Supernatural: Bugs pt 2
Images borrowed from here because my efforts to screencap anything would be laughable.
Dean: So what are you saying? That Dad was disappointed in you?
Sam: Was? Is. Always has been.
Dean: Why would you think that?
Sam: Because I didn't want to bowhunt or hustle pool, because I wanted to go to school and live my life, which, in our whacked-out family, made me the freak.
Dean: Yeah, you were kind of like that blonde chick in The Munsters.
Sam: Dean, you know what most dads are when their kids score a full ride? Proud. Most dads don't toss their kids out of the house.
Dean: I remember that fight. In fact, I seem to recall a few choice phrases coming out of your mouth.
Sam: You know, the truth is, when we finally do find Dad, I don't know if he's even going to want to see me.
Dean: Sam, Dad was never disappointed in you. Never … He was scared.
Sam: What are you talking about?
Dean: He was afraid of what could have happened to you if he wasn't around. But even when you two weren't talking he used to swing by Stanford whenever he could. Keep an eye on you. Make sure you were safe.
Sam: What?
Dean: Yeah.
Sam: Why didn't he tell me any of that?
Dean: It's a two-way street, dude. You could have picked up the phone.
En route to getting a professor to examine their finds, Sam and Dean pause to have out the argument they couldn’t have properly with Matt present - and both demonstrate that it is much easier to understand some things about a relationship from the outside than the inside. While Sam is caught up in his conflict with John, Dean perceives that John is frightened. He’s been frightened for 22 years now, since the day he found out monsters were real. From what we know of John, he is a loner and a bit of an autocrat, and definitely somebody who likes to be in control. Sam has inherited some of this - he’s less of a loner, obviously, since unlike John he forms a long-term working partnership, and so far hasn’t managed to alienate all their friends (although, okay, most of them are dead), but he definitely likes to be on top of things and understand them. Even aside from the horror of what happened to Mary and the potential danger to his children, the discovery of the supernatural must have been terrifying to John, because he would have immediately realised that he didn’t know the rules. It’s impossible to be in control of things if you don’t know how they work, and the world doesn’t work anything like the way John thought it did. We can see that he plunged right in, struggling to find out all the rules as quickly as possible so he could be in control of his life again. And he’s desperate to ensure that his sons know all the rules as well - because being in control is what keeps you safe. To Sam, who was raised with knowledge of the supernatural, this makes no sense. All around him, he can see people living their lives without being bothered by the supernatural very much at all, whereas John deliberately seeks it out. It looks like those people are safe, and John is trying to get them all killed. Sam just wants to do safe things, and he can’t understand why that makes John angry. Most people, at one time or another, have faced parents furious with terror because their parents had some reason to believe they were in danger. It’s a baffling experience for a kid, generally, because you know you were safe the whole time. What Sam can’t see is that, in John’s head, the desire to do ‘safe’ things and avoid looking the supernatural in the face is the most dangerous thing of all.
On the other hand, Dean’s defence of John only holds up so far. He may have been afraid of what would happen to Sam while he was away at university, but the fact remains that they have had to make do without him for days or weeks at a time, from an age when they were both too young to put up a decent fight against a monster. And more importantly (at least for the current conversation, since most of their backstory hasn’t come out yet) he isn’t here now. Something is badly wrong. They have been personally targeted again, and one person is already dead because of it. Demons are acting strangely. John knows something is up; it’s why he buggered off in the first place. So if he’s so frightened of what will become of them without him - where the hell is he?
What Dean doesn’t see is that, yes, John is scared … and he’s protecting himself as much as he’s protecting them, by insisting on always being in control. We’ll meet some John’s friends, to whom he hasn’t spoken for a long time, because of a sudden urge to strangle each other - but he wasn’t always like that. He was always a bit on the stubborn side, sure, but he used to have a business partner and there’s been no word on him being kicked out of the marines for being unable to play well with others. Then he got scared, and had to be in charge of everything - including the lives of his children. John is as much scared of Sam as he is for him, because he can’t control Sam at all. Sam has a will of his own and the ability to take action to get what he wants. So far, Dean has been pretty biddable - so John is less afraid of him. With so much uncertainty in his life, John seems to be very much averse to fights he can’t win. Relationships that involve a bit of give and take don’t seem to work very well for him anymore; in Lucifer Rising, Bobby will curse him as a coward for not being able to bring himself to make amends with Sam. There’s nothing in John’s life like Sam and Dean have - a partnership that requires him to rethink his views and regularly make concessions (although he will get a small taste of it when the family reunites) - so he seems to have lost the knack. Dean frets that John has abandoned him even though he tried to do everything he asked - as though his efforts weren’t good enough. But that’s not how John thinks. He’s found a link to the big, scary thing that tore his life apart, and he can only conceive of dealing with it by himself. There’s nothing Dean could ever have done to be ‘good enough’ because it’s not about him: it’s about the fear in John’s head. Neither Sam nor Dean can see past their own distress to work out what’s going on in their relationships with their father - but John can’t do it either, because, while he sometimes does a very good impression of it, I don’t think he’s actively trying to break his kids’ brains. He’s just in over his head and can’t see what’s happening. They’re looking for John to get his help - but John’s got far too many problems of his own to be their saviour.
Professor: This is quite an interesting find you've made. I'd say they're 170 years old, give or take. The timeframe and the geography heavily suggest Native American.
Sam: Were there any tribes or reservations on that land?
Professor: Not according to the historical record. But the … relocation of native peoples was quite common at that time.
Sam: Right. Well, are there any local legends? Oral histories about the area?
Professor: Well … you know, there's a Euchee tribe in Sapulpa. It's about 60 miles from here. Someone out there might know the truth.
…
Sam: What can you tell us about the history there?
Joe: Why do you want to know?
Sam: Something bad is happening in Oasis Plains. We think it might have something to do with some old bones we found down there - Native American bones.
Joe: I'll tell you what my grandfather told me, what his grandfather told him. Two hundred years ago, a band of my ancestors lived in that valley. One day, the American cavalry came to relocate them. They were resistant, the cavalry impatient. As my grandfather put it, ‘on the night the moon and the sun share the sky as equals’, the cavalry first raided our village. They murdered, raped. The next day, the cavalry came again, and the next, and the next. And on the sixth night, the cavalry came one last time. And by the time the sun rose, every man, woman, and child still in the village was dead. They say on the sixth night, as the chief of the village lay dying, he whispered to the heavens that no white man would ever tarnish this land again. Nature would rise up and protect the valley. And it would bring as many days of misery and death to the white man as the cavalry had brought upon his people.
Dean: Insects. Sounds like nature to me. Six days.
Now we enter the portion of the story where the experts deliver exposition … and this is where I get confused. For a start, I don’t think the anthropology professor they visit first should be exactly thrilled that a couple of ‘his students’ have brought him a bunch of bones in a box. Even if it’s already been established that the bones aren’t from a relatively recent murder case, archaeologists don’t exactly encourage people to just dive in with both hands and rip up anything that looks interesting. I could imagine there not being too much yelling, because they’re only claiming to be first-year students, and this is hardly the first time people have disturbed a site in the interest of showing off what they’ve found. But still, I don’t think ‘interesting find!’ exactly covers it, and I’m not sure how he’s able to tell much about them from a quick glance when they’ve been removed from their original context. I’m also a bit bemused, given what he thinks the bones mean, that he’s not more excited. There’s no record of a Native American settlement in this area? Congratulations, you just found one. Okay, it might not make you the next Howard Carter - but it’s still a decent discovery, and there have to be some potential papers in it. What sort of anthropology department is this, anyway?
Since the professor has run out of information, Sam and Dean go to Sapulpa to find out more. And … I think it is probably a bad idea to introduce Native American people to relate relevant ‘oral history’ even though they are not otherwise allowed to be in this story, despite the fact that the source of the problem is a crime committed against them. The man they ask about it expresses only the most passing interest in the vindication of his old family story. Wouldn’t this be a startling revelation - you mean Grandpa was right? I think I see what they’re going for, because history is often whitewashed when it comes to atrocities - both deliberately, and because it’s easy for people to forget about massacres that didn’t affect them. That parallels the situation with hunters nicely: everybody but them is ignoring the supernatural threat because it isn’t bothering them at the moment. But in that case why not just … make the anthropologist a Native American? That would give him instant authority in his subject matter, some potential personal interest in the topic, and since having one character give the exposition would be more efficient, it might be possible to give him a larger role in the plot.
As it is, this part of the episode just strikes me as bad storytelling because it undermines a lot of what they’ve been setting up in the previous episodes. In this world, the supernatural is real, and because it is real it leaves evidence behind. If you have a problem with a ghost scratching people’s eyes out when they chant ‘Bloody Mary’ in front of a mirror, you can track down an actual Mary who was murdered in front of a mirror and match her handwriting to the scrawl she leaves on the backs of her victims’ mirrors. The records are all there, if anybody can be bothered to look. But here … not so much. Who is Joe White Tree and how does he know what he knows? We see Sam and Dean ask a man for directions, but we don’t see what they say. What could they say? ‘Could you point us to the guy who knows everything? Come on. You know you’ve got one.’ Joe claims that his story is a bit of family history, but he also says no one who was present that final night in the village survived. So when he says that ‘they say’ the dying chief cursed the land … who are ‘they’? This legend doesn’t seem to have a verifiable source. Not that I’m saying the chief needed to have an army of journalists on hand to record his dying words for posterity, but there should at least be a reference to survivors who passed the story on. Or, failing that, evidence that the place has been cursed. We’ve already established that this is desirable land: it was desirable enough back then for the white settlers to want to take it off the original inhabitants and it’s desirable enough now to make a pricey neighbourhood. So where are the records of earlier, failed settlements? Where are the old newspaper reports of people driven out due to plagues of insects? Was something I don’t know about cut for time, here? Because this just doesn’t make sense. Unlike the other stories in Supernatural, this one sounds more like an actual legend. If the people weren’t attacked by a swarm of bugs right on cue, I’d think Joe was just screwing with Sam and Dean because they interrupted his game of solitaire to ask stupid questions.
Complaints aside, yes, I do get the theme. Oasis Plains used to be a normal place. With obvious allowances made for differences in technology and culture, it was exactly the sort of place it is becoming now - families lived there, and did the things that families do; probably parents had arguments with their children. Then something came in from outside and destroyed all that, so it can never be again. The horror is real, but most of the world is pretending it never happened. But every now and then, that horror peeks out and reminds everyone. It mirrors the supernatural horrors of the world nicely, and it might have made a good parallel if they’d actually explored it, instead of waving it around for a minute and then going right back to the bugs.
Sam: Matt, just listen. You have to get your family out of that house right now, okay?
Matt: What, why?
Sam: Because something's coming.
Matt: More bugs?
Sam: Yeah, a lot more.
Matt: My dad doesn't listen in the best of circumstances. What am I supposed to tell him?
Sam: You've got to make him listen, okay?
Dean: Give me the phone! Give me the phone! Matt, under no circumstances are you to tell the truth; he'll just think you're nuts.
Matt: But he's my -
Dean: Tell him you have a sharp pain in your right side and you have to go to the hospital. Okay?
Matt: … Yeah. Yeah, okay.
Dean: … Make him listen. What were you thinking?
…
Larry: Get off my property before I call the cops.
Sam: Mr Pike, listen -
Matt: Dad, they're just trying to help -
Larry: Get in the house!
Matt: I'm sorry. I told him the truth.
Dean: We had a plan, Matt. What happened to the plan?
Since there’s apparently no way to break this curse, or at least no way to break it before it kills everyone, and an army of cockroaches is already erupting in the Pike family backyard, Sam and Dean attempt to arrange an evacuation. Incidentally, if I were calling on nature to rise up and avenge me and mine, I’d be thinking of …I don’t know, Ents. Or at least wolves. Bears, maybe. Something with a decent snarl on it and the ability to express that it is seriously pissed off on my behalf. Not cockroaches. I think that poor chief got a bit screwed in the curse department. In any case the evacuation doesn’t go exactly as planned, and here I think they’ve really fallen down in tying their story elements together.
They’re facing both a little problem and a big problem here. The little problem is that Larry and Matt are at odds, and Larry is naturally inclined to assume that his son is playing a practical joke when he tries to tell him something a bit out of the ordinary - particularly something that gets in the way of his grand business plan. Ordinarily, that’s not a huge problem, although it clearly feels like one to them. They’re fighting, but neither of them has yet said or done anything that couldn’t be forgiven - and they are both concerned for each other’s safety. But now it is paired with a big problem: the complete refusal of the world to accept the existence of the supernatural. This is an ongoing problem for everyone: it prevents people from protecting themselves, it impedes the work of hunters and it just makes life hard. In Ghostfacers Sam and Dean observe wryly that trying to tell the world the truth is a good way to land yourself in a straitjacket, and in Repo Man Dean expresses a similar sentiment - ‘Never tell’, he says to Jeffrey, because Jeffrey’s stint in a psychiatric facility is exactly the response you can expect for pointing out the obvious. Of course, individuals can be convinced. Once the supernatural starts affecting them, you can lay out all the evidence for them and they’ll connect the dots. They’re just not interested in looking for it on their own.
Sam urges Matt to convince his father of the truth because he’s worried about what will happen when they finally locate John. He’s already had an explosive argument with his father, and now he fears that John won’t accept him as part of his quest. This isn’t about convincing John of any particular facts - from the look of things, John already knows more about the problem than he does - but of getting him to understand that this is important to Sam, and that he needs help in dealing with it. And that’s great: I can see the connection to Matt, who has picked up that something is wrong from his interest in bugs, and who is frustrated that Larry can’t see that this is too important a thing for him to lie about. But ultimately … I’m with Larry on this one. This makes no sense. As far as I know, only one death on the site has been officially connected with bugs of any kind (has anybody but Sam and Dean connected Lynda’s demise to spiders?), and that was a year ago. There’s no known history of trouble in the area, and Sam and Dean are working from a story that ultimately goes back to a situation without witnesses - and they didn’t even bother to relate that to Matt. Bugs are coming to kill us because there are a lot of cockroaches in the backyard! Yeah, I wouldn’t believe that one either.
While it is perfectly understandable that John is scared out of his mind at the moment, it’s also reasonable to point out that he’s missing the obvious: since the monsters went straight for Sam, it’s clear that his children are not safe simply because they are not near him, and they are likely to be just as frightened and angry about the situation as he is. But I’m having trouble faulting Larry’s scepticism. So that’s a really well-timed angry bug swarm.
Larry: So what do we do now?
Sam: We try to outlast it. Hopefully the curse will end at sunrise.
Larry: Hopefully?
Joanie: Bug spray?
Dean: Trust me.
When it becomes clear that there are too many insects to outrun, Sam, Dean and the Pike family retreat into the house and attempt to hold off the bugs. You’d think this would be a hopeless last stand, but as it turns out the sun rises shortly thereafter and the bugs helpfully vacate the premises. I think the concept here isn’t bad. The onslaught mirrors both the attack on the Native American village and the invasion of Sam and Dean’s childhood home. You’re supposed to be safe in your own house, but these are alien creatures who don’t recognise the rules of your world. They’re not interested in how you think the world works - only in their own mission. But there’s no denying that the whole thing looks a bit silly. There’s no reasonable way to account for the six or so hours they must have spent in total darkness resisting the onslaught, and any invasion you can successfully fend off with a can of bug spray and some random junk you found in the attic is unlikely to make the history books; the Athenians at Marathon it ain’t. We’ve been led to believe that this will be epic, the culmination of six days of rage and grief. But when we get to it, it just looks annoying. I’ve been on picnics like that, although admittedly there were fewer termites and more flies. I can’t help but think that if they hadn’t wasted time getting two people to deliver exposition that one person could have managed quite adequately, they might have had time to do this properly. And now I really think the unnamed chief should lodge a complaint with whoever is responsible for enacting vengeance curses. Because this one is a perfect example of ‘half-arsed’.
Sam: I want to find Dad.
Dean: Yeah, me too.
Sam: Yeah, but I just … I want to apologise to him.
Dean: For what?
Sam: All the things I said to him. He was just doing the best he could.
Dean: Well, don't worry, we'll find him. And then you'll apologise. And then within five minutes, you guys will be at each other's throats.
Sam: Yeah, probably.
In the aftermath, Larry and Matt reconcile - each of them giving up the thing that was annoying the other: Larry, his real estate scheme and Matt his bug collection. Significantly, they aren’t giving these things up for each other, it’s just that the shared experience has altered how they view the world. Obviously Larry cannot in good conscience attempt to sell cursed land and Matt, while he has the pleasure of being right, no longer finds insects so attractive now that they’ve tried to kill him. Before, the problems in their relationship seemed insurmountable - but in view of the other horrors present in the world, their squabbles don’t seem so awful. In changing how they think, they are able to meet in the middle and go on. Seeing that reconciliation is possible seems to hearten Sam - looking at his own relationship with his father from the inside, it has been impossible for him to see a way out of the conflict. As much as he’s wanted to find John in order to get answers and assistance, he’s been dreading having an actual conversation with him. The reminder that conflict between parents and children is a fairly normal part of life helps put things into perspective for him. Before, he was too close to see it.
Dean’s remarks both highlight and undercut this. On the one hand - he’s right. Sam and John will get right back to bickering as soon as they have to spend any significant amount of time together. They’ve been thinking of their latest fight as something exceptional and possibly unfixable, but to Dean, at least on one level, this is just more of the same. Fighting is what Sam and John do: it’s their version of normal. But at the same time … Matt went through this process with Larry, but Sam is not going through it with John. He’s going through it with Dean, and is coming to understand certain things about John better by seeing him through Dean’s eyes. It’s Sam and Dean, not Sam and John who are learning to moderate their views by incorporating a different perspective. This isn’t to say that John doesn’t want to reconcile. He clearly loves his kids and is pleased to see them when they meet again, and he’s not incapable with drawing certain parallels between his own situation and Sam’s. But by not being here, he’s missing out on things. There are things he will never properly understand, and some of those things will have a profound effect on his children’s future.