Things I Love About SPN Season 1: Home (Part 2)
Continued from Part 1
Warning: image heavy post
Some brief reference to mental health issues
Next, we see the boys sitting in Missouri’s waiting room just as she emerges with a client. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” she assures him as he leaves. “Your wife is crazy about you.” But as soon as she closes the door on him, she turns round to the brothers and reveals “poor bastard, his woman is cold bangin’ the gardener.”
Is anyone else troubled that the very first thing we learn about Missouri is that she’s a liar?
The justification she gives is “people don’t come here for the truth, they come for good news.”
Seems like that might be an important point to remember. I’ll come back to it later.
Missouri wastes no time in showcasing her psychic credentials: she addresses Sam and Dean by name before they even get a chance to introduce themselves. She then takes Sam’s hand and reveals that she knows about Jessica’s death and John’s disappearance, apparently from reading Sam’s mind, but when Dean asks her where his dad is and whether he’s OK she says she doesn’t know, and when Dean challenges her on this, she responds with attitude:
DEAN: Don’t know? Well, you’re supposed to be a psychic, right?
MISSOURI: Boy, you see me sawin’ some bony tramp in half? You think I’m a magician? I may be able to read thoughts and sense energies in a room, but I can’t just pull facts out of thin air. Sit, please. [SAM smirks at DEAN and they sit down. MISSOURI snaps at DEAN.] Boy, you put your foot on my coffee table, I’m ‘a whack you with a spoon!
DEAN: I didn’t do anything.
MISSOURI: But you were thinkin’ about it. [DEAN raises his eyebrows. SAM smiles.]
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.09_Home_(transcript)
Sam finds all of this highly amusing, which is understandable considering he’s used to Dean’s cocky attitude and constantly being the butt of his teasing. He’s enjoying seeing his older brother copping shit from somebody else for a change. The first time I watched the episode, I sympathized, and I enjoyed Lorretta Devine’s entertaining performance. But after subsequent rewatches I’ve since started to question her constant needling of Dean throughout the episode. Almost the first thing she says to him is an insult:
Was he? Let’s check the photographic evidence we’re shown in the episode.
Looks fine to me.
Maybe it’s all just for fun and it’s supposed to come across as motherly, but a lot of it seems quite uncalled for and I’ve begun to wonder if, at one time, there was a more serious intention behind it all. I’ll be examining that possibility later too.
Sam asks her about her first meeting with his father and we learn it was Missouri who first revealed the nature of the supernatural world to him:
MISSOURI: He came for a reading. A few days after the fire. I just told him what was really out there in the dark. I guess you could say…I drew back the curtains for him.
DEAN: What about the fire? Do you know about what killed our mom?
MISSOURI: A little. Your daddy took me to your house. He was hopin’ I could sense the echoes, the fingerprints of this thing.
SAM: And could you?
MISSOURI: I….[She shakes her head.]
SAM: What was it?
MISSOURI: [softly] I don’t know. Oh, but it was evil. (Ibid)
She reveals that she’s been keeping an eye on the old Winchester home, and it’s been quiet: “No sudden deaths, no freak accidents. Why is it actin’ up now?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Sam replies, “But Dad going missing and Jessica dying and now this house all happening at once . . . it just feels like something’s starting.” (Ibid)
I’d just like to take a time out from this narrative to point out something that bothers me about the season 13 retcon of Missouri’s character where she’s portrayed as a hunter, neglectful of her young son because she was always out hunting. The Missouri character in this episode is a psychic running a private practice for her clients out of her home. She is not a hunter, and there’s no indication she ever was. Now, I acknowledge that there’s nothing that directly contradicts the possibility that she might have been a hunter in the past, which does leave the later writers with some wiggle room, I guess. But the dialogue here distinctly implies that she’s been on the spot the whole time observing the progress of the old house. Besides, “Home” is a myth arc episode and Missouri represents a version of a specific traditional character from the Hero’s journey, and that’s the wise old crone or witch figure who typically lives alone on the outskirts or borders of the town or village, isolated from normal society. So, I’m going to call bullshit on the idea of her ever having had a son or a normal family life of any kind. That wouldn't fit with the archetype. Again, I acknowledge that there’s nothing that directly excludes the possibility, but it strikes me as unlikely given her mythical status. (And if you’ve been following these reviews so far, you’ve probably already picked up on the fact that I’m not a fan of retcon in general :P)
But, to return to the plot of “Home”, Jenny is on the phone with someone who’s threatening to sue her for the misfortunes of the amputee plumber, but she ends the call to investigate more scratching and crashing coming from upstairs. While she’s out of the kitchen an invisible force drops the front of Ritchie’s play pen and opens the fridge to reveal a sippy cup of his favourite juice prominently displayed with the rest of the contents stacked to the sides creating a convenient space for him to climb into, which he promptly does, and the fridge slams and locks closed with him inside it. When Jenny returns to the kitchen and finds her son is missing there’s a couple of minutes of frantic searching before milk spilling from the fridge alerts her to his whereabouts so she’s able to rescue him from a chilly fate.
Sam and Dean choose this moment to turn up on her doorstep and ask if they can show Missouri round the place “for old time’s sake”, which would be a cheeky request at the best of times, but Jenny’s stressed so she tries to fob them off and close the door. Dean tries to forestall her: “Listen, Jenny, it’s important - ” at which point, Missouri slaps him upside the head:
“Give the poor girl a break, can’t you see she’s upset?” she says then adds, to Jenny, “forgive this boy, he means well . . .”
It’s a description of Dean that seems to persist despite all the evidence to the contrary, but we’ve seen several episodes now undercutting the stereotype that Dean is all brawn while Sam is all brain. We should know by now that he isn’t stupid. And, if Missouri’s psychic, she should know it too.
But the exchange does stall Jenny long enough for Missouri to open a conversation with her about the house: “You think there’s something in this house, something that wants to hurt your family. Am I mistaken?” she asks, and adds, “we’re people who can help, who can stop this thing. But you’re gonna have to trust us, just a little.”
Jenny trusts them enough to let them back in the house, anyway, and we see them next in Sari’s bedroom, which Missouri reveals used to be Sam’s old nursery. Dean pulls out his EMF metre and it lights up like Christmas. And Missouri is still needling Dean, calling him an amateur for needing the tech.
Dean’s starting to get pissed with all the flak he’s getting.
Missouri senses an energy but it isn’t the same as the one she felt when Mary died. She also reveals there’s more than one spirit in the house. “They’re here because of what happened to your family. You see, all those years ago, real evil came to you. It walked this house. That kind of evil leaves wounds. And sometimes, wounds get infected . . . This place is a magnet for paranormal energy. It’s attracted a poltergeist. A nasty one. And it won’t rest until Jenny and her babies are dead.” She isn’t able to tell them anything about the second spirit.
“Well, one thing’s for damn sure -- nobody’s dyin’ in this house ever again,” says Dean, “So, whatever is here, how do we stop it?”
Cue the next scene in Missouri’s kitchen where she and the boys are busy making up hex bags, and we get some of my favourite “wackadoo exposition” on how to exorcise a poltergeist:
DEAN: So, what is all this stuff, anyway?
MISSOURI: Angelica Root, Van Van oil, crossroad dirt, a few other odds and ends.
DEAN: Yeah? What are we supposed to do with it?
MISSOURI: We’re gonna put them inside the walls in the north, south, east, west corners on each floor of the house.
DEAN: We’ll be punchin’ holes in the dry wall. Jenny’s gonna love that.
MISSOURI: [slyly] She’ll live.
SAM: And this’ll destroy the spirits?
MISSOURI: It should. It should purify the house completely. We’ll each take a floor. But we work fast. Once the spirits realize what we’re up to, things are gonna get bad.
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.09_Home_(transcript)
In retrospect, the inclusion of crossroad dirt on the list of ingredients seems noteworthy, given the myth-arc nature of this episode and the importance of crossroads and their demonic connection in the season 2 arc. Whether or not it’s deliberate foreshadowing, I don’t know, but I think it’s possible the writers already had some idea of where they wanted to go with season 2 if they got the opportunity.
Typically, Dean feels the need to taste the goods. And thus begins his series long tendency to touch, poke, handle, bury and kiss things he shouldn’t.
Next, we cut to Missouri hustling Jenny and her family out of the house:
JENNY: Look, I’m not sure I’m comfortable leaving you guys here alone.
MISSOURI: Just take your kids to the movies or somethin’, and it’ll be over by the time you get back. [JENNY, still slightly unsure, leaves with her kids. MISSOURI goes back inside.] (Ibid)
(I don’t blame Jenny for being wary. For all she knows, this could all be a scam to turn the house over while she’s gone. I’ve seen “The Frighteners”. Maybe she has too! 😉)
Once Jenny’s gone Missouri and the boys set to punching holes and placing the hex bags and, as she predicted, the house starts to attack straight away. As soon as she places the first bag, she’s whumped by a chest of drawers. The attacks to the brothers are particularly interesting. As usual, Sam’s throat is the target, cutting off his breath, while Dean uses a table to fend off a knife attack to his body.
Remembering the traditional association of breath and soul, we once again see the brothers symbolically identified with soul and body respectively in the way they are targeted by supernatural forces.
Dean’s anticipation of the knife attack seems almost - dare I say it? - preternatural. That and quick reflexes enable him to defend himself from injury and he’s able to complete his task. But Sam is less fortunate; the cord is so tight around his neck he can’t get it off and, although he still tries to reach the wall even while being throttled, he passes out and drops the bag. He’s only saved by Dean’s timely arrival. Despite strenuous tugging, Dean can’t remove the cord either until he kicks a hole in the wall and places the final bag, at which point the poltergeist’s energy seems to vacate the house.
It seems significant that Dean has to finish the job in order to save Sam. With the spirit’s energy dissipated, Dean manages to disentangle the cord, Sam draws in a huge gasping breath. Dean gives him a quick once over to check he’s all right, then pulls him in for a brief hug. It lacks the ceremony of all future occasions; it’s all over so fast I couldn’t even get a decent cap of it but, here it is:
The show’s first brother hug!
Afterward, they’re all standing in the post-poltergeist fall-out in the kitchen. “You sure this is over?” Sam asks.
MISSOURI: I’m sure. Why? Why do you ask?
SAM: Never mind. [He sighs.] It’s nothin’, I guess.
But he doesn’t seem convinced. Then Jenny arrives home with the kids and is shocked by the mess she finds. Sam offers to pay for the damage, which doesn’t please Dean, and he’s even less pleased when Missouri volunteers him for cleaning detail. “Don’t you worry. Dean’s gonna clean up this mess,” she says. Not “we”, not even “Sam and Dean”. Dean might well wonder why she’s specifically picking on him.
With Missouri treating Dean like he’s a slave and calling him “boy”, I can’t help wondering if there’s some reverse racial irony intended.
“Don’t cuss at me!” she adds as he walks away muttering. Maybe all this is meant to be funny, but her expression as she looks at Dean afterward doesn’t strike me as humorous:
And after all that, Dean still helps her down the steps as they leave the house!
Then, once they’ve left, we get this creepy and unnatural overhead camera angle on the front door, as if something’s watching from above, just waiting for them to leave.
I think you’re right, Sam; it ain’t over yet!
And, sure enough, as soon as Jenny retires that night, her bed starts shaking violently. Luckily, the boys are still hanging around in the car outside the house because Sam has a bad feeling. “Why?” Dean wants to know, and Kripke takes the opportunity to sneak in another pop culture reference: “Missouri did her whole Zelda Rubenstein thing; the house should be clean; it should be over.” Horror fans may recall Zelda was the psychic from the movie, Poltergeist.
Then Sam sees Jenny banging on the window and calling for help, and we get a reprise of the shot from Sam’s vision.
Sam alerts Dean and the boys spring into action. Dean goes to rescue Jenny while Sam gets the kids. The fiery figure appears in Sari’s bedroom again but Sam grabs and escapes with her and Ritchie, but as he runs down the hall his eyes widen and he stops, puts down the kids and repeats familiar words to Sari.
Sari screams as Sam is grabbed and dragged backward into the kitchen by an invisible force that smashes him into the furniture and units.
Outside, Sari reports that something’s got Sam just as the front door slams, so Dean grabs the salt gun and an axe from the trunk and starts in on the door, while the poltergeist flings Sam all around then pins him to a wall. Jared does an excellent job of miming being pinned, by the way:
Then a flaming image of a stunt guy in a fire-proof suit emerges and advances on Sam.
Meanwhile Dean breaks through the door in a possible allusion to the “Here’s Johnny” scene from “The Shining”.
Running into the room, he lifts the salt gun and is about to shoot the fiery figure, but Sam forestalls him. “I know who it is. I can see her now,” he says, and the flaming Michelin Man morphs into Mary in a nightdress:
Dean’s arm wavers and drops, and he stares at Mary, stunned. Once more the little lost boy is stripped bare:
The expression on his face when she says his name! The way his eyes follow her as she moves past him and toward Sam!
Tears spring from Sam’s eyes as Mary approaches; this is like seeing his mother for the first time.
And then she utters those enigmatic words:
Why is she sorry? She doesn’t explain. We don’t get an explanation until season 4. I’m pretty sure the show hadn’t thought that far ahead back in the first season, and I’m quite sure the idea that Mary was a hunter was a much later afterthought. It’s possible, though, that there was always a plan that Mary would, in some way, turn out to be responsible for Azazel’s pursuit of Sam. Or, perhaps Kripke’s thinking was simply that, as a spirit, Mary might have a prescient knowledge of Sam’s future and “I’m sorry” was more an expression of condolence than an apology. On the other hand, Kripke may not have had a firm plan at all at this stage, and this was just a blank he intended to fill in later. Storytelling is like that sometimes. Writers don’t always know right away why they’re moved to write a certain line. Sometimes it’s just an act of faith that, in due time, the muses will provide.
But for now, Mary says nothing, just turns and confronts the poltergeist. “Get out of my house,” she tells it, (which, incidentally, is rather reminiscent of the ending of another horror movie, The Others, but that could just be a coincidence).
Mary boots up the flames again and ascends in a fireball that dissipates on the ceiling. It’s a special effect that’s so cool I’m willing to forgive the team for the fiery walking Michelin Man from before.
Dean looks devastated when she disappears and, just like at the beginning of the episode, he seems to look to Sam for some kind of guidance on what’s happened, or what to do now:
After a good deal of swallowing and jaw clenching, Sam pronounces:
In the aftermath, we find Dean looking through the photos Jenny found earlier.
He thanks her then stores them away in the trunk of the car, in a box that already has some photos and a few odds and ends in it. It isn’t clear what those items are; one is possibly an old baseball. But the point is obvious that this is a collection of the few personal memorabilia the Winchesters have remaining to them.
Meanwhile, Missouri emerges from the house and declares, “there are no spirits in there anymore, this time for sure,” which seems to beg the question: if she can be sure now, why not before? “Not even my mom?” asks Sam.
MISSOURI: No.
SAM: What happened?
MISSOURI: Your mom’s spirit and the poltergeist’s energy, they cancelled each other out. Your mom destroyed herself goin’ after the thing.
SAM: Why would she do something like that?
MISSOURI: Well, to protect her boys, of course. [SAM nods, with tears in his eyes. MISSOURI goes to put her hand on his shoulder, but she stops herself.]
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.09_Home_(transcript)
We tend to think of John being the first domino that set up the tragic cycle of Winchester self-sacrifice that culminated in Sam throwing himself into the Cage. I think it sometimes gets forgotten that the first example set for Sam came from Mary, here in the place where it all started. And I can’t help but wonder if that was the Demon’s plan all along. Is it at all possible that Azazel could have manipulated the events depicted in this episode in order to force Mary’s sacrifice and set the ball rolling? Stay tuned, and shortly I’ll posit a theory of how that might have been possible.
“Sam, I’m sorry,” says Missouri. “For what?” he asks, in a spooky repetition of the exchange between him and his mother.
MISSOURI: You sensed it was here, didn’t you? Even when I couldn’t.
SAM: What’s happening to me?
MISSOURI: I know I should have all the answers, but I don’t know.
(Ibid).
Interestingly, Missouri seems unable to make eye contact with Sam when she answers. In fact, she seems positively shifty eyed.
Something tells me she knows more than she’s telling.
“Don’t you boys be strangers,” she calls as the boys climb into the car. “See you around.” There’s something very knowing in her expression when she says it.
There’s a sharp contrast between Missouri’s cool, pointed stare and the happy, smiling wave goodbye that Jenny’s giving them.
Kripke revealed later that he had always planned to bring Missouri back, but Loretta Devine was unavailable to appear again. What were his plans for developing the character, I wonder? If she had become a repeating guest star, would she have remained the benevolent character she appears in this episode?
From her expression as she watches the boys drive away, I’m not so sure. In this private moment when she isn’t observed by any of the other characters, she seems to reveal something that seems almost . . . sinister?
Of course, I could be reading too much into her expression, because there is a more innocent explanation for her furtive behaviour, as we discover in the next scene when she returns to her own home:
MISSOURI: That boy…he has such powerful abilities. But why he couldn’t sense his own father, I have no idea. [The camera pans over to her couch, where JOHN WINCHESTER is sitting.]
And so, we learn that Dean’s prayer was heard and answered, though he never knew it. John, it seems, works in mysterious ways.
JOHN: Mary’s spirit -- do you really think she saved the boys?
MISSOURI: I do. [JOHN nods sadly and twists his wedding ring on his finger.] John Winchester, I could just slap you. Why won’t you go talk to your children?
JOHN: [tearfully] I want to. You have no idea how much I wanna see ‘em. But I can’t. Not yet. Not until I know the truth. [They share a look. The screen fades to black.] (Ibid).
As John echoes the line from the first page of the journal, we come full circle, but he’s clearly talking about a different truth now. So, the episode leaves us with two questions: what is this new “truth”, and why was Mary sorry? Are the two related? Time will tell, but I have other questions: like, how would Kripke have developed Missouri’s character if he’d had the opportunity? And might she have turned out to be more connected to John’s enquiries than he realized?
The case against Missouri Moseley.
I hesitate to venture what may well be an unpopular opinion, since it seems that Missouri was generally well liked in fandom. I liked her myself initially but, after many rewatches and some conversations with other fans, you’ll have gathered I now have some reservations about the character. These begin with her treatment of Dean, which seems mostly uncalled for and, in retrospect, unkind.
I think it was, perhaps, easy to overlook this aspect at first because this was only the tenth episode and my initial impression of Dean to this point was probably dominated by his cocky exterior and his constant needling of Sam. Doubtless, I thought it wouldn’t hurt him to be taken down a peg or two and get a taste of his own medicine. Of course, we soon learned that Dean’s brash exterior was just a front that he used to hide the broken little boy inside. I may not have fully absorbed that fact at the time, even though we’d been shown plenty of evidence of it, and even after watching the scene in this very episode that had made a point of showcasing his vulnerability:
But if I may be forgiven for not immediately recognizing Dean’s inner damage, what about Missouri? If she’s psychic, surely, she should be able to see through his cocksure veneer. And if that’s the case, and she’s aware of how truly fragile he is underneath, her constantly slapping down someone who already has low self-esteem seems less amusing.
But more telling, perhaps, is the failure of her exorcism spell. Far from “completely purifying” the house, it seems no more effective than rock salt in that it merely temporarily dissipates the spirit’s energies. Furthermore, she compounds this misfire by failing to detect the continued presence of poltergeist. In short, she’s almost completely useless against the poltergeist.
Two possible explanations for her inadequacy occur to me: first, perhaps she’s just a charlatan. Most of her ‘mind reading’ could simply be astute body language reading - after all, Dean telegraphs his actions so transparently in this episode, even the viewer has no trouble seeing what he’s thinking. Also, depending on how early in the action she was first in contact with John, which isn’t known, some of the information she used to convince the boys of her ability could have been received from their father. This is how phony psychics work.
However, her initial detection of the poltergeist and the presence of another spirit can’t be so easily explained, but there is another possible source who could have supplied that information, which leads me to my second conjecture.
Recalling that the first things we learn about Missouri are that she tells lies and she claims to read minds, I’m prompted to ask: who else have we been told does that? Remember what Dean said about demons in Phantom Traveler?
A fellow fan once drew my attention to the way Azazel and his minions all behaved toward Sam and Dean, elevating Sam and treating him as the golden boy, while putting Dean down and treating him as stupid and worthless. To a degree, Missouri does exactly the same thing, constantly belittling Dean whilst she is consistently warm, comforting and encouraging to Sam:
What if Missouri was actually of the Devil’s party? Let’s not forget, she was the one who originally revealed “the truth” to John and thus is responsible for setting him on his path of supernatural destruction and revenge.
So, is it possible her ineffective spell, and her apparent failure to recognize the continued presence of the poltergeist, could be part of a demonic plot to make Sam’s vision come true, and to force the situation that led to Mary’s sacrifice that set the first example for Sam?
Even her praising of Sam for sensing the poltergeist, when she couldn’t, may be part of that plan. It was the start of him seeing himself as special for having those abilities, as chosen. In the next episode we will see Sam beginning to exhibit a little arrogance about his powers, setting him up for the pride that will eventually contribute to his fall in season 4.
All of this is pure speculation, of course. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know what Kripke’s plans for the character might have been if he’d had the opportunity to continue working with Loretta Devine, but I’m curious to know what others’ think of Missouri, and whether anyone finds my head canon at all appealing.
There is one last point about Missouri that I promised to come back to when I drew attention to her statement: “People don’t come here for the truth. They come for good news.” Given the emphasis this episode has placed on John having learned “the truth” from Missouri, that seems a significant attitude for her to express in our opening introduction to the character. It seems to me to raise the question of whether what she revealed to John was actually true, or whether it was just “good news”. Since the episode has been playing with the theme of John’s mental state following the fire, there is room for yet another interpretive possibility where Missouri simply encouraged him in his delusion that something killed Mary because, for John, it was good news to have it confirmed his wife was murdered by some evil supernatural force rather than confront the possibility he was responsible for her suicide.
(A broader discussion of the different interpretive possibilities present in The Pilot, including the ‘shared psychosis’ reading of Supernatural, is given in my review at https://fanspired.livejournal.com/123128.html)
So, once more, Kripke has delivered a remarkably dense and multi-layered script capable of many different levels of meaning, and guest star Loretta Devine is to be congratulated for a wonderfully nuanced performance that allows all these possibilities to be explored. And, finally, kudos to Ken Girotti for his excellent visualization of the episode.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this recap of “Home”. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and impressions about the episode. Does anyone else share my ambivalence about Missouri?
Coming next: Things I Love About "Asylum".
(A/N: to receive an LJ notification when the next review is posted, please tag "episode rewatch").