Supernatural: What Is and What Should Never Be

Have You Been Drinking?
by Sylvia Bond
Supernatural Episode Review – Season 2, Episode 20
“What Is And What Should Never Be”

There’s something intriguing at the prospect of being able to see how your life would have been different if you hadn’t been in it, or if different things had happened instead of the ones that did, or any combination of the above where you get to see how much impact you had on the world. Because that’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? To know that we mattered in some way, that we were visible, that we left a mark? Thus follows this ep wherein a djinn allows Dean to have this very experience.

However. Since this is Supernatural, and since this whole situation involves a Winchester, naturally things are sad, get sadder, and then are the saddest they could possibly be. You’re not surprised, I wasn’t either, but it was how Show went about it that impressed me, plus there are many, many closeups of both boys, leaving me feeling like a fan in a candy store, even as I was looking for the tissue to mop my weeping eyes. Not to mention the fact that this ep raised serious and deep ideas that took me a bit by surprise.

Let’s cover the basic plot first. Sam is doing research in a motel while Dean is narrowing in on their search for a djinn. Because Dean is foolish enough to enter the abandoned warehouse all by himself, he naturally becomes victim to the djinn, and somehow enters a fantasy world where everything he ever wanted has come true. Eventually he figures out the various problems presented by this world, and comes to the painful conclusion that he must return to his own world, which he does by killing his fantasy self, and when he does, he and Sam are able to rescue one girl from the djinn, thus adding to their enormous tally of people they’ve saved while hunting evil.

The biggest chunk of what this ep is about is the form the fantasy world takes. In it, Dean lives with a nurse named Carmen, his mother lives alone in their childhood home, Sam lives in California with his girlfriend Jessica, and lastly but not leastly, The Dad is dead. Now, I’ve asked myself many times why this is so. That is, whether the fantasy is based completely on Dean’s desires, whether the fantasy is one of those where you get exactly what you want only not in the way you would have wanted it, or whether the djinn based the fantasy on his interpretations of what Dean wanted and screwed up a little.

Now, it would be cool to think that Dean’s perfect fantasy would have involved a life without The Dad, because that would raise all sorts of ideas in my head about how Dean’s subconscious works, and how he might love The Dad, and be proud of their work as hunters, he does not actually like The Dad very much. Which would put a different slant on everything that’s come before, all the conversations between him and Sam where Dean is always on the defense about The Dad’s choices, and open a whole new and interesting can of worms. But, knowing Dean like I do, tend to think it’s not that; his love and admiration for The Dad knows no bounds, and even if he has some resentment there, or some longing for normal, his role has been that of the good soldier, and as many of you know having families, as hard as we might try, our familial roles never change. They can’t. Your siblings won’t let you. Trust me, I’ve tried.

Anyway. I tend not to think it’s the second option either, because then that would mean that there is a purpose to the fantasy, like, to teach Dean a lesson about being careful what he wishes for and all that. But since we find out at the end of the ep that the djinn creates fantasies for his victims in order to keep them docile so he can feed off them (their energy, their life-force or whatever, being a staple in the djinn’s diet), the idea of a higher consciousness trying to teach a lesson doesn’t seem to fit the bill, here.

So I’m going to choose Door Number Three here, because it seems to me that the djinn, coming upon Dean rooting around in his warehouse, read his mind as quick as he could, and took what was there, getting superficial information about Dean’s deepest, innermost fantasies, and the biggest of which was that Dean wishes he hadn’t been raised a hunter, hadn’t lived the life of a hunter. Would that necessarily mean that Dean wanted The Dad to be dead and gone? No, but the djinn seeing the wish, interpreted the driving force behind the whole hunter business as being embodied by The Dad. So he got rid of him. And thus The Dad is there-but-not-there. (That is, The Dad was in the fantasy world, but died of a stroke before Dean arrived.)

So seeing that The Dad is dead, in this world Dean has new and different relationships with those around him, and it’s the relationships that bring this ep to life. He’s got Carmen, the nurse chick with whom he lives and who understands him enough to know that food at a five star restaurant will never be as good as a cheeseburger. What I like about his relationship with her is that he realizes it’s respectable and that that would be okay. But what I like best is the look on his face when he tells her that she’s “the one;” it’s a soft-eyed sweet expression, and it’s easy to see that Dean would throw it all away if he had someone like this in his life. Someone who understood him like that.

Then there’s The Mom, still alive, sporting Rapunzel-like tresses, and so accepting of Dean’s weird behavior and his odd questions about The Dad as only a Mom can. I love the moment where she touches his face and tells him to get some rest, it’s such a Mom thing to do, and something Dean never had. And, the life that she created (and represents), the house that she lives in, the soft colors and flowers that surround her (just check out the Victorian-style wall paper) are the antithesis of world where The Dad walked, and stalked, and hunted. The contrast is surreal, and sharpens the idea that a hunter’s life is just not normal. It’s not safe, it’s not sane, it’s barely consensual, and if you live it, places like the Winchester house are completely out of reach.

So Dean, being given the chance, rolls in it. He rolls on the couch, waking up there after having spent the night, looking about as beautiful as a man can. He rolls in the BLT on toast The Mom makes for him, making little moans as he eats with such passion and abandon that it makes me want a BLT even though I can’t stand them. He even rolls in mowing the lawn, which is an interesting scene, done to a riotous version of “It’s a Wonderful World,” and against a backdrop of the typical suburbia, complete with a white picket fence and some almost too-perfect climbing roses. But beneath the funny, the ha ha of “I’d never thought I’d seen Dean mowing a lawn,” is something profoundly sad, it gets to me every time I see this scene.

There he is, mowing the lawn (badly, I might add), working his ass off on a sunny day, happy as a lark like it’s a gift to get grass dust and clippings on your pants, and to have your ears ringing for hours from the sound of the blade, and the smell of gasoline in your nose and on your fingers. And then, after, sitting on the steps, drinking a beer as he admires his handiwork and the day, and so happy, his smile beaming so brightly that it could burn your retinas if you were to look directly at it. (Luckily we have the filter of film to save us from that messy fate.) It’s all very pretty to look at, but when I think about it, about his joy in the simple act of mowing the freaking lawn, it makes my throat close up a little and I have to look away.

Mowing a lawn is something so simple and basic and, to those of us with lawns, not very fun, but Dean, for all he’s eschewed normal and espoused living off the grid, the second he’s offered the alternative? He grabs for it with his whole body, and holds it so tightly you can almost see him shaking from it, the want of wanting, the ungettable get. Here it’s his, and in getting it, he realizes how much he’s always wanted it. And up comes the pain of regret and all that stuff, poking up through the skin of that beautiful face of his. Oh, the anguish of it all.

But worse than watching Dean getting exactly what he never realized he always wanted, was watching his relationship with Not-Sam. Not-Sam arrives from Stanford as Dean’s drinking his beer, and he’s brought Jessica with him. It’s fun to watch Dean embrace Jessica in a bear hug, but it’s not fun seeing the narrow-eyed disdain that Sam flings Dean’s way almost from the start. We see more of this as the family goes out to celebrate The Mom’s birthday, and where Not-Sam and Jessica announce that they are engaged. Dean is truly happy for Not-Sam and wants to celebrate some more. But each time he tries behaving as he normally would towards Not-Sam, their interactions are painful and show the distance between them. Not-Sam accuses Dean of drinking too much, too early, of being an asshat for stealing his prom date years before, and, worst of all, of being too familiar by calling Not-Sam “Sammy.”

That last bit seems to represent the entire problem in a nutshell; if Sam and Dean aren’t Sam and Dean, is it a world worth living in? I can see that Dean would be troubled by The Dad being dead, I can see him probably getting bored if he had too many lawns to mow, that he would get restless if he were to settle down forever, I can see him being able to solve these problems, but if he and Sam don’t get along? No, no, and just no. At which point Dean starts to investigate, and I’m firmly convinced that he wouldn’t have started poking around had he and Not-Sam been friends. This is the djinn’s first and last mistake in keeping Dean docile.

Which brings up the scene that I like to call the George Bailey scene for obvious reasons. First, I want to mention the image of Dean sitting stonily on the couch as he contemplates this life that would be perfect, except for the lack of Sam, and Dean’s so handsome when he’s upset like this, it almost seems cruel to admire the view. But I do. Anyway, he gets on the internet, and finds out that people he saved in the real world have died in the fantasy one, which is where it takes the George Bailey turn, in particular with regards to the plane crash from “Phantom Traveler.” Every one that the police officers, and doctors and journalists on board would have saved had they not died also died, because Dean wasn’t there to save them in the first place. Which makes me realize how the number of people Dean didn’t save could rise exponentially, not to mention the people The Dad didn’t save. It would number in the thousands. If you added in the number of people in turn that those people didn’t save? Hundreds of thousands.  (The newspaper article also mentions government workers but I’m not really sure how they could have saved anyone, but there you go. Maybe they created and passed a bill that actually did some good in the world, who knows.)

Dean marches off to the graveyard to have a chat with The Dad’s headstone. The lighting is beautiful, the night is dark, and the conversation is serious. Dean wants to know why he has to be the hero, why he can’t be happy, why he can’t have normal. Then, as Dean imagines that The Dad would say that weighed against all those other lives, the choice of Dean sacrificing his own is no contest, but I don’t for a minute imagine that The Dad would have said that exactly. There is duty and there is obligation, but it’s only Dean who thinks that his life has no worth when the other choice is someone else’s happiness. And here we have it again, it’s not only sad, it’s REALLY sad. Where in the world did Dean come up with this load of bull? Somewhere along the line his lack of self-worth was given nuclear powers or something, because it’s got a half-life of about a gazillion years.

However, I am treated to not one but TWO man-tears of pain, and have come to the conclusion AGAIN that no one cries as beautifully as Dean does. Or, to put the credit where it ought to go, no one cries as convincingly as Ackles does. Sometimes he cries all tight and fighting it, sometimes the tears just come without him moving a muscle. This time we get the latter, as the tears streak down his face like a one-two punch, and again I feel bad that watching Dean suffer gives me such pleasure, but I blame Ackles, I do. If he didn’t do it so well, it wouldn’t be fun, and I wouldn’t look forward to it so much. So, like when this scene opened, and Dean is angst personified, I was like, “C’mon, Ackles, BRING IT!” And he did. Like he always does, bless him.

After this, Dean determines that he needs to hunt down the djinn to solve the gig and get himself home, so he goes back to The Mom’s house to get a silver knife. Whereupon Show gives me the lovely little meet and greet scene between Not-Sam and Dean that mirrors the meet and greet scene from The Pilot, back in Season One. In both, Dean comes in, wakes up Sam/Not-Sam, the boys wrestle (YEAH!), and Dean lies that he was looking for a beer. It’s wonderful stuff, and I’m glad someone was on the ball enough to realize how cool this would be, because what it does is show even more clearly the differences as well as the similarities between the two worlds. One of the similarities is that Not-Sam, like Sam, once woken up, goes into hunter mode with nary a twitch. Armed with baseball bat (or whatever) he’s going to GET the intruder, and that’s just the way it is. Had it been anyone else but Dean, I would have predicted bashed in heads and buckets of blood, because even Not-Sam is just that scary.

Not-Sam has mean things to say to Dean about stealing from The Mom, and Dean responds by telling the truth, that is, he’s got to kill the djinn with a silver knife dipped in lamb’s blood. Thus making Not-Sam feel like he’s got to go with Dean, even though he Thoroughly Disapproves of everything Dean is and represents simply because even Not-Sam can acknowledge that Dean is his brother, and blood ties win out over all else. The scene in the car as they drive towards the warehouse is terribly cute: First, Dean calls Not-Sam a bitch, and Not-Sam, totally confused, has no idea what he’s supposed to say. Anyone else would also be confused because calling someone a bitch (or a jerk, which is the expected response) is not a typical term of affection. Not-Sam is also thrown by Dean’s tossing his cell phone out the window, not to mention the little tupper full of lamb’s blood; watching Sam’s face is a fun-house event, he’s all shocked and open mouthed, further contrasting Not-Sam’s life with Sam’s, and outlining for the general masses how totally WHACKED being a hunter is.

The hunt through the warehouse further demonstrates this. Not-Sam’s only desire is to get them the hell OUT of there, but Dean is a hunter and onward he pushes, getting closer and closer to the truth until, at last, the whole crazy ride comes to a full and complete halt as Not-Sam drops the facade and out steps the whole gang for one last try at getting Dean to stay. First Not-Sam tries, then Carmen tries, then Jessica tries, and then The Mom tries. Of all of them, I would say that The Mom and Not-Sam have the most potent weapons going for them, the sadness in their voices as they try to convince Dean to stay, as well as the fact that to Dean they represent the strongest love of all, that of family ties. The Mom’s voice, when she tells Dean to (again) get some rest make me go all teary every single time, and then Dean’s expression when she touches his face? It’s like he’s ripping himself up from within trying to resist her, and it rips me up with it.

As for Not-Sam, it’s to him and him alone that Dean apologizes as he shoves the silver knife into his own gut, which transports him to his own reality, where his very own Sammy has just found him. The rescue scene is typical in that the djinn finds and grabs and chokes Sammy, and it’s brother Dean to his defense, because, of course, seeing Sammy in peril gives Dean the strength to do whatever he needs to do, in spite of the fact that he’s been tied up for who knows how long and had a ton of life forced sucked out of him.

The final scene at the red-walled motel is more heart-wrenching than all the rest put together because in it, Dean explains to Sam what happened to him, and Sam, being Sam, tries to give value to Dean’s sacrifice. There is value in saving people and hunting things, Sam tells him, and while Dean agrees, the price has been so high that he finds himself on the verge of not being able to pay it. It’s a heavy burden to bear, and it’s a sad, sad, sad expression that Dean wears as the ep draws to a close.

No happy ending, no redemption, just sacrifice and more pain than can be accounted for. Yet I find myself listing this ep as one of my top five all time favorite episodes for so many reasons, it’s difficult to include them all and not go on all day and all night. But I’ll just start as I mean to go on, shall I?

In my review, I mostly talk about story, what happened in the story, and who did what to whom, and what it might mean, without really going into detail about the lighting, the music, set design, makeup, you know, like I usually do, since I like to give props to the boys and girls behind the scene who make it all possible. But this time, the story was so good, SO seamless, that all the behind the scenes stuff became a part of what was in such a realistic way that all I was able to do was take it all in of a piece, and didn’t even notice the man behind the curtain, like I usually do. So, gold stars for everyone, and in particular the music guy, for writing those sad, low cello pieces that I love and adore beyond reason.

If the orchestra was beautiful, then the boys are gorgeous, and even if they always are, I like to point it out in case anyone thinks I’m actually THAT oblivious. Which I’m not, okay? Sometimes things just come together in a perfect way, and whether it’s the lighting (yeah, Lighting Team!), the weather (yeah, weather!), or just the fact that Ackles and Padalecki both got a good night’s rest, followed by a huge and nutritious breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast and butter, juice and coffee, strawberries and cream, and, because they’re growing boys, sticky buns with REAL pecans, I don’t know. I couldn’t honestly say, all I can tell you is that both lads are sparkling through their skins and bursting through the screen and into my living room. All shiny white teeth and bright green eyes, and skin enticing enough to want to touch. There ought to be a law, really, against two good looking guys being in the same show, let alone on the same screen at the same time. This fangirl’s heart can only take so much, you know.

As for the acting, since the ep is Dean-centric, Ackles naturally rises to the occasion, as he always does, and breaks some of his own records, like in the last scene with the real Sam where he confesses he wanted it so bad; the expression on his face as his desires war with his responsibilities, he’s so good, sometimes he just kills me. But even though the ep was Dean-centric, the character of Not-Sam/Sam is a lynchpin upon which Dean’s world revolves, and, as I’ve pointed out, it’s his relationship with Sam that makes the difference. That makes him realize he’s been trying to fix things up between himself and someone who is, down to the bone, only figment of the djinn’s imagination. (Which is why the djinn lost before he’d even started.) And, in playing the role of the lynchpin, Padalecki pops it.

By this time, Padalecki has got Sam down to a fine art. (A fine, FINE, art, may I say.) And perhaps it maybe has even become second nature to him, something known and comfortable. After all, he’s played Sam for two years, now, so to take something so familiar, and turn it, ever so slightly to the left? It bespeaks of not just a familiarity with the character, but an awareness of what makes Sam Sam, enough to the point where he can adjust this aspect, and tweak this mannerism, until what we see is Not-Sam. Enough Sam to recognize him by, but not the Sam we know and love. After doing it one way for two years, to twist it like that, well, that takes some doing in my book. And it’s fascinating to watch because he still makes it look like that’s the skin he was born in; it’s natural and smooth, and very easy on the eyes.

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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