Things I Love About SPN Season 1: Asylum #5
Supernatural, Season 1
Episode 10, “Asylum”
Written by Richard Hatem
Directed by Guy Bee
Continued from #4
Warning: image heavy post.
Now we come to the juicy filling in the pie: the big confrontation that the episode has been building to. The setup begins when the teenagers hear a noise, then we see a shadow on the wall that we recognize as Dean’s. Unfortunately, Kat doesn’t, and Dean is forced to dive for cover as she promptly takes a shot at him. We get a couple of good close ups of the wall where the rounds hit so we can see how much damage the salt gun can do. That may soon become relevant . . .
When the teenagers tell Dean about the phone call, he immediately recognizes it as a trap.
“Watch yourselves,” he tells them as he readies himself to go rescue Sam, “and watch out for me!”
He searches the basement and, as he turns a corner, we get a jump scare shot of Sam looking creepy, but he seems fine as they compare notes so it’s another case of defeated expectation . . . except he denies having seen Ellicott when Dean asks, so we know something’s up.
Dean reveals that the hospital riot was caused by the patients rebelling against Ellicott’s inhumane experiments. “Dr. Feelgood was working on some sort of, like, extreme rage therapy,” he explains. “He thought that if he could get his patients to vent their anger then they would be cured of it. Instead, it only made them worse and worse and angrier and angrier. So, I'm thinking, what if his spirit is doing the same thing? To the cop? To the kids in the seventies, making them so angry they become homicidal.”
Now, it strikes me that this is just a more exaggerated form of what the younger Ellicott was doing when he encouraged Sam to express his feelings about his brother. Indeed, it’s the standard approach in most psychotherapy, and I can’t help feeling some kind of comment is being made here about psychiatric practices in general.
“Come on, we gotta find his bones and torch ’em,” Dean continues, but Sam seems resistant.
SAM
How? The police never found his body.
DEAN
The logbook said he had some sort of hidden procedure room down here somewhere where he'd work on his patients. So, if I was a patient, I'd drag his ass down here, do a little work on him myself.
SAM
I don't know, it sounds kinda...
DEAN
Crazy? Yeah. Exactly.
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.10_Asylum_(transcript)
Again, I like that Dean shows his compassionate side in this conversation, but should we be concerned that he identifies so readily with the mindset of the criminally psychotic? o_O
Dean moves ahead and, as Sam turns and watches him, we once again get a shot that suggests all is not well with the younger Winchester. Jared’s seamless transition from baby-faced Sammy to something more disturbing is always impressive, and it’s helped here by the use of lighting that casts half his face in shadow, symbolizing the division between Sam’s psyche and Ellicott’s dark influence.
Creepy Sam is creepy.
Inside room 137, Dean discovers a door to the hidden procedure room, but Sam is reluctant to let him explore further. Raising the salt gun he demands Dean step away and the onset of a nosebleed, like the young cop’s from the teaser, confirms that he’s under the influence of Ellicott’s rage therapy. This is the first time we see Sam’s mind enthralled to a supernatural power. It won’t be the last.
DEAN
(rising to his feet, his eyes going from the gun to SAM's face) Sam, put the gun down.
SAM
Is that an order?
DEAN
Nah, it's more of a friendly request.
SAM
(raising his gun to point at DEAN's chest) ’Cause I'm getting pretty tired of taking your orders.
DEAN
I knew it. Ellicott did something to you.
SAM
For once in your life, just shut your mouth.
DEAN
What are you gunna do, Sam? Gun's filled with rock salt. It's not gunna kill me.
SAM shoots DEAN in the chest. The shot blasts him backwards through the hidden door to fall on the floor.
SAM
No. But it will hurt like hell.
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.10_Asylum_(transcript)
And now we recall the damage the salt rounds did to the wall earlier, so we know Sam isn’t exaggerating.
Undeterred, despite the fact that he’s lying on the floor gasping for breath, Dean is determined to salt and burn Ellicott’s bones, “and all this will be over,” he assures Sam, “and you'll be back to normal.” But Sam insists that he is normal.
For Sam, Ellicott’s spell works in a similar fashion to the way the shape shifter did for Dean in “Skin”: it’s a truth-telling device that reveals the darker thoughts that Sam would never normally express out loud.
“Why are we even here?” he demands. “’Cause you're following Dad's orders like a good little soldier? Because you always do what he says without question?”
Although the soldier theme has been quietly building in the earlier episodes, I think this is the first time it is applied to Dean directly.
“Are you that desperate for his approval?”
At the symbolic level, since Sam and Dean represent two halves of one person, this confrontation can be seen as an argument between the two sides of Sam; he is raging against that part of himself that still needs his father’s approval.
“That's the difference between you and me. I have a mind of my own. I'm not pathetic like you.”
As the half of the partnership that represents the mental faculties, it makes sense for Sam to lay claim to having a mind of his own that Dean lacks. His low opinion of Dean reflects the low status our culture has traditionally afforded the body and its physical demands, our animal nature, so to speak. From classical times literature has elevated mind/spirit over body/emotion. The body, with its coarse demands and desires, is depicted as inherently corrupt, born from dirt, even demonic; it is the source of sin and needs to be castigated in order to elevate the soul. Sam’s character expresses a cultural bias that longs to free the mind from the base demands of the body, but the moral of the show is that both these aspects are equally important and necessary to keep us human. The central purpose of seasons 4 and 5 is to dramatize the effects that might ensue if these two aspects of the person were actually able to act independently of one another.
In the earlier episodes the show has already been subtly challenging the notion of Sam’s intellectual superiority by showing that Dean possesses a mechanical genius and instinctual skills that, while less cerebral than Sam’s, are no less effective. And now he draws on his animal cunning, if you like, to find a way to overcome Sam. Taking out his own gun, he offers it to his younger brother:
DEAN
Come on. Take it. Real bullets are gonna work a hell of a lot better than rock salt. (SAM hesitates) Take it!!
SAM points the gun at DEAN's face.
DEAN
You hate me that much? You think you could kill your own brother?
Then go ahead. Pull the trigger. Do it!
SAM pulls the trigger. The chamber is empty. He tries again, and once more.
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.10_Asylum_(transcript)
Dean capitalizes on Sam’s distracted frustration, knocking him down with a split-second move like the one in Bloody Mary, and as Sam stares up at him stunned and bewildered, he explains “man, I'm not going to give you a loaded pistol!” and, having effectively demonstrated his own kind of street smarts, he delivers a second heavier punch that almost unbalances him and knocks Sam out. Again, it makes symbolic sense that the body’s automatic defences have the ability to render the mind unconscious in a situation that requires action rather than thought to get the job done.
But to return to the brothers as characters rather than symbols, the original script’s description of this moment is interesting. While it calls for an equivocal moment regarding Sam’s inner thought processes as he raises the gun, it suggests that the ambiguity should be resolved when Sam pulls the trigger. No inner struggle, it says definitively.
From Hatem’s original scipt:
https://www.slideshare.net/JulesWilkinson/109-asylum
But, for me, Jared’s performance definitely suggests he is conflicted. I think there’s even a suggestion of a tear in his eye. Whether that was an acting or a directorial decision, I don’t know, or maybe that’s how Hatem intended it to play out, I’m not sure. It depends how you read his script. On the other hand, maybe I’m just seeing conflict in the performance because I’d really like to believe there was still some part of Sam that was fighting the supernaturally induced rage.
Dean’s conflict at beating his brother senseless, however, is completely unambiguous. He has no hesitation in doing it, but he’s regretful of its necessity.
And I love that we get a very clear shot of the amulet hanging down as he pats his brother’s unconscious body affectionately and says “sorry, Sammy”.
It isn’t the last time in the show’s run that we see Dean knock Sam out. Alas, it is the last time that his motivation and subsequent regret remain so pure and obvious.
Nevertheless, relieved of the threat of Sam’s enthrallment, Dean is able to hunt for Ellicott’s corpse unhindered. He repeats the same search process Sam went through earlier, and we see the spirit cross in the foreground, setting up the expectation that Dean will be attacked in the same way. There’s a nice performance from Jensen when he finds the body stuffed in a cupboard. He does a great job of communicating the sudden reek when he opens the door, and gagging while he’s pouring the accelerant, conveying that the stench from the body increases as it gets wet. Attention to these little details always enhances the show’s realism.
The anticipated attack comes just before he can light up the corpse. The spirit plunges its fingers into his brain just as it did Sam’s but, although the process is clearly painful, it doesn’t seem to affect Dean mentally. He’s still able to function sufficiently to reach for his lighter, ignite it, and throw it into the cupboard. Ellicott’s spirit duly burns up, calcifies, falls over and crumbles (which seems an odd thing for an immaterial spirit to do but, whatever; ding-dong, the monster’s gone.)
We’re left to speculate on why Dean was less affected than Sam. Of course, at a purely practical, plot-driven level, one of them had to be able to function long enough to get the job done, but there are also dramatic considerations. Does it, for example, prove Sam’s claim that Dean has no mind of his own to be violated? Certainly, in keeping with the show’s symbology, supernatural forces tend to target Sam mentally and morally while Dean appears to suffer more physical and emotional attacks. Perhaps, on the other hand, it proves Dean’s claim that the spirits are attracted to Sam’s “ESP thing”.
Of course, in an episode with such a strong psychiatric theme, there's also a psychological explanation to consider: like Ellicott’s patients, Sam was harbouring unexpressed anger which, from the spirit’s point of view, made him an ideal candidate, whereas we know Dean already confronted his own anger issues back in “Skin”. Plus, we know Dean has his own methods of getting these things out of his system; he told us in “Wendigo” that killing as many evil things as he possibly could made him feel better. It may not be the healthiest coping mechanism, but it at least demonstrates that he’s in touch with his dark side, which was emphasized by the way he so readily identified and empathized with the inmates’ revenge on Ellicott. Sam, on the other hand, tries to deny his own darker impulses, which again might make him more susceptible to psychological attack.
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