Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 11: “Scarecrow”

Directed by Kim Manners
Story by Patrick Sean Smith
Teleplay by John Shiban

“Scarecrow”, Episode 11, is a stand-alone great piece of television. It’s essential to the overall mythology of the Arc of the series, but there’s so much more in it. The script is great, the direction is great, the mood is great. It brings back Demons. It’s hard to remember that demons are a relatively new thing in Season 1. It’s not assumed that a Demon killed Mom, but when we first meet a demon in “Phantom Traveler,”, it sneers at Sam, “I know what happened to your girlfriend.” It is then that we realize that demons are not like your run-of-the-mill ghost/spirit. Ghosts/spirits are self-obsessed and self-consumed. They only care about their own pain and their own revenge. Demons are working on a larger scale, and seem to have an actual End Game. We still don’t know what it MEANS, and what it has to do with the Winchesters, but suddenly, in “Scarecrow,” demons get personal. They are not just connoisseurs of random violence. They have the Winchester family specifically in their crosshairs.

We are introduced to a major major character in “Scarecrow,” named Meg (played by Nicki Aycox), and she will last (albeit in a different form) until Season 8. I miss her.

“Scarecrow” also plunges headlong into the growing conflict between Sam and Dean, something set up in the pilot, and continued on, looked at through different angles of the prism, in every episode since. Dad continues to be missing, although in “Home”, we realized he was still alive. The argument between the brothers over what to do about this situation has come up repeatedly, and in “Asylum,” the episode before this one, the tension is about to boil over. Dean has received a mysterious text from an unknown number, giving the boys coordinates of where to go next. Dean obeys the order from Dad, as he was trained to do, and Sam resists. He wants to know WHY. Dean doesn’t CARE why. This conflict has years of backstory behind it: Sam the rebel son, Dean the obedient older son, Dean’s frustration with his sibling for not being a better son, more obedient and respectful, and Sam’s rage at not being allowed to go his own way and develops how he sees fit. “Asylum” ended with Dad finally calling the brothers, their first actual contact with his voice since the series began.

There is a lot of ground to cover in “Scarecrow”: the brothers’ argument, the introduction of Meg, and the reappearance of Dad. There is also a monster to fight and a case to investigate, just like any other “Monster of the Week” episode. John Shiban wrote the script, with the actual story being by Patrick Sean Smith (“Scarecrow” was his only Supernatural job, although he went to be the creator of Greek, following in the footsteps of Supernatural creator Erik Kripke). John Shiban, of course, got his start on The X-Files (as a writer and producer), and has had a stupendous career ever since, executive producing Star Trek Enterprise and Breaking Bad, executive producer on Supernatural, as well as a writer of many of the great Season 1 and Season 2 scripts. He has moved on to other things, but is still a consulting producer on the show. In Season 1, thus far, Shiban was responsible for writing the scripts for “Skin” and “Hook Man”. Thinking thematically, there are some interesting connections between those scripts and the script for “Scarecrow”, especially with “Skin,” where the brothers’ relationship is first really destabilized by undercurrents of resentment. Shiban revisits the same territory in “Scarecrow,” and the results are explosive. The ground has been prepared: when Sam walks away from Dean, it may be upsetting, but it doesn’t come from out of nowhere.

The “Scarecrow” script could very well have been a mess. It could have felt way too bogged down with all the ground it had to cover. It could have been cheesy beyond belief. A scary scarecrow? Please. Instead, it keens with a kind of eerie unspeakable creepiness, the kind of violence that can’t really be pointed to or seen, but is instead felt/sensed in the actual atmosphere, like ozone. This is the world the brothers inhabit, and there are no “days off” from such a mood. It gets inside of you. It inhibits what may be your natural responses. You hunker down. The threat is everywhere, in the air you breathe.

There are obvious Wizard of Oz references throughout “Scarecrow,” not to mention in the series as a whole. The boys hail from Kansas, after all. I discussed all of the various inspirations for Supernatural in this introductory post about the pilot. The inspirations run the gamut: from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to, even more explicitly, On the Road. But Wizard of Oz is in there, too. It’s been such a subtextual reference all along that I was thrilled when it “went text” in Season 9, looping in Frank Baum and his daughter Dorothy. You just felt all along that there needed to be some sort of Wizard of Oz payoff for all of those references sprinkled along the yellow brick road.

The scarecrow in Wizard of Oz bemoans the fact that he was made without a brain, and the monster in “Scarecrow” is certainly brainless, working on instinct and mindless need. Nature must be kept in balance. If that means human sacrifice, so be it.

There is a kindly aunt and uncle in “Scarecrow” who have taken in their teenaged niece, who is named “Emily” (shades of “Auntie Em”). And there is even a scene with people in a root cellar, although not because a tornado is coming down the pike.

While Wizard of Oz dominates, the mood and feel of the episode calls to mind Shirley Jackson’s creepy stories, “The Lottery,” in particular, with its chilling vision of a town gathered in the square for a mysterious lottery. (If you haven’t read it, then I beg of you to do so. And skip this next section for there are spoilers.)

The mood of the story is benign, ordinary, with good ol’ hometown gossip and recipes and chores to do and chilluns to mind. Until you realize what the lottery is about. The mood turns, horrifyingly, in the last line:

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

Shirley Jackson

After the story first appeared in The New Yorker, the magazine was bombarded with angry anxious letters about it. It was that disturbing. One person asked, worriedly, “Are you describing a current custom?” That comment alone is tribute to Shirley Jackson’s massive power as a writer. Jackson surrounds her terrifying visions with cloying female domesticity, suburban small-town life, sewing circles, genteel boarding houses, country lanes. But she looks beneath the surface of American life, and finds blank-faced horror.

The Supernatural writers know their Paradise Lost, that’s for sure, but they know their Shirley Jackson as well, I’d bet money on it.

One of the uneasy elements of humanity revealed in “Scarecrow” is how dangerous “consensus” can be. When people feel the need to agree, when they succumb to the pressure of the group, when the group over-rides the individual, Evil can be justified. You can do ANYthing if you are operating under the assumption that what you are doing is “for the greater good” (a line that comes up repeatedly). This is a landscape Supernatural will re-visit repeatedly. I mean, hell, the angels operate under unquestioned consensus. The angels are willing to sacrifice thousands of people in order to save millions. On the one hand, if you think of it as war-time logic, it makes sense. Thousands of guys died on the beach at Normandy. Even more civilians died in the wake of the invasion. But it was seen as necessary for the greater good. I won’t argue with THAT. So, as with any moral dilemma, it really depends on what angle you look at it. If you think about the Free Will conversation which enters the series explicitly in Season 5, but has been there from the beginning, then you can see that Dean and Sam are on the side of the individual and choice. But, interestingly, the whole “consensus” problem is also operating in the Winchester family. The “consensus” was set by John Winchester: You are a part of this family and therefore you do things my way. Saving the WORLD is more important than your happiness. And Dean and Sam both bought that (Dean more than Sam). They bought it because they had to. They were children. This was their father. You only rebel when you know there is something else out there, some other destiny you may want to chase. But the pressure on Dean and Sam to conform to what their father expects of them, and not just that, but who their father thinks they are, represents a huge and dangerous personal level of “consensus-building”.

Does John know how smart Dean is? Does John know how soft Dean is? Or does he not recognize those things because they don’t “fit” with his conception of his eldest son? I would bet that he sees these things and does his best to crush it out of Dean. Which is why Dean is so conflicted. Both brothers do this with one another, too: Dean sees Sam a certain way, and can’t adjust when other things come into play. Sam has a version of Dean which dominates in his mind, and is surprised when Dean doesn’t cooperate with that image. “Consensus” means the blurring out of individuality, “consensus” means clipping off that which does not fit. Consensus is inescapable in the Supernatural mythology.

When a group decides to do something, think something, ban something, fight something, it is very difficult for an individual to resist. What is one man against so many? A group coalesces into something hard, something unbreakable. And look out for when people say “we” in that respect. It’s ideological bullying. Saying “we” is an explicit signal: “Everyone else thinks this. Why don’t you?” Christopher Hitchens wrote a lot about the use of the word “we”, saying, at one point, something along the lines of: “Do not involve me without my consent.” You hear a lot of “we” talk in political talk, too, from both sides: obviously each side has a vested interest in appearing “unanimous” on all subjects. It drives me crazy, because I am neither left nor right, I am one of those annoying people who flows between the sides, picking and choosing what I, personally, believe in and think is right. As a contrarian and an outlaw (really, no other word for it, also it just sounds cool), I am sensitive to the extreme to the use of the word “We” and recognize it as the forceful-consensus-building-tactic that it is. Sometimes using “we” is helpful, especially in critical writing, but only in specific cases. I use it to describe story: “we then see the scene unfold …” blah blah, but in general, it should be avoided. Or at least used sparingly. It definitely should not be used when you are describing an opinion. “We obviously all feel bad for so-and-so.” Don’t presume to speak for everyone. I was in a writing group once with a woman who clearly wanted to be writing articles for women’s magazines/Deepak Chopra-type stuff/inspirational stuff. She presented something to the group and my comment was, “It would be interesting to see how the piece would read if you took out the word ‘we’ throughout and replaced it with ‘I’.” People HIDE behind the word “we”. I’ve done it myself. I try to catch it when I do it, and take my own advice: “Sheila, just say ‘I’. You don’t actually mean ‘we’. You mean ‘I.'”

I think I have not only made my point but bashed it on the head so many times it is now flat as a pancake.

The last concept I wanted to throw out there was the concept of the “straw man”.

Drawing by Jon Tan

When I used to write about politics, I ran into “straw men” all the time. The “straw man argument” is extremely hard to combat. That’s why it is such an effective tactic. Someone shows up with a “straw man argument”, mis-representing what you have said, and they go about attacking the straw man, and all you can say in response is: “But that’s not what I said. You are mis-representing what I said.” Obedient little soldiers rush into the fray wielding pitchforks in order to attack the straw man, or, conversely, they use the pitchforks to protect the straw man. It’s amazing how PREDICTABLE everything gets when the Straw Man Argument is used. You could almost write the script beforehand. It confirms my suspicion that the disappearance of Rhetoric classes and Logic classes from public school curriculum has been a tragedy, and has ruined generations of people’s ability to engage with difficult concepts and critical thinking.

There are a couple of “straw men” throughout the episode. The whole thing opens with John Winchester telling the boys it’s “not safe” to come to him, and also to just follow his orders without questioning him. All of that could go under a “straw man” umbrella. It’s bull shit, really. And it helps silence Sam, it helps batter down Dean’s individuality. How do you fight a straw man? It’s so effective. So, too, the townspeople’s justifications for their horrible acts. They are protected from drought/foreclosures/illness. Their insistence that pain has NO part in life, that they are better than others who are not so “blessed”… all of that creates a giant straw man. It’s all a distraction, really, from the existential realities of human life. Meg is a walking/talking “straw man argument”. She erects a beautiful and alluring attitude for Sam to stroll into, live in, and it almost gets him. She reflects to him the pain of feeling like an outsider in your family, of not wanting to be bossed around. And she turns Dean into a straw man, too, knowing that Sam is already halfway there, and then leads him closer and closer to it. In Meg’s version of events, Dean is the “scarecrow”.

Dean and Sam will fight many “straw men” over the course of the series. These straw men will be external and also internal. They will have to use their free will, their brains, their battered senses of self, their moral compasses, in order to combat everything that comes at them.

It’s hard to believe that one 42-minute episode of television could somehow get all of that “in there”. But “Scarecrow” does. And it does so elegantly, subtly, emotionally.

Kudos to Kim Manners and Serge Ladouceur, too, for the camera moves throughout the episode, which reflect all of these themes. Pay close attention. The Pagan God in question operates on a cyclical basis, the round of the seasons being its primary time-table. The use of circling camera moves is almost over-the-top in the episode, but it’s a beautiful dovetail with that “circle of life/seasons” theme. The camera is always swooping around either this or that brother, panning around in a wide arc. Kim Manners was, obviously, a very inventive director, and his “stamp” is recognizable. There is one close-up of Sam that is so close it basically re-defines the word. But everything that has to do with the camera has an emotional content (or it should). The camera moves reflect the “round of life” themes of the Monster of the Week storyline, and also reflect the dizzying almost-vertigo sense both brothers get when they go their separate ways.

Let’s get down to brass tacks.

Teaser
Burkittsville, Indiana
One year ago

The time/place stamp on the teaser is, for some reason, chilling. Perhaps it is because what happened happened so long ago in the Supernatural lexicon that nothing can be done to save anyone. You know it going in. It pre-dates Sam and Dean getting back together. It pre-dates everything. Sam is still at Stanford when this teaser goes down. It gives a helpless feeling. Also, Blair Witch Project fans will immediately recognize the name “Burkittsville”, although that one went down in Maryland. It’s just one of those fun inside-jokes that Supernatural delights in.

It’s nighttime and we see what looks like the main street of a little toy town. It’s perfect. A swoop of quaint storefronts, a little gas pump, a raised sidewalk. It’s a dream of American small-town life, straight from the Shirley Jackson playbook.

A young couple have stopped in the town to have their car fixed. While they waited, they had a meal at the local cafe, and now, the proprietors, a married couple, and a young girl, usher the couple (who are holding boxes of leftover pie) out to their car. The mood is friendly and warm. “Everyone in this town is so nice.” The young guy jokes, “What’s the catch?” You’ll find out what the catch is soon enough, sir. He shakes hands with the elderly guy, revealing a cool tattoo up his forearm. (The tattooed guy is played by Christian Schrapff, and he is gorgeous. He hasn’t worked since 2009, at least not according to IMDB, and that’s too bad. I would love to see more of him. For the sheer eye-candy factor.) The townspeople stand in a cluster, give them directions to get out of town, and wave them off into the night.

A couple miles down the road, the car breaks down. The guy pulls off to the side of the road, tries to use his cell phone, no signal. Through an orchard off to the right of the car, he sees a light gleaming, a house, maybe he can call for help. The couple walks through the orchard, which is yet another magnificent “set” in this episode, perhaps not quite as extensive as the asylum in the former episode, but equally as evocative. It’s an orchard, but we see it in many different moods: foggy night, misty morning, and it almost lives and breathes like an actual essence. It’s a great and moody landscape, a mysterious maze, you could get lost in there.

As the couple strolls tentatively through the pitch-black orchard, they come across a scarecrow. It is one of the scariest things the show has ever created.

The guy jokes, “If I only had a brain …” But the girl is starting to panic, her breath coming high in her throat. As they walk away from the scarecrow, it raises its head. She actually sees this, and gasps, but instead of being like, “Dude. THE SCARECROW JUST MOVED,” instead she just whispers, “Let’s get out of here.” Yeah, because that makes sense. The orchard seems to stretch out into infinity, the light through the trees getting farther and farther away. You get the sense they are being followed. And, of course, they are. They start to run. At some point, you don’t see what happens, but the guy disappears, leaving the girl alone. She is in a full-blown panic attack, running, and comes across her slashed and dead brand-new husband in the fallen leaves. Screaming ensues. It is so dark you can barely see anything, and as she huddles over her spouse, suddenly she looks up and starts screaming, getting up and running, with the camera in full-on pursuit. Of course, she falls, because this is a horror film, and women always fall when they are running from a monster, and suddenly, to quote Shirley Jackson, the scarecrow is “upon her”.

1st scene
It starts where Asylum left off, repeating the overhead shots of the brothers sleeping in the dark-red motel in Rockford, Illinois. Dean’s phone on the nightstand is ringing, and since Dean is dead to the world in his shirtless wonder in the next bed, Sam answers it. He sits bolt upright. “Dad?”

Suddenly, there is an enormous closeup of Dad’s mouth (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), speaking into the receiver, in a taut and emotionally coiled intense voice.

Talk about a straw man. Dad is the ultimate straw man. He appeared in the Teaser in the pilot. Since then, we have only seen him in person once, at the very end of “Home”. The series toyed with us for the intervening episodes, where Dad was often referenced, Dad was missing (and even more present in his absence), and where he seems to leave the boys messages, through outgoing voicemail messages, and coordinates texted from an anonymous number. But there has been zero actual contact. Now, with that giant closeup, we know what we are seeing is real. This is Dad, and he is reaching out to the brothers. Why? It’s been, what, a week or so, since they were back in Lawrence, Kansas? Dad said to Missouri Mosley in the final scene that he can’t see the boys until he “knows the truth”.

If you haven’t seen the rest of the series, “knowing the truth” seems to mean finding out what it was that Killed Mom,. But it goes way deeper than that, it goes to the center of the earth and deeper. It has to do with Sam. “Knowing the truth” of who Sam is and what happened to Sam and why is what Dad is really searching for, alongside of his search for the thing that Killed Mom, and Dad knows that the two things go hand-in-hand. Of course, none of that is clear at this stage in the game. But the fact that Meg shows up in this particular episode is eloquent. Because everything has to do with Sam. We are only just starting on that journey, and it will take three seasons to fulfill its promise. Ironically, by leaving them out of the loop, Dad has put them in even more danger. He has left them vulnerable in ways he could not foresee, or refuses to foresee, since he is so wrapped up in his own idea of himself as Their Leader. If Sam had an inkling of what the problem was, then perhaps he wouldn’t have been so susceptible to Meg, who is obviously suspicious right from the start. Knowledge really is power. Dad has taught the boys how to hunt monsters, how to shoot guns, how to track these things down. But he has left them totally defenseless in the most important ways.

Sam, finally hearing Dad’s actual voice, in real-time (for the first time in years, since he went to college), is blindsided. And, because he has had so much time on his own, outside of Dad’s influence, he wants to enter into the conversation as an equal. You can feel that. And Dad won’t allow it. Sam asks questions, and gets vague answers. Dad tells Sam that he is getting very close to finding the thing that killed Mom: “It’s a demon, Sam. I also know what happened to your girlfriend.” (Chillingly, he uses the same words that the demon used in “Phantom Traveler”.) Dad apologizes for not being able to “protect you from that.” As this conversation goes on, sleepy naked Dean wakes up in the next bed. The symphony of behavior that then ensues is fascinating! And it’s all colored by the weird fact that you never see this guy’s naked skin and it’s distracting. Kim Manners knows that. He uses it to the show’s advantage.

I said in “Asylum” that the weird thing about Dean being all cuddly and naked in this important scene is that it’s something I want to see, as a viewer, because I am human and I enjoy naked beautiful men. BUT because I am also fully immersed in the Supernatural mood, my main thought when I see a mere glimpse of naked biceps and chest is: “Dean! You’re far too vulnerable. Put some clothes on.”

I’ve written a little bit about “objective” and how important objective is in acting. In many ways, it’s the most important thing. Being able to call up emotions is also important, but if you don’t know how to “play an objective”, you have NOTHING. As my acting teacher Sam would tell his students, “The name of the job is not FEEL-er. It is ACT-or.” Both Padalecki and Ackles are amazing at playing objectives, long-term and short, tracking those objectives over sometimes an entire season. There are smaller objectives too: “I am hungry.” “I need to get out of here.” “I am listening to what this person says.” These are all play-able objectives. You can have competing objectives. “I really want to walk out of the room, and yet I know I have to stay here and listen.” If you are playing those competing objectives, as hard as you can, you’re gonna get some great behavior. And behavior was my “way in” to Jensen Ackles’ work. His beauty was almost irrelevant, although it made what he was doing (especially in the comedic episodes – which are my favorite) even more startlingly good. I honestly don’t mean to dismiss a lot of the gushing commentary about Jensen Ackles. I get it. He is gorgeous. But, if you are familiar with my work, then you know that I want to break down WHY someone is effective. View my writing on Cary Grant, Elvis Presley, and other very obviously attractive human beings. It’s not enough that they’re attractive. It’s how they use their beauty (or don’t) that is interesting. It is the talent that lights up the beauty that makes them stars.

My point being: Just for fun, watch a scene where Dean is involved. Try to figure out “what he wants” in the scene, and then watch him play it. Watch how many shades he finds of that particular objective. Watch what happens when he DOESN’T get what he wants (because objective is useless without obstacles.) Jensen Ackles knows what Dean wants: in a large Character-Spine sense, and also drilling down into the moment-sense. I want sleep. I want sex. I want pie. I want a good relationship with my brother. I want Dad to approve of me. I want this random person to like me/approve of me/want to fuck me. I want a drink. I want to jerk off. I want total silence, no more talking. Whatever it is, Jensen Ackles has made choices, serious choices, in his preparation with the script: for the episode as a whole, and for each particular moment. Robert Singer called him a “meticulous actor”. You don’t SEE his work, you never feel the strain/reach there, but you see that meticulous preparation in the good-ness of the work. This is nuts-and-bolts acting stuff, and of course it is best when it is totally invisible and you don’t notice it at all. But it’s a lot of fun watching Jensen Ackles “play” stuff. He seems 100% alive, but that is only because he has prepared so damn specifically.

All of that is to say: Jensen Ackles’ symphony of behavior in the next bed is fascinating. He’s shocked that Dad has called. He is also truly anxious that Sam is the one handling the call. Because Sam isn’t saying what HE would say, and that makes him nervous. Sam is questioning Dad too much. Sam isn’t aligning himself to whatever Dad is saying. Dean is, frankly, almost in a panic about that. What Dean is playing, the real objective, through those initial moments is: I need to take over that phone call. It comes out in different ways. But that’s ALL that Dean wants. Sometimes he has lines, “Gimme the phone,” sometimes he doesn’t. At one point, he reaches over to quickly put on his T-shirt, a gorgeous detail which may seem casual but totally isn’t. He needs to “man up”, because he’s about to talk to Dad. He needs to be covered for that. Underneath every expression, every gesture, every line, is the underlying increasingly urgent objective: Gimme the phone gimme the phone gimme the phone gimme the phone.

The inventive and often-humorous and always-specific “playing of competing objectives” is why Jensen Ackles is so much fun to watch as an actor.

Sam asks “Where are you?” and of course Dad will not answer. He asks the brothers to stay away from him. It’s too dangerous. Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays the hell out of his one scene. There is only one full-body shot and we see him standing in a phone booth with “Sacratel” written on the outside. For the most part, though, we are jammed up in his grill, close-ups of his mouth, his eyes. He is filled with regret, seemingly, that he can’t see his sons, but Sam blows right by that. This is bull shit. If you’re close to killing the thing that Killed Mom, then we need to be there. You have no right to shut us out of this. We gave up our whole LIVES for this quest, and now you don’t want us there?

Dad says, “You’re gonna have to trust me on this.” How often do the Winchesters ask one another to blindly follow something based only on trust? It’s happened multiple times already, and it’s still happening. Trust is a beautiful thing. Relationships cannot occur where there is no trust. But the Winchesters use trust like a battering ram against one another, they use it to bully and cow one another.

Meanwhile: symphony of behavior in the next bed. I actually find myself getting anxious on Dean’s behalf, so strongly is he playing his anxiety and objective.

Dad finally has had it with Sam’s questions and resistance, and his whole voice changes. “We don’t have time for this. I’ve given you an order.” It’s cold, it’s contemptuous, it’s a cutting-off of warmth and possibility, and it is denying Sam any agency in his own life. Sam does not respond well to that, he has a lifetime of resentment built up against that tone of voice. We’re PEOPLE, Dad. We are not DRONES.

Finally, fully clothed, and therefore ready to talk to his father, Dean can no longer stand it and he reaches out and grabs the phone from Sam. “Dad?” Interestingly, we no longer get any close-ups of Dad from here on out. We only get Dad when Sam is talking to him. Kim Manners knows we’ve seen enough. And he also knows that what happens next needs to happen in a way that leaves Sam out of the loop. Dad and Dean against Sam. Sam not included. Decisions being made for him. Him being told what to do without being filled in on WHY.

The next moment is one of my favorites, in not only this episode but the whole series. Watch Dean’s entire transformation the second his father speaks to him. Obviously, Dad is now giving Dean a direct order, something he was trying to give to Sam. Watch how, slowly, subtly, Dean’s posture changes, it straightens, his face changes, flattens out into something blank and submissive, and he says in response, “Yes, sir.”

It is our first actual glimpse of Dad’s effect on Dean. We saw the flip-side of that, in Dean’s phone call to Dad in “Home,” where he asks for help, breaking down in tears. It is so hard for Dean to ask Dad for help that we get how battered he has been by this man. But it is in the quiet military “Yes, sir” where we actually see the life Dean has led since he was 4 years old. And it’s awful. It’s Episode 11 now. We’ve seen Dean operating without Dad around, and he’s a beautiful wreck a lot of the time. He’s hot, emotionally, he’s in-the-moment, he’s tough, he’s devoted to his lifestyle, its music, his car, his sex life, his food. He tries to clean up his messes when he makes them. He is so happy his brother is hunting with him again. We’ve seen him in a lot of moods. But we’ve never seen this.

If there was one moment that made me turn on John Winchester, without even knowing the full story, it was when Jensen Ackles slowly straightens his posture, flattens his features, and says, “Yes, sir.” How dare you do that to this wrecked beautiful guy? How dare you require him to hide his light?

I said in my first post about Dean Winchester that the show wants you to worry about him in a way that is usually reserved for female damsels-in-distress characters. And here, in this scene, is why. He seems very fragile. Of course he would start the episode half-naked. No coincidence there.

Still in that obedient mode, he reaches out for a pen and scribbles down whatever it is Dad had wanted to impart from the get-go. Meanwhile, Sam sits in the other bed, and positively seethes. Dean is not furious. On the contrary, Dean is bathed in relief. Dad is alive. Dad finally called them for real! To Dean, Dad calling them with an order is a straightening-out-of-the-world that has been topsy-turvy for months. Dean knows who he is in this environment. He doesn’t have to think for himself anymore. Recall the terrible words Sam said to Dean in the final scenes of “Asylum”: “I have a mind of my own. I’m not pathetic.”

It’s hard to ever think of Dean Winchester as “pathetic”, and it’s a terrible judgmental word that I rarely use. But seeing Dean bustle around, relieved, happy, after watching him go through a radical physical change while on the phone with his Dad … you can sort of see what Sam was reacting to, monster-infected-language or no. It’s painful.

2nd scene
The Impala hurtles through the darkness, Sam at the wheel, Dean riding shotgun, looking through the notes he took from Dad with a little flashlight. Dean’s filling Sam in, who greets it all with a mixture of skepticism and rage. Three different couples, in different years, all went on cross-country road trips, and were never heard from again. They all went through the same area of Indiana, on the second week of April, before disappearing off the map. This is now the second week of April. “Dad wants us to go hunting for something before another couple vanishes?” Sam says. Dean, engrossed in the notes, says, “Yahtzee,” the first time he uses what will become a well-worn phrase for him, meaning “Bingo!”

Dean, looking through the notes and the Missing Persons files, says to Sam, completely missing the vibe that is coming from his brother: “Can you imagine putting together a pattern like this? The man’s a master.”

Without another word, Sam pulls the car over to the side of the road. Oh, so that’s why Sammy was driving! I see where you’re going with this, Supernatural! Dean is taken aback, wonders what’s going on, and Sam tells him that they are not going to Indiana to work the case. Dad called from a pay phone in Sacramento, so that’s where they’re going. An argument ensues, one we have seen before, in different forms, but it has solidified now, and become much more volatile. Like I said in other re-caps, what happens here is really a cumulation of the arguments they’ve been having all along. It’s exhausting and annoying to keep arguing about the same thing and not come to any resolution. Both actors are not playing this as a stand-alone argument, but the cumulative effects of a lifetime. And that cumulative-effect NEEDS to be in place, otherwise what happens next would feel arbitrary and forced, as opposed to organic and awful.

Sam reiterates his point: If Dad is closing in on what killed Mom and his girlfriend, then they need to be a part of it. Dean’s argument is: “Dad doesn’t want us there.” Sam’s counter is: “I don’t care.” Dean just cannot work with that. He doesn’t even understand it. It also enrages him, because this is just Same Ol’ Same Ol’. Why won’t Sammy toe the family line? Why won’t he just do what he is told to do? Everything would be perfect if he would just SUCCUMB. Sam is very strong here. He is angry at Dad, angry at Dean, and angry at the larger forces that have derailed his whole life. He will NOT be kept separate from resolution, revenge. Sam actually isn’t in line with the Winchester family credo, not all the way. OUR lives are important too. What happened to US takes precedence. Dean honestly can’t keep up, his “straw man” of Sam would never act this way. Trying to diffuse the situation he says, “I know how you feel,” which is a mistake. Sam pounces: “Do you? How old were you when Mom died? Four? Jess died six months ago. How the hell would you know how I feel?”

It’s mean. But Dean had it coming. Dean’s reliance on the age-old “Dad gave us an order, he has his reasons” is not working. I love Padalecki’s line-reading of, “I don’t understand the blind faith you have in the man.” It’s just so filled with history, it’s filled with a lifetime. He has been wanting to say that to his brother since he was a child, and now, here it is. It’s awesome. If you haven’t seen the clip of Jared Padalecki’s audition for the role of Sam, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Ackles was originally called in for Sam, and they loved him. But when Padalecki came in, they knew they had their Sam, so they pitched to Ackles the Dean role, saying, “You want to play the Han Solo of the series, instead of the Luke Skywalker?” Ackles was no dummy. He said Hell Yes. But what is so great about watching that audition is that Padalecki doesn’t have the role yet, but it doesn’t matter: There is Sam. He is who he is in the pilot. He is giving an opening night performance in an audition situation. He is making sense of the language, he is highlighting the issues he has with his brother, he is seething with an entire backstory. It makes it look like all Jared Padalecki had to do was show up. But of course that’s too simple. He had to show up with all of his talent intact and accessible to him: his smarts, emotional and otherwise, his ability to make sense of language, his understanding that the real “thing” with the show was going to be this relationship with the brother. It’s a hell of an audition.

When Sam says, “You don’t even question him!” Dean responds, “It’s called being a good son.” Which is also mean. Sam gets out of the car and goes to the trunk. It’s the middle of the night and they are on a country road. But Sam has had it, and the situation is also urgent: They are in Illinois, and it will take some time to get out to California. He needs to start NOW. He doesn’t have to do what Dean tells him to do. Fuck THAT. He has HAD it. Dean is not equipped to stop what is going on. Instead, he gets petty, and ratchets up the real fight. What the hell is wrong with you? You’re a selfish bastard, you only think about yourself.

Sam heads off, away from the car, leaving Dean there. It is so striking how easy it is for Sam to walk away! Supernatural, in its typical twisty codependent way, makes me love Sam for it, and also makes me resent him. They make me complicit in how the brothers are tied together in that unhealthy way. But Sam so easily cuts that cord. It will get more difficult for him as the series continues, but he is always the one who has one foot out the door. It breaks Dean’s heart.

Dean is left standing at the car. He yells after Sam, “I will leave your ass here!” Dude, I think Sam is leaving YOUR ass. Dean seems very young. Sam turns around to look at his brother, and says, with a smile on his face, a smile born of adrenaline and challenge, and says, “That’s what I want you to do.” These chickens are coming home to roost still in Season 9. Only the situation is much worse, and Dean is much worse. Dean throws Sam a look before he gets back in the car, and it’s a look filled with such hurt and surprise, it’s heartbreaking.

Sam stands and watches the Impala barrel off into the night, in just one of the many gorgeous moody night-time shots in this particular episode.

3rd scene
The Impala pulls into the main street of Burkittsville on a day of pouring rain. It’s early morning. Dean sits in the car for a second, and he’s “off”, you can tell. He looks at his phone, clicking through the rolodex. (Side note: I love the glimpses we get of the boys’ contacts. People we never hear from, but indicative that the brothers both have lives that go on off-screen. Like, Dean has a listing for “Carmelita”. Those familiar with Season 9 will remember his satisfying hook-up with one of his porn star idols, whose pseudonym in film was “Carmelita”. One wonders if she had a phone-sex line? Anyway: funny. I love the thought, too, of the props departments creating these contact lists of totally fictional unseen characters for the various closeups of the brothers’ phones.)

The brothers’ separating is played like a divorce or a break-up. You know, yearning glances at your cell phone, where there is no incoming call from your beloved. All part of the twisty world that Supernatural asks you to accept. Dean, of course, does not call Sam. Dean’s journey in this episode, by the way, fascinates me. Because he goes through a huge turn-around. And it appears to be sincere and not manipulated by an outside event. The turn-around seems to come from within Dean, his moral compass guiding him to say the right thing at the right time. And, fascinatingly, what happens in that beautiful turn-around scene (when the brothers speak on the phone), is something we (almost) never see again in the entire series as whole. At least not so clearly. It’s a glimpse of what life could have been if the brothers were healthier, not so damaged. It’s a minuscule moment where we get to see the “What If” for both of them, an alternate reality. The only other time I get that very particular vibe is in “Mannequin” from Season 6, of all things. Sam’s got his soul back. They’re working a case, and Dean gets a panicked phone call from Ben that Lisa is in trouble. The entire time that Dean has been trying to have a romantic relationship as well as being a surrogate father for Ben, Sam has been totally unsupportive (due to the fact that he has no soul). He judges Dean, he doesn’t care about Lisa, he makes fun of Dean for fielding phone calls from Ben. It’s painful to watch. You want Sam to “get it”. You know Sam WOULD “get it” if he freakin’ had a damn soul. Supernatural totally denies you the satisfaction of seeing the brothers behave normally. Sam was the one who told Dean to go find Lisa and make a life for himself. And Dean does that. But when Sam returns, he is “off”, and makes fun of Dean for playing golf, and for living in a nice house, and caring about this woman and child. Ugh. It’s awful. So in “Mannequin”, Sam has his soul back, and Dean is feeling like he needs to go see what’s up with Lisa, he’s really worried. And Sam has a moment where he says to Dean, “Man, go! I’ve got this covered. This is important to you. I totally get it. I hope they’re okay. Give me a call when you get there.” My God, that moment is such a relief. That is how healthy siblings operate with one another. Of COURSE Dean’s main priority would be the woman in his life and the kid he is helping to raise. Of COURSE Dean’s priorities would shift to his new family. That’s how things SHOULD go. But that is the only time we see a Winchester deal with the significant other of the other brother in a normal healthy way. And it is a glimpse, a tragic glimpse, of how far away they have come from a normal life, and how the way they operate is totally Bad News for them. It’s the only time we ever see it.

Anyway. Moving on.

Dean approaches a taciturn guy sitting in front of “Scotty’s Cafe”, out of the rain. Despite the almost-twee small town vibe, the guy is smileless to the point of unfriendliness. And Dean, because he cannot help himself, because he knows he has a massive charm that usually gets him through the door with people, sets out to charm the guy. It is classic Batting Eyelashes behavior, and tips over into outright flirtatiousness, a mask over the hostility towards this guy who is somehow resistant to the Dean Winchester Beauty. (I go into Dean Winchester’s Batting Eyelashes behavior in the “Bloody Mary” re-cap, but it is obviously an ongoing theme.)

Dean opens with, “Lemme guess. You’re Scotty.”

Too intimate, Dean. Too friendly. Scotty looks up at him, cold as stone. Dean is not used to resistance like that (although he should be, it happens often enough, but he can’t help it), and introduces himself as “Detective John Bonham.” Best line in the episode: Scotty looks up at this glimmering freckled hottie-McTottie trying to charm him and says, flatly, “Isn’t that the drummer from Led Zeppelin?”

Dean is surprised by the comment, pleasantly surprised, which I just find so funny. Dean, you are not the only person who has heard of Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin is one of the biggest bands ever. But to Dean, it’s his own private little obsession, he feels like they are HIS, he can’t believe that somebody else knows who “John Bonham” is! Instead of trying to cover his tracks and saying something like, “I don’t know, is it?” Dean instead says, impressed, “Very good! Another classic rock fan.”

Which is so stupid, because it immediately makes him seem so suspicious! You are admitting you are using a fake name. Who will trust you after that? But Dean is more caught up with the fact that he has clearly found a soul mate, another person who (amazingly, in Dean’s world) knows who John Bonham is. In Dean’s fantasy, the next thing that should happen is a discussion of favorite Led Z tracks. I mean, why not? Well because Scotty (Brent Stait) is staring up at you with outright hostility, that’s why. Dean is “prey” to men. His dad has flown the coop. Dean needs the approval of men, even sexual approval, he wants them to like him, and grant him power/access. Already, par for the course, his interaction with Scotty has not gone well. He brings out the Missing Persons photos of the couple we saw in the teaser. He wonders if Scotty saw them last year, around this time. He says he’s asked around in the surrounding towns (one of which is called “Salem”, another fun connection-point). Scotty looks at the posters with a blank face and says, No, he hasn’t seen them. “We don’t get many strangers around here.”

You have to hear the line-reading to hear how hostile he makes the word “strangers” sound.

Dean has gotten nowhere. And because he is who he is, he can’t let the moment lie where it is. In order to destabilize this hostile cold douchebag who is immune to his charm, and not LIKING him, dammit, why isn’t this guy LIKING him?, Dean takes the underlying subtextual “batting eyelashes” that has been going on, and brings it to the surface. He says, in an outrageously flirtatious way, “Scotty, you’ve got a smile that could light up a room, you know that?”

Obviously, he’s being sarcastic because the guy hasn’t smiled once. But there’s more, there’s always more. This is how Dean uses himself with other men. We’ve seen it repeatedly. He’s softer with women, less aggressive, although he’s certainly got some tactical strategies there, too. But women are easier, women are where Dean can relax. They’re kinder to him, too. They accept him. They love him with more ease. Men are the ones Dean really needs. I’m not saying sexually, not really, although to say that there ISN’T a sexual component to his interactions with men is to completely ignore the evidence Jensen Ackles has given us through 9 long seasons. Dean gets all messed up in how he deals with men. And because he operates mainly from a sexual place, it’s just so much a part of who he is (you know that he always has a condom on his person at all times, no question), that need comes out in strange ways, like choosing to say a flirtatious thing to an unsmiling hostile guy. It goes over as well as you would expect.

Flirting with Scotty is also a way for Dean to “win” in an encounter where he has lost from the get-go. Dean doesn’t “use” sex with women as a way to “win” – that’s one of the most attractive things about him, and why women probably love him so much, even for a night. He’s into sex for the best possible reasons: it feels good, it’s fun, and it’s a stress reliever. He doesn’t judge women for being with him. He does not have a double-standard. In an interaction with Chuck (I love Chuck) in Season 5, Dean judges Chuck for having a whole “virgin/hooker thing going on” with women. Dean doesn’t see women in those compartmentalized buckets. He’s grateful to them for the comfort they provide. But with men? He loses his footing. When he’s mid-crisis at the end of a hunt, he is the Clear Leader in any room, but in other situations, he gets discombobbled, and so he pulls out his cock (metaphorically) because he knows that he very well might “win” if he does so. Even just seeing the discomfort in the other guy’s reaction could be a reminder that he’s not TOTALLY lost the battle. He’s got the biggest cock in the room and he knows how to use it.

It’s great and fascinating stuff. It is the unique dynamic Jensen Ackles brings to the table.

4th scene

The next scene starts with a stunner of a shot, with a stunner of a camera angle, of Sam on a lonely misty road, waiting for a ride. The camera angle is great. Because it’s from Meg’s point of view. Only she’s not where she should be: in that shot, she should be right behind him on the ground. She really does appear from out of nowhere. But she’s there, in the camera angle, before she even appears. Sam Winchester. In her crosshairs.

Sam, walking backwards, keeping his eye out for cars, turns, and suddenly, right beneath him, he sees a girl, sitting with his back to him. It is so creepy how she is just suddenly there. Sam, in later seasons, would immediately find her appearance suspicious. It’s an endless road, how could she just show up like that? Where did she come from? But this Sam is still only 6 months into the job. Maybe his time at Stanford has softened him. He stands over her for a second, and then we are on the ground, at her level. She is listening to music on her headphones, and “doesn’t hear him” speak to her at first.

Meg is played by Nicki Aycox in these early episodes, and she returns in Season 4, as the real girl Sam and Dean couldn’t (didn’t) save. The role of Meg is eventually played by Rachel Miner, and I prefer Miner’s performance, its sleazy sense of camp, its wisecracking ooze (Miner is excellent with language), its over-sexualized brand of trauma and a battered desire for understanding. Aycox is good, but a little stiffer as an actress, a little more arch and cool. Not quite as damaged-beyond-repair. Of course the later Meg has been tortured for years, something this Meg has not gone through yet. The difference in performance makes sense. But Miner manages to make us ache for a demon, literally ache for her, and worry about her, and that is no small feat. Meg is so important, and Aycox brings her to life. Her scenes with Sam in “Scarecrow” are fascinating to watch once you know who she is, and what she’s up to. Because she plays him like a violin. And he walks right into it.

I have a very difficult time imagining Dean being played like that. Not by a woman. Dean (weirdly) has proper boundaries with women, Sex-God though he may be. They have power over him because he desires them, he’s okay with that, that’s the natural order, they get to say what they want, he is lucky if he is invited along for the ride. It’s men he is susceptible to. Sam is the opposite. Of course Sam’s situation is complicated by what happened to him when he was a baby, something he has no idea of at this point, but which will lead him down the darkest paths of temptation. Dean has sex with an angel one time, and even then, she had lost her grace, so maybe it didn’t count as inter-species fornication. But in general, he sticks to humans. He’s not even tempted otherwise. It grosses him out. But Sam doesn’t have those same boundaries. And here is our first glimpse of it.

Sam reaches out to touch her, to get her attention, and she jumps with fear. He is apologetic, humorous, curious. She, all arch and overtly sexy in a very plausibly-deniable way (a tease, in other words), with big wide eyes, backs him off his assumptions saying, “You could be some kind of freak.” That word again. But here, it makes Sam laugh. The way Padalecki plays this scene is so interesting. He is not finding her presence there strange at all. It’s almost like he’s happy to see her.

A truck pulls up, and the driver says, “Hop in.” When they both move forward, the leering driver says to Sam, “Not you. Just her.” Grinning at him, cocky and way too intimate, teasing and flirty, she gets into the truck.

Male-female hitch-hiker dynamics of course makes me think of the Be-All End-All of such a situation, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, which was then explicitly imitated in Mystic Pizza, 60 years later.

Sam gives Meg a sort of shocked look as she settles in to the passenger seat, but it’s intimate too. Like they’ve already shared something, some energy has already passed between them. Even though the driver is right there on the other side of Meg, he says, in a kind of teasing low voice, “You trust Shady Van Guy and not me?” She laughs, her eyes are filled with meaning and teasing, and it’s all a bit much, you know what I mean? I mean, it’s supposed to be too much. Dean would clock her right away as up to no good, and back away slowly. He would not be into being teased like that, maybe because he’s teased all the time, he’s hit on all the time, he’s skeeved on all the time. It makes his skin crawl. He likes a friendlier vibe. But Sam? Sam leans right into it with that sexy low comment, conceding quite a bit of ground to her.

The truck peels off, leaving Sam alone, quizzically considering the odd encounter he just had in the middle of nowhere.

Side note: Later, we learn that the Burkittsville town is “blessed”, with healthy crops, financial stability, abundance, while the surrounding towns are falling apart. So I love that in contrast to the vibrant leafy almost toy-like perfection of Burkittsville, Sam is in what looks like an apocalyptic wasteland. Withered weeds, no tall trees, nothingness. It’s just a stylistic visual thing, obviously: everything looks scarier in the mist. But it also looks dead and empty.

5th scene
Dean, having been shot down by Scotty, has befriended the general store owners/garage owners we saw in the Teaser. He’s questioning the elderly couple, Harley (Tom Butler) Stacey (P. Lynn Johnson) and showing them the Missing Persons photos. He gets a kindly yet firm from both of them, “Nope, never seen them.” (Tom Butler was just in another episode of “Supernatural” in Season 9 as the Werewolf Patriarch. He’s a lovely actor.) Into the scene strolls the couple’s niece, Emily (Tania Saulnier) whom we also saw in the teaser. She says, “Did he have a tattoo?”

Bloodhound Dean sniffs a lead. Yes, yes, he did. Emily looks at the photo and recognizes the guy immediately. Innocently, she turns to her aunt and uncle says, “Don’t you remember? They stopped here and we fixed their car and blah blah blah.” Uncle looks again and says, “Oh, that’s right!”

The whole scene is played very casually, nothing tipped too early, nothing obvious. It is certainly conceivable that Gramps might not remember him. They tell Dean which way they went, and off he goes.

6th scene
As Dean drives along, the EMF starts buzzing like crazy in his bag in the back. He pulls over, in the same spot we saw the couple pull over in the teaser. It is late afternoon, and the orchard stretches off to the right, and it is deserted and beautiful. (The colors look more autumnal than mid-April, but I will forgive that inconsistency. What are ya gonna do when you’re filming a series in the autumn?) Dean, not even sure what he’s looking for, starts through the orchard and comes across the scarecrow, hanging there like a burnt effigy out of some freakin’ nightmare.

Take a look at the camera moves in this scene. There are some great circling shots, some great spliced-together shots of Dean walking through the orchard, giving a fragmented sense to his experience, the green leaves crushing in on him, blocking our view of him, with mist unfurling in the background.

And as he approaches the scarecrow, suddenly there is a major POV shift, with the camera hovering above the scarecrow’s head looking down on Dean. Dean stares up at the scarecrow for a long time. Then he says, “Dude, you fugly.” He says it so simply, with a look of almost grossed-out pity for the thing on his face.

Dean grabs the nearby ladder and climbs up to take a closer look. Some beautiful shots of Dean from below (almost nobody on the planet looks good from that angle: thankfully, both Supernatural actors do, and so the camera is often placed at knee-level, looking up at them). Dean stares into the gaping maw of the horrible scarecrow. It seems like it could come alive at any moment. It is filled with violent potential in its stillness. Dean notices something on the scarecrow’s right arm, and then pulls out the picture of the missing guy, to check out the swooping tat. And there underneath the sleeve of the scarecrow, hardened into something that looks like leather, is the same tat. Dean pulls back a little and stares directly at the scarecrow’s face. The stillness in the scene is part of why it is so frightening.

7th scene
The Impala pulls up to the gas station at Burkittsville, and young Emily is working the pumps. She is clearly a secret gearhead because she knows that the gas tank is down by the license plate. Dean chats her up, and this attempt goes better than the one with Scotty. Perhaps because he doesn’t do any flirting to get what he wants. It’s fun to clock Dean’s Batting Eyelash Behavior, because it’s just as interesting when he doesn’t use it as when he does. Instead, he and Emily just have a nice conversation, but of course the whole time they’re talking, you can see the wheels turning, turning …

He learns that her parents died in a car accident when she was 13, and her aunt and uncle took her in. He says, “They seem like nice people.” He asks about the town, and she says it’s a great place, even though it’s in the “boonies”. She says, “I love it here.”

Now. Maybe it’s just a trick of casting, and what her face looks like, but when she says “I love it here” I sense something else. The actress plays this role with a big smile, and very sad eyes. Hard to describe, but definitely present in every choice she makes. She is not bubbly and vivacious, there’s a wistfulness somewhere. There’s a loss there, of course, she lost her parents, and so that’s probably part of it. But maybe, since she’s smart, she senses that something is not quite right about her little toy town, and she can’t put her finger on it.

See what I mean about the sad eyes?

The scene takes place in broad daylight, and Ladouceur (and team, color correction, whoever else) highlights the contrast, so that it almost seems like colors have become irrelevant. Her sweater is red, her eyes are blue, but everything is so high-contrasty, it’s hard to tell. It’s a very dramatic look for what is a very stock scene.

Dean listens as she tells him how every other town around Burkittsville is struggling, but they are untouched. Almost “blessed”. When one spends so much time in what is a cult, as she has, you definitely parrot the positive party line to outsiders. But the eyes are the giveaway and Dean doesn’t quite know what he’s looking at, or sensing, but some sort of alarm is going off dimly in his brain.

He asks her about the scarecrow, and I love how he sort of leans into her, almost like he’s going to offend someone if he disses the scarecrow too loudly. It’s conspiratorial, but in a different way from Sam leaning in to Meg with his low sexy comment about the Van Guy. Dean is still not sure what he is dealing with, if she’s some kind of Stepford Wife or if she’s semi-normal. How much does she know? He befriends her, in other words. Straight up. He’s on the level in his dealing with her. She laughs at the grossed-out expression on his face and says, “Yeah. It sort of creeps me out.”

Dean sees a car in the garage behind her, and asks whose it is. She tells him, innocently, that some people just drove into town and needed it worked on. Click, click, click, goes the Abacus in Dean’s agile brain. “Is it a couple? Guy and a girl?”

Doesn’t it seem like a bit of a crapshoot to just HOPE that a guy and a girl will drive through your town every year in the second week of April? What if nobody shows up? Maybe it would be better to hold a “Couples Therapy Festival” in your town every year or something during that week so you’d be sure to have someone to sacrifice. Look at me. Helping out the monsters.

8th scene
Sam, meanwhile, has learned that the next bus to California is not until late the next day. Frustrated, he turns away from the counter and, automatically, looks down at his phone. Scrolls through HIS Rolodex until he lands on Dean.

We know who “Rebecca Warren” is, but who the hell are all those other people?

He presses the finger on Dean’s name, and still hesitates.

Totally rom-com cliche. Used here for brothers. Classic Supernatural.

It is at that moment that Meg, who is lolled on the floor with her backpack, again, right beneath him, looks up and interrupts him, in a tone of surprise: “Sam?”

Sam sees her, puts the phone away.

Knowing what we now know about Meg, the moment is fascinating. It seems casual, almost coincidental, the best part of it. But make no mistake: she stops him from calling his brother. Meg is lying on the tile floor, one leg cocked up over the other, in a pose that is totally ridiculous in a gross bus station, and Sam would see that if Sam were at all thinking clearly.

She lolls around, the Star of her own ongoing drama. That is how Aycox plays the role, totally narcissistic, and it’s pretty great. Because we can see it and Sam can’t.

Turns out, she’s trying to get to California too. What a coincidence! And that is basically Sam’s reaction too. “Wow, so am I!”

When she asks him what’s in California, with that too-intimate energy she has used with him from the start, he says softly, “Something I’ve been looking for for a long time.” She takes this in, and she never blinks. Meg rarely blinks, a clear actor choice. It’s an uncanny effect, especially here, when we are first getting to know her. The effect is predatory, even though her behavior is all “hey, I’m a cool sexy chick just going where the wind takes me.”

This early on in the game with Supernatural, I had not been worried about Sam. He seems more complete, more “finished” than Dean. Sam seems independent, he can take care of himself. “Scarecrow” was the first episode where I felt a prickle of worry for him. I had a visceral dislike of Meg and how she treated him, how buddy-buddy she was with him instantly, and why wasn’t he picking up on it? Even without the last scene of “Scarecrow”, which totally blew my mind the first time I saw it, I felt creeped out by her. If nothing else, she is clearly a “Fatal Attraction” bunny-boiler. You couldn’t even have a quickie with her in the bus station bathroom without her going all psycho. RUN, SAM, RUN.

9th scene
My favorite scene in the episode. Sometimes the simplest scenes are the best. I love the choice of camera shots, although they’re pretty standard: wide shot, medium, closeup, but it doesn’t feel “stock”. It feels organic. And Ackles is doing some crazy weird work, even in the long shots (especially in the long shots). So Dean walks into the totally empty Scotty’s cafe, where the couple whose car is being worked on are eating. Just like the couple we saw in the teaser. Scotty is waiting on them. Dean, who has already had a sexually charged run-in with Scotty, can’t act normal, and has to still throw his “weight” around, because that uncomfortable moment still lingers in the air. He calls across the room when he enters, “Heya Scotty!” Totally familiar and friendly, because he knows Scotty hates him. Scotty owns the cafe, and Scotty now has to wait on Dean. So, by default, Dean gets to be in the dominant position, and he enjoys the power-switch. Dean is ultra-friendly here, you couldn’t clock him on what he was actually doing, but his undercurrent is loud and clear. As Dean walks to a table, right next to the couple (I would be so annoyed if I were them: The restaurant is empty, why are you sitting on top of us?), and calls out to Scotty as he walks by – “Cup of coffee – and how ’bout a piece of that pie, Scotty?”

Our first mention of pie in connection with Dean!

Dean sits behind them, staring at the couple, who don’t look at him, and Dean is staring at them with a big friendly smile on his face. He looks so nuts. He starts to make conversation, and, unlike the gentle conversational tone he took with Emily, here he is aggressively friendly, trying to act casual, butting himself in where clearly he is not wanted.

“Soooo … you just passin’ through?”

Their backs are to him, so they haven’t seen him sitting behind them.

They make stilted conversation with the chatty stranger who asks them what they are doing, where they are going. Every time the conversation lags, you can see the couple turn back to their food, like, “Okay, are we done now?” You wince for him. Normally his charm works. But when he’s off, as he has already been twice in this episode, he is WAY off.

The more he butts in, the worse it gets. He finally says, almost whispering it to them, so that he seems tremendously frightening, even though he is still smiling (which makes it worse), “The roads aren’t safe at night … You could be in danger.”

Finally, the guy turns to him and says, “We’re trying to eat.”

Dean just didn’t find the right tone for the conversation. This one should have been a no-brainer. He seems to know that, and, like a lunatic, says outloud, “If my brother were here, he would have given you that puppy-dog look and gotten you to do whatever he wanted,” or something like that, which … WHAT? Why are you saying that to these already freaked-out people? They don’t even know who you are! It’s hysterical. But it’s great, too, because Dean is missing his brother. He’s been almost okay until that moment.

Dean is amazing in a crisis. Dean is amazing with children who are frightened. Dean is amazing when people are in a panic and need a leader. But Dean is NOT amazing when he has to act “casual”. It’s so hit or miss with him. The script is great at giving him that complexity: He didn’t flail around with Emily. That one went easy. Why is that? Because she was open? Because she lost her parents and maybe that’s a bond there for him somehow? Or, because she’s a pretty girl, and he can relax with pretty girls, whereas with everyone else on the planet he behaves like an awkward lunatic? I don’t know. It’s interesting, a great character detail. Imagine if he was always smooth. What a bore. Imagine if he was always a bumbling wreck. That would make no sense, since he’s supposed to be a great hunter. He’s hit or miss, like we all are, the character is allowed that flexibility.

And that’s why I like this scene so much. Ackles plays it so well, every beat, every pause, every lean-in to the camera.

So Scotty is sick of the chatty vagrant hanging around his town and has called the Sheriff (David Orth), who shows up at that moment. Dean hasn’t even been fed yet. No coffee, no pie. Best of all, when the Sheriff walks in, Dean rolls his eyes to himself, knowing what’s coming, and as the Sheriff approaches the table, Dean grumbles, “Oh, come ON. I’m having a bad day already.”

A normal civilian, who doesn’t have regular contact with the police, might be a bit more flustered. Not Dean. He’s put OUT by it. Perfect capper to all of the behavior in the scene.

Next thing we see is a police car escorting the Impala to the edge of town.

10th scene
Meg and Sam have snacks at a little table in the bus station. They’re drinking beer. Her black top is falling off her shoulder all the way, and it annoys me. Pull your damn sweater up, woman. You’re in a bus station in Indiana. Relax. Also stop insinuating yourself into Sam’s life. See what I mean? Suddenly my protective instinct kicked in with Sam. He is too open to her, he’s telling her too much. The scene opens with her babbling on in her narcissistic way about how she loves her parents and they want what’s best for her, even if she doesn’t want it.

Sam laughs in sympathy. He says he knows what she means. He says, and it’s a betrayal, a casual one, but a betrayal none the less (and when Meg re-appears in “Shadow”, Dean clocks him on it: “You were bitching about me to some chick??”), “That brother I was telling you about … it’s kind of like that with him.”

She stares at him, unblinking. Like a cult leader, or an abuser, she is subtly and insidiously creating an Us vs. Them dynamic involving her and Sam. Sam is with HER now. Everyone outside our small enlightened circle is bad and doesn’t want what’s best for us. But WE know better. (That insidious “we” again.)

If alarm bells are going off for Sam, I don’t see them.

He seems to enjoy her company, finds her cute, probably wants to kiss her, and she also seems to be someone who really seems to get what he is going through. He is about to go off on his own again, after months back in the family fold. Meg plays on his sense of isolation, she, too, is going off on her own, and aren’t they brave pioneers. It’s all played pretty subtly. There’s something “off” about her, but it’s more on a supersonic prickly-hairs-on-back-of-neck level, nothing overt.

10th scene
The poor couple in the cafe are now on their way, and their car breaks down, yet again, right at the old orchard. It’s nighttime. They, too, follow the light. They, too, are stalked and chased by the scarecrow. (I love how the scarecrow moves, by the way. Boy does it have a stride: earthy and lumbering, and yet powerful and unafraid. It moves with a terrible and unstoppable purpose.) Mayhem ensues, and it looks like they’re gonna be goners when Dean, who clearly did not stay out of the town as ordered to, shows up and shoots at the scarecrow. The shot has no effect. The scarecrow walks forward again, a huge lumbering nightmarish vision, and there’s a great running shot from behind of Dean and the couple barreling through the orchard back to the car, the camera basically chasing the three of them. And Dean, while running at top speed, turns around to shoot the shotgun behind him at the scarecrow, and dude, this actor is a total action hero with a move like that. (He also, side note, apparently knows all the words to “Ice Ice Baby”, as evidenced by his “impromptu” rap with Padalecki at Vegas Con this weekend. Sorry, this flew up on my Twitter feed yesterday and I was trying to figure out a way to share it. Rap starts at around the 2:15 mark. Anyone in the Gen X date-bracket knows the words to that song, myself included. Perhaps others do, too. But that song has such a specific time-stamp.)

They all make it out to the road.

Guess the scarecrow can’t leave the orchard. I know. I’m wicked smart.

11th scene
One of the most fascinating scenes in the entire series, maybe. It’s the phone conversation I mentioned earlier. There’s a lot in it, a lot of information. There is Monster of the Week information, but then there is a huge relationship conversation. It is the healthiest either brother will be, maybe ever? It’s amazing to watch, especially in conjunction with Season 9, where things have so broken down between them. You watch them talk here, and you feel the loss of that relationship even more acutely. Look at how they were actually able to talk to each other, as hard as it was. Look at what happened!

We can discuss why Dean has the turn-around. There isn’t an A-ha moment. There isn’t a sappy “here is what I have learned” moment. He’s come to it on his own time, and I love that. It is something Dean has never ever said to Sam. It is something that Dean, perhaps, has never even thought before. And it is not easy for Dean to say, but he says it. And it’s not a ploy or a bluff. It’s true.

Suddenly, really for the first time, Dean seems like a valid grown-up.

After the Orchard Debacle, Dean has obviously given Sam a call to talk about it. Good boy. Sam sits in the bus station, and Meg is, again, lolling around on the floor, fast asleep. Sam is saying to Dean, when the scene starts, “So the scarecrow came off his cross??”

What I love about Padalecki’s choices in this scene is that he is whispering almost. You could say that he is trying to be sensitive that Meg is sleeping. But I see something else there. Meg has already set up an Us vs. Them dynamic, and Sam has already joined in with that by confiding in her about his bossy big brother. So he feels guilty for talking to Dean, he knows she will give him shit about it. So he whispers. And that, my friends, is dysfunctional. And Meg is the one who set it up. You can SEE how she does it when you watch those first scenes, and she does so in a push-pull (“You could be a freak!”) kind of way that hooks Sam in even further. But that Sam would feel guilty about talking to his brother after knowing this girl for five hours ia a huge clue that something is not right. She’s manipulating you, buddy. Talk to your brother in a normal voice, if you want to. Who cares what Meg thinks?

But it’s a great choice, that whisper. It’s filled with weird inappropriate guilt. It shows Sam’s susceptibility. Dean’s susceptibility is obvious from the get-go, even with all the tough-guy stuff, because Ackles plays it so vulnerable and heart-on-sleeve. Sam’s susceptibility is more hidden, although we already understand, from the dreams he’s been having, and his encounter with his mirror-self in “Bloody Mary”, that he is not just the kid who got away, who had a nice girlfriend and went to college. I’m fascinated by Sam’s susceptibility to Meg in “Scarecrow”. I’d love to hear others’ reactions to it. Dean is susceptible, but he wouldn’t be susceptible to Meg, no-way no-how.

Sam has known the girl for one night and he’s already acting like a guilty husband whispering to his mistress on the phone. His mistress being his brother. I mean, really.

Dean is driving. We go back and forth between them. It’s an equal scene, although it’s tipped towards Sam, because of how close Kim Manners has chosen to go. Even with Dean’s big monologue that is coming, the camera moves tell another story.

Dean is filling Sam in, and he has figured out what they may be dealing with, although he doesn’t have the details down yet. The scarecrow is a Pagan God of some kind, and every year the townspeople offer a human sacrifice in order to have healthy crops and avoid pain and disease. And of course it would have to be a guy and a girl offered up, as some sort of fertility rite. Dean does not have the edge here he has in other scenes with his brother. Dean can get explosive, but he can also get passive-aggressive. His passive-aggressiveness with Sam is reaching critical mass in Season 9. Dean doesn’t process hurt well. That’s how it comes out. But none of that is present here. He does make a joke at one point, saying, “I can figure out stuff on my own…” even though he does wish he had his “trusty nerd geek sidekick” to help him out. But he says it fondly, even affectionately. And Sam laughs. Supernatural gives you a heartbreaking glimpse, in this scene, of how the brothers could behave, who they could be to one another, if they would just allow it, if they had good boundaries, if they weren’t so damaged. We almost never see it again.

Look at how gorgeously he is lit.

Sam’s laugh is filled with love. His brother … his ridiculous brother … he loves him. It’s amazing to see. It’s a great scene. Even better when you consider that both guys are filming their side of the conversation by themselves, without the other actor there.

Sam wonders how Dean will figure out what Pagan God they’re dealing with and Dean tells him he’s on his way to an appointment with a professor at a local community college. So he’s got it handled. Once the informational part of the conversation is over, Dean haltingly says, “Actually, uh, I want you to know …” And there is so much behavior in that one line, you can’t even parse it. He looks blasted-open in a way, and it’s uncomfortable for him, and he does a little laugh at one point, sort of to calm himself down … and it’s not over-done, it’s not “acted”. It’s LIVED. His behavior is LOUD. Elia Kazan, Mr. Behavior, would love his work. Who cares about the lines. It’s the BEHAVIOR that tells the story.

Sam rescues Dean: “I know. I’m sorry, too.”

It’s awkward. It’s a chick-flick moment and neither one has even one impulse to cut it short or make fun of it. They’re IN it, they have to ride it out.

Dean then takes the plunge, and it is a plunge, you can feel it, and says what he wants to say. He gets it all out. I re-watched this episode last weekend, and I had forgotten this scene, or its particulars, and I was in tears, especially thinking about the broken awful situation in Season 9. Good Lord, this scene in “Scarecrow” is important. It is a peace treaty that never shows up again. They go too far the other way.

Dean’s monologue is basically: Sam, you’re right. I was wrong. You have to go your own way. You’ve always known what you wanted. You stand up to Dad. Fascinating trailing-off: “Hell, I wish I …” He doesn’t go there, and then says, “I admire that about you.”

Admire! What a word! What a word for him to use.

And this is where Kim Manners pulls in close, closer, OMG SO CLOSE, to Sam’s listening.

Sam is stunned at what he is hearing. His whole life he has waited to hear SOMEONE in his family say that to him. He almost can’t believe what is happening. It’s like a huge weight is lifted off his shoulders. With all of his ranting and raving about doing what he wants to do, he actually DOES need his family’s approval. He is HURT that his Dad wasn’t psyched about his soccer playing. He is HURT that Dean treated him going to Stanford like a betrayal. And to hear Dean basically let him off the hook for being his own person … well, it’s both dysfunctional but also totally human. Families often do this to one another (monsters or no).

There are a lot of dovetails with this scene throughout the series. I am thinking of the scene in the junkyard in Season 5, when Dean basically tells Sam it is his choice to “say yes” to Lucifer. Sam says, “You’re gonna let me say Yes?” And Dean says, “I don’t have to ‘let’ you do anything. You’re a grown – over-grown – man. Whatever you choose, I’ll back your play.” There’s the episode when they go to Heaven, and they traipse through your memories, Dean growing more and more hurt that Sam’s best memories all have to do with escaping the family. Dean’s regression. But it’s all there in this quiet intimate phone call. The entire relationship.

Sam says, “I don’t know what to say … ” A beautiful script thing. Sometimes script writers, who are, after all, writers, make everyone just too damn articulate about their feelings. My friend Jen, who is an acting coach, works really hard with her students on fight scenes. “Most people DON’T know how to fight. Most people are AFRAID to get into arguments. STRUGGLE.” So I love that Sam admits he has no words. And Dean says, “Say you’ll take care of yourself, Sammy.”

It’s a wonderful scene.

They hang up. It is at this moment that Meg wakes up. She looks like a serpent, coiled up on the floor, and she uncurls herself, keeping her eyes on Sam the whole time. She walks over to him, sits down, and says, “Who was that?” (Not blinking once.)

Sam, blasted-open himself, says, “My brother.” There’s an edge in her voice, “Your brother? What did he want?”

“To say good-bye.”

12th scene
Dean strolls through what looks like an empty Tudor mansion with a professor of mythology (the perfectly cast William B. Davis), asking questions about the importation of Pagan Gods to America through immigration. Dean can’t tip his hand on what he is looking for. He asks about the immigrants who settled this area, where did they come from mostly? Northern Europe, Scandinavia, comes the answer. “I’m curious about a God that might live in an orchard …” says Dean. In the guy’s office, a book is spread out on the table, and the camera angle is off-putting: it’s below them, showing the ceiling spreading up above them. It gives the scene a claustrophobic feeling, even if you’re not even sure what you are reacting to. Basically, it’s a scene of exposition, a scene of “Lore Explanation,” but there’s a weird-ness to it, something is not quite on the level. Half of the job is done by casting William Davis, whose face looks like one of the woodcuts in the book he shows Dean.

The Professor starts to seem a little strange. Some of his reactions to Dean’s questions don’t seem quite right. Dean, engrossed in the old book, flipping through it, doesn’t notice. He comes across an old creepy woodcut of a scarecrow in a field.

The Vanir are Norse fertility gods, and each one gets its power through a “sacred tree”. Not Yggdrasil, one of my pet obsessions, thanks to A.S. Byatt, who has been into the Ragnarok myths for decades and weaves them into her stories. I’ve had nightmares about Yggdrasil.

As often happens with these professors the brothers interview, Dean wants to know some practical information: How do you kill these things? And the professor, who lives in a hypothetical world, always says, “These are just stories.” There are no true believers in academia. So then Dean adjusts, “Yeah, no, I know, but if you wanted to kill it, how would you?” That kind of exchange is a running theme in the show. It makes the brothers seem more serious, more useful, than those with multiple degrees who can’t even be bothered to BELIEVE in what they are teaching.

The lighting is natural. There are no fluorescents. There isn’t even a table lamp in that room. Everything is natural lighting, the shadows bleeding into the light. It makes for beauty (like the shot above), but it also feels old-fashioned. As though the scene is taking place in the pre-modern era they are discussing.

Dean has gotten what he came for, enough information to move forward, so he thanks the professor, heads to the door. He opens the door, after flashing a nice smile behind him at the Professor, turns around and gets a rifle butt smack in the nose from the Sheriff who is standing right there.

Please watch Ackles’ glorious floppy pratfall backwards, shot in one. The legs go up in the air, the body flops backward, the legs fall … He collapses at the feet of the Professor, who now lets his Ominous Freak Flag fly, as he and the Sheriff share a look full of portentous meaning. But I never get sick of that pratfall.

13th scene
On a pouring rainy morning, the four main townspeople of Burkittsville, Uncle and Aunt, Sheriff, and Scotty, stand huddled under four black umbrellas. They are arguing. Or, rather, Uncle Harley is arguing, pushing against the consensus of the group. Whatever decision has been made (and we are not let in on it), does not sit well with him. But the situation is now desperate, since the couple they sent to the orchard got away, meaning there will be no sacrifice this year. They tremble at the thought. You can feel the helplessness of Harley in facing the other three, who are thinking/acting like One Being. Harley cannot break through the consensus of the group.

The scene ends with a flourish, dramatically filming the four black umbrellas from above, which wipes away the individuality of those holding the umbrellas. You can’t tell who is who. The Group has won over the individual.

I cannot even begin to outline the history of “Umbrella Shots” in cinema, particularly of this shot-from-overhead nature, but here are just two examples that came to mind:

Foreign Correspondent, 1940

Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

I could go on forever. The raindrops fall around the camera as it rises. It’s a great shot.

14th scene
Blackness, and then a door above opens, the door to a root cellar. Through the light pouring down, we see Dean, bump on his noggin, trapped down in the cellar. Aunt and Uncle are now hustling Emily down into the cellar, bringing us back to Wizard of Oz land. Emily is crying and confused. Why have her Aunt and Uncle turned on her? What’s happening?

Her Aunt, filled with sorrow, but also a kind of implacable certainty, says, “It’s for the common good,” before closing the door on Dean and Emily.

Scary shot. That Aunt terrifies me. She would fit right in in a Shirley Jackson story.

15th scene
Back at the bus station, Sam is gathering up his stuff, and Meg is on him like white on rice. Where’s he going? I so WANT him to say, “None of your business” but of course he doesn’t. That’s the problem when you let certain people (or, er, demons) “in”. They take liberties. They use what they know about you, and they turn it against you. Nothing is innocent. Sam thinks he’s just spent the waiting time in a more pleasant way than he would have if he were alone. He doesn’t realize what he’s done. Besides, he’s been trying to call Dean and Dean isn’t picking up, so he’s distracted. He’s worried. He tells Meg this.

Maybe it’s my sensitivity to how abusers operate, especially insidious emotional abusers. Sam has decided he needs to go to Burkittsville. Something’s not right. Nicki Aycox plays her reaction to this perfectly. I know this, because I want to say right in her face, “Back OFF, lady.” When Sam says he needs to go check on his brother, she says, “Your brother???” The same brother you were just bitching about to me last night? That one? I thought you said you wanted to get away, I thought you said blah blah … Abusers use logic in the face of emotion. Beware. Meg says to Sam, “Our bus is leaving.” Again, with the collusionary language: “Us”, “we”, “our”. Great script-writing. It happens invisibly, like poison gas.

She says, almost pleading, “Saaam. Come. With Me. To California.”

One wonders what would have happened if the story had gone down that way. Sam would, essentially, have been leading Meg right to John Winchester.

Sam, gently, feeling her hurt and surprise, says, “He’s my family.”

It is a betrayal to her. She thought they were in sync. Sam walks away, and the camera stays on her, pulling in close. The way Meg is treated visually, throughout the episode, is very destabilizing. Especially because we’ve seen “guest stars” come and go, Haley in “Wendigo”, Amy Acker in “Dead in the Water”, the “one-off” women who populate the episodes. Meg is not treated like that. She is treated like she is more. Which, of course, she is. But if you remember watching the episode for the first time, you will remember how strange it felt. How … too much … it felt. What the hell is up with this broad? I’m sure many people guessed. I didn’t. I assumed she had something to do with what was happening back in the orchard. I thought that was the connection. I did not sense the Larger Picture. Maybe I should have. Pulling close in to Meg after Sam walks away is an enormous visual clue. It is telling us: “This ain’t no normal guest spot.”

16th scene
Dean and Emily are trapped in the dark root cellar. She is crying, and in shock. Dean is freaked out, but also questioning her. You had NO idea that this was what your aunt and uncle were up to? Emily had no idea. She is devastated. She is afraid of dying.

Dean does not have a plan (which becomes an ongoing joke for the rest of the episode), but he knows he has to get her to calm down. Here is where Dean shines. Always. His intensity and strength of purpose, his objective, pours into the baffled frightened people he encounters, and gives THEM strength. It happens automatically, sometimes, but sometimes he has to demand it. Either way, he knows how to do it, because his objective is so strong. As she says she “can’t believe” what is happening, he says, not without sympathy, “You better start believing. Because I’m gonna need your help.”

His tone, his energy, gets through to her. She almost visibly calms down. She follows his lead. He asks if there is a tree in the orchard, an old tree, maybe? She says yes, there is an apple tree, brought over by the first settlers to the area. They refer to it as “The First Tree.”

One does not need to be a theologian to realize the implications of an apple tree called “The First Tree”. Meg has arrived in the series. And so has the Bible. That is not a coincidence.

As they talk about the tree, suddenly the door from above opens, and the terrifying four townspeople all stand there, Scotty with his gun drawn, looking down at them. It’s time.

17th scene
I don’t know how “they” do it, and I am sure color correction is involved, but up until now when we have seen the orchard it is dark, filled with greens and blacks. Now, in the next scene, as Dean and Emily are bound to trees as the sacrifice for the Gods, the orchard seems ice-blue, with whites and greys. Again, definitely not a mid-April palate, but it’s an interesting visual choice. The orchard always seems cold, the greens we see are shadowed by black, and mist, but now, in broad daylight, it seems damn near Arctic.

Emily is crying as she is bound to the tree. Uncle Harley is apologetic. Stuff it, Gramps. So is Aunt. But Aunt is scarier than all the rest of them. Because Aunt feels terrible, she is crying, too, and yet she continues on with the sacrifice. Now that’s cold. She also tries to explain to Emily why this must happen. Her words have resonance with the larger Arc, the Winchester Arc, the brothers-relationship Arc. She speaks of “responsibility”, she speaks of having “no other choice”. When Emily pleads that she is their “family”, Aunt says, “Sweetheart, that’s what sacrifice means.”

Sacrifice is obviously a common behavior-pattern in both Sam and Dean. Being willing to sacrifice yourself “for the common good” is expected. Being willing to sacrifice yourself in order that your brother may live is something both Sam and Dean feel deeply. They race towards self-sacrifice. Sometimes it is noble. Other times it is because they (i.e.: Dean) cannot deal with the thought of being alive while the other is dead. The impulse to self-sacrifice is almost compulsory in the Winchesters. The impulse to “take responsibility” is also compulsory. You clean up your messes. If it’s your fault, you do what needs to be done to make things right. Often, though, they take on too much responsibility. Or, the situation is more complex than they are willing to admit.

The Aunt, connecting the concept of sacrifice directly with family, is something the Winchesters understand in their DNA. But because we are seeing the Aunt as monstrous, these concepts sound cold, clinical, and terrifying coming from her. Yet it’s the same thing we hear from Sam and Dean throughout. Now that’s a good thematic connection, presented subtly and well.

What is your individual life worth? The Aunt is asking Emily to de-value her young life in order that the community will continue to live. It’s terrible.

Dean, hovered over by rifle-wielding Scotty, is struggling against his own ropes, and listening to this claptrap (which is somehow not claptrap when it’s coming from his mouth, or his Dad’s). It’s a hell of a closeup. The air on his skin looks cold. He’s very pale. They’re outside, where the lighting team has to work double-duty to control the light sources in close-ups like this.

The four murderous townspeople walk off, leaving Dean and Emily trussed up for the taking, and as they leave, Dean, who cannot resist getting in one last shot at Scotty, screams, “I hope your apple pie was freakin’ worth it!!” It’s a beloved line to Supernatural fans, and it makes him seem ridiculous. Poor Emily, looking over at Dean, is hoping he will be the Indiana Jones leader, he CLEARLY will know what to do. That impotent taunt at Scotty is not a hopeful sign. When she asks what the plan is, he says, “I’m working on it.”

It makes you uneasy when Dean doesn’t know what to do. Hell, it makes HIM uneasy.

18th scene
Time has passed and it is now night. Dean and Emily are still tied up. The shot is the same one as what ended the last scene, Dean in the foreground, Emily at the next tree, looking over at him, waiting. She says, again, “So what’s the plan?” HOURS have clearly passed. It’s a very funny cut, from the former scene to this one. Dean, totally lost, says, in an unconvincingly reassuring tone, “I’m working on it!”

They are placed with their back to the scarecrow on his cross so they will not be able to see when it is coming. Emily hears footsteps in the seasonally-inappropriate crunching fallen leaves, and starts to panic, almost screaming. But who comes around the corner? Not Lumbering Pagan God, but Sam. He races to untie Dean, who, hilariously, says, “I take back everything I said. I am so happy to see you.” I love that Sam casually admits he stole a car to get back to Burkittsville. In Supernatural, there is literally ZERO wrong with car theft. It is treated as casually as buying breakfast. There are thousands of people at this point across America wondering what the hell happened to their cars.

Dean, as he’s being untied, says to Sam, urgently, “Keep an eye on that scarecrow. He’s gonna come to life at any minute.” Sam looks behind him and says, “What scarecrow?”

And look at what Sam sees.

Freakin’ terrifying.

Once Dean and Emily are freed, the three of them run through the orchard, back towards the cars at the road. Dean is like, “We’ll look for the sacred tree tomorrow morning, we gotta get the hell out of here.”

Not so fast. Shirley Jackson takes over the narrative, and suddenly Sam, Dean, and Emily are surrounded by the four townspeople, holding guns on them. So the scarecrow is off his cross, and they aren’t being allowed to leave. Harley and Aunt are still pleading with the two prisoners: this is what HAS to be done, do you know what will happen to us if we DON’T sacrifice you?

The scarecrow has other plans, and jams his hooked-scythe hand through Uncle Harley. Aunt sees the blade protruding from his chest and screams, and I don’t feel bad for her at all. Listen, like you said, it’s “for the common good.” Harley drops to the ground, and the scarecrow, holding on to Aunt, basically plucks at Harley’s dead body with his scythe hand, and drags the two off into the orchard. It’s an amazing bit of physical business. It looks brutal.

19th scene
Time to torch the sacred tree. It’s morning, and we are treated, again, to the orchard in a different mood. The sun is clearly low in the sky. We even get some lens flares (Supernatural doesn’t overuse lens flares, a welcome change to so many other films/TV shows out there. When you get a lens flare in Supernatural, it usually means something.) Dean, Sam, and Emily stroll through the orchard, looking for “The First Tree”. Nobody talks. Emily is clearly traumatized, but feels strong with the brothers by her side. What has happened to her is awful. Her life is awful. It has been based on a lie. She was taken in by family who then withheld essential information from her. Hm. Sound familiar? Dean and Sam get it. They were just treated the same way by their Dad 48 hours earlier. All unsaid. The connection is there if you want to make it, but nobody worries about driving the point home.

The twisted tree comes into view in the foreground.

Sam douses it with gasoline. Dean picks up a branch and lights the end. Emily quietly takes it from him. She wants to light the tree on fire. Dean looks at this pained young woman with the friendly smile and the sad eyes, and says, “You know everyone in the town is going to die.” She says, simply, “Good.”

Loss of innocence is a terrible thing, but it is also a necessary thing, if you want to live in reality. If you want to be in charge of your own destiny. There are moments, later, when Dean says, “It makes me wish Dad had protected us more.” Or Sam says, “I wish I could have kept my innocence about what was out there.” They both were shown that the world is filled with supernatural horrible things, the monster under the bed is real, there are no bedtime stories to comfort you, no sanctuary. You must live in the world of The Real. Both Sam and Dean, at times, feel lucky that they “know” what is really going on out there. It beats the alternative. But there are moments, moments, when they feel the loss. And they are usually kind with the victims they encounter, who have to go through a similar discovery process. Dean is that way with Emily in the moment she takes the torch from him. Now she knows. Her life will never be the same again. But perhaps, in lieu of her new knowledge, she actually has a SHOT in life.

Loss of innocence also makes one think of the Garden. And Eve. And the apple from the apple tree. It’s kind of unfair to blame Eve, because Eve is the curious one, Eve is the restless one, Eve wants to know. Wanting to know is what makes us human, what makes us special, what makes things like, oh, space travel possible. Thanks, Eve.

But still: when you leave “the Garden”, there’s no going back.

They stand back and watch the tree burn.

20th scene
Dean and Sam stand at the bus station, seeing Emily get on a bus to Boston. Why Boston, I don’t know. But I hope she’ll be okay. Once the bus pulls away, they walk off towards the Impala, and neither of them say anything for a bit. Now that the case is over, they’re back where they left off, but not really. Something has shifted over the course of the episode. It happened without the brothers’ straining for it, or reaching for it. Dean says, “So. Can I drop you off someplace?”

As he says it, a sort of strange awkward smile lights on his face. He feels awkward. He hopes Sam will stay with him, but instead of letting that show, he hides it. For Sam’s sake. If Sam wants to go, then Dean meant what he said back there. He has to let him go. The smile is the giveaway, and it’s vulnerable, but I fully believe that Dean is ready to let Sam walk away at this point. He will hate it. But he will do it.

Sam, who had been through his own damn thing with Meg in the bus station, and wrapped up in her narcissistic web of “our families don’t understand us”, has some things to say now, so he stops, and says it. He doesn’t want to be dropped off anywhere. He’s gonna stay with Dean. Dean is vulnerable, but not needily so. He is curious what made Sam change his mind, and Sam says (and it’s a great line): “I didn’t.” Beautiful, unexpected script-writing. Sam and Dean NEEDED to have that fight. Both guys NEEDED to get that shit out. And, in a way, nothing has changed for Sam. He tells Dean that he still wants to find Dad, and he still wants to help with whatever Dad is working on. He still wants revenge. But he has to stay with Dean. Dean is his family. “You and me. We’re all that’s left.”

For a second, you think Dean is actually going to have an open and emotional reaction, and hug Sam, or some shit. You think he actually might participate in the chick-flick moment to end all chick-flick moments. Instead, he reaches out and puts his hand on Sam’s shoulder. He says, as though he’s choked up, “That was beautiful, Sam. Hold me.”

It’s so damn REAL. Mean. Total big-brother stuff. If Supernatural did not lighten the mood of the moment, then we would be in Lifetime-movie land, and who needs that. Dean has shown enough growth/change in the episode. It’s time for him to remind us of his knee-jerk reactions to sentiment. Because that’s who he is. It’s also how siblings are with one another, often. You’re so “over” each other that when shit gets real, you often don’t quite know how to handle it.

Sam laughs, Dean laughs, and the moment passes. They go to get into the Impala, Sam taunting Dean with how he needs him, he just saved his ass back there. Dean says, “I woulda gotten out. I had a plan.” Hysterical. When were you planning on implementing that plan?

I’ve mentioned before how so often in these “final scenes” with “brothers getting back into the Impala”, we see Dean getting in first, and Sam having some … behavioral stuff … before getting into the car. It’s happened often enough that it is clearly deliberate. Sam’s qualms about the hunter life, about the Winchester life, about putting his old life in the rear view mirror. He hesitates. He stands there.

And here, Dean gets in the car, and Sam is standing outside, by the passenger door. Before he gets in, he quickly looks around the empty parking lot, before turning to get into the car.

No close-up. No big important pull-in to his face. Just a quick glance around.

Sam hasn’t told his brother about Meg, because why would he. She’s vanished, but she’s still there for Sam, in that quick glance around the parking lot.

21st scene
That glance around the parking lot leads us into the coda of the episode. That quick glance brings us back to Meg, who we now see sitting in the passenger seat of yet another truck, barreling down the dark country roads. It’s an odd thing, remembering my first time seeing “Scarecrow”. The second you see Meg come back into the story, that late in the episode, minutes before the ending, you know something is really REALLY wrong. You’ve sensed it already. But now you know. Oh, SHIT, what is THIS now. I thought I had a handle on the stakes here, I thought it was about Dad and Mom and Jess, I thought I understood the weird universe of the show. This last scene blew the lid off and said, “You don’t know jack-SQUAT.”

The skeeze-ball trucker is leering at Meg, who submits to it with a coy and knowing attitude. She tells him to pull over, and he, thinking he’s about to get lucky (because wouldn’t you?), obeys. He waits to see what she will do next, and obviously he is not expecting her to pull some pewter-carved bowl out of her bag, place it in her lap, take out a knife, and slice his throat open.

She holds the bowl under his gushing throat (it’s really gory: you can actually see the pulse pumping the blood out), collects the blood, and then intones some Latin into the dark red depths. (I love the inventiveness of this creation by the Supernatural writing team, used again and again. Fresh blood in a bowl being the demon’s telephone line.)

Seen from below, Meg speaks to whatever is communicating to her through the blood. She is complaining. She doesn’t understand the orders and is pissed off about it (thematically, this loops her in to Sam talking to Dad in the starting scene. This scene is a mirror to that one, which brings up all kinds of nasty implications).

The glimpse of a Bigger Picture is given in her side of the conversation: “I could have stopped Sam. I could have taken them both.”

Although I knew all along that Meg was not right, I did not see that coming. Watching the episode again, as I have, it’s fun to see how she’s playing the “orders” she was given, how she is on a mission, how she works it, and where that inappropriate “Your brother???” reaction really comes from.

That last scene scared the hell out of me on my first viewing. I was worried for the both of them. As long as we stuck with the two of them, in the Impala, working jobs, I felt like maybe they had stuff under control (as much as possible, anyway).

Meg is the Game-Changer.