In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural

by Supernatural. tv,

  When John passed the Impala to Dean, he showed faith in his son’s ability. Giving Dean the Impala meant he was able to send his son out on hunts alone, trusting that Dean knew enough about evil to take care of himself. When this rite of passage happened, though, is not clear.

  In the pilot episode, Sam was surprised Dean was doing a job by himself, though Dean was twenty-six. However, when Dean was nineteen, he met Lisa, a.k.a. Gumby Girl, when Sam and John were on a hunt in Florida, so the Impala was probably Dean’s at the time. When had John realized his sons would have to carry on the job without him? Had John ever thought they’d be able to stop hunting, or once he knew what was out there, did he intend to keep going, fighting as much evil as he could?

  At the end of season one, the brothers didn’t know there was a whole community of hunters. As far as they knew, they and Bobby-and Caleb and Pastor Jim-were it. The Winchesters couldn’t walk away from this life. In season two, they learned about the Roadhouse and other hunters, but even with this knowledge, they couldn’t walk away. Their quest for the Yellow-Eyed Demon wasn’t done.

  The Impala’s trunk, where a secret compartment hid the tools of their trade, was the target of Dean’s attack at the end of “Everybody Loves a Clown” (2-2). John had died and left them to do this job on their own, and Dean’s anger and frustration and fear and guilt was focused there on the symbol of their work and the sacrifices their job had required them to make.

  At the end of “Croatoan,” after facing a situation that brought their mortality into sharp focus, Dean said, “I just think we ought to … go to the Grand Canyon.” When Sam questioned him, he continued. “Yeah, I mean, all this driving back and forth cross country and, you know, I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon?” Even such a detour, taking time for themselves, would mean people would die because the brothers weren’t around to save them from what goes bump in the night.

  In season one, Dean loved the job. He didn’t think of doing anything else. Everything he learned about being a hunter from his father was black and white. The creatures he encountered, the things people did, were either good or evil. He didn’t have choices to make.

  In season two, after losing his father to the job and carrying the heavy knowledge that he might have to kill his brother, the job weighed deeper on him. He was starting to see those shades of gray, especially regarding Sam and his uncertain future. Dean had decisions to make, and none of them were easy. The choices and the responsibility were getting to him, and nothing showed this more than his willingness to give the Impala to the survivors of the town in “Croatoan.” He confessed how tired he was of the job, and he was willing to die alongside his brother. If he couldn’t save these people, maybe the Impala could.

  In “Bloodlust” (2-3), with the Impala fixed and cresting the hill to “Back in Black,” Dean was putting on an outward show for his brother. He was still grieving for his father, but he was putting on a brave face, and the Impala gleams accordingly. Sam remarked on his good mood and Dean replied, “I got my car, got a case, things are looking up.”

  Really, Dean couldn’t leave the hunter’s life any more than he could walk away from the car. When Dean checked the Impala’s trunk in “What Is and What Should Never Be” (2-20), the trunk was empty except for some trash and a few copies of Maxim magazine. Dean grinned and said, “Who’d’ve thought, baby? We’re civilians.” But he seemed to be a bit disappointed in how he turned out, despite how happy as he was to see Mary alive and Sam and Jess together. Dean is GOOD at being a hunter, and in this alternate reality he was a screw-up, as we learned from Sam’s stories about Dean’s scams and seductions, and the way everyone asked him about whether he’d been drinking. Hunting is his skill, and if he needed proof to go on to fight another day, the fantasy world was it. So he returned to the life he knew and continued the hunt. It holds him together and gives him purpose.

  THE CONNECTION TO DEAN

  Television shows have long perpetuated the myth that the car defines the man. Starsky and Hutch’s Gran Torino showcased the renegade detectives. The Dukes of Hazzard’s 1969 Dodge Charger identified them as outlaws. Magnum P.I.’s Ferrari defined the detective as flashy.

  What does Dean’s 1967 Impala say about him?

  The Impala is as much a part of Dean as the leather jacket, the amulet Sam gave him, his boots, and his wisecracks. All the Impala’s various meanings come together here in Dean-Dean is a product of a unique past, as much John’s legacy to the world as the Impala is John’s legacy to Dean, a hunter through and through.

  In most of season one, with the exception of the episode “Faith” (1-12), when Dean was dying after being electrocuted during a hunt, the Impala was always gleaming, buffed to where the brothers could see their reflections in her roof during end-of-episode conversations. Dean had everything he wanted-his brother was by his side, they were looking for their dad, and his family would be together again soon. Even in episodes like “Bugs” (1-8), where the weather was rainy, the Impala was shiny. The boys were searching for their father but there was no real urgency. They knew John could take care of himself. At the end of the episodes the Impala would make her triumphant exit into the sunset to the accompaniment of classic rock, job finished, people saved.

  The change began in “Provenance” (1-19). The first scene with the Impala showed her lined up next to all the expensive cars at an art auction, and she looked uncharacteristically filthy. The contrast was clear-the Winchesters’ life would always be on the fringe of normal society, never a part of it. But more, while the Impala didn’t fit in, Sam did. He knew about art history, he charmed the upper-class Sara. Dean hadn’t seen this side of Sam. He wasn’t around when Sam was falling in love with Jessica, missed out on that part of Sam’s life. He regretted not knowing Jess better, not seeing his brother in love. He wanted his brother to be happy, wanted him to have a normal life though he knew that meant Sam would leave him. And while Dean wanted that for his brother, he knew he’d never have it for himself. He’d done too much, seen too much, to turn away from the hunting life. The car’s condition reflected this hopelessness.

  In “Dead Man’s Blood” (1-20), Dean had everything he thought he wanted-the family was working together again. But it wasn’t all he remembered. He’d forgotten what it was like to not be in charge, not to be making his own decisions, and he’d forgotten what it was like to be the buffer between John and Sam. Keeping them from each other’s throats had become harder now with Sam’s sense of independence and John’s even deeper focus now that he was hot on the demon’s trail. The Impala was dirty and John called Dean on it: “Dean, why don’t you touch up your car, before you get rust? I wouldn’t have given you the damn thing if I thought you were going to ruin it.”

  The blow stunned Dean. He valued the trust his father had in him, and if his dad questioned his care of the car, maybe John was doubting his faith in Dean’s hunting ability. Sam saw his brother’s reaction and bristled at his father, then silently urged his brother to stand up for himself. But Dean remained silent. Perhaps he, who knows John best, understood John’s remark was made out of frustration. So much of their lives was out of control-taking care of a vehicle was one thing they could control.

  Dean’s dreams of family togetherness crumbled further when John revealed their secret weapon, the Colt. Once the demon was dead, what then? John’s quest had taken twenty-two years of their lives. What would happen when the hunt was over? Dean’s future was uncertain, and the dirty car reflected that turmoil.

  By the episode “Devil’s Trap” (1-22), when the boys knew the demon had their father, Sam had to wipe dust from the Impala’s trunk before he could draw the devil’s trap on it with a grease pencil, making it a lock-box to keep the Colt safe. Dean never would have allowed the layer of dust if his mind hadn’t been occupied.

  Then the Impala was crushed by a semi. Her steel frame protected her men, but she sacrificed herself. When Sam went to help Bobby clean out the trunk before the authorities could find
their weapons, he had to convince Bobby not to sell her for scrap in “In My Time of Dying,” (2-1). “There’s nothing to fix,” Bobby told him. “The frame’s a pretzel, and the engine’s ruined. There’s barely any parts worth salvaging.” But Sam argued, “Listen to me, Bobby. If there’s only one working part, that’s enough. We’re not just going to give up on …” Sam may not have known he was speaking of Dean, but Bobby did. He knew, as we did, that Sam felt that by giving up on the car, he would be giving up on Dean. He refused to give up on either one. He had to believe that Dean would live, so he made the comment that “Dean will kill me” if he allowed the Impala to get junked.

  As season two progressed, the Impala began to look road-weary—particularly in episodes where Dean was worried and anxious, such as “Crossroads Blues” (2-8), where Dean considered trading his soul for his father’s return, and “Nightshifter” (2-12), when Dean’s face on the news started a manhunt for the Winchesters. On the run, Dean had no time to care for his car or for himself. The secret he carried weighed on him. The ride-into-the-sunset scenes were rare; the boys were encountering tougher cases and failing to find the answers they were looking for.

  In season two, Sam never drove the Impala. He was driving the night she was T-boned, and before the car was fixed, John told Dean Sam’s secret. Did Dean keep Sam from driving the car because he no longer entirely trusted his brother? It’s a stark contrast to season one, when Dean’s offer to let Sam drive showed in a very Dean-like way that he was reaching out to his brother, trying to bring Sam back into the hunting life and help him get over Jess’s death.

  In “Croatoan,” when Dean chose staying with Sam, handing over the Impala’s keys to the town survivors, Sam understood the depth of his brother’s sacrifice. The car was all they had, and with her gone, so was their means of escape, their weapons, their know-how, and their home.

  At the beginning of season three, Dean had a year to live. He mistreated the Impala-bouncing her over roads like he was one of the Duke boys instead of a Winchester-even as he abused his own body, eating bacon cheeseburgers for breakfast. But once he found his desire to live, he started tending to his baby again. In “Fresh Blood” (3-7), he began teaching Sam how to take care of the car, symbolically getting Sam ready to fight the war on his own. In the season finale, he told Sam to remember what John and Dean had taught him, and to take care of the car.

  Why do the writers use the Impala as an outward sign of Dean’s subconscious? Novelists have the luxury of showing their characters’ inner turmoil in words. Television writers have to depend on the actors’ ability and physical clues. What better physical clue than Dean’s most prized possession?

  MARY FECHTER has been known to become obsessed every now and again, and one of her favorite obsessions is Supernatural (especially Dean, you might have noticed). She writes romance for The Wild Rose Press and Samhain Publishing under the name M.J. Fredrick. Visit her Web site at www.mjfredrick.com or her blog at www.marywritesromance.blogspot.com.

  John Winchester and a demon-killing Colt six-shooter: Supernatural’s own deus ex machina? Or do the secretive, seemingly all-knowing, and vaguely mysterious hunter and the magical, seemingly all-killing, and vaguely mysterious weapon parallel each other’s journey through the series’ narrative?

  Tracy S. Morris explores Daddy Winchester’s role within the Supernatural universe and the weapon that finally brings his mission of vengeance to an end.

  TRACY S. MORRIS

  JOHN WINCHESTER AND THE MAGIC BULLET THEORY

  Back in 1835, When Halley’s comet was overhead, same night those men died at the Alamo, they say Samuel Colt made a gun. A special gun. He made it for a hunter. A man like us, only on horseback. Story goes, he made thirteen bullets. This hunter used the gun a half dozen times before he disappeared, the gun along with him… . They say … they say this gun can kill anything.

  -JOHN WINCHESTER, “Dead Man’s Blood” (1-20)

  There is a fifth character in the play who doesn’t appear except in this larger-than-life-sized photograph over the mantle. This is our father, who left us a long time ago.

  -TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Glass Menagerie

  One of the major influences for Supernatural as cited by the show’s creator, Eric Kripke (if, according to fans, Joss Whedon is God, then surely Kripke is the Little Baby Jesus), is Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. As a nod to the book’s influence, it was even used as a prop in the first season episode “Wendigo” (1-2).

  Most anyone who knows Star Wars or Lord of the Rings is already familiar with the formula that Campbell documented in The Hero With a Thousand Faces: the archetypal hero is presented with a call to adventure, undergoes trials, is guided by a wise man, and at some point acquires a mystical and wondrous object to aid his quest.

  In Supernatural, Sam is obviously the reluctant hero who initially refuses the call to adventure in favor of the safe world of academia and a shiny future in tax law. In the absence of their father, the older brother Dean, who embraced the lifestyle that Sam rejected, plays the role of wise man and guide. (And flirts with the role of the soul mate, in a platonic, manly, and fraternal way. Really. We swear.)

  In “Dead Man’s Blood,” the boys acquire their wondrous object: a gun that can kill anything. This is Supernatural’s One Ring of Power, the Holy Grail, the Singing Sword.

  Or maybe not.

  Fans of the series have had very mixed feelings about the Colt as an item. Like each of the aforementioned plot devices, the very existence of something like the Colt weakens the story because it places too much power in the boys’ hands. With a gun that can kill anything, Sam and Dean can-well, kill anything. With it, the boys no longer have to rely on their own skills to solve problems. Every conflict they encounter starts to have a Colt-shaped answer.

  According to Super-wiki,46 a Supernatural canon and fandom resource, “the Colt is a singular gun made by Samuel Colt in 1835 for a hunter at the time.” The gun is a Texas Patterson 1835, the first cap-and-ball handgun ever made, but this particular version has supernatural powers: “when used with the similarly magic bullets made especially for it, the gun can kill anything.”

  When the Colt was first introduced, we weren’t told specifically how Samuel Colt managed to achieve this marvel of supernatural engineering. John Winchester mentioned that it was created when Halley’s Comet was passing near Earth, on the same night as a bloody battle at the Alamo (according to Super-wiki, it’s likely that the battle was the Siege of Béxar, and not the more famous bloody last stand with Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston).

  Judging by the description that John gave, the Colt’s creation presumably required a perfect alignment of magic, noble and willing bloody sacrifice, and a once-in-a-blue-moon astral event. (Or, apparently, a demon who knows how to make magic weapons. But what are the chances that a magic weapon-making demon would be willing to help a hunter? Better in the year 2007 than in 1835, it seems.)

  Additionally, the Colt’s use was limited to thirteen bullets, the idea obviously being that when they’re gone, they’re gone. So each bullet had to count. By the time the Colt came into the hands of the family Winchester, there were only five bullets remaining.

  Between John, Dean, Sam, and their poignant yet completely screwed-up version of family love, they blew through four of the five bullets in defense of one another-all the while yelling at each other about who wasted which bullet.

  From a storytelling perspective the Colt is problematic because it’s essentially a deus ex machina. The phrase’s literal meaning is “God from the machine.” The term comes from Greek tragedy, in which an actor playing one of the Greek gods would be lowered to the stage by crane and then right all the wrongs existing in the drama. In modern storytelling, a deus ex machina is any kind of unlikely contrivance that solves an otherwise unsolvable problem. When the deus ex machina is an object, it usually grants the wielder an almost godlike power. And like the original deus ex machina, it
makes for a very uninteresting plot-as well as a very short plot.

  However, I think the Colt serves an important function outside of its role as deus ex machina: as a metaphor for the journey that John Winchester takes throughout the series.

  I’ll return to John and the Colt in a minute. First I’d like to examine Kripke’s interest in the journey itself. From Sam’s journey to accepting his place in a world that doesn’t fit his definition of normal to the Winchester family quest to kill the Yellow-Eyed Demon to the boys’ physical trek down the road to the next monster: every aspect of Supernatural is about a trip of some type. Though the show is obviously influenced by the hero’s journey as laid out in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, it also draws on the idea of the great American journey, as expressed through the lure of the open road.

  In the past, Kripke said that his influence for this aspect of the show was Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical work On the Road. In the book, two men set out on a series of trips, searching for something that even they can’t define. It’s no coincidence that Sam and Dean of Supernatural have names remarkably similar to those of Kerouac’s main characters, Sal and Dean. Or that Dean Winchester seemed at first a lot like Dean Moriarity: a charismatic drifter, con man, and womanizer who is fixated on finding his father.

  And speaking of fathers, while the boys spent most of season one looking for John, he was on his own journey, the same quest he had been on for twenty-two years: to find his wife’s killer. John’s pursuit was ultimately the boys’ pursuit. And while the family motto may be saving people, hunting things, it was a diversion at best, something to pass the time while they found information on the demon that killed Mary Winchester.