Supernatural: Dead Man’s Blood

Enter the Gods by Sylvia Bond
Supernatural Episode Review – Season 1 – Episode 20
“Dead Man’s Blood”

There is a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson entitled “Give All to Love,” in which he enjoins us to believe in love above all else, and to be brave when we encounter it. The closing lines of the poem state, “Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.” This sentiment describes how I felt watching this episode. Not that Dean and Sam are half-gods by any means. I’m still a Dean girl through and through, and Sammy is a close and hard second. (Some days he takes the lead, and this always freaks me out.) It’s just that in this episode, John (The Dad) Winchester shows up, and I don’t mean in a flashback or over the phone, I mean in person. In whisky-voiced, five o’clock-shadowed, pillow-lipped, rangy-legged person. And I am pole axed from the very first second he appears because he’s twice as tall as he should be, and covered with hair.

The episode is about the boys chasing vampires, which they’re not very good at because a) they’ve never hunted vampires before, and oddly b) they don’t believe in vampires. Which is about as wacky as, say, elves not believing in fairies. They occupy the same universe, don’t they? Of course there are vampires in the Winchester Universe! Show has its own ideas about what is vampire lore, and if it sticks to those ideas, it’ll be doing a pretty good job. Vampires mate for life, they have lots of sex, they react to sunlight like someone with a bad burn, and the only way you can kill them is by lopping off their heads. Also, they can be bestilled by injecting them with blood from a dead man, or presumably, a dead woman. While they are in this state you can do, oh, pretty much whatever you want with them. Such as lop off their heads, which in a hunter’s mindset, is about the only thing you need to be doing with a vampire.

The boys are at a sunny diner, doing research. And because it’s sunny and they’ve both had their first cups of coffee, they are sweet and bright-eyed, looking like they could take on anything. There’s some suggestion by Dean that the boys could head back to New York so that Sam could get some nookie with that gal Sarah, but Sam declines. The boys then flounder around a bit, and finally follow up on Elkins, who got mauled in his cabin. Turns out that The Dad knew Elkins, so off they go. They check out the cabin where the Elkins got his, and poke around in the detritus left behind from the attack. (Apparently The Dad had a falling out with Elkins, but then, according to canon, The Dad had a falling out with a lot of people.)

The boys find a PO box number and combination, and off they go to check it out. At the Post Office they find a letter addressed to The Dad. This bodes interesting for me because every time the boys encounter any of the bread crumbs that The Dad has left scattered about, they usually get into a hard and heavy argument about what it means, and one of them, inevitably, gets slammed up against something, which never grows old for me. But this time, they’re sitting in the car, dithering about whether they should open the envelope or not when there’s a knock at the window. It’s dark. I don’t know who it is. I think it’s the cops, but no. Wait. It’s. The Dad.

[nms:CW Supernatural,2,0]

Oh. My. Holy. Hell. It’s The DAD. The boys are shocked ghost white to find The Dad sneaking up on them. (The last time they were together, ages ago, they agreed that The Dad would be safer apart from his boys.) The Dad slips into the backseat of the Impala like he owns the place and takes the letter from Dean. Instantly the scene flips from two brothers floundering around to three men on a mission, one of whom is in charge of everything and everyone. The Dad doesn’t read the letter aloud, he merely scans it, mutters to himself (with those pillowy lips of his), and then starts barking out orders. There’s a vampire nest, they are going after it. There’s a gun, The Dad wants it. Follow me, The Dad says, and off they go.

Show then provides several interesting scenes that may or may not have moved the plot forward, but had me at the edge of my seat, wide-eyed, my mouth open. Thinking, oh my word, I’m so glad I’m not a Winchester. Or maybe I secretly want to be one because there’s nothing as freeing as being able to shout at a sibling at the top of your lungs. Or slam him against a wall so you can intone dark and desperate threats that demonstrate how really upset you are (as well as how much you care), and don’t intimidate said sibling in the least. But plot moving or no, these scenes reveal much about this broken little family, rather like lost and gleaming gems sifting up through the dust.

So here’s one of them. I call it the Bed Scene, because if you can name a thing you can control it, which I certainly want to do, considering how much of a jolt it caused to my innards. Maybe “bed” is not the best word to use, being reminiscent of other types of naughty activities, but there you go. In this scene, the camera pans from right to left, across the supine bodies of Mr. Winchester’s sons. (The Dad’s sitting in a chair, elbows on his knees, resting his dark head against a police scanner that he holds in his hands.) I have to think of them as “sons” at this point, because since he came on camera, since the “father” has manifested himself, I had to allow for a description in addition to “boys,” “darlings,” and “my own true loves.” So there they are, asleep, fully dressed, and on top of the motel counterpanes that will never show the dirt, which is a good thing because they’ve fallen asleep with their boots on. Okay, Sam, he’s the near one, is wearing sneakers, but you see what I mean. The camera pan is slow, sloooooow, slow, and I get excellent eyefuls of tummy, and hip, and thigh. And then one of them shifts in their sleep. I think it is Sam. He’s a long drink of water, that one, and in my mind’s eye, he fills the screen with those legs of his, and it is this sight that causes my fertile brain to want to create my own personal, hasn’t-yet-been-filmed back story.

I want to know how it came about that the boys are asleep and The Dad is awake. Was there an argument as to who would rest and who would remain awake? What did this argument entail? Was there any pushing and shoving? Or did The Dad simply bark out the order, and the sons did as they were told? I like to imagine that there was this discussion. Everyone is tired after the unexpected meeting in the car outside the post office, which has left them grubby and worn. Then The Dad says, in that whisky voice of his, which sometimes sounds like a door creaking open, “You boys get some rest.” Dean speaks up, “But The Dad, you need-” And then The Dad says, “Did you hear what I just said? You boys get some rest.” I don’t know what Sam says at this point (I think he’s still shocked seeing The Dad after four years), but the end result is the same. An intimate, closed-door, vulnerability where the boys have the first good sleep that they have been allowed since Dean picked Sam up at Stanford. The Dad is watching over them, making them as safe as a baby in its mother’s arms, and I can imagine that they were both asleep the second their darling heads hit the pillow.

Then there’s the Argument Scene, which gives me a mild prescience of the shape of things to come. The Dad and the boys are parked by the roadside, with a collection of sheriff’s cars, etc., blocking their way to the vampire’s nest. Sam wants to know how The Dad is sure it’s vampires, and The Dad shows them a vampire fang. Dean falls right in line with this, wide-eyed and believing, but Sam has got more questions. Like, how do you know, and where do they come from, and blah, blah, blah. Hey, it’s nothing you or I wouldn’t want to know, so I can see why he’s asking the questions. But The Dad looks like he wants to snap Sam in two, not just for being annoying but also for daring to question his commander’s orders. But he gives Sam what he wants (information), and then barks at Dean, as if to take out his temper. He says, in an unbelievably nasty way, “Hey, Dean, why don’t you touch up that car or you’re gonna get rust. I wouldn’t have given you the damn thing if I thought you were going to ruin it.” How is it that if he’s mad at Sam, he takes it out on Dean? Just doesn’t seem fair.

Another great scene is the one I like to call The Fight Scene. The Dad has snapped out an order that the boys are to follow him, and off they go, Sam, for once, driving the Impala. This might be a little bit of a plot trick, but it works because it allows Sam to be daring and forceful. He’s spitting nails as he drives, muttering about following The Dad’s orders (which he hates), and being expected to do so without knowing what’s going on (which he hates even worse), and then in a fit of fury, he pulls the Impala to a screeching, wet-tire halt in front of The Dad’s truck. Yeah, that’s right. He cuts The Dad off in traffic. Now, this is nothing you should try with Mr. Winchester at any time, but to do it when The Dad is hot on the trail of this mysterious gun and you are, frankly, setting yourself up to be torn asunder. Everyone gets out of their respective vehicles. In the rain. Sam and The Dad come together, belly to belly, and it’s rather like watching the wind up for an installment of The Friday Night SmackDown on the WWE. I can hear the announcer now, “And John the Dad will NOT let it go! He is not going to take this kind of SASS from the newcomer, Sammy the Kid. I think we’re going to see some heads come off tonight!”

They have words, and then they turn away from each other, with Sam muttering, “This is why I left,” and The Dad asking, in that tone that only Dads have, “What did you say?” Frankly, I don’t know how Sammy has the guts, but he does. He turns around and marches back, jaw tight, chest out. There’s thumping and shouting as they plan elbow drops and side slams. There’s going to pinning and submitting, with The Dad demanding obedience and screaming his version of “What the hell’s wrong with you!” while Sam is shouting back along the enigmatic lines of, “You’re just mad ‘cause you can’t control me any more!” Say what? This kind of talk implies something rather interesting, distracting me from whatever grappling maneuvers they have planned. You can’t control me any more? This means, I think, that at one point, The Dad had both sons firmly under his control, doing exactly what he wanted them to do. Which explains the whole expectation of power that The Dad exuded when he slipped in to the back seat of the Impala during The Letter scene. Canon indicates that The Dad trained his sons like warriors, which was a pretty brave undertaking, considering that he must know that in all cases, the student will some day outflank the master. Thus Sam arrives, mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it any more.

Up jumps Dean, shoving himself right in the middle of the smackdown, where I can hear the announcer say, “Oh NO! Daring Dean has JUMPED in the ring to break it up! He doesn’t wanna see blood spilled or skulls broken, no he wants it fair. He’s pushing them apart, he’s, oh, please, TELL me when it’s over!” (If there had been a wall, somebody would have been slammed against it.) Yeah, Dean separates the two of them, pushing them apart with his own body, ready to take whatever it is they’re planning on dishing out. He subdues Sam with a tight fist in Sam’s jacket, and a shove towards the Impala. He subdues The Dad with a “That means you too,” and a jerk of the chin to indicate that The Dad should sashay it back to his own truck, and that there’ll be no blood spilling tonight. Guts, you say? Half-gods? Here we have three full-on gods, spitting lightning bolts, shivering thunder from their pores. You don’t want to get messed up with this, no, sir, you do not. I pity the fool that thinks otherwise. I pity the fool.

And I pity the vampires the boys are going after because I assure you, heads will roll. In the morning, The Dad and the boys machete-up at the vampire’s nest, aiming to go in there and clean out the vermin. This scene gives me a good opportunity to check out The Dad’s weapons cache, and everything in there looks deadly and scary. Then The Dad starts to talk about the Colt, and how it was made, his voice coming out like he spent the previous night in a bar, smoking and drinking good whisky, and you know, maybe he did. The Colt was made by Samuel Colt in 1835, on apparently the same night that Halley’s comet was seen overhead, and those men died at the Alamo. Well, I looked this one up, and yes, Halley’s comet was seen in 1835, but the Alamo occurred in the following year. There are other inconsistencies with the gun as well, however, given The Dad’s silky-voiced recitation of the history of the gun, and the fact that the whole legend of the Colt is just so durn cool, I am willing to overlook this.

Into the nest they go, hoofing it across bales of hay and tiptoeing in their steel-toed boots next to vampires in hammocks, which gives the whole scene the quality of every pirate movie I’ve ever seen. I think it’s the hammocks that do it. Naturally, Dean and Sam try to free some victims while The Dad goes straight after the gun. And naturally, everything goes belly up when the victims don’t want to be freed, and then there’s the Throwing of The Dad, who lands hard, and everyone we care about manages to skedaddle out of there as fast as they can. However, as The Dad intones in his silky-rough voice, once a vampire gets your scent, you may as well make an appointment at the nearest funeral home. How’s that for cheery?

They devise a plan, which involves Dean going off to get some dead person’s blood (let’s be PC about this, shall we?), leaving Sam and The Dad alone for what I like to call The Smile Scene. In my memory, the whole thing was nothing but a slightly saccharine and improbable let’s-patch-up-our-relationship interlude, where father and son are brought together over the admission that The Dad used Baby Sam’s college fund to buy ammo. (It was only $600 when The Dad cashed it in, but still.) However, upon rewatching, I found that the scene had much more than that.

Sam and The Dad are alone together for the first time in four years. This cranks up the prickly sense of, as Dean would say, awkward, and I’m wondering how they’re going to keep from killing each other till Dean gets back when The Dad starts to talk. So I’m going to listen, right? With that voice, how could I not? And Sam does, too, because in spite of his anger, he’s a pretty curious guy, and he always wants to know why, why, why. So The Dad tells him. Cool things like, “This is never the life I wanted for you,” to which Sam responds, “Then why did you get so mad when I left?” Can you imagine any other show getting straight to the point like this? I can’t. The Dad explains that he saw evil everywhere, and if Sam was apart from him, he couldn’t protect him. He was so worried that it came out as anger. This means something to Sam, in fact it means everything, and you can see in The Dad’s eyes the slow realization that Sam might be able to forgive him for being such a jerk. It’s the whole darkness and hard honesty of this conversation that keeps it from being too sweet. And then they smile. Sam smiles, and then The Dad smiles back and the room is lit with about a million watts of light, so it’s pretty cool. Both The Dad and Sammy the Kid have great teeth, and I have a thing for teeth, so this scene is worth it, just for those smiles.

Then, using Dean as bait, the Winchesters capture some vampires. (Naturally, with Dean as bait, this was a given. I mean, with a face as sweet as that, what vampire could resist?) There is, of course, the requisite bit where Dean’s got to kiss something that should be, by rights, moldering in the ground, and I’m sure it’s nasty. One of the vampires is Kate, who is the life-long mate of the head vampire guy. The other one is Show’s version of a red shirt, and he is tied up, and on his knees, awaiting his demise.

What follows next is the Head Chopping Scene. The Dad takes out his machete, which he handles with about as much ease as I would a cooking spoon. He’s even less worried than I would be about getting butter on my apron (which comes out, you know, if you wash it right away), and with one swoop, lops off the vampire’s head. Blood goes splashing across the rocks, leaving me to gawp as I think about it. Have you ever cut off the head of anything? I never have. I’ve never even seen so much as a chicken’s head being cut off, and yet here is The Dad, sizing the vampire up, taking aim, and slicing through spine and throat and muscle, and he never even pauses. His eyes are not blank, as if what he’s doing will need to be pushed to the back of his brain at some point, no, he’s perfectly lucid and clear and focused. This is the kind of man you most definitely would not want to cut off in traffic. Hell, I wouldn’t even want to jostle his elbow while waiting in line for an Orange Julius, supposing he ever drinks the stuff. No, indeed, and rather like an Australian wine, this is man for laying down and avoiding. Walk away. Walk away fast.

But the Winchesters, they don’t walk away. They are so cute they are sure to become some vampire’s dinner and dessert, so they burn some special herbs (saffron, skunk cabbage, and trillium) and douse themselves in the ashes. And then they Discuss. Sam figures out (somehow) that once The Dad has the gun, he will go hunting the YED by himself. This pisses Sam off to no end, cause he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t like to be left out of the big playoff. The Dad says that he’s trying to keep his boys safe, and Dean replies, “That’s crap.” Say what? This is shocking to me! The Yes-Boy saying No? Pigs are surely flying, and I am gratified that the expressions on both The Dad’s and Sam’s faces reflect the same sentiment. It’s Dean’s impassioned speech that sells it and seals the deal, “We’re stronger as a family, we just are, and you know it.”

Then comes what I call The Road Scene. Dean and Sam are in the bushes, and The Dad pulls up in his truck. It’s a big black monster truck, and out he steps to confront the baby blue cars full of vampires. The head of the vampires wants his woman. The Dad’s got her. In fact, he’s got her on a rope, which he pulls on to demonstrate his command of the situation. There’s something very hinky (or is it kinky?) about The Dad pulling on a rope with a woman at the end of it. He’s gentle with her, rolling that rope around his powerful hand, and he’s got her pumped full of dead people’s blood, so she’s at his mercy. He wants to trade her for the gun, and the head vampire guy agrees to this. But everything goes awry, naturally, and the head vampire guy manages to get hold of Sammy the Kid who always reminds me of an Exceptional Child at Risk who no one is paying any attention to. How does he manage to get himself into these bad spots, I ask you? The Dad shoots the head vampire guy with the magic gun (wasting a bullet), and the head vampire guy goes up in spectacular special effects flames. Dad looks up from what he’s just done, his eyes as mild as though he’s just finished buttering his toast. No longer just the hunter, but also a father who loves his sons.

Back at the motel, Dean and Sam are slamming clothes into duffels. Are these clean clothes, I wonder? Did they smell them first before they started packing? The Dad comes in, all huntery and bossy again, scolding because the boys didn’t follow a direct order. “Yes, sir,” says Dean, however he’s not back in Yes-Boy mode, because he adds, boldly, “But we saved your ass.” The whole timing of this scene impresses me. It knits itself together as The Dad admits and the boys agree that they are stronger as a family and that they will stay together to fight the thing that killed mom. Yeah!

Chide me if you will for not delving with any depth into scenes that involved the vampires, but with three gods stalking around, I was a tad preoccupied. Yes, the vampires were cool and sexy, but it’s hard to mess a good vampire up, once you’ve got some interesting lore in place, which Show did, early on. And yes, there was a quasi-lesbian kissing scene, okay, I’ll include that because some guy’s gonna wanna know about it. But to me, the episode was more about the family Winchester, and watching three separate strands come together in a very tightly woven rope. How’s that for a bunch of metaphors? I’ve got gods and the Friday Night SmackDown, and now rope. With a show like this, however, I’ve got to use everything at hand to figure it all out. Otherwise, those broken gems (otherwise known as John, Dean, and Sam) will slip through my fingers to fall back into the dust.

Sylvia Bond is a ten-year technical writing veteran with too many degrees under her belt to count. She lives in Colorado, but does not ski, preferring instead to spend her money and time at the annual Great American Beer Festival, taking road trips across the United States, and reading historical fiction from the comfort of her fluffy green arm chair. She has been involved in fandom since 1993 and been writing fanfic since approximately 1993. What she finds most amazing about fandom (besides the open heartedness of fans and the sheer amount of creativity) is how visible fandom has become. “In my day,” she says, “we had to hide behind P.O. boxes to get fanfic. But nowadays, people wear t-shirts that shout their affiliation and share their shiny toys on the internet.” It’s a wonderful world.

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