SPN 4.19 "Jump the Shark" - Or, Holy Crap, I Wrote Meta
I went into this episode as unspoiled as possible - I knew there were rumors of a third Winchester, but until we got an episode description and title for 4.19, I thought those rumors were connected to "Sex and Violence" and the siren being like a brother to Dean. Part of me dreaded the idea of a third Winchester brother, a long-lost half-sibling, though there have been some good fic that dealt with the possibility, often being the connection to another fandom in a crossover (i.e. Xander Harris of Buffy the Vampire Slayer being the long-lost half-sibling), and of course there have been very, very bad fic that tried to do the same.
I had a lot of different ideas about what Adam could be, and knowing from 4.17 that angels can be illusion-makers I wondered if they might be involved - that this was to be another lesson for Dean as 4.17 was, or if Adam would be revealed to be something other than strictly human, like Anna Milton: maybe he was an angel who'd lost his memory and thought he was his vessel, or he had been injured by demons, or any number of things, and somehow knew of the Winchesters as a connection to his brethren. Part of me hoped he would not be evil, and part of me hoped he would be a normal human. With these last two, I was - in part - right. The real Adam was not evil and he was a normal human. We never really met that Adam, though the ghoul's behavior at times reflected what Adam's personality must have been like; we have to assume that the things he said about his experiences with John were taken from the real Adam's actual memories. The photographs and the evidence from the journal - the ripped pages and the one-word entries - support this.
For an episode with a plot summary as fanfic-cliche as "long-lost half-sibling", this episode was excellent and it is rife with meta potential. I've watched entire once and partially again and I already have a long list of meta bulletpoints.
I haven't had a chance to read more than a couple of reviews, but one constant point that just about everyone is making is that when John finally found out about Adam, when Adam was twelve, John had just lost Sam to Stanford: John had screwed up royally with Sam and their blow-up had been so bad that - knowing how stubborn they both are - they might never have seen each other again. (Dean is the one who instigated their reunion, by bringing Sam back to hunting in "Pilot", though if Dean hadn't have come and the YED had still killed Jessica, there is a reasonable possibility that Sam might have sought them out.) Having lost one youngest son, John finds out about Adam and thinks he has another chance to do right by his new youngest son. His behavior towards Adam is demonstrated by the stories of going to a baseball game and the picture of fishing - the epitome of normal. Even Dean can't believe that their Dad would take Adam to a baseball game. As others have pointed out, Adam was John's second chance to do right by Sam.
However, there's still Dean. When Sam leaves for Stanford, there's no reason for John to leave Dean behind when he's off on hunts, and certainly when Sam was in high school and Dean was finished (circa 1998, since Dean is mysteriously still in school in November 1997 ("After School Special")) Dean may have gone on week-day hunts with John as well. It's not clear when John finally saw Dean as a full-fledged hunting partner, though Dean was Sam's primary parent and caretaker for many years prior and certainly both boys participated in hunts as teenagers and trained to be hunters at John's orders. With Sam gone, there's no excuse for leaving Dean behind, and Dean was twenty-two - an adult in just about every sense of the word. Is this when Dean began hunting on his own as well? It seems that Dean and John were at least occasionally splitting up and hunting on their own prior to "Pilot" - what's unusual about John's disappearance is that he hasn't checked in, not that he went off on his own, though to Sam the idea might have been odd because he would have assumed that John and Dean were always together after he left. If Dean was itching to be an adult and hunt on his own occasionally, or frequently, and particularly if Dean's behavior towards John had changed after Sam left, John may have felt that he was losing Dean as well. At the very least, John may have experienced some separation anxiety or "empty nest syndrome" at his sons' maturity and adulthood. He may have felt that Dean's independence was another sign of failing a son, rather than the natural and healthy development that it should have been, and embraced opportunities with Adam, however infrequently, to prove that he could be a real father. He may have looked back on his life and for the first time realized just how bizarre Sam and Dean's childhood/adolescence had been and realized that Sam's desire for normalcy wasn't as wrong and hurtful as he'd thought it was. Adam was the child who adored or idolized John (Dean) and at the same time likely the intelligent child he could never connect with properly (Sam). (Adam was pre-med; one assumes a certain level of bookish intelligence more akin to Sam's than Dean's hands-on street smarts.)
At the same time, we have to keep in mind that John did not visit Adam frequently: a few birthdays, Adam says, and possibly a few other times. Had John visited Adam too often, Dean would have become suspicious; there are only so many times John can go on a hunt by himself to Minnesota and not need backup. Worried or suspicious, Dean could have called up Pastor Jim, who if memory serves also lived in Minnesota, and found out that that Pastor Jim had no idea that his state was having recurrent problems.
We don't know exactly what John and Dean were up to during the three or four years Sam was gone. We don't know when Dean went on his first solo hunt, or when John gave him the Impala and got himself the truck. Adam says that he learned to drive from John and at least implies that he got to drive the Impala - he saw it on several occasions at the very least. At those times, Dean couldn't have had it, obviously. Perhaps there was another vehicle that Dean drove in those days and John gave Dean the Impala later. Maybe Dean only got the Impala shortly before "Pilot", when John thought he finally had a lead on the YED for real this time, and thought there was a good chance he'd die trying: giving Dean the Impala beforehand was ensuring the inheritance and "making things right" with Dean as best he could. Maybe he recognized Dean as the guy in 1973 who convinced him to buy the car in the first place and thought it right to give it to him; this has been addressed in fanfic.
Then again, maybe on those occasions, John had "loaned" Dean out or "apprenticed" him to other hunters, or Dean took it upon himself to get that education from other hunters, either to continue proving himself to John or because he genuinely enjoyed hunting and wanted to know more. I'm sure there are things Dean knows about hunting that aren't in the journal; some of that would have come from John and experience, and the rest from interacting with other hunters. Maybe he studied with Pastor Jim, or Bobby, or someone not yet mentioned on the show, or all three, at different times over the course of those three or four years. The only event in Dean's life - that I can recall - that dates to this period and is a time when he was separated from John was his brief romance with Cassie. Clearly, it wasn't the only time John left Dean alone.
John wasn't just taking Adam to baseball games or teaching him to drive - both quintessentially paternal acts, embedded in the American experience in a kind of photographic negative of the tall tales and urban legends that are also so frequently pointed out as part of the idea of America and the road trip. He also teaches Adam to play pool and poker, and we see Dean react very negatively to this: to Adam, they're just games, and like the baseball games and driving, they are games that are coded as masculine and often part of the father-son experience; they're a pastime, just fun. But for Dean, who in particular is quite good at pool and poker and has used his winnings to finance his life, a supplement to credit card scams, they aren't just a game: they are life skills, survival skills. To Dean it sounds like Adam is making light of something essential to existence and, of course, essential to relating to John.
This isn't the only reason Dean reacts poorly to the idea of Adam and to the actuality of meeting him, however. Dean relates to John in an entirely different way than Sam does. In fannish terms, Dean's hardcore OTP is John/Mary: other meta writers have, I'm sure, talked about how Dean canonizes his mother and by extension the relationship John and Mary had. Mary is holy, sacred: he remembers her, albeit probably vaguely by now, and certainly this season he has new memories of her, having been sent to 1973 and meeting both John and Mary as young adults. Just as "In the Beginning" smashed some of his image of Mary - her own words saying that she would hate to have her children hunting, when he likely imagined she would be proud of him and his accomplishments as a hunter and a faithful son - this episode smashes some of his image of John. John is not the steadfast, faithful husband: to Dean, John had an affair, however brief, being disloyal to Mary's memory. And the proof of that affair has the audacity to call itself John's son, to refer to John as "Dad", as though they had a real connection. Though intellectually Dean had to know that John probably wasn't celibate, that intellectual knowledge did not prepare him for the emotional confrontation with reality.
Sam's reaction was the polar opposite, and with good reason. Sam doesn't remember Mary, doesn't remember his parents' relationship - and certainly doesn't have a child's idealized memory of his parents' marriage that Dean has. Sam has for years seen John for what he is: just a man, and a flawed one at that. That John may have had other relationships doesn't really surprise him, though I think he was just as surprised as Dean to learn of a brother and the effort that John took to keep Adam a secret. Sam never really idolized John the way Dean did and as a result is better able to accept that John made mistakes, and in fact may feel justified in seeing his father as an imperfect man by seeing evidence of that imperfection. One assumes that John was careful in his sexual activities, just as we assume Dean and Sam are. Sam, with his exposure to college culture, particularly in California, may also be more ready to accept that no birth control is 100% and to deal with the situation maturely, whereas Dean's seedier education and working-class persona ties him to stereotypes of blame and disdain for "illegitimacy" and marital disloyalty. He freaks out at the possibility that Ben might be his son in Season 3 - the worry that is connected to his going to Hell, that if Ben is his son then he is abandoning him, comes only at the end of the episode. Sam may have even had longings for a younger sibling and knowing that Adam is like him - a college student - may have satisfied cravings for a sibling who understood him, who could have helped absorb some of John's frustrations back in the day. And, like I joked in my crack fic from the other day, having a younger, uninitiated sibling gives Sam an opportunity to be an authority: he's the one who gets to tell Adam about what goes bump in the night, how to use a gun, how to be a hunter. He's no longer the baby of the family needing protection, supervision and education from the older members now that Adam is around.
I found it interesting that Dean starts to calm down after his blow up in the motel and his subsequent discovery of clues at the tomb and the bar: finally, he is back in his element - investigating a job, pretending (quite successfully) to be an FBI agent, figuring things out. Not only is he away from Sam and Adam for a while, which on its own might have been useful, but he has the opportunity to prove to himself that he is a competent hunter, which Sam had called into question in "Sex and Violence" while under the control of the siren's venom, and this proactiveness and confidence helps counteract the feelings of uselessness that linger from as early as "In the Beginning" and more recently in "On the Head of A Pin", when he tells Castiel he's not someone to count on to save the world from the apocalypse. And maybe there's a sense of uselessness from "The Monster at the End of this Book" - while Chuck didn't interpret everything correctly, he got the gist on a lot of things and Dean may be wondering what Chuck is seeing now and what parts of it is preventable or malleable. And of course his competency as a hunter ties back with his image of his father: like he tells Sam, and like we've known for a long time, he idolized John and craved to be just like him. When Dean thinks he falls short of being just like his father, his self-esteem plummets. Though Dean is smart and very capable, he often doesn't feel that way because he always measures himself against an imaginary John Winchester.
Sam, who from an early age clearly excelled at school, has had other rubriks in his own mind to grade himself with. Sam is calm with Adam until Dean calms down; then, delving into his own feelings of revenge, he begins to lose his calm: an interesting juxtaposition. Dean is right - and we fans are right, too, who have discussed this in episode reviews and meta for some time now: Sam has turned into John. Sam voluntarily returns to hunting when Jessica is killed, and, more importantly, really embraces revenge when Dean goes to Hell. A number of meta writers have discussed Dean being to Sam something like what Mary was to John: while Jessica was a girl Sam was going to marry, he was still hiding himself from her and their relationship was at most a few years old. Dean is inseparable from Sam's sense of family. His loss, particularly after three years of hunting together and their father's death, is much more profoundly felt. Sam embraces his desire for revenge and accepts Ruby's help in developing his powers and later even accepts her demonic blood to build up those powers. Had Adam actually lived, instead of dying before they ever got to town, Sam would have been a dangerous role model. John at the least had his boys to look out for and encountered hunters who were calmer and more centered than he was: this kept him unlikeable but reasonable. Had his first hunting teacher been someone like Gordon or like Sam is now, he may have gotten himself killed or self-destructed early in the game.
Dean's relationship to hunting is much different: though he remembers and misses Mary, his attitude towards hunting has never seemed much like John and Sam's revenge, though certainly he had satisfaction in being the one to kill Azazel with the Colt. Dean's attitude is more like Mary's, or perhaps Samuel Campbell's: it's the family business. You do it because it's the right thing to do and you have the ability and the power to do so. It's about justice, not revenge. We don't know how the Campbells got into hunting, but their attitudes and stability - they lived in a nice house, had family dinners, Samuel didn't think much about other hunters - indicates to me that whatever got them started in the business is long over. My own fanon is that Samuel, and possibly Deanna, had fairly steady jobs; they did what they could in their environs but did not go beyond neighboring counties very often. Hunting was important but peripheral to their everyday lives, like individuals belonging to a minority religion or culture who lived primarily secular or mainstream lives. Though Dean hunts more frequently - constantly, actually - and I have trouble seeing him settle down anywhere at this point, at earlier points in the series I think he could have if he had a family to settle down with.
Like so many other episodes this season, this episode centers on ideas of family: Dean's insistence that only he and Sam are John's family and Adam isn't; Sam's comment to Adam - "Welcome to the family" - when Dean storms out of the motel room; Adam's mother's death and Sam's comment that maybe he and Dean should be able to relate to that; the sibling ghouls and their loss of a parent. Families keep secrets from each other - John keeping Adam's existence a secret and not telling Adam the truth about hunting; Adam's mom keeping John's identity a secret until he was twelve; Sam still has not told Dean about drinking Ruby's blood, but clearly that made him all the more interesting a meal to the ghouls.
Another theme in this season has been illusions - things like the fact that the angels have to take vessels; the shapeshifter in "Monster Movie"; the inhabitants of the house in "Family Remains" (thought to be ghosts, but weren't); the entire 4.17 "It's a Terrible Life"; and so on - and this episode certainly had it as well. I've already discussed the way Dean's image of his father has been changed - his idealization of John being a kind of illusion, covering up who John really was. Certainly Adam's image of John would have been changed as well, if Adam had still been alive. The ghouls' behavior covered up clues that would have lead Sam and Dean to figuring out what they were - it's not normal behavior, it seems, for ghouls to attack the living, and this change of behavior, like Sam's, was born of revenge. The way the bartender's wife pegged Dean for an FBI agent, and the revelation that the simple bartender had actually been a sheriff's deputy and apparently worked with or had contact with John in 1990, were all kinds of illusions or uncovering an illusion. And of course the most important illusion of the episode was the revelation that Adam and his mother were, in fact, dead the whole time and the ghouls had assumed their identities. Like Castiel's phone call to Sam, pretending to be Bobby, a few episodes ago, the Adam who called John's phone probably wasn't Adam, but the ghoul pretending to be Adam.
(Minor quibble: Sam says that John was there in 1990, but Adam was born in 1992? Or did I hear that wrong?)
I found the chain of information on the ghouls' side of things interesting, if not necessarily needing much analysis. They went after Joe Barton, the former deputy, first: he was named in the papers. From eating him, they found out about John Winchester and that John had been injured and that Kate Milligan had cared for him. That made Kate the proverbial Dr. Mudd and therefore also an enemy. From eating her, they knew about Adam and that John was his father, which made Adam a target. By eating Adam, they had the information and identity necessary to reel in John. Had Dean not blurted out that he and and Sam were John's sons, they may have never been in danger, but once he did, the ghouls had new targets: Dean and Sam were John's proxies and, with the disclosure of being hunters, also the enemy.
Finally, one of the ghouls said something like "You are what you eat". This is certainly true for the ghouls - they can assume the identity of the people they've eaten, which is how they were able to fool Dean and Sam into thinking one of them was really Adam. I found it very interesting that it's Sam who hears it, and how meaningful that is to him. He consumed Azazel's blood as an infant and developed supernatural abilities as a result. Now he is consuming Ruby's blood and his abilities are developing further. Does this mean that Sam's very essence is becoming demonic? Is Sam no longer human, but some kind of demon, or on his way down that path? It will be very interesting to see where the show goes with this, especially with the apocalypse coming and the fight to keep Lucifer caged.
On the whole, a good episode, especially when connected thematically with the rest of the season. I wasn't thrilled with the actor who played Adam, though he was all right, but what was particularly good about the casting was the slight physical resemblance and the costuming department dressed him up to emphasize that. Take a look at when he enters the restaurant - hoodie and backpack like season one Sam, short hair and squarer build like Dean, height seemed to be somewhere in between, and his coloring is similar enough to both of them, though his eyes are a different color. I always look to my own siblings when I think of critiquing casting: it's hard to find any resemblance between my two brothers, but if you throw me into the mix, you can see it clearly. It would be difficult to find another actor of the right age with the right mix of similarity and dissimilarity.
I found Dean's choice of guns this episode a little odd - have we seen this cream-and-silver colored gun before? And I laughed like crazy when Dean called the holy water "Jesus juice". Sam's phrase about failed birth control - "got one past the goalie" - was bizarre; I've never heard it before, and though I understood it from context, I had no idea why someone would come up with that euphemism. Is it a regional expression somewhere? Heaven knows the boys have seen just about every nook and cranny of the lower forty-eight and could have picked up all sorts of slang over the years.
Finally, though we desperately need more female characters on Supernatural, I'm glad that Adam was a brother instead of a sister. Even beyond the whole "killed off a female character" trope, Adam's masculinity makes John's behavior towards him easier to examine in comparison to how John was with Sam and Dean. Had Adam been a girl, it would be too easy to fall into an easy answer of keeping a daughter safe by not exposing her to hunting, but as a son instead we get to see Sam and Dean's struggles with understanding his existence, John's keeping him a secret, and their own attitudes towards hunting and the problems of this season.
I had a lot of different ideas about what Adam could be, and knowing from 4.17 that angels can be illusion-makers I wondered if they might be involved - that this was to be another lesson for Dean as 4.17 was, or if Adam would be revealed to be something other than strictly human, like Anna Milton: maybe he was an angel who'd lost his memory and thought he was his vessel, or he had been injured by demons, or any number of things, and somehow knew of the Winchesters as a connection to his brethren. Part of me hoped he would not be evil, and part of me hoped he would be a normal human. With these last two, I was - in part - right. The real Adam was not evil and he was a normal human. We never really met that Adam, though the ghoul's behavior at times reflected what Adam's personality must have been like; we have to assume that the things he said about his experiences with John were taken from the real Adam's actual memories. The photographs and the evidence from the journal - the ripped pages and the one-word entries - support this.
For an episode with a plot summary as fanfic-cliche as "long-lost half-sibling", this episode was excellent and it is rife with meta potential. I've watched entire once and partially again and I already have a long list of meta bulletpoints.
I haven't had a chance to read more than a couple of reviews, but one constant point that just about everyone is making is that when John finally found out about Adam, when Adam was twelve, John had just lost Sam to Stanford: John had screwed up royally with Sam and their blow-up had been so bad that - knowing how stubborn they both are - they might never have seen each other again. (Dean is the one who instigated their reunion, by bringing Sam back to hunting in "Pilot", though if Dean hadn't have come and the YED had still killed Jessica, there is a reasonable possibility that Sam might have sought them out.) Having lost one youngest son, John finds out about Adam and thinks he has another chance to do right by his new youngest son. His behavior towards Adam is demonstrated by the stories of going to a baseball game and the picture of fishing - the epitome of normal. Even Dean can't believe that their Dad would take Adam to a baseball game. As others have pointed out, Adam was John's second chance to do right by Sam.
However, there's still Dean. When Sam leaves for Stanford, there's no reason for John to leave Dean behind when he's off on hunts, and certainly when Sam was in high school and Dean was finished (circa 1998, since Dean is mysteriously still in school in November 1997 ("After School Special")) Dean may have gone on week-day hunts with John as well. It's not clear when John finally saw Dean as a full-fledged hunting partner, though Dean was Sam's primary parent and caretaker for many years prior and certainly both boys participated in hunts as teenagers and trained to be hunters at John's orders. With Sam gone, there's no excuse for leaving Dean behind, and Dean was twenty-two - an adult in just about every sense of the word. Is this when Dean began hunting on his own as well? It seems that Dean and John were at least occasionally splitting up and hunting on their own prior to "Pilot" - what's unusual about John's disappearance is that he hasn't checked in, not that he went off on his own, though to Sam the idea might have been odd because he would have assumed that John and Dean were always together after he left. If Dean was itching to be an adult and hunt on his own occasionally, or frequently, and particularly if Dean's behavior towards John had changed after Sam left, John may have felt that he was losing Dean as well. At the very least, John may have experienced some separation anxiety or "empty nest syndrome" at his sons' maturity and adulthood. He may have felt that Dean's independence was another sign of failing a son, rather than the natural and healthy development that it should have been, and embraced opportunities with Adam, however infrequently, to prove that he could be a real father. He may have looked back on his life and for the first time realized just how bizarre Sam and Dean's childhood/adolescence had been and realized that Sam's desire for normalcy wasn't as wrong and hurtful as he'd thought it was. Adam was the child who adored or idolized John (Dean) and at the same time likely the intelligent child he could never connect with properly (Sam). (Adam was pre-med; one assumes a certain level of bookish intelligence more akin to Sam's than Dean's hands-on street smarts.)
At the same time, we have to keep in mind that John did not visit Adam frequently: a few birthdays, Adam says, and possibly a few other times. Had John visited Adam too often, Dean would have become suspicious; there are only so many times John can go on a hunt by himself to Minnesota and not need backup. Worried or suspicious, Dean could have called up Pastor Jim, who if memory serves also lived in Minnesota, and found out that that Pastor Jim had no idea that his state was having recurrent problems.
We don't know exactly what John and Dean were up to during the three or four years Sam was gone. We don't know when Dean went on his first solo hunt, or when John gave him the Impala and got himself the truck. Adam says that he learned to drive from John and at least implies that he got to drive the Impala - he saw it on several occasions at the very least. At those times, Dean couldn't have had it, obviously. Perhaps there was another vehicle that Dean drove in those days and John gave Dean the Impala later. Maybe Dean only got the Impala shortly before "Pilot", when John thought he finally had a lead on the YED for real this time, and thought there was a good chance he'd die trying: giving Dean the Impala beforehand was ensuring the inheritance and "making things right" with Dean as best he could. Maybe he recognized Dean as the guy in 1973 who convinced him to buy the car in the first place and thought it right to give it to him; this has been addressed in fanfic.
Then again, maybe on those occasions, John had "loaned" Dean out or "apprenticed" him to other hunters, or Dean took it upon himself to get that education from other hunters, either to continue proving himself to John or because he genuinely enjoyed hunting and wanted to know more. I'm sure there are things Dean knows about hunting that aren't in the journal; some of that would have come from John and experience, and the rest from interacting with other hunters. Maybe he studied with Pastor Jim, or Bobby, or someone not yet mentioned on the show, or all three, at different times over the course of those three or four years. The only event in Dean's life - that I can recall - that dates to this period and is a time when he was separated from John was his brief romance with Cassie. Clearly, it wasn't the only time John left Dean alone.
John wasn't just taking Adam to baseball games or teaching him to drive - both quintessentially paternal acts, embedded in the American experience in a kind of photographic negative of the tall tales and urban legends that are also so frequently pointed out as part of the idea of America and the road trip. He also teaches Adam to play pool and poker, and we see Dean react very negatively to this: to Adam, they're just games, and like the baseball games and driving, they are games that are coded as masculine and often part of the father-son experience; they're a pastime, just fun. But for Dean, who in particular is quite good at pool and poker and has used his winnings to finance his life, a supplement to credit card scams, they aren't just a game: they are life skills, survival skills. To Dean it sounds like Adam is making light of something essential to existence and, of course, essential to relating to John.
This isn't the only reason Dean reacts poorly to the idea of Adam and to the actuality of meeting him, however. Dean relates to John in an entirely different way than Sam does. In fannish terms, Dean's hardcore OTP is John/Mary: other meta writers have, I'm sure, talked about how Dean canonizes his mother and by extension the relationship John and Mary had. Mary is holy, sacred: he remembers her, albeit probably vaguely by now, and certainly this season he has new memories of her, having been sent to 1973 and meeting both John and Mary as young adults. Just as "In the Beginning" smashed some of his image of Mary - her own words saying that she would hate to have her children hunting, when he likely imagined she would be proud of him and his accomplishments as a hunter and a faithful son - this episode smashes some of his image of John. John is not the steadfast, faithful husband: to Dean, John had an affair, however brief, being disloyal to Mary's memory. And the proof of that affair has the audacity to call itself John's son, to refer to John as "Dad", as though they had a real connection. Though intellectually Dean had to know that John probably wasn't celibate, that intellectual knowledge did not prepare him for the emotional confrontation with reality.
Sam's reaction was the polar opposite, and with good reason. Sam doesn't remember Mary, doesn't remember his parents' relationship - and certainly doesn't have a child's idealized memory of his parents' marriage that Dean has. Sam has for years seen John for what he is: just a man, and a flawed one at that. That John may have had other relationships doesn't really surprise him, though I think he was just as surprised as Dean to learn of a brother and the effort that John took to keep Adam a secret. Sam never really idolized John the way Dean did and as a result is better able to accept that John made mistakes, and in fact may feel justified in seeing his father as an imperfect man by seeing evidence of that imperfection. One assumes that John was careful in his sexual activities, just as we assume Dean and Sam are. Sam, with his exposure to college culture, particularly in California, may also be more ready to accept that no birth control is 100% and to deal with the situation maturely, whereas Dean's seedier education and working-class persona ties him to stereotypes of blame and disdain for "illegitimacy" and marital disloyalty. He freaks out at the possibility that Ben might be his son in Season 3 - the worry that is connected to his going to Hell, that if Ben is his son then he is abandoning him, comes only at the end of the episode. Sam may have even had longings for a younger sibling and knowing that Adam is like him - a college student - may have satisfied cravings for a sibling who understood him, who could have helped absorb some of John's frustrations back in the day. And, like I joked in my crack fic from the other day, having a younger, uninitiated sibling gives Sam an opportunity to be an authority: he's the one who gets to tell Adam about what goes bump in the night, how to use a gun, how to be a hunter. He's no longer the baby of the family needing protection, supervision and education from the older members now that Adam is around.
I found it interesting that Dean starts to calm down after his blow up in the motel and his subsequent discovery of clues at the tomb and the bar: finally, he is back in his element - investigating a job, pretending (quite successfully) to be an FBI agent, figuring things out. Not only is he away from Sam and Adam for a while, which on its own might have been useful, but he has the opportunity to prove to himself that he is a competent hunter, which Sam had called into question in "Sex and Violence" while under the control of the siren's venom, and this proactiveness and confidence helps counteract the feelings of uselessness that linger from as early as "In the Beginning" and more recently in "On the Head of A Pin", when he tells Castiel he's not someone to count on to save the world from the apocalypse. And maybe there's a sense of uselessness from "The Monster at the End of this Book" - while Chuck didn't interpret everything correctly, he got the gist on a lot of things and Dean may be wondering what Chuck is seeing now and what parts of it is preventable or malleable. And of course his competency as a hunter ties back with his image of his father: like he tells Sam, and like we've known for a long time, he idolized John and craved to be just like him. When Dean thinks he falls short of being just like his father, his self-esteem plummets. Though Dean is smart and very capable, he often doesn't feel that way because he always measures himself against an imaginary John Winchester.
Sam, who from an early age clearly excelled at school, has had other rubriks in his own mind to grade himself with. Sam is calm with Adam until Dean calms down; then, delving into his own feelings of revenge, he begins to lose his calm: an interesting juxtaposition. Dean is right - and we fans are right, too, who have discussed this in episode reviews and meta for some time now: Sam has turned into John. Sam voluntarily returns to hunting when Jessica is killed, and, more importantly, really embraces revenge when Dean goes to Hell. A number of meta writers have discussed Dean being to Sam something like what Mary was to John: while Jessica was a girl Sam was going to marry, he was still hiding himself from her and their relationship was at most a few years old. Dean is inseparable from Sam's sense of family. His loss, particularly after three years of hunting together and their father's death, is much more profoundly felt. Sam embraces his desire for revenge and accepts Ruby's help in developing his powers and later even accepts her demonic blood to build up those powers. Had Adam actually lived, instead of dying before they ever got to town, Sam would have been a dangerous role model. John at the least had his boys to look out for and encountered hunters who were calmer and more centered than he was: this kept him unlikeable but reasonable. Had his first hunting teacher been someone like Gordon or like Sam is now, he may have gotten himself killed or self-destructed early in the game.
Dean's relationship to hunting is much different: though he remembers and misses Mary, his attitude towards hunting has never seemed much like John and Sam's revenge, though certainly he had satisfaction in being the one to kill Azazel with the Colt. Dean's attitude is more like Mary's, or perhaps Samuel Campbell's: it's the family business. You do it because it's the right thing to do and you have the ability and the power to do so. It's about justice, not revenge. We don't know how the Campbells got into hunting, but their attitudes and stability - they lived in a nice house, had family dinners, Samuel didn't think much about other hunters - indicates to me that whatever got them started in the business is long over. My own fanon is that Samuel, and possibly Deanna, had fairly steady jobs; they did what they could in their environs but did not go beyond neighboring counties very often. Hunting was important but peripheral to their everyday lives, like individuals belonging to a minority religion or culture who lived primarily secular or mainstream lives. Though Dean hunts more frequently - constantly, actually - and I have trouble seeing him settle down anywhere at this point, at earlier points in the series I think he could have if he had a family to settle down with.
Like so many other episodes this season, this episode centers on ideas of family: Dean's insistence that only he and Sam are John's family and Adam isn't; Sam's comment to Adam - "Welcome to the family" - when Dean storms out of the motel room; Adam's mother's death and Sam's comment that maybe he and Dean should be able to relate to that; the sibling ghouls and their loss of a parent. Families keep secrets from each other - John keeping Adam's existence a secret and not telling Adam the truth about hunting; Adam's mom keeping John's identity a secret until he was twelve; Sam still has not told Dean about drinking Ruby's blood, but clearly that made him all the more interesting a meal to the ghouls.
Another theme in this season has been illusions - things like the fact that the angels have to take vessels; the shapeshifter in "Monster Movie"; the inhabitants of the house in "Family Remains" (thought to be ghosts, but weren't); the entire 4.17 "It's a Terrible Life"; and so on - and this episode certainly had it as well. I've already discussed the way Dean's image of his father has been changed - his idealization of John being a kind of illusion, covering up who John really was. Certainly Adam's image of John would have been changed as well, if Adam had still been alive. The ghouls' behavior covered up clues that would have lead Sam and Dean to figuring out what they were - it's not normal behavior, it seems, for ghouls to attack the living, and this change of behavior, like Sam's, was born of revenge. The way the bartender's wife pegged Dean for an FBI agent, and the revelation that the simple bartender had actually been a sheriff's deputy and apparently worked with or had contact with John in 1990, were all kinds of illusions or uncovering an illusion. And of course the most important illusion of the episode was the revelation that Adam and his mother were, in fact, dead the whole time and the ghouls had assumed their identities. Like Castiel's phone call to Sam, pretending to be Bobby, a few episodes ago, the Adam who called John's phone probably wasn't Adam, but the ghoul pretending to be Adam.
(Minor quibble: Sam says that John was there in 1990, but Adam was born in 1992? Or did I hear that wrong?)
I found the chain of information on the ghouls' side of things interesting, if not necessarily needing much analysis. They went after Joe Barton, the former deputy, first: he was named in the papers. From eating him, they found out about John Winchester and that John had been injured and that Kate Milligan had cared for him. That made Kate the proverbial Dr. Mudd and therefore also an enemy. From eating her, they knew about Adam and that John was his father, which made Adam a target. By eating Adam, they had the information and identity necessary to reel in John. Had Dean not blurted out that he and and Sam were John's sons, they may have never been in danger, but once he did, the ghouls had new targets: Dean and Sam were John's proxies and, with the disclosure of being hunters, also the enemy.
Finally, one of the ghouls said something like "You are what you eat". This is certainly true for the ghouls - they can assume the identity of the people they've eaten, which is how they were able to fool Dean and Sam into thinking one of them was really Adam. I found it very interesting that it's Sam who hears it, and how meaningful that is to him. He consumed Azazel's blood as an infant and developed supernatural abilities as a result. Now he is consuming Ruby's blood and his abilities are developing further. Does this mean that Sam's very essence is becoming demonic? Is Sam no longer human, but some kind of demon, or on his way down that path? It will be very interesting to see where the show goes with this, especially with the apocalypse coming and the fight to keep Lucifer caged.
On the whole, a good episode, especially when connected thematically with the rest of the season. I wasn't thrilled with the actor who played Adam, though he was all right, but what was particularly good about the casting was the slight physical resemblance and the costuming department dressed him up to emphasize that. Take a look at when he enters the restaurant - hoodie and backpack like season one Sam, short hair and squarer build like Dean, height seemed to be somewhere in between, and his coloring is similar enough to both of them, though his eyes are a different color. I always look to my own siblings when I think of critiquing casting: it's hard to find any resemblance between my two brothers, but if you throw me into the mix, you can see it clearly. It would be difficult to find another actor of the right age with the right mix of similarity and dissimilarity.
I found Dean's choice of guns this episode a little odd - have we seen this cream-and-silver colored gun before? And I laughed like crazy when Dean called the holy water "Jesus juice". Sam's phrase about failed birth control - "got one past the goalie" - was bizarre; I've never heard it before, and though I understood it from context, I had no idea why someone would come up with that euphemism. Is it a regional expression somewhere? Heaven knows the boys have seen just about every nook and cranny of the lower forty-eight and could have picked up all sorts of slang over the years.
Finally, though we desperately need more female characters on Supernatural, I'm glad that Adam was a brother instead of a sister. Even beyond the whole "killed off a female character" trope, Adam's masculinity makes John's behavior towards him easier to examine in comparison to how John was with Sam and Dean. Had Adam been a girl, it would be too easy to fall into an easy answer of keeping a daughter safe by not exposing her to hunting, but as a son instead we get to see Sam and Dean's struggles with understanding his existence, John's keeping him a secret, and their own attitudes towards hunting and the problems of this season.