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According to recent reports from Vancouver, the cast returned to work the first week of August (about two weeks late). Jensen Ackles also explained in a recent virtual “fan experience” through Creation Con that the writing for the last two episodes has been tweaked to reflect recent events (i.e., the Coronavirus pandemic). With these writers, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. He also said that 15.19 will be a season finale, while 15.20 is more like a series finale (and expressed sadness on Instagram when he got the final script, which said “The End” instead of the usual “To Be Continued”). In an already truncated final season, that likely means we’ll get stuck with some filler clips episode as the last one. Yay.
This week, the final episode of the show, “Carry On,” airs after a one-hour retrospective. Feel free to comment about the episode below as you watch it.
You can find a promo, photos and a synopsis here for 15.20. Maybe someone can make heads or tails of it.
If you’re enjoying these articles and reviews, any contributions are welcome. Even in a pandemic, the kitties still gotta eat and I’ve got a house full of snarfly foster kittens with seasonal eye gunk right now. My kitty Goose is doing much better, thank you (she’s acting as if nothing happened now), but I’ve still got that bill, so every little bit helps.
Scroll down to find links to all of my recaps and reviews of all seasons up to this point.
Recap: Recap of the efforts so far to take out Chuck, mostly of Dean being furious about being a puppet all his life. Cut to Now, where a man is pulling up outside a very seedy establishment called “Rooster’s Sunrise Motel.” On the soundtrack is “If I Didn’t Care,” sung by The Ink Spots in 1939. There is, by the way, a lovely duet version of this sung by Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams) and her devoted friend and exasperated lover (one of three), Michael Pardue (Lee Pace), in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2009) that is very much part of the plot.
The man, balding and pensive, hesitates for a moment before going inside. The young girl at the desk identifies him as one Travis Johnson. Though he’s there past check-in time (10pm), she lets him in and mentions that he requested a specific room: 214. He calls it “Doctor’s orders.” She correctly guesses that he once stayed there, but he says it was “a long time ago.”
With a duffle bag in hand, he enters a hallway with a candy and a drinks machine behind him (these will show up later). As the music plays, he nervously goes to the room and puts in the key. But he has to steel himself to do it, first. Inside, he finds a standard Supernatural motel set, with a double bed, the usual spare furniture, and a décor of geometric red-and-gray circles and squares.
Putting the duffle bag on the bed, he opens it and takes out a bottle of cheap whiskey, from which he swigs large. As he sits on the bed, his phone buzzes. It’s a text from someone named Caitlin that says, “Travis, I’m worried. Why would you go back to that place?” Rather than answer it, he shuts it off and puts it on the bed beside him.
“Just one night,” he mutters to himself. “And then, it’s over.” Why do I think things are about to get more complicated than that? Maybe because this is a Supernatural MOTW ep teaser?
Clutching an ornate gold ring on a chain around his neck, he closes his eyes and shakes his head, telling himself in an unconvinced voice, “It wasn’t real. It was never real.” Too bad, for him, that doesn’t seem to be true as the closet door opens behind him. By itself.
A shadowy figure of a young boy with dark circles under his eyes comes out of the closet and into the light. “Do you remember me?” the boy asks the man. “I remember you.”
Shocked and horrified and babbling in denial that this can’t be real, Travis accidentally knocks over the bottle and breaks it as he falls to the floor and scrambles away from the apparition. Crouching down, the child thing picks up the broken bottle, leans over Travis, and says, “Boo.”
Cut to outside Room 214 as Travis screams and then death-gurgles.
Cue title cards.
Cut to the Impala at night. Dean is driving, while Sam rides shotgun. Dean asks how much longer they have for their trip and Sam says, “Seven hours.” Dean’s not thrilled. They both sound tired.
It turns out they are investigating Doomed Teaser Travis’ death. As far as they know, he “slit his throat with a whiskey bottle” (the audience, of course, suspects that’s not really true). Travis was an “old friend,” but Dean points out that they hadn’t seen him in a quarter of a century. He says they’ve “missed funerals” of much closer and more recent friends. Why are they checking this one out? Sam says it’s because they have little else to do, since Chuck is still distracted with wrecking worlds, Jack is back in his room, and Castiel just up and left (Dean looks guilty when Sam says this, so I guess he hasn’t told him whatever Castiel told him after the credits last week).
In fact, just as Sam is asking him if he knows why Castiel left, and Dean is playing dumb about it, Dean gets a text from Castiel, saying “Did you tell Sam, yet?” When Sam complains that Dean is texting and driving, Dean puts the phone away without telling him who it was from.
The following morning, they arrive at the motel. It doesn’t look any better during the day. Dean comments that “it looks smaller.”
Sam: Yeah, well, we’re bigger.
Each comments in his own way that neither ever had any intention of revisiting this part of their past. As they get out, they do so into a flashback to January 1993 (Dean’s birthday month, though that never gets mentioned). John has just dropped them off to go on a hunt and weeDean is complaining about having to hang back and babysit weeSam. After all, when he was Sam’s age (about ten, at this point), he was babysitting Sam.
WeeSam: Pretty sure that’s illegal.
Dean suggests they go practice shooting, but Sam just wants to go to the room. Dean notices Sam is hiding something and wrestles it away from him. It’s a book Sam stole from the last motel, The 1991 American College Guide. Dean scoffs at the possibility of Sam ever going to college, especially with their spotty educational record. Hunting is their life.
Dean gives him back the book and goes inside, leaving Sam standing there, looking woeful. Later, we see Sam staring at the same book, in a room with the same layout and décor as the infamous Room 214, before setting it down on the bed. He opens his duffle bag, revealing a pistol and a knife on top of a flannel shirt. Well, that sure just summed up the show’s look. He takes out the knife and handles it rather sadly, laying both it and the pistol next to the bed. This obviously isn’t the life he wants.
In the hallway, Dean is stealing from the vending machine by punching the order numbers a certain way and tapping on the side. He gets busted by a young girl in pigtails, but she’s just kidding. She wants him to teach her the trick.
She introduces him to her brother, Travis, who looks just like the ghost boy in the teaser. She says her name is Caitlin, the same as in the teaser text. So, she was Travis’ sister, not girlfriend or wife. Dean smiles and teaches her the trick. She and Dean bond over classic muscle cars, like the one he and Sam just arrived in. It turns out her and Travis’ mom works on the cleaning crew at the motel.
Cut to Now and a much-older Caitlin is sitting in a diner, lost in grieving, holding a cup of coffee. She comes alive when the Brothers enter the diner, getting up to hug first Dean and then Sam.
As they all sit down, Caitlin admits that she’s feeling guilty about her brother’s death. His life went downhill after Sam and Dean left, due to something that happened while they were there. He got into drugs and couldn’t stay employed. She urged him for a long time to get therapy. When he finally did, it helped at first. Unfortunately, his therapist had the idea that he should go back to the motel and “face his fears.” in Room 214. Obviously, that did not end well.
It turns out that Caitlin didn’t just call them for the funeral (which was last week). She thinks “she’s back.”
As we go into another flashback, we find out that whoever “she” was, she attacked Travis first. He was at the candy machine, trying to learn Dean’s trick. After some frustrating failure, he started to leave, but then the machine disgorged some candy. But when he went to get it, a grody old hand with a ring on one finger grabbed him through the slot and he saw a hideous face reflected in the plexiglass. He screamed for help, which brought Caitlin and Dean running, and the creature let him go. But he was too traumatized to tell them what happened, at least at first.
Inside the motel room, the Brothers are going over the case. Dean says there’s nothing in the coroner’s report to indicate anyone but Travis was in the room. Sam says he couldn’t find anything to indicate witchcraft, demonic possession, or anything else “that’s our kind of thing.” Dean suggests that maybe the “immersion therapy” Travis’ therapist suggested made him crack when he got to the room, but Caitlin insists her brother would not have killed himself.
Back in the flashback and in 214, Travis is freaking out and thinking they’ll believe he’s nuts, even as Caitlin tries to reassure him that she didn’t see anything there. Dean is getting off the phone with Bobby, who says that John is nowhere near a phone.
When Caitlin expresses surprise that Dean would call his father, Dean gives her and Travis The Talk and Sam backs him up. He asks Caitlin if anything weird has been happening in town. She and Travis take him and Sam to a nearby playground, where there is an impromptu shrine of Missing posters and flowers. Three kids their age have gone missing in the past few months, the latest the previous week. Dean stares at the posters as we cut back to Now.
Adult!Dean is skeptical that this is the same monster as 27 years ago. First of all, it only preyed on kids and Caitlin has to admit that no kids have recently gone missing in town. Second, Dean is certain he killed it all those years ago.
Caitlin complains that he’s “changed.” He was the one who believed Travis when they were kids. But Dean is convinced it can’t be the same monster now, even over Sam’s objections.
Cut to another flashback. The kids are in a storeroom, looking at newspapers for stories about the missing kids. They’ve got a town tourist map and are trying to triangulate (from where the kids went missing) where they might find the MOTW’s lair. The closest spot is an abandoned cannery.
Dean insists on going in alone. Sam says their dad wouldn’t like it. Dean points out that John isn’t there and would expect Dean to “take charge,” anyway.
Even though the other kids want to come along, Dean figures that since even Sam has never been on a hunt, they would be liabilities and in danger, so he leaves them behind. Caitlin shows up when he’s trying to pick the lock at the cannery, anyway. Despite her snarky distraction, he manages to pick the lock and goes in, telling her to stay behind him.
Back at the motel room, Sam is playing a word game with a box of letter dice, with Travis, and reassures him that Dean will kill the monster, “whatever it is.”
In the cannery, Caitlin is complaining that the abandoned building is “gross.” Dean points out she insisted on coming along. She picks at him, basically saying he’s scared (Who wouldn’t be?) and Dean claims he’s not.
Eventually, they find what looks like a pile of children’s clothing in a corner under a blanket. Dean finds a motel room key, but when he uncovers the rest of the pile, he recoils (we don’t see from what) and won’t let Caitlin see it. In fact, he pretends all he found was the motel room key (for #214). But he still hurries Caitlin out the door.
Back in the motel room, things are taking a turn for the bizarre, as Travis gets a message on the pad of paper he’s writing that says, “Sam kill you,” and Sam gets a similar one regarding Travis. The game pieces start to shake. They stop momentarily, only then to burst into the air as the lights go back.
Sam and Travis recoil in opposite directions, so Sam is on the opposite side of the room when the same moldy old witch from the candy machine appears behind Travis and grabs him. Sam calls out his name, just as Dean and Caitlin burst into the room.
When Dean goes to shoot the witch, she knocks the gun out of his hand. He then slashes at her with the knife, slicing off her fingers (which dissolve) and the ring on her hand. It lands underneath the bed, where we see it’s the same one that Travis was wearing on a chain in the teaser. Dean then stabs the witch in the gut. She screams an echoing cry and vanishes. The lights flicker back on.
Caitlin runs past a shocked Sam to Travis and hugs him. As Dean walks out of frame toward Sam, he reappears in frame in front of the candy machine as an adult. As he’s walking down the hallway, a figure runs behind him past the candy and coffee machines. Dean senses this and turns around.
At first, he thinks it’s Sam, then just his own imagination. But when he turns around with a shrug, he sees the figure at the end of the hallway and stops dead. The lights fritz and the figure moves down the hallway with inhuman, flickering speed. It’s weeDean, but a very dead-looking weeDean.
The figure says, “Hey, Dean,” in an angry, sinister voice. “I’ve been waiting for you.” Nodding at his knife, which he is holding, somehow, the figure tells him, “You know what you have to do.”
Dean tries to fight the hypnosis, but the figure tells him, “You failed,” with an evil smile. Dean is unable to stop himself trying to gut himself until Sam walks into the hallway unexpectedly. The figure vanishes and Dean realizes he’s not even holding a knife. When a bemused Sam asks him what he’s doing, Dean realizes that “Caitlin’s right.”
Later in a bar, Dean apologizes to Caitlin for not believing her earlier and feels bad about Travis’ death. Obviously, he didn’t kill the monster, after all, when they were kids. Caitlin admits that she didn’t have any proof before now and Sam points out that all of them had thought the monster was dead.
Either way, they now need to figure out what “she” is so they can kill her for real this time. Sam is going to hit the books. Caitlin points out one important detail about the monster – “she’s scary.” By this, Caitlin means that the MOTW is manipulative and likes to stalk her victims.
Dean mentions that “she” can also “look like other people.” She’s a mimic. More reluctantly, he admits something he didn’t tell anyone when he was a kid. What he found in the cannery was the monster’s nest and the missing children were there, dead.
As we get some quick and jagged flashbacks to what Dean actually saw back then, Caitlin realizes that’s what he was hiding from her. Sam asks why Dean never told him about it and Dean says it was because he hadn’t seen “anything like that before” and they were all kids his, Sam’s, Caitlin’s and Travis’ age. After he thought he’d killed the monster, he basically just wanted to forget all about it. So, he made a call to the police and walked away. This wasn’t very successful: “I had nightmares about it for the longest time.”
When Dean apologizes for not telling him, Sam magnaminously allows that they were kids and “we used to keep a lot of secrets from each other.” Dean looks sketchy at this, but as he’s walking away to get some food, he looks as though he’s rolling his eyes a bit at Sam’s hypocrisy.
In the motel restaurant, Dean is ordering for himself and trying to add in Sam’s “healthy” order with an unimpressed waitress. As she leaves to put the orders in, Dean gets an unexpected visitor. Billie pops up on the chair next to him.
She’s annoyed that Dean is wasting time on an MOTW case and she has bad news. She just watched Chuck burn an entire planet to ashes. Problem is, that was the last one save Earth Prime. He’ll be here soon and when he arrives, they won’t have much time to take him down. She says she’s visited Jack in the Bunker and given him the info about his final trial.
Dean lets on that he knows about the whole plan and asks how she got Jack on board. She says that she just told Jack “the truth.” She told Jack that Dean would never forgive him until he ended Chuck and “freed” Dean from the “hamster wheel” of having no choice in his life – and it’s true, isn’t it? Dean looks uncomfortable, which means she’s probably right.
In a motel bedroom (different from 214, as the circles-and-squares wallpaper is green, not red), Caitlin is asking Sam if he ever wanted a normal life. Sam responds by saying he’s sorry about Travis. He then discovers some info about Baba Yaga – she feeds on children and she has a ring that contains her “heart.” Sam wonders if the reason Dean defeated her the first time was because he separated her from her ring, not because he cut off her fingers or stabbed her.
Caitlin is shocked to realize the ring in the rather stylized illustration Sam found online looks just like a ring her mother gave to Travis after the “incident.” Her mother had found it in a vacuum cleaner and it was never claimed. The stone inside had been “busted up,” but Travis liked it and wore it on a chain around his neck: “It was his lucky charm.”
Well, not so much, I guess, considering how horrible his life turned out to be. Maybe the witch had been feeding on him all along. Caitlin says that Travis had the ring fixed a few weeks before his death.
She has some kind of realization. As Sam infodumps, oblivious, about the stone, she wanders off as if in a trance and he’s shocked to find she’s left the room. But it turns out she thinks she knows where the ring is. She goes to her car to look through Travis’ effects. But when she finds the chain, the ring itself is missing.
She’s bewildered – where did it go? When she closes her hatch, “Travis” appears next to her, holding the ring and asking if that’s what she’s looking for. She screams.
Back in the diner, Billie drops an important bit of information. She tells Dean that she isn’t in this part of Chuck’s death book, so this will be the last time Dean sees her before “the end” (Chuck’s arrival). She demands to know if Dean is still on board, even though the plan means Jack’s death and the betrayal of Amara. Though uncomfortable, Dean says he is.
She asks if Sam is, too, then is annoyed to realize Sam doesn’t know about the part where Jack dies. She tells Dean he needs to “get your house in order.” She hates “disorder” and “loose ends.” Dean says he’ll get Sam on board, too.
Dean returns to the room with food (it’s 219, by the way) to find Sam on the phone, frantically trying to find Caitlin. He found her car, but she wasn’t there, and she’s not answering her phone. Believing (accurately, of course) that Baba Yaga has kidnapped her, he quickly fills Dean in on what he and Caitlin found out.
Dean: Okay, so we track her down, junk her Precious, and it’s Game Over?
Sam says yeah. Dean asks where and Sam says she’ll have a nest, just like at the cannery, only all the recent attacks happened at the motel. So, it’s somewhere around here.
They split up to go looking (always smart – not). Sam goes down to the reception area and sees smoke coming out from a door behind the front desk. It turns out to be the receptionist getting high with a bong.
Dean, meanwhile, goes back to the hallway where the vending machine is and Baba Yaga nearly got him before. He notices and remembers the vending machine, this time. This is, by the way, the same hallway that contains Room 214. Someone is watching porn in Room 212, but when Dean reaches 214, the door suddenly opens (why the Brothers didn’t start the search in 214, when they already knew it was the problem child, I’m not sure).
Dean [pulling out his gun and cocking it]: I’ve seen this movie before.
As he warily enters the room, spidery music plays and the door slams behind him. He spins around, but when he turns back, he’s inside the old cannery. Confused, he crouches down and tries to figure out what’s going on. Then he goes down the stairs into the cannery proper.
As he’s prowling around, his breath comes out as fog. Eventually, he comes to the nest he saw when he was a kid. This time, when he pulls back the blanket, he sees weeSam dead and says his brother’s name out loud. As he staggers out into another corridor, he hears his name called. It’s “Travis” (the witch, of course), looking the same as when he went after Caitlin, dead and with his throat cut, but still standing.
Dean calls him out, saying he knows what the MOTW is now. When he points out that he’s “a little old for you,” Baba Yaga says that’s normally true, but “he” has been starving for so long that “he” will take anything and anyone. “Travis” attacks Dean, knocking him down. As the monster pins Dean, it flashes back and forth between Travis and the witch. Baba Yaga is so hyped up that she apparently can’t keep up the glamour completely.
During this attack, Sam is walking down the same hallway and goes right past 214. But he hears a faint sound of struggle and turns back. Inside, he finds Caitlin unconscious, face down on a bed, and Baba Yaga attacking Dean on the floor. Sam calls his name and attacks her, stabbing her in the back. It only annoys her and she flings Sam across the floor.
But this gives Dean the chance to grab the ring off her finger and kick her across the room. He then slams his gun butt down on the ring, just as Baba Yaga is getting up for another attack. The ring explodes in green fire and across the room, so does the witch. Caitlin wakes up just in time to watch the MOTW go up in flames.
Afterward, Caitlin thanks Dean on their way out of the motel. She asks Dean an odd question: “Were you scared?” Dean responds with honesty: “Always am.” Caitlin realizes how much he’s grown and matured, since his teenage self never would have admitted that.
Caitlin: You know what they say about getting older. You tell the truth more because the lies, they don’t make anything better.
Dean looks pensive as they hug goodbye and we segue back into one last weeChester flashback. WeeCaitlin is thanking weeDean for saving her brother. He gives her his number, in case anything weird every happens to her again, and she says she hopes she’ll never have to call it. She also says goodbye to weeSam (who is coming out to the lobby with his stuff) as she goes.
Right before John rolls up in the Impala, weeSam asks weeDean if he ever found the missing kids. WeeDean lies and says no. He figures they are just “gone.” When Sam asks what they will tell John, Dean says they’ll say that they “handled it.”
But before they go out, Dean has one more thing to tell Sam. He gives his blessing to Sam wanting to go to college, but wistfully adds, “We do make a good team, don’t we?” And weeSam agrees.
Cut to the present. The Brothers are driving home in the Impala, Dean driving. Sam is trying to call Castiel and Dean, looking uncomfortable, tells him to hang up. He fills Sam in on Billie’s diner visit, then also mentions Jack’s full role in the plan. He admits that Castiel told him before he left.
Sam is salty about it. He gets furious with Dean, while demonstrating precisely why Dean didn’t tell him, at first. Dean even says, “Because I know you couldn’t handle it!” when Sam asks why he didn’t tell him. He says that Sam has never been on board with Billie’s plan and has had all of these “ethical” questions about it (ethical questions, one might add, that are highly relative and that prioritize Sam’s needs and what Sam thinks should happen, rather than what other people want or what might be best for everyone).
After Dean says, “We don’t get a choice” and Sam yells a bit, Sam then just snaps, “Drive … just drive.”
Credits
Ratings for this new episode remained steady at a 0.3 in the A18-49 demo and dropped to 917 thousand in audience.
Review: My main objection to “Drag Me Away (From You)” is that it comes in so late. Really? Five episodes left and this is the third MOTW ep in a row? This couldn’t have aired earlier in the season in place of some of the truly forgettable dogs we had, instead?
Also, why a weeChesters ep so late in the game? It certainly hasn’t figured into the rest of the season, aside from Billie’s conversation with Dean, unless there is supposed to be something in here about things not being what they seemed and people trapped in fantasy worlds, that might explain the hot dumpster fire weirdness of episode 15.19 and isn’t just another take on “The Werther Project” from Season 10.
The episode also had some stale elements to it. It went largely the way other weeChester episodes have in the past and borrowed heavily from Season 1’s “Something Wicked,” right down to Dean’s guilt about an unfinished hunt when he was a child. The episode even obliquely references that episode when Dean mentions he was babysitting Sam at Sam’s age.
I couldn’t help thinking this was a golden opportunity to have guest kids who weren’t white and American. Maybe have them be illegal migrant farm workers, for example. Or give them a backstory where their mom was on the run from an abusive spouse. Something different from white, Middle American, small town kids.
It didn’t help that it was totally unnecessary for this near-immortal witch-ghost character (it’s actually quite common for witches to be inhuman and/or ghosts in British and mid-Atlantic lore) to be Baba Yaga. Pretty much nothing of the real Russian folklore about Baba Yaga was in here. Granted, my gold standard for a television version of Baba Yaga – from Lost Girl – is pretty high, but still. This was Baba Yaga in name, only.
I also can’t say I was thrilled by Sam’s reaction to Dean’s news about Jack. First of all, what happened to being magnanimous earlier in the episode? What happened to all that maturity, Sam? Did it evaporate again?
I kept thinking of that scene at the end of Season 1’s “Bloody Mary,” when Sam rather snottily tells his brother that he’s entitled to keep secrets, Even though, about two seconds later, he’s shocked to see an hallucination(?) of Jessica (whose murder he had dreams of, but whom he never warned), he doesn’t learn anything from it. He doesn’t open up to Dean.
And no offense, Sam, but that earlier “secret” of Dean having seen the pile of dead kids doesn’t count as one you needed to know. Sam always seems to feel entitled to keep secrets from Dean, but Dean can’t keep any secrets from Sam.
Second, Sam is furious with Dean for not telling him, but not with Jack for keeping everyone in the dark until the last possible moment when it was just about impossible for TFW to come up with another plan. Strictly speaking, Dean just found out. Why not get on Jack’s case for lying to them for so long – again? When does Sam intend to start having Jack face consequences for his actions?
And when Dean finally tells him about Jack’s real role in the plan, Sam doesn’t even take into consideration what Jack wants or how high the stakes are. It’s all about the happy ending Sam thinks he’s entitled to, which includes never facing up to the possibility that Jack may have to die, or that this might be the best thing for the SPNverse.
Possibly all this had something to do with the inexperience of the writer, Meghan Fitzmartin, whose only other credit on the show has been co-writing “Peace of Mind” (14.15).
This is Amyn Kaderali’s ninth time in the SPN director’s chair, though, and he delivers on some serious horror. Despite the clumsiness, in spots, of the writing, there was a lot to recommend in “Drag Me Away (From You).” This episode had a lot of genuinely unsettling atmosphere in it, especially in the scene where Dean finds the kids, while the witch attacks Travis and Sam. And pretty much everything in the cannery was creepy.
The witch’s attack on Adult!Dean in the hallway is also chilling. Even after 15 seasons, Jensen Ackles manages to convey the sense that Dean is in real danger, not just from the witch, but from his own guilt, his own secrets. Kaderali evokes in that ubiquitous candy machine the same kind of dread that It put into sewer holes. Every time the thing popped up, especially when someone noticed it, I thought, Oh, here we go now.
If the show had bothered to portray the ghost invasion in as creepy a manner as this episode, the first three episodes of this season would not have been so hideously dull. It’s nice to see that the show is still capable of scaring and unsettling us, this late in the game, of making us feel that Sam and Dean can be in real peril from such a mundane hunt. The way the witch stalked them and drew them in, one by one, evoked I Know What You Did Last Summer, where the characters didn’t have that kind of plot armor.
One thing the episode gets across really well is how depressing a life it is to grow up poor and transient like that. Not just poor, but dirt poor, hard-scrabble poor, drifter poor.
There’s a strong hint, when Caitlin talks about how her brother accidentally adopted Baba Yaga’s ring as his lucky charm, that his bad luck and dysfunction as an adult stemmed from her sucking off him all these years. But in this case, it’s almost a metaphor for how having a lousy start in life holds you down and back, as if there were an emotional vampire pressing you down into adulthood.
Addictions, chronic bad health, poor financial habits (assuming you manage to get any money to blow in the first place) all come into play. Since you didn’t start out with enough breaks in life, you just can’t seem to catch any later on, either. Makes me hope that Travis’ soul was able to travel on to Heaven, but it’s also possible that the witch trapped, ate and destroyed the souls of her victims.
Travis’ death could also be seen as a metaphor for the perils of ignoring reality. In Supernatural, the supernatural world is quite real. You ignore it at your peril. You can pretend all you want that the “sunlit world” (as Tales from the Darkside used to put it) is all there is, but that world is surrounded by the supernatural world that will happily eat you up whether you acknowledge (or are aware of) its existence or not. In that sense, Supernatural has always been very much a fairy tale, where the traveller would do well to arm up for any dangers lurking on the roadside when going through the woods.
Travis knew from childhood that the supernatural world was real and that it was ravenously dangerous. That’s what messed him up. But he let a clueless shrink persuade him otherwise – worse, to challenge that supernatural world in its own lair and then reject its very existence. That is like rejecting the existence of cars on a superhighway in the middle of rush hour. You’ll very quickly get squashed. Needless to say, it didn’t end well for Travis.
I was not too thrilled with how thin Caitlin’s characterization was. Yes, it was nice that she wasn’t automatically turned into a love interest (as would have happened in the earlier seasons) and that it was her brother rather than her husband or boyfriend. But she was basically there to be a cheering section, infodump some family business, and find something important before needing to be rescued. We never found out if she managed to break out of that cycle of poverty and dysfunction, about whether she was married, whether her mother was still alive, what kind of job she had, or what. The Brothers don’t even seem to have asked.
I also wasn’t overly thrilled with how she kept baiting Dean about being scared when they were teens inside the cannery. It was an extremely dangerous situation (as Dean had made abundantly clear back at the motel) and she had followed him against his express instructions that she stay behind with Sam and Travis because she had no hunting experience. Plus, the whole “Girl snarks at boy about being afraid” trope just needs to be burned down, never to be used again. It’s so freakin’ sexist, in both directions.
Speaking of the cannery scene, Dean’s PTSD really crops up here as we discover that one of his big nightmares was discovering a pile of dead kids his age in the witch’s nest. That’s got to have messed with his head, especially since he later hallucinates the scene with weeSam being the dead body in the nest.
The way Baba Yaga manipulates him later on is a lot like how she manipulates Travis in the teaser. She uses their childhood damage against them. It makes her seem especially evil, even though she is nothing on the scale of Chuck in terms of wrecking the Brothers’ lives or threat to the rest of the world. This image of an “adult” monster preying on young children (for however long; we never find out her backstory or if she was ever human), using their fears against them, has a strong emotional resonance that the Chuck apocalypse story lacks because the witch story is rooted in real childhood fears.
I’ve seen the kid actors for Dean and Sam come in for some criticism on social media, especially Paxton Singleton as weeDean. I rolled my eyes at that, particularly when the same fans held Brock Kelly up as a popular version of weeDean in Season 4’s “After School Special.” Since when? Poor Kelly got nailed left and right at the time for his portrayal in that episode.
Personally, I think both Singleton and Christian Michael Cooper (as weeSam) did just fine. And no, weeSam didn’t get that much to do in this episode, the way weeSam usually does in these flashback stories. That’s probably because this was somewhat of a retread of “Something Wicked,” which was Deancentric. Even so, we did get to find out something new about Sam, which was when he started thinking about going to college (it was pretty early) and what Dean’s reaction was to it.
Then there was Billie’s meeting with Dean. I wish I could say this led to something important for Dean, though I suppose it did (they just didn’t stick the landing afterward). But it’s quite interesting how Billie sees only Dean as the important one to deal with. He’s not just the point man in Team Free Will to her. Just as he was the leader on the hunt against Baba Yaga (both as a teen and as an adult), he’s the leader of TFW today and she doesn’t want to have to deal with anyone else. She feels it’s his responsibility to get everyone in line. We’ll see how well that all pans out.
Next week: Unity: Dean takes Jack on a final journey to complete his quest, while Sam and Castiel try to find another way to defeat Chuck.
The Kripke Years
The Gamble Years
The Carver Years
The Dabb Years
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I agree, in this case it just didn’t work and to me the whole scene felt very much like a different writer which left me going huh? What the heck that doesn’t fit in with what we just saw.
Pretty much how I also felt about this week’s episode too it just didn’t seem to fit with the overarching journey of the whole series, like I was suddenly watching our Brothers in a different show.
There was a bit of good in this episode, the scares were more scary than in a while. It drove home just how awful living in motels in poverty was and also the fact John, the Uber Hunter, missed a big hunt right where he drops his kids off but Dean did the job in his stead anyway ( albeit imoerfectly because incomplete intel) showing just how good Dean was becoming as a hunter.
Travis and Dean parallels screamed , but whilst Sam was willing to drive hours to go to a funeral of someone who he’d had no contact with in twenty plus years, he wouldn’t hear his brother out , only hours earlier having been understanding was about the fact his brother was traumatized , so his actions and anger later didn’t really track logically. Dean never catches a break with his own traumatic life, or gets much understanding. He doesn’t just have to be strong, he has to be the strongest about everything.
The whole final scene seemed like a late insert to make the upcoming story make sense , ruining this episode.
It’s pretty stupid not to have questions about Death returning Jack , have him eating hearts and think it’s all good so it seemed like Sam got plot stupid this week.
It was Billie and Jack’s plan, Cass knew but chose not to brief Sam too, so let Sam go be mad at the right people was my first thought. Dean barely had much more than a day or so advance knowledge. We know he needs time to process stuff, but it’s hardly the longest secret he’s kept and it wasn’t Dean’s secret to tell. Instead of badgering Dean by text, why didn’t Cass just say something to Sam himself, take some responsibility instead of expecting Dean to break the bad news, or Jack for that matter, if he wanted to prove he’d changed, right there was the perfect opportunity to tell the truth and show how sorry he was.
Final scenes that are mytharc-y, as I recall, are often written by the showrunner or some other senior writer. A lot of times, what may seem to be a solo effort (especially by a new writer) is really a collaboration of the writers room. That’s not always an improvement on the original.