SPN 4.11 - Episode Review
I'm trying to get caught up on a hundred things, and finish a dozen projects. Wish me luck! But here's a little trip in the Way-Back Machine for my episode review of 4.11 "Family Remains." (Episodes 12 & 13 are in the works.)
SUPERNATURAL
Episode 4.11
Family Remains
Written by: Jeremy Carver
Directed by: Philip Sgriccia
Guest Starring: Mandy Playdon, Helen Slater, David Newsome, Bradley Stryker, Alexa Nikolas, Dylan Minnette,
Plot Summary: Sam and Dean take on a case that looks like a vengeful spirit, but a case of mistaken diagnosis proves deadly.
Review
Two things this episode does right off the bat. It neatly misleads us, just as the Winchesters are mislead, about what or who the Bad Thing really is. All the signs are there, we've been around the supernatural now enough to know... don't we? And it establishes that Dean's been leading them a breakneck pace of hunting ever since his roadside confession in 4.10. Sam says he's running. Dean says they're working. But something's out of kilter.
As a side-note, Sam is disturbingly adorable when he's exhausted. ;-)
This was an episode with a seemingly simple case, which turns seriously creepy fast. The effect is nicely enhanced by the deep shadows and subdued colors in which it was filmed, very early-SPN-ish. There's a troubled family trying to put a yet-unspecified past behind, a face in the upstairs windows, and the boys' attempts to scare the family off with mysterious building code violations fails miserably. There's something in the boy's closet, someone scrawls "GO" on the wall, and then the teenaged girl hangs her hand off her bed and *something* wetly licks it. She thinks it's the family dog ... until the dog walks in her bedroom doorway.
Nicely subtle use of yet another urban legend, Show! But that's where the simplicity of the tale ends. The girl screams, Sam and Dean appear at the door, and announce to the truth to the horrified family: there's a ghost in the house. Even as the family argues against this outlandish warning, the lights go out, and Dean barks orders to get in their cars and go. But too late. The warning is smeared in the blood of the family dog on the side of their moving van, and all the vehicles - including the Impala - have slashed tires. Furthermore, the Winchesters' arsenal has been pilfered from the trunk.
Now *that* is one fast-moving, ambitious ghost.
The guest stars in this were well cast, I thought, from the kids to the troubled husband and wife to the sarcastic brother-in-law. Their confusion and angry fear seems all too real, the beats beautifully timed, as Dean herds the family back inside to seek cover, because they are the hunted, now. This is Dean at his best: take-charge, thinking on his feet, willing to pull any bluff if it gets the job done and saves lives.
Sam meanwhile volunteers to check the attic, where the daughter of the house's original owner hung herself years ago. I'm not sure what Sam intended to do, armed only with a flashlight and maybe a pocket full of salt, but apparently Dean is putting his trust in the hunter's skills Sam polished while he was gone. Assured that Dean is okay, he leaves Dean to keep the family within a protective circle of salt. No one, Dean vows, not even the snarky brother-in-law, is going to die tonight, and he stands guard with no weapon but his wits.
Sure enough, with Sam absent, a door creaks open and a pallid figure emerges from the gloom: the filthy, hideous figure of a teenaged girl with a huge knife in her grasp. She advances with a silent snarl, but stay calm, Dean tells the family, she's a ghost, she can't come in the circle. And she steps right across.
It seems bro-in-law was right about it being some backwoods psycho, and the family runs while Dean braces for the attack. He just fends off the screeching, flailing girl when Sam's flashlight blazes in her eyes, and she screams and bolts for the safety of the dark. Sam and Dean find the family huddled outside, and decide that since the threat is only human, the family can make a run for it while the boys hold her off.
Just one catch. The family's young son is missing. The chaos erupts again, the mother near hysterics, and the evidence of a family already torn by mysterious loss is painfully clear. Dean orders the mother and daughter into a nearby shed, while he and Dean separate, Sam taking the husband and Dean the brother-in-law. For the boys to split up now seems downright ridiculous, especially with civilians in tow. But then again, neither the child's father nor the uncle were going to wait passively for Sam and Dean to find the boy. This might be the only way they knew to keep the men-folks somewhat contained.
As a plan, it worked about as we would predict. Dean takes bro-in-law on a search for crawlspaces in the walls, and finds one. The narrow passage leads to a hole beneath the floor, into which Dean lowers himself. (Here a Kripke tribute to anyone who's ever been in a spooky situation, as Dean chants, "Please nobody grab my legs.") Under the floor, he finds gruesome evidence of the feral girl's habitation: rotting animal parts and two stick figures scrawled in blood. Yet he has committed a cardinal sin in horror movies: he's left a weaker comrade alone.
Right on cue, bro-in-law turns, sees the wraith girl *right there*, and they scream as she swings the knife. Dean is just in time to see bro-in-law's head flop dangling through the hole in the floor. He clamps a hand over his flashlight and pins himself to the wall, hiding.
The scene when Dean appears alone to Sam and the family at the shed I thought was impressively played. Dean is a wreck, barely speaking, focusing first on Sam as if looking for strength, while the mother's growing, fragile-voiced horror is more powerful than any scream. Asked whether he'd found her son, Dean can only whisper, "No." When he does speak, his voice and expression are dead, the sentences truncated: he couldn't get to the man in time. He shouldn't have left him alone. Silent emotion is chewing Dean alive as he goes back out, away from the family's grief.
We learn moments later the root of the family's dysfunction: their eldest son died in a car accident not long ago. This house was meant to be their fresh start. Now it might see the collapse of everything. But Dean is still visibly shaken, and vows in quiet vehemence that he *will* find their son, if it's the last thing he does. When the father asks why Dean cares so much, Dean makes no reply.
In the meantime, Sam has been reading the hanged woman's diary, and summons Dean to share the awful truth. The mad girl in the walls was the suicide woman's child - sired on her by her own father. The girl has been hostage in this house for her entire life, and by murdering the previous owner, she committed fratricide on a monster. (I have to say that this exchange won extra points from me, for carrying the boys' "silent communication" trick to new heights.)
It's an interesting twist, however, to see Dean's near-sympathy for this murderous feral girl, despite witnessing the anguish her actions wrought on an innocent family. Unlike the Dean of earlier seasons, he expresses compassion for a monster, due to the unthinkable circumstances that created her as she was. But Sam reminds Dean with gentle sternness that she doesn't get a free pass for murder.
Plus, they still have a missing boy to find. The Show tries a new trick by using night vision to show the son, tied up in some basement crawlspace. The mad girl appears, holding a dead rat in offering, but Danny just screams into his gag as the girl munches her gruesome snack.
Upstairs in the kitchen, Dean hacks the plastered-over dumbwaiter chute clear, while Sam explains the situation to the boy's dad. Holding to his vow to save the kid, Dean lowers himself into the bowels of the house.
Meanwhile, out at the shed, a window smashes and the mother and daughter scream.
Dean finds their weapons stash strewn about the dirt under-flooring, and further along, though a hole in the foundation, there's Danny, tied up and alone. He frees the boy who warns him to hurry, "he's" coming back. Turns out it's not one spook, but two, and something attacks Dean from behind.
At the same time, the mother in the shed fight so defend her daughter, as the feral girl batters with fists and knife to get in. From here, I have to say the timing of movements seems to go a little "off." While Dean fights for his life against the wild girl's larger brother, Sam and the father haul the kid up, but then they pause for hugs and reunion stuff - despite sounds of Dean's struggle being audible up the empty dumbwaiter shaft. Sam urges them out of house, but it feels about five beats too slow. I don't know whether to blame editing or directing, but....
Be as it may, Sam does drop down the hole in time to see Dean get the upper hand, and there's a cool lighting affect as Dean fires, twice, directly into the crazed youth's body. As Sam crawls in, Dean pushes the body off and looks away, spent in more ways than just physical.
Topside, the frantic mother screams as the wild girl bursts in the door, but then unseen hands yank her outside, and we hear the brutal sounds of a struggle, followed by pregnant silence. When they open the door, it's to see the dad standing there with bloody hands and a haggard face. The mad girl's body lies half-hidden in the darkness beyond.
In the end, the family thanks Sam and Dean, stating that they're far from okay, but at least they're together. One wonders if that will be glue enough to hold them, after the purely human horror they have seen.
What I struck me in this episode is that Sam seemed to be holding back, kind of watching and keeping himself in readiness while Dean struggled with his private troubles, but not intruding himself on Dean. Sam is present and active, watching his brother's back, voicing concern, a good carry-over reaction from Dean's confession in 4.10. But Sam is oddly silent in the face of Dean's determination to risk himself to save this family's son, despite their lack of weapons.
The old Sam would have protested, citing recklessness or a death wish, but this Sam is older, and perhaps owns new understanding. Maybe he sees Dean is working through the horrors he revealed to Sam last episode, and that he *needs* this rescue to balance some internal scale. But the brother-in-law's death must mute Dean's sense of victory.
In yet another Impala-confessional, Dean reveals one more truth: he was worse than those two psychotic teens. They had merely defended their territory like the animals they'd been raised to be. But not only did Dean break in Hell and turn to torturing other souls, he took a perverse and terrible pleasure in it. He found satisfaction in dealing out the pain he'd taken for so long. Dean clearly hoped to find redemption in saving lives from evil, but this hunt taught him that no such comfort existed.
And there we have it. The boys are far from okay, but at least they're together, but will this be enough? Dean is being astonishingly open with Sam, and Sam's just taking it in, burying whatever horror he feels somewhere dark and deep. But confession brings no solace, no absolution to Dean. He tried *so* hard in this episode to throw himself in the grenade, to save this family whatever the cost, but it just doesn't balance the ledger.
I don't know about you, but a Dean who feels he can't sacrifice enough is a Dean that worries me. It used to be Sam who thought if he just saved enough people then he, too, might be saved. Dean's "taint," however, is ever so much darker for it being a choice he made. Dean doesn't seem to see that he is as much the victim as those feral kids they buried back there, that he and they both became monstrous under torment no mortal could endure. He sees only that he has failed: failed to save the bro-in-law, failed to resist Hell, failed to stay true to his life's calling of saving people, hunting things. In Hell, he became the agent of evil.
I worry where this bleakness of heart will take Dean. And I wonder how much Sam can continue to absorb, locked in his silence and secrets.
~ * ~
SUPERNATURAL
Episode 4.11
Family Remains
Written by: Jeremy Carver
Directed by: Philip Sgriccia
Guest Starring: Mandy Playdon, Helen Slater, David Newsome, Bradley Stryker, Alexa Nikolas, Dylan Minnette,
Plot Summary: Sam and Dean take on a case that looks like a vengeful spirit, but a case of mistaken diagnosis proves deadly.
Review
Two things this episode does right off the bat. It neatly misleads us, just as the Winchesters are mislead, about what or who the Bad Thing really is. All the signs are there, we've been around the supernatural now enough to know... don't we? And it establishes that Dean's been leading them a breakneck pace of hunting ever since his roadside confession in 4.10. Sam says he's running. Dean says they're working. But something's out of kilter.
As a side-note, Sam is disturbingly adorable when he's exhausted. ;-)
This was an episode with a seemingly simple case, which turns seriously creepy fast. The effect is nicely enhanced by the deep shadows and subdued colors in which it was filmed, very early-SPN-ish. There's a troubled family trying to put a yet-unspecified past behind, a face in the upstairs windows, and the boys' attempts to scare the family off with mysterious building code violations fails miserably. There's something in the boy's closet, someone scrawls "GO" on the wall, and then the teenaged girl hangs her hand off her bed and *something* wetly licks it. She thinks it's the family dog ... until the dog walks in her bedroom doorway.
Nicely subtle use of yet another urban legend, Show! But that's where the simplicity of the tale ends. The girl screams, Sam and Dean appear at the door, and announce to the truth to the horrified family: there's a ghost in the house. Even as the family argues against this outlandish warning, the lights go out, and Dean barks orders to get in their cars and go. But too late. The warning is smeared in the blood of the family dog on the side of their moving van, and all the vehicles - including the Impala - have slashed tires. Furthermore, the Winchesters' arsenal has been pilfered from the trunk.
Now *that* is one fast-moving, ambitious ghost.
The guest stars in this were well cast, I thought, from the kids to the troubled husband and wife to the sarcastic brother-in-law. Their confusion and angry fear seems all too real, the beats beautifully timed, as Dean herds the family back inside to seek cover, because they are the hunted, now. This is Dean at his best: take-charge, thinking on his feet, willing to pull any bluff if it gets the job done and saves lives.
Sam meanwhile volunteers to check the attic, where the daughter of the house's original owner hung herself years ago. I'm not sure what Sam intended to do, armed only with a flashlight and maybe a pocket full of salt, but apparently Dean is putting his trust in the hunter's skills Sam polished while he was gone. Assured that Dean is okay, he leaves Dean to keep the family within a protective circle of salt. No one, Dean vows, not even the snarky brother-in-law, is going to die tonight, and he stands guard with no weapon but his wits.
Sure enough, with Sam absent, a door creaks open and a pallid figure emerges from the gloom: the filthy, hideous figure of a teenaged girl with a huge knife in her grasp. She advances with a silent snarl, but stay calm, Dean tells the family, she's a ghost, she can't come in the circle. And she steps right across.
It seems bro-in-law was right about it being some backwoods psycho, and the family runs while Dean braces for the attack. He just fends off the screeching, flailing girl when Sam's flashlight blazes in her eyes, and she screams and bolts for the safety of the dark. Sam and Dean find the family huddled outside, and decide that since the threat is only human, the family can make a run for it while the boys hold her off.
Just one catch. The family's young son is missing. The chaos erupts again, the mother near hysterics, and the evidence of a family already torn by mysterious loss is painfully clear. Dean orders the mother and daughter into a nearby shed, while he and Dean separate, Sam taking the husband and Dean the brother-in-law. For the boys to split up now seems downright ridiculous, especially with civilians in tow. But then again, neither the child's father nor the uncle were going to wait passively for Sam and Dean to find the boy. This might be the only way they knew to keep the men-folks somewhat contained.
As a plan, it worked about as we would predict. Dean takes bro-in-law on a search for crawlspaces in the walls, and finds one. The narrow passage leads to a hole beneath the floor, into which Dean lowers himself. (Here a Kripke tribute to anyone who's ever been in a spooky situation, as Dean chants, "Please nobody grab my legs.") Under the floor, he finds gruesome evidence of the feral girl's habitation: rotting animal parts and two stick figures scrawled in blood. Yet he has committed a cardinal sin in horror movies: he's left a weaker comrade alone.
Right on cue, bro-in-law turns, sees the wraith girl *right there*, and they scream as she swings the knife. Dean is just in time to see bro-in-law's head flop dangling through the hole in the floor. He clamps a hand over his flashlight and pins himself to the wall, hiding.
The scene when Dean appears alone to Sam and the family at the shed I thought was impressively played. Dean is a wreck, barely speaking, focusing first on Sam as if looking for strength, while the mother's growing, fragile-voiced horror is more powerful than any scream. Asked whether he'd found her son, Dean can only whisper, "No." When he does speak, his voice and expression are dead, the sentences truncated: he couldn't get to the man in time. He shouldn't have left him alone. Silent emotion is chewing Dean alive as he goes back out, away from the family's grief.
We learn moments later the root of the family's dysfunction: their eldest son died in a car accident not long ago. This house was meant to be their fresh start. Now it might see the collapse of everything. But Dean is still visibly shaken, and vows in quiet vehemence that he *will* find their son, if it's the last thing he does. When the father asks why Dean cares so much, Dean makes no reply.
In the meantime, Sam has been reading the hanged woman's diary, and summons Dean to share the awful truth. The mad girl in the walls was the suicide woman's child - sired on her by her own father. The girl has been hostage in this house for her entire life, and by murdering the previous owner, she committed fratricide on a monster. (I have to say that this exchange won extra points from me, for carrying the boys' "silent communication" trick to new heights.)
It's an interesting twist, however, to see Dean's near-sympathy for this murderous feral girl, despite witnessing the anguish her actions wrought on an innocent family. Unlike the Dean of earlier seasons, he expresses compassion for a monster, due to the unthinkable circumstances that created her as she was. But Sam reminds Dean with gentle sternness that she doesn't get a free pass for murder.
Plus, they still have a missing boy to find. The Show tries a new trick by using night vision to show the son, tied up in some basement crawlspace. The mad girl appears, holding a dead rat in offering, but Danny just screams into his gag as the girl munches her gruesome snack.
Upstairs in the kitchen, Dean hacks the plastered-over dumbwaiter chute clear, while Sam explains the situation to the boy's dad. Holding to his vow to save the kid, Dean lowers himself into the bowels of the house.
Meanwhile, out at the shed, a window smashes and the mother and daughter scream.
Dean finds their weapons stash strewn about the dirt under-flooring, and further along, though a hole in the foundation, there's Danny, tied up and alone. He frees the boy who warns him to hurry, "he's" coming back. Turns out it's not one spook, but two, and something attacks Dean from behind.
At the same time, the mother in the shed fight so defend her daughter, as the feral girl batters with fists and knife to get in. From here, I have to say the timing of movements seems to go a little "off." While Dean fights for his life against the wild girl's larger brother, Sam and the father haul the kid up, but then they pause for hugs and reunion stuff - despite sounds of Dean's struggle being audible up the empty dumbwaiter shaft. Sam urges them out of house, but it feels about five beats too slow. I don't know whether to blame editing or directing, but....
Be as it may, Sam does drop down the hole in time to see Dean get the upper hand, and there's a cool lighting affect as Dean fires, twice, directly into the crazed youth's body. As Sam crawls in, Dean pushes the body off and looks away, spent in more ways than just physical.
Topside, the frantic mother screams as the wild girl bursts in the door, but then unseen hands yank her outside, and we hear the brutal sounds of a struggle, followed by pregnant silence. When they open the door, it's to see the dad standing there with bloody hands and a haggard face. The mad girl's body lies half-hidden in the darkness beyond.
In the end, the family thanks Sam and Dean, stating that they're far from okay, but at least they're together. One wonders if that will be glue enough to hold them, after the purely human horror they have seen.
What I struck me in this episode is that Sam seemed to be holding back, kind of watching and keeping himself in readiness while Dean struggled with his private troubles, but not intruding himself on Dean. Sam is present and active, watching his brother's back, voicing concern, a good carry-over reaction from Dean's confession in 4.10. But Sam is oddly silent in the face of Dean's determination to risk himself to save this family's son, despite their lack of weapons.
The old Sam would have protested, citing recklessness or a death wish, but this Sam is older, and perhaps owns new understanding. Maybe he sees Dean is working through the horrors he revealed to Sam last episode, and that he *needs* this rescue to balance some internal scale. But the brother-in-law's death must mute Dean's sense of victory.
In yet another Impala-confessional, Dean reveals one more truth: he was worse than those two psychotic teens. They had merely defended their territory like the animals they'd been raised to be. But not only did Dean break in Hell and turn to torturing other souls, he took a perverse and terrible pleasure in it. He found satisfaction in dealing out the pain he'd taken for so long. Dean clearly hoped to find redemption in saving lives from evil, but this hunt taught him that no such comfort existed.
And there we have it. The boys are far from okay, but at least they're together, but will this be enough? Dean is being astonishingly open with Sam, and Sam's just taking it in, burying whatever horror he feels somewhere dark and deep. But confession brings no solace, no absolution to Dean. He tried *so* hard in this episode to throw himself in the grenade, to save this family whatever the cost, but it just doesn't balance the ledger.
I don't know about you, but a Dean who feels he can't sacrifice enough is a Dean that worries me. It used to be Sam who thought if he just saved enough people then he, too, might be saved. Dean's "taint," however, is ever so much darker for it being a choice he made. Dean doesn't seem to see that he is as much the victim as those feral kids they buried back there, that he and they both became monstrous under torment no mortal could endure. He sees only that he has failed: failed to save the bro-in-law, failed to resist Hell, failed to stay true to his life's calling of saving people, hunting things. In Hell, he became the agent of evil.
I worry where this bleakness of heart will take Dean. And I wonder how much Sam can continue to absorb, locked in his silence and secrets.
~ * ~