“At last, we can retire and give up this life of crime.” - Zoe

Oh, My GOD, It’s Linda Blair
by Sylvia Bond
Supernatural Episode Review, Season Two - Episode 7
“The Usual Suspects”

Rather like a pair of elderly bulldogs who insist on escaping from their yard to depart for destinations as yet unknown, the Winchester boys are KNOWN to the police. Thusly, they are arrested. Isn’t that nice? At least it’s nice for me, even if not for them, because I enjoy the realism and the way this connects with the fact that they are wanted men. Apparently Dean gets arrested first, which begs the question, what foolish thing was he up to in order to call attention to himself like that? (Apparently he got caught bloody handed by the body of some dead chick. Who was, interestingly enough, appropriately and REALISTICALLY dressed for mourning her late husband in ratty t-shirt, sloppy pants, and an oversized bathrobe. Hurray for Show!)

And then, the police descend upon Sam, who is holed up in some dive GREEN motel somewhere in Baltimore, Maryland. The nicest people live in Baltimore, you know, so I’m not sure why they would have such an ugly motel, but they do. Anyway, right behind the squad of police all pointing their junk at Sam, in walks Linda Blair, and bright as a penny, she asks, “Going somewhere, Sam?”

Let’s talk about Linda Blair for a minute. To ignore the fact that she guest stars in this episode would be disingenuous, not to mention a blatant lie about the fact that it totally freaked me out to see her. Years back, I saw The Exorcist on the big screen, not during the original run, but several years later when my boyfriend at the time thought it would be a GOOD idea to take me to see this thing. Maybe he thought I’d cling to him during the scary parts, but I was shocked to my core and absolutely horrified and freaked by the entire movie, and definitely not up for any nookie then or ever with him. (We broke up about a month later.) Not long after that, I went on a tour of some Hollywood back lots (my friend Mike’s dad was a security guard at a studio and had ALL the keys), I ran up against the freaking statue that they used for Pazuzu and nearly had a heart attack. To this day, I refuse to watch anything to do with this movie, any makings of, documentaries, histories, film reviews, anything. Because if I see images of that icy bedroom and hear Regan’s gravelly voice? I can’t sleep for a week.

So when I got wind that Linda Blair (I am unable to refer to her as just Linda, for some reason) was going to be in an episode with MY boys, I just about lost it. Not that I thought she’d ruin it, she’s a fine actress, as I recall, but I knew that every time I looked at her, I was going to think about, you know, the devil. Not just any demon, which this show is full of, but THE devil. No, no, no, that’s just too rich for my blood, no thank you. But I had to watch it, don’t you see? Sam and Dean, my own true loves, are in it, so there was no getting around Linda Blair. So I girded my loins, pulled up my big girl panties, and saddled up.

And it wasn’t so bad, I’ll admit that now. Linda Blair is older (as are we all), so gone is the fresh-faced girl with that look in her eye (you know the one at the end of the movie, when she looks at the priest’s collar), that says, “Yup, uh-huh, I’ve met the devil, you bet.” (Somehow that was almost the scariest part of the movie.) Instead she is a fully grown woman with a marvelous mop of sun-streaked hair, a shy little smile, and her eyes sparkle in a way that tells me that long gone is the devil, and it was just a movie anyway, wasn’t it? Yeah, uh-huh, you go Linda Blair, and thanks so much for giving me nightmares FOREVER.

I never really did get over Linda Blair being there (and was a tad peeved that there was a whole lot of her and not a lot of the boys together), but I went with it. Especially in light of the clever and twisty scene between her and Sammy boy. Linda Blair interrogates, cajoles, and threatens, as well as promises Sam that if he gives her what she needs to know, Sammy can be shed of big brother and soon be happily ensconced in his regularly scheduled life. (Think he was tempted?) At first Sam is totally not jiggy with being arrested, it’s just not his thing, but he’s lovely as he tries to pull himself small, folding his arms to his chest, ducking his chin so that his Samhair falls into his dark, jade green eyes. He’s not going to tell her anything, see? But the moment she actually threatens Dean, Sam undergoes a change.

He laughs, ha ha ha, flips his head back to send his hair flying out of his eyes, turns a chair around backwards (cause he’s sassy like that), and then straddles it with his, GUH, thighs. Then he starts telling her the story, his version of the story, and of course, it is all lies. But since he tells the lies in his Sammy way, with that voice and that particular tip of the head that says, “I’m so earnest and nice here, you might as well believe me,” you’d think Linda Blair would fall right over for it. She doesn’t, of course, because she’s a good cop and she pays attention.

What she’s missing here is just how damn beautiful Sam is in this scene. I’ll go on about it, shall I? To begin with, he’s in the right colors, a clear, dark blue shirt with a white t-shirt underneath. Plus, the shirt is flannel, which I adore on a man because it’s so soft; it makes me want to put my face against his chest and listen to his manly heartbeat. Then there’s the lighting, which, for some reason, gives the camera (and me) access to Sam’s (and Padalecki’s) great bone structure. The man’s got long bones, obviously, but here, with the overhead halogens, you can see grace and depth of his jawbones, and the marvelous density of his mighty brow. And then there’s the almondy tilt to his eyes, jade green and dark here, that flicker clear and bright beneath the shaggy mop of bangs.

Yeah, I’m not in love with the middle part of his hair so much, for reasons I have stated before, but I’m in love with his whole look. His hair looks like the character slept with it wet and then ran his hand (the other one, being in a cast, is not much help), and ta da, he was ready for his day. And frankly, when you look as good as this guy does here, with classic, out-of-control Samhair and that cotton candy mouth, there’s not much more you need to do. Anything else would be overkill. (The comment about the brothers seeing the second biggest ball of string in the continental U.S always makes me wonder not where THE biggest ball of string is located, but instead whether there are actually big balls of string outside the continental U.S. I mean, what other country would think it would be a good idea to collect string just to look at?)

And the scene itself is fun, because you see Sam telling the story of what he wants her to think happened, sandwiched in between what really happened, and this includes scenes of Dean and Sam on a gig, trying to figure out what’s going down. Dean and Sam have some funny, funny moments here, which are classic enough (albeit short) so that fans refer to this ep through them. Like the one where the boys are getting coffee and Dean refers to Sam as Skully. Sam says, “You’re Skully” (with a lovely petulant pout on his sugar sweet lips as he tosses the newspaper at Dean), to which Dean replies, “No, I’m Mulder. You’re the red-headed woman.” Oh Dean, you know Sam doesn’t actually have red hair, don’t you?

Then there’s the bit where they’re dressed like insurance salesmen (looking more like mischievous schoolboys), and the look Sam gives Dean when he steps out of line. Dean’s going on and on, wanting the chick to tell him about how weird things were getting before her husband died. He’s terribly cute here as he almost salivates at the thought of all the cool things she’s going to tell him. Sam’s expression is pure law-abiding, let’s-keep-things-normal-here-Dean and you-better-mind-me-boy, and definitely does the trick.

Then there’s the one that’s the most fun, because as Sam is trying to break into the chick’s dead husband’s laptop, Dean’s bored so he starts making mouth noises. Clock noises, tick tock, tick tock, and then, finally, with that juicy mouth of his, raspberries. Which finally sends Sam over the edge with a “Dude, SERIOUSLY!” to shut Dean up. Fans of the show say that to each other to this very day, with much pleasure and delight. What I like is the idea that, in spite of the training the boys have in Waiting, sometimes Dean gets bored. Sometimes he reverts to his inner ten-year-old self who might not always on the job, who might get distracted by mouth noises or a splinter he found in his thumb, and might just want to go play on the swings, and do that thing that brave kids do, which is jump off the swing when it’s at it’s highest point. Yeah, I can see Dean being a daredevil on the playground.

Anyway, between the truth and the lies (which Sam tells SO well), the MOW of the week is revealed as being a ghost chick that might go by the name of Dana Shulps but actually turns out to be a death omen. (Someone killed her and she’s trying to warn anyone else who might be marked for death.) What I liked here was Show’s sophisticated development of this storyline, it watched like a fine mystery, with the clues coming down slowly and not easily. Well actually, there’s one main clue and that is the phrase “danashulps” that keeps appearing everywhere and on everything. It’s on the dead chick’s fax machine, it’s on glass tables (showing up when Sammy blows his soft, delicious breath over it), it’s on printouts, it’s on Linda Blair’s computer, and finally, when Linda Blair visits the ladies, it’s on the mirror. It’s then that the ghost visits her, and Linda Blair is savvy enough to realize that something’s amiss here. (What I want to know is whether Linda Blair got any flashbacks to her earlier, uh, work during the filming of this particular scene.)

At various points Linda Blair talks with her boyfriend, some lunkhead named Pete. (I like to think of him as Bad Pete, because from the get go he’s obviously not a nice character.) And you know how I know he’s a lunkhead? Because when Linda Blair brings her doubts to him, that there was no motive and no weapon involved, so thusly Dean might not be guilty of killing the dead chick, Bad Pete pulls her into a side hallway. He murmurs at her, chucks her on the chin, and convinces her she just thinks she’s got doubts, but she doesn’t really. Bad Pete made my blood boil; I had a boyfriend like that once who, when I would tell him I wanted to do thus-and-such-a-thing, he would say, “You don’t really, you just think that you do.” It was so confusing to me (and I was quite young) that it took me a while to figure out what he was doing. It’s very controlling and manipulative, and that’s what Bad Pete’s doing to Linda Blair here, though surely she should know better by now NOT to date at work? Let alone be taken in by a lunkhead like Bad Pete. (She even kisses him and it’s just, ug, gross.)

There’s a great scene where Sam and Dean are in separate interrogation rooms. Sam has already got a pen and paper, so he’s going at the whole danashulps thing, writing it down with casted fingers, and comes up with the fact that maybe it’s an anagram. In the other room, Dean is whispering to himself, coming up with the same thing. When he’s confronted by a lawyer who is SURE my darling boy could get the death penalty, Dean also gets a pen and paper to write a note to his brother. Delightfully, Dean holds his pen like a third-grader, and for some reason I love that about him. It’s like watching someone tie their shoes, and realizing that at some point, someone taught them how to make the bunny ears and which way to loop the shoelace. Nobody does it exactly the same, of course, but it’s like you get to see a bit of them that was frozen when they were five. Same here with Dean. He started writing like that early on and has ever since. What’s fun for fans (who aren’t obsessed with Dean’s writing style as I am) are the mirror images of Sam and Dean coming to the same conclusion even though they aren’t together. (Plus Dean’s handcuffed to a table here, which is, you know, it’s own kind of porn.)

Dean uses his lawyer to get a message to Sam, to tell his brother what he’s figured out about the anagram, that maybe the event that created the ghost happened on Ashland street, but also something else that took me a bit to figure out. The message is from Hilts to McQueen, Hilts being the character that Steve McQueen played in the movie The Great Escape. What Dean is telling Sam here is that he should make his escape while Dean distracts everyone in the police station. (Which he does in a very funny interrogation scene, which I’ll get to in a moment.) What intrigues me the most is the idea that Sam could have, apparently, broken out at any time. That he actually stuck around putting up with bad coffee and hard chairs because that’s where Dean was. That he suffered himself to be held at the police station until Dean gave him the signal. There’s something eerily powerful about that.

Anyway, the interrogation focuses on Dean, whom they tape while Dean confesses. What’s funny here is watching Dean tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but so help me God, he’d be sexy even if he wasn’t saying a word. The lighting guys are at it again, doing their bright and shiny best in all of Dean’s (and Ackle’s) scenes in the squad room. The set guys have put a table that reflects light up, and thusly we get, yeah, all those freckles, and the sparkles in Dean’s eyes, and the lovely swell of that raspberry mouth thrown into high relief. I wouldn’t say that what Dean was wearing stands out in my memory, but with a face like that, who cares what he’s wearing?

Dean runs through their current gig, and when he gets to the danashulps part of the problem, that’s when Linda Blair wakes up and gets out of bed. And yeah, I’ve not forgotten the funniest part of the taped interview, which is where Dean states his name for the record. He says, “My name is Dean Winchester. I’m an Aquarius. I like sunsets, long walks on the beach, and frisky women.” He all but winks and only fans are amused. The police are not, and neither is Bad Pete. (But who cares what THEY think!)

Linda Blair, now realizing that the boys might be on to something beyond her ken, goes alone to talk to Dean Winchester, one on one, so she can get the facts. I like how her character doesn’t totally believe him, but that she’s willing to try because she’s seen the evidence with her own eyes. The whole conversation between them is witty and clever, and then Dean wants to send her to Sam. She asks, “You’re giving up your brother?” because she’s still a cop and her reflexes are to uphold the law. Dean just gives her a look that says, “Right, yeah, like that’d ever happen.” Best of all, we learn how the Winchesters keep track of each other and it totally works. If you ever get separated, go to the first motel (not hotel, they’re too expensive), and check in under Jim Rockford. Your brother will find you.

I notice at this point (late in the ep because I’m a tad slow), that there are a lot of shout outs in this ep, and not, I’m thinking, by accident. Let’s see, there’s several X-Files and Skully and Mulder nods (about secrets, finding the truth, and whether Sam has red hair or not), two references to the movie The Shining (how difficult it is for spirits to get their messages across the veil), a major nod to The Great escape (i.e., instructions for Sam), that the boys call their shared lawyer Matlock (as a nod to the rumpled grey suit the lawyer wears, apparently), a little nod to the TV cop show C.H.I.P.S. (Bad Pete bears more than a passing resemblance to Frank Poncherello, though his smile isn’t, and never could be, as bright as Erik Estrada’s), and lastly here, The Rockford Files.

Jim Rockford, as many of you might remember, could be considered a 70’s era cousin to the Winchester boys. They both have cool muscle cars, though the Impala is a tad more powerful than Jim’s Pontiac Firebird. Both Jim and the boys dress in low-budget clothes, and while Jim lives on the grid and the boys off it, Jim is on the edge, and abides in a grotty trailer at the edge of a parking lot. The boys, similarly, abide in a string of grotty motels. Both of them want to avoid conflict (or interaction) with the police, and all of them march to the tune of their own drummer. So I’m not surprised, really, that the boys use Rockford as part of their brother code. And I love the fact that they have a code. I like to imagine the two of them, in their younger days, sitting in the back seat of the Impala as The Dad drives an endless highway, thinking up goofy ways to communicate.

Okay, back to the ep. At Dean’s behest, Linda Blair goes to see Sam. Obviously Sam’s expecting Dean, but we get a lovely taste of the outsider perspective as she follows along her partner-of-the-moment who’s more experienced than she is in things of the supernatural. It’s interesting to watch him become the “cop” in this scenario, asking Linda Blair if she recognizes the women in the photos he’s showing her. (Photos that he acquired by illicit means.) When she does, Sam decides they need to go looking for her, to salt and burn the bones. Linda Blair says, “Of course,” in that tone you use when you realize that the other person is following all the rules, but they’re his rules. Twilight zone rules, which make perfect sense if you are in the twilight zone. Which Linda Blair now is.

Off the two of them go, Sam looking yummy and EXTRA tall next to Linda Blair’s petite-ness, and that’s something I never thought I’d see: Linda Blair and my Sammy working together, her listening to him, her going along with it. Heck, when Linda Blair played Regan, Sammy (and thusly Padalecki) wasn’t even a twinkle in someone’s eye and I wonder if anyone has stopped along the way to have any Zen thoughts about two twigs in a river and all that. At any rate, the two of them locate the bones via EMF and Sam uses those mighty MIGHTY muscles of his to break down a brick wall. He starts with a crowbar or something and then ends with his elbow, and I know it’s just a set and that the Set Dressers made it easy and that Padalecki made it look real, but when I stay inside my suspended reality, it’s amazingly manly and strong and awesome the way he can do this! (I did worry about Padalecki throwing himself so much into the wall, and thus his character, that he might hurt his hand.)

Because the dead body has a necklace like Linda Blair’s, they figure out that Bad Pete has been a bad boy. Meanwhile, however, Bad Pete has taken Dean (oh no!) off in a van into the middle of the forest somewhere where it is obvious, even before the exposition, that Bad Pete is going to off Dean. But Sam knows that all county cars have a lo-jack on them to prevent county and city vehicles from being stolen. (Oh, like anyone would want to steal the dopey cars that the county gets! Besides which, why didn’t Linda Blair think of this?)

The bit with the lo-jack always makes me think of the scene in The Brady Bunch movie, where Greg and Marsha misinterpret the hijacker who’s trying to take their family station wagon. “This is a hijack,” he says. To which Greg and Marsha reply, “Hi, Jack, do you need a ride?” Anyway, while Dean is in dire peril, Sam and Linda Blair track them down, Linda shoots Bad Pete, and then realizes that Sam and Dean are the good guys. Or maybe she realizes that first, and then shoots Bad Pete, but no matter, the results are the same. Dawn rises in the forest and she lets them go. (I thought it was very interesting how the theme of shooting someone you love or care about for the greater good came up again.) As they walk down the road, Dean expresses a desire for some pea soup, a nice shout out to The Exorcist, which makes me glad because it’s nice to know that I’m not the ONLY one to have seen this movie. Although Sam and Dean probably laughed their asses off, having seen the real think like, about a gazillion times.

I liked this episode, even though there was no Impala to speak of; it is referenced but never seen. I missed that sleek black beast. However, we do get a mention of The Dad, who is missing, according to Linda Blair. It took me a while to figure out that this wasn’t a mistake of Show’s. While WE know that The Dad died and was cremated, he actually died under an assumed name, so this all makes sense. (I’m just glad to get even the merest mention of The Dad because fans miss The Dad, and Show was WRONG to let Jeffrey Dean Morgan escape their clutches so easily. They should have hung on to him by hook or by crook. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for a nice flashback with The Dad, which would be VERY easy to do. You hear me, Show?)

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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