Supernatural: No Rest For The Wicked
Star TrekStargate:AtlantisFireflyYes, Sometimes Bon Jovi Rocks
by Sylvia Bond
Supernatural Season 3 - Episode 16
“No Rest for the Wicked”
“We don’t always get what we want,” says Dean in this episode, bloody but unbowed, to which I want to add, yes, but sometimes we get what we’ve been desperately hoping for. Although, yeah, it sounds a little weird to be hoping to see Dean’s final day on earth before the hellhounds get him and all the suffering that goes with that. I mean, what kind of whack job would want to see that kind of angst and suffering? A fan, that’s who. A True Fan, who has been on the road with the Winchesters long enough, and who knows that THIS is the day, the day of all days. Not a good day, no, but an important one.
I’m just glad that Show, in spite of the writer’s strike, was able to tell this particular story, because after all the buildup of this season, it would have been a tremendous letdown if they had not. And a gyp besides, although watching it, I was of two minds. In the first mind, I’m Little Orphan Annie, tugging on the coat sleeves of the man in charge, in this case, Uncle Kripke, going, “Dean’s going to be okay, isn’t he? You’re not gonna hurt him real bad, are you? Me and Sandy are AWFUL worried about him.” In the second mind, I’m a rather more like crack whore who isn’t much concerned with anything except where her next hit is coming, and she’s rather keen on watching all the suffering that she’s sure Show is going to dish out. It is with these two faces that I watched this episode, one of me cringing and crying, the other smiling with glee.
The basic story is, as I said, Dean’s last day on earth. We don’t get this day moment-by-moment, which would have been rather cool, but we get huge chunks of it, enough to take us along for the rather bumpy and angsty ride. Because of course, as you might have guessed, Sam is determined to keep trying till the midnight hour, and Dean is determined that nothing shall keep him from his appointed rounds. Till the end, Dean stands firm and never wavers, never backs down, those raspberry lips firm and his eyes (crystal green always, due to some marvelous lighting by my boys in the lighting department) always on the, er, prize. I love him for that.
But first, a new twist: Dean has a nightmare where hellhounds are chasing him. Usually we get to see Sammy having nightmares, so being inside Dean’s brain was a treat. And I knew it was a dream because of the weird camera angles and washed-out, green-tinted colors. Actually it was more of a nightmare, and I thought it was interesting that Dean would actually have a chasing dream like that. (I can totally relate because for years I used to have dreams that Nazis were chasing me.) Chasing dreams are the scariest thing because you can never run fast enough or far enough, because however slow the Nazis (or hellhounds) shamble, they always manage to catch up to you. Luckily Dean wakes, the flicker of his eyelashes making him particularly sweet and vulnerable. By the woodcut print we can tell he was reading about hellhounds before he fell asleep. That’ll teach him, you think? Alas, no. But the main point here is that the dream shows Dean scared enough to run, which given his development as heroic figure adds wonderful layers - if he was never scared he would have been a far less interesting and dynamic character.
With Sam there as he wakes up, Dean makes jokes about taking in the donkey show in Tijuana, all the while Sam is making promises by candlelight, promises of fealty and devotion. It’s rather like getting Dean out of his deal has become the Holy Grail for Sam, and he is confident of his success. (Though he seems rather dubious about the donkey show, were he able to save Dean, I’m sure he’d be willing to go along with party plans a little racier and out there than he’s used to. Heck, maybe he’ll even consent to watching The Wizard of Oz synced up to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon!) It is in this scene also that Dean has that hallucination that is apparent only to those who are close to the end of their contract. I particularly liked the way Dean’s face went from smiling to stillness as he watches because I’m sure it isn’t every day that his brother has the face of one of hell’s minions. (The crack whore loved it; the Orphan was freaked and knew it would only get worse from here.)
In the next scene, we got ourselves a Class A-1 dither to beat all dithers, one that the boys have had before lots of times, but this time, because the clock is ticking towards the darkest hour, it has extra punch. Bobby has sussed out Lilith’s location, Sam has all kinds of ideas about what they can do, and Dean shoots them all down, wisely, I thought, because the intel comes from Bella, who, Dean has FINALLY learned lies as easily as breathing. (The “Holster it up, Sam,” line from Dean was totally apt, because Sam has moved from being a paladin to acting like a gunslinger just moments before High Noon. Somebody’s got to control that boy!) There’s nothing as satisfying as a scene where the two brothers argue. I may have said this before, but it is only when there is utter trust can two people rant and rail at each other the way these two boys do. Their voices are pitched, there’s jagged edges to everything they say, both are desperate, and then Dean brings a halt to it with a heartfelt, “Just no.” Then he goes and sits in the flickering light of some beeswax candles, setting aglow his skin and my poor fangirl’s heart to beating. He’s tired, he’s weary, and in spite of that, still beautiful.
I’m particularly fond of the scene where Sam summons Ruby. It had shades of John Winchester all over it - the only thing missing was the part where Sam slices open his own wrist to add blood to the ceremony. (Along with the grunt of pain, the five o’clock shadow, and that whisky voice…ooooooo, sexy!) Anyway, along comes Ruby posing and yakking, blah, blah, blah. I think she’s saying something about what Sam could do to save the day, his dormant powers, etc., and then there’s an argument over the knife. And then in walks Dean, in big brother mode. (Which totally saves the scene, because even if Ruby is only on the screen for five minutes, it’s already fifteen minutes too long.)
Then there’s a fight with loads of terrifically good whumpage that the crack whore liked especially well. When Dean punched Ruby, I stood up and CHEERED, and I think I pulled something in my shoulder punching the air because now it hurts like hell! It might even require physical therapy, but it was worth it, just to see Dean come down HARD on a character that has been lying and conniving ever since the day she was created. What was even better was the feeling that Dean, at last, was expressing some of his frustration over the fact that Ruby had been lying to Sam because Dean cannot condone, anything that hurts Sam or, in this case, gives him false hope.
And guess what? Dean’s already figured out what Sam was going to do, so he’s able to trap Ruby with a devil’s trap he painted on the ceiling ages ago. The look he gives Sam is pure older brother, not quite so much “I told you so,” but more “You should have listened to me, idiot.” Older brothers (and sisters) for all they are so damn bossy, don’t tend to forget that lessons are better absorbed and acknowledged if they’re not delivered with sarcasm. (Actually that only happens when they’re older, but you see what I mean.)
As the boys stagger up the stairs with the magic knife, they leave her in the basement, and I realize that I’ve actually gotten in Ruby exactly what I asked for. She’s not a Good Demon, she’s more nebulous than that. She has ambition, and she’s twisted everything enough to so that the boys don’t know when to trust her and when to not. And each time they face her, it is with stamina and brave hearts and their eyes wide open to the danger. (Yeah, I know, be careful what you ask for, yadda, yadda, yadda.)
Once upstairs, Sam and Dean holster up. The crack whore is the first to notice that if there was any first aid applied, it was not filmed; thusly, she feels gypped. However, the is placated by the fact that while the boys talk, their heart-to-heart is intensified by the sad piano cords that I’ve come to associate with Dean in a dark and pensive mood. The whole of the scene is beautifully paced; there are, as well, close-ups of eyes, and mouths, and the flush of Sam’s skin as he listens to his brother and works to keep from coming apart at the seams.
Wonderful things are said during this conversation, bringing many issues into a condensed emo mess. Sam says that he’s not afraid of what he might have to become to save Dean. (As to exactly what Sam might become is an issue that fangirls have been debating for ages.) Dean makes the anti-martyr speech, using the sexual metaphor of “spreading it for these demons” to tell Sam what they should NOT be doing. Then Dean talks about not making the same mistakes, and as he launches into his speech about stopping the cycle of sacrifice, which makes total sense, he tells Sam, “You’re my weak spot.” Now this has been said and acknowledged before, but with the sad piano and the time crunch and the glitter in Dean’s eyes, it’s rather more emo than the crack whore likes. The Orphan enjoyed it just fine because no one was bleeding or anything gory and violent like that. Besides, who doesn’t like it when the angst and the love oozes out of every Winchester pore like this, huh? Angst, damnit, angst! It’s what we signed up for!
It’s at this point (a whopping almost sixteen minutes!) that the camera takes us to New Harmony and away from the boys. I’m thrilled, frankly, that we got so much boy-togetherness before Show remembered that there should be a MOW included somewhere. In this case, we get Lilith on shore leave in a happy suburb, where she gets to play at being the naughty little girl, and where every day is her birthday. The setup reminded me of the one storyline in Twilight Zone, The Movie, where Kathleen Quinlan’s character rescues a little boy from his dangerous and harmful fantasy life. So, not terribly original, but creepy enough, just the same. Then it’s back to the boys! Once Bobby is able to stop the boys from racing off (and how long has it been since you saw a carburetor cap like that, I ask you?) and redefine the meaning of family, the boys are on the road, driving through the darkness, in the Impala.
The scene where Dean gets Sammy singing was priceless. I got the feeling that when Dean’s alone in the car, he sings rather a lot. I can see him rolling all the windows down, cranking the radio all the way up, and singing at the top of his beautiful, musically talented lungs. So, to cheer Sam up, because that’s what big brothers do, he starts off rather like Sister Maria does with the Von Trapp Family Singers: he encourages by demonstration and then brings Sam into the fun. (The whole “Bon Jovi rocks…sometimes,” line is sure to become a classic.) Sam, alas, can kill vampire men much better than he can sing, but his enthusiasm and joy make that okay. Plus, it was one of those Winchester moments you wish you could lock in a golden box forever, because in between the woe and strife and the never-ending angst, there are these bits of good times, stops for coffee and pie, an excellent sunset as they drive across the flat highways of the plains, or even the quiet joy of stretching out on a real bed after sleeping in the car for three days - because the Winchester’s lives are not all on the screen, you know. Lots of it is off screen, and it’s tidbits like these that give me the flavor of that.
But then, Dean stops singing and the camera zooms in on his face. For one second, you get to see it, the real fear. His skin is as white as paper and his eyes have this glazed look like you might have if you were tied to the tracks and a freight train with no breaks was coming. To me, he looks like he’s about to puke, and I, in sympathy felt like puking with him. Alas, this interesting sight is interrupted by a cop car’s siren, and the boys are soon pulled over for, of all things, a broken taillight. Dean is (a little inexplicably) able to “pierce the veil” and see that the cop is a demon in disguise, and so kills him. What’s funny here is as the boys and Bobby hide the cop car in the woods, we see the car’s number on the top. It’s nice to know that the eternal question of “Car 54, where are you?” can now be answered. (It was buried in the woods by the Winchester boys!)
When the boys arrive in the happy suburb (and I’m sure there’s some sort of metaphor going here about how evil hides behind smiling faces and manicured lawns or something), Dean is able to spot all the demons, and there is a tidy little dither that follows. Sam wants to “ninja in,” while Dean counsels caution. Oddly, it is Sam who wins out by appealing to Dean’s heroic side, by telling him that if they get Lilith, they save everybody. I liked the way the dialog developed here moving the plot forward and logically getting Dean to agree to the mayhem that’s about to ensue. And boy does it ensue!
The mayhem during the battle scene is made up of pure Winchester scream-and-leap tactics: Bobby sanctifies the water supply and Sam and Dean move in, taking the demons completely unawares. Two things appealed to the crack whore here. One was the bit where Dean holds the demon close for Sam’s killing blow, covering his mouth while he glows and dies. I mean, what would it take, how hardened to this would you have to be to do it without flinching? Apparently, Dean’s been refined in the hottest crucible; he doesn’t hesitate, not for one second. The second bit was where Sam wiped the blood from the knife on the sleeve of his jacket. Gone are the days when he protested the taking of the lives of the human hosts. Now, if there’s a demon, he’ll kill it, end of story. (Besides which, his Samhair was in a delightful tumble at this point, and he was breathing hard, his body trembling head to foot as if he was so wound up, he couldn’t come back down. The crack whore liked all of this, but the Orphan was saddened by the fact that the boys have had to become so dark in order to beat back the darkness.)
Enter Ruby, and I’d like to say enough of her already, but since she’s threatening Dean, I’m treated to the sight of Sam coming up behind her in full-power mode. He says, “Take it easy,” in that way that indicates that if she doesn’t, it’s all over for her in two-seconds or less and hang the consequences. Plus, there was that interesting little moment, if you watch carefully, where Ruby actually backs away from Sam, as if she were truly afraid of him and not just being cautious about the magic knife. Their squabble is interrupted by more oncoming demons and the trio does what people do when thrown together in a foxhole: they start working as a team. While this makes sense psychologically, it was disheartening to see Dean forget all his mighty protestations about her reliability and so forth. But as long as he doesn’t take his beautiful eyes off her, I’ll be satisfied.
As Bobby’s holy sprinkler system keeps the demons at bay, the oddly formed trio enters the happy house and goes looking for trouble, which they find, natch, by splitting up. (Will they EVER learn?) Dean carts scared husband guy down to the basement while Ruby and Sam trot upstairs. Then all of a sudden, Sam is on his own. He is perfectly wide-eyed and terrified, which I like because I think that once Sam loses that last bit of fear, that’s when we’ll loose Sam to the darkness. And I don’t know about you, but as he’s going down the hall, the Orphan was hiding her eyes and the crack whore was on the edge of her seat. It’s funny to be so divided like this, but I had this nasty feeling that it was going to get uglier before it got nicer, and that Sammy boy was going to take me there.
And he does this by entering the naughty little girl’s room, tiptoeing up on the pink canopy bed, his shoulder to the fore thus properly keeping his profile narrow, twisting that knife in his hands like he’s ready to use it. The crack whore approves of the way Sam silently (and with those graceful long fingers of his) pulls back the curtains; she wants bloodshed and she wants it now. As the mother mouths, “Do it!” over and over, the crack whore is pretty sure she’s going to get her way. But the Orphan sees what Sam sees: a sweet and sleeping little girl. How can Sam possibly bring himself to kill such an innocent thing, even if the body contains the demon Lilith? The sad part is, he’s ready, he’s going to do it, he had the knife up and his teeth were bared and everything. The fact that Dean stops him in the nick of time is not as important as the fact that Sam was, at that moment, willing to do the most horrible thing to save Dean. And even though he never had to do it, it makes you wonder how far he will be willing and how far he will eventually go.
Then, as it gets closer to midnight, the brothers argue. There are raised voices and yummy brotherly clutching, and Dean says that it’s all his fault, taking the blame in a way that’s so typically Dean. Then he tells Sam good bye in that Deanish way of his, not by saying, “goodbye” or “I love you,” but by telling Sam what his duties and obligations will be once Dean is gone: keep fighting, look after Dean’s wheels, and remember what The Dad and Dean taught him. (Because duty and obligation are how Dean organizes his world, you see.) It is during this simple dialog that Show winds up the angst meter so hard and so fast that the Orphan wants to go home, but sadly she can’t because being homeless is kind of the definition of being an orphan. I give her a poke with my elbow and tell her to pay attention, because this is what Show does best: a scene with two brothers at odds, each ready to die for the other, and a no-win scenario during which the ultimate sacrifice will have to be made. (Plus, Sam and Dean are so damn beautiful here, it creates the most horrible of dilemmas: should I lust after them or cry for their fate?)
The crack whore just wants to see what Show will do with the whole hellhound concept. As the clock strikes midnight, she is quickly satisfied as the hellhounds approach. Show wisely does not show us the hellhounds, but instead we got some hellhound-cam, and the horror on Dean and Sam’s faces as THE moment arrives - midnight on Dean’s last day.
It is Dean who first hears the growls and snarls that no one else can hear, and then he takes off running, and for some reason my heart went out to him more than if he had stood his ground. Dean is not Superman (or Batman, for that matter), he is made of flesh and bone, he is only human. So he runs, which is exactly what I would do. He runs to give himself just one minute more, to spread the goofer dust and stand his ground, maybe for Sam, maybe for himself.
But then, Dean realizes that Lilith has possessed Ruby, so instead of fending off evil with the goofer dust, they’ve locked it in the room with them. Whumpage ensues, with Sam against the wall and Dean, in an oddly provocative pose, on a table. (He really shouldn’t do…THAT…with his thighs. I don’t think either the Orphan or the crack whore can take it. I know I can’t.) Lilith is as mad as hell and she wants Sam’s giant head on a pike; her kiss repulses him, but he submits thinking that he can trade himself up for Dean. Alas no, and, cruelly, she lets the hellhounds in to take Dean.
When they come, it is worse than I had imagined, but I think that only right, considering the buildup this particular scene has had. Flesh is rent by invisible claws, blow spurts and flows, and then there is the screaming. Yeah, I’m all about whumpage for Dean, I like to watch him struggle and be brave. But this, this did me in, as the Orphan and the crack whore came together inside me in horror. I had my hands over my mouth, trying not to shriek out loud, because for some reason, just then, it all came together and felt so REAL, I was as raw as the Velveteen rabbit when all his fur has worn off. But with Sam screaming, his voice sounding jagged and ripped, I couldn’t look away, not even for a minute.
Sam’s begging Lilith to stop it, and then it gets surreal: Lilith pops out this white light, and all of a sudden, everything goes still, you know, the way it has after the fireworks have stopped for the night. Sam is able to get up, and oddly, Lilith backs up from him. Like she’s afraid of him, and I’m like when did this happen? It goes back to the kiss, I think, when she kissed him, I think that it tipped Sam over into the dark. Not that he’s fully darkside, but enough so that he can put a stop to the madness.
But why doesn’t she just kill Sam, when she’s been sending demons after him for that very reason? I think this can be explained by what I like to call the The Ruby Slipper Conundrum. In the movie version of The Wizard of Oz (and maybe the book version, too, I forget), the WW of the W tries to take the slippers that used to belong to her sister, the WW of the E, off Dorothy’s feet but she can’t. Later, she has her flying monkeys sweep Dorothy up and cart her to the WW of the W’s castle. Whereupon the WW of the W gives Dorothy a whole hour to think it over. And Dorothy would have handed over the slippers, if a certain group of motley heros hadn’t marched in there and saved her.
So what stayed the WW of the W’s hand? Well, the truth is, as long as the slippers are on Dorothy’s feet, the witch can neither have the slippers nor hurt Dorothy. I think the same applies here. Lilith can’t kill Sam herself, which is why she keeps sending Show’s version of flying monkeys after him. But Sam can best the flying monkeys, and in the end, didn’t all Dorothy have to do is click her damn heels together three times and she was where she wanted to be? Likewise, I think all Sam has to do is want it hard enough and the power will be his. And it seems like it is, because after Lilith flares her white light at him, he’s able to stand up like nothing happened, AND she backs away from him in fear. When he attacks her with the magic knife, the familiar black smoke shoots out of her mouth and she collapses to the floor. (Is she dead? Is Ruby dead at last? Oh, I HOPE so!) So I’m thinking that something happened to Sam that not even he is aware of.
In spite of any of this, it’s too late, Dean is on the floor, as still as a corpse should be whose soul has been dragged into hell. Sam bends down and with tears dripping from his face, cradles Dean’s body in his arms in less than a heartbeat. He’s a mess just the way I like him, but again, the pain is far too real, and I wanted to be a stuffed bunny again, immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Watching Sam weep this time is just about this side of too much, and I know for a fact I wasn’t the only fangirl that night who simply went into a state of shock at the thought that Dean had actually died.
The last camera angle goes in real close, right up to the surface of Dean’s beautiful green eye, where we see, at last, Dean in hell. He’s all alone, and with a blood-filled mouth and hooks digging into his flesh to hold him in place, he screams for Sam. Over and over and over. And then the screen goes blank. It’s a cliffhanger, and a painful one. Dean is dead, he’s gone to the pit, and there was nothing Sam could do to save him.
Or was there? And is there?
I don’t want to speculate because it’s not in my nature, besides it’ll mess up the purity of the moment - so beautifully filmed that the emotions come out of the screen like punches, one after the other. But something happened here, something Show left purposefully ambiguous as to keep us on tenterhooks until new episodes start arriving. Meanwhile, the questions start piling up: What is hell? Did Dean go there? And if not, where is he?
I think he’s not in hell, and it’s not just me knowing with my TV trained brain that one of the stars of Show will be back next season, it’s the way it was done. Now, I don’t know about you, but my version of hell comes from Disney. It’s full of orange and red flames and those little imps who poke at the damned with tiny black pitchforks. Even less cartoonish versions of hell usually include lakes of orange and red fire, smoking sulphur and brimstone, devils and demons, the screams of the souls of the damned, and everyone is naked. Besides, Kripke said in a variety of ways that he didn’t want to show hell because the budget could never do it justice and the implication I got was that Dean wasn’t actually going to go there.
Besides, this vision of hell contains none of these things I just talked about, plus, as you know if you’ve seen the ep, Dean’s got clothes on. And as soon as I got over feeling cheated about this, I realized that the color scheme was similar to Dean’s earlier nightmares. I’m thinking that Dean is not really in hell, but trapped in his own psyche, and only Sam can get him out.
We do make our own hell, you know. For me, it’s the guy from Accounting who always wants to tell me, down to the last detail, about the crabgrass he spent all week eradicating from his lawn. (Like, who cares already!) For Dean, hell is anywhere where there is no Sam, which is not something any fangirl needed Show to point out. But whether it’s all in Dean’s head (and the cross-girders pattern was a little reminiscent of brain synapses), or whether he is really in the pit, as the episodes ends, the Orphan is in tears, a huddled mess on one end of the couch. The crack whore, who has just finished her last dime bag, realizes suddenly that there isn’t going to be anymore crack until September begins to weep.
Ever see a crack whore cry? It’s not a pretty sight. And all of us, the crack whore, the Orphan, and me, are a mess because we have to wait to find out what really happened (and what will happen), until Season 4 (YEAH!) starts. But what Show doesn’t realize is that there’ll be a lot of us fangirls sitting in corners rocking, filled with useless crack yearnings that only Show can satisfy. And let me say this before I go on: I fell in love with Dean all over again. Sam, you know, big, tall, gorgeous, emo Sam, complete with Samhair, yeah, he was coming in fast on the rail on the inside, the dark horse for ages now, and was about to take over. Oh, but Dean, Dean, Dean, he really slayed me this time around. Only Dean can say so much without saying anything at all; only Dean can cry without crying. I am a rock solid Deangirl once again. Sorry, Sammy, better luck next season.
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.
Never miss an update. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email or subscribe via RSS
Stumble it!
