“While what? I watch helplessly from the sidelines? I don’t think so.” - Helen, The Incredibles

Necrophilia Wins by a Mile!
by Sylvia Bond
Supernatural Episode Review – Season Four, Episode 9
“I Know What You Did Last Summer”

Apart from the fannish screaming I can hear ringing in my ears about this ep, I can’t say I’ve anything to complain about because it pleased me greatly; it had everything I wanted and almost nothing I didn’t. I can’t even really think of what it would have taken for this ep to have pressed more of my “I want” buttons, unless it was to have a miraculous return of The Dad, come down from heaven, or, better yet, a sepia-toned flashback of him barking out orders to his boys in that gravelly yet velvet-soft voice of his. But you can’t have everything you want, though, sometimes, you get exactly what you have been asking for.

This ep has it all. A dither in the Impala. In the rain. A dither in a motel. A COW who wasn’t  pretty in a compartmentalized, TV-ish kind of way. First AID! Flashbacks and lots of ‘em! Drunk Sam. MORE drunk Sam. Drunk, stumbling Sam. Whumpage on a drunk and stumbling Sam. Belligerent Sam. Sarcastic Sam. And lastly, but not leastly, NEKKED Sam. Well, half-nekked anyway, and what a nice view it was so smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. But mostly? Mostly what I enjoyed was the fact that during the course of this ep, Padalecki finally got to. Strutt. His. STUFF.

The basic plot is that there’s this crazy chick whose name is Anne or Shirley or something like that. She can hear angels talking to each other in her mind, so, naturally, she gets locked up. Using what appears to be “sidekick kid” powers, she escapes, and Ruby informs our brave boys that they must find her before the demons do. This leads us all on a dangerous game of hide and seek, as in, the boys seek Anne Shirley, they find her, they hide her, some demons show up, at which point they all get separated, and they to find her again, and then the angels show up, saying that she must be destroyed, and then the ep stops because it’s to be continued next week. That’s all you really need to know about the plot, which provided a marvelous set of bookends for all the juicy goodness inside. A simple framework, if you will, for a masterpiece of Winchester Wonder.

The opening salvo for this particular ep is Sam drunk in a bar, playing pool and flinging loosing bets around like a drowning man. Dean walks in, or rather, STRUTS in, and starts complaining to the other player that Sam is too drunk to know what he’s doing and could the guy give Sam a little leeway? Lo and behold, it occurs to me that the brothers are doing a little sting action and the mark seems unaware that he’s about to be taken for a ride. Just as Sam spots that skank Ruby and the whole game is off, and just as Sam lays down his pool stick, I realize that I’ve been given a little slice of Winchester life.  How much of their livelihood is made from pool sharking as compared to credit card scams is unknown, but I enjoyed watching it happen in Real Time, and liked being finally able to see the thing we’ve heard tell of, and the facial expressions between the brothers as they play the scam. What makes it even better is the fact that it’s Dean who is the straight guy in this scenario and it’s SAM who is playing pool and, had the game continued, would have wiped the board with that guy. (Not to mention the lovely long angles of Sam’s arms reaching across that pool cue, and his adorable, devilish expression when he knows he’s set the guy up good and proper.)

Upon that skank Ruby’s advice, the boys investigate the disappearance of Anne Shirley, who escaped from the asylum. There’s the usual boys in suits, talking to a civilian and trying to fit in when you and I know that either Dean or Sam could so easily end up in a place like that should the wrong word get out. Then the boys trot on over to Anne Shirley’s parent’s house where they discover two dead bodies and leave their fingerprints everywhere.

Now, the last name of Milton might have some significance if I stopped long enough to think about it, but I’m more distracted by why we keep seeing boys’ reflections in various mirrors rather than the boys themselves. Not that I mind such a focus, as a flipped image of either Sam or Dean is better than no image at all, but mirrors? They reflect the soul and capture it, so I’m thinking there’s something to that only I don’t know what because Sam and Dean look so nice and tidy in suits and ties and I’m distracted. (Sam’s sigh upon discovering the dead bodies says so much more about his being too battered by life to spare any sympathy for anyone else than any dialog ever could.)

Then at the church, we meet up again with the COW, Anne Shirley, whom we first saw in the asylum. The COW was an interesting piece of work, wasn’t she? Not only can she hear angels talking to each other, she’s ordinary looking, a wee slip of a thing against the ecclesiastical purple windows of the church and the white, white, white of the hospital bed. She’s got rather ratty, overly dyed hair, a pale face with big, orphan-dark eyes. I liked that she seemed pretty calm while being told she was crazy, and I particularly liked her “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” advice when she tells her counselor that the end of the world is coming.

There was lots to like about her, so much so that I fear for her continued existence in Show; I predict that she’ll be dead by the end of the next ep for any number of reasons, all which have to do with how real she felt, how organic. And by that I mean the plot puts her sensibly in Sam and Dean’s way, via Ruby, and she’s significant to the flow of what’s happening to THEM, that is, why she’s there is not about her, not really. And, sadly, Show tends to off secondary characters with impunity, especially the interesting ones.

One of her best qualities, besides her earnestness, is the fact that she knows about the boys before she meets them. To her, Sam’s the famous Sam Winchester, and, better yet, his brother is known to her as THE Dean (as in the One and Only!), which lights up Dean’s face like Christmas morning. He likes having his reputation precede him, don’t you think? Anyway, at one point, Dean refers to her listening in to Angel Radio, which made me think of Radio Free Europe, which is a radio station that provides uncensored news in countries where free press is banned.

My first encounter with RFE was when I was living in Germany when the Cold War was still in sway, and the Berlin Wall seemed a permanent scar on the landscape. We (living in West Germany) would see these commercials on TV that spoke of the value of RFE and the fact that if you got caught not only providing information but also just listening, it could be a death sentence. All of which upped the ante for me on what Anne Shirley was doing, and I could see it from afar what the problem was. If the demons got her, they could force her to tell them what the angels were talking about. I couldn’t see the angels suffering her to live if she was that great a threat to their battle against evil, which they are already loosing. So rather than let her fall into demon hands, the angels show up at the end and announce that they have to kill her. Kind of like destroying a radio station in order to keep the Communists from finding the main transmitter. So I’ll be sad to see her go, but go she must to protect the Greater Good.

As for the first aid, I’ve long bemoaned that for all the boys get mangled, we never get to see them patching either themselves or each other up. To me it stands to reason that first aid would substantiate a large part of the boys’ experience; for Show to ignore this (especially in favor of loosely conceived female guest stars who inevitably die nekked in the shower) is really a waste of screen time. There have times where first aid has occurred, however I can count them on one hand and still have a finger and a thumb left over. For four seasons of whumpage and limpage, it’s a pretty sparse representation.

Until now. This particularly edible scene opens with Sam stitching himself up after he and Dean hurled themselves through a window to escape the demon Aristotle. Or Aristide. Or something like that. Anyway, Sam’s using one of those curved needles, and the gash in his arm looks horrid and deep. Sam’s all brave and bloody and sewing His Own Arm (without the benefit, one assumes, of a shot of lidocane), as the blood slips realistically down his skin as he applies pressure by pulling on the needle, and then on the thread with his teeth (nice close up there!) to tie one of those suture knots you hear tell of. I don’t think I’ve ever been so pleased or so convinced by a first aid scene than this.

Meanwhile, over at the sink, Dean is spitting up blood and tossing back large mouthfuls of what is most assuredly whiskey. I love men who spit well, and Dean’s at the top of my list. He’s covered with blood splotches and looks pretty banged up, and I admire his reflection in the mirror. For a moment, I wonder why Dean isn’t patching his brother up, and was on the verge of writing an angry letter to Show for messing up such a Golden Opportunity, when Dean says, “Hurry up, I’ve got a dislocated shoulder over here.”

And doesn’t that make sense? Dean can’t help Sam because his shoulder is out of joint, he’s in a great deal of pain, and I can see it coming. Oh, yes indeedy. Sam finishes up the sewing by snipping off the end of the thread. When he pours the whiskey over his wound, because it’s the only anesthetic at hand, Sam grunts and groans while Dean looks on, grimacing in sympathy. It’s already a good, brotherly moment, them sharing what they have shared so many times, and then it gets even better.

Dean bends over (making the most adorable “I’m ready for pain” face), and Sam starts to count one, two, three, and actually pops the shoulder back in on “one.” Swearing, Dean paces across the room, sucking back more whiskey, and I for one was completely satisfied with this scene. Why? Because there’s blood-soaked shirts (Sam), and ice packs (for Dean’s shoulder), wincing (both Sam and Dean), loads of whiskey, and basically a sense of reality, where the boys have to hole up and lick their respective wounds. I enjoyed the matter-of-fact way that they go about their business, their wordless gestures and looks to communicate pain, desire for the whiskey, and the whole f’d up nature of their current gig. Plus, I like Dean’s trust in Sam (even after all is said and done) where he can bend over like that and know that Sam knows what to do with his shoulder.

There’s a number of scenes with that skank Ruby and I think the best part for me was Dean’s continued reaction to her. Each time they meet up with her, whereas Sam responds to her with soft, urgent tones as if he trusts her to know what to do, Dean reacts rather like he wouldn’t spit on her EVEN if she was on fire. Even when he realizes that Ruby is the one responsible for Sam being alive (having saved him from both a pair of demons and his own mangled path of self-destruction), he can’t bring himself to say anything nice. Yeah, it’s in his eyes, but he mostly delivers “well” and “you know” until Ruby stops him from straining himself. He knows she’s a demon, and there’s no power on earth that will ever make him forget that. That’s Dean exactly, and I appreciate the writer(s) who got their Dean notes out and put them to good use.

Then there were the flashbacks about Sam’s Past. Flashbacks: Love ‘em or hate ‘em. Discuss. I love them, I do. I love the way they explain things, I love the perspective they bring, and although my friend in Alaska (she moved there recently from Texas and thank goodness for long distance calling plans) pointed out that it would have been nice to get that skank Ruby’s story (and her relationship to Sam) in Real Time, it was still nice to find out what the hell happened while Dean was in hell to bring Sam to the sorry state of Consorting with Demons. And not only that but Cavorting with them as well, and more about that in a bit. Back to the flashbacks.

The first one happens as Sam and Dean drive in the Impala through the dark night, snipping at each other. Dean’s pissed about the fact that Sam’s been hanging out with Ruby. Then Sam snaps rather sarcastically that they could trade stories, and pot, meet kettle, etc. It’s terribly brotherly and very, very fun, because the silence that follows this remark stretches on FOREVER. It takes a brave Camera Guy (and director) to let the camera run and run while the Sound Guy (or Gal) has nothing to do but listen for pops and hisses, but the result of which is a completely realistic silence that makes me nod my head with pleasure and give those involved a Gold Star. Nice going! The second series of flashbacks begin when the boys, battered and bruised and laying low, begin to talk (rather than dither), with Dean being rather sweet about it, that he needs to know what’s going on with Sam. Either way, I thought the flashbacks were introduced well, and there were plenty of them, almost enough to satisfy even me.

I loved all the flashback scenes terribly well because they show me what Sam was like without Dean, and this is not the Sam of “Mystery Spot,” who ate cleanly and organized both his charts and his weapons with the scary attention to detail of a Unabomber. No. This Sam drinks, and not only that, he drinks a lot. Hard liquor, straight from the bottle, no pretense of measuring out two fingers into a glass and then making it a double. He just opens ‘er up and sucks it back. And then he stumbles, over gravel, down hallways, and across rooms, shoving aside the detritus from all his days and nights of self-neglect, making room for the current day of hopelessness. He stumbles as if he cannot bear to lift his feet, as if the energy even of breathing is too much for him.

His clothes are untucked, his hair askew, and all the while, the expression on his face tells me that he wishes that the earth would just open up and swallow him whole. And this is where Padalecki is able to show what he can do. For ages now, he’s been playing the “sidekick kid,” the rather prissy and prim little brother, and relegated to being the straight man to Ackle’s Dean, and was rather treated like a set of guest towels. You know the ones. They’re expensive and pretty, and no one can ever bring themselves to use them because, really, they’re just for show. Padalecki’s Sam was becoming like window dressing, and you can only look at it for so long before you begin to ask yourself, “Well, what can he do?”

A lot, apparently, because it’s mostly Padalecki alone on the stage where his Sam reacts to the world almost without assistance from any other characters. He does a bangup job of it, I’d say, not only because the length and breadth of him is a delight unto my eyes, but because I found his performance rather riveting. I’m always on the verge of saying that Padalecki plays a good drunk because he must have a lot of drunk friends, but even in my head that sounds wrong, so I edit myself and say that he must have watched a lot of drunk people because he’s got it down pat. And different kinds of drunks, too, all in the same two stages of the Kubler-Ross model, over and over, anger and depression, because it’s simply beyond Sam’s capacity to adapt to his situation. Padalecki gets that, that an angry drunk one day is going to behave differently than an angry drunk the next day.

Yes, I understand that the Makeup People must have a lot of drunk friends as well, because Sam shifts from being flushed to pale (sometimes with circles under his eyes worthy of the most pathetic orphan, sometimes with that red sear that you see when the person is exhausted), but it’s Padalecki who does that curled lip of disdain at a world that cannot possibly understand what he’s going through, who flails those long arms of his to show how badly Sam is out of control, and who hunches that sculpted back over the table, attempting to load bullets into Dean’s gun (in a potentially suicidal way) while he takes a swig of Jim Beam.

It’s almost like Padalecki sat down with me and, pen and paper in hand, asked me to list for him those characteristics and attributes I would like to see Sam portray whilst being terribly depressed about Dean. “He should be miserable with grief,” I would have said, “he should drink a lot, and make it interesting with lots of visual texture, have him live like he’s on skid row, and, if you could, have him wear a nice, skimming grey t-shirt.” To which Padalecki would have said, “What about the Carhartt jacket, the one with the hoodie?” (He’s a very meticulous sort.) “Yes,” I’d say. “Make sure he wears that too, because it brings back the old days when he was innocent and sweet.”

Sam is a mess, and while it was most assuredly the script that indicates this, it’s Padalecki who stomps perfectly through the squalid squat where Sam is holing up, his slightly unfocused and bleary eyes not seeing the peeling wallpaper or the scuttle of cockroaches or the moldy, lead-based paint, nor even his own lack of grooming and self-care. All the time Padalecki is making Sam stare into the middle distance, at the wreck of his Dean-less world, I had the comfortable feeling that Padalecki gets it. That he understands his character so well that the ramifications of Sam’s loosing Dean come out through every pore, every twitch, every sideways roll of his eyes; every breath Padalecki takes contains the litany of Sam’s ever-present and suicidal grief.

There were so many versions of Sam that Padalecki brought to the table, I was like a pig in mud, enjoying it even though Sam was suffering. There was trembling-lip Sammy at the crossroads. There was depressed Sammy, loading bullets into a gun, because he’s about to swallow them. There was killer Sammy in the squat in the woods. (The scene where he sits in the abandoned house whose walls are so ruined that branches can be seen through the slats is my favorite. There’s just so much desolation and loneliness there, which switches to complete bad-assery as Sam gets up and plants the sawed off on the panels of the door as he answers the knock on the other side.)  There was end-of-his-rope Sammy, stuck in a motel with Ruby (who’s brought her certificate of having not taken over a live girl but instead a dead one). Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

So while I rolled (and rolled) in all this Padalecki-generated goodness, poor Sam is having a hell of a time, because UP comes this scene. This is the one that had me squirming in my seat and half covering my eyes with my fingers, but peeking, you know, because I could not resist, especially not if Show was going to go THERE. And oh, they WENT. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion, nothing and nobody could stop either of them; it was horrible and wonderful at the same time.

This is the scene that has fans screaming. They’re screaming still. The skank Ruby has proven to be a thorn in the collective side of fandom for a number of reasons. Last season it was because many didn’t like the actress who played her. (Which I could care less about, what mattered to me was the amounts of screen time she stole from the boys.) This season, starting with the very first ep, it was the implication of the relationship between her and Sam. What happens to her and with her is a source of the fannish screaming. Listen. If you hold your head just right and squint, and if the wind is coming from the east like there’s a weather inversion, you can hear it.

And why? Because, you see, if Sam’s sleeping with the demon Ruby, it’s either rape (because the woman inside the body has no opportunity to say no) or necrophilia (because the dead body Ruby is inhabiting is dead, and that’s just plain gross). Either way, Sam can’t win for loosing, and the skank Ruby (who is a demon, remember) has the fans Up in Arms in her defense. Say what? She’s a demon, hello. (Plus, there was that fun little moment when Padalecki stepped up and actually deigned to speculate that Sam and Ruby were exchanging more than just words, if you get my meaning, and didn’t THAT fan the flames of People Who Like to Get Upset and Expect TV Shows to Fairly Represent Demons and Women.)

Here, Ruby’s trying to console Sam about the loss of his Dean; I loved the moment when he shuts her the HELL up, because nobody, but nobody gets to talk to Sam about that. So there’s Ruby, and for some reason she’s hitched her wagon to Sam’s star and wants to keep him well content (and, might one add, tame?), and so she ups and kisses him. I LOVE Sam’s reaction, and Padalecki plays this so well, reaching inside of his soul for Sam’s reaction of being confronted with something that he might want (and might very well need) but knows he can’t and should not have, that is wrong on so many levels that there aren’t even enough words to describe just how wrong it is. He flings her away like he’s been burned, hand wiping at his mouth convulsively, like he just threw up in it a little, and knowing she’s a dead body AND a demon, it’s just to much for him. It’s excellent stuff.

Ruby is not one to be put off so easily, and so she slinks up to Sam, plants herself between those oh-so-masculine thighs, and purring, rubbing up against him and saying all sorts of naughty girl things and basically flings herself at Sam. I got the feeling that this was done on purpose, so that the audience would know that most of this is not Sam’s fault. The boy’s not gotten any in months, he’s lonely, alone, and missing his Dean, with a head full of drink and a body riddled with despair, he would have to be superhuman to resist her. It’s not rape if she jumps him, right?

Well, it’s not even that, because what it is is necrophilia, because the only thing keeping that body animated and free from worms and rot is the demon possessing it. And that’s just gross. (As well as being a felony or a misdemeanor in most states.) But I think, more than the issue of whether it’s a lack of consent or the lack of ethics is the idea that Sam is he’s consorting with a demon and somewhere in the Bible it says that you ought not to do that. But then, he’s been doing that for AGES, so really, him sleeping with her now is no worse than the fact that he’s dealing with her at all. He might as well as slept with her from the drop for all he’s suffered her to live since then. And after that, what more is a little spit and semen going to hurt?

That particular argument settled in my head, I can say, being terribly honest, that I rather, uh, liked the scene that starts with her throwing herself sluttily at Sam and ends in the only way it decently could, and that is with a fade to black. In between, there is nothing but porny goodness, and again it was like Padalecki had stopped by to take notes (or read my mind) because my “I want” list, which contained Sam’s nekked nudity, among other things, was fulfilled to a nicety. I can say that typically I do not like watching scenes like this on TV; because it’s TV (rather than cable) there’s only so much they can do and the kissing typically falls short of either reality or a turn-on factor, and can you say boring? But here I watched with my mouth open, uneasily bestirred, because Padalecki plays it like Sam’s aching for air, like he’s not breathed since Dean died and the only source of oxygen is that skank Ruby.

Not only is Sam covered with grit and sweat from burying a dead body, but also with giant, grabby hands, he pulls her to him, rips off her shirt and they go at it, mouths and skin, suggesting soon-to-come acts of depravity, oral and whatnot. And then she takes HIS shirt off, and there’s hands reaching between bodies, here we go. There’s deltoids and trapezoids, biceps and triceps, clavicle bones and ribs, all covered with Sam’s tawny, shimmering-with-sweat skin. And that HAIR, spilling darkly across the long bones of his marvelous face, and oh. I think I just went up in flames, my couch is on fire, and I buy the whole thing, and am not willing to make any apology for it. To quote the movie “Chicago,” it’s reprehensible, but not indefensible. (Either for Sam or for me. What’s a girl to do, anyway, when Padalecki takes off his shirt like that, I ask you!)

For me the irony is that this is the guy who, in the first episode was rolling his eyes and feeling holier-than-thou about the fact that his brother and The Dad were acquiring illicit funds from credit card scams. His pre-law studies at Stanford gave him a lofty perch indeed from which to judge everyone, especially with regards to Dean’s sleeping with every Terakian slave girl and moon princess on the show, because Sam only slept with girls with whom he had an emotional connection, and oh, how the mighty have fallen.

He is a glorious mess indeed, but more important than the actual issue of the fact that he’s sleeping with a demon is the fact that Sam has fallen low enough so that this act seems like a good idea. He’s lost everyone, and not only that, this evil creature is the only thing he can relate to, the only one who seems to understand that with power comes responsibility, and the fact that the whole “I ingested demon blood when I was a mere babe” idea has been SCREAMING in his head for over a year. There’s no Dean around to keep the screams at bay, there’s nothing left to live for except revenge, in fact, there’s nothing else but this demon standing in front of him offering succor and surcease, and so what’s a baby brother to do? The event marks Sam’s even further fall from grace, and throw ‘em if you got ‘em, but remember, we’re all living in glass houses.

Dean, meanwhile, has been listening to these flashbacks, and he stops Sam to say, “Could you please leave out all the nakedness,” and it makes me giggle to think that Sam has been giving his brother THAT much detail, but maybe, seeing as how close they always have been, it doesn’t surprise me overly much. At the same time, I was not surprised by Dean’s less than astonished reaction. Sure he was grossed out, but he wasn’t screaming. I felt that Dean’s response would be mine, that Sam had long ago started sleeping with the enemy, and maybe he was glad his little brother got laid finally. (I also don’t fear for the Cock of Doom curse to take effect, seeing as how Ruby’s already dead.)

As for Ruby, I have had the most ambivalent feelings towards her because while she might be able to help Sam (and seems to be the only one not only not denying what and who he is, but accepting him at the same time), I still don’t think she’s playing straight with him. Sam’s defense of his relationship with her is that he’s using evil to fight a greater evil. He’s practical, it’s expedient, and so The-Dad-Like, but it’s a false grace, and makes me feel that the reason the crossroads demon didn’t want Sam’s soul is because hell has already got its hooks in there. Poor Sam. Poor lost boy.

Lots of stuff happens after the last flashback, good stuff, fun stuff, and I’d love to talk about it all but I’ve really reached my word limit! For example, there’s another flashback, a rescue scene, and then there’s the maid who brings the towels who made a better Ruby than the real one. Or how about the moment where when Ruby wants to know where the demon-killing knife is, Dean turns Sam in quicker than that, giving us a brilliant grin that earns him absolutely no forgiveness whatsoever. There’s awkwardness between Dean and Ruby, Sam comforts Anne Shirley when she grieves for her parents, and then the angels show up because the fun’s over. Such killjoys, those angels. I for one want to see them get their comeuppance, but not before torturing the boys first. And lastly, what about Aristotle. Or Aristide. Or whoever. The guy who knew Dean from hell, and who Dean knew also? Show kills me with this kind of stuff and I for one can NOT wait for the next ep.

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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