Supernatural: Wendigo
Images borrowed from here because my efforts to screencap anything would be laughable
Supernatural, so I’m told, is a horror show. It’s an idea I have difficulty getting my head around because frankly, it’s not scary enough. I have the same problem with Doctor Who - ‘hiding behind the sofa’ from the Doctor Who monsters is traditional, but they’ve never worried me in the slightest, and even the silliest horror movies can give me a week of terror-induced insomnia. It’s not a fault of the storytelling, the costumes or the special effects (although nothing in the world is as hilarious as an 80s Doctor Who monster): it’s that the perspective is wrong.
Horror and heroic epic have at least one important thing in common: they’re both about people being forced to confront the monsters lurking under the beds. The difference in the experience as a viewer or a reader, I would say, is whether the characters have any idea what’s going on. Granted, no one told Frodo about the giant spider, but he was quite thoroughly aware that his journey would be ‘a flight from danger into danger’; meanwhile, the unfortunate sea captain in The Screaming Skull repeatedly insists ‘I am not nervous, I am not imaginative and I never believed in ghosts’, even while being quite lethally haunted.
Heroic epic means you grab your sword and go and kill the damn hydra whether you want to or not. Horror means you spend the first month or so wondering who keeps moving your keys … and when you find out the answer to that, you wish you hadn’t asked. In Supernatural, the only people who are in a horror story are the unfortunates who appear in the pre-credit teaser. And that’s why I find it hilarious that Tommy, the unlucky lad about to become part of a wendigo’s larder, is reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He’s on a camping trip, and Joseph Campbell isn’t exactly an author I’d read to lull me to sleep after a long day of hiking, so I can only assume that somebody in the props department also thought this was hilarious. Tommy is reading about heroes, but he’s actually starring in his own personal horror story. The heroes will be along in a minute, armed with a bag of peanut M&Ms and no concrete plan of attack.
Before getting on with the story proper, we take a detour into Sam’s dreams. Aside from establishing that Sam has seen Carrie, and foreshadowing Sam’s unfortunate prognostication problem, it plants us firmly inside Sam’s brain. Which is about half of what the writers are interested in - they spend a lot of time deconstructing the ideas of heroes and monsters, victims and villains. How people think and why they do what they do is particularly important to the show’s story arcs, whether you’re talking about the monsters or the people who slay them. These days, Hollywood generally knows when to stop: at about the point when the villain has plummeted to his death and the hero has got the girl. But traditionally, stories about heroes were much keener on the idea that all stories end in death and misery if you let them go on long enough.
‘Hero’ is a Greek word, meaning ‘defender’, and that is, essentially, who heroes were: the people the city sacrificed, sending them out to deal with the monsters because they didn’t particularly want to do it themselves. It’s an awful job that nobody would volunteer for, so unsurprisingly most heroes were fairly messed-up people whom you might not be exactly thrilled to see unless there was, in fact, something large and toothy lurking outside the city gates. They were prone to excesses of emotion, fits of violence, crippling hubris and making exceedingly poor decisions - and that was on a good day. And they had a tendency to meet very sticky ends. Once they’d slain their monsters and received their laurels, heroes had a distressing tendency to wander off cliffs, have ships fall on their heads or be murdered by their spouses (and a lot of them really had that last one coming).
Without denying sympathy to its particular heroes, who are as well intentioned as they are troubled, Supernatural deals with this surprisingly well: this is a world that breaks everyone in the end, but it breaks its heroes first. It probably deals with it better than it originally intended to, since it has continued after its original five-season arc, leaving Sam and Dean to deal with the aftermath of saving the world, but even at the outset it embraces the problems of the hero trade. Older hunters are generally dysfunctional, starting with John Winchester himself, whose ill-advised attempts at distracting his children from the crisis they’re facing we first confront in this episode - and Sam and Dean are operating from an uneasy position of guilt and rage mixed with altruism. At this point, they’re still relatively innocent and optimistic, but not very much of either. It’s not really an option for heroes.
Sam: These coordinates he left us. This Blackwater Ridge.
Dean: What about it?
Sam: There's nothing there. It's just woods. Why is he sending us to the middle of nowhere?
…
Sam: So Blackwater Ridge is pretty remote. It's cut off by these canyons here, rough terrain, dense forest, abandoned silver and gold mines all over the place.
Dean: Dude, check out the size of this freaking bear.
Sam: And a dozen or more grizzlies in the area. It's no nature hike, that's for sure.
As distractions go, you have to give John credit: this one is a doozy. This is only Sam and Dean’s second proper, grown-up job together - and they’re not much better at this one than they were at the last. So it’s all the more obvious that they are completely out of their element. Though it’s since been established that they were given some training in conventional hunting, courtesy of the yet-to-be-introduced Bobby Singer (and they do pick up some basic tracks in this episode), they are primarily urban hunters. Dark alleys, sewers and leaky basements? Easy stuff. Anything involving trees? Um. Well. We might have a problem.
They’re equally unconvincing as ‘environmental studies majors’ and ‘park rangers’ and barely even bother to keep up the pretence once they have a foot in the door. They pick fights with the actual trained guide and go wandering out into the woods without any significant supplies and with no idea whatsoever what they’re facing. I can only assume that John handpicked this case as the one most likely to keep his inexperienced children occupied and off his trail. Of course, that also makes it the case most likely to get them killed. I’m sure John means well, but sometimes I think his definition of ‘protection’ is a little skewed.
Also, the whole episode makes me imagine Sam and Dean having this conversation:
Baker: Do you think it was a bear?
Witch: A bear? Bears are sweet. Besides, you ever see a bear with forty-foot feet?
Baker’s Wife: Dragon?
Witch: No scorch marks, usually they’re linked.
Baker: Manticore?
Witch: Imaginary.
Baker and Wife: Griffin?
Witch: Extinct.
Baker: Giant?
Witch: Possible. Very, very possible …
Into the Woods
In House it’s never Lupus; in Supernatural it’s never bears. Well, except for that one time when it was a teddy bear.
Sam: The coordinates point to Blackwater Ridge, so what are we waiting for? Let's just go find Dad. I mean, why even talk to this girl?
Dean: I don't know, maybe we should know what we're walking into before we actually walk into it?
Sam: What?
Dean: Since when are you all shoot first ask questions later, anyway?
Sam: Since now.
This is something that Dean brings up repeatedly throughout the episode: since when are you violent? I’m violent. In a basic sense, Sam really is different at the moment. His girlfriend just died. The monster he thought had attacked them at random is back and specifically targeting him. Apparently he has visions now. And the life he imagined for himself is essentially over - he still believes he might get back to law school one day, but the idea that he could simply walk away and be safe is gone forever. With all that on his mind, it’s not surprising that he’s a little tetchy.
In the broader sense, it all comes back to roles - the ones people choose for themselves and the ones that are forced upon them. It often operates on the grand scale (What is the role of a monster? What is the role of a hero?), and when the angels arrive on the scene the concepts of monster and hero will blur to the point where the two can be separated again only by an extreme act of will on the part of the hapless protagonists. But it also explores how these roles operate in a microcosm - in families and individuals.
Not all the roles they take on are counterproductive. Sam and Dean still working out the details of their partnership here, but ultimately Dean will work best when his eyes are focused on the situation in front of them, reminding Sam of the importance of dealing with this crisis before they worry about the vast and complex future; Sam will work best with his eyes fixed on the middle distance, reminding Dean that they have a goal to reach, and that they do need to put some thought into how they’re going to get there. When separated or forced to step out of these roles, their progress tends to stall - and they’re generally unhappy. But at the same time, right now they’ve been apart so long that their views of each other, and of themselves, have simplified almost to the point of caricature. It will be a long time before Dean truly recognises that Sam is both capable and independent; it will also be a long time before Sam realises that Dean is both bright and sensitive. The ‘roles’ they have assumed are not exactly wrong - Dean is certainly more physical, prone to resorting to punches and shoves when he runs out of words to express himself; Sam is more cerebral and imaginative, making leaps (both justified and not) from one idea to the next. But there’s more to it than that. For the moment, it’s worth noting that we already know Sam has much more fire in him than Dean is giving him credit for - after all, Sam was the one who escaped, even if only for a little while.
Dean: Well, we'll find your brother. We're heading out to Blackwater Ridge first thing.
Haley: Then maybe I'll see you there. Look, I can't sit around here anymore. So I hired a guide. I'm heading out in the morning, and I'm going find Tommy myself.
Dean: I think I know how you feel.
…
Sam: We cannot let that Haley girl go out there.
Dean: Oh yeah? What are we going to tell her? That she can't go into the woods because of a big scary monster?
Sam: Yeah.
Dean: Her brother's missing, Sam. She's not going to just sit this out. Now we go with her, we protect her, and we keep our eyes peeled for our fuzzy predator friend.
Dean bonds with the victims. He bonds almost obsessively, clearly seeing himself in them and trying to give back to them what he has lost. Find an individual who didn’t know ghosts existed yesterday and is struggling to adjust to it and you will also have found Dean’s best friend du jour. Haley, the first of these, has a fairly simple character design - but she’s likeable nevertheless. Like Sam and Dean, she’s on the hunt for a missing relative; like Dean, she seems to have designated herself as officially responsible for everyone. While she isn’t especially useful in dealing with the monster, she doesn’t do anything egregiously stupid either - she gets captured, but so does Dean, and when the evidence starts to swing toward the likelihood of there being something unnatural in the woods, she doesn’t protest more than necessary. Upon first meeting her, Dean pulls a variety of I-will-hit-on-her-at-the-first-opportunity faces in Sam’s direction, but once it’s established that she’s serious about dealing with the problem in front of her he largely lets this go. There’s some of the defensive banter he put on in front of Jessica, but we’re probably down from slap-across-the-face to expressive eye rolling as an acceptable response. Haley cares, so her right to be involved is instantly respected.
Dean: Roy, you said you did a little hunting.
Roy: Yeah, more than a little.
Dean: Uh-huh. What kind of furry critters do you hunt?
Roy: Mostly buck, sometimes bear.
Dean: Tell me: Bambi or Yogi ever hunt you back? - What are you doing, Roy?
Roy: You should watch where you're stepping. Ranger.
Dean: … It's a bear trap.
Haley: You didn't pack any provisions! You guys are carrying a duffel bag! You're not rangers. So who the hell are you?
Dean: Sam and I are brothers, and we're looking for our father. He might be here, we don't know. I just figured that you and me, we're in the same boat.
Haley: Why didn't you just tell me that from the start?
Dean: I'm telling you now. Besides, it's probably the most honest I've ever been with a woman ... ever. So we okay?
Haley: … Yeah, okay.
After a perfunctory investigation that establishes that the monster definitely is not a bear but might be just about anything else, they head out into the woods. You have to feel for Roy, Haley’s paid guide: in addition to the people he’s actually paid to protect, he ends up responsible for a pair of obviously fraudulent ‘rangers’ who alternate between sulking and attempting to beat him at some sort of male dominance contest. I can also sympathise, at least a little, with Dean’s frustration - born of a combination of envy that Roy has the luxury of ignorance, and resentment that he himself gets no recognition as a professional.
Sam and Dean are, after all, the people most knowledgeable about monsters present: when the time comes to kill the wendigo, they will have to work out how to do it. But the cases where they are deliberately called in by people who recognise what they do are few and far between; usually, they have to convince people of their credentials while fighting off monsters. It’s a pretty good reason to be annoyed - and yet, at the same time, at present Dean is asking for more than he deserves. Neither he nor Sam act like professionals here: Sam spends most of the episode wildly uninterested in the case itself, preferring to focus on the problem of John, and while Dean wants to think of himself as the leader, in charge, there’s a limit to how much serious thought he’s going to devote to the process. They don’t even know when to lie and when to tell the truth. Dean dances around the facts with Roy, hinting he’s a better hunter by reason of his knowledge of the supernatural - and later Sam will lose his temper and do the same. This does nothing but make Roy suspicious. But they lie to Haley until specifically called on it. When the matter comes up, it becomes immediately clear that this is one situation where a bit of honesty would have worked better than a fake ID: this is a place where people go missing, and they have reason to think their father was there recently. If Dean can see himself in Haley, it’s just as true that Haley can see herself in Dean. You don’t always have to lie to get help.
Sam: Dad's not here. I mean, that much we know for sure, right? He would have left us a message, a sign, right?
Dean: Yeah, you're probably right. To tell you the truth, I don't think Dad's ever been to Lost Creek.
Sam: Then let's get these people back to town and hit the road. Go find Dad. I mean, why are we still even here?
Dean: This is why. This book. This is Dad's single most valuable possession -everything he knows about every evil thing is in here. And he's passed it on to us. I think he wants us to pick up where he left off. You know: saving people, hunting things. The family business.
Sam: That makes no sense. Why doesn't he just - call us? Why doesn't he tell us what he wants, tell us where he is?
Dean: I don’t know. But the way I see it, Dad's giving us a job to do, and I intend to do it.
Sam: Dean ... No. I’ve got to find Dad. I’ve got to find Jessica's killer. It's the only thing I can think about.
Dean: Okay, all right, Sam, we'll find them, I promise. Listen to me. You've got to prepare yourself. I mean, this search could take a while, and all that anger, you can't keep it burning over the long haul. It's going to kill you. You’ve got to have patience, man.
Sam: How do you do it? How does Dad do it?
Dean: Well for one - them. I mean, I figure our family's so screwed to hell, maybe we can help some others. Makes things a little bit more bearable … And I'll tell you what else helps: killing as many evil sons of bitches as I possibly can.
It eventually becomes clear that there is something sinister - and smart - lurking in the woods. Unfortunately, it also becomes clear that John has led them astray: he is currently quite probably driving as fast as he can in the opposite direction. Naturally Sam finds this somewhat upsetting - it’s certainly unsettling to think that your father might be hiding from you when you desperately need his help. In some ways, Dean’s response is remarkably healthy; certainly he gets more satisfaction from his work now than he will at any point in the future. The focus is firmly on helping people, on making the world a better place, with vengeance only coming in a distant second. The trouble is, as an ideology it’s fundamentally flawed. It fails to take into account that the line between ‘people’ and ‘things’ is nowhere near as clear as Dean would like it to be, and that while you can certainly save people’s lives, you can’t make them un-know the terrible truths they’re being confronted with. Innocence, once lost, tends to stay lost - and that’s often how monsters are made.
It’s also putting far too much faith in John’s judgement. John is a long way from infallible - he is handling this situation very badly, and has handled other cases in the past equally badly. While Dean is right that Sam can’t afford to rage at everything he sees, not if he wants to live long enough to take his revenge, Sam is also right: this makes no sense. John does not have the right to simply hand over his to do list and tell them to manage it while he deals with the real problem. Sam’s stake in this quest is now very personal and Dean’s always has been. They should finish this job because it’s the right thing to do, not because John has told them to. They absolutely should not let John have this all his own way - but it’s going to be a while before Dean works that one out.
Sam: 'Wendigo' is a Cree Indian word. It means 'evil that devours'.
Dean: They're hundreds of years old. Each one was once a man. Sometimes an Indian, or other times a frontiersman or a miner or a hunter.
Haley: How's a man turn into one of those things?
Dean: Well, it's always the same. During some harsh winter a guy finds himself starving, cut off from supplies or help. Becomes a cannibal to survive, eating other members of his tribe or camp.
Ben: Like the Donner party.
Sam: Cultures all over the world believe that eating human flesh gives a person certain abilities. Speed, strength, immortality.
Dean: If you eat enough of it, over years, you become this less than human thing. You're always hungry.
Given that about half of it is delivered by Dean, whose current opinion of all things supernatural could probably be summed up as ‘Ew! Ew! Squish it now!’, the description of the wendigo is remarkably sympathetic. This is one of Supernatural’s great strengths: right from the start there is the disquieting recognition that this could happen to you. People don’t ask to become monsters: it is something that’s done to them. As the show progresses the idea deepens: this will happen to you. Their whole world is infected by the supernatural, and ultimately there is no escaping it. Everybody dies, after all - and then what happens? Nothing good, that’s what. So the wendigo is a tragic figure: a man trapped in an impossible situation, breaking terrible taboos only to survive. We’re not talking about the Hannibal Lecter kind of cannibal here. Ben, Haley’s younger and not-missing brother, brings up the Donner party, grounding the idea in reality: survival cannibalism happens. If you’re eating people who have already died of unrelated causes, rather than killing them yourself, it’s not even particularly immoral - not in desperate circumstances.
A moral line was crossed at some point, but it’s impossible to say when. Did he kill his comrades to feed himself? Or did the first murders come later, when he was already crazed and changing? That’s the other thing about the wendigo: for all his sympathetic description, he remains one of the show’s most inhuman monsters and we know nothing about him as an individual. First depicted as a scrawled stick figure, he is kept largely off camera or in the shadows; when we do get a glimpse of him, he looks like Gollum on steroids. And he never speaks for himself, only ‘borrowing’ the voices of others to lure out his prey. Most monsters remain more or less themselves - not necessarily themselves at their best, but themselves nevertheless. They still have opinions, emotions, ideas … and if given a chance they’ll express them. Not the wendigo. From the local landscape, it’s a reasonable guess that he was a miner … but that’s all anybody could determine about him. It’s quite clear what the price of his survival was - his sense of self.
Dean: You thinking what I'm thinking?
Sam: Yeah, I think so.
Now thoroughly annoyed, the wendigo kills Roy and kidnaps Dean and Haley. Fortunately the peanut M&Ms turn out to be a handy tool after all, as a trail of them allows Sam and Ben to track the wendigo back to its lair and reunite with their siblings - as well as the long-absent Tommy. And that, finally, is where the balance of power shifts. Armed with flair guns to burn the monster alive, Sam and Dean split up. Dean heads back into the cave, yelling at the top of his lungs to attract attention, Sam attempts to shepherd the others to the exit. Naturally, the wendigo, being no fool, goes for the weaker, more profitable target: Dean is alone, watchful and clearly seeking a confrontation; Sam is hampered by his need to watch his charges and clearly focused on getting out. It’s not hard to work out who’d be easier to kill. Also, the bigger group potentially provides more meat. The wendigo quickly locates Sam’s group and backs them into a corner … only to be shot by Dean, who has deliberately (and quietly) circled back around. In some ways it’s a small thing, but for Sam and Dean its significance is tremendous: this is the very first time they’ve actually devised a plan that worked. They defeated Constance Welch through a mixture of blind luck and intuition - this time they actually decided what to do and followed through with it. It was a relatively simple plan, and it required using unarmed people as bait, but it was still their first legitimate victory. And that’s a long way from nothing.
It’s also important how they beat it. The wendigo could never have played this simple trick, and it’s not particularly surprising that he couldn’t see through it. He is, necessarily, alone. At some point in his past, back when he was human, he reached the point where he could only see the people around him (whether alive or dead) as resources to be consumed. By the time he encountered other people again, he was unable to see them any other way. The wendigo can never expect rescue; he will never have a partner he can trust or people he cares about - and so he cannot envision a plan that requires people to work together. He’s certainly smart enough: he can look at two targets and determine which one is the best to attack, he can lure his prey and set up ambushes … but it would never have occurred to him that they would expect him to go for Sam and be prepared for it. It’s been a very long time since options like that were available to him - not since he was human. By definition, then, Sam and Dean’s great strength is in partnership. As two together they can accomplish what one alone could not - just as long as they work with each other rather than against each other. That’s the tricky bit.
Dean: Sam, you know we're gonna find Dad, right?
Sam: Yeah, I know. But in the meantime? I'm driving.
They end with establishing a tradition. Those are important: people have habits, verbal shorthand, private in jokes that help them get a feel for how things are, or express how they’re feeling without needing to spell it out in detail. Most of their old habits (whatever they may have been) don’t work anymore: either they’d require their father to be present, or they handled situations relevant to two children waiting rather than to two adults on a quest. Everything’s new, and they have to start over from scratch. Getting back to the car means the workday is over, and they’re free to make jokes or express dismay over the sheer weirdness of their existence. Hotel rooms work for that too, although they’re less reliable. Exchanging the car keys means compromise or reconciliation, except when it means ‘I am busy bleeding to death, so you should definitely drive’. It’s a small vocabulary, so far, just a handful of words and ideas - but they’ve only got one successful job behind them, as yet. It’s a start.