SPN 5.15 - We need a writing resurrection
“Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” struck me much as Sam Interrupted did, a potentially interesting premise that never really went anywhere, didn’t have a great deal of suspense and also didn’t follow well on the drama of the previous episode. I rather liked MBV, and certainly its ending shot of Dean reaching his breaking point was moving and lent hope to something good (writing wise) coming around the bend. But as with SI, the emotional punch of Ellen and Jo’s loss never really went anywhere and barely got acknowledged in the subsequent episode.
Continuity? What Continuity?
Similarly here, there’s no direct reference to Dean’s despair or the fallout from Sam’s detox. This seems particularly odd given that they’re working a case in Bobby’s backyard, which at first led me to believe that it was shortly after the last episode. But clearly Sam and Dean haven’t been at Bobby’s for at least a few weeks. So for all we know it could be even longer since Sam recovered and they left. I am less than thrilled with how the writers aren't dealing with Sam’s addiction issue. First, it simply gets wiped away in the season premiere, and now it seems to be conveniently over with no ill effects. Given that in 4.21 the detox didn’t last because Sam promptly went out and got himself hopped up again, we really didn’t know if it was as simple as a few days shaking off the physical effects (nor if the demon blood was actually necessary, because in MBV I think it could be argued that it really wasn’t). But either this episode aired out of order, or there just wasn’t any follow through here.
The episode also doesn’t make much sense. Sam arrives at the diner, still trying to get in touch with Bobby. Given the case, I could see them trying to get in touch with Bobby for at least a week rather than coming back all the way into SD when Bobby’s already there. And if Bobby hadn’t answered for days at a time regarding a case in his backyard, they should have been more worried about why he wasn’t doing so – thus going straight to Bobby’s house to check on him rather than going to interview the witness. Why Bobby would ignore their calls is another good question. After all, they’d surely left messages as to why they were calling, which meant that he’d know if he didn’t answer they’d be showing up soon. And since he didn’t want them to interfere, why not just call back, say he looked into it and send them off onto another hunt?
Instead, we have the super convenient occurrence of Bobby, who wasn’t answering five minutes earlier, suddenly picking up just so that Sheriff Mills can recognize his voice and send Sam and Dean packing. (And, by the way, surely I wasn’t the only person who knew this would happen from the moment Mills asked for their supervisor’s number).
Speaking of Mills knowing Bobby, one thing hinted at in the episode but completely unexplored, is how Bobby has been seen by his neighbors all these years. At the least, it would seem that people are aware that something is going on at Singer Salvage, with the convenient catchall of drunkeness covering up a lot. But given that Bobby has lived there for a great many years, there have to be people that remember Karen's death (however did Bobby explain that the first time?), his fallout from that, the changes in him, etc. Mills saying that there was mail fraud and drunk and disorderlies involved? Um, how about the dead woman left in his house in 1.22? In the end we have another Bobby-centered episode in which we learn very little about Bobby.
Fewer distractions, more talking
After Sam and Dean discover Clay Thompson’s grave, we have the most amusing scene in the episode where Clay Thompson confesses, and then the sheriff turns out to be in the know. This was momentarily interesting, in suggesting that as the apocalypse nears, more and more people will be moving out of plausible deniability into believers in the supernatural. However, nothing’s really done with this larger idea, and other than Dean and Sam’s rather entertaining surprise, they don’t discuss it except for a few lines at the end of the episode.
One thing I did like was Sam and Dean’s momentary disagreement in what to do about Clay. The whole scene was a bit of a S1 callback, with some levity and both brothers being on opposite sides of the “shoot-first-ask-questions-never” divide. I don’t know what we’re to make of it because by the time they find out about Bobby’s wife, there’s really no more disagreement evident.
Speaking of Karen, I was less than thrilled with her Stepford Zombie characterization. On the one hand, I get it. If she at all realized that her time with Bobby was limited, maybe she just wanted to make Bobby as comfortable as possible, and maybe she had spent all her time alive being Suzy Homemaker, so cooking and cleaning would have been the obvious things to do. Unlike Bobby, she's never moved on. However, that's also the whole problem. She's been dead for decades. EVERYTHING in the world is different to her now, even with Bobby's less than high tech abode. Bobby is different to her -- very different, I would expect. If Jess would hardly recognize Sam now, imagine Karen. There's a lot of interesting stuff that could have been done here. When Bobby talks at the end about things being 1000 times worse, there could have been all sorts of avenues explored in showing how a loved one coming back long after the mourning was done can be horribly, horribly upsetting to everyone involved. It can be, as it was apparently intended to be, a form of torture for the still living person. But the only dilemma set up in this episode is whether or not Bobby will kill her again. And given that all the dead end up taking on their true nature in just a short time, this drains the dramatic tension from the plot.
One of the things I loved about the idea behind this episode is that it challenges one of the basic premises of the show, namely the idea of revenge as a form of forestalling closure. Certainly, Azazel's death didn't improve anything for Sam and Dean in terms of actual events. In fact, it may have made things worse. I doubt Azazel would ever have gotten Sam to do anything, for the very reason that he was carrying the baggage of Mary's murder and also John's death. Ruby not only came without that, she was able to help Sam from the start, forging a very different sort of relationship with him.
But had John gotten his wish in Salvation and actually gotten Mary back, how would that have played out? John was no longer the man she'd fallen in love with. He was no longer the father that Dean had first known. And he was 22 years older than she was. I'm pretty sure Mary would have been quite distressed to discover what had happened to the people she left behind. John's path of revenge was a way of keeping Mary ever present because he couldn't let go. Yet, despite him, time marched on. Whether he got Mary back or not, he'd never get back the life he lost with her, nor the different future for their children. Revenge really accomplished nothing.
What's more, had Mary come back during Salvation, she would have returned to a crisis still continuing. Unlike Karen, she would have at least have had some frame of reference for it. But I rather wonder if she would have been ready to just follow John's lead on anything since, when she last knew him, she was the one with all the knowledge and skills. We know that the Mary John though he knew, was not all there was to Mary at all. As in Song, that would have become apparent very quickly. What we still don't know is if John knew about Mary's hunter past later on. I can't imagine he wouldn't have run into someone who knew the Campbells.
But Karen is no Mary. When we get her scene with Dean where she alludes to Bobby’s changes and talks about her job being to bring him peace, it skeeved me out more than making me feel sympathy for her. Because the problem is there wasn’t much personality coming through from Karen, though I think the actress was trying. I get no sense of who this woman was, just what she used to do for Bobby that he doesn’t bother to do for himself since she's been gone. Even Bobby’s sole memory of Karen that he gives us, her tone deaf humming, is tied to her cooking, not anything about who Karen was as a person. I don’t disagree at all with Karen that ideally having a spouse means you have someone with whom you can share your burdens, and from whom you receive emotional support. But I really didn’t care for the way it was put, nor do I feel that this is something exclusive to spouses. So the extra dig at Dean for never having been in love seemed both unnecessary and ridiculous, given what Dean has done for those he loved. More to the point, it didn’t go anywhere in exploring what’s happening between Dean and Sam this season, nor did it go into the relatively unexplored ground of Bobby and the Winchesters, something we're in dire need of and which could have had some really interesting commentary given Karen's position. I couldn't help thinking of the lyrics to Carry On here -- maybe Karen thinks there can be peace because she is dead. Certainly, the worst sort of pain the Winchesters have experienced (as has Bobby) has all been due to loved ones. This conversation could have been much more interesting and meaningful all around but this was a very paint-by-numbers script.
Wait, huh?
And speaking of things which seem kind of ridiculous to ignore, why is it that no one mentions in this episode how Dean has come back from the dead? If there was one argument I expected Bobby to make which would stop Sam and Dean in their tracks, it was how after a few tests both of them believed Dean was Dean and no one’s suggesting he should be shot in the head. I mean Sam even lays it out there asking Bobby what he’d do if it was them. Uh, we KNOW what Bobby would do!
We could definitely have had more dialogue and incisive observations in the scene with Bobby and Karen, and could have skipped Sam’s scene at the Jones house which seems to have been included solely for the ew factor. The only protestation we ever get from Dean is when he points out that as Bobby’s (adopted) family, he and Sam are at least as important to him as his wife. However, with Sam’s “bigger fish” line they just move on from that into the confusing, if action packed, end.
Jeremy Carver takes the easy road out again when Sam does not have to convince the sheriff of anything since, by the time he arrives, her husband is dead and her son is a bloody-mouthed corpse eater. She pulls herself together awfully quickly, considering. Then we have the rather bizarre standoff scene in the jail. I have no idea why the writers chose to stage this in Sioux Falls rather than someplace smaller and farther away (I don’t know as Bobby was ever placed in the city itself). Even going by the 2000 census, we’re talking the largest city in SD with a population of around 150,000+ for the metro area. I have no idea who Sam decided “everybody we can find” is, but I’m going to fanwank it that the dozen or so people in the jail represented those actually close to/in the vicinity of the zombies and that they're actually far to the outskirts of Sioux Falls. Why all these zombies then decide to show up at Singer Salvage, I have no idea other than it making for another good video game scene. But more importantly, why would Sam and the sheriff show up at Bobby’s house when they were all set up at the sheriff’s station? What made them think the zombies would turn up there? And what happened to all the people down at the station? (Also, she’s the sheriff, she couldn’t have called in her personnel?)
In short, we could have cut all of Sam's solo scenes from this episode and instead had him talking with Karen while Dean talked with Bobby. Sam's loss of Jess would have nade for some interesting reference points with Karen, and then we could have had the zombie attack occur in the same way without worrying about the rest of the affected families (whom the audience doesn't care about anyway). The sheriff could still have shown up to save the day as a result of having followed the zombies.
At least the whole zombie hunting scene was more interesting than most of Sam Interrupted, however pointless and inexplicable it was. Bobby says he gets it, but he never give the exact message that Karen passed on, nor why only some people got raised since you can bet that even in a small town there have to be a ton of people buried there by now. That it’s all done just to send Bobby a message seems incredibly pointless – how hard would it be for Lucifer or any of the horsemen to kill him? Or just to show up and scare him in person?
Small stuff
1) Sam digs! And I quite liked the little editing move between their joint spades in the ground moving into the open grave. 2) The broken coffin didn’t look broken enough for someone to have dragged themselves through it with several feet of dirt pressing down on it. Given that Karen was cremated and needed no literal grave escape, this all seemed unnecessary. 3) “I’m a taxpayer.” Not if you’ve been dead five years, you’re not. 4) I felt JiB callbacks in the episode, with Sam and Dean in a cell and the setup for a sheriff’s station siege. It made me unexpectedly miss S3. 5) Bobby tells Karen it’s 4 AM, and then in the next scene when they’ve finished eating, it’s rather sunny outside. How many servings of pie did Dean have? 6) “Awesome, another horseman, must be Thursday.” Between that and the Mills family reading the Spike comic, I was definitely getting a Buffy shoutout. 7) I’m not clear what the blood was doing outside of Ezra Jones’ house. Did she kill her husband outside and drag him in? What was that about? 8) Wow, Dean’s break-in was quiet and subtle. A longtime hunter like Bobby would never be alerted to it. Apparently the sound guys didn't read the script that closely. 9) Since when does a closet door lock from the inside? 10) Interesting shot to have the blood spatter on the camera. 11) It was a nice touch to have Sheriff Mills unable to answer how she was doing. 12) Calling the papers? How quaint. How many cities have more than one and why would a town supposedly so small as this one have even one?