Supernatural: Season 2, Episode 10: “Hunted”

Directed by Rachel Talalay
Written by Raelle Tucker

Let’s take a moment to note the first female director of the series (it is her only episode). Talalay does her best with a script that is all over the place. Gordon wants to take over the episode. He basically DOES take over the episode. But Talalay does her best to even things out and prioritize the Advent of Ava, with a truly loopy motel room design that is, at first, totally random (and I also would like to stay there indefinitely), but there is a method to the madness of that motel. The blue circles on the wall are psychedelic and strange, creating a dream-like psychedelic atmosphere that (somehow – for me, anyway) loops us in with the teaser.

Season 2 has a much more complex arc than Season 1, which was all Dad-Dad-Dad-Dad. Season 2 has multiple arcs set up from the beginning, each one inching its way towards a climax. There’s Dean not being able to deal with Dad’s death and John’s whisper at the end. That took up the first part of the season. Along with that, there is Sam, and the “problem of Sam,” seen through Dean’s eyes, and now, with “Hunted”, the “problem of Sam” is the rocket that propels us to the end of Season 2.

One of the best adversaries the show has ever seen has been not a monster, not a demon, but a mortal man, Gordon, played by the magnificent Sterling K. Brown. He entered in “Bloodlust,” one of the best episodes of Season 2, and brought with him his own objectives, his own story-line. He nearly takes over every time he shows up. This is unique: to have a secondary character whose needs and wants and desires rival the leads. Even at the end of “Hunted,” when Gordon is hauled off to jail, the look on his face would crack glass. He is an enemy you do not want to have. His gentleness towards Dean (mixed with the potential of violence) creates disorientation. Dean revealed his tender underbelly to Gordon, not realizing he was in the presence of a predator. Gordon senses Dean’s fears about masculinity, that he’s not as good a man as his dad was. Dean didn’t expressly say that to Gordon when they were BFFs for 5 seconds, but Gordon picked up on it. Gordon has a lot of emotional ammo in his arsenal.

Gordon is reminiscent of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a man buried in the jungle, there for the purpose of a mission, but the mission has so become the man that he is now lost to humanity. It’s one of the themes of Supernatural: how does one do the job and not BECOME the job? Where are the lines drawn? How do you know when you’ve gone over? Gordon has the messianic belief in the rightness of his cause that is typical of all tyrants, dictators, cult-leaders. The Gordon episodes are disorienting because of that submerged identification factor. He presents an alternative. In order to understand Gordon and his effect on Sam and Dean (Dean, in particular) one has to understand just how attractive is the alternative Gordon embodies.

In “Croatoan,” Sam confronted Dean, saying, “We’re SUPPOSED to struggle with these things.” That goes against John Winchester’s training, it goes against Gordon’s understanding of his job. It’s no coincidence that Gordon would re-enter the action after those crucial words were spoken, because Gordon presents a way of life that is beyond that struggle. Gordon doesn’t feel he’s doing right, he KNOWS he is doing right. But on the flip side, and back to Mr. Kurtz, if you know you are doing right, even if “doing right” means doing terrible terrible things, then you are no longer really human. You have abdicated your place at the civilized table. To further the confusion, that is how Gordon views Sam. It’s irreconcilable. And, of course, Mr. Kurtz, at the end of Heart of Darkness, seems to realize that himself, as his last words suggest: “The horror – the horror.”

Hunters get into the business through personal trauma (except for Garth). Everyone else reels through their “job” with a mixture of Charles-Bronson-revenge-film anger, total lack of perspective, and an OCD-serial-killer’s attention to pattern-making. Gordon took his sister’s disappearance on the chin. He made the choice to become a hunter. Sam and Dean were children when their mother died. They were raised “in the life.” They had no choice. Sam doesn’t remember his mother. Dean only remembers fragments. John Winchester is more of a classic Hunter than Dean and Sam are: Dean and Sam missed having a mother, but they were so young that the life John gave them was the only life they ever knew. (And for hunters, that also appears to be rare. Most hunter parents we meet try to protect their children from the job. That’s what Dean does when he lives with Lisa and Ben. Not John. And not the Campbells, ironically.) Gordon’s trauma has made him a good hunter, and has made him unreachable.

It’s interesting to consider where Sam Winchester ends up going in the seasons after Season 2. Season 3, and the heart-wrenching Season 4. Season 6. How he deals with his problems, with his own past (distinct from Dean’s past, although Dean can’t really accept that), is unique, and deeply threatening to Dean.

Dean’s “job” was twofold:
1. become a hunter
2. protect Sam

Dean barely lives outside of those two mission statements. One can hardly blame him, but I’m not interested in watching Supernatural from a place of blame or not-blame. What we are seeing onscreen is conflict, inner and outer, and conflict is the stuff of Drama, and should be maintained until the final frame (whenever that may be), and all will be resolved, and everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. Until then? Bring it on.

The Psychic Kids plot-line is one of the driving forces of Season 2, set up in Season 1, with Sam’s visions and the advent of Max Miller. The plot-line loops together the Yellow-Eyed Demon and the Winchester Family, making personal what was before seen as random. What if all along Sam was “the one” the Demon was really after? We meet Andrew Gallagher in “Simon Said,” and now in “Hunted” we meet Ava (the wonderfully screwball Katharine Isabelle). The Psychic Kids plot-line develops in a sort of X-Men/Breakfast Club kind of way. In general, I am not a fan of the Psychic Kids plot-line, it feels imposed, as opposed to an organic out-cropping of the natural action. You can see that imposed feeling in “Hunted,” because we have Ava and Gordon side by side in the same episode, and it’s almost two episodes shoe-horned into one. The Gordon Walker Arc feels natural and organic, acting as a counterpoint to the somewhat-healthy hunter atmosphere of Ellen/Jo/Ash.

Teaser
As teasers go, this one is top-notch. After bitching about the non-entity score in “Croatoan,” “Hunted” more than makes up for it by using Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” underneath the teaser. THIS is how you score a sequence. The song, famously, is one big crescendo. It doesn’t have a traditional verse-chorus-verse-chorus format. And it works beautifully with the action onscreen. They play the entire song!

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
To call Alice, when she was just small

When the men on the chessboard.
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know

When logic and proportion have fallen softly dead
And the white knight is talking backwards
And the red queen’s off with her head
Remember what the door mouse said
Feed your head,
Feed your head

You could have a field day coming up with Supernatural connections to those lyrics. The Yellow-Eyed Demon could be seen as the white rabbit, the one who leads Sam and Dean down the rabbit hole. Connected to that, Sam’s visions, and “the problem of Sammy” is also the white rabbit. Sam needs to know who he is, must follow that white rabbit. To those who come close to the Yellow-Eyed Demon, it is impossible to maintain one’s sense of self. “Logic” and “proportion” are suddenly dead (that “fallen softly dead” in the song is a great phrase, it’s like it happens without any fanfare). The line between sanity and insanity is blurred. Similar to the ongoing “joke” in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: Maintaining your sanity in an insane world is the most insane prospect of all. If everyone around you is insane, if the world is insane, then your sanity will be the thing that will seem REALLY insane. Through the looking glass.

The teaser is pleasing in how it is put together, every element, acting, production design, lighting, editing, and music. It feels BIG. It doesn’t feel like a one-off. And watch for when the music comes in. It’s quite early in the game, soft, eerie, underneath the dialogue between the psychiatrist and Scott, and continuing on through the rest, Scott’s lonely walk through an abandoned landscape, with shadows and mist and an elevated train rattling by above the action. Scott is stabbed in the chest by an unseen figure. It’s perfectly timed for the final phrases of the song.

We don’t see Gordon. He’s always just a little bit ahead of the action, ahead of the brothers, seen in silhouette or reflection. He’s the white rabbit, too.

1st scene
Picking up where we left off, at the riverside, with Dean about to come clean, and yet now, it’s now a grey and stark sky, autumnal, no more Magic Hour glamour-puss lighting. Maybe they just color-corrected the shit out of it. Whatever it is, it is an entirely different mood than the final scene in “Croatoan.” It’s somber.

It’s hard for Dean to look at Sam when he speaks. Sam never takes his eyes off Dean. There is that urgency in him, and left-over anger from a lifetime of feeling like a disappointment to his dad. There’s rage that Dean didn’t tell him this immediately. Watch both actors play this scene. There’s a real specific beat-to-beat-to-beat understanding of the event of the argument. It builds.

As Sam’s rage ratchets up, Dean’s energy goes down. I love Sam’s gesture with the beer, the cast on his arm.

Dean’s tone is already quite different from what we saw in Season 1 when Sam and Dean would argue about Dad. Here, Dean is openly furious at his father: “I wish to God he’d never opened his mouth. Then I wouldn’t be walking around with this screaming in my head all day.”

I remember the first time I watched Season 2. By the time we got to “Croatoan,” John’s death felt light-years away. I had forgotten about the whisper. There were episodes where it never entered my head at all that Dean was keeping a secret. When I went back to re-watch, I looked for Ackles keeping that secret in episodes 2 through 8, and it’s everywhere. Ackles was playing that long quiet arc with no dialogue to support it. But it was there in his pauses, his moments of thought, the closeup at the end of “Bloodlust,” it was everywhere. I think maybe it was then that I fell in love with Season 2.

Sam is intent on “figuring out what all this means,” and Dean, seeming tired beyond his years, wonders if they really do. Sam is stunned. Dean’s motives are not quite on the level, and Sam is on it like a hound-dog. Dean wants to “make sure …”, his voice trailing off. Is Dean just waiting for him to turn evil? Dean actually seems panicked, a new thing for him, at least in our view of him. John’s whisper has done its work. It has isolated the brothers from one another. It has hamstrung Dean. The final shots are asymmetrical: We are right in Dean’s freckled grill, as he closes his eyes, begging Sam to lay low with him for a while. And Sam? We don’t get a close-up of him, we see him in medium shot, over Dean’s shoulder, his brother horning in on his space. He’s going to have to get away. The visual says it all.

2nd scene
The red neon Vacancy sign shines out through the rainy night, and Sam, clearly sneaking away from the motel, comes out and walks among the cars in the parking lot. It’s strange to see him by himself: Sam seems slightly sinister here, but there’s no reason to really feel that: Going off by yourself does not mean you are somehow suspect, but in the Winchester Belljar, that’s exactly what it means. Sam goes to the car beside the rain-speckled Impala, and calmly and coolly picks the lock, gets in and drives away. There’s a great view of the “Velvet Inn Motel” sign (VELVET, not Value, much much better, thanks for the correction, Helena – my eyes were deceiving me), reflected in the wet pavement, the red taillights. Edward Hopper. The loneliness of Americana.

I love the motels. So let’s linger for just a second to appreciate.

Not knowing what the hell is happening is part of why the first scene is so effective. We’re not told crucial information. We see Sam holding up a piece of motel room stationary with a handwritten address on it. (I love props and I love handwriting. I nearly died and went to heaven during “The Usual Suspects.” Writing is important to these guys. Dad’s journal. The serial-killer walls all hunters maintain. These guys use technology, but they still pick up a pen on occasion.)

The building is derelict, falling-apart. The mist is thick, like a living thing.

Sam breaks into the building, although it seems like there’s nothing to break into, and slowly steps forward into the darkness. He activates a trip-wire, the isolated clink of the bomb ringing loud through the silence, and then KA-POW, and actual GOOK – Sam’s guts and blood – hits the camera. Thanks for that visual, Supernatural.

Afterwards, silence, stillness, and the image fuzzes to white occasionally, and we’ve been primed to understand now that we’re seeing a vision, but then we see an unknown woman, waking up in bed, drenched in sweat, panting for breath.

The guy in bed with her wakes up too, and she says “It’s just another nightmare … go back to sleep.”

It’s really well done, because it’s like: Who the hell is THAT?

Sam and Dean operate in their own little world. They interact with civilians pretty much only when they are helping them out or saving their asses. Or, with Dean, when he has sex with them. Dean and Sam don’t have friends, certainly not friends who are out there in the world doing normal jobs living normal lives. Despite some of my issues with the Psychic Kids plot-line, what is great about it is it brings these isolated weirdos (Sam and Dean, I mean) into close contact with regular people, and that is always interesting.

Ava is great news. She is different than Max or Andrew, she has a hunter’s sensibility, despite the fact that she’s a secretary, engaged to be married, driving a VW bug. But what she saw in her dream gnaws at her. She has to go find that guy she saw. She has to warn him. She is a regular person who has to do an extraordinary thing, and I love it when Sam and Dean are a party to that transformation.

3rd scene
Sam walks into the roadhouse by himself, no Dean in tow. Even though it’s only 5 minutes or so of time, the lack of Dean creates great tension, making us wonder what the hell is going on, and where the hell is Dean. You see, they make us complicit in their symbiotic relationship.

There are a couple of quick shots of people looking over at Sam; it becomes extremely ominous by the end of the episode. The natural suspicion of hunters, for sure, but also … What have they heard about him and his different-ness? He exudes separateness, it’s like a scent. Ellen, behind the bar, feels the vibe in the room too. You can see it on her expressive face. She is kind to Sam, she has always been kind, but she senses his different-ness, too. He told her about his visions. But I’m guessing she sensed it before that. Dean is an entity she recognizes. He’s clearly a hunter, like her husband, like his father. But Sam … he brings something else to the table. Not necessarily bad. But you can’t quite tell Ellen’s opinion of it in how Ferris plays the scene. That ambiguity is great.

There’s some gorgeous behavior from Padalecki as he approaches the bar. He looks almost boyish, even though he’s so tall. He’s grinning a little bit, shame-faced, because he knows that she knows what’s going on, and he knows that Dean has probably been calling. It’s like he’s a teenager who’s stayed out all night and begs the neighbor-lady not to tell on him. In a way, Sam concedes her status, in that beautiful way he has, he concedes her right to give a shit about him. (Consider the difference to Dean’s behavior with Ellen.) Ellen can’t help but mother both of them, and Sam lets her have that power.

Samantha Ferris’ eyes see all. It would be foolish to lie to her. You can see why Jo felt she needed to fly the coop. There’s no bullshit with Ellen, and that’s a good thing, but if you were interested in doing your own thing, making your own mistakes, it would be very challenging to have those eagle-eyes staring at you. She’s intimidating. And, let’s not forget: she may be concerned about Sam’s different-ness, too. She may think some pretty dark thoughts about him, alone, when she’s by herself. She pretty much thinks that Dean should be keeping a very close eye on him.

Ellen knows Sam has “left Dean,” (there’s those romantic tropes again!), and wonders what’s going on between the two of them. Sam resists her more direct questions, but without any ego. He just steps over them gently, pursuing his own train of thought. When he asks how Jo is doing, Ellen says she doesn’t know. Jo has left. She sends postcards sometimes. Sam is shocked, and also embarrassed when he learns that it all fell apart after Jo worked that job with them. Jo decided she wanted to hunt. Ellen said fine, just not under my roof, and so Jo left. By that point, I was so invested in Jo that I was dying to figure out where she was, what she was doing, how she was doing.

Ellen starts laughing, in that grim Mama Bear way she has, saying, “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I wish I could blame the hell out of you boys. It’d be easier. Truth is, it’s not your fault.”

Sam is wrapped up in his contribution to Ellen’s pain. He’s a good guy.

But Ellen sees that inward-ness in Sam, and speaks in a way that will cut through it: “It’s not your fault, Sam. None of it is.” Her gentleness is stronger than her strength. The openness between them helps create the next moment, when Ellen tells him that she forgave “your daddy” a long time ago. It’s hard for Ellen to say it. It has taken a lot of soul searching, and guilt, too, about lashing out at the brothers for something that was not their fault. When the opportunity arises for her to make that right, she takes it. I would guess, too, that Dean, by calling her repeatedly, is also in the process of conceding her place in the Winchester Family. It took a lot for him to make that call, or at least a momentary gritting of the teeth before dialing. But she’s in with them now, and so her words to Sam are part of that family feeling, that intimacy of family.

The pain is still there for her, but she is in tune with Sam’s pain too. If she can relieve it just a little bit, well, that’s what family’s for.

When Sam asks her, “What did happen?”, she takes a moment, and, just like Sam did, steps gently over the direct question, avoiding it. A mirroring moment. She asks, “Why did you come here, sweetie?”

I love the “sweetie.” There is so little softness in their lives, so little loving-woman-care. Not to be stereotypical, but whatever, that’s what the show is. It’s about men without women. It’s a Howard Hawks world. So when women do arrive, tough and capable as they may be, they bring another possibility. It’s an uneasy clash of energies: women are welcome, necessary, it’s like being able to breathe pure oxygen when they’re around, but their softness and their ability to love in a gentle and caring way (without compromising their power) can also be terrifying. We’ll see that repeatedly.

Sam throws himself on her mercy, and says, “I need help.”

4th scene
Ash (Chad Lindberg) is back, and talk about glorious behavior. He kills me. When the brothers met Ash, there was all kinds of weird power dynamics going on (mostly between Dean and Ash, what a shock), but he earned their trust by being the Smartest Guy in the Room. And for there being no bullshit in his approach. Sam and Dean can be intimidating. Ash is not intimidated. Why would he be? He is as awesome as they are, and he knows it, and he has found a life that is meaningful and perfect for him. (I love when we learn much later that he has been “saved,” and was a snake-handler at his congregation. Of course he was.) The thing about Ash is: everything he does is sincere. People like that are rare. He has no ulterior motives. He doesn’t appear to be working personal shit out through his job. He is a person who treats whatever circumstance is right in front of him at face value, knowing he can cut through the crap to find his way towards the right path. He is totally lacking in self-consciousness. He is always himself, and in that way, he’s even more grounded than Sam or Dean are, who were raised to be liars. He is probably a world-class lay. Like, epic. He is 100% committed to all possibilities in every single moment. He sees things on multiple levels simultaneously, maybe that comes from his complicated math background. He is comfortable in both the concrete and the abstract.

The scene here is a short one, with Sam telling Ash what he needs, as Ash listens. Talalay makes what could be pretty stock actually rather interesting, by having the camera float from Sam, down to Ellen, and back up to Sam. The shots of Ash listening are hilarious. There’s one moment where you see Ash glance over at what are presumably the other customers. He is sensitive to spatial relations and he understands the clientele here. Maybe Sam should, yeah, keep it down a bit. But it’s the glance of a spy, only his eyes flash over.

Time passes with a cut, and Sam has been nursing a beer at the bar, when Ash emerges from his Man-Cave. Ellen is visible in the kitchen window beyond, and Ash bursts forth, declaring, “DONE and DONE.” Because Ash is who he is, he is not “over” his own brainiac expertise, although he makes a big show of being over it because it’s fun. He still takes a moment to triumph over a job well done or quickly done. And maybe Sam and Dean need (on occasion) to be taken down a peg. Ash enjoys being the guy who can do that, enjoys the look of amazement on the brothers’ faces when he performs some weirdo feat in record time. I enjoy him so much. Sam says, “Already?” and Ash hoists himself into the bar stool next to Sam, all deadpan and Alpha, saying, “Apparently, that’s muh job!” Watch Padalecki’s reaction to the pea cocking. This is relatively familiar ground to him, since he has an older brother who Peacock-Burlesques right in his face on occasion, but it still takes him aback.

Comedy.

Ellen comes out, drawling, “Okay, okay, tell us what you found out, Ash”, another humorous and gentle motherly moment, as though Ash and Sam are brothers and are going to start being foolish as opposed to communicating. I get why the roadhouse needed to go, but I do love the atmosphere, as briefly as we get to revel in it.

Ash tells Sam what he’s found out, and we get a nice re-cap in case we’ve forgotten the trial of Psychic Kids. There’s Max Miller. Andrew Gallagher. And Scott Carey, who turns out, was just stabbed a month ago and now rests in a cemetery in Lafayette, Indiana.

Ash’s way of giving information is so entertaining I could watch an entire show where he acted as a tour guide. He takes big deep breaths, and then barks out his lines in a torrent: For example: “Fuzz don’t have much …” Ellen and Ash both hover around Sam, looking on. At one point, a figure crosses by in the foreground, moving back to the pool table, and as Ash rattles off the names, he watches the figure pass by. It’s a small detail, it helps ground the scene (and it also helps set up the confrontation at the end, over the phone between Ellen and Dean. The roadhouse is not a safe haven, not at all. Ash knows that.)

Sam gets up to head out, Ash drinks the last of Sam’s beer, and Ellen calls out to Sam, she can’t help herself: “I gotta call Dean. I gotta let him know you where you are.”

The Claustrophobia. It’s almost worse because it comes out of a caring place. And think about what that claustrophobia has meant to Sam in his own life. He loved his father, as angry as he was at him, and he loves his brother, but … can’t he have some Me Time without people sending out a warning message over their CB radios? Honest to God. But Ellen comes from the hunter world and it is how the hunter world operates. Trust must be mutual. There are rules. Everyone must abide by them or the entire venture falls apart. Gordon is an example of an untrustworthy individual whom the hunter world has shunned: he’s too much in it for himself, he’s reckless, he would throw you to the wolves if it would help him, and his word is NOT his bond. Sam doesn’t balk at her comment in the way Dean would, he gets where she’s coming from (again, he’s lovely in these moments with her), but he does beg her to hold off a little bit.

“My brother means well …” says Sam (that phrase again, so often used in connection with Dean – so complicated, so great) “but he can’t protect me from this.”

Ellen intensely dislikes agreeing to this, but she does.

5th scene
Sam poses as a high school friend of Scott Carey’s and has infiltrated the Carey home to interview Scott’s dad. It’s a modest house, and Sam’s stolen car – which looks like a big-ass rental car, gleams outside, boxy and strange-looking. Out of place. The interior is very dark, with a scratchy couch. Once again, the decision-making process as to how to approach these people (should we be journalists? Friends? U.S. Marshalls?) is fascinating to me, and we never see them come up with the plan. So yes: let me intrude on this poor man’s grief by pretending to be someone else, his son’s dear friend from high school with a SHIT-TON of questions.

Mr. Carey, though, seems eager to talk about his son (Sam was counting on that) and tells Sam how Scott changed over the last year, bad headaches, nightmares. Sam asks if he could see Scott’s room.

Because that is a totally normal request to ask of a grieving father.

There’s mournful music as Sam looks through Scott’s totally depressing bedroom. Scott is another one, though: he’s in his early 20s but perhaps his depression had impacted his ability to be independent, so he sleeps in his dad’s house, in the room he had when he was a kid, with his high school trophies beside his bed, concert posters on the wall, pill bottles crowded on the bedside table. It’s pretty bleak, never mind the Yellow Eye collage hidden in the closet!

And because I am a librarian’s daughter, and the first thing I do when I go into anyone’s apartment for the first time, is look at the books they have on the shelves, let’s take a look at Scott’s bookshelf!

Mass market paperback heaven. Shogun, for God’s sake. Tom Clancy. Stephen King. Jeffrey Archer. Make of it what you will. Like Dean, Scott still has a collection of cassette tapes. The room is so dark that you can barely see anything. It’s extremely melancholy. I remember the troubled young man in the teaser. How terribly he must have felt lying in bed in that room, thinking he was losing his mind.

Sam, then, finds the collage of Yellow Eyes in the closet, and it’s really well-done, the eyes peeking out from behind the clothes, before being revealed in full. And while Scott actually wasn’t crazy, and this was an expression of actual reality … boy, does it LOOK crazy.

6th scene
The opening sequence is so Sam-heavy. It’s strange to have Dean so totally absent. It’s one of the reasons the episode feels, at times, like a seesaw, weighted down on one side, and then on the other. There’s not anything wrong with that, necessarily, but, as I mentioned above, Gordon has a way of taking over. But it’s not time for him to enter yet. And Dean is off-screen, going crazy. Sam by himself is a fascinating prospect, and we don’t get much of it. Or of Dean by himself, for that matter. The times when the series shows them separated are really interesting, and I hope there’s more of it. The intimacy they share is intense, and why the show works, but the tension created when they go their separate ways is HUGE. Almost anxiety-provoking, and it’s great.

In other news, I love old-fashioned motel signage.

Signage like that is one of the ways the show embeds itself in Americana, a time before homogenization and identical Holiday Inn Expresses off the Interstates. It’s a Humbert Humbert America, with isolated motels, where people pay cash because they don’t want to be bothered. The Blue Rose doesn’t have terrifying decor like the Baskervilles Motel in “Crossroads Blues”. The Blue Rose motel room serves to make Sam and Ava seem cut off from the world of shadows and night and yellow-eyed-collages, suspended in a blue-swirly-world of dreams.

“He Used To Call Me — Blue Roses.”
I cannot let the Blue Rose Motel slip away, though, before I mention the connection to The Glass Menagerie, where blue roses are a main motif. From Act I, scene 2, a scene between the disabled Laura and her nervous faded-Southern-belle mother Amanda – Amanda is asking her about a boy Laura went to high school with, a boy named Jim:

LAURA: He used to call me — Blue Roses.

AMANDA: Why did he call you such a name as that?

LAURA: When I had that attack of pleurosis – he asked me what was the matter when I came back. I said pleurosis – he thought that I said Blue Roses. So that’s what he always called me after that. Whenever he saw me, he’d holler, “Hello, Blue Roses!”

Later in the play, Laura’s brother Tom, at the insistence of their mother Amanda, brings home a co-worker to dinner, in the hopes that he will hit it off with Laura. Because Laura is … frankly … worrisome. She has a limp, she spends all of her time playing with her menagerie of glass animals, and she doesn’t DO anything. What is going to happen to her?? Coincidentally, the guy Tom brings home is Jim, the guy who called Laura “Blue Roses” in high school. Panic and comedy ensue. Amanda has put on basically a BALL GOWN for the dinner, because the stakes are life and death. Later, the electricity goes out, and Laura and Jim, known as “The Gentleman Caller,” are left alone. In one of the most famous scenes in American theatre, the two talk. Laura is painfully shy, and Jim is a nice guy who enjoys bringing her out of her shell. They end up dancing together in the darkened living room even though Laura insists she can’t dance because of her disability. In their dance, they knock against her little cabinet of glass animals, and the unicorn falls, its horn cracking off. Jim is apologetic, Laura tries to not mind. She tells him that now the unicorn is like all the other horses, and maybe the unicorn won’t mind, because it’s hard to be different. She understands that. Jim, not realizing at all that he has awakened Laura’s heart and sexuality, her hopes and dreams, launches into quite a sincere monologue that he actually means as a pep talk. And it IS a pep talk.

JIM: You know — you’re — well — very different! Surprisingly different from anyone else I know! Do you mind me telling you that? I mean it in a nice way — You make me feel sort of — I don’t know how to put it! I’m usually pretty good at expressing things, but — this is something that I don’t know how to say! Has anyone ever told you that you were pretty? Well, you are! In a very different way from anyone else. And all the nicer because of the difference, too. I wish that you were my sister. I’d teach you to have some confidence in yourself. The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They’re one hundred times one thousand. You’re one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here. They’re common as — weeds, but — you — well, you’re — Blue Roses!

LAURA: But blue is wrong for — roses …

JIM: It’s right for you!

So. It’s all quite devastating if you know how the play ends. Jim was flirting with her in a nice way, thinking she lacked self-esteem and needed to know she was pretty and worth something. But Laura thought it meant something, Amanda thought it meant something, so when Jim reveals he is engaged to be married … dreams shatter. The unicorn’s horn was broken for nothing. Laura retreats into her delusions. And Tom runs away to … basically become Tennessee Williams, fleeing from the memory of his insane sister (which he actually had in real life. Rose Williams was eventually lobotomized.)

I won’t go on too much about this, but the Blue Rose is such a specific and famous reference that I’m choosing to follow that lead a bit.

Blue roses, of course, do not exist. “Blue is wrong for … roses.” Laura is just as rare (meaning impossible) as a blue rose. If you saw a blue rose in the wild, you would take great care of it, since it would be sui generis. In re-reading Jim’s monologue to Laura, it makes me think of our long conversation just last week about Sam’s “different-ness” and what that signifies, and how his awareness of his different-ness was there young, in the same way as would be true for Laura in the play. He would feel like a freak, he calls himself that, a unicorn amongst normal horses, he would strive towards a normal life, what other people have, in order to quell the deeply uneasy feeling he had that he was too “different” for any of that to be possible for him. A blue rose can’t exist in nature. Perhaps the “Blue Rose” motel was chosen for this particular episode because of the isolated Psychic Kids out there, fragile and sui generis, rare and impossible as a blue rose, unlike other people, unlike other roses. The Psychic Kids are vulnerable, and need protection, but they don’t know where to find it and traditional methods, like psychiatry, have failed. All that is left to them is madness, delusions, suicide, death.

Similar to Glass Menagerie.
Blues Roses Digression Dunzo

When Sam walks back to his motel room door we see him from across the lot, a stalker’s point of view, the camera literally peeking at him around the corner. There’s even a slight breathing sound in the soundtrack. Before you knew Ava was coming, the first time you saw the episode, it was quite ominous. What was that thing that stabbed Scott in the teaser? I did not guess that Gordon was coming back, or that that was Gordon. But I can be quite slow. And Sam looks vulnerable, when being stared at in that stalker way. He’s even more vulnerable because he’s cut himself off from Dean. He senses it, though, as he puts the key in the lock and whirls around to grab the person right behind him, shoving her up against the wall. It’s the woman from the teaser, terrified, blurting out, “You’re in danger!”

7th scene
Let us take a moment to praise Katharine Isabelle. She strolls into what is an extremely well-set-up and very limited world, the world of Supernatural, and all she knows is she saw this guy in her nightmare and she has to warn him. But the entire time she warns him, she is also laughing in outright panic at how strange it all is, and how scary, and how he must think she’s crazy, and she thinks she’s going crazy, too, and what is so funny here (and it’s similar to getting an outsider POV, like we got so satisfyingly in “The Usual Suspects”, although not quite the same thing) is that she is her own person, who lives her own life, and isn’t immediately all submissive to Sam’s status (as a guy who knows stuff, OR as the guy who is the star of the show). In fact, when Sam starts to show his expertise to her, she laughs in his face. Outright. “Okay. You’re nuts. And buh-bye.”

There are those Sam and Dean meet who give them that outsider’s look, that I’ve mentioned a bunch of times already. Moments of realization and revelation when a one-off character realizes just who they are dealing with and how different these guys are from … practically anyone else. Are these guys even real?

Now. Supernatural is smart to use that type of thing very sparingly. Otherwise, the show would worship the two lead characters too much, and that may be okay for 10-year-olds who don’t pick up on or appreciate nuance, but it’s unsatisfying stuff for most people. When the show gets an opportunity to take Sam and Dean down a peg, it goes for it. It takes the edge off, and it doesn’t compromise their heroic status at all. To go along with the Tough Guy Tradition, there is nothing more pleasing than big eye-patched John Wayne being taken down a peg by Katharine Hepburn. You can see him almost thinking to himself, “My GOD. How am I supposed to deal with this AWFUL woman. Why won’t she just … ACCEPT my superiority??” Seeing big huge John Wayne undone by some sassy little lady is one of the great pleasures in cinema, and he allows it, without compromising his status in the slightest.

So, taking all of that into consideration, what a firecracker like Ava does is it gives the guys (or Sam, in this case) an opportunity to be with a normal person, and have to react to a normal person’s reactions to these supernatural events. And Ava is different, because she is not a victim, or someone Sam has to interview about a case or something like that. She has come up behind him in the dead of night, and blurts out a story about seeing him in a dream, and he can’t run the interaction, he can’t guide it. He has to just sit back and try to parse through the monologue to figure out what the hell is happening.

What Katherine Isabelle is doing in this scene is extremely funny (“I am NOT insane and I am NOT on drugs!” she offers with no prompting from Sam), but Padalecki’s reactions are almost just as funny. It’s the John Wayne thing again. He has to deal with someone else’s energy and adjust. Sam and Dean are powerhouses, and they enter a room and tend to dominate it. They’re the stars of the show. The whole thing is set up that way, and the characters demand it. It’s great when we get these wild cards, these peripheral characters who zig-zag their way into the Winchester path, and add something fresh, something new.

(Side note: The linoleum. What is that painting back there? The circular modish lights. It’s insane.)

Later, when Ava starts shouting in a querulous hysterical voice that she’s just a secretary from Peoria and she should be home right now finishing up her wedding invitations, Sam’s face in reaction makes me laugh out loud every time. This is the subtle nuts-and-bolts stuff of acting, the stuff that isn’t a huge teary “Croatoan” catharsis, but is JUST as important, in terms of the effectiveness of the performance. Actually, it’s MORE important. Plenty of people can produce tears and be effective in some big emotional scene. But the subtleties of listening and reacting (John Wayne again: he said he didn’t consider his job to be that of “actor,” he thought of his main job as being a “RE-actor”) … that’s what makes acting great, that’s what makes scenes great.

This is Katharine Isabelle’s scene. Totally. Padalecki is playing support staff. And he’s great at it. He lets her have the scene, it’s generous, totally, every single moment of what Padalecki is doing here. You can almost clock him, the actor, enjoying what she, the actress, is throwing at him. What a delight to play a scene with someone so funny and unpredictable.

She’s so out of control initially, pacing and ranting, that he just has to wait it out. Watch him wait it out. He tells her to calm down. And I laugh out loud, again, not only at the look on his face but because of the fact that there is a china cabinet in that crazy motel room.

But look at Sam’s face.

And let me just wildly speculate that there is a china cabinet in the motel room not just because it’s funny (although it is that) but because Laura in Glass Menagerie also had a cabinet, filled with her collection of glass animals.

Let us return, though, to Sam’s face. He’s great with people. He calms her down. He asks her name. She tells her story. He breathes afterwards, “I don’t believe this …” and she moans, “Of course you don’t. You think I’m a total nutjob.” Sam says, “No. I mean, you must be one of us.”

And now it is Ava’s turn to look at Sam like he is crazy. She is standing against the wall divider in the room, a white trellis with a design of big juicy blue roses.

I think again of Glass Menagerie. It’s an association that is there for the taking, clearly deliberate, and yet not underlined or even expressed. It’s great stuff, though. What will happen to the Blue Roses out there? Who will look out for them? Max is gone. Scott is gone. Ava and Sam are extremely vulnerable.

Whatever Ava was expecting, she was not expecting “You’re one of us.” She was clearly expecting to be mocked, laughed at, thrown out of the room. But for this giant guy to suddenly get all evangelical on her … Ho NO, she did not sign up for THIS.

Ava: “Okay. So… You’re nuts. That’s great.”

Sam’s patience with her is exquisite. There’s humor there, too. I love watching him handle her. It’s a great scene.

8th scene
17 minutes into the episode, and we get our second glimpse of Dean, whom we have not seen since the Gloomy-Gus-Chat at the riverside. The Impala’s headlights cut through the night, Dean’s phone rings, and it’s Ellen. I love how this small scene is shot. We’ve got Ellen at the wall-phone in the roadhouse with some random wooden monkey crouching beneath the phone. WTF. She’s in darkness and in light, at the same time. So is Dean. We get a behind-the-shoulder shot of Dean that is super-gorgeous …

and then we get an equally gorgeous shot of Ellen that is just like Joan Crawford hiding in the closet in Sudden Fear, a band of light only across her eyes. Good stuff.

But what is great here is how it reveals where this relationship has gone. Ellen’s in now. It’s not easy for Dean to let people in. And Bobby is still pretty much a one-off character at this point, although that will change. Dean bristled at her immediately when he first met her, and that continued on in “Bloodlust,” when Sam calls Ellen, worried about Gordon. Dean’s reaction to Sam calling Ellen speaks volumes. He’s afraid of Ellen. He’s attracted to and feels protective of Jo. Dean’s responsibility for Jo in “No Exit” took on the big-brotherly thing, mixed with sexual tension, that is their vibe from here on out, and yet Ellen was so angry at Dean at the end of “No Exit” that he basically recoiled from her merely because of the look on her face. He was very sorry, if he understands anything he understands family, but Ellen shut him out. And then Jo shut him out. And forget it, Dean doesn’t stick around for longer than 2 seconds when women get hard on him. He’s outta there. “See ya around.” But since then, whatever has happened in the time since, it’s all settled down. In “Croatoan,” Sam suggests calling Ellen for help, and Dean agrees. Maybe the fight in “No Exit” was so intimate, and so nasty, that that felt so much like family to him, that they’re all connected now. That happens sometimes. Whatever the case may be (and, as always, it’s the missing pieces that are so fascinating and are the GLUE that holds the show together – those absences and gaps), Dean is now totally on the level with Ellen, and Ellen is totally on the level with him. There’s no grappling for power, except that Dean wants something and begs Ellen to tell him where Sam is. But Dean admits her place in his world, and she accepts him for who he is. It feels like eons ago that she corrected him so fiercely, “You watch your tone with me, boy.” They’re past that now.

The show is so good with this stuff. Dean calls Sam “that kid” and while it is deeply dysfunctional it is also 100% touching and understandable. I love the word choice from Tucker.

Ellen says, “Now, Dean, you know what they say, you can’t protect your family forever. I say screw that. He’s in Lafayette, Indiana.”

Dean says, “Thanks” and hangs up.

Everything has shifted, in terms of Ellen and Dean, and I like it. They’re both prickly creatures, protective and potentially nasty when threatened. But they understand one another.

9th scene
Back at the Blue Rose Motel, the two Blue Roses talk things out. Ava is hell-bent on saving Sam still, even though he is clearly nuts, and maybe even a religious fanatic, and pleads, “Why can’t you leave town, please? Before you blow up!” When he says No, she responds as though he’s frustrating her TO NO END. (It’s so funny and somewhat of a relief to see people who DON’T stand on ceremony with these guys. They’re both so … commanding and impressive.)

Ava’s journey is fascinating and so far it is different from Max’s and Andrew’s. Maybe it is because she is in Sam’s position, a pro-active one, where Sam was when he raced off to find Max, but her feeling is: Okay, I’ve done my duty, I’ve warned him, now let me get back to my life. Instead, though, Sam talks to her as though she is part of something bigger, she is part of some grouping (even though her mother is alive and well and living in Palm Beach, not burnt to a crisp on a nursery ceiling), and maybe there’s more to this. But Ava didn’t sign up for that. Ava didn’t sign up for anything. It makes me curious as to why she was chosen. What I am getting at is: She’s a little bit like Frodo. Or Bilbo Baggins. A humble creature who has suddenly found herself swept far away from her cozy life, and maybe required to do something very brave. If you think about it, coming to find Sam was extremely brave. What Isabelle brings to the role is a screwball sense of how out of the ordinary all of this is for Ava. How she’s a steady person, with a good job, a nice fiancé, and she can’t make sense of any of it. She’s no Andrew Gallagher, strolling down a sidewalk wearing a silken robe, and totes cool with being a freak-of-nature. She wants NO part of ANY of it. None!

She seems so concerned about him that when he says, “We’re a part of something …” you think she might be about to change her tune. Instead she takes a moment, stands up and says, “Y’know what? Screw you, buddy. I am a secretary from Peoria and I’m not part of anything!” Then comes the wedding invitations monologue, and her hysterical little pantomime of all the scribbling she should be doing right now, by the way, and she thrusts her ring in his face to show him her status, and he sits on the bed, staring up at her, taking it, waiting it out, letting her get it all out of her system, and like I said, I laugh out loud. It’s so entertaining.

She has no desire to save his “weirdo ass” (she kills me) and she starts to leave. Still sitting on the bed, he stops her, quietly, openly. Doesn’t she want to know the truth? Don’t her visions scare the hell out of her? It’s a beautifully composed shot, with her in the foreground, him small in the background, and, of course, gives us another opportunity to check out that insane room.

Sam says, “I need your help,” and he’s so truthful, and so soft with it, so gentle, that what’s a secretary from Peoria supposed to do?

10th scene
Great and very funny cut, to Ava seated in the psychiatrist’s office we recognize from the teaser. We hear the psychiatrist off-camera saying to her, “So, you’re new in town” and she, smiling like a maniac, completely in a panic, says quietly, “That’s right,” and it’s so screwball I couldn’t be happier. She looks totally insane and is so clearly lying, and thinks she has to smile widely and then her lies won’t be as apparent. But her dead eyes are the giveaway.

“What made you decide to seek out therapy?” he asks. She reaches for a lie, desperately, and then says bluntly, “I have no idea.” The calm therapist urges her to continue, and she manically reaches for words and you have no idea what she’s going to say next because SHE has no idea what she’s going to say next. “I’m … just feeling … really … anxious right now …”

And as she babbles, suddenly we see the room in its entirety, from behind her head, and we see Sam climbing along on the ledge outside the window. You guys, it is so dumb, and SO FUNNY.

Why couldn’t they have just broken in after hours? Because it’s funnier to have Ava see Sam sneaking by during her bogus therapy appointment on a ledge outside the window, that’s why. Ava, who is not practiced in lying and pretending she’s someone else, sees Sam behind the therapists’s head and jumps out of her skin, exclaiming, “Holy crap!!” When the therapist turns, Sam has sidled on by out of sight. Ava, who barely knows her own name anymore, starts babbling about how she ate Pop Rocks and drank a lot of Coke when she was a kid, and she wondered if that is somehow the genesis of all of her problems.

It is the urban legend that will never die. The poor “Mikey, he likes it!” kid will live forever because of it.

The therapist’s poker face betrayed intense interest on the woman before him, who is CLEARLY out of her mind.

Ava. Suddenly working with Sam. Suddenly taking on Dean’s role. Collaborating. Not graceful about it. Freaking out. But helping anyway. Because she’s brave and she wants to do the right thing and if pretending she needs therapy will somehow help in doing the right thing … then she’s game. It’s wonderful. It doesn’t happen often in the show. It’s very satisfying.

11th scene
Once I made the Blue Roses connection, it was all I could see. Sam and Ava re-enter the motel room. I mean, come on.

Ava is in a daze. She has no measuring stick for what is happening now. She just pretended to need therapy so that Sam could break into the psychiatrist’s (other?) office and steal Scott’s case files. Yesterday she was answering phones in a cubicle. What has happened to her? Sam is busy at the table, opening up the file and then notices Ava’s wandering floating energy, asks if she’s okay. She’s close to snapping, she’s delirious: “I just helped you steal some dead guy’s files. I’M AWESOME.” She’s due for a long nap. But they listen to the tape recordings, they hear Scott talking about his abilities. They glance at one another. It’s good information, but both of them are worried. The guy talking on that tape was stabbed, and Ava saw it happen.

And then, the Impala, chugging like a dragon, pulls into the parking lot of the Blue Rose Motel. One wonders what name Sam registered under. I like to know these things. I love to see how they operate. Dean pulls up and stares across the way at Sam’s room. It’s such a great Peeping Tom shot. And it gets better. At the first sight of Sam in the window, Dean breathes a sigh of relief to himself, “Thank God you’re okay.” It’s sweet. Sam then moves away, and suddenly there is Ava through the window. Whatever Dean might have been expecting, it would not be that Sam had a girl in there with him. Good old Dean starts laughing, pleased, and it’s not as icky as the “That’s muh boy” thing at the end of “Provenance” although you will notice that Dean doesn’t move to drive away, just in case there might be something romantic going on in there. Oh, no. He rests his elbow on the car door, and settles in to watch and see what’s going on. It is not a shock at all that Sam would feel he needed some privacy, because honestly. But still, it’s a funny moment, and sensitively handled.

Back inside, there are closeups of the tape recorder, and closeups of Sam, the camera moving in on both, prioritizing what is being said, highlighting it. Scott talks about the Yellow-Eyed man, “he says he has plans for me … there’s a war coming … people like me will be the soldiers …”

Ava is struggling with denial.

“He’s not talking about us, is he?” Sam has moved over to the wall-divider with the blue roses, so now it’s his turn to be in front of the gigantic Glass Menagerie subtext. And when Gordon shoots, which he does right now? The bullet pierces one of the Blue Roses. It all may be a bit much, but I like it. Finally, we see Gordon, on a nearby rooftop, with one of the fiercest guns we have seen yet on the series. It’s a true assassin’s rifle with a silencer on it. He keeps shooting, shattering the glass window. Sam, meanwhile, has leapt on top of Ava, because that’s the kind of guy he is (if he or Dean saw Force Majeure, their heads would explode in outrage), and she’s screaming, and he’s ordering her to stay down. It’s chaos. The shots are very accurate, bursting into the blue wall right behind their heads.

Through the rifle sight, we see Sam’s head peeping up over the table, and Gordon’s finger on the trigger. Suddenly, off-camera, Dean shouts, “GORDON,” and then the rooftop fight is on. It’s two ferocious guys, both carrying guns, and it’s brutal. The fight choreography is terrific, and both of them are so good at it, it doesn’t look like “marking it” at all. Dean has the upper hand, because of the element of surprise, and crouches on top of Gordon punching him in the head repeatedly. Gordon had this one coming, there’s so much left over from “Bloodlust,” for both of them. Gordon is able to knock Dean off of him, and then smashes the rifle butt into Dean’s face, which, yeah, gotta hurt. Dean is knocked out, and Gordon stands, blood pouring out of his mouth, and he’s seen completely in isolation, up against the sky, and he looks formidable and terrible.

Gordon is the wild card of the episode.

12th scene
Sam and Ava climb up to the rooftop together. Ava lives in the normal world, where you call the cops when some unknown sniper tries to mow you down, but Sam says calling the cops wouldn’t do them much good. Crouching down, Sam picks up a bullet casing and starts babbling to her excitedly: “These are 223 caliber. Subsonic grounds. The guy must have put a suppresser on the rifle.”

Ava’s posture and expression as she listens to this monologue is hilarious.

She exclaims, “DUDE. Who ARE you?” with this helpless funny gesture at the bullet and the ground it was laying on, like … really? What the hell? The outsider POV on these guys … what would we do without it? Because we forget, we spend so much time with them, but imagine if you were her. I love how Raelle Tucker has conceived of Ava, and I love how Ava is thrown into the thick of it with Sam, highlighting how strange Sam is, but also how awesome Ava is. Sam, beautifully, realizes his mistake, and blusters around, embarrassed, sort of like Ava was doing in the therapist’s office. And his answer to her question is: “I just watch a lot of T.J. Hooker.” T.J. Hooker went off the air in 1986 and then had a long shelf-life with re-runs. But still. Nice outdated reference there, pal. It’s like blabbing about CHiPs (any time either of them reference CHiPs, it warms my heart. You honestly have to be a certain age to even get how ridiculous that show was, what a huge hit the show was, and how stupid it all seems in retrospect. And I suppose now is as good a time as ever to provide a link describing the time I screamed, “Don’t even try, CHiPs” repeatedly into my boyfriend’s face, as he cowered helplessly in fear, wondering why his girlfriend was suddenly so angry at CHiPs that she had to shout at HIM about it. Maybe you had to be there. But maybe you will understand.)

Regardless: T.J. Hooker. Nice save.

Ava is so tiny, and Sam is so tall, that this is really the only valid way to shoot them in the same frame, similar to having Sam seated on the bed back in the room.

And here is where the two plot-lines of the episode merge. Sam, having no idea that Dean was just outside his window grinning like a happy Peeping Tom, decides to call Dean. It’s a concession on his part, him saying to Ava, “We definitely need some help …” and Dean picks up after the first ring. It’s this beautiful weird shot, with Dean’s head in the side of the frame, everything else black. Nothing else is visible. There are zero clues as to where he is.

His voice is calm and semi-normal. I like the script here.

Dean: Hello.
Sam: Dean.
Dean: Sam, I’ve been looking for you.
Sam: Yeah, look, I’m in Indiana. Lafayette.
Dean: I know.
Sam: You do?
Dean: Yeah, I talked to Ellen. Just got here myself. Real funky town. You ditched me, Sammy.
Sam: Yeah, I’m sorry. Look. Right now there’s someone after me.
Dean: What. Who?
Sam: I don’t know. That’s what we need to find out. Where are you?
Dean: I’m staying at 5637 Monroe Street. Why don’t you meet me here?
Sam: Yeah, sure.

“Funky town”, naturally, is their code word, akin to “Poughkeepsie” so there’s that beautiful detail in the scene, and it’s fun to think of them giving one another secret messages in plain view, but there’s more here. I’m actually more interested in the fact that Dean says “You ditched me, Sammy” AFTER saying the code word. By that point, in the filming, we see that Dean is tied up in some horrible abandoned building, and Gordon is holding the phone to his ear. Everything is information only on Dean’s side, every answer, the listing of his address, he’s doing what Gordon said, he manages to throw in the code word, AND he doesn’t care if Gordon hears him say the terribly vulnerable words, “You ditched me, Sammy.” And he SOUNDS vulnerable when he says it. You can hear the hurt, not just in his language choice, but in the tone of his voice. It’s a moment I like thinking about. I know people love to explain stuff, and (obvi) so do I, but there are some things I prefer to be left in that mist of “Hmm, what is that about”… (this is what I mean when I babble about Supernatural not being an “either/or” show, but a “both/and” show – at its best, it has “both/and” in its moments. The CHARACTERS may be struggling to find the “either/or” of any situation, but every moment usually contains its opposite. That mirroring effect. This is especially true with Dean, probably because of the guy playing him, who is pretty much unable to have an un-layered moment. He puts those layers into everything.)

I love the moments like that, the “You ditched me, Sammy”, that have a little bit of space around them, the space of unknowingness, of emotional truth and uncertainty. It’s a very well-written scene.

Once the conversation ends, we hang in the room with Gordon and Dean a little bit. Light streams in through the slats behind Gordon, so we can’t see his expression at all, but the gentle tilt of his head is eloquent, and his soft soothing voice, “Now was that so hard?”

Dean’s reply is the satisfying “Bite me,” and it’s a playground taunt, said in an almost a flat tone, almost as though Gordon isn’t worth getting worked up about. Of course Gordon IS worth getting worked up about but Dean won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing that. What follows in the scenes with Dean and Gordon is the continuation of what went on in “Bloodlust”, with that strange and eerie mix of predatory behavior and, almost, coddling … that is so freakin’ creepy, as well as scary, but, frankly, Dean is used to it, in a way. He’s used to being treated that way. There are New York Public Libraries full of “Dean Winchester as teenage truck-stop hooker” fanfic. Now I happen to like the gaps in the timeline, and like not knowing what really went on in those years following Dean getting released from the boy’s home, and Sam secretly applying for college, and Dean reaching his early 20s – I like those gaps. I like them because how strange it must have been to be … reaching manhood … with a father like John Winchester … in their particular unique family unit. And starting to express their sexuality, and how to do so under the tremendously strange situation they were living in, and … You know. We don’t know much about what went on. We know some, but not much. I like that. I am also, by the way, of the opinion that Dean has traded himself for cash in the past, on occasion, either out of desperation to feed Sam, or because, what the hell, he needed some extra money himself … it may be one of the reasons why he has a strict rule now about never paying for it. I get why others wouldn’t see it that way, but, for me, it’s one of those things that is interesting to contemplate, and it brings up all kinds of fascinating behavior, which is 100% Ackles. It’s subtext. It’s also in the text, when we see clearly that John had no compunction whatsoever about using Dean as bait, and Dean going along with it as though it was business as usual. This whole nasty thing was made quite clear in Season 4 with the implication that Dean was raped repeatedly in Hell. It’s just something that’s fun to think about. (Not fun, like “Yay, Dean got raped” but fun to think about the deep layers that are there in that meticulous performance.) Follow the behavior. I think it was Elia Kazan who defined acting as “psychology plus behavior” and honestly, it doesn’t get any clearer than that. Hard to do, but that’s what’s going on in any good actor. You get the psychology of the character, and you get it through the behavior. Gordon treats Dean with contempt but also softness, gentleness, completely unruffled by anything that Dean throws at him, and it’s a total mindfuck, and familiar enough and scary enough that Dean recognizes it for what it is. Dean is in deep shit and he knows it. How do you get what you want? You go for it. Dean has an objective: Get myself free from Gordon. How should he do that? He tries many different ways. A scene like this one is an actor’s dream. Okay, let me try to reason with him. Nope. Let me try to joke with him. Nope. Let me get all tough and firm with him. Nope. In the middle of the crisis, you’ve got to be thinking, planning, manipulating, striving, trying to get ahead of the situation, trying to anticipate. It’s really great work from Ackles, especially because he is denied his body language. It’s all gotta be in the face and in the voice (although his hands, flopped over the edge of the chair, sometimes tell the whole story. Watch the hands. Fists. Gesturing. Nervous restless wiggling.)

After they hang up, Sam tells Ava his brother is in trouble. “He gave me a code word,” he informs her. “‘Funky town.'” Like that is in any way valid. It’s SO FUNNY to me.

Yet another 1980s reference. T.J. Hooker and “Funky Town” in the same scene? I’m in love.

Ava gives him a look like he’s nuts, like … you, with your supersonic 500 caliber Uzi knowledge and your code word, which is FUNKY…. TOWN…? Am I actually throwing my fate in with yours? Sam is embarrassed enough about it, his secret little espionage world he has created with his brother, and NOBODY gets to see in there, that he gets flustered by the way she’s looking at him, defensive. “He thought of it. It’s kind of … a long story …”

You know what? Having just re-listened to the song, laughing all the way through it, I NEED to hear that story, Sam.

13th scene

Like so many other scenes where Dean is placed in the foreground, clicking and clacking his sexy guns together while some poor sap is tied up in the background, now we have the same thing, only in reverse.

Dean starts off with a mildly vicious joking tone. He calls Gordon “Gordy.” He refers to him and Sam “leaving you tied up in your mess for 3 days” and starts laughing, man, that was so funny. Gordon is, as he was with the vamp in “Bloodlust”, completely unreachable. It is the Hunter mindset gone to its farthest extreme. Gordon will remain forever as an example of what single-minded obsession actually looks like in action. It is not pretty. Sam will end up embodying it when he has no soul. It is not terrifying because it is violent. It is terrifying because it is so reasonable. You can actually talk an hysterical person off a ledge. There’s space there for you to reach them, even if it’s through trickery. But a person who has thought things out, who has weighed the pros and cons, who has come up with a decision after a long process … that person is operating from a reasonable place. Even if their reasoning may seem completely mad … they will not be stopped. They think YOU’RE the crazy one. That’s what Sterling Brown brings so gorgeously to the role, and why I cherish the episodes where he appears. He is truly formidable, and he’s not a sneering villain. He’s, honestly, the same as them … but has come to different conclusions. You couldn’t say that if Dean or Sam were in his position, they wouldn’t act as Gordon does. They will be tested along those lines constantly.

Brown is so strong as Gordon, so movie-star-compelling, that it’s just great watching Ackles have to react. Ackles is so strong himself. He needs a strong counterpart. He gets it in Padalecki, the show is completely blessed with the chemistry of its two leads, but in these larger Arcs, we need actors who can step into this intricate intimate story, and own their spot in it. Like Ellen does. Like Jo does. Like Bobby will. Like Garth will. Like Benny will. These are all powerhouse actors too.

But Dean realizes, very quickly, that Gordon coming after them has nothing to do with revenge for what happened back there during “Bloodlust.”It’s much worse. It’s about Sam. Sam must die. “It’s nothing personal …” says Gordon, and he means it. Dean is alarmed, you see him throw away all the tactics he had counted on.

14th scene
Sam walks Eva to her cute little Volkswagen, and she is very reluctant to leave him. Sam has already moved on, you can see him thinking, thinking of Dean at that address on the stationery. She’s pleading, “You’re stepping right into my vision. This is how you die!” Sam replies, “It doesn’t matter. It’s my brother.” Heart-crack. She doesn’t like this, though, because she is a good and caring person, and even though she just got shot at with a rifle, she offers to help. Courageous. Sam needs her to be safe and thinks she should go back to her fiancé. “You’ll be safe there.” She will?? It’s a little strange, considering what happened to the rest of the Psychic Kids, but this is an extraordinary circumstance: his brother has a gun to his head at this very moment. The second he and Dean are in the clear, his thoughts go back to Ava. That kooky brave woman who jabbed her ring finger in his face and called him a “weirdo.” It’s a loose end. He knows it. He will regret letting her go.

15th scene

Gordon sits with his rifle in his lap, across from Dean, who now realizes he is in deep shit, and has subsided into an almost passive state. He doesn’t look at Gordon. He listens, but he doesn’t look.

And I want to wallow in Sterling Brown’s line readings. “She didn’t make it.” It’s eerie, how he speaks, how calm he is, how informative. Dean calls him a “son of a bitch” at one point, a pretty mild epithet, but Gordon stands up and whacks Dean across the side of the face, saying, “That’s my momma you’re talking about.” The wit in the line, the truth of it too (if you think about it) surprises Dean and makes him laugh. It’s spontaneous. It feels genuine, even though the stakes are so high for him. He almost appreciates the comeback, like, “I gotta remember that for the next time someone calls me a ‘son of a bitch,’ that’s a good one.” The slap is a small interruption in Gordon’s monologue, and he has a moment when he raises his finger, like a teacher trying to get the attention of the class, and then moves on with the story: “Anyway …” That little raised finger is truly insane. It’s scarier than any punch he could dish out. And a gesture like that is 100% Brown. He chose that gesture. That’s his understanding of Gordon at work, on display. Goosebumps.

Gordon’s ability to dehumanize his opponents is complete. In many ways, it is the state Dean reached in Season 9. And Sam was right to be afraid of it, and Castiel was right to be worried. Dean had become the thing he hated. It’s not that one needs compassion for, say, a Wendigo. But you should kill it with a sense of duty, not glee, you should not be triumphal in the moment. It’s not fitting. Somehow. You don’t want to cross that line. You should commit to the job, but you shouldn’t love it. However, come on, we all know that that’s almost an impossibly high bar to reach. But that was Sam’s point in the intense confrontation he and Dean had in “Croatoan.” We are SUPPOSED to struggle with these things, Dean. Dean resists that, for his own good reasons, and when he kills he does usually have a good reason, at this stage of the game. Trust me. “I know how to do my job, Sammy.” But Gordon is past the struggle part. There’s something so beyond the pale in how he talks about the “psychics” that the demons have been gathering for the coming war. “They aren’t pure, it’s not like they’re really human …” If you convince yourself that your enemy lacks humanity, then of course it will be easier to kill them. Genocidal maniacs everywhere have known that from the beginning of time.

The scene is also a reminder that Sam, at this point, knows more than Dean does. Sam has heard Scott’s tape recordings about the war coming, and the demon army. Dean doesn’t know anything about that. So Gordon revealing it here is a shocker to Dean, and his first reaction is to laugh. The idea is moronic. But as Gordon continues, you see the scales fall away from Dean’s eyes. Gordon holds all the power, emotionally and physically. Dean doesn’t have time to get the poker face going, and it’s incredibly dangerous to be vulnerable or unsure in front of Gordon. But you can see it happen.

Dean brushes it off, tries to, and Gordon, in an interesting moment where you can see that it actually does matter to him what Dean thinks of him, says, “Dean. I’m not some reckless yahoo. I’ve done my homework.” It shows the status Dean has in the hunter world (or, more likely, his father) that someone as strong and tough as Gordon would even feel the need to say that. Gordon then says the words that call us back to the people looking over at Sam as he entered the roadhouse, at Ash’s uneasiness at doing this business so out in the open: “You got your roadhouse connections. I got mine. It’s how I found Sammy in the first place.”

Gordon has the upper hand again, and naturally starts up his explanatory monologue again. At this point in the action, though, I truly WANT to hear him keep talking, not just because of his delicious line readings (every single one is perfect: the pauses, the eye movements, the tone) – but also because I knew NONE of what he was talking about and at this point in Season 2, I was sick of the confusion. What is happening?? (I’m not a big plot-person, anyway. I would prefer to watch a movie with a bunch of interesting people sitting around a table talking, and nothing actually happens, than an intricately puzzle-piece-plotted movie. I like character and behavior. Hence, my love of Supernatural, good LORD, it’s HEAVEN. But also, there’s enough plot to please the Plot-People, so everyone wins!)

As Dean listens to Gordon, he starts to get … just how serious the situation is. His energy changes. The wisecracks are starting to disappear. The anger is coming up.

Gordon says he bet that Dean somehow managed to warn Sam over the phone, and says with a laugh, “You didn’t think I was that stupid, do you?” These flashes of insecurity, about what Dean thinks about him, that Dean thinks he’s dumb, are fascinating to me. Dude, you’re the one with an Uzi. Who the hell cares if you’re dumb, you’ve got all the power!

And, most sinister and gross of all: he refers to Sam as “Sammy” throughout. Sam had already told him in “Bloodlust” “He’s the only one who gets to call me that” (one of my favorite Sam moments in the entire series), and so it’s deliberate, it’s a “Fuck you” to the request of Sam, and it’s meant to get under the skin. A nickname is intimate and not everyone is allowed to use it. Just because Dean calls Sam “Sammy” doesn’t mean everyone has the same rights. Normal people understand these things and respect them. Those who are bullies refuse to get it, and make a point of ignoring those natural boundaries.

Gordon lays out his plan for killing Sam, because, yes, all killers tend to do that before killing someone, and Dean throws in a comment about Sam not falling for a tripwire, and Gordon’s reaction is a quiet, “Maybe you’re right. That’s why I’ll have two.” You can practically see the color drain from Dean’s face as Gordon approaches him, looming over him.

Gordon apologizes. He means it. That’s the most terrible part. He is sorry. “For what it’s worth, it’ll be quick.” He moves out of the frame to go set up his snare, and Dean turns into this absolutely stunning completely silhouetted profile. It’s just a great shot, we can’t see the expression on his face, but we don’t need to. Dean has plunged into the blackness of what is coming next. Besides, Ackles acts the shit out of that shot, whether we see his face or no. It’s beautiful. Go, Talalay.

16th scene
The trip wire gleams across the floor, Gordon unfurling it, and working on the placement. Nothing will stop him. And Ava saw it happen. That’s all I could think of when I saw the following scene: Ava told Sam that he “blew up.” If she hadn’t seen that, would he have thought of a trip wire? Trip wires aren’t really part of their everyday life. Monsters don’t set trip wires. MEN set trip wires, and the Winchesters don’t fight men. But Sam is coming to the standoff with knowledge of what is going to happen. And Dean DOESN’T know that Sam knows.

Dean takes another tack, trying to reason with Gordon, man to man: “Come on, man. He has more of a conscience than I do. He feels guilty when he searches the Internet for porn.” Poor Sam. But it’s such a funny and great character detail. Sam sitting up straight on the bed, earnestly watching Casa Erotica and then refusing to admit it when Dean busts him doing it. No matter what Dean says, though, Gordon remains a calm immovable force. Almost buddy-buddy with Dean: As a matter of fact, Gordon pulls up a chair beside Dean, sits down, and thinks about what Dean said.

“Maybe you’re right,” he says again. “But one day he’ll be a monster.” “How? How does Sam become a monster?” Dean’s getting hot, and Gordon expresses surprise, hitting Dean where it hurts: “I’m surprised at you, Dean. I had heard you were more of a professional.” More like your dad. Gordon presents the “if you had an opportunity to kill Hitler, would you” thing to Dean. What if Hitler was riding shotgun in your car? Young Hitler. The “crappy artist” Hitler. You’d kill him, wouldn’t you?

Hitler as a crappy painter always reminds me of this great Eddie Izzard bit where he pretends to be the frustrated-artist Hitler: German accent: “I can’t get the trees right … I MUST KILL EVERYONE IN THE WORLD.”

Gordon says, “You’d take him out, no question.”

Dean says, “That’s not Sam,” and Gordon suddenly grabs Dean by the shoulder, holding him, an intense moment of touch, not violent, but intentional, and Gordon leaves his hand there, giving us this strange little tableau that I find endlessly fascinating.

Dean doesn’t like to be touched. Touch startles him. If you were his girlfriend, you probably shouldn’t hug him from behind. He needs to know where everyone is, and who is coming at him from what side, even with gentle intentions. (In my 20s, I dated a cop for a little while who worked homicide in Chicago. The shit he saw. He had serious PTSD from his job and I didn’t really understand it, and he couldn’t really explain it, and so it was a super relaxing relationship. ?? I hugged him once when he wasn’t expecting it, he didn’t see me coming and he shoved me across the room. Hard. Automatic reflex. He probably feels guilty about it to this day. I was so apologetic, it was horrible. He was a nice person. He didn’t mean to do it.)

Back to Dean: It’s a strange moment. Still, gentle, soft almost. Dean doesn’t look at Gordon, but he reacts to the touch, a slight start, and then goes totally still, staring down at Gordon’s hand. All I can say is: Nobody told Ackles to react that way. Television directing is too fast and furious, there’s barely time for rehearsal except for blocking and fight choreography, and small body-language things like that aren’t in the director’s hands anyway, although directors often take credit for shit they had nothing to do with. Why would you react this way? It seems so natural and perfect, because it’s Ackles doing it – but there are other choices that could have been made: staring directly at Gordon, ignoring the hand, or shrugging his shoulder up to get the hand off, or any number of other choices. What Ackles chooses to do is to go still and soft, staring down at the hand resting on him. It’s 3 seconds of screen time, I won’t go on too much longer about it, but it’s a potent reminder of that great quote from American acting teacher legend Stella Adler: “The talent is revealed in the choice.” It’s a tough sentiment and many actors hate it, because it seems to imply you can’t grow as an actor. Can’t you DEVELOP your talent? Well, of course you can. But in the moment, when the cameras are rolling, and the curtain goes up, what matters is talent, and there most definitely your talent is revealed in the choices you make. An actor who lacks sensitivity will make choices that are lacking in sensitivity. That’s how it works. Acting is not a democracy at all. It is a total and RUTHLESS meritocracy. You can WANT to have talent, but you will still make stock choices, cliched choices, you will think you’re funny when you’re not, you will cry too much when the better choice is to hold back your tears, you will not understand that a moment needs stillness as opposed to movement, and on and on. Take any acting class and you will see those with no aptitude for it struggle to … get some aptitude. And then are BAFFLED as to why it seems so easy for others.

I’m fascinated by Jensen Ackles because he is the type of actor who makes the types of choices he does. And it’s in the small moments, not the big moments like when he cries or has huge tormented closeups. It’s the strange singular moments like his reaction when Gordon rests his hand on his shoulder. That’s all him. And it’s a weird choice, people. It’s unique. It’s counterintuitive. It’s why we like to sit around talking about him, moments like that. Or, I’ll just speak for myself. A moment like that is why I love acting. It has mystery in it. It is psychology revealed through behavior.

Gordon says it is Sam’s “destiny” to become a monster. It is a done deal. Destiny vs. Free Will is a long time out in the series, at least explicitly, but it’s there from the get-go. It’s there in Sam, but it’s there elsewhere. Is it “destiny” that Dean will become Gordon? Is that just inevitable for all hunters?

Things start changing and Dean’s panic starts revealing itself. Little flicks of the eyes, tightening of the lips, and Gordon probably senses it too. And there’s that part of him, that “did you really think I’m stupid” part, that wants to put Dean in his place. But talk about unreachable. Dean is an open book, and sexually quite suggestible, which everyone and their grandmother and their pet Wendigo pick up on. But there’s also a part of him that will always be hidden. He has erected his personality that way since he was a child. Maybe that’s what brings out Gordon’s anger, that he can’t get at him the way he wants to. Dean’s burlesque act means he reveals and conceals, sometimes simultaneously. He’s starting to lose track of it right now.

Gordon says, coldly, “Look. I’m sympathetic. You love the guy. This has gotta hurt like hell for you.” Gordon says the words, but he doesn’t know what any of them mean: “sympathetic” “love” “hurt.” The focus switches to Dean (same take, I love it when they do that), and he’s starting to fall apart. He can’t keep the panic off his face now.

When Gordon stands up, ending their tete a tete about Sam and Hitler, it’s a fluid movement, nothing jagged or alarming, but he takes out a handkerchief, and stuffs it into Dean’s mouth, tying it on the back of Dean’s head. It seems to me more of a humiliation tactic than anything else. Dean could still scream pretty loud with that thing in his mouth, but to be man-handled like that, to be gagged, by this monster dick who keeps calling his brother “Sammy”, who’s oozing all that competence and coolness at him and implying stuff about his professionalism, meaning his courage, which means his manliness … it’s nasty. Once Dean is gagged, Gordon sits back down and starts talking about John, John “would have had the stones to do the right thing.” It’s a, dare I say, very bitchy comment, and when he takes it further (“So you’re telling me you’re not the man he is?”) Dean slowly turns and gives him the deadly dagger-eyes.

This is the ugliness of men. This is how men torture each other.

17th scene
We enter Ava’s vision. It’s the same scene. Sam’s hand holding out the address. The mist. Sam creeping through the shadows. Only now, he peeks through the slats, and sees Dean, tied up and gagged, and also sees Gordon. Sam is now caught up on what Dean has figured out. He looks freaked out. Gordon??

The music under this sequence is good, orchestral and ominous. They have redeemed themselves after “Croatoan.” Sam starts to pick the lock. It is amazing to me that in that ruin of a building there would even be a lock at all. Really? The place is a dump! Gordon stands at the window, and says to Dean, “You hear ‘im?” Dean is now openly afraid, and it’s a terrible sight, that gag in his mouth. It’s worse than seeing him get punched. Sam slowly enters, and Dean sits there, listening, hunched over, hands tightly balled up, the gag contorting his face, and when the explosion comes, agony from Dean. Look at the body language.

Both Padalecki and Ackles have talked about the experience of being tied up during the show. It’s great, because their comments speak to the power of Make Believe, which is basically what acting is all about. Colleagues have spoken about Meryl Streep, saying that one of the reasons she is so phenomenal is that she flat out believes more than other actors do. There IS no acting, in other words. It’s just belief. Like a little kid playing dress-up, or pretending to be shot in the back yard. (I call this the “Bang Bang You’re Dead” School of Acting. It is my favorite kind of acting. It is the freest kind of acting.) I’m not one of those people who thinks that gaining 80 pounds for a role shows what a good actor you are. As a matter of fact, I think it represents a failure of the imagination. It’s also terrible for your health. Put on a fat suit, use your damn imagination, and don’t wreck your metabolism for all time. Really gifted actors remember what it was like to be 8 years old and pretending to be shot dead in the back yard. They believe with that much commitment. And so in those moments of sheer make believe, there is no memory that you are “acting.” Padalecki and Ackles both talk about the experience of having their hands tied, and how, even though they know it’s make believe, and that they’ll be untied soon, the situation starts to become real, and they start to actually struggle. Even though they are “fake tied up”, the struggle is real enough that they’ll have bruises or red marks on their wrists. Because the mind understands it’s not real, and the body doesn’t. This is the magic part of acting, when that transfer takes place. Stanislavsky called it “the magic What If.” By that he meant, all an actor really needs to do is ask “What if this were real?” That “What If” is magic in the hands of suggestible actors: ANYTHING can become real using the power of “What if …?” I often think of that when I see Padalecki or Ackles fake tied up. They are actors. They are not delusional. They finish up their scenes and go home to have a bite to eat.

But watching Ackles buck and strain against his ties, moan and roar into his gag, his fingers flaring out, bunching up again, his mouth straining … That’s “the magic What If” at work.

Dean’s grief is palpable in the background, while Gordon takes up the foreground, listening, his eyes cool and focused, murmuring, “Hold on. Not yet.” Dean is completely in a blur back there, and you squint to see him … you don’t want to leave him like that. Sam is now up to speed with everything Dean knows, but Dean is still in the dark about what Sam knows. In that moment, he comes to terms with his brother being dead, with his failure to protect him.

The second blast comes, and Dean huddles against it, the pain on his distorted face is awful to see, especially since he is in the presence of Gordon, and at this point in the action I need SOMEONE to kick Gordy’s ass. The smoke is thick, and after the second blast there is silence, broken only by gasps from Dean. Gordon, holding his huge rifle, stands over Dean, almost gentle. There’s no taunting. He’s quiet and still when he says, “Sorry, Dean.”

It’s such a fantastic character.

As Gordon heads off into the next room where the blast was, Dean, awfully, starts rocking back and forth in his chair, straining against the gag. He’s going to hurt himself. Every muscle in his body is taut, wanting to leap, get up, attack, escape … The next short shot is one take, Gordon entering that back area, gun drawn, looking around. He sees a smoking shoe on the ground. Unconnected to a foot. Then he moves forward, looking around through the smoke, turning, and then, gorgeously, a silver gun enters the frame, behind Gordon’s head. It’s so Tarantino. Guns, guns, everywhere.

Gordon makes some crack about getting tetanus if you walk around with no shoes on, and Sam roars, “PUT THE GUN DOWN NOW.” Dean, hearing Sam, is, almost tragically, like a baby in a crib, dying … DYING … to be picked up. Gordon keeps his cool, saying, “You wouldn’t shoot me, Sammy? Because your brother thinks you’re some kind of saint.” “Sammy” again. Also, morally, Gordon is using Sam’s different-ness as a way to shame him: if you shoot me, aren’t you a monster? Gordon insisted earlier to Dean, “I’m a hunter, not a monster.” It’s not that Gordon needs to prop up his belief in himself, he has plenty of self-belief to sustain himself, but I would suggest that something about the Winchesters, their closeness, their formidable nature, pushes HIS buttons. THEY are a mirror, too. He lost his sibling, remember. He had “the stones” to kill his sibling. It gives him a sense of superiority over the “weaker” Winchesters who can’t bring themselves to turn the other one in.

Naturally, instead of just shooting the guy, Sam lets Gordon chat for a bit, and he loses the moment, Gordon surprising him by wheeling around, knocking the gun out of his hand, and attacking him. Honestly, boys, haven’t you even watched your own show? Don’t give the monster a chance to monologue because you always lose the upper hand. Gordon gets beaten up by BOTH Winchesters in “Hunted,” and the fights are both great. Sterling Brown is superb, physically, a real match for both these guys. The fight with Dean on the rooftop was shorter, and more constrained, Gordon lying down, trapped, and then Dean being knocked over. Here, we have two huge guys, on their feet, going at it. And Sam has a cast on one arm. Gordon kicks at Sam, Sam crashes through a dilapidated wall, falling to the floor. Dean, hearing all of this going on behind him, struggles, in vain, and (hilarious), you can hear his muffled, “Son of a bitch” through the gag.

He is a complete and total damsel in distress. He is this lady.

Gordon takes out a big silver knife, and, naturally, has to make a remark first: “You’re no better than the filthy things you hunt,” as Sam lies bleeding on the floor. But Sam is fast, struggling with Gordon’s arm, knocking him off, punching him in the head, pow, pow, pow. Up comes Sam, grabbing Gordon’s rifle.

Gordon, staring up at the gun in his face, barks, “Do it. Show your brother the killer you really are, Sammy.” Now it’s Gordon’s turn to get a rifle butt in the face. Ouch. Then we get a huge star close-up of Padalecki, blood coming from his nose, out of breath, but still in control of himself. And when he speaks, it is so Han Solo-Charles Bronson-Dirty Harry “Make My Day”:

“It’s Sam.”

It’s so satisfying, almost the equal of Sam saying to Gordon, “Dean’s the only one who gets to call me that.” It’s a great callback, an accumulation from that moment in “Bloodlust.”

I am intrigued by how slowly Sam goes to untie Dean. Here we go again, with “the talent is in the choice.” Another actor may have rushed in there, showing more urgency in his movements, a hero coming to the rescue. Maybe Padalecki went that way in rehearsal, and then realized that wasn’t right. However it all went down, when Sam enters the room where Dean is tied up, he moves slowly and exhaustedly, a hand coming down on Dean’s shoulder from behind, it’s a tired “Hey there, buddy, how ya doin'” touch, and then kneels, without saying a word, to untie Dean’s hands. The urgency is all on Dean’s side. These guys … they do not make the expected choices.

Once Dean’s hands are untied, he hurriedly takes off the gag, and jumps to his feet, grabbing hold of Sam to get a look at his face. It’s a terrific moment. No dialogue. It’s not sentimental, like “OMG my dear brother you are alive!” But it is caring and concerned. Dean’s the one who was just tied up on the railroad tracks, but in his mind, it is Sam who is the damsel in distress. Sam claps Dean on the arm.

Getting one look at Sam’s busted-up face, Dean whirls around, clearly on his way to kill Gordon, but Sam stops him. I love Dean’s line: “I let him live once. I won’t make that mistake twice.” But Sam has been a busy boy, back at the Blue Rose. He knows what’s on its way. And at this point, both guys still have, you know, morals. We don’t kill people. Gordon is a person. Let’s let the law handle it. But we don’t know that, all we know is Sam saying, exhaustedly, “Trust me. Gordon’s taken care of.”

Dean has no idea what that means but he accepts Sam’s word for it. They leave. Their gaits are slow, tired, they’re both worn out. But come on, guys, Gordon is a Balrog from the deep. Hustle, please. As they move away from the building, suddenly Gordon emerges again, holding two guns, shooting after them. It is an AWESOME moment.

He is so deliberate about it, and he also holds the gun to the side, which is so completely bad-ass and a moment I myself would love to play, if I ever had a fake gun in my hand. It is marvelously villainous, and he is dead-eyed and focused. A movie monster. Startled (because, why? Come ON, guys, smarten up), they take for the bushes, in a great shot, beautifully lit, where they are huddled alarmed silhouettes.

Gordon is still coming, the dirt exploding around Sam and Dean from the shots fired. It is then that the cop cars arrive, lights flashing, cops emerging, shouting at Gordon, “DROP YOUR WEAPON.” Sam is like a little kid, grinning and pleased at his plan working out, Dean giving him a glance like, “You did this?” Gordon complies, dropping his weapons, never once taking his eyes off that dark spot in the bushes where he knows they are. It’s frightening. Because he is an enemy that will not disappear. As we will see. Even jail time. He will not forget. They basically should have killed him (but then we wouldn’t get more Gordon episodes! The second he “bit it,” I missed him. He’s awful, but he’s great.)

The cops then discover Gordon’s phallic tray of weapons, on the grate behind his driver’s seat. Yeah. That’s not normal. As Sam and Dean peek through the shrubbery, Gordon, handcuffed, never stops staring over at them. He does not protest how he is being handled, he says not a word in his defense, he knows he is busted, but that look on his face: I will get you for this. Oh, it’s ON now.

“Anonymous tip,” whispers Sam, and Dean whispers back, “You’re a fine upstanding citizen, Sam.”

A deliciously ambiguous line.

18th scene

There’s a nighttime shot of Harvelle’s Roadhouse, and it’s just a quick and efficient way to place Ellen back in the action, a “Meanwhile, back at the roadhouse” moment, but it’s beautifully set up, and I love how the Strip Joint neon is reflected diagonally in the nearby windshield.

Ellen’s on the phone with Dean, saying, “Gordon Walker was hunting Sam?”

Back at the Impala, Sam sits inside, like he’s a little kid, and Dean is the Dad who has shit to do outside and doesn’t want his kid to hear. That’s what it looks like. What is Sam doing in there?? Sam knows that now things may potentially get ugly, and he is going to be the center of a lot of terrible attention. He already is. His different-ness has been confirmed, by the “demon army” comment, as well as the terrible revelation at the beginning of the episode, that John Winchester suspected that Sam might turn evil, and that Dean would have to be prepared to either “save” him or kill him. It’s awful. No wonder he just sits in the car and lets his brother read Ellen the riot act.

And Dean is hot, yelling at Ellen about the roadhouse and how “someone over there can’t keep their mouth shut.” Even though it’s a confrontation, it doesn’t have the vicious lock-down feeling of their dynamic in “Everybody Loves a Clown,” or even “Simon Said.” This feels like a family fight. Loud and messy, open, free. It may not be pleasant, but it’s intimate.

Ellen sticks up for their circle of people. Ash, Jo, Ellen … no way, no way would they have told anyone anything about Sam. “WHO ELSE KNOWS ABOUT SAM?” Dean yells, glancing back at Sam, who is in the Impala and appears to be holding up his phone, listening to music. It’s practically hysterical: the muffled sound of the music, Sam is checking OUT. It is all too intense, it is his worst nightmare come true, he is now “the problem,” he is “the one” they’re yelling about out there, and it’s just like Dean and John discussing him behind his back. Eff this, let me listen to some tunes. Such a funny weird detail. Sam has retreated to childhood passivity while the adults flip OUT.

Ellen cautiously looks around at the bar, telling Dean that a lot of hunters come in there, and she can’t control them. Maybe they do talk to Gordon. But there’s no way for her to censor the connections made. We get a glimpse of the hunter world, and there’s a woman at the bar playing cards. Our first female hunter? While I do watch commentary tracks, and am aware of backstage stuff, and script drafts, and what the creators feel about this or that Arc, it is actually against my deeply held belief system (ha, how’s that for hyperbole) to let that influence how I see things. It’s up to ME what I think. I don’t care that so-and-so made a comment that he didn’t like that Arc, or that the fans hated a certain character and so she/he had to go … I try to resist consensus and make up my own mind. I hear all that noise, and a lot of it is really interesting, but I am DOGGED in my belief that I get to choose what I like and don’t like. Once the show is out there, it’s mine, it’s yours. That’s the fun of it, and certainly the fun of our conversations here. It’s similar to my feelings about Elvis as an actor. My opinion is is that because Elvis was so open in interviews about how much he hated all of the movies he made, many critics have subconsciously chosen to view the movies with that prior knowledge in mind, because they don’t want to contradict what Elvis himself thought. It doesn’t make sense, but I’ve seen it go down. I realize I’m making a somewhat unfair assertion, because who knows what’s in people’s minds, but I’ve experienced it first-hand, when I’ve written something about what a great actor I think Elvis is, and someone will invariably show up to say, “Well, but, you know that Elvis hated his movies.” Yes. I know. And I don’t CARE. Elvis is not the boss of me. I do not feel beholden in any way to him, to mirror my responses to his. Maybe he wasn’t the best judge of how good he was, and how entertaining those movies are. Maybe I can decide to not listen to Elvis at ALL and make up my own damn mind, how’s that. (It’s one of the reasons why I do my best to judge Supernatural based ONLY on what is onscreen and whether or not I think it works.) All of that being said, I am aware of Eric Kripke’s griping comments about the roadhouse, and they are pretty hilarious. On one of the commentary tracks, he was quite clear in how much he hated the roadhouse, especially “all those shots of hunters cleaning their guns …” Ha ha. And this shot, of Ellen looking down the bar, is exactly what he was talking about.

The roadhouse, for me, has a lot of pros (Ellen, Jo, Ash, expanding the ensemble) and a lot of cons (Sam and Dean are better when they don’t have a home base, this is a road trip show). And when they DO finally get a home base (Bobby’s), it’s much much better, story-wise, than the roadhouse. Because it becomes a sort of alternative family, and Bobby rises in the narrative, and it all worked out perfectly. The roadhouse had to go. Even without Kripke’s comments in my ears, there was something that didn’t work for me about all of the hunters, oiling their guns at the bar. Something, dare I say, a little … nerdy? Like: No. This place does not exist. Sam and Dean work because we get the sense that they operate in the real world, and touch down in different spots that are recognizable to us. The roadhouse feels like Diagon Alley. Or Hogwarts. Fantasy-land. A tiny bit dumb, in other words. Not dumb in the context of Harry Potter where it works, but dumb here.

Ellen is so herself. She is not defensive. Dean is yelling at her, but she doesn’t correct him or snap him up short. She’s up front: “I can’t control these people. I’m sorry.” It’s grownup time.

19th scene

The Impala roars through the night, and Sam leaves a message for Ava. Along with his slow movements when releasing Dean, and his choice to listen to music while Dean shouted at Ellen, Sam’s energy here is slow, heavy with thought and worry. The urgency earlier in the episode is still there, but it’s submerged. The reality of his situation is starting to sink in.

They’re all caught up with each other. Dean cracks a joke about Gordon reaching for the soap. Oh, Dean. The dynamic with Gordon was so nasty with anxious masculinity, it’s sickening, they bring it out of one another. Sam, though, is still worried. Gordon could escape. They might not pin the murder of Scott Carey on Gordon. They aren’t out of the woods yet. And why isn’t Ava picking up her phone? She told him to call. Dean, meanwhile, has a moment, a sort of gearing himself up moment, as a light flashes over the windshield. You can see him get ready. He says, “You ever take off like that again …”, throwing a warning glance over at his brother. It’s soft, though, like a dad who has gotten over the fear of his son gone missing, and the relief colors his scolding.

Sam, though, wonders what Dean was going to say. Almost taunts his brother: “You’ll what? You’ll kill me?” It connects us to the opening scene, but in an ironic world-weary whistling past a graveyard way. Making a joke about something that is deadly serious. Dean murmurs, “That is so not funny” and Sam cracks up.

Sam has started to collect himself again, and asks Dean where they’re going now.

“One word,” says Dean. “Amsterdam.”

So this is interesting, and part of the Season 2 Arc that’s been building. Dean’s exhaustion, Dean’s fed-up-ness, now that John is out of the picture … it’s like the exhaustion he has felt for 10 years has suddenly roared into that vacuum. Why is it our responsibility? I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon. That’s stupid. Why can’t we lay low for a while? I’m tired, Sam, I’m tired. It came up in “Croatoan,” and it comes up again here. Sam starts laughing at Dean’s suggestion, and Dean is like, “Man, the coffee shops there don’t even serve coffee.” Yes, Dean. We know. Sam treats it like a joke, because Dean not being a driven workaholic is completely foreign to him. It’s almost … alarming. It’s almost like they switch places (part of the fluid flux of the show.) Sam is now driven to do whatever it takes to understand who he is and what is happening. Dean wants to get stoned and get laid. When Dean says, “Screw the job,” Sam starts. It’s like Dean is speaking in Swahili. It makes no sense. He doesn’t know this Dean. He grew up with another Dean. Yes, something is happening with Sam, and Sam is becoming the problem, and things are changing for Sam … but something is happening with Dean, too. That symbiosis again: how they react and morph and merge and diverge. It’s beautifully designed.

It highlights, too, how joined at the hip they are, how set-in-stone their dance step is. If one diverges, the other has no choice but to adjust, and yet they resist adjusting. Change is to be feared. Dean sees Sam as his little brother, and it is his job to protect him. Sam sees Dean as somewhat infallible, and (in his opinion) needs to slow down a bit on occasion, to think things through. When Dean expresses exhaustion, and a desire for … a vacation?? … it does not compute.

Dean goes on, “I’m sick of the job. We don’t get paid, we don’t get thanked. All we get is bad luck.” (Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you broke all those mirrors.) Sam, wrapped up in his own problems, wrapped up in worry about Ava, gives Dean a pep talk, a sort of daylight image of the nocturnal nastiness provided by Gordon. “You’re a hunter, Dean …” But Gordon, as always, has messed things up – or, as Dean agonized at the end of “Bloodlust,” it’s all “jacked up” now. That’s what Gordon does. There’s no glory or comfort in being a hunter. And Gordon is an example that is both compelling and repellent. He provides Dean with an almost attractive “way out” of the exhaustion he experiences, the exhaustion of the moral man doing a shitty job: If Dean could be like Gordon, his worries would disappear. But, of course, if Dean were like Gordon, nothing else would be possible for him. A relationship with Sam, nothing, all would vanish. Encountering Gordon makes Dean think thoughts like “The horror – the horror.” That has been Dean’s shift through the episode, something he has not discussed with Sam, not explicitly. But it’s there. In a way, Dean is right back where he was at the start of the episode, begging to Sam to lay low with him for a while. But it’s different. It’s not the same conversation. Gordon is basically there in the car with them. When Sam says, “It’s what you were meant to do,” Dean retorts, “I wasn’t meant to do anything. I don’t believe in that destiny crap.”

Destiny, again. From Gordon’s comment about Sam to Dean’s comment about himself. That’s what’s really on the table now.

Sam hears that subtext and speaks to it. Brave, considering who Dean can be in conversation, slightly bully-ish and dominating. “You mean, you don’t believe in my destiny.” “Whatever,” is the eloquent and gracious reply.

Sam is clear and brave and open. He references things that are sore spots for Dean, and he does so with no embarrassment, because these things must be said. It’s easier for Sam than it is for Dean, and Dean’s symphony of responses to Sam’s casual mention of Stanford and also his closing remark: “You can’t protect me from this” – shows Dean’s whirlwind. He goes from, “Yeah, wow, when you ditched us for California, man, was THAT a bad idea” … to a sudden sharp look at the thought that he won’t be able to protect Sam. Or that Sam won’t allow him to protect him. What, then, of John’s whispered instructions? That barb won’t be removed so easily.

Sam and Dean have reversed again. Dean seems like a big kid (“Whatever”, etc.), wanting to run away, and Sam seems like the adult.

Look at this stone-cold fox.

Sam says, “You can’t protect me,” and Dean has his symphony of responses before saying calmly, “I can try.” Unexpectedly, Sam says, “Thanks for that.” It’s nice. Dean is like, whatever, it’s my job, of course. The whole thing ends with a “Bitch” “Jerk” exchange, cute, taking the edge off the seriousness, but I may be in the minority, “Bitch/Jerk” never felt like a real “bit” to me, like it was a real “thing.” It felt more like a response to the fans who loved it, putting it in again as a catchphrase, and whatever, people love it, I won’t rain on anyone’s parade. Don’t come at me with pitchforks! It works in other moments for me, especially when it does NOT happen, like in the Djinn episode: that’s my favorite “jerk” “bitch” moment, the one that feels the most organic, along with the one that just went down in “Fanfiction.” Carrying on!

Both of them seem battle-scarred and weary here, and Sam picks up the phone to call Ava again. Dean teases him, “You sweet on her?” Sam’s prissy response makes me laugh, “She’s engaged, Dean.” I notice, though, that Sam didn’t really answer Dean’s question. Dean then does that shrug with his face that I love, and wonders, “What’s the point in saving the world if you can’t get a little nookie once in a while?”

Firstly: don’t ever say “nookie” again. Thank you.

HOWEVER, besides that: Dean’s concern about Sam’s celibacy, has been there since “Provenance”, where it reaches screwball heights that I found supremely entertaining. But that minor emotional Arc will be rising again. Dean thinks Sam might need a push. He knows his brother. Sam feels guilty for watching porn. Sam has morals and everything, and prefers there to be, you know, a relationship going on for there to be “the sex”. Whatever, that’s all fine, but life isn’t worth living, especially as a hunter, without careless pleasure to counteract it. Dean’s teasing, but it’s one of those bread crumbs through the forest that will be picked up later.

Ava, again, doesn’t pick up. “What?” asks Dean. “Just a feeling,” says Sam. “How far is it to Peoria?”

20th scene

The Impala (I love how it is used to basically say: “The boys are here now” – we don’t even need to see them, it cuts out a lot of unnecessary stuff) looms in the foreground outside of Ava’s house. Dean and Sam quietly break in, wielding flashlights, looking terrifying. Especially because poor Ava apparently has mist inside her house.

They’re calling out “Hello” as they move through the house. Their flashlight beams pick up blood stains on the carpet, and then Ava’s fiancé, slaughtered in his bed. It’s gruesome. Sam is pretty devastated, Ava is nowhere to be found, and Dean takes in the bloodbath before him, without blinking an eye, and moves into the room to take a closer look. There’s yellow powder on the window sill, which Dean rubs between his fingers, and then informs Sam, helpfully, “Sulfur.” How many times have these actors had to do that exact same moment? And it never gets old. (Padalecki, in one of his fart-ridden outtakes: “I had some sulfur for lunch.” I am still laughing.)

The demons definitely should develop an antidote so they don’t leave their calling card behind them. Right? Someone should get on that.

And then, for the slower ones amongst us, or any newbies, Dean says, to Sam, who of course already knows what sulfur means: “Demon’s been here.” The reaction shot from Padalecki, with the light coming the blinds in the background, and the mist that Ava has inside her house, is beautiful.

Excellent ominous music again, as Sam notices something on the floor and crouches down to pick it up. We get a gigantic closeup, with a really delicate focus-switch in the middle of it, from Sam’s huge face, to the teeny engagement ring in the foreground. That’s the camera operator, working his subtle magic. Sam doesn’t say anything, and Dean glances over, sensing … something. The music, which had been frightening and really really dark, suddenly resolves into a sound more mournful, elegiac, as Sam stares at the ring.

He says softly, sadly, “Ava.”

The other Blue Rose has vanished into the night, leaving her ring behind. She is racing to meet her destiny.