Supernatural: Bugs pt 1
Images borrowed from here because my efforts to screencap anything would be laughable.
Travis: This place is perfect … Except for the mosquitoes. Dustin?
Dustin: Help me! I'm trapped! I broke my ankle!
Now that the episode-reordering weirdness is out of the way, Supernatural approaches the midpoint of its first season with two sets of paired episodes, the first of which - Bugs and Home - deal with domestic horror, underscoring just how little ‘normality’ there is for anybody in this world. Bugs opens in Oasis Plains, a place that is becoming normal. If it is ever finished, this will be an ordinary suburban neighbourhood - a little on the pricey side, according to the workers onsite who are currently doing something or other to do with electricity or gas, but nevertheless a place where perfectly normal families will live and do perfectly normal things … whatever those may be. But it isn’t that yet, and its transitional state emphasises its oddness: the skeletal frames of half-built houses sit right next to structures that look finished; the streetlamps are up but the lawns aren’t down; somewhere in the neighbourhood you will find occupied houses - but most of them are empty. This is a ghost town in reverse, waiting for people to move in and make it ordinary. By the end of the episode it will be a proper ghost town - the people driven away, never to return - because of the neighbourhood’s bug problem.
One of the workers, Dustin, falls down a mysteriously appearing hole and breaks his ankle - which is bad. But when his friend, who has run off to fetch a rope to haul him out, returns a few minutes later he finds that Dustin is dead, having had his brains consumed by a mass of carnivorous beetles - which is obviously much, much worse. The threat in the story is almost absurdly domestic: buy a house and you probably also buy a bug problem. You’ve got to keep the flies and mosquitoes from getting in during the summer, wage a never-ending battle against cockroaches and be prepared to drive termites out of the woodwork before they ruin your home. There’s nothing abnormal about a few insects in a home, but if you take a small problem and blow it up to epic proportions it can destroy everything.
Sam: You know - we could get day jobs once in a while.
Dean: Hunting is our day job, and the pay is crap.
Sam: Yeah, but - hustling pool? Credit card scams? It's not the most honest thing in the world, Dean.
Dean: Well, let's see … honest …fun and easy. It's no contest. Besides, we're good at it - it's what we were raised to do.
Sam: Yeah, well, how we were raised was jacked.
Dean: Yeah, says you.
By contrast, we find Sam and Dean at their most obviously nomadic, and yet in the middle of their daily routine. They find the midway point between ‘normal’ and ‘strange’ in a completely different place to the pretty-but-cursed homes in Oasis Plains - and to illustrate the fact we first view the scene upside down, reflected in a large puddle in the road. Sam is using the bonnet of their car as a kind of chaise longue to do some research into their next case; Dean is in a bar, hustling pool to provide the funds that will allow them to eat while solving it. The criminal aspect of their lifestyle is still bothering Sam - but from the brevity and relative good humour of their argument, his protests seem to be more of a matter of form than anything else. By this point in the story the erosion of his ordinary, university-student persona is almost complete, and in the next episode he’s going to have to bite the bullet and tell Dean the whole truth. He’s not quite ready to talk yet, so he still puts in a protest about the things they have to do to survive … but it’s not worth getting worked up about. Dean’s answer to Sam’s complaint is that what he is doing is perfectly normal for them: it’s what they know, it’s what they’ve always done, it’s what they have the skills for. While that certainly fails to answer Sam’s point about honesty, as far as it goes Dean has a point: normal is relative pretty much by definition.
One point having gone more or less to Dean, Sam immediately turns the tables on him by expressing incredulity at his TV-viewing choices. The unfortunate construction worker who got eaten by beetles has been misdiagnosed with mad-cow disease in a desperate attempt to explain the rapid deterioration of his brain. Dean will recognise the name of the disease from an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show - which Sam can scarcely believe. Like everything else in this episode, this straddles a halfway point between the normal and the strange: in many ways, Oprah sounds just too mundane to have anything in it that would interest Dean Winchester at all. It’s a talk show, and thus deals in topics that would engage the interest of the much-sought-after ‘average person’. While the segments may be sensational (frankly, my recollection is fuzzy), they’re the ‘ordinary’ kind of sensational: sex scandals, health scares, celebrity gossip. As far as I know, no one on Oprah ever claimed to spend their days killing zombies - it has very little bearing on Dean’s daily life, which is probably why he likes it. On the other hand, the programme is marketed largely at women, so in order to meet one particular definition of ‘normal’, Dean isn’t allowed to watch it - and he’s clearly embarrassed to have been caught out at enjoying something less than conventionally masculine. Watching Oprah is normal to Dean in the same way that hustling pool is normal to Sam: it’s familiar to them, but they’re both uncomfortably aware that they’re breaking a few social conventions when they do it.
Dean: Growing up in a place like this would freak me out.
Sam: Why?
Dean: Well - the manicured lawns, the ‘How was your day, honey?’ … I'd blow my brains out.
Sam: There's nothing wrong with normal.
Dean: I'd take our family over normal any day.
…
Larry: Sam, Dean, good to meet you. So - you two are interested in Oasis Plains?
Dean: Yes, sir.
Larry: Let me just say: we accept homeowners of any race, religion, colour or ... sexual orientation.
Dean: … We're brothers.
Sam and Dean’s first stop in Oasis Plains is the company where Dustin worked, where they interview the witness to his death, and from there on to the construction site in order to poke around in the hole where he died … apparently while construction continues around them, which says a lot about the safety standards of the site. Their investigation is inconclusive: Sam finds a few of the beetles that did the deed down the hole, but nothing like the swarm that devoured Dustin; most of the evidence has burrowed its way back to the earth. With nothing concrete to go on, they head over to the finished, populated part of the neighbourhood to interview the people who live here, get some of the free food they’re offering as part of a promotional barbecue, and argue a bit more about what constitutes ‘normal’ and whether it’s desirable to have it.
Dean expresses some discomfort at the surface-level order of the place - it doesn’t look like the sort of place where anything ever happens. There is a constant tension, both in him and in Sam, between a desire for comfort and security and the knowledge that it doesn’t really exist. Right now, Dean is pretending that he doesn’t want what he can’t have, but the way in which he expands on the idea reveals the truth: with no home or security to support him, Dean takes comfort in the only thing constant in his life - his family. His family as he knows it would not exist without the supernatural (in an extreme sense, since he and Sam were selectively bred by angels to end the world - remove the angels and you remove them), and so embracing the normality of suburban life would take away the only kind of consistency he’s ever known. But on the other hand, Oasis Plains only looks serene. Sam and Dean are there to look into something weird. Whenever they go somewhere it’s to look into something weird - and they usually find it. The supernatural is an ordinary part of everyone’s lives, but only a very small percentage of people understand it.
At the barbecue they are greeted by Larry Pike, the neighbourhood’s developer - who immediately mistakes them for a gay couple. In the recent past, such a couple would have had to lie about their relationship - or at least keep very quiet about it if they didn’t want to face obvious and frightening discrimination. Of course, there are still plenty of places where gay people are persecuted, but fortunately the number of places where they are not seems to be on the increase. This is an awkward transitional phase: there have always been gay people, but only recently in modern American culture (other times and places being a different matter) has it begun to be thought of as a normal thing to be. Everyone is hyper-aware of the horrors of the past, and of the wrongs still being done, and nobody wants to be taken for a bigot … so people tend to overcompensate. Larry’s little speech is obviously a company line, because Lynda, the head of the sales department, will repeat it verbatim a few minutes later - and as an effort to make people feel normal it backfires somewhat. Really accepting people as normal would mean not needing to highlight your acceptance: it would just be taken as a given that you’d have to be a truly terrible person to have a problem with someone because of their sexual orientation. But the world doesn’t seem to be there just yet.
Of course Sam and Dean are not a couple, and being siblings naturally look moderately perturbed by the idea that somebody thinks they’re having sex, but it does illustrate the way the definition of a ‘normal’ family can change. Gay people were just as normal 50 years ago as they are now, but they weren’t called that - and in time being gay may come to be regarded as so normal that no one needs to remark on it anymore. Sam and Dean’s family is ‘abnormal’ in a different way: their lives are governed by knowledge of the supernatural. It’s a real thing and it’s not going to go away, and they’re regarded as strange because they acknowledge it. If the world sat up and said ‘ghosts and monsters exist, so we’re going to need a different branch in emergency services to deal with them’, then dealing with the supernatural would still be dangerous, but it would not need to shape a person’s whole life. Sam’s right: there’s nothing wrong with being ‘normal’ or wanting a home or a family, and at different points in time he and Dean both walk away from hunting to try to embrace that. But what you know is part of who you are, and you can’t just voluntarily cease to know things. Sam and Dean will always know things that other people do not, and no matter what they choose to do they can’t really think of themselves as normal because the world won’t think of them as normal. They’re not the ones who’d need to change in order for them to become ‘normal people’.
Matt: Are you going to tell my dad?
Sam: I don't know. Who's your dad?
Matt: Yeah, Larry usually skips me in the family introductions.
Sam: Ouch. First name basis with the old man - that sounds pretty grim.
Matt: Well, I'm not exactly brochure material.
Sam: Well, hang in there. It gets better, all right? I promise.
…
Sam: Remind you of somebody? … Dad?
Dean: Dad never treated us like that.
Sam: Dad never treated you like that; you were perfect. He was all over my case. … You don't remember?
Dean: Well, maybe he had to raise his voice … but sometimes you were out of line.
Sam: Right. Like when I said I'd rather play soccer than learn bowhunting.
Dean: Bowhunting is an important skill!
We are also introduced to Larry’s family - his wife Joanie and his son Matt. Joanie is something of a nonentity in this story: she makes a few friendly remarks in this scene and returns at the climax to be terrified by a swarm of insects, but otherwise she may as well not exist. Since the Pike family is acting as a parallel to the Winchester family, this is hardly surprising. To them, Mary may as well not exist. Sam and Dean are at an age when most people are aware of their parents as individuals with a variety of strengths and weaknesses - loved and respected, but not infallible. Dean remembers Mary, yes, but only as a four year old thinks of his mother; to Sam she never existed at all. When they talk about John, it is with affection mixed with irritation - even Dean, who idolises him, can grouch about the state of his writing. There’s none of that with Mary, who is an idea rather than a person. Friendly, stubborn, desperate Mary Campbell is still a stranger to them. She’ll begin to do something about that in the very next episode, but she hasn’t yet - so Joanie Pike has nothing to say.
Larry and Matt are a different matter entirely. It turns out that Larry is not only the developer behind the neighbourhood, but the owner of the property where the barbecue is being held. He clearly lives his job, having turned his home and his family into an advertisement for the lifestyle he’s created here - and apparently having roped Lynda into it too, since she’s moved in next door. So Sam is right: Larry is at least a little bit like John, who has given up his whole life, as well as the lives of his sons, to the business of hunting monsters. The dispute between Larry and Matt is complicated: on the one hand, Matt is being genuinely obnoxious here, attempting to use his pet spider to scare the guests; on the other, Larry is being a bit unreasonable. It’s not just that he’s brought his work home, he’s brought his home to work - and imposed it on his family. Joanie joins in giving the sales pitch for the neighbourhood, although she seems good-natured about it; Matt is excluded. Since there are a lot of empty houses here, this isn’t just a one-off routine. They’ve got to keep selling, and the pressure to look ‘normal and happy’ must be fairly high; it shows up in Lynda’s nervous laughter when Joanie jokes that she’s a noisy neighbour - she really doesn’t want anyone to mistake that for serious criticism. For Matt, having his life used as a showpiece is understandably frustrating. You’re not supposed to have to be on your absolute best behaviour in your own home all the time, because it’s your home. It’s no wonder Sam sympathises with him. While John (speaking through Dean) is quite right that understanding how to use weapons is essential to their lifestyle - if they want to stay alive, anyway - the lack of anything much in their lives that doesn’t revolve around hunting is bound to hard on his children. Though it doesn’t seem to be his intention - in Two and a Half Men Sam says that John always insisted their career as hunters was temporary, although that probably got a bit difficult to believe around the ten-year mark - John is allowing his obsession to devour his children’s identities. What they might want doesn’t matter when compared to what he feels he must do.
It’s also a theme of the story that it is easier to gain perspective on something from the outside than from the inside. A few ‘bugs’ in a family relationship are to be expected - but when you have to deal with the problem even one can seem like too many. To Larry and Matt, their conflict is immediate and real - and Matt at least implies that he fears that there is genuine dislike at its source. As an outside observer, Sam is able to view the situation with amused empathy - Matt is just a kid, and while he feels trapped now, he’s just a few short years away from adulthood, so Sam can repeatedly assure him that he’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel soon. But when talking about his own family to Dean, Sam presents himself as the victim of all John’s ire, which Dean managed to escape by being ‘perfect’, and Dean goes along with him, inferring that he’s never wanted anything that conflicted with John’s will. We already know that isn’t true. Skin showed us that Dean is unsure of John’s love for him - he feels that his efforts to do what John wanted weren’t good enough, because John has abandoned him despite them - and in various places he’s expressed annoyance that Sam got a chance to really live that he didn’t. In future episodes it will only become clearer that Dean, like Sam, sometimes just wanted to do the things kids do - and suffered for it. Even right now, Sam has enough information to start working this out, but he’s too close to it to see it. He’s missing important points about what Dean wants and what he really thinks - and a few interesting things about John, too.
Sam: What are we doing here?
Dean: It's too late to talk to anybody else.
Sam: We're going to squat in an empty house?
Dean: I want to try the steam shower! Come on!
The investigation at the party reveals that a year earlier a man died on the construction site from an allergic reaction to bee stings - adding weight to Sam’s idea that these are bug-themed deaths. Since there is nothing else to be done for the night, they take refuge in a nearby house (over Sam’s protests) - and inserted between scenes of Sam and Dean’s stay at the house is a sequence depicting Lynda’s demise. She too is killed by ‘bugs’, at least more or less, since from the amount of blood pooling around her it looks as though she sustained fatal injuries when she fell through the glass of her shower screen in the act of fleeing from the spiders, rather than being poisoned by the spiders themselves (personally, I’d have run away screaming when the first one appeared in the bedroom - fear of spiders saves lives!). What makes the scenes different is whether or not it counts as ‘normal’ for the participants. Dean is playing: you can tell by how seriously he takes his shower, towel around the head and all. Presumably they have squatted before at some point, but most of the other empty houses we see them spend the night in are old and abandoned. This is an opportunity to spend a night in a new, clean, functional property - no risking electrocution just to get the lights to turn on! Dean wants to try the steam shower the realtors have been raving about and, unlike most other showers in his life, this one is (mostly) his: a thousand people haven’t used it before him, and the water isn’t being simultaneously pumped to a dozen other motel rooms where the shower is in use. At this particular point in time, Dean isn’t allowing himself to express any desire to have a home of his own - so pretending for one night is something of an adventure. Paradoxically, living like a ‘normal person’ for a while is a bit weird for him, and that’s what makes it fun; it’s like watching Oprah. Lynda, on the other hand, is home - and we see her acting as though she is. She takes her hair out of the tight, uncomfortable-looking bun she’s had it in all day, sits on her bed to watch TV for a while and then wanders off to have a shower of her own. This is an ordinary night for her, and the strange invades it horrifyingly and lethally.
The people here are being driven from their homes - by death if nothing else - as the Winchester family was once driven from theirs. Sam and Dean are coming back into the normal world, as visitors, just as everybody else is on their way out, running for their lives. Oasis Plains is balancing on a knife’s edge, currently a home to regular families, heroes and an assortment of monster bugs. Halfway built, halfway destroyed, halfway to normal and halfway to strange. Much like the rest of the world they live in.
Sam: Hey, Matt. Remember me?
Matt: What are you doing out here?
Dean: We want to talk to you.
Matt: You're not here to buy a house, are you? Wait - you're not serial killers?
Sam: No, no. I think you're safe.
Dean: So, Matt. You sure know a lot about insects.
Matt: So?
Dean: Did you hear what happened to Lynda, the realtor?
Matt: I heard she died this morning.
Dean: That's right. Spider bites.
…
Sam: So, if you knew about all this bug stuff, why not tell your dad? Maybe he could clear everybody out …
Matt: Believe me, I've tried. But Larry doesn't listen to me.
Sam: Why not?
Matt: Mostly, he's too disappointed in his freak son.
Sam: I hear you.
Dean: You do?
Sam: Matt - how old are you?
Matt: Sixteen.
Sam: Well, don't sweat it, because in two years, something great is going to happen.
Matt: What?
Sam: College. You'll be able to get out of that house and away from your dad.
Dean: What kind of advice is that? The kid should stick with his family.
Three deaths make a pattern, so Sam and Dean decide to put Matt Pike under surveillance and follow him into a little patch of forest. They meet in the middle of a misunderstanding: they’re all aware that something is wrong, but they come at it from different directions because of their differing perspectives. Matt, whose mind is all caught up in the natural world, worries that he might be being stalked by serial killers; Sam and Dean, who think of everything in terms of the supernatural, accuse him of controlling the spiders that killed Lynda. They’re all wrong, of course (although I find it amusing that Sam is surprised that Matt knows about the earlier deaths - if he were behind them, he would know), but gaining some insights into Matt’s thoughts and his expertise on various kinds of insects and arachnids brings them several steps closer to the truth. Matt’s behaviour is not exactly all that odd: he’s a teenager in conflict with his parents - whoever would have thought it? Despite all the differences in their lives, Sam can sympathise entirely: he’s been there, he’s had those fights. But Matt can tell them that the insects, who aren’t generally big on emotional motivation, are behaving very oddly indeed. It is nature itself that is acting unnaturally; the problem is bigger than a bit of teenage angst.
I think the conversation that Sam, Dean and Matt have about Matt’s future is phrased a little oddly - it makes it sound as though Dean is arguing against Matt getting a university degree, and given the point of the whole debate I don’t think that’s what they wanted him to say. They dealt with university students in both Skin and Hook Man, and in neither case did Dean wander around insisting that everybody should live with their parents full time; most of the people they meet have left their childhood homes - it’s something people tend to do. What he is attempting to argue against is Sam’s idea that the best way to deal with a family dispute is to run away. Of course, Sam’s points are not unreasonable either: in two years Matt will be a little older, and thus perhaps better able to understand his father, and having a space to call his own might ease the tension in the relationship; as he says later, most parents are openly proud when their kids get into university, and going off to get a degree is not generally a march into exile. But Sam is also over identifying with Matt, mapping his experiences onto Matt’s life - and he doesn’t even know the entire truth about those. Larry and Matt are at odds, but this doesn’t look like the sort of situation where Matt should flee as quickly as possible for his own good. There’s no reason why father and son can’t attempt to work out their differences and understand each other now. Their whole relationship needn’t be based on the idea that Matt is going to go away as soon as he possibly can.
In the midst of all this they come across a very active pile of earthworms and Dean, apparently unconcerned that they might be killer earthworms, sticks his hand into it to extract a skull. Aside from my desire to have him say ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio!’ at this point (he must have at least seen the Mel Gibson version, surely), this provides them with the means to make sense of what is happening here. A dead human being is usually an annoyed human being, and therefore the potential source of any supernatural manifestation. Although I’m not at all sure that what they choose to do with this storyline makes as much sense as it could.