in bed together, with Dean on the bottom, a clear inversion of the way things are normally filmed, woman on bottom, man on top of her. I’ve written about it before. I don’t want to make too strong a gender-studies commentary on it because all of that gets too reductive for me, too binary. Man on bottom doesn’t mean he’s less masculine, or a “bottom”, or whatever. But who we are in bed says a lot (says everything?) about who we are. Dean is on the bottom more often than he’s on the top. And compare it to what we see of his brother in the sack (or in a public restroom, or in a doctor’s office, or an abandoned shack, it doesn’t matter, Sam is ready to GO) … and we see the difference. There’s been a lot of thought given to who these guys are in a sexual context. And it’s really the only time we see them in a place where the other is not welcome. It’s important information. Private information.

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I’m not sure what music was playing during the broadcast version of “Route 666”, but in the version of Netflix it was “Paradise” by Sharif, this beautiful sort of Spanish-infused song, with beautiful pertinent lyrics.

The song is different on the DVD, doesn’t have the same feel. I prefer “Paradise”, but who cares what I prefer, song copyright laws being what they are.

10th scene
Mr. White Boy Mayor is out in a field at dawn, and there is snow on the ground. He stands at a big table set down there, and is looking at some kind of floor plan. And you know we were overdue for the Racist Truck. Quick break for hot tender sex notwithstanding. The truck appears and chases the Mayor down (great stunt from a guy rolling down a hill), and the Mayor rolls right into the frame, dead as hell, with a look of horror on his face. Nice detail though: the Mayor doesn’t even look surprised when the truck shows up. He’s been waiting for it. He knew it would come for him next.

11th scene
Dean and Cassie lie in bed, holding each other, coming down from their own hot-ness. They are relaxed and totally open. You can feel who they were as a couple, finally. You can feel what they found with each other. She’s a fighter, she’s a go-getter, and with him she got to be soft and open and sexy, she got to let her guard down. And the same is true for him with her. They’re very similar types. She laughs sort of and says, “We should fight more often,” and Dean says, wiped out, but enthusiastic, “Absolutely.”

So now we get some pillow talk. He has zero defenses here and it’s fascinating to watch. Sam will never see him like this. This is where Dean Winchester fits in with the long tradition of Tough Guys in primarily American cinema: characters played by John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, guys who are legitimately tough and capable, who operate in mostly a male world, but who reserve their hearts and their vulnerability for women. This is no longer seen as “healthy”, and you could certainly make that case. Some of my perspective on this comes from dating a Tough Guy, whom I have mentioned before in these re-caps, because he reminds me of Dean Winchester, complete with working on his car, and having beers as he watched football, and really bad past trauma that he told me about but that really couldn’t be mentioned. I remember he was telling me about something once, and it got really open, and he cried, he really cried, like broke down. I had never seen him cry before. It was totally outside my conception of him. And we had been together for, I don’t know, two years at that point? A couple days later, I referenced the moment, and stupidly made mention of the fact that he had cried (not in a mean way, not at ALL), and he barked, “I didn’t cry.” It was ridiculous. You actually DID cry, I saw the tears. I said, “Dude, you cried.” Which was very dumb of me. He got really mad and clamped down on further openness. I apologized later. I felt terrible. He told me he would deny he cried if I told any of his friends. Why would I tell your friends that you cried? But, you know, he had that whole thing going on. I had to tread carefully sometimes. Tiresome maybe, and I screwed up on occasion, but he was so great with me, so tender and funny (I was even more of a handful than he was – he made it his mission in life to make me laugh and make me feel safe), that I put up with all of that. I was the one who got to see that side of him, exclusively. Old-school. Throwback.

To obnoxiously over-simplify the matter, Alan Alda came along in the 70s and suddenly men were supposed to talk about their feelings in a way that would have made John Wayne want to blow his brains out. But at least in cinema, men WERE talking about their feelings all along, although they probably wouldn’t have referred to them as “feelings”. It was the woman who “got” to see that side of men, and only she was let in there. You saw Humphrey Bogart maneuver in the bar in Casablanca and he is one way, and then you saw him alone, or alone with Ingrid Bergman, and you saw the whole underbelly. And, in that context, a good woman is the one who will not throw that vulnerability back in his face. A good woman can be trusted to know about that vulnerability, and protect it, and also not poke holes in the Tough Guy persona. Naturally, there are all kinds of traps with this kind of stuff, and it can leave men isolated, and women crazy. So a little balance is necessary. Watch “Only Angels Have Wings” to see the dynamic in its most baroque form. The role Cary Grant plays there is named Geoff Carter, and he is a total Dean Winchester type: Nearly impenetrable in his toughness, his bravery, his boys club mentality, doing a dangerous death-defying job. Geoff Carter has a male sidekick played by Thomas Mitchell (who is clearly in love with him), and he needs a woman who can TAKE that lifestyle, and not Mother Hen him to death, and who won’t throw him under the bus if he shows vulnerability to her in private moments.

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Dean has no more awkwardness with her, no more anger or even hurt. Everything is now filtered through the sex he just had, which wasn’t just hot, it was love. He’s safe. He can say anything now. “I told you who I really was. That was a big first for me.”

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She says something about things “working out” if you want them to, and you sense all of this … STUFF holding him back, stuff that has nothing to do with his feelings for her. Dad clearly called in the middle of their relationship back then, and Dean had to drop everything and run. The sacrifices this young man has made. When she says that, basically opening the door again, he almost winces with a yearning to go in that direction, but knowing he CAN’T. What, he’s never supposed to get married? Fall in love? Dad expected that of him? How dare you, John W.

She says that whatever happens now, no more excuses. He says okay. Tenderness, sweetness, you never want the guy to have to leave that bed. But the phone rings. It’s clearly Sam with the news about the Dead Mayor.

12th scene
Dean meets Sam out on the road, where there is another crime scene set up, and snow is falling, and Sam has been there a while, questioning cops, trying to get the low-down. Dean approaches, and I love Padalecki’s line reading of “Where were you last night?”

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It’s goofy, but Sam is HAPPY for Dean. He has to tease him, of course, because that’s the only way their relationship can even semi-work, but he’s happy Dean didn’t come home to the Victorian B&B even though the wooden bird scared the shit out of Sam in the dead of night when he got up to take a leak and discovered Dean’s bed was empty. You almost know that Sam smiled to himself when he saw Dean wasn’t there. Dean, true to form, can’t really deal with the attention being given to him. It’s a little creepy too because his sex life is involved. Remember: he and Sam are new to working together as men, without Dad there as the focal point. Sam says, “So I guess you guys worked stuff out, huh …” (almost proud, Dean took his advice!)

Dean says, “We’ll be working things out when we’re 90.” It’s a funny line, and one I relate to. I’ve got a guy like that in my life. I’ve said shit like, “We’re gonna be in retirement homes one day still doing this shit to each other.” But it’s interesting because just in the last episode Dean faced death twice. And as the series goes on, he is more and more open about the fact that he knows he will not get old. Seeing Cassie changes how he thinks about it, he’ll be old, he’ll be an old man, of course he will, and they’ll still be doing the same shit to each other. It’s very HUMAN, that comment. We won’t see much of it again.

Having sex does make one have a more optimistic view of life. It’s one of its most healthy byproducts.

Back to the case at hand: Dean is confused because the Mayor was white. It doesn’t fit the pattern.

13th scene
Dean meets up with Cassie at the newspaper to go through the archives. It is the closest we get to a “library scene” in “Route 666”. It’s the middle of the day but all the lights are off. It’s a shadowy stylish space, with people in the background basically working in the dark. Very funny and effective: the Supernatural team went all out to drench the series in style.

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Sam has been at the court house and calls with some news. He found out the Mayor bought the property where he was killed last month. He bought it from the Dorian family who had owned it for 150 years. Dean listens to all this, murmuring comments to Cassie, and she fills in missing blanks. They are so together in this scene. Relaxed, focused, at least, totes a couple. It fits. They make sense together. Kudos to these two actors for giving us that in only three short scenes.

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Dean pulls up old newspaper articles, about the Dorian family, wonders about the murders in the 60s. Cassie isn’t surprised there’s not much out there. Back in the 60s, the town didn’t exactly care about its minority citizens.

At this point, I couldn’t give two shits about the Mayor’s property and the racist truck. It doesn’t hold my interest compared to the giant sweep of what the hell is going on with Dean and Cassie, AND Sam’s reaction to it.

14th scene

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You would think the boys would put this together somehow. But they don’t. The truck comes for Cassie, roaring outside her Mom’s house. She cowers inside. It’s a tiny bit dumb.

15th scene
The entire exposition of the entire episode is placed in the totally capable hands of Kathleen Noone. She has a giant monologue. GIANT. I find it hard to follow, at times: wait, who is Martin? Who is Cyrus? Help me? But she fills it with such agony, 40 years of keeping a secret, that she is nothing less than heartbreaking.

Dean and Sam have obviously come over when Cassie called. There’s more coffee, and this is funny: Sam hands Cassie her coffee and she jokes, weakly, “You wanna pour a shot into it?” Dean and Cassie sit together on the couch, and his posture is protective and alert, one arm across the back of the couch behind her. Sam is gentle when he turns to Cassie’s mom and asks her the question they wanted to ask on that first night: Didn’t her husband see a truck?

She tells her story. It’s a pretty huge monologue. She is magnificent: the emotion is held back and then it starts POURING out of her.

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There is a love triangle. There is racial tension. There is a murder. There is a coverup. There is an elopement and a burning church. You know, the usual.

Dean asks a dumb question: “Why didn’t your husband call the cops?” She looks at him stunned. A nice reminder of how we can be blind to the realities of others, not because we are cruel or mean, but because we just don’t know what it is like to be somebody else. There are some nice shots of Cassie, looking at her mother, overcome with emotion. There is, again, that beautiful blue-black-slat lighting in the background.

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Crying Mama says, “I thought I was protecting them. And now there’s no one left to protect.”

Dean says, and this is Dean at his very very best, “Yes, there is.”

16th scene
After this scene, Dean and Sam stand at the Impala outside the house. They both seem world-weary, battle-scarred, humorous, very very human. And Sam has now “gotten” the depth of what went on with his brother and Cassie, and he actually seems happy to have that knowledge now. It’s not triumphant knowledge, like, “haha, my brother got hurt, now I know he’s human.” It’s kind, it’s gentle. And this is Sam at his very very best.

Sam is almost laughing about how simple his life was, not even a year ago. Exams, papers on “polycentric cultural norms”. (Their road-trip lifestyle brings them into contact with all kinds of polycentric cultural norms, and it’s a better and less abstract education that way, probably) Dean has no idea what that means.

All the edges are off them right now. No blame. Not even regret. Just a battered humor about how weird their lives are.

Sam says, “I miss conversations that didn’t start with ‘this killer truck'”…

I like it when they have a sudden awareness of how strange their lives are.
“We’ve got zombies on the loose, dude.”
“Our lives are so weird.”

They don’t do it TOO much, because it would pull us out of their reality, but when they do sort of step back and shake their heads at how strange their lives are, it is funny.

Anyhoo, blah blah, evil white guy in the 60s is haunting his truck, now buried in the swamp. The spirit was awakened from the destruction of the old Dorian place. (The brothers hash all this out, all with a classic Supernatural profile shot.)

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I love when Sam says, “You know we’re gonna have to dredge that body up from the swamp, right?” and Dean throws him a smile. It’s intimate. The air has cleared. It’s interesting: both of them would be better with each other if they had significant others in their respective lives. Love/romance takes the pressure off their relationship. Nobody can be EVERYTHING to you. Dean has opened up to Cassie, and so things are easier with his brother. It’s not rocket science. It’s right there in the behavior.

When Cassie comes out to join them, Dean says they’ll be back eventually, and: “Don’t leave the house.”

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She bristles at the bossy pants tone, says she “hates it”, but it’s a sexy moment, too. Dean is such a Boss in the car with his brother, and has been arguing with Sam for months about how “authoritative” he is, and now Cassie comes along and says the same thing, right in front of Sam, and what is Dean’s reaction? A meek, “Don’t leave the house please?”

The question mark at the end makes it funny.

17th scene
Dean and Sam have somehow protracted a giant digger or whatever, and are pulling the truck out of the swamp in the dead of night. Because, yeah, nobody’s gonna notice that. After Dean backs the digger up successfully, Sam, who can’t leave well enough alone, says, “Now I know what she sees in you.”

Dean doesn’t realize how much Sam is focused on him. It seems weird to him. Inside himself, he is all fucked up, and a mess about Cassie, and discombobbled, and he’s also getting laid right now, so that’s awesome, but he’s just Dean, he’s a mess. Sam being all admiring about his driving and then connecting it back to Cassie seems like a stretch to Dean. He doesn’t get it.

Sam says, “Come on, man, you can admit it. You’re still in love with her.”

Sam, there is a rotting skeleton in that truck, leering right at you, you need to focus and stop obsessing on your brother’s love life.

Sam and Dean burn the racist guy’s bones, and at that moment the truck appears. So … the truck is pissed? That they burned the bones? Maybe racist guy has some DNA in the truck, and so the truck is still infused with supernatural racist magic? Who the hell knows. I don’t care.

What matters is we are about to get some awesome stunt driving. And I love car chases!

Dean uses himself as bait (typical) and tells Sam he has to burn the truck. Sam ends up not doing that and comes up with a plan involving hallowed ground on the county line and blah blah blah. It’s quite a thing to come up with while your brother is screaming at you through the cell phone being bore down on by a giant racist truck.

Sam is pretty badass here, with the phone, the flashlight, the map. I love a show where the characters can be badass when
1. at the library
2. looking at a map
3. printing out copies of medieval paintings

I mean, look at Sam, holding a phone, a flashlight, and a map. Why is that so pleasing to me??

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Nerd Sam yells at Dean, “You need to go exactly 7/10ths of a mile and stop.”

I’d be like, “Dude, just burn the fucking truck. I don’t understand math.”

The chase is pretty great, though, and there’s a moment where the Impala slows down suddenly, lets the truck pass, and swerves off to the left, and just LOOK at this stunner of a shot.

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Dean jams on the brakes when he reaches the Fibonacci number of the Circumference of the square root of the isosceles Triangle or whatever the hell Sam told him to do.

At the end of the road, the truck’s headlights glare, but the truck does not move. Dean informs Sam, “The truck is staring at me.”

Like everything else he encounters in his life, the truck is staring at Dean.

Funny coda to the frankly implausible scene: The truck blasts right through Dean’s car and Dean freaks, thinking he’s about to burn up in a fiery mesh. He is left alone in the dark, panting for breath, and gets back on the phone with Sam, who explains about hallowed ground and burnt churches and I don’t know what else, and says, “I figured maybe that would get rid of it.”

“Maybe? MAYBE?” shouts Dean. “WHAT IF YOU WERE WRONG?”

Sam says, “Honestly that thought hadn’t occurred to me.”

It’s played for laughs here, but it is also interesting, a hint at his smarts, but also … maybe his recklessness. Dean would never have risked Sam’s life like that on a hunch.

18th scene
Sam waits in the car as Dean and Cassie have their little goodbye. It’s powerful. The music is so sweet and sad you want to open a vein. Or maybe that’s just me. Highly possible. She is sad, he is sad, but they both are happy that this goodbye is not as bad as their last goodbye. Dean says, “Maybe this time it will be a little less permanent.” A comment like that just tossed into the mix and never followed up on? Dean just doesn’t talk like that. She is never mentioned again. Bad. We at least could have had him trying to call her and a boyfriend picks up or something, some way to “end” the Cassie thing. You can’t just throw shit out there like that and think fans won’t remember it.

She says, and it’s kind, but truthful, “I don’t see much hope for us, Dean.”

He is sad. He wants to live in hope, despite everything. He doesn’t want the door to close. The metaphor is not done for him. Leave the door open, always always leave the door open. Lisa’s door is closed, and yet he keeps knocking on it, one, two, three, four times. Please let me in, please open the door and let me in. Dean equates his relationship with Cassie to the “strange things” he’s seen. It is the second time he’s done it. Love is as mysterious as the supernatural. Love also, in its way, helps him to believe. It could also be called “faith”.

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Believing you are deserving of love is hard for some of us. It is the most important thing to “work on”. It can potentially change everything. Not the love itself, but believing it could be yours, believing you are worth it.

So far I have found it to be impossible. However, I do keep in mind: Men loved me when I didn’t think I was deserving of it. They weren’t waiting for my permission to love them, or waiting for me to feel better about myself. They found me lovable already. And they were good men. Michael loved me when I didn’t know I deserved it, and I loved him all while he was completely convinced that he was a Total Wreck and wondered why I put up with him. But whatever, we loved each other. So, you know. There’s hope.

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19th scene
An awesome ending: because Dean snaps back, to impenetrability … he is okay with his secrets. He will live in this memory for a long time. It is oxygen in his blood. Sam wants to talk about second thoughts, and maybe how meeting someone like Cassie may make them think their life choices aren’t worth it. “Meeting a girl like that, does it make you wonder …”

Dean doesn’t engage. I LOVE the look he throws Sam before he puts the sunglasses on. You cannot boil down what that look says. It’s not just one thing. It could be anything. It can’t quite be captured in a screen grab, because it goes from stoic to smile and then back.

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The show (and Ackles’ work) makes us want Dean to say, “I want her, I want that life, I want to go back there, I love her, I’m happy.” And it refuses to satisfy us. And in refusing to satisfy us, it basically guarantees that the show will continue. This is how you create tension, not in plot, but in character. And character is EVERYTHING in Supernatural. It’s why we watch. If you were only in it for the monsters, you would have bailed long ago. And the mystery of that look in Dean’s face … it’s still something we are interested in discussing, unpacking, understanding.

Dean turns away, still smiling, to himself, and takes some ridiculous wrap-around sunglasses out of the glove compartment.

Dean never wears sunglasses. Ever. The only time we see him in sunglasses ever is here, and when he is forced to, against his will, hilariously, in “Changing Channels”. So with a huge shit-eating grin on his face, impossible to boil down into one thing, he throws his head back on the seat to get some well-deserved shut-eye. In contrast to the melancholy wistful and sweet music, he looks completely and utterly happy.

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215 Responses to Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 13: “Route 666”

  1. rae says:

    I’m still hoping that Cassie will resurface — even in a reference — sometime. Such a great character! And I love the responses she brings out of Sam and Dean, in their interactions with her and with each other about her.

    I feel like a locked, buried diary would still not be safe from Dean Winchester. It could be translated into Enochian, hidden in one of Crowley’s safe houses via a portal into the future (or the past, whatevs), and Dean would still manage to get his hands on it and make someone (Kevin, Cas, Sam, whoever) translate it for him.

    Sam’s part about how strange their lives are reminds me of the episode with the guy (Aaron?) with the Golem, and his reaction to burning bones: “These guys are psychopaths!” I don’t even blink at some of the things they do because it seems so normal now, but it was a great reminder about how bizarre and frightening their work really is.

    //when he reaches the Fibonacci number of the Circumference of the square root of the isosceles Triangle or whatever the hell Sam told him to do.//
    This made me laugh really hard, but at the same time, tracking 7/10s of a mile whilst being chased down the road by a killer truck is a bit unbelievable, too.

    //Believing you are deserving of love is hard for some of us. It is the most important thing to “work on”. It can potentially change everything. Not the love itself, but believing it could be yours, believing you are worth it.//
    I really needed to hear this right now. Maintaining hope, too.

    Thanks again for a great recap and analysis, Sheila! I know I don’t always comment on them, but I read all of them and follow all the discussions in the comment section every day. (I find myself nodding a lot, or pulling out another mentioned episode to review something someone wrote about.) What a great environment you’ve created!

    • sheila says:

      // It could be translated into Enochian, hidden in one of Crowley’s safe houses via a portal into the future (or the past, whatevs), and Dean would still manage to get his hands on it and make someone (Kevin, Cas, Sam, whoever) translate it for him. //

      hahahahahaha True, true. Dean is a total snoop!

      // “These guys are psychopaths!”//

      SUCH a funny moment. Warming their hands over a burning body? Totally casually? Sooooo funny.

      // Maintaining hope, too. //

      I wish you the best!! That’s all we can do, really!

      Thanks for reading and commenting – so so much!

      • sheila says:

        and Echikunwoke (the actress playing Cassie) has a super busy career and may not be available to return – but like you said, to at least reference the character’s name, for goodness’ sake. Jess is only in the pilot, and then a couple other episodes, sprinkled over, what, 4, 5 seasons – and her name is referenced all the time. She is part of Sam’s past, and she is talked about. I’m not sure what the thinking was behind just “disappearing” Cassie like that. It doesn’t fit with the continuity of the rest of the show.

        I’m sure there’s a reason, or maybe there isn’t, and it’s just a dropped ball.

        Whatever the case: it stands out.

        • rae says:

          /Echikunwoke (the actress playing Cassie) has a super busy career and may not be available to return/
          Sounds like Loretta Devine — but at least Missouri got mentioned in a later season!

          Some of the characters in this show remind me of certain rare friends (the ones you haven’t known for that long, but it still feels like forever — and no matter how long it’s been, you can pick up a conversation like it’s only been a few minutes instead of several years).

          With Cassie it’s kind of alarmingly noticeable that she’s got only one episode. There are other characters with very few episodes that seem like they’ve been involved in way more episodes — Death has only actually been in four episodes, which still astounds me –and whilst Cassie may have been harder to do that way (with her plans to stay in the community in which she grew up), I feel like she could have been, nonetheless.

  2. rae says:

    Death is brilliant, really. Love him — food and diction choices and all!

  3. Maureen says:

    “Actors sometimes justify the big stuff (“I murder my uncle because he murdered my father …”) and forget to justify the small stuff like why they don’t light the cigarette, or why they don’t drink the cup of coffee they just poured, or whatever.”

    I haven’t even read the whole review, but had to stop and comment on this line. Here, in a nutshell is where you explain to me why certain moments, performances, movies resonate so much with me. I know I feel it, but I didn’t know exactly why I felt it. Does this make any sense? I know nothing about acting, about filming-and I felt like a light bulb went off over my head when I read this.

    I know you love classic movies-do you feel like this kind of acting was more prevalent back then? I ask because there are so many moments that stick with me from older movies, and I can’t say the same about newer ones. I am not a movie snob, I love all kinds of movies, but those moments that really hit you, I don’t know-they seem few and far between.

    • sheila says:

      // I know I feel it, but I didn’t know exactly why I felt it. Does this make any sense? //

      Total sense.

      I think you do see that type of acting more in old movies because all of those people came from a theatre background, where that type of work is not only common but necessary – stage work is full-body stuff, you have to know “why you cross from left to right” – and it doesn’t have to be some world-shaking thing, just “I need to open the damn window”, or whatever. You have to have a reason for everything you do. We’re not talking about Dustin Hoffman being a pain in the ass (hilariously) in Tootsie, refusing to cross the stage. Good actors have one thing in common: they all know how to justify things, they do it naturally, they do it through asking questions.

      In film/TV it is challenging – because things are broken up into small chunks. You can lose that sense of “wait, why am I doing this? why do I pick up this book and not that book?” But JA has justified the shit out of every choice in whatever script – from small choice (why do I put down the coffee cup) to big choice (I will take this moment to kill this demon because I have a clear shot).

      Nowadays, you get a lot of actors who pour into Hollywood and may have some raw type of talent or a good look but don’t know how to work. They have no technique. They don’t even know the right questions to ask. They would think that “justifying” why you put down a coffee cup is way too detailed. And like I said, probably the choice to do so in that manner was done on the fly, or in 2 minutes time, once JA realized the blocking of the scene and that he would need his hands free. It wasn’t this huge thing, I’m sure.

      OR – another problem: lots of acting teachers ONLY focus on emotion. Learn how to bring up emotion. And so the actors who come out of that kind of training can cry on cue but they don’t know to pour a drink, or make a sandwich onstage, anything, or walk from left to right – they don’t know to justify what they are doing up there. They are totally LOST if they don’t have a camera right up in their face.

      And you’re right: those moments do really hit you. It makes things seem real. Every single second that Cary Grant has in His Girl Friday is so alive, so justified, so full, so hilarious, so emotionally charged, and also he NEVER SHUTS UP. It’s a marvel, that performance.

      • sheila says:

        Speaking of His Girl Friday, it’s on TCM tonight at 8!

        • Maureen says:

          I really enjoyed your reply to my comment, and what you said about acting teachers only focusing on emotion, that explains so much. Yet, as they say-the devil is in the details, and those small movements, gestures, that make so much sense to an audience, that is what we remember.

          I’m glad you reminded me about His Girl Friday! I am 4 hours behind you, so it comes on at 4:00 pm here-just ran in to set my DVR. I have been so focused on all of Mary Astor’s films this month, I didn’t check the schedule after last Wednesday. A real treat to have her as the TCM Star of the Month. Like you described Cary Grant, her performances are full-there is a reason I can’t take my eyes off her whenever she is on the screen!!

  4. Helena says:

    //Funny coda to the frankly implausible scene: //

    I’ve commented on this before, but it’s funny what one regards as frankly implausible in a piece of television including, say, a wendigo, Reaper, or racist truck ™. For me it’s the pouring of coffee out of a teapot.

    So, so, so, so wrong.

    • sheila says:

      hahahaha Yeah, wendigos are perfectly believable – but you have to draw the line somewhere.

      Also, it’s just so high-maintenance what she’s doing there! Sugar cubes! Spoons! Teapot. Could it be tea? Are we missing something? It’s so elaborate whatever the hell she’s doing.

      My brother used to rant about how the people on Sesame Street didn’t believe Big Bird when he would tell them about Snuffleupagus. My brother was like, “They are talking to an 8 foot tall bird that talks.”

      • Helena says:

        //Could it be tea? //

        Believe me, I spent a good minute or five replaying the scene asking myself – is it really tea or coffee? I checked out Sam’s reactions to the drink – nope, I think if it had been tea there’d have been a funny face. All that paraphenalia is Cassie’s mum’s after all, and maybe after all she got her teapots and her coffee pots mixed up.

        Phew, glad we got that sorted out.

        nice capper when Cassie gives Dean a mug of coffee in the office in a later scene. No need to negotiate twiddly teaspoons and sugar cubes there. What a relief.

        However, if what’s in a teacup or how people handle cutlery is more compelling than a racist truck you know something’s up with the episode.

        • sheila says:

          hahahahahahahaha

          Laughing out loud. SERIOUSLY. It’s a huge issue.

          A bunch of kids died in a fire in a church in 1963, but wait a second, is she pouring coffee OUT OF A TEAPOT??

        • sheila says:

          and yes, I was so relieved when Cassie brought Dean coffee in the newspaper office and it was a regular mug, and no fuss about it. Chill out, girl. Dean’s not gonna drink it anyway.

        • SarahJay55 says:

          As a Brit, I guess I just assumed it was tea! I was more concerned about her putting sugar in both cups. Did she ask? Maybe she remembered how Dean took his [hot beverage of choice] but what about Sam?

      • Helena says:

        //“They are talking to an 8 foot tall bird that talks.”//

        Does your brother watch Supernatural? Fascinated to know what would twitch his implausibility-ometer.

        • sheila says:

          Ha. He’s only seen one episode, I think – it happened to be on and he had to tune in to see what his sister had been babbling about. He thought it was great.

          We all used to get so upset that the Sesame Street people didn’t believe in Big Bird’s friend. I know that was a common reaction. Little kids were having anxiety attacks about it so they finally let Snuffleupagus join the real world and everyone acknowledged his existence.

  5. Helena says:

    This recap made me laugh more than any other you’ve done so far, I think, not least because, hand on heart, it is a bit of an episode of two halves and I tend to fast forward the bits about the truck because blah blah, just not as interesting as Dean, Cassie and Sam’s hilariously gobsmacked reaction to the whole thing.

    One thing. I’ve seen precisely 10 seconds of Days of our Lives in The French Mistake episode, yet Dean and Cassie’s argument (closing doors, throwing away keys, are we done with that metaphor) reminded me of that style of tv so much that I wondered if they threw in a secret homage there. I love the way Dean’s voice rockets upwards to prepubertal heights in the exchange you quote, and Cassie tears that jacket off. Puts her in the driving seat – I like that they did that.

    • sheila says:

      It really is so uneven. The romance is just so much more interesting – normally they do a better job of weaving stuff together. So I feel bad but I’m like, “Oh well, some guy was beaten to death with a tire iron in 1963, too bad for him, WHAT’S HAPPENING BACK IN THE BEDROOM?” and it’s kind of awful.

      // I love the way Dean’s voice rockets upwards to prepubertal heights //

      So right! It’s so touching – on the verge of embarrassing. Good choice.

      and yes, Cassie with the jacket! Hot. And, just character-wise – Dean needs the go-ahead. He’s all about getting the go-ahead first. Then he can let his Freak Flag fly. So when she goes to get him undressed – he knows where he’s at, then it’s all gonna be okay.

      And ha! Soap opera language. So true. Dean’s kind of at sea, so he falls back on a metaphor, and clings to it past its prime.

      • Helena says:

        //It really is so uneven. The romance is just so much more interesting – ”//

        Indeed – I’m just waiting for Jessie to jump in and shred the episode with a giant flaming forensic scalpel.

        • sheila says:

          You can see why “they” wouldn’t want to “call back” to the episode – because it’s not their finest hour. But still: THEY’RE the ones who gave us this hot-pulling-off-jacket-first-sex-scene-in-the-series-rolling-around-in-bed-tempest-in-a-tea/coffeepot relationship – take some responsibility for it and at least mention the poor woman’s name again. I mean, I realize it was 8 seasons ago and at some point I will have to let it go.

          • Helena says:

            8 seasons ago, and the wounds are still raw. Is that the equivalent of ‘bad things happening in the 60s which still haunt us today’?

            //WHAT’S HAPPENING BACK IN THE BEDROOM?”//

            The episode should have been called this. It’s much more accurate. Or possibly:
            //hot-pulling-off-jacket-first-sex-scene-in-the-series-rolling-around-in-bed-tempest-in-a-tea/coffeepot relationship//

            I mean.

          • sheila says:

            Also, the title. The devil doesn’t have anything to do with this episode. Just not … it doesn’t fit together, feels random.

            I agree: everyone was like, “Let’s throw Dean into a romance, let’s do a sex scene, we haven’t done one yet.” That is the only thing that interests everyone involved – you can really tell.

        • Jessie says:

          Ha! Who can be bothered though right? The disconnect here is so profound. Why isn’t Cyrus visible in the truck? Why is the truck the murderer and not Cyrus? Why the hell is this random guy telling us about the mysterious local legend of the Truck That Kills? If they wanted to do a Christine homage they should have done something more along the lines of the James Dean car in that Paris Hilton episode, which I actually think is super fun.

          The way they tackled this just does not work. There is no link between racial violence and Dean and Cassie’s story (thank God because who would want to see people give Dean and Cassie the side-eye for that reason). If they wanted to do a story about racism and interracial relationships they should have used a monster tied to themes of the natural order or purity or outside vs inside. The B Story should have been about what Sam and Dean look like.

          The real story is obviously about how relationships work, how hurt works, how you can reveal yourself to important people in your life. Racist trucks are not cutting it here. Despite the best efforts of all involved to make the thing menacing it cheapens and cheesifies the Racism Message and the Love Message.

          • Helena says:

            Plus, there’s something super weird with the chronology, I think. Cassie’s mum looks about 10-15 years too young to have been a young woman of, what 20 in the early ’60s. And given Cassie is around the same age as Dean her parents would have waited to have her until they’d been married for 15 years. I can accept lots of implausibilities in this show, because der, but I find this bogus chronology rather disturbing – they really wanted to do something about racism in the South, but couldn’t figure out a way which didn’t involve playing with the time space continuum.

          • Jessie says:

            It’s not as egregious as Bugs, which uses Native American genocide as window-dressing, but racism and race crimes are definitely the afterthought there. It’s not pleasant. And the thing is it’s not a terrible idea — crimes of the past revisited on the present. That’s the meat and potatoes of Supernatural. But they smashed it together with this other story and it doesn’t work at some really basic levels — like, as you accurately point out, the age of Cassie’s mom! Who apparently had Cassie when she was like 40 years old.

          • sheila says:

            Right – lots of holes in the Monster Plot, sort of thrown together. The mission here in the script clearly was: “Let’s let Dean fall in love” – and clearly at some point the choice was made to put him into an inter-racial relationship – and never have it be an issue – not even acknowledged, really – (which I love).

            Like, imagine if they had tried to do a big “reveal” that Cassie was black. You know, you see her from behind, talking to the Mayor – and then she turns around – and her skin color would be used as a “reveal”. Black people are often treated like that in cinema – objectified, fetishized – whatever you want to call it. At least she was spared being treated like that by the camera. She strolls into the episode carrying a whole life with her, one that has nothing to do with Dean. And it’s never even referenced – Sam doesn’t do a double-take – which would have been awful, but it’s how these things are often treated – I mean, there are so many ways they could have gone wrong with it.

            But then: the whole episode IS about race. Nothing wrong with that – and the ghosts of those towns would probably be pretty pissed. Although how a ghost would get their hands on a modern Monster Truck, as opposed to a beat-up 1957 pick-up truck – is beyond me.

          • Helena says:

            //The B Story should have been about what Sam and Dean look like.//
            Jessie, what do you mean here? I’m intrigued.

          • Jessie says:

            hang on a sec let me grab my armchair-writer’s hat. so comfy.

            Only that if you’re going to tell an A story about racial othering or people freaking out about the purity of white women than those are the kind of themes your character arc should comment on. Power adheres in particular places in social structures, and shapes our ways of knowing each other. We act and think and be in these systems that pre-exist us and there are many character stories you could tell about that.

            Too direct a parallel or lesson would be just as insulting of course — actually “what Sam and Dean look like” is way too on the nose. “Ma’am, people shouldn’t judge you on the colour of your skin. You know just the other day a stranger told me to shave because I look like a vagrant. Yes I surely feel your pain.” Where’s my Emmy?

          • Helena says:

            //Only that if you’re going to tell an A story about racial othering or people freaking out about the purity of white women than those are the kind of themes your character arc should comment on. //

            I see … I think I took you a bit too literally, as in ‘why does Sam look like a moose and Dean like a squirrel?’ or something like like.

          • sheila says:

            So would a bad way to handle this be:

            Cassie and Dean broke up because of prejudice against inter-racial couples? Or Cassie mis-understands something and thinks Dean has “jungle fever” – or some kind of misunderstanding along that level? So that whatever happened between them is sort of going over the same ground as what happened in the past?

            I mean, that would have been awful. But is that kind of what we’re talking about?

            Or Dean being “put off” by the fact that she’s so pissed off about racist issues – you know, feeling threatened by it, because he’s white?

            I liked that race didn’t play into their bond at all, except that it was obviously something they had discussed back then, because of course they would have, they were intimate. But it’s not a “thing” at all that she’s black, he’s white. Not to them, not to anyone else.

          • Jessie says:

            No I agree, they definitely should not have made an issue of Cassie and Dean being together! Dean’s reactions to the racism she talks about say everything that needs to be said. Anything more would have been a disaster. In that sense it’s a good thing that the A and B story only connect through the plot.

            You can play the what if game until the cows come home but imagine if the Cassie story had been in a different episode with a different monster, one that required less serious attention, and this episode had had a different Sam-and-Dean story, thus sucking less air out of the main story.

            ‘why does Sam look like a moose and Dean like a squirrel?’
            no philosophy or art or science known to man or demon that could answer that one.

  6. Helena says:

    //Dean’s kind of at sea, so he falls back on a metaphor, and clings to it past its prime.//

    Talking of metaphors …

    • sheila says:

      hahaha

      He has no life raft in the storm of his emotions!

      • Helena says:

        He’s up shit creek without a – no, hang on, that’s not right, sounds more like Season 9.

        But seriously, this episode is quite soapy – soapy background music, a few shots which are quite soapy.

        Until you redeemed this with your recap, I imagined a conversation with the creators running along the lines of, ‘nope, racist truck thing isn’t really working. But hey, if we get Ackles to take his clothes off – who’s gonna care?’

        • sheila says:

          And that really sums up my reaction.

          “Oh, look! Kissing! Pillows!”

          • sheila says:

            There’s also the swaggering Mayor with family secrets, who is wearing a bolo tie. Straight out of Dallas.

            The take-away for me is the conversation between Sam and Dean by the car, and also the scene with Cassie and Dean where they argue. They are the only reasons to see the episode. Nothing else is pushed along – the Dad thing, the demon thing – it’s just character stuff.

          • Helena says:

            Well, yeah, so it worked, didn’t it! Phew!

            Next on Supernatural:

            Sam and Dean deal with a difficult table setting issue, and have to dig deep into the lore to work out whether fish knives go before soup spoons and what kind of wineglass to drink a nice chilled Chablis from. Meanwhile Castiel experiments with different kinds of table napkin and the ghost of Bobby returns to advise on condiments.

            Seriously, man, cutlery. Dean can barely use a knife and fork, and thinks the only good use for his mum’s silverware set is for the wherewithal to gank a djinn.

          • sheila says:

            // Sam and Dean deal with a difficult table setting issue //

            dying …

            sounds like some of the fanfic I’ve come across. “Dean is a barista finishing up his art studies requirements” … he IS???

          • sheila says:

            No judgment on the fanfic, by the way. It’s just kind of funny picturing Dean as a barista writing papers about Caravaggio. That’s all.

            But the image of them “digging deep into the lore” about soup spoons is hysterical.

            You know the Men of Letters had impeccable table manners!

          • Helena says:

            //“Dean is a barista finishing up his art studies requirements” … he IS???//

            Well, here comes Season 10, bring it on!

            Of course, this means the writer is a barista finishing up her … oh I can’t be bothered to type the rest of this.

            I just daren’t go near any other recaps or forums or chats about Supernatural, I just daren’t …

          • sheila says:

            I see some of it linked on Tumblr sometimes and there will be summaries … my favorite summary I’ve seen was: “Dean is a closet vegan.”

          • Helena says:

            //It’s just kind of funny picturing Dean as a barista writing papers about Caravaggio.//

            Well, according to Sam, an art course is great for meeting chicks. So there’s that.

            And hey, back in the day they used to light episodes like a Caravaggio. Including certain scenes in this one.

            Plus, homoeroticism. Ah, I see what they did there.

  7. Helena says:

    //my favorite summary I’ve seen was: “Dean is a closet vegan.”//

    Makes the ‘Dean and Sam have sex with each other’ variety sound plain old boring, don’t it.

    Glad to hear that Men of Letters have impeccable table manners. They sound my sort of people. They would certainly know the difference between a coffee pot and a tea pot.

    • sheila says:

      And in Season 9 – suddenly they have this really high-end coffee-maker in the Bunker. I am betting Dean bought it, with his new “nesting” instinct.

      • sheila says:

        No teapots in sight.

        Because THAT is what is important.

        • Helena says:

          Ok. Sorry Sheila. 40 odd comments on this episode and I’m afraid most have been about the correct use of teapots. Makes Supernatural sound like Jane Austen. Or Ozu.

          • Sheila says:

            It is so funny to me that we all zoomed in on that coffee behavior.

          • Helena says:

            //It is so funny to me that we all zoomed in on that coffee behavior.//

            Well, maybe that barista spinoff series idea isn’t such a bad idea, after all.

  8. Sheila says:

    This is already one of the funniest comment threads.

    • Helena says:

      It just seems that the more, ahem, problematic the episode the funnier the comments – I remember some of the comments on Bugs were just hilarious. Much as I adore the in depth comments on the more serious/well written episodes, it’s nice to let off a bit of steam.

      I don’t think there are any more episodes like this left in the Season (a bit duff and sticking out from the series arc like a sore thumb)- they’re all pretty integrated and/or really strong in their own right (apart from my personal bete noir, Hell House, and I’m learning to enjoy bits of that)

      • sheila says:

        Right, the rest of the season is pretty strong – Off the top of my head I can’t think of any more stinkers in Season 1.

        I have some issues with Benders. But nothing really serious.

  9. Jessie says:

    Like this shot, from the Racist Monster Truck’s perspective.
    *deep breath* AAAAAAAAAAAAHA HA HA HA HA

    This is a weird episode for me. Anything with both Sam and Dean in it gives me joy for days. Anything that attempts to give the truck sentience makes me cringe for days. And some of the shots with Dean with his clothes off actually make me uncomfortable. The lighting and everything is so gentle. It makes his musculature look so round. The pillow talk, when he’s rubbing her arm. And he’s so huge in a way you’re not usually forced to recognise but everything is so soft. It weirds me out. This is the only time we ever see him like this. He’s not jumping up and giving Sam the double-thumbs up through a window after this one. I wonder if it was ever like this with Lisa.

    That truck is NOT from the 60s. I mean come on.

    The two suited-up conversations are my favourite parts of this episode. JP is so GOOD. Dean is just flailing inside and JP lifts it up into this kind of light-hearted realm of love. Hey man, you’re having big feelings, it’s okay — better than okay, it’s great! Let’s talk about it!

    “Everyone’s gotta open up to someone sometime.”
    Who did Sam open up to in college then? That he never told Jess is such a telling note. This kid was seventeen when he decided to leave, maybe eighteen when he hit Stanford. Before he went to college we can guess he was frustrated, angry, sad all the time — taking it out on Dean, probably, when he wasn’t internalising it — and then he opened up a whole new life for himself and by the force of his will made it work. And he made friends, and met Jess at some point, and he never told anyone. How did he cope?

    Dean at the end of that scene is hilarious: “Get in the car. GETINTHECAR! I need to flee this Wharf of Emotional Revelation!”

    I love Cassie. Like you say, she’s so specific. And she breaks up with Dean not because she’s a bitch or for some crazy generic girl reason, but because she was a sensible and steady girl in her early 20s and she met this amazing grungy man and fell head over heels in a shockingly short about of time and then when she’s pouring her heart out he tells her he has to go because his Dad calls the shots and also he hunts MONSTERS? Seriously. That’s a good reason to break up with someone, especially if you’re starting to get a bit freaked out about how deep in you are.

    There are a lot of lovely gaps in this backstory. I wonder how long ago they had their relationship. Dean and John were still hunting together (as they weren’t at the pilot) and it seems like the hurt has had the time to settle into that occasional nag that doesn’t overwhelm unless you poke it. Maybe two years ago? Or maybe relatively soon after Sam left, when he would have been a wreck and more liable to exposing himself? She didn’t have one of those big oh, you’re SAM reactions to Sam, which hints that he didn’t say much about him, maybe because that whole thing was still too much.

    Pillow talk. Cassie can’t stop touching his chest. I feel ya Cassie. And at the same time thank Christ the mayor died or maybe he never would have put his clothes on again. Dean Winchester you make me feel very strange things. Put some clothes on. Go away. Go fetch Sam, I want to watch him smile.

    even though the wooden bird scared the shit out of Sam in the dead of night when he got up to take a leak
    you kill me

    “Now I know what she sees in you.”
    Hey, how did Sam know Cassie fell in love with Dean when he pulled her truck out of a swamp in Ohio? Was she talking to Sam the whole time? Scamps!

    As much as I hate the racist truck the lightwork in all of its scenes is stunning. Big ups to Ladouceur and Shapiro.

    Aw, that moment in the car at the end. Love the song.

    Great comment about Tough Guys in Old Hollywood films, men who can only be truly vulnerable around women. I also always think about buddy movies (and TV) where you get these two men whose primary and central relationship will always be each with other. But even in buddy movies they have friends, spouses, etc. Who is always driving/walking off into (a matte painting of) the sunset in Supernatural? I’ve spoken before about romance tropes. War films are another touchstone: men under duress, in moral and physical peril, foxholes, etc. Throw a whole bunch of these references in the tumble dryer and what you pull out at the then is this bizarre mutant sweater that will only ever fit one, um, show. Am I done with this metaphor yet?

    • Helena says:

      //Throw a whole bunch of these references in the tumble dryer and what you pull out at the then is this bizarre mutant sweater that will only ever fit one, um, show. Am I done with this metaphor yet?//

      And where can I buy one of these sweaters, Jessie?

    • Jessie says:

      Apparently it is very important to me that Whoopi comments on just about everything I say. Thanks in advance for fixing my tags Sheila………

    • sheila says:

      // And he’s so huge in a way you’re not usually forced to recognise but everything is so soft. //

      It’s like his chest is carved pewter breast-plate armor. He really is freakin’ cut. We just never see it. And of course she’s nicely covered up by the blankets and by curling up next to him – he’s the one half-naked and objectified.

      And right: we never ever see him like this. The Lisa thing may have started with wild sex but I get the sense that that was not what was going on between them when she took him in for a year. They don’t have any sex scenes, if I’m recalling correctly – and no pillow talk. Their relationship conversations are in kitchens, garages, stairways. And they are extremely intimate in their own way. He obviously loves her for many complex non-mushy reasons but I’ve always wondered if trauma/PTSD/grief made him, you know, impotent. For the most part, anyway. I mean, when he goes to get the Impala out of storage – it’s like he is retrieving his cock. It’s obviously filmed that way.

      // Dean is just flailing inside and JP lifts it up into this kind of light-hearted realm of love. //

      I know!! We almost never see them like this. I’m trying to think of another equivalent and am coming up empty.

      Backstory gaps: I wonder about Sam in college too. It’s clear that pretty much all he did was study and go to the library, and get straight As. He wasn’t partying or any of that. He made friends (and then of course, seasons later, we learn that these were all strategically “placed” in his life – so sad, so awful) – but yeah, how do you … cope?

      It’s like growing up in Witness Protection or something. Or like Running on Empty – one of my favorite films of all time. There’s a lot of Winchester correlations with Running on Empty.

      The Timeline: So Cassie was in college when they were dating. If Dean’s the same age, then that would mean it was about five years ago? But maybe Dean’s a little bit older than her, I can’t tell. It is interesting to think of what was going on for him that would make him open to such a thing. I think he gave up on love early. Maybe “Bad Boys” was the clincher, you know? “Oh. Okay. School dances and romance and stuff are not for me. That will not be my path.”

      Also, how did he hide the relationship from Dad? You’d think he would feel he would have to, right?

      // She didn’t have one of those big oh, you’re SAM reactions to Sam, which hints that he didn’t say much about him, maybe because that whole thing was still too much. //

      Right! I love how she just looks at Sam, says Hi, and back to Dean. I guess I love it because it’s nice to think that Dean had a relationship where they talked about things OTHER than his family.

      // And at the same time thank Christ the mayor died or maybe he never would have put his clothes on again. //

      hahahahahahahaha

      // Hey, how did Sam know Cassie fell in love with Dean when he pulled her truck out of a swamp in Ohio? //

      DYING. Yeah, that line comes from out of nowhere. Just a kind of bossy-script way of looping what they’re doing (pulling a rotting truck out of a swamp) to the romance – because yeah, that makes TOTAL sense. When I fall in love I immediately think of rotting racist skeletons in a Missouri swamp.

    • Jessie says:

      He really is freakin’ cut. We just never see it… he’s the one half-naked and objectified.
      Maybe what feels so tonally different in that bedroom scene is that he’s treated in a beefcakey way. And beefcake is about safety, right? Beefcake studs are impenetrable, they’re under no threat from anyone’s gaze, they’re not disasters through and through. That interlude of safety is Cassie’s gift and it’s strong enough to change the visual dynamic of the show.

      That’s something that would have been impossible for the show to represent with Lisa, for all the reasons you mention. And I mean we’re not talking about Phantom Traveller here where Sam might as well be Sundance coming home for Etta.

      Running on Empty is a great comparison! I should watch that again. Add it to Helena’s reader.

      If he didn’t hide the relationship from John, he definitely hid the depth of it. John would probably encourage the sex, but woe betide anyone who wants to make an emotional connection.

      • sheila says:

        // And beefcake is about safety, right? Beefcake studs are impenetrable, they’re under no threat from anyone’s gaze, they’re not disasters through and through. //

        Excellent observation! We’ve discussed that before – and how the show doesn’t “objectify” them in the way we would expect, in a Bay Watch kind of “guys showing us their hot bods” way. It stands out when it does. Like that one scene of Sam coming out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel and it’s like, “HOLY BATMAN NAKED CHEST”. For the most part, they are both drowning in layers.

        I mean, Cassie is almost fingering the guy’s nipple throughout this scene. I certainly don’t blame her, but it’s as graphic as the show gets. (Well, unless you count Sam’s sex scene with Ruby. Yowza.)

        Speaking of beefcake – you might find this interesting. My friend Mitchell and I had a conversation about Burt Reynolds: http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=57123 (scroll down) – and we talked about his nude spread in Cosmo. Mitchell made the point that it was “cheesecake” photo as opposed to “beefcake” – Reynolds was presenting himself in a “cheesecake” way, which is normally the Realm of Women – and it really was a game-changer because he was such a masculine sex symbol. And he had fun with it.

        The impenetrability of the beefcake aesthetic is not what Supernatural is about – it’s far more “cheesecake” when it decides to go there. The guys, strong as they are, male as they are, are constantly under threat of penetration of all kinds. It’s kind of awesome. I mean, not for them, obviously, but in terms of look/feel of the show.

        • Jessie says:

          I read that one! Great chat.

          We have talked about this before yes! And about how when they do go that route it’s usually Sam. The towel, his sex scenes with Ruby & Madison, his soulless workouts. And Dean, if you’ll let me beat a dead horse, kind of exists in this netherworld between beefcake and cheesecake — he can access the power of the former, he can exploit or more usually be exploited by the accessibility of the latter.

          It’s pretty destabilising. And yet I was like holy shit he’s comfortable, he’s in a safe place, make it stop! Ha ha — complicit again.

          It reminds me of all that talk of fear in the latest episode, how much of a baseline level of fear he’s always operating under.

          • Helena says:

            //kind of exists in this netherworld between beefcake and cheesecake//

            Does that make him just plain cake?

          • Helena says:

            Sorry, just coming to grips with the concept of a netherworld of cake …

            Possibly Dean’s preference, if forced to choose, would be to exist in a netherworld of pie. Sam would probably go for a netherworld of salad.

          • Jessie says:

            HA! Well you know pies can be savoury or sweet…..

          • sheila says:

            “salty and sweet. Best of both worlds.”

            Oh, Dean.

            Whatever Dean is, he is edible.

            // And yet I was like holy shit he’s comfortable, he’s in a safe place, make it stop! Ha ha — complicit again. //

            I know!!!

            Yeah, that body language, and framing, and the way he looks – the way he answers the phone, but then adjusts so his arm is still around her – it’s total Boyfriend behavior – and yeah, live it up, kids, cause we won’t see THAT again.

            Dean himself is probably like, Jeez, it’s good to get all bulked up in my leather and flannel again. Put on the sunglasses. Live in the memory of the moment, that’s enough.

      • sheila says:

        and yes: Running on Empty!! The older brother being required to sacrifice his life, his future, to the family – and he participates in that, because it’s his family and he doesn’t want to cut ties. And who would look out for his younger brother??

        Killer. That whole cult-under-siege mentality.

        Fascinating to imagine Dad and Dean working alone. I wish we had had some flashbacks of that. Of what the hell was going on there between them, when Dean was 22, 23 – Sam long gone – and it was just Dean and Dad. I suppose it’s too late for that now. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is outta here and JA is getting too old to “pass” for an early-20-something guy – but still: it’s very interesting to contemplate. Dean probably loved it, to some degree, because he was fulfilling expectations – but then also hated it – when it came to a seismic event like meeting Cassie.

        • Jessie says:

          Eh, slap a bowl-cut wig on him and part it down the middle, he’ll be fine!

          Now can you imagine JARED trying to play 17 or 20 again? It would blow their CGI budget.

          • sheila says:

            hahahaha Yeah, Jared has totally transformed. No way could he approach 22 again. And methinks there’s a bit of a receding hairline thing going on there as well.

            In the most recent episode there were a couple of shots where Sam basically looked like Marlo Thomas in That Girl. Hysterical.

      • Helena says:

        Man, who knows about Daddy’s reactions to Dean and women.

        One thing, though, I think Dad knows Dean is bait. In Dead Man’s Blood, there he is, laid out as bait for the lady vampire, who gives him the full gamut of kiss him/hurt him, right in front of dear old dad. And Dad’s calling the shots in this episode, so the decision to use Dean as bait would be his, right? I find the whole scenario pretty disturbing, and a very black mark for John Winchester.

        • Jessie says:

          oh wow, I never thought of that. Suuuuuper gross. Should be fun talking about it in the recap! ha ha

          • Helena says:

            Well, it certainly adds a rather twisted element to the whole ‘going hunting with dad’ scenario, Dad being very big on ‘I want to protect my sons so you have no choice about how you live your life’ and yet dangling his first born in front of monsters to skeeve over. That scene is one of those where I think ‘Is this me not getting something, or is this set up just really, really wrong.’

          • May says:

            “I think Dad knows Dean is bait.”

            I’ve always figured this is the case. And I’m pretty sure John made Dean use sex/his sexual appeal to get information, etc.

            “Suuuuuper gross.” YES.

        • sheila says:

          Awful. And Dean doesn’t even question it – and again, watch how he deals with it when the vampire is moving in on him by the car. This is very familiar ground to him. He submits to being kissed and groped. He’s grossed out but this is not his first time using himself this way. Dad has done it to him before. And he has participated, done it to himself. It’s a whole twisty dynamic, and yeah, it seems totally NORMAL to the Winchesters. Not even Sam balks at it.

          Also, just a guess: Dean has already been roofied, what, 3 or 4 times at that point in his life? In his own personal life? Dad just sees that aspect of Dean and instead of, you know, being worried about it – being worried that his son is seen as a walking/talking dildo to 95% of the planet – he USES it.

          Makes you wonder how it would have been different if the Winchester boys had been girls. Would you USE your daughter’s seething sexuality in a dangerous situation? Ugh. Freakin’ John W.

          • Helena says:

            I used to fall on the side of ‘Dad went mad and couldn’t help it’ but that episode tipped me over to the ‘deliberately set out to manipulate and undermine in the most damaging and inappropriate ways until and after his death in ways that have rippled out into and wrecked pretty much everything in his sons lives, particularly Dean’s’ side.

            On a lighter note

            //I mean, Cassie is almost fingering the guy’s nipple throughout this scene. I certainly don’t blame her, but it’s as graphic as the show gets.//
            The thing is, you can’t see what she’s doing with her other hand.

          • sheila says:

            Yeah, it’s really nasty. It seems like Dad focused on corralling and controlling Sam – who was always the more intractable one – but in the process, he was literally ruining Dean. Dean is expendable. I wonder if, on some level, he’s ashamed of Dean – the softness of him, the sexual thing he’s got going on with both men and women as well as monsters – You know, something may be “wrong” with Sam, but the “thing” that is wrong with Dean has to do with masculinity and what that is supposed to look like.

            Then there’s the whole “your Dad never ‘broke'” in Hell – and all that, and the obvious sexual assault Dean went through down there … and he knows that DAD knows about it.

            It’s all about sexuality. For Dean, anyway. I can barely watch Frontierland (and I love it to DEATH) – because Dean is so vulnerable, trying to fit in with a bunch of “real men”. He’s so NEEDY. I mean, it’s so so funny – the clothes, the behavior … but he is completely unequipped to … just BE.

            And there’s Sam, leaning over the bar as though he actually lives in that era, saying, “this sarsaparilla is just fine” – and he “passes” in that world. Dean never “passes”. Not in his own time, or any time.

          • May says:

            “Makes you wonder how it would have been different if the Winchester boys had been girls. Would you USE your daughter’s seething sexuality in a dangerous situation?”

            My first instincts are to say no, he wouldn’t, as John seems to live in a world of macho bullshit (where you see the idea that men can’t be raped). So he wouldn’t think sexual assault is something he would need to protect sons from, only daughters.

            And yet…the mission comes first for John. He sacrificed Dean’s childhood. He is willing to kill Sam if necessary (or pawn that off on Dean). So, honestly, he probably would use it. But only if Dean was Deanna, not if Sam was Samantha.

          • sheila says:

            // The thing is, you can’t see what she’s doing with her other hand. //

            If only the Mayor hadn’t died … they would go in for Round Two.

          • Helena says:

            //Dean never “passes”. Not in his own time, or any time.//
            Although, for some reason, I could see him doing ok in 1944, once he’d got over the suits and stopped staring around him like a gobsmacked yokel. Or binglestiff, or whatever. Tho he’s still a bit of softie in Elliot Ness’s eyes.

          • sheila says:

            “You have such delicate features for a hunter.”

            And a Campbell says that to him.

            He gets it from all sides. He is so exposed. This is his burlesque act, this is his Marilyn Monroe, Joan from Mad Men persona – it works for him, but it also makes him super vulnerable in a very feminine way.

            He honestly doesn’t even surprised by it anymore. It’s so INTERESTING. Such an interesting character thing. So specific – and I can’t think of any male who is doing this in quite this way right now. It doesn’t really exist outside of what JA is doing on this show.

          • sheila says:

            I love when Eliot Ness totally bitch-slaps him for talking about his feelings. It’s so funny to me. Because normally Dean is the “ew, feelings” guy – but in 1944, he’s a total navel-gazing softie.

            Yeah, 1944 maybe – Eliot Ness actually thinks Dean has something to offer – and Dean wouldn’t have to deal with things like, oh, vegetarians and yoga retreats in 1944. He would be like, “Oh wait, I understand the rules here! I can operate here!”

            But the guys in 1842 or whatever look at him like, “Why are you wearing a blanket?” “What the hell is up with your shirt?” “Who do you think you’re kidding?”

          • Helena says:

            //If only the Mayor hadn’t died … they would go in for Round Two.//

            Surely it’s at least Round Six by then.

            If only the Mayor hadn’t died … is now my favourite justification for everything.

          • sheila says:

            May –

            // So, honestly, he probably would use it. But only if Dean was Deanna, not if Sam was Samantha. //

            Yes.

            What is it about Sam that is not seen as “penetrable”? Why is Sam more worthy of protection? It’s so messed up.

          • sheila says:

            Helena –

            Yes, one would hope it was Round Six. It’s gonna have to live in the memory for a long long time.

            Route 666 is a bad title anyway.

            “If Only the Mayor Hadn’t Died” or “What’s Happening Back In the Bedroom” are far more representative.

          • May says:

            “Dean is expendable. I wonder if, on some level, he’s ashamed of Dean”

            My pet theory is that, when Mary was still alive, Dean was much closer to her than John. I mean, yes, Dean was only 4 and all 4-year-olds love their mothers, but I think they got along better than John and Dean did. I don’t think Dean would have been as damaged had John died instead of Mary.

            We know the marriage wasn’t perfect. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some “jealousy” on John’s part (not in a Freudian sense–ick!–just in a the-kids-come-first-now way).

          • sheila says:

            May – yeah, I can see that. There’s that wonderful moment when Dean goes to hug his mother after she fights with Dad on the phone and Sam looks on. Observing how long Dean has been “cleaning up Dad’s messes”.

            And Dean has this look on his face, almost confused, briefly – like, “I don’t even really know what you’re talking about … ”

            and yeah, Dean didn’t get enough Mother Love. His reactions to women are always sort of alert and open and excited that he’s gonna get … taken care of, maybe? He’s gonna get to be soft again, because women don’t judge him for that.

            Once Mom died, forget it – Dad went about crushing the softness in his son. Or, worse, having Dean use his softness as bait.

          • Jessie says:

            What is it about Sam that is not seen as “penetrable”? Why is Sam more worthy of protection?
            The interesting thing about Sam is that unlike Dean he’s got something supernatural going along with his childhood conditioning. He says at the end of S8 that he’d known since he was a child that there was something wrong about him. Of course he did! He was completely different from his dad. He was completely different from Dean. It’s an elemental demonstration of what the show does so well, rendering domestic traumas into supernatural events.

            Dean’s role was to be caretaker in this weird interstitial place between brother and parent. And caretaker for John, we know from 201, somewhere between son-spouse.

            Sam’s role was just to Be. And he did that, he’s always done that. But at the same time he’s always Been, Wrongly. I like the word permeable for Sam. What has seeped into Sam over the years is an ontological threat to his being.

            So it’s almost not that Sam needs more protection from the outside world than Dean (although obviously it is about that), it’s that Sam’s being needs to be controlled.

  10. Helena says:

    Right, enough with the teapots.

    I think if this had been a stronger episode structurally, it would have been the perfect counterpart to Skin, and not stuck out like the bit of the sore thumb it is. There’s ‘old friends’ in trouble parallel – and all that means about the rift between past and present life. Rebecca knows nothing of Sam’s past – Cassie knows about Dean’s job, and the aftermath is still playing out. You can’t help notice the contrast in how the siblings introduce each other. Dean pushes himself forward as Sam is in no hurry to introduce him to Rebecca. Dean on the other hand introduces Sam pretty much instantly – he’s a neutralising and normalising presence – not words that apply to Dean. Also in Skin we see ‘Dean’ both undressed (albeit while shapeshifting – bleh) and with Rebecca together on a sofa, in an utterly creepy run up to an attempted murder. How the real Dean behaves in this episode couldn’t be more different – if it does anything, it erases that creepy image for good. The shifter Dean taps into anger, resentment and entitlement, Route 666 Dean is about hurt, vulnerability and loyalty, putting aside past hurts to help someone in need. The ending of Skin is about Sam cutting ties with his old life, it’s a ‘lesson’ albeit done with some subtlety. Route 666, for all its roaring unsubtleties, bless it, doesn’t make the ending into a lesson, shuts up at just the right moment, leaving you with that beautiful smile and silence in the car.

    • Jessie says:

      good comparison – love the contrast in brotherly introductions!

      Yeah, that ending is just magic. It makes me think of the Changing Channels theme song in a really soppy and sincere way. Town to town, two-lane roads, etc, etc.

    • sheila says:

      Nice connection with Skin! I hadn’t thought of that.

      And good Lord, thank goodness “Route 666” did not end with a homily about “what we have learned” – or even with something obvious and sentimental like Dean staring sadly out of the Impala window, longingly, regretfully, whatever.

      Nope. Sunglasses, grin, silence.

      So there were some good instincts operating here, story-wise. But the damn Truck has nothing to do with anything!

    • May says:

      “Right, enough with the teapots.”

      And just as I was starting to think of brothers as Mr. Winchester and Mr. Sam Winchester.

  11. mutecypher says:

    I think I got off on the wrong floor, I was loving the Fibonnaci reference.

  12. Max says:

    Recap is a pleasure as always! But I almost choked on my tea/coffee(?) reading you preferring “Paradise” before “She brings me love” by Bad Company. This is close to blasphemy Sheila!

    I love this episode for the same reason that Sam doesn’t, it makes you start sentences with “this racist killer truck”! I know Krikpe didn’t love it either but I really don’t get it. Ok I guess it’s not in such good taste to …I don’t even care it’s so fucking great!
    It’s the perfect mix of “good” bad (um, racist killer truck) and good good (character stuff). And the character stuff is soo good! Thanks for breaking down, as you always do, why we all love, and have reason to love, Jensen Ackles. So not just the pretty boy. I just realize I’ve never really known what I’ve been looking at or why a particular moment has fascinated me so endlessly before you tell me.

    And JP really is showing us how much in awe we would all be of seeing this Dean Winchester guy in this vulnerable state. The brother-stuff is the sweetest in this episode, we’ll never see it like this again.

    Until the last minute of the last episode airs, I’ll cling to my utterly unrealistic hope of them having saved Cassie for some super-awesome big comeback. She was the one!

    • sheila says:

      “tea/coffee?”

      hahahahahahaha

      I know, I’m sorry for the blasphemy!! Just calling it like I see it!

      // And JP really is showing us how much in awe we would all be of seeing this Dean Winchester guy in this vulnerable state. The brother-stuff is the sweetest in this episode, we’ll never see it like this again. //

      I know, right? You watch this episode after seeing the rest of the series and you really really feel the loss of this kind of bond between the brothers. And Dean really NEEDS Sam to be this way, even though he hates it, and tries to wriggle out of it. Sam actually helps Dean deal with what is going on in this episode – “you need to talk to Cassie about your relationship” – Dean very well might not have “gone there” if Sam hadn’t shoved him in that direction. A glimpse of that kind of dynamic comes up again in “Mannequin” – when Ben “parent-traps” Lisa and Dean – and Sam basically tells Dean, “Go see what’s wrong, I’ve got this case under control” – totally supportive, totally pushing Dean towards the right thing – which is intimacy with his family (the family of Lisa and Ben). It’s beautiful. Way too brief!

      // I just realize I’ve never really known what I’ve been looking at or why a particular moment has fascinated me so endlessly before you tell me. //

      So happy to hear that! Thank you, Max!

      I admit to loving this episode too – even with the racist monster truck. I love it for the character stuff. It’s unique – the show isn’t going to be about their love lives, or the romances they have along the way – it’s always going to have larger concerns. But it’s interesting to see the relationship prioritized here – we get some of that later with Lisa and Amelia, respectively – but not as much as is happening here – where it’s really the whole point of the episode.

      I am glad, however, that Supernatural (except for Cassie) chose to go with having consistency in the guys’ love lives – meaning: in general, women don’t show up for one episode as a “love interest” and then are never heard from again. They are carried through in the memory of the show. Even Madison the damn werewolf is brought up a couple of times again – it was a huge thing for Sam, and the show lets him (and Dean) remember that. That’s why it’s so weird that they just drop Cassie like a hot potato.

      // Until the last minute of the last episode airs, I’ll cling to my utterly unrealistic hope of them having saved Cassie for some super-awesome big comeback. She was the one! //

      You and me both. And until the last minute of the last episode, I will also cling to my belief that Dean’s necklace will return.

      • May says:

        “And until the last minute of the last episode, I will also cling to my belief that Dean’s necklace will return.”

        YES. At the end of the last episode, when the brothers have resolved their major issues, Sam will give it back to Dean. Dean will put it on and the brothers will drive off in the impala to work a case. And everything will be right with the world.

        • sheila says:

          May – from your lips to God’s ears!

          Nothing has gone right since he threw out that necklace.

          The fact that teenage Dean was wearing it in “Bad Boys” was a relief – they remember.

          If the necklace isn’t brought back, I very well may spontaneously combust. As a meaningless protest.

    • Cat says:

      Rant Warning:

      I really do resent the show for not bringing back Cassie as the woman Dean would seek out before going to Hell. Instead it’s some random chick from the bendiest weekend of his life? Nope nope nope. And Cassie is NEVER mentioned again? Fuck that. No. I do not accept that and I will forever irrationally hold that against Lisa and Ben. I can’t help it. It would have been fine if they would have just let Lisa and Ben be a side plot for one episode showing us that Dean has father-son issues, but nope they dredged that up and made Dean promise to Sam that he would seek out Lisa based on one dream sequence of Lisa? BLEH. HATE IT. I reject that entire thing with every fiber of my being because it could easily (yes yes real-world actor availability means nothing to me!) have been Cassie with a son. Just chaps my hide and always will.

      /rant over

      • sheila says:

        Yeah, not bringing her up ever again is a big ol’ fail. You can’t set a character up that strongly, and set up the relationship as this Huge Deal, and then drop it. Supernatural is not that kind of show.

        I like Lisa and Ben though (oops! Don’t yell at me! haha) – I thought Dean’s sort of “yeah, lemme go get some more bendy action” thing was immediately changed once he saw the kid – and this whole other alternate world opened up before his eyes during the course of that episode – and he associated Lisa with that. This could have been mine. Maybe I could still have it.

        But you’re right: Cassie casts a long long shadow. It was a mistake to never mention her again. Even if he was trying to reach out to her – and found she was married – SOMETHING – to let us know they remember that it actually freakin’ happened.

        • sheila says:

          Also, to put in a line like, “Maybe this good-bye will be a little less permanent …”

          They’re usually so careful with following thru on clues like that, even if it takes seasons for the pay off – so it’s just a disappointment that they dropped the ball on this one.

  13. Max says:

    Oh yeah, but that I’ll actually bet money on making a return! It would be horrible if it turns out Sam didn’t dive into the dumpster to save that damn necklace. And doesn’t Dean know he will, counting on it? It’s something I need to believe. It would be so great to be rewarded for that trust in their relationship.

    • sheila says:

      Yeah, the way they filmed that moment of Dean dropping the necklace in the trash can, as Sam watches – leaves it open.

      I’m SURE Sam retrieved it.

  14. Max says:

    I too shall spontaneously combust if they don’t give us that scene.

  15. Max says:

    World Weeekly News!! When is that making a comeback by the way? They went out of print but Supernatural could surely bring them back from the dead as they do everyone else?

  16. sheila says:

    Okay, everyone, I’m sorry – I don’t like how my comments are set up – the threads are awkward. So I am re-locating us down here where we can continue to discuss sexuality, pie, beefcake vs. cheesecake, coffee vs. tea, and all other issues Supernatural.

    • May says:

      It is a bit confusing. I’m jumping all over the place!

      //Once Mom died, forget it – Dad went about crushing the softness in his son. Or, worse, having Dean use his softness as bait.//

      I didn’t really get a chance to fully form my thoughts up there (I was at work *cough* ON MY BREAK *shifty eyes*), but yes! I think John probably viewed Dean as a momma’s boy and tried to beat it out of him (figuratively and, I’m sure, literally).

      //Sam looks on. Observing how long Dean has been “cleaning up Dad’s messes”.//

      Sam, who has no memory of his mother, sees Dean comforting Mary and immediately frames it in terms of John. Dean doesn’t. That moment was about MOM. When Dean comforts her, he says that dad still loves her, but also that he loves her and HE will never leave her. Kid-Dean clearly picked a side (momma’s boy side).

      //So it’s almost not that Sam needs more protection from the outside world than Dean (although obviously it is about that), it’s that Sam’s being needs to be controlled.//

      THIS. It’s why all of Sam’s heaven memories are of leaving. Freedom.

      • sheila says:

        There’s that really interesting moment in Dead Man’s Blood – when Sam and Dad are in the motel room together, while Dean is out stealing blood from a corpse at a funeral home (you know, all in a day’s work). And it’s awkward at first, and then Dad says he set up a college fund, and that means he never wanted this life for his boys, etc.

        But the moment I am thinking of is: Dad says to Sam, “You and I are just very different people.” And Sam says, “No, we’re not” (or something like that).

        And at first there’s a huge closeup of John W. – as he takes that in – and Sam says, “I think we’re a lot more alike than we both realize …” and Dad sort of concedes, “maybe you’re right …”

        But it’s that first closeup that interests me, when John W hears what Sam has said and doesn’t react.

        Because by that point he knows that Sam has “demon blood” and he is probably pretty sure that “Sam” is the key to this whole thing that killed Mom – and Sam really WAS different – and if he weren’t his son, he would hunt Sam and kill him.

        So Sam’s comment, which comes from an emotional place – “you and I have a lot in common, we’re not all that different” – I don’t know, I feel like I can see almost a hesitation in John, an internal registering of the comment, like: “You’re half-demon, boy. We are NOTHING alike.”

        I may be reading into it.

        Does anyone else remember the moment I’m talking about?

        • Helena says:

          Yes. Wow.

          //I feel like I can see almost a hesitation in John, an internal registering of the comment, like: “You’re half-demon, boy. We are NOTHING alike.”//

          Which has its final expression in ‘save Sam or kill him’ …?

          Have to rewatch this episode AGAIN. I went from thinking ‘meh, vampires, to wow – this episode is so important.’

          • sheila says:

            Totally!! You can see John insisting that they are “different” – and seen in one interpretation it could be read as a giant concession, letting Sam be his own man – but Jeffrey Dean Morgan is not actually playing it that way. You can feel him resist the comparison.

            And then in the next second, he matter-of-factly dangles his first-born as sex-bait to the vampires. And none of them think it is creepy at all.

            Father of the Year!

          • Helena says:

            And why do you think he doesn’t tell Sam? Inability to tell the truth to his children and not be utterly controlling aside.

          • sheila says:

            and, a propos of nothing, I have a white-hot crush on that lead male vampire.

          • sheila says:

            I remember Jessie making a comment a while back that we so see Dad through Dean’s eyes that it is really a very slow process to understand just how messed up Dad really is – that he is NOT a hero. I had a similar experience – I was reading into John’s comments/looks a lot of Love and Caring (albeit twisted) that I now think is bogus.

        • sheila says:

          Helena – I wonder that too. Part of Dad’s uber-macho need to control the narrative, and keep his sons on a “need to know” basis?

          He says flat out that he doesn’t expect to survive the war. So he flat out expects to die without Sam knowing the truth. And then he puts it on Dean’s shoulders to handle. Maybe that was his plan all along. Dean flat out loves Sam more than Dad does. Maybe Dad knows that and knows Sammy will have a better shot at turning out well if Dean is “in charge” of the situation.

          Thoughts?

          • Helena says:

            //Maybe Dad knows that and knows Sammy will have a better shot at turning out well if Dean is “in charge” of the situation.//

            That’s a charitable spin on things, for once ;-)

            I just don’t know. I guess it’s a good sign, sort of, that Dad can’t pull the trigger on Sam in cold blood. Not telling Sam is business as usual, as is dumping responsibility for Sam onto Dean.

            Dad doesn’t entertain the thought that Dean will reject his final commandment. Dean’s biggest act of rebellion, or independence, is not even remotely considering the possibility of killing Sam.

          • sheila says:

            It’s a hell of a burden to place on Dean, though. He sees Dean as a Sherpa. It’s totally unfair. Dean is NOT unbreakable. He is so cavalier about Dean’s well-being.

            I love how the series really holds off on revealing what Dad whispered to Dean. JA talks about that in the commentary track to Episode 1 of Season 2 – that it’s not until Episode 9 (I think?) that we learn what was said. Tension. Patience.

        • May says:

          It’s been a while, so I don’t really remember. I’ll have to rewatch when I get a chance! But I believe it. Sam is right: he and John are a lot alike. BUT John can’t see past the demon-blood thing. He is all about the mission now. (I think that is how he managed 100 years in Hell without cracking. He’s fueled by anger and vengeance. Dean isn’t.)

          It’s funny. I never had much sympathy for John. But I’ve found myself wondering about what went wrong with him. I think the cupid thing—the angels basically forcing John and Mary to fall in love so they will have Sam and Dean—makes a lot of stuff click into place. Cupid induced love seems to make people a little crazy, creates a feeling that can’t be ignored, no matter the facts. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was one of the key reasons John became so obsessed.

          The marriage is so creepy in that context! Dean is horrified when he learns about it (and given everything we’ve talked about, it is much, much more than just “I want my parent’s love to be real” horror). Interestingly, Sam is indifferent/intellectually interested in it, but has no emotional reaction that we see much of (or that I can remember).

          • sheila says:

            Definitely. And Dean hates destiny, fate, things being foreordained. It takes away power, agency. It makes him feel helpless. So … nobody had any CHOICE here? We were all just chess pieces in your little game?

            He is already on such shaky ground in terms of having a stable sense of self … This is why we always see those little eruptions of emotion from him any time anyone says the word “mom” or even “family” … He has integrated none of that pain into himself – but it’s this shallow veneer over the emotion, it’s always always bursting through – he is totally not in control of it.

            So to see that this was all part of some plan …

            It’s such a betrayal.

            If I recall, when Lucifer shows Sam how individuals were “placed” in his life all along – Sam has a similar reaction of horror. It makes him re-think everything. Things he thought were real were actually engineered events.

            I may be hazy on some of the details.

          • Jessie says:

            That’s a great theory about Cupid! How interesting. Destabilises a lot of the Epic Love Story of Mary and John foundation the show’s built on. Makes me wonder if they got a soulmate heaven when John got out of hell.

            I love the way the show fiddles with the Campbells and Winchesters, and how that’s been developed through contrasting Hunters and Men of Letters, and of course playing the compare and contrast game with the two duos, Mary/John and Sam/Dean. So much fun and pretty unlike anything else out there right now.

          • Arielle says:

            Hey. I’ve only recently found these reviews but I’ve lost the last few days to reading every single one of them and every comment following. You guys are fantastic and I hope you don’t mind me jumping in on a slightly random tangent and asking your opinion.
            May, you mentioned John in Hell and how he didn’t crack for a century and I’ve heard this discussed a lot but I’ve got to say that my take on that, especially since it comes from a deliberately cutting statement made by Alistair, is that it is a bald faced lie. I find it completely plausible that Alistair is lying his ass off because, let’s be honest, who on this show knows Dean better than the demon who spent decades deconstructing him a piece at a time? Dean’s two biggest soft spots are Dad and Sam and it is not outside the realm of possibility that Alistair got his hands on John. That part I believe. The parts I have trouble with are a) that John might have been The Righteous Man and b) that he never broke.
            I base this on a few things, some taken directly from the show and some pure speculation:
            1) Why would John be The Righteous Man? Because he traded his life to bring his son back? We’ve seen others do that in the show, we know that neither John nor Dean were the first people ever to die for love so why them? It’s pretty unbelievable that no one in all of human history who traded their soul for love ever broke.
            2) No angelic army was ever sent to retrieve John. If he was supposed to be the First Seal and Heaven was still pretending that they wanted the Apocalypse stopped then there is no way they would have left him there.
            3) If John was unbroken, and thus presumably strapped to a rack somewhere deep in Alistair’s domain, how in God’s name was a waiting at the front door to bust outta Hell and sucker punch Azazel in All Hell Breaks Loose 2?
            Now for the speculation:
            Castiel’s statement in that last scene in On the Head of a Pin, when taken in context with what we learn in Lucifer Rising, implies to me that The Righteous Man is actually a stand in title for Michael’s True Vessel. It was Dean who broke the First Seal and not John because, in a sense, Dean was the First Seal. This also, to me anyway, fits nicely with everyone’s obsession with having Sam break the Final Seal. If Lilith’s death was all that was required there had to have been other ways but everyone on both sides was dead set on getting Sam to do it. Taken with the True Vessel knowledge. that implies that the Final Seal wasn’t Lilith but in fact LilithandSam: Lucifer’s First Demon killed by Lucifer’s True Vessel.
            None of it can really be substantiated but it does seem to fit into the themes of prophecy and predestination that the angels adhere to so strongly. Thoughts?

  17. Max says:

    sorry am I missing something? where are we going?

    • sheila says:

      No, never mind – we were all talking up thread and the way my comments are set up it was getting confusing. But there’s more going on up there!

      :)

  18. Helena says:

    //And then in the next second, he matter-of-factly dangles his first-born as sex-bait to the vampires. And none of them think it is creepy at all.

    Father of the Year!//

    Bringing it downthread.

    Not for nothing are there direct comparisons with Azazel.

    That’s what I find fascinating about the Benders episode too. This image of corrupting fatherhood, and a corrupted family of hunters, no less. They aren’t just monstrous mirror images, there are direct parallels with the Winchester family dynamic.

    • sheila says:

      Definitely!! And Sam is the one imprisoned, while Dean, yet again, is being dangled in front of the monsters as something “delicious”. He’s super grossed out, of course, but it’s really just part of his everyday reality, being skeeved on like that. Part of how he will engineer Sammy’s escape.

      I LOVE that cop, too.

      • Helena says:

        //And Sam is the one imprisoned, while Dean, yet again, is being dangled in front of the monsters as something “delicious”.//

        And forced to choose between Sam and the lovely lady cop – just horrible. The anguish. An absolute nadir.

        Unpicking the handcuffs, great scene.

        • sheila says:

          Yes, that choice! Killer.

          I watch the unpicking the handcuffs scene and think: “Can he stretch his body any further apart? Don’t throw your back out, dude.”

          • Jessie says:

            Benders: first to bring us amazing hardboiled lady cops and creepy girl children! The most awesome of episodes.

          • sheila says:

            I get so excited when a little girl shows up in Supernatural and she’s NOT creepy.

  19. Helena says:

    //I was reading into John’s comments/looks a lot of Love and Caring (albeit twisted) that I now think is bogus.//

    That was a great insight from Jessie.

    I come back to that scene in Season 2 between Dean and Jo. He describes shooting cans at the age of 7 and bullseying them all. Dad, he says, gives him a look … Jo assumes, because of her own experience of her dad, that it was of pride or love … Dean doesn’t answer, but his face tells its own story. This is post-Kill Sam and the View of Omnipotent and Benevolent Dad isn’t cutting it any more. You get a glimpse of that smile in Series 1, but dammit I can’t remember precisely where, maybe when Dean arrives with the dead man’s blood or the bogus colt … it’s a smile, but a frighteningly cold and inward smile, a lower key expression of ‘Now my evil plan is falling into place … mwah hah hah.’

    If someone had smiled at me like that at the age of 7, it would have frightened me to death.

    • sheila says:

      I know.

      And think of how far Dean comes with it – in Season 4 and 5 – when he says he gets where Castiel is coming from with his Dad issues – God is “just another deadbeat dad” – He still does some switchbacks on that, and HE is the only one who gets to talk like that. If anyone else criticizes his dad, he still automatically gets defensive. That great scene when Bobby says “you’re a better man than your Dad ever was.” GULP.

      Even in Season 9, we get another glimpse – of Dad leaving Dean in a boys’ home, aka reform school, because Dean got busted for shoplifting (he lost the food money for Sam in a card game and stole some food). Sam is pissed off on Dean’s behalf – and Dean gets defensive – “I lost the money – I had to pay for it – I know how you think but this wasn’t Dad’s fault.”

      You want to shake him.

      • Helena says:

        //That great scene when Bobby says “you’re a better man than your Dad ever was.” GULP.//

        And Bobby is a better Dad than Dad ever was.

        Bobby is one of the rare father figures in Supernatural that doesn’t skeeve over Dean. Possessed Dad does and Possessed Grandfather Samuel does too. Although they are obviously possessed when they do it hints at this horrible kind of corruption deep inside them – not that these fathers harbour actual sexual feelings for their son/grandson, but they sense that his sexual and emotional core is ‘other.’ ‘In real life’ they want to stamp on it because it holds up a disturbing mirror to themselves, as a man and as their blood relation. And when possessed and the demon taps into their most withheld destructive feelings, it all comes out as this ghastly sexualised stream of abuse. Grandpa Sam practically lapdances on Dean.

        • Helena says:

          Maybe corruption is too strong a word – a visceral, unprocessable reaction, more like

        • May says:

          //He still does some switchbacks on that, and HE is the only one who gets to talk like that. If anyone else criticizes his dad, he still automatically gets defensive.//

          I like that touch. It seems very realistic to me (as someone who has some experience with flawed parents, I’ve seen that blame/forgiveness/defense/blame cycle first hand).

          //And Bobby is a better Dad than Dad ever was.//

          YES. And Dean was his favourite, too (hee!).

        • sheila says:

          // not that these fathers harbour actual sexual feelings for their son/grandson, but they sense that his sexual and emotional core is ‘other.’ //

          Yes. Grandpa Campbell. Gross. The way the Campbell clan looks at him when he enters into their midst … I mean, they can sniff his difference. It’s interesting how they are human beings but in that one scene, they seem like monsters.

          Bobby lets Dean be. He reprimands him when he thinks Dean is being dumb or girlie or neurotic, but he lets Dean’s sexuality alone, just lets Dean be whoever he is – and doesn’t comment on it, or try to crush it, or make fun of it. Dean’s a grown man, it’s his business.

          He probably has some private thoughts which would be very interesting to hear – Bobby is pretty discerning. He would have sensed early that Dean was developing in a certain way – not sexual-orientation-wise, not really – just in terms of … that “other”-ness that everyone senses. Dean’s sexual persona (to quote Camille Paglia) was none of his goddamn business.

          It’s refreshing. TOTAL subtext here. But the actors are clearly aware of it and playing it.

          • sheila says:

            It makes me think of Gladys Presley a little bit. Her son’s sexuality was so palpable – before he even knew what to do with it – before he even was having sex – that she worried about it, and hoped he’d find a nice girl. Obviously he ended up finding thousands of nice girls. :)

            But she was aware of what her son was putting out there and aware of the power of it. She was proud of it, in a strange way. But also worried that the throngs of girls clamoring around her son were going to eat him alive. He would say, “Mama, they just want to touch me. They don’t want to hurt me.”

            I don’t know – awareness of the “erotic muse”-like qualities of your offspring is touchy territory.

            Bobby doesn’t question it, or comment on it. Dean is relaxed with Bobby. There’s never any flirting going on there, you notice.

            But Dad obviously saw what Dean had going on – when Dean was young – and decided that was an “asset” that Dean could “use” in the fight. Gross.

          • Helena says:

            //It makes me think of Gladys Presley a little bit.//

            God, I just love the Bobby-Gladys Presley parallel!

            And God, the Campbells. What a creepy bunch. I felt quite relieved when big daddy shapeshifter turned up to claim his own from the clutches of the Campbell clan.

          • sheila says:

            There’s just some very interesting specific dynamic about an adult being aware of the sexuality of the burgeoning person they are in charge of. It can be creepy – but, you know, when you’re dealing with someone like Elvis – it’s a reality as a parent, I imagine. Guy’s gonna be pawed at for 20 years straight – it’s as real as any other situation in his life! And she sensed it BEFORE he became a star.

        • Jessie says:

          Azazel!John and Dean in that cabin in Devil’s Trap is one of the creepiest things the show’s ever done. He literally licks his LIPS. Kudos to JDM for taking it that far. I think Pileggi must have taken some of his cues from there.

          I just rewatched Plucky Pennywhistle’s Magical Menagerie recently (hooray) and it’s pretty striking in the way it comments on Sam and Dean’s upbringing. Dean has this horrible moment where he tells a kid to suck up his own dissatisfaction and repress his feelings and cut his neglectful mum a break. Season Seven, Time For Therapy!

          • sheila says:

            Oh man that Devil’s Trap scene.

            I adore Plucky Pennywhistle. “Ball-washer.” “What?” “Ball-washer.” “What?”

          • Jessie says:

            ha ha ha! And JA at the end completely breaking character in the face of all that glitter, and Sam’s little smiles that his brother can still laugh.

            That episode takes some risks with its humour and doesn’t land them all, but when it does it’s GOLD.

          • sheila says:

            When Dean tells him that the next Fear Monster is a gigantor robot with laser eyes – Sam’s sudden change of expression always makes me laugh out loud.

            “Well, then I’ll be sure to see it coming.”

            and yes! the look on Sam’s face when he hears Dean laughing. :(

          • Helena says:

            //And JA at the end completely breaking character in the face of all that glitter//

            That is Ackles laughing, isn’t it, not Dean. Love that.

          • Jessie says:

            That’s definitely Ackles laughing! He even has to clear his throat to get back into the Dean register. But it’s obvious why they said fuck it and kept that take — it’s pure joy.

            Ha ha, Sam leaving to take care of the robot. So many times they do that. “Well I’ve run into a bunch of stuff and always managed to kill it at the end of the third act somehow, guess I’ll figure this one out too!”

          • sheila says:

            He so rarely laughs. It’s a shocker. Like when he takes Castiel to the whorehouse and it doesn’t go as planned. Seeing him roaring with laughter is amazing – because it’s just not part of who he is, at ALL.

            The character could have been such a humorless BORE in somebody else’s hands.

            It’s always a bit amazing to see JA in the gag reels. He is so clearly not at ALL like Dean Winchester. His laughter is this helpless high-pitched roar, and his body lurches all over the place when he’s guffawing. It’s awesome. He completely hides that part of himself in this role!

            Just another reminder that this is a great CHARACTER part for him. He’s a character actor in the body of a Leading Man, and you can count on one or two hands the others that qualify.

          • Jessie says:

            The gag reels are funnier and more fun than 99% of comedy films, or their gag reels. I get the dopiest smile on my face watching them.

          • sheila says:

            The farts alone could power the entire Pacific Northwest.

      • Helena says:

        What’s Sam’s journey with the Dad thing? I get the feeling he really seems to come to terms with Dad over time, and even becomes more ‘like Dad.’

        • sheila says:

          I think Sam is a LOT like Dad. Dad’s bad-ness is made manifest in Sam’s actual blood – so Sam kind of has to deal with his own darkness in a very real and practical way – in a way that Dean can’t. It’s like struggling with mental illness. That’s a constant thing with Sam!

          And it is that very distance from Dad – his willingness to say, “Dad was a douche for leaving you in this boy’s home for stealing food to feed ME” – it shows his healthiness, his distance.

          Dean has no distance. No boundaries. Dad wouldn’t let him have boundaries. It’s one of the reasons why I find it so exhilarating when Dean DOES get pissed off about Dad – the scene where he faces himself in Dream a LIttle Dream – one of my favorite scenes in the whole series. And he goes apeshit, you had no business putting all that on me!!

          Therapeutic. But Dean can’t seem to LIVE there.

          • May says:

            Sam can compartmentalize, so he probably learned to become OK with loving his father, but not liking him and his choices.

            Plus, Dad is dead. That probably took a lot of pressure off of Sam and gave him the freedom to look back on things objectively.

  20. Helena says:

    153 Responses to Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 13: “Route 666″

    Blimey, Sheila! Not bad for an episode called, ‘racist truck, who gives a fuck?’

  21. sheila says:

    If I’m ever feeling low, I am going to come back and read this comments thread.

    Last October, if someone had said to me “glitterbomb a moose” I would have had no concept of what that meant. Now I’m like, “Oh yeah, copy that.”

    • Helena says:

      //Last October, if someone had said to me “glitterbomb a moose” I would have had no concept of what that meant. //

      We’ve all been on a learning curve here. Now it’s ‘desecrate a corpse, glitterbomb a moose, oops, if only the mayor hadn’t died … meh, whatever.’

      Do you think tshirts with ‘I glitterbombed a moose’ would go down well at the next Supernatural convention?

  22. hunenka says:

    Hi, just a lurker here, but I wanted to tell you that these episode reviews of yours are absolutely amazing, I’m happy every time I see you posted a new one. The attention you give to detail, all these little things that you point out… it’s fascinating, eye-opening sometimes, and it’s making me love the show even more than before (which, I thought, was impossible).

    So I just wanted to thank you for that. :)

    • sheila says:

      Hunenka – Thank you so much for de-lurking! So glad you are enjoying!

      I’ll have the next one up maybe this weekend – pretty busy right now – but I am not abandoning my SPN re-cap project.

      Thanks again!

  23. sheila says:

    I know I’ve mentioned many times how much I love Tessa the Reaper, and what she brought to the show in her episodes – phenomenal, so this is very exciting news.

    https://twitter.com/MyLindseyMckeon/status/451088374422466560

  24. Tabaqui says:

    I don’t have much of weight to add here, but – I live in Missouri. Earlier in May of this year? It was below freezing. So.

    And re: coffee/tea…. It always felt to me that they were sitting in a ‘parlor’ or really formal room, a place for ‘guests’ not ‘family’, and all that folderal with cups and spoons and whatnot was not only Cassie’s mom’s way of doing things (being formal with unknown people), but a way to put a barrier between her and Dean (and Sam). Between an ordered, expected kind of life (where you have sugar tongs and matching cups and saucers) and the utter insanity that is Dean and his life of killing ghosts and chasing monsters.

    • sheila says:

      Maybe so. I find it unjustified and ridiculous – as well as entertaining! That poor actress must have been like, “You want me to do what? Are you f***ing kidding me?”

      We will continue to make fun of her teapot behavior – there’s a joke about it in the comments section to “Provenance” – hahaha it will never die. This whole Route 666 comments thread still makes me laugh when I read through it. We went insane.

  25. Tabaqui says:

    Oh, I agree, it’s an incredible bit of business to saddle someone with, and the comments up there are hilarious.

    I kinda love that, in the midst of all this *very serious stuff*, what’s getting the most traction is ‘coffee or tea?’

  26. Cynthia says:

    Thank you for such an in depth review of one of my favorite episodes. I always wondered why Dean looked at the cup and put it down after looking at Sam’s. I had my own ideas, but your explanation is so logical. I am rather frustrated with the SPN writers for not bringing Cassie back nor mentioning her existence in the 9 seasons the show has been on, thus far. I understand if Megalyn (forgive me if I spelled her name wrong) is busy with other projects, but it doesn’t stop them having Dean mention her on occasion. The final scene of Route 666 made me a fan of Jensen. I don’t know if it is his experience in soap opera acting, his talent as an actor, or if he just really got along with Megalyn, but that goodbye kiss was so real, I felt the sadness of their saying goodbye. Maybe it is because of all three reasons. Hopefully, before the show has its final episode, the powers that be, will resolve the Cassie storyline for us, one way or another. I know they can; they did so in season 8, with Sara and Sam. Thank you, again for your great analysis.

  27. Helena says:

    //If they mention Cassie again, we should all throw a party.//

    A tea party? With sugar tongs?

  28. Jessie says:

    moving into an elderly relative’s (vacated) house, we have recently spent way too much time being befuddled by the cutlery drawer. If this is a fork for meat roasts why does it have a little lever? What is this thing that that looks like a speculum if speculums were also guns? Why does gravy need a special gravy stirrer? Why is this spoon so teeny? WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I NEEDED YOU, CASSIE?

  29. Helena says:

    //WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I NEEDED YOU, CASSIE?//

    In her truck stuck in that friggin’ swamp again. Damn you, Dean, where are you when you’re needed?

  30. Jessie says:

    At any one time there’s like a 60% chance he’s dead, Helena, give the guy a break!

  31. Helena says:

    But that means 40 per cent chance of being alive. That’s quite good odds for a Winchester. Or at least he could have given her Bobby’s number who’d give her a good deal on a tow, maybe cash for spare parts if the truck’s a write off.

    By the way, has anyone ever seen Bobby do anything to a car at any point in the entire series or is that scrapyard just some kind of abstract sculpture park?

  32. Jessie says:

    Oh, the salvage sign is just a facade. In fact all of those cars crossed Bobby at some point. He leaves them out as a reminder to the rest of us.

  33. Helena says:

    The yard is like a labyrinth with Bobby in the middle as a drunken, grumpy minotaur.

  34. sheila says:

    // In fact all of those cars crossed Bobby at some point. //

    HA!

  35. Betty says:

    Sheila–Your reviews are awesome. I love how you explain what the actors are doing invisibly that makes the characters so real, and the filming techniques that I never knew were being utilized. I find it extremely satisfying to read your insights on what JA is subtly doing to subvert expected gender roles. And your friends’ comments are icing on the cake (meringue on the pie?)

    • sheila says:

      Betty – thanks so much! I am glad you are enjoying them! There’s so much to analyze it can be overwhelming – besides the plot, I mean, which is secondary (for me, anyway).

      And yes, the gender-bending stuff is so great, something you totally wouldn’t expect with a character like Dean Winchester. Love it!

      Thanks again and have a great weekend!

  36. Falchetta says:

    slightly off topic, but since you mention John not breaking in hell, I keep wondering why everyone seems to take Alistair’s word as 100% truth. Maybe he didn’t break, but Alistair could have lied or exaggerated to cause Dean pain (knowing that it would).

  37. Kathy says:

    Very true, but also the tortured Dean because they needed to make him break down. There was no reason to do that to John; like John would only get the ‘normal’ torture, not the special treatment? But Dean has said several times that Demons lie or use part of the truth to hurt you.

  38. Lythea says:

    “It is a truth universally acknowledged that any man being possessed by a demon must be in want of an exorcism.”

    Oh, I love you guys. The initial analysis is always amazing, and always gets better in the comment thread. Which is not a thing that is normally happens here on the internet. I really do have to catch up so I can join in on the current conversation. But just had to put in a note of general appreciation.

  39. lindah15 says:

    Hello!

    I stumbled onto your SPN posts only last week. Thank you for all of your insight on all of the hard work that takes place both in and behind each scene!

    (And also thanks to you, I appreciate Jensen Ackles’ acting even more — and I didn’t think that was possible.)

    I know this is a year late, but I wanted to mention one of the reasons why this particular episode didn’t work for me. You’ve already covered most of the other reasons, but I didn’t see this one yet:

    To me, the emotional backbone of the story should have been grief, outrage and solace. Especially since Cassie, as written, was her own person and not just an episodic, one-off, girlfriend-of-the-week. Her father had just died as a result of a deep dark secret of a long ago act of killing. This should have resonated like crazy with the overarching Winchester saga. But Cassie, the center, the lynchpin, does not hold.

    The death of a parent is a BIG DEAL for both Dean and the show itself. I think Dean and JA were both very conscious of how this would be affecting Cassie. Or rather how it should have been affecting her. I didn’t see very many acting choices/line readings from Megalyn Echikunwoke that tapped into a suppressed ocean of grief. So many of her choices struck me as energetic and peppy, concerned with “hey, my ex is back in town”. Granted her ex was Dean Winchester, but even he and his magical pecs shouldn’t be able to evaporate her grief out of existence. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought she should have been near tears at some point after the solace of sex with Dean.

    A lot of the way I saw JA’s hesitancies and withholdings (with both Sam and Cassie) in this episode had to do with how triggery Cassie’s loss would have been for Dean, in addition to all the hurt and vulnerability you mentioned above.

    I think that’s why there’s a demonstrable disconnect on how the brothers viewed this interlude. Sam, as of this episode, had never personally experienced the loss of a parent. He would see this as a straightforward reconnection and reconciliation. Which is why he would feel something approaching delight on his brother’s behalf.

    Dean’s feelings would be more complicated, of course. But I think his initial prime motivation was just to help someone he cared about, someone who at one time had slipped inside his demarcation of family. The fact that he put aside how uncomfortable her loss would have made him, in addition to how deeply she had hurt him, spoke volumes on how much he still cared about her and how much of himself he would be willing to sacrifice for her even now.

    I suspect the producers regretted this missed opportunity. And I think it’s why Cassie is never mentioned again in-show. I dunno if they ever will.

    • sheila says:

      lindah15 – welcome! Thanks for reading and commenting! I really appreciate it – and hope you feel free to comment again!!

      Yours is a very sensitive reading of the episode – and involves some subtleties that I had missed in my initial reading. It actually makes me want to watch it again – and I like your thoughts on how this was definitely a missed opportunity. Perhaps they were so concerned with making some comment on racism (misguided!) … that they missed that subtlety of the death of a parent and how that would dovetail with Sam and Dean’s feelings – as well as the fact that their dad at this point was still MIA.

      In later seasons – SPN never misses an opportunity to connect the “case” with the emotions/psychology of the brothers – and sometimes it gets way too literal – but sometimes it really helps. It’s the power of the show. This is NOT just Monster-of-the-Week – every single case is an opportunity to go deeper into the experience of the two leads.

      Seeing that Dean had had a girlfriend, that he let someone in like that … was an awesome deepening of understanding of the character. It helps to remove Dean from the initial Han-Solo structure of the character – adds complexity, etc., especially when you meet Cassie and see who she is. A powerhouse, a sweetheart, a woman with her own life, her own interests, a passionate devotion to her own career, etc.

      But the freshness of grief – and the looming loss of a parent (especially to a violent death) – was not really explored. SPN would get much better at making those connections once the series found its sea-legs.

      Thanks again for the comment and for sharing your thoughts!

      • lindah15 says:

        Thanks for the welcome!

        I’ve been thinking about why Megalyn made the acting choices she made. I have a theory…

        On paper, hooking up with an ex while she’s freshly bereaved is kinda skeevy. The fact that it did not come across that way at all is entirely due to the performances by JA and ME.

        But I think it’s possible the producers went through a de-skeeving process after the script had already been locked, and that process would have been removing/hiding/ignoring a big portion of Cassie’s grief and vulnerability. It worked, but I think it made us lose some of Cassie’s depth and a lot of the episode’s resonance.

        But that’s just a theory. I have no idea if that’s how it actually went down. But it’s a built-in fault of the story structure.

        I admit I’m not a fan of this writing team at all. At all. But your post has made me look more closely at this fan-reviled episode and appreciate what it does do right, so thanks! I look forward to your take on some of their later episodes, if you decide to continue this project that far…(yes, please?)

        At the moment, I’m getting to the John Winchester episodes. You and your commenters are extremely insightful!

  40. mking400 says:

    I got sucked into the world of SPN after it found its sea legs. At this point, I can’t remember exactly when that happened. Could be season 2, 3, not sure. Though in watching season 1, a few fuzzy things are coming to back to memory. Regardless, I have been in love with the show ever since my first viewing. Stuck with it through all episodes, good and not so good.

    Through the years, references are made to other seasons, other episodes. Most I remember, and a few slip by unnoticed. I knew at some point, I would go back to the beginning with my own eyes, and not through Then/Now flashbacks. Seasons kept going by, schedules busy, and the idea gets pushed aside. Taking myself to where it all started, especially after 10 seasons, seemed like such a daunting, time-consuming task.

    For whatever reason, things clicked into a place where I came about watching the pilot. Then the next. And the next. I have been treating it as a gift to myself during my birthday week. It has been a wonderful gem of a time capsule, and like savoring the best piece of dark chocolate, letting it deliciously melt in your mouth.

    Then came Route 666.

    I have slammed on my brakes and have not been able to move on just yet. The halt was not due to out-maneuvering a chase provided by a racist monster truck (I love that someone put a copywrite logo of sorts after it in a comment. Ha!). But for so many things this episode embodies. Though, I have had my share of racist monster truck moments. Will try not to digress.

    I ate this episode up! While Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal has many scenes so steamy that I felt I needed to leave and let the characters have the room to themselves, I never felt that way about Supernatural. Until Cassie came along. Wow.

    Yes, it has some wonky issues, but I am in love with this episode. Route 666 makes me glad that I have waited all these years to watch the series from the beginning. Being a fan, I would have been pissed knowing Cassie was out there, fighting the good fight, living her life, being all beautiful, smart, and cool, and, the only woman to truly capture Dean’s heart. Umm-hmm. For this show to NEVER make noticeable, meaningful reference to her through the years??? Not cool.

    The powers that be have made multiple nods to characters and situations that created less impact, I just don’t understand why Cassie has been swept away and kept in the shadows buried under so much dust of forgotten memory.

    Would it have killed them to somehow include the romance of Cassie and Dean in the 200th episode? The forgotten brother gets a sentence or two, why not Cassie?

    I know many did not like Cassie’s character. Not sure if it had to do with race, acting, the actor, the writing, or they were 12 years old and just didn’t want Dean with anyone but themselves. But as someone who did not know Cassie existed, at all, and only know about the romantic relationships, family feuds, SPN lore, etc. post-Cassie, this episode was quite a welcome surprise.

    Love interests for both Winchester boys fall into a type and typically not of color. Dean’s head most always swivels when a busty blonde wearing little clothing walks by his line of vision, or they are the ones he chats up at the local dive bar. That seems to be the preference. Not making it into a negative trait, just an observation. Much like the lack of diversity overall on the show. Which seem to go on in stretches. That could be the insistence of the WB, or CW, the powers that be, or the location of the episode. The creator has said he was born and raised in a small town, so I can see that he was drawing up on what he knew. I too was brought up in an even smaller town within the same state across the lake, at around the same age, so I totally get the lack of diversity. Only commenting on its complete absence too often when it should not have been the case. So far, season 1 has a bit more inclusion. Yay, Loretta Divine!

    Back to Route 666. In the opening scene, I thought it would be just another person killed by the evil of the week at random, only to find out its to be turned into an issue that is race related. I was poised to cringe, ready to find out the writers’ take on it, and how it would play out. Then the reveal of Cassie as Dean’s love interest, made ME do a double take, sit up, and take notice instead of Sam. Already poised to cringe for other reasons, I was in position to see how the writers would let this relationship unfold.

    Surprised yet again, they did not make an issue of an interracial relationship. Granted, this aired in 2005 and one would think this is not a big deal. However, it’s 2015 and it’s still turning heads. A white man with a black woman has, for whatever reason, always been more taboo than the opposite. So, while it is not as big a deal with interracial relationships now (though for many, it still is), and they are becoming more mainstream, it was not the case so much ten years ago. Not with any popularity anyway.

    Because the SPN writing staff handled the idea of Dean and Cassie so well, I was allowed to check this woman out free from shackles of race in the dialogue. Sam as the vehicle used for the audience perspective was so perfect. Every silent and verbal reaction was dead on and not unnecessarily wrapped up in making a big deal of race for Cassie and Dean. For that, I am appreciative. Racism is discussed, not ignored, and also later given gravitas by Ms. Noone. But that is not at the core of the relationship of Cassie and Dean, nor does it come off as a fetish for him.

    I’ve mentioned before, I have not seen the first season of Supernatural. That I recall. I for sure have not viewed the first 13 episodes. Because Cassie stands out, and would be in the back of my mind for subsequent episodes. As I’m sure she will as I continue going through the time warp. Though I may hop off when it comes to Dick and the Leviathan. Who really wants to relive those days?

    Likely there are better superfans than moi who can recall and recite every detail on the SPN timeline. I can’t remember the number of love interests Sam and Dean have had, nor do their names come up. Yes, when people mention their names, I then have vague memories. But they’re all kind of blah. I don’t remember a sizzling burning desire between any of the ladies. Or not noticing dialogue because you are paying attention to non verbal cues. Nor do I EVER remember watching a scene repeatedly because it induced curls in toes.

    I’ll admit it. I’ve watched it more than once. I know I’m not the only one, judging by the amount of replies just to this review, and the thousands upon thousands of viewings by people of that scene alone.

    Yes, there were many weak things about this episode, and yet, it was one of the most compelling.
    -Racist monster truck, whose body work seemed to evolve with the times, but carried its racial intolerance with it all the way from the 60’s.

    -Cassie not being as broken up or emotional about her father’s murder as one would be in those circumstances.

    -The Dean and Cassie bliss being interrupted by the Mayor’s death (okay, those are my own selfish desires).

    -Cassie being tormented in every corner of the bottom floor of her mom’s house by the racist monster truck. I would have bought it if prior to that scene she was being chased in her car, was able to give it the slip, and make it to the inside of the house. Whereby rasict monster truck would antagonize and scare Cassie from the perimeter.

    -Blocking regarding the tea/coffee scene. People were quick to jump on that. It’s understandable. While watching, I kept thinking that blocking was a bit flowery in its expense of energy. So again, I fell out of the dialogue and let my mind wander. It wasn’t until she had business with the sugar cubes did I notice the coffee/tea shuffle. Dean and Sam don’t really drink tea. The complicated dance Cassie performed is usually done with tea, coffee not so much.

    It was a bit busy. A few possible reasons: It could have been the product of the writers painting themselves in a corner, and the blocking was a way to get the characters out and moving into the next beat. Could be a set design thing. In a modern layout, Cassie could have given her chunk of text in the kitchen and brought the coffee mugs over on a tray where they were seated because the space would allow for that action. Or, it was originally written that she’s sitting during her monologue while they all have coffee/tea. But it came off a stagnant while looking at dailies and decided to change the blocking. Or, that business came about during a table read. Could have been all of those things. Who knows.

    I am surprised that people jumped on coffee/tea, but no one questioned the blocking of the dock guys the boys questioned. If indeed they were supposed to be peeling shrimp, that did not read at all. I knew it had to be something pertaining to seafood that they were supposed to be doing. But, their movements had more of a look of two old guys playing chess at a park but they were sitting side by side. I guess everyone was more caught up on when Dean and Cassie would appear in another scene to notice. I’m guilty of that too, but the blocking of the older men at the dock bugged me. One guy pretty much sat there, while the other gave his take on the racist monster truck and push something with his finger around on the table in front of him.

    Dean’s reaction to the coffee/tea was good, and necessary. Sam’s reactions and the ability to carry those one-sided conversations…gosh, hats off. I am continually blown away by the acting choices these guys make. In addition to being the leads in an incredibly popular show for 10 years. Leads that are in practically every scene of every episode for 10 years. I know there are a few exceptions here and there, but they are acting for a good 40-43 minutes of every show, every week, for 10 years.

    I think some people don’t realize how much work goes into it. That is a LOT of dialogue to memorize in one episode. You’re handed last minute changes to what was already memorized moments before shooting. Not to mention the added the layers of nuance, stunts, effects, green/blue screen reactions, props, wardrobe, makeup, or other actors in the scene not being on top of their game, which can throw off so much. The camera picks up everything.

    So while I did get a slight jolt out of the moment with the coffee/tea biz, at the same time it made me thoughtfully wonder and appreciate the choices Cassie and Dean made with that bit. As a character, if Cassie’s mind was all over the place with her father, work, deadlines, her mom, murders, a racist monster truck terrorizing the town, and this incredibly hot man she broke up with who is sitting feet away looking like he has carnal thoughts going through his mind, AND Cassie likely has those same thoughts, I don’t blame her for the busy-ness of her actions while conversing.

    Cuz let’s face it, I know MY mind would be racing with a whole awful lot if put in that same situation. Therefore your actions would be read the same.

    Okay, back to Cassie and Dean. Those two had excellent chemistry from the get go. None of the other ladies who have crossed paths with the boys have been nearly as compelling. So much, you want to see more of them interact in any way, not just romantic. I really had to go back and listen to the dialogue because it was so fascinating watching Dean and Cassie together. Didn’t matter what they were doing. The fight/love/cuddle scenes heightened the attraction. But I was just as invested when they would drink coffee, or say goodbye. These two worked. Unlike anyone on the series since.

    I don’t want to cop to the easy route of thinking that in later episodes the guys were in real life relationships outside of the show, so the love scenes on TV were not as played up. Granted, SPN is not about romance, but only speaking of the romance that has been woven into the series. It is truly about chemistry. And I have yet to see Jensen carry himself in the same way on that show with another woman. Those two made the relationship of their characters real. Love scenes on screen (and on stage) are not super sexy in real life while shooting. But, to take that, make it look convincing, and so much so, that you want to watch that scene, and any other scene more than once, is some real good ol’ chemistry. A lot of trust goes into that bond, and if it lacks it shows.

    Those two got real comfy with each other and it reads so well. I’m not saying they carried on romantically in real life, but that they brought their A game to their romance on screen. When the chemistry is not there, you can tell in the little things. They are minute, but they are there. It can be in how an actor holds back and it’s not for emotional effect, or hand placement. An air of reserve in what is supposed to be a passionate kiss. How the shoulder moves during a kiss or embrace.

    Cassie and Dean did not display anything but heat and chemistry the entire episode. Believe me, I was looking for some sort of stiff reserve on Jensen’s part because I had made assumptions about his character. He’s good. If either of those two actors felt any sort of negative feelings about the other, it did not come off that way. The attraction blew through the roof in how they looked at the other, his protective arm behind her back, her level of comfort and safety she exudes and gives to Dean, his hold on her while cuddling and returning to it when interrupted. Even the kissing was just shy of tongue, that last one being quite wet (go back and look at that again). IF I had any doubt about their chemistry, it was erased when Dean was making Cassie become one with that mattress. Whew! Needed a fan for that one indeed! I don’t know about that other song used in Netflix, but Bad Company’s She Gives Me Love fit that scene beautifully.

    That scene and, frankly, all of them are hot, sexy and made me want more of Cassie and Dean. I hope the powers are checking out these posts and will give us more of those two cuz I know I am not finished. I can’t imagine they are worried about saving face after all this time. They’ve written in, and around far crappier situations. If nothing else, they can capitalize on the latest trend of interracial relationships and act as if they are exploiting it. At this point, I don’t care. I just want more Dean and Cassie love.

    I think I’ve gone off on a rather lenghty tangent, and gotten most all of the thoughts out of my head. Felt like I couldn’t continue watching the rest of season 1 without somehow finding out if there were others out there who felt as strong with everything Route 666 had to offer. My apologies for errors in spelling and such. Was typing fast and furious and wanted to get it all out before I got distracted and eventually not post anything. Thereby becoming just another lurker like someone else mentioned. :)

    Thank you Sheila for writing such an intelligent, compelling, thought-provoking review for this episode. And thank you to those who have also taken time to make equally interesting comments. I’m not sure I’ll have the strength to stay away from future reviews, especially if they are as juicy to wrap my head around, and as lengthy in additional responses. It was such a joy to stumble upon this awesome review/reply after reading, and weeding, through so many juvenille and/or racist comments by teens and surprisingly, adults on other forums.

    I wanted to geek out on this episode with fans who could express their opinions, respect opposing views, keep it engaging, and not be hurtful or demeaning because of the annonymity of the internet, or because they don’t know any better. This has been a refreshing change of pace. Thank you all!!! :)

    Every department within Supernatural deserves whatever kudos come their way. Lighting, sets, props, makeup, special effects, location, editing, DP, so on, and so on, and so on. For all the men and women who are a part of the Supernatural machine keeping it going all these years, kudos. And obviously to our leading men. I’m still blown away by their treatment of the craft after all these years. If not for their committment, the show would not have lasted nearly as long as it has.

    I will, like I’m sure all of you, watch Supernatural til its final episode. And will tune in when/if they ever decide to do reunion episodes down the road, ala 24. Til that time, I seriously hope that they have the cojones to stage a return of Cassie in a meaningful way whenever the final season comes about. There are ways to work around shooting schedules, so hopefully the excuse of availability won’t be an issue.

    Would I love for Dean and Cassie to eventually have closure and settle down in a place of their own in Ohio, sure! She’s feisty and independent enough to keep him from being bored and allow him to spread his wings. Besides, who wouldn’t love a woman who is awesome in every way, AND knows place settings and the purpose for every utensil created, and keep a man guessing is it coffee or tea?

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