Supernatural: Hook Man pt 1
Images borrowed from here because my efforts to screencap anything would be laughable.
Lori: Okay. What do you think?
Taylor: Um …
Lori: Oh God. Too Martha Stewart?
Taylor: Here - wear this.
Lori: Um … I don’t know if this is really me …
Taylor: Lori, there’s a hot chick buried somewhere in there -
Lori: Okay, okay!
The opening of Hook Man is perhaps unusually long and detailed - it not only takes a while to get to the bloodshed, it covers multiple locations and people and sets up several character points. This would be because Lori is one of the lucky few to survive an opening scene of Supernatural … and because this episode is all about her. I’m somewhat uncomfortable with Lori as a character. The more religious a person is, the less likely I am to want to be around them. There are, of course, plenty of people who believe all sorts of things without bothering me at all - and that’s fine; none of my business. But church-going, morality-policing Lori Sorenson is definitely on the list of people I’d avoid. In this instance, I’m fairly certain I’m supposed to regard Lori as morally grey - but the show could cover her with flowers (I was going to say hearts and flowers, but in Supernatural they … might actually do that with real hearts) and spend 40 minutes writing sonnets to her magnificence and I’d still just want her to go away. Still, I can recognise that Lori is a victim of her upbringing and culture - and that is what connects her with Sam and Dean.
Lori is going on a date and her roommate Taylor, who is clearly very tolerant and a better person than I am (which is ironic, considering her fate), is helping her get ready. It’s immediately clear that she’s conflicted: she’s not pleased with the conservative image her first attempt to get dressed (sort of) projects, but she baulks when Taylor suggests that she swap out her business shirt for something a little more dressy. I’m less sure whether I’m supposed to make something of the fact that she’s perfectly okay with the short skirt that makes up the rest of the outfit; possibly they were just trying to spare the actress a complicated costume change in the middle of a scene - but if it is intentional, then she walks into the scene trying half to dress up and half to cover up. Lori is a girl who doesn’t know what she wants.
Lori: I thought we were going to the party.
Rich: Well, we can’t arrive on time.
Lori: You know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you brought me here on purpose.
Rich: What? I’m offended.
Lori: Yeah, I’m sure.
Rich: … Do you want to get that?
Lori: Definitely not.
Lori’s date turns out to be starting - and finishing - at what appears to be a local ‘lovers’ lane’. While she didn’t expect to come here, rather than the party they are going to attend, she seems largely untroubled by this turn of events until her date, Rich, takes things further than she is willing to go by putting his hand under her shirt. Lori asserts herself twice, telling him to stop. So far so good - on Lori’s side of the equation anyway - but we never see how Rich intended to respond to this because they are distracted by strange noises outside the car. Rich investigates and Lori huddles in the vehicle, frightened, until the strange sounds move from around the car to above the car. Finally she flees and, while she doesn’t find the killer, she does find her unfortunate date dead and hanging above the car - his trailing fingernails making scratching sounds on the roof.
Amusingly, although the episode is entitled Hook Man, they never actually manage to do the Hook Man legend - later in the episode the scenario with Lori’s father will come close, but even that will be subverted in a dozen different ways - since there’s nothing in this particular story that requires the murderer to have a hook. The proper Hook Man story is a bit too bloodless for Supernatural’s purposes, and requires the villain to be deprived of his weapon: there, the idea is that the kids drive away and later discover the hook hanging from the car’s doorhandle; if they had stayed and had sex, as they originally intended, they would have been chopped into little pieces. This legend about the dead boyfriend, however, definitely belongs to the same ‘family’ of urban legends - and it already says a lot about Lori. Snopes tells me that stories like these date back to the 1950s, and they’re big on rigid gender roles: it’s always the boy who goes out to deal with the problem and the girl who stays behind in the dubious safety of the car; she never thinks to accompany him or deal with things herself, and if she survives the night it’s because the big strong men come along and save her. Fifty years on, despite the great strides made in women’s rights and the unstoppable forward march of technology, Lori (with a little help from Rich) is still following the damn script.
A person stranded in an isolated spot in the 1950s would face a genuine dilemma: they would have to bet either on their ability to outrun or outfight a killer, or on their car’s ability to hold off his attempts to get in. Now we have another option: the ability to call for help. Of course, that doesn’t magically make the problem go away - once you’ve called you still have to decide what to do next - but it does help: you only have to stay alive until the police arrive, rather than escaping all by yourself, and you can at least get advice from trained professionals. We know Lori has a functioning mobile phone because she refuses a call from her father just seconds before she and Rich are attacked … but she doesn’t use it. Lori huddles, shrieks and whimpers, until finally she panics and runs. Even then she only gets a few paces before she turns to see Rich’s body - and stops and screams some more. The rest of the world has moved on, but Lori and Rich are still trapped in the 1950s, and there’s only one way this story goes.
What she doesn’t know is that she is, at present, in no danger. The ghost is essentially under her unwitting control: it reacts to her thoughts and prejudices. That leaves open the question of why the ghost has chosen Rich as a victim. I would like to think that Lori is judging Rich for his refusal to heed her first clear ‘no’; that would give her a definite reason to be concerned. Of course, it’s a big leap from there to tearing his arm off - but that part isn’t Lori’s fault. However, given the tenor of her other judgements, the ghost’s personal history and the fact that the ghost puts in an appearance the first time Rich touches Lori rather than the second, I rather suspect that she’s inclined to judge anyone who suggests extra-marital sex at all. That said, I’m predisposed to dislike her, so I may be judging her too harshly. I’m not unaware of the irony.
Sam: I had them check the FBI’s Missing Persons Data Bank. No ‘John Does’ fitting Dad’s description. I even ran his plates for traffic violations.
Dean: Sam, I’m telling you - I don’t think Dad wants to be found. Check this out. It’s a news item out of Plains Courier. Ankeny, Iowa - it’s only about a hundred miles from here.
Sam: The mutilated body was found near the victim’s car, parked on Nine Mile Road.
Dean: Keep reading.
Sam: Authorities are unable to provide a realistic description of the killer. The sole eyewitness, whose name has been withheld, is quoted as saying the attacker was invisible …
Dean: It could be something interesting.
Sam: Or it could be nothing at all! One freaked-out witness who didn’t see anything? It doesn’t mean it’s the Invisible Man.
Dean: But what if it is? Dad would check it out.
Now the guest characters are sufficiently traumatised, we switch back to Sam and Dean, who are multitasking: Sam is searching for news on John; Dean is looking for their next case. This episode suffers rather more from its dislocation than Dead in the Water did. There might have been a few oddities in that one, but at least the plot was on track. Here, the continuity is all over the place. Dean’s bemused speculation that John might be hiding from them makes little sense in the wake of Phantom Traveller: now they know John is hiding from them - and just about everyone else. This story deals largely with Sam and Dean’s nascent attempts to work out how to do their job, as well as Sam’s ongoing guilt about the secrets he kept from Jessica - and the ones he’s now keeping from Dean. This is all fine, because they’ve obviously still got a long way to go on the path to professionalism, and it’s not as though Sam’s issues have now vanished into the ether. But given the trajectory of Bloody Mary and Skin there’s a certain amount of ‘been there, done that’ in this episode; Sam and Dean now have six cases behind them, all with more-or-less satisfactory results, and if nothing else by now Sam has already hit rock bottom and opted to start climbing back up rather than make use of a drill.
Interestingly, Dean insists that they should investigate the case because John would do so. It’s not his fault that he doesn’t quite appreciate the facts surrounding John’s disappearance: he’s suffering from the whole unfortunate timey-wimey thing and has not yet heard John’s voicemail message. But the fact is, as the audience, we know that John probably wouldn’t check it out. He’s busy obsessing over his own problems, and is not only not assisting random people in distress, he’s not even answering direct cries for help: he’ll ignore some pretty desperate ones from his own offspring in the near future, so friends and acquaintances are probably also out of luck. What Dean means is that he would check it out, and he’s using an erroneous image of John to justify his own inclination. In fact, this will become a staple of Sam and Dean’s work habits over the years: when their epic quest of the year stalls, they go to work on something on the smaller scale, and we get a ‘monster of the week’ episode. Admittedly, it can sometimes feel frustrating when the big, world-ending threat vanishes for a couple of episodes and we get ghosts and vampires instead - but on the whole I don’t mind. It would be amazing luck if a quest went smoothly: there would be bound to be delays while you were searching for a lead, waiting for a contact to get back to you or observing the effects of your latest move. In storytelling terms, you’ve got two options: you can either skip ahead to the end of the waiting period, or you can explain how the characters passed the time. Generally, Supernatural opts for the latter. Not all the ‘monster of the week’ plots work, of course (personally, I’m going to hold a grudge over Swap Meat for the rest of eternity), but I think the intent behind them is good. Unlike their dad who, for all his virtues, really takes the art of obsession seriously, Sam and Dean are always available to help anyone in need: if one of them temporarily forgets the importance of that, the other is there to remind him. It’s right at the bedrock of their journey, because here and now they have to do the work John isn’t doing. Just because there are demons plotting the end of the world doesn’t mean there aren’t also ghosts stalking the living. Dean already has a good sense of this - but he doesn’t yet have the confidence to make the argument on his own. Well, that and dragging in your parents for back up is a classic way to win a debate against a sibling.
Lori: I can’t - it’s Sunday night.
Taylor: It’s just us girls. We’re going to do tequila shots and watch Reality Bites.
Lori: My dad makes dinner every Sunday night …
Taylor: Come on, Lori. I know this has been hard, but you are allowed to have fun.
Lori: I’ll try.
Taylor: Okay.
…
Sam: My name is Sam. This is my brother, Dean.
Dean: Hi.
Sam: We just transferred here to the university.
Lori: I saw you inside.
Sam: We don’t want to bother you. We just heard about what happened and …
Dean: We wanted to say how sorry we were.
Sam: I kind of know what you’re going through. I saw someone get hurt once. It’s something you don’t forget.
Sam and Dean infiltrate the university as transfer students and discover Lori’s habits from a student named Murph who seems oddly blasé both about the death of one of his classmates and the trauma of the student who witnessed it: his main input into the conversation is that Lori is both ‘hot’ and ‘a reverend’s daughter’, and thus some kind of special conquest. This is the trouble I have with this episode: I want to slap nearly all the guest characters repeatedly until they stop being obnoxious.
Naturally, being a reverend’s daughter, Lori is at church - and Sam and Dean wander into the middle of a service in order to have a chance to talk to her. And this scene I must say I love, because neither Sam nor Dean has the least idea of how to behave in a church: they bang the doors, stare at everyone and Dean completely misses the cue to pray. At least from my point of view, it’s beautiful. Religion in Supernatural is generally more trouble than it’s worth, because it’s usually amateurs messing about with things they don’t understand. That isn’t to say that religious people are bad - that would be unfairly maligning a large proportion of the world’s population - but rather that they are about as much use in dealing with supernatural threats as the police are, and tend to end up in over their heads by trusting the wrong people on bad evidence; the fate of the Novak family would be the most obvious example. Reverend Sorensen, standing in front of his congregation in his delightfully silly outfit, presents himself as an authority on the supernatural and what you should do about it - although his advice seems to come down to a very unhelpful ‘submit and like it’. But he knows nothing at all about his deity or any other. Despite having all the trappings of the supernatural around him (because the rituals and relics often do work and are important), the reverend is a victim rather than a hero in this piece - no one ever even bothers to explain the situation to him. In point of fact, it’s fairly likely that Reverend Sorensen’s deity of choice (although I realise there is a certain amount of ambiguity around Chuck’s identity) is at this moment having his fifth whiskey of the morning and debating whether it’s too early to hire a prostitute. That would probably shock him, and that’s kind of the point: he has no idea what he’s talking about.
If you’re really having some trouble with a god, then going to a priest is pretty useless (unless, of course, like the not-yet-introduced Jim Murphy, that priest also happens to be a hunter). You’d be much better off seeking out the scruffy vagabonds disrupting the service, because they have the skills to handle the problem. Dean is nonreligious; Sam seems to be a sort of generalist theist of the largely non-practising variety - but these are the heroes taking on gods, ghosts and monsters. They’re not particularly interested in religious services because they appreciate that they don’t do a lot of practical good. Lacking any religious inclination myself, I find this refreshing. It gets depressing, seeing the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ made synonymous with ‘Do you have morals?’ so often in fiction. Dean’s got plenty of moral convictions without religion, and Sam’s don’t depend on religious faith - he’ll drop that like a hot potato once he actually meets the people he’s been praying to, and yet here he is, still being a good person. So if I gush a little … well, that would be why.
Outside the church, Taylor attempts to convince Lori to spend the evening with her friends rather than with her father - and she agrees to try. But here, as always, what she wants is frustratingly unclear. To Taylor she makes the argument that she belongs with her father; in a subsequent scene, she will tell her father that she wants the space to live her own life. This gives us the second half of Lori’s problem: she seems concerned with being normal, but she can’t identify what ‘normal’ is. Is it being the dutiful daughter, following all the rules from her childhood? Is it being the rebellious student, doing all the things that young people away from home are supposed to do? Certainly, both roles are potentially ‘normal’; they’re easy clichés in fiction that anybody can recognise. But Lori has no easy means of deciding what constitutes normal for her. It’s no wonder she and Sam feel a connection.
Dean: So this is how you spent four good years of your life, huh?
Sam: Welcome to higher education.
…
Sam: Hey, check this out. 1862: a preacher named Jacob Karns was arrested for murder. It looks like he was so angry over the red light district in town that one night he killed 13 prostitutes. Ah - right here, ‘Some of the deceased were found in their beds, the sheets soaked with blood. Others were suspended upside down from the limbs of trees as a warning against the sins of the flesh’.
Dean: Get this - the murder weapon? Looks like the preacher lost his hand in an accident. Had it replaced with a silver hook.
Lori provides Sam with enough of a description of what happened to Rich for him to recognise the shape of the legend - although why he immediately assumes a hook comes into it I do not know - so he and Dean head to the university library to dig up the background information, and eventually discover a mass murderer with a motive to continue his killing spree in the afterlife. The scene blurs the concepts of ‘normal’ nicely. Dean teases Sam about his studies, but after all Dean has basically spent ‘four good years of his life’ - and more - exactly the same way: they’re not in the library to do research for an essay, they’re there to look up the history on a potential haunting, and that’s not exactly an unusual component of the job. Since I cannot imagine that John would allow Dean to wander off and have fun while he was digging through the research, surely Dean has spent a significant part of the last four years in libraries and universities. If hunting were a job that paid actual money, they’d be looking for people with degrees in history, anthropology, languages and literature to do the reading - and a lot of the time Sam and Dean track down such people to confirm or elaborate on their suspicions anyway. Whatever else may have been different about Sam and Dean’s lives over the last four years, this part was normal for both of them.
As for the ghost, he is Lori’s situation taken to extremes - someone who has completely failed to make any choices about who he wants to be and become a monster in the process. Jacob Karns urged restraint in others in the name of his religion, but he himself was a wanton killer, committing horrific acts in order to indulge his own personal feelings. That’s a man trying to have his cake and eat it too: you can’t be a pillar of morality and a mass murderer at the same time - that should go without saying, but apparently somebody needed to say it to Karns. Taken past Lori, there is also an obvious connection to Sam and the conflict between his desire to maintain a façade of ‘normality’ to ward off his feelings of guilt and his desire to embrace (at least in the short term) the world of hunting in order to track down Jessica’s murderer. They get away with this, just, because Sam will not come clean about his visions until Home - and concealing his psychic tendencies is the last stone in the wall of normality he’s got left. But Bloody Mary already dealt with the destructive aspects of Sam’s refusal to face his guilt, much more directly than Hook Man will - with Sam literally brought to his knees by the crisis - and Skin forced him to abandon the trappings of university life that are so abundant here. So while there’s nothing exactly wrong with telling this sort of story now, it does feel as though it’s been thoroughly upstaged. It would have worked better as a precursor to Bloody Mary.
Dean: Here you go.
Sam: If it is a spirit, buckshot won’t do much good.
Dean: Yeah, rock salt.
Sam: Huh. Salt being a spirit deterrent.
Dean: Yeah. It won’t kill them, but it’ll slow them down.
Sam: That’s pretty good. You and Dad think of this?
Dean: I told you: you don’t have to be a college graduate to be a genius.
Since Karns committed his murders in the same place that Rich was killed, Sam and Dean head out there to investigate, armed with new (to Sam) rock-salt ammunition - and are promptly arrested by a local police officer for wandering about brandishing guns. I understand that the rock-salt thing is a little bit funny, because Wikipedia tells me that rock-salt shells are an actual thing in the real world that people know about, so taking 20 years to discover them probably does not exactly count as genius. But once the hilarity subsides, I have to admit that it does say something important about hunter society. There’s no handbook, there’s no orientation day, there’s no easy compilation of everything you’ll need to know on the job - it’s all scattered through thousands of books on history and folklore. Basically (with some exceptions, like the Campbell clan), to become a hunter you survive a monster attack. Then you use what you learnt from surviving the first time to help someone else live through the next assault. If you’re lucky, you might find somebody (or a series of somebodies) to teach you - but anything your mentor doesn’t know, or happens not to pass on, you’re going to have to work out for yourself. It’s a primitive society in the midst of a high-tech one, with information spreading through rumour and chance meetings. So there are going to be a lot of people out there reinventing the wheel, over and over again, and being justifiably proud of what they’ve come up with. Apparently John Winchester’s friends never taught him that particular trick, and one day he or Dean looked at a shotgun shell and … something clicked. Fair enough. In some other part of the country, I bet there’s some guy who’s just worked out after 30 years on the job that vampires (not as extinct as everyone thought!) don’t like the blood of the dead.
More worryingly, that exposition bug seems to have followed Sam from California to Iowa - it’s vaguely disturbing, the effect that a university campus has on him and it now seems to be spreading to Dean. They should get that checked out before they start explaining that cereal goes in bowls and should have milk on it.