Supernatural: Skin pt 1
Images borrowed from here because my efforts to screencap anything would be laughable.
Policeman: It’s okay. It’s okay.
Rebecca: In there! In there!
Policeman: Freeze! Don’t move! Drop the knife! Keep your hands where I can see them! Drop it! Hold it right there! Do it!
Identity is fragile. We know this because we just watched Sam’s sense of self be pretty thoroughly shattered by Bloody Mary. Now it’s Dean’s turn - and while he will defend himself a little better, he will mostly do so because of Sam. So that balances out nicely.
The story opens on a woman in distress: bound to a chair and obviously injured. Fortunately, the police are there to stop this situation from going any further than it already has. Less fortunately, the suspect they spot attempting to flee out onto a balcony appears to be Dean. We just spent the last five episodes establishing that the Winchesters are basically good people: they will put themselves at considerable risk to protect others, they can extend compassion and care to other people when they deny it to themselves and while they kill their prey, they’ve never shown the slightest interest in drawing out the process. So something is clearly up here; that is definitely not Dean. To some extent, Supernatural still can and does use this gambit. Season seven’s Slash Fiction invites the audience to consider all the possible reasons why Sam and Dean might fire on a room full of unresisting people, suspect that they are all pretty unlikely and conclude they are being set up. Which they are. But these days we can no longer automatically dismiss a bound and badly injured person as ‘not Dean’s doing’.
This episode pits two people who barely exist against one who doesn’t exist at all. Sam and Dean do win - but they don’t come away unscathed. Ultimately, no one in Supernatural does. It is a world in which otherwise good people are routinely made complicit in the unthinkable - in which the slow, almost geological, force of immortality erodes everyone. If you were to take Dean aside in this episode and describe his actions in Let It Bleed to him, he would probably look at you as though your head were on backwards - yes, he and Sam will, in moments of panic, stoop to something like torture in upcoming episodes, but it is at least a little comforting that they will be completely useless at it. The idea that he could keep this up for hours? Inconceivable!
Here and now, Dean is young and as optimistic as he’ll ever be. But the gods of his world have plans for him that aren’t kind, and certainly don’t take into account what he thinks is right or wrong. Some of those plans were, of course, set in motion before he was born. But from the audience’s point of view, the assault starts here. Because when he walks away at the end of this episode, he will have fewer choices than he did when it started.
Dean: Well … what exactly do you tell them? You know, about where you’ve been, what you’ve been doing?
Sam: I tell them I’m on a road trip with my big brother. I tell them I needed some time off after Jess.
Dean: Oh, so you lie to them.
Sam: No! I just don’t tell them … everything.
Dean: Yeah, that’s … called lying. I mean, hey, man, I get it: telling them the truth is far worse.
Sam: So, what am I supposed to do, just cut everybody out of my life? … You’re serious?
Dean: Look, it sucks, but in a job like this you can’t get close to people. Period.
Sam: You’re kind of antisocial, you know that?
Dean: Yeah, whatever.
Sam: God …
Dean: What?
Sam: This email from this girl - Rebecca Warren - one of those friends of mine -
Dean: Is she hot?
Sam: I went to school with her and her brother, Zach. She says Zach’s been charged with murder. He’s been arrested for killing his girlfriend. Rebecca says he didn’t do it … but it sounds like the cops have a pretty good case.
Dean: Dude, what kind of people are you hanging out with?
Sam: No, man, I know Zach. He’s no killer.
Dean: Well, maybe you know Zach as well as he knows you.
We scroll back in time to a week earlier to find Sam and Dean stopping for petrol and debating whether or not Sam is allowed to have a social life and hunt monsters. This debate is at least temporarily decided in the affirmative when Sam discovers an email from a friend in distress - and promptly has them hurrying back the way they came in order to offer assistance. The episode is all about the nature of identity, and how you (and everybody else) can identify yourself as really you. So naturally Sam and Dean come at this from opposite angles.
In one sense, right now Sam has a much more solid identity than Dean has - he knows people: just take a look at his address book. At least some of ‘who you are’ is based on other people: how you relate to the people around you, or (if you prefer it), how you don’t. One of the oldest heroic road-trip stories, The Odyssey (okay, they’re on a boat, but it’s a mode of conveyance and they stop to see the sights and pick fights with monsters, so I say it counts), deals with the idea: Odysseus must get home, because if he doesn’t there will be no one to care for his father in his old age and bury him when the time comes; if he doesn’t get home his wife Penelope will become someone else’s wife; if he doesn’t get home his son Telemachus will lose his inheritance - or even his life. In order to exist in the world, Odysseus must have roles that relate to other people - as son, husband, father and as ruler of Ithaca - and the greatest threat in the story is that he will drown at sea: if that happens, everything that he was will go to somebody else, and he won’t even have a grave marker bearing his name. It will be as though he never existed at all.
Or there is Tom Bombadil, chiding the Hobbits for asking him who he is when he’s already told them (although I’d say they could be excused for missing it, since he insists on speaking almost entirely in verse):
‘Eh, what?’ said Tom sitting up, and his eyes glinting in the gloom. ‘Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless? But you are young and I am old. Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the Little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless - before the Dark Lord came from Outside.’
The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring
That’s who he is: the guy who knows everybody, because he was here first. Unfortunately, Sam can’t give anywhere near so thorough an account of himself as that. He is still struggling to keep up a façade he no longer believes in, using the distance afforded him by email to maintain the fiction of ‘normality’. As long as his friends don’t see him, he can be whatever he wants to be to them - so in effect, Sam’s friends know someone who doesn’t exist. Their Sam had a girlfriend who died in a tragic accident and is now driving all over the country with his brother, looking at cheesy tourist attractions and finding enough time and distance from his grief to return to his studies. This made-up Sam is based on the real version - on their memories of how he looks and talks, on the familiarity of his writing style - but it remains a fictional character, only loosely related to Sam himself. In trying to protect his identity, Sam is half strangling it. He can hardly bear to face himself; he doesn’t want other people to know the real him.
As for Dean - well, Sam’s teasing aside, I think it’s been pretty thoroughly established even at this early stage that he isn’t antisocial. He likes just about everyone, and makes friends in several of the episodes. But he has resigned himself to the fact that these friendships will always be transitory. He’s not entirely real to these people - a fairy-tale character who stepped out of the shadows and slew a monster. It’s the opposite of Sam’s lies to his friends: Dean shows people the true world just by existing, but it doesn’t mesh very well with the ordinary lives they need to lead, so they wave him a friendly goodbye and try to forget they ever saw him; forgetting the supernatural can be a difficult business, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to try. Right now, Dean doesn’t know anybody but Sam. It may or may not be good for Sam to have these awkward, email-based friendships built on a web of lies, but it would certainly be more convenient for Dean if he didn’t. Sam’s insistence on keeping up with the doings of the mundane world is a reminder that he might at any moment decide to return to it. And that scares the hell out of Dean, because without Sam he would essentially cease to exist. There are traces of him, I’m sure: a birth certificate, certainly, probably some scattered records pertaining to his schooling … but that’s about it. If Dean were to be killed by a monster in a swamp or a sewer, who would even notice? Who would even bother to look for a body? He’d vanish as surely as Odysseus would, lost at sea. It’s not fair to Sam that he got designated as Dean’s anchor to the world by default - but the fact that it’s unfair doesn’t make it untrue.
Sam: So, tell us what happened.
Rebecca: Well, Zach came home and he found Emily tied to a chair. And she was beaten up and bloody, and she wasn’t breathing. So he called 911, and the police - they showed up, and - and they arrested him. But, the thing is, the only way that Zach could have killed Emily is if he was in two places at the same time. The police - they have a video. It’s from the security tape from across the street. And it shows Zach coming home at 10:30. Now, Emily was killed just after that, but I swear, he was here, with me, having a few beers until at least after midnight.
Sam: You know, maybe we could see the crime scene. Zach’s house.
Dean: … We could?
Rebecca: Why? I mean, what could you do?
Sam: Well, me, not much. But Dean’s a cop.
Four hundred miles later, Sam and Dean meet up with Sam’s friend Rebecca, who is desperate to save her bother Zach from a false murder charge - but has no idea how to go about doing it. Sam offers his and Dean’s assistance, and constructs a false identity for Dean as ‘a cop’ on the spot. And that’s where things become awkward. False identities are par for the course for them, but it’s a different thing when someone else constructs one for you without your consent - there’s a confused moment where, if Rebecca weren’t too upset for analysis, she could have spotted the lie immediately; then he catches on and tries to reassert a bit of control over his sense of self - he’s not just a cop, he’s a detective; he likes that better. Even more awkward is Sam’s attempt to play the role he has constructed for himself via email: the innocent little brother, who is eager to help but completely useless in these situations, really. He and Dean will have to confer in whispers and find excuses to send Rebecca out of the room to prevent her from realising that Sam is in fact Dean’s partner, and every bit as capable of handling this crisis as Dean is.
There are two sides to this charade. On the one hand, it is blotting out one of the better parts of Sam’s character - he has put his own quest on hold to help a friend deal with her crisis; he wasn’t just taking another swing by the world’s biggest ball of twine, he was looking for his missing father and trying to find out what, exactly, happened to Jessica. This is no small thing he’s doing for Rebecca and Zach - and yet still he thinks of the truth of his situation as something to be ashamed of. But on the other hand, if Sam, as he claims, really does believe Zach’s problems may have supernatural origins, then part of this situation must be a desire to confront his insecurities and attempt to move forward. To help Zach, at some point he would have to tell Rebecca about the supernatural. There would be no point in her continuing to try to track down a human murderer when the real culprit is a monster who lives in the sewers. Whatever means she used to free her brother would necessarily differ from the route she’d take if this were an ordinary murder case. Of course, that’s not exactly how this plays out, but Sam still gets points for trying. He hit rock bottom in Bloody Mary, but he’s already clawing his way back up the only way he knows how. It’s often difficult for him to face or deal with things that are bothering him simply for his own good - but he can do it if it will protect someone else.
Sam: Check this out.
Dean: Well, maybe it’s just a camera flare.
Sam: That’s not like any camera flare I’ve ever seen. You know, a lot of cultures believe that a photograph can catch a glimpse of the soul.
Dean: Right.
Sam: Remember that dog that was freaking out? Maybe he saw this thing. Maybe this is some kind of dark double of Zach’s; something that looks like him but isn’t him.
Dean: Like a Doppelgänger.
Sam: Yeah. It’d sure explain how he was in two places at once.
We skip to the perspective of the monster, a shape-shifter who is still wearing Zach’s face and scouting out ‘his’ next victims. Shape-shifters mean fun with pronouns again, and they’re a lot harder to quantify than demons. Demons have very strong identities. They may have to hide their real names to protect themselves and they necessarily possess humans to get things done, but once they’ve picked out a nom de guerre they tend to be happy to stick to it, and they’re usually pretty recognisable: Ruby will go through four different bodies, and while there will be differences - understandably, as she’s filtered through the interpretations of four different actresses - she’s always Ruby. Shape-shifters can be anybody they like … but they aren’t really anybody in themselves. Though they are born in a single form, they begin changing shape much too early to have any recollection of what they ‘really’ look like - and it would mean very little if they did, since the resemblance between a baby and an adult human is fairly slight under the best of circumstances. There doesn’t seem to be any face that’s ‘theirs’ at the bottom of all their changing; all they can do is borrow someone else’s. And aside from the short-lived ‘Bobby John’ of Two and a Half Men, none of them has ever had a name. It’s difficult to assign individual characteristics to a shape-shifter, because they borrow so much from their victims. There is something in there that is ‘them’, because they have varying motives for their actions. But when they talk about themselves it gets all muddled together with the role they’re playing.
Tentatively, I think this shape-shifter is male, because he seems to be the kind of misogynist who doesn’t recognise women as people at all: they’re just props in his revenge fantasy, which is all about the men and what they have that he doesn’t. We see that as we watch him work, impersonating a businessman named Alex and attempting to kill his wife Lindsay: his is targeting men with homes and wives or girlfriends, respectable people who fit comfortably into the world they inhabit. The women themselves are incidental - whatever they say or do, he is going to torture them to death - because the point of the exercise is that the men he impersonates are blamed for their murders. He turns them into something like him: hated outcasts whom nobody wants to see. If he can’t have a home and a wife, nobody else can either. It never occurs to him that meeting a woman without intending to murder her might be a more productive solution than all this death and mayhem.
I don’t think we see the ‘shape-shifter eyes’ shown in these scenes again outside of security footage. Possibly this is a continuity error, but I also think it works quite well as the same kind of conceit used in Doctor Who’s Blink. In Blink, the monsters are frozen as statues as long as someone is looking at them - only when you look away can they get you. At several points in the episode, only the audience’s eyes on the statues could be keeping them frozen; when the lights fail and we can’t see them either, that’s when the characters are really screwed. Skin is a story of stolen identities, but we are in on the secret from the get-go: like Sam and Dean, we look at things from the outside, so we know something is fishy about Zach’s case even before any evidence turns up. To the people on the inside, everything looks normal - if the horrifying kind of normal. The characters see a normal person; we see a monster, because we are by default watching him on film. And I think this is particularly likely, since the scenes following the shape-shifter are interspersed with scenes of Sam and Dean discovering the strange nature of their eyes.
Dean: I just talked to the patrolman who was first on the scene, heard this guy’s - Alex’s - story. Apparently the dude was driving home from a business trip when his wife was attacked.
Sam: So he was two places at once.
Dean: Exactly. Then he sees himself in the house - the police think he’s a nutjob.
Sam: Two dark doubles attacking loved ones in exactly the same way.
Dean: Could be the same thing doing it, too.
Sam: Shape-shifter? Something that can make itself look like anyone?
Dean: Every culture in the world has shape-shifter lore. You know: legends of creatures who can transform themselves into animals or other men.
Sam: Right: skin-walkers, werewolves.
Dean: We’ve got two attacks within blocks of each other. I’m guessing we’ve got a shape-shifter prowling the neighbourhood.
…
Sam: I bet this runs right by Zach’s house, too. The shape-shifter could be using the sewer system to get around.
Dean: I think you’re right. Look at this.
Sam: Is this from his victims?
Dean: You know: I just had a sick thought. When the shape-shifter changes shape … maybe it sheds.
Sam: That is sick
Some poking around both at Zach’s house and at the second crime scene determines that this monster is probably a shape-shifter lurking in the sewers beneath the residential street - and here we get our first family of monsters: shape-shifters, werewolves and skin-walkers are all basically the same thing, little more than variations within a single species. Werewolves and skin-walkers are humans who have been bitten; shape-shifters are born as they are. In Monster Movie it will be established that a shape-shifter can change to look like a werewolf if he wants to - albeit a cheesy, B-movie sort of werewolf. All of them are susceptible to silver.
I like this, because the identity of a shape-shifter is paper thin at the best of times, but it is even more fragile than one might think because mythology changes. Nowadays we’re up to our eyeballs in sympathetic werewolves, because it seems to many people to be a bit much to blame people simply for being bitten by something. But there have been as many different concepts of shape-changing beings over the years as there have been cultures to make them up - what this thing is in any given century will be up for debate. Petronius’s Satyricon, a Roman novel probably written sometime during the reign of Nero, has a character named Niceros encounter a being that might fit into any of Supernatural’s three shape-changing categories: he sets out on a journey with a soldier who, apparently just for the fun of it, stops along the way to perform a little ritual that involves urinating in a circle around his clothes; this gives him the power to change into a wolf - and he promptly runs off to eat the neighbours’ cattle. As you do. The word Petronius uses for his monster is ‘versipellis’ - literally ‘skin-changer’. Given the puddle of shed skin that Sam and Dean find lying in the sewer, I’d say that’s an even better name for the thing they’ve encountered than ‘shape-shifter’. Especially since versipellis was also slang for ‘con artist’ or ‘double-dealer’. This monster is engaging in the ultimate form of identity theft, as he literally sheds one identity for another whenever it’s convenient.
Rebecca: I told them that we were with a police officer. And they checked it out, and they told me that there is no Detective Dean Winchester.
Sam: Beck -
Rebecca: No, I don’t understand why you would lie to me about something like that.
Sam: We’re trying to help.
Rebecca: Oh, trying to help? Do you realise that that was a sealed crime scene? This could have just ruined Zach’s case!
Sam: Beck, I’m sorry, but …
Rebecca: No, goodbye, Sam.
Dean: I hate to say it, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You lie to your friends because if they knew the real you, they’d be freaked. It’s just … it’d be easier if …
Sam: If I were like you?
Dean: Hey, man, like it or not, we are not like other people. But I’ll tell you one thing: this whole gig - it ain’t without perks.
…
Sam: Don’t move! What have you done with him?
Shape-shifter Dean: Dude, chill. It’s me, all right?
Sam: No, I don’t think so. Where’s my brother?
Shape-shifter Dean: You’re about to shoot him! Sam, calm down.
Sam: You caught those keys with your left. Your shoulder was hurt.
Shape-shifter Dean: … Yeah, it’s better. What do you want me to do, cry?
Sam: You’re not my brother.
Shape-shifter Dean: Why don’t you pull the trigger, then? Because you’re not sure. Dude, you know me.
Sam: Don’t.
What follows, as they attempt to hunt down the shape-shifter, is a blurring between Sam and Dean’s world and that of the monster. Rebecca, in all innocence, passes Dean’s name on to her brother’s lawyer and discovers that Dean is not in fact a cop. This is exactly the wrong moment for such a revelation: they’re in much too far to back out, but neither do they yet have anything to show Rebecca to demonstrate that, official or not, they are exactly the kind of experts she needs to deal with this mess. Her rejection naturally pushes Sam a few steps further out into the margins: now he has been branded a liar by his friends, and the fictional Sam he has been working so hard to maintain has been badly damaged, and because he is lying to them, he can’t easily replace him with the real Sam: the one who is about to go down into the sewer to confront the person who has killed at least one woman and seriously injured another, and ruined the lives of two men - one of them Rebecca’s brother. Right now, Sam has got the worst of both worlds.
The trip into the sewer turns out to be more complicated than they expected; though they find the shape-shifter, he simply injures Dean and makes a quick getaway - leaving Sam and Dean to chase after him. In a moment of spectacular stupidity, they decide to split up in order to pursue a creature that can look like either one of them if it wants to, and head off in different directions with the intention of meeting in the middle. Some days, I don’t think they die anywhere near often enough. There’s a nice moment in all of this, as we watch each of them hunting down the shape-shifter in his own way: even now, Sam hasn’t quite given up on respectability - he keeps his gun hidden beneath his jacket and keeps up a reasonably sedate pace; Dean, who doesn’t much care what people he’ll never see again think of him, simply hurries down the street with his weapon in full view, scaring as many bystanders as he possibly can in the process. And somewhere in all that (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the attention he was drawing to himself), the shape-shifter captures Dean and takes his place.
Dean insists that their job has perks. He’s referring to Fun with Weaponry, and try as I might I can’t quite see how crawling around in a sewer filled with bits of gooey shed skin with a gun constitutes a perk - but he’s right all the same. The biggest ‘perk’ they have is knowledge, and that’s what is going to save him. No ordinary person seeing his brother come towards him down a street would ask himself whether he might be a monster in disguise. This is exactly what the shape-shifter has been relying on all this time: that people assume that they are seeing what they think they’re seeing. Sam, who knows better, is after more. He doesn’t quite get it right here, in his first encounter - he has just enough doubt for the shape-shifter to successfully take him captive - but it sets up a pattern of resistance that is going to get them out of this mess. The only reason that Dean is getting out of this situation as himself at all is that Sam knows him, and he’s prepared to fight for him.