Jo meta for No Exit
Jo gets a raw deal from us fans. Her introduction was clumsily written and you don't need spoilers to see she's being set up as some sort of a love interest for Dean: notice that the very end of this episode is the first time she's had an actual conversation with Sam. And that's weird because, actually, Jo and Sam have a lot in common.
What do we know of Jo prior to No Exit? Well, from the aired episodes, very little. She's the daughter of a hunter and has lived in the world of hunters and the supernatural all of her life. It's normal to her and she's comfortable in that world. She can handle guns and she can fight. (Yes, she made a rookie mistake holding the shotgun too close to Dean in their first encounter but when he disarmed her she followed through; she didn't freeze. So that wasn't the first time she's had to defend herself physically: she has some experience.) Jo is self-confident enough to hustle the guy in Simon Said, and she's smart enough to pick up on the demon connection when she overhears Sam's conversation with Ash. She pays attention to details. And that's about all we really know about her.
Our introduction to Jo in No Exit is her blazing row with Ellen. Their argument feels like an oft-repeated disagreement, with Ellen making concessions that aren't truly concessions and Jo determined to do as she pleases. It has the flavour, if not the substance of Sam's fight with John in Dead Man's Blood:
JOHN (to SAM): You left. Your brother and me, we needed you. You walked away, Sam, you walked away!
ELLEN (to JO): Hey, you don't wanna stay, don't stay. Go back to school.
Both are parents trying to fit their grown-up children into the life they want them to live, instead of what the child wants. And both of them respond in substantially the same way:
SAM (to JOHN): You were just pissed off you couldn’t control me anymore!
JO (to ELLEN): What are you going to do, are you going to chain me up in the basement?
Of course this isn't any great character insight: parents have been having that row with their kids for as long as there have been families. Family is a huge theme in Supernatural, though, and these echoes don't seem like a coincidence. Sam wanted out of the Hunters' lifestyle; Jo wants in, but the conflict is essentially the same one and it seems likely to have the same ultimate result because Ellen is, frankly, wrong. Jo, at 21, is old enough that if Ellen won't allow her to make her own mistakes and learn from them, she's going to do exactly what Sam did: leave and not come home. It's easy to see why Ellen is so protective, but boy is she going about it the wrong way!
Dean thinks of Jo as an amateur with some romantic notions about the lifestyle, and he's not entirely wrong. But Jo isn't totally unprepared. She has the training - just how much we don't know, but she's competent. She has the method: she's done the research herself, identified a likely supernatural threat and made up her own mind how to investigate it. In fact, she did a damn good job putting that file together: six disappearances over eighty years is hardly likely to ping most people's radar.
DEAN: Can you imagine putting together a pattern like this? All the different obits Dad had to go through? The man’s a master.
- that's Dean talking about John (in Scarecrow). But this spotting and interpreting a pattern in events most people would never connect seems to be Ash's special genius; I suspect it runs in the family. It seems likely this was Bill Harvelle's method; maybe John picked it up from him (?) Stepping into the realm of pure speculation for a moment, I wonder if the file Ellen gave to Sam in Everyone Loves A Clown was also Jo's work. Ellen didn't credit anyone in that episode; she just says she was going to give the information to a friend. I think that the argument that opens No Exit has been going on for a long time; Jo has backed down in the past, allowing Ellen to pass on information she's collected to more experienced hunters. But this time, Jo refuses to take "stay home" for an answer because she trusts the Winchesters to have her back. If Hunting were the kind of job you can apply for in the real world, Jo would be about at the level of a qualified apprentice. Not ready to strike out on her own, but certainly ready to study under a master. That's what she's doing in this episode.
In a lot of ways, she does know what she's doing. Her MO is almost exactly the same as Sam and Dean's: check out the apartment building. She gets a tour on the pretext of wanting to rent; they prefer the more direct approach of breaking in. When they meet, she improvises quickly. I think she is drawn to Dean and pretended to be his girl because it gave her an excuse to grab his ass, but her mind is on the job while she does it. She manages to have a conversation about the case, in front of the building owner, without letting the "civilian" know what they're really talking about. And she had the sense to cover her tracks before she took off…I think it's worth noting that she was able to leave the Roadhouse for a spur-of-the-moment trip to Las Vegas and expect Ellen to have no problem with that. It implies that Ellen does trust Jo to take care of herself, by herself: Ellen's okay with Jo being independent, but not with her hunting.
That said, Jo is very inexperienced at the practicalities of hunting, and it does show; Dean's "amateur" remark is fully justified. It is probably a narrative device that Jo wasn't aware the apartment building is on the site of an old prison execution field, but it's a pretty big detail for her to have missed when she put her pattern together in the first place. It makes her look sloppy at best. Her constant playing with her dad's knife seems to be a nervous habit; she seems barely aware that she's doing it at first and she snaps at Dean, telling him to sit down, betraying her own nerves. Most of all, her response to Dean when they begin searching for the spirit does a good job of making his point for him: her Plan A is to make herself the bait, for goodness sake! To Dean's "I'm a little twisted" Jo responds, "You don't think I'm a little twisted too?" - totally missing the point. She's not your average gal, but Jo really isn't "twisted", not the way Dean means it.
Jo is a bit too in-your-face about the whole equality thing. I have some empathy with her assumption that Dean is being chauvinistic. If, as she said in Everyone Loves A Clown, most of the hunters she's encountered see her as nothing but an easy lay, I'll bet that's the attitude she's accustomed to: you're a pretty little girl, stay home with your Barbie and leave the men's work to the men. So, yeah, I get it. It's fundamental to Jo's character that she wants Dean, and Sam, to see her as an equal - both in terms of being a hunter and in terms of gender equality. She offers to flip for the use of the sofa; a lot of women would simply assume the man will let her have the bed (though I've got to wonder at this point where the hell Sam slept!) This hunt, for Jo, is all about proving herself.
I think she does a good job of it, too, with one exception. Jo takes Dean's words to heart, staying awake most of the night going over the case. When they learn another woman has gone missing, and figure out that she may be still alive, Jo's focus changes. Until this moment, for Jo the hunt has been all about Jo: her hunt, her need to prove herself (and have some fun doing it). But from this point on, she's all about saving Teresa. The instant change of focus reminds me a lot of Sam: he has the same sudden shift in attitude in episodes like Phantom Traveler and Bloody Mary.
Inside the walls with Dean, Jo shows the same determination. Going on alone was reckless, but Sam or Dean would have done the same thing, given the same circumstances. Where Jo does fail is when Holmes' ghost actually comes for her. I know a lot of people have asked why she didn't run: that doesn't bother me because having re-watched that scene a few times I can't see anywhere she could run to. She's pretty much cornered, physically, when the ectoplasm starts oozing out of the wall. But she's got Dean on the phone when it happens. She could have given him some useful information (like what's happening and where the hell she is) but instead, Jo panics. That failure is a measure of her inexperience. When Sam and Dean are in a similar situation (eg. in Provenance when Sam and Sarah are trapped in the house) they talk to each other, exchange information, ideas, keep each other in the picture. Dean expects the same of Jo, and she fails.
Jo wakes up in a seriously scary place, and yeah, she panics and has a little cry. Can you blame her? She's being hunted by the ghost of a sadistic serial killer and she wakes up in a box with bloody scratches all around her. 'Most everyone would fall apart at that point. But Jo doesn't fall apart. She's scared, sure, but once she becomes aware of Teresa's presence again there's this immediate shift in focus. Having someone to help calms her down and she stops thinking about herself. She even manages a little humour.
Jo doesn't just lie there waiting for rescue, though she must know that Dean and Sam will keep looking for her. Her options are seriously limited but she does try to break out of the box, and when Holmes attacks her she has the presence of mind to defend herself, using her dad's iron knife to repel the ghost. And after all that, she's brave enough to play bait in the trap they set for Holmes.
It's her conversation with Sam at the end of the hunt that really sums up where Jo is on her own journey:
SAM: So? This job as glamorous as you thought it would be?
JO: Well, except for all the pee-your-pants terror, yeah. Sure. But that Teresa girl's gonna live a life because of us. It's worth it, isn't it?
SAM: Yeah. Yeah it is.
JO: Hey, what if somebody finds that sewer down there, or a storm washes the salt away?
In terms of whether doing the job is worth the risks they take, Jo and Sam are on the same page here. Not only that, but she's conscious of the fact that they haven't "killed" the ghost; she's still thinking like a hunter. Sam and Dean are ahead of her, but then, they should be!
Finally, there's the revelation at the end that John Winchester was in some way responsible for Jo's father's death (or, at least, that Ellen believes he was: we don't know the truth of it). Jo evidently needs some time alone to absorb what Ellen has told her and when Dean approaches her, she's just not ready to share. She lashes out and when she does tell him what's wrong, she puts the worst possible face on it. Is she trying to hurt Dean? I think maybe she is, but that's a normal reaction so soon after getting a shock like that. Jo can't take her feelings out on John; so she strikes out at Dean in proxy. Had Dean not been there in that moment, I think she would have calmed down fairly quickly and wouldn't have mentioned it to Dean.
But what strikes me most about that final scene is the way Dean approaches Jo. It's very big-brother-like, and it makes me think that Jo has got what she wanted: she's earned that level of respect from Dean…and thanks to Ellen's revelation, she doesn't even notice.