Bardic’s Descant: 6:16 …And Then There Were None – She Has A Message For You
Production Notes
I really enjoyed this episode while I was watching it: the tension level was way up there, the camaraderie among Dean, Sam, Bobby, and Rufus was positively delightful, and we learned key pieces of the Bobby and Rufus back story that illuminated all their interactions since we first met them. Everything among our principals felt absolutely genuine and became downright heart-wrenching, and Mike Rohl’s hard-driving direction and Serge Ladouceur’s brilliant lighting design kept everything that happened both perfectly clear and dramatically scary. In the aftermath, however, I felt a bit let down in two main respects: the way the tale apparently abruptly truncated the story of the Campbells, and how Eve came off as nothing more than a classic megalomaniacal villain who simply couldn’t resist tweaking the heroes’ noses.
As usual, I’ll get my criticisms out of the way first. The biggest one has to do with Samuel and Gwen Campbell, and goes beyond just this script by Brett Matthews to take on the scripts for the season as a whole so far. I can’t help but feel that the Campbells haven’t been well used or consistently written and portrayed this season, and I think that’s a shame. Samuel’s depiction was particularly choppy; we saw him go from forceful clan leader in Exile On Main Street and Two And A Half Men to little more than a passive observer in Unforgiven. Admittedly, he always had secrets, and as we learned more, particularly in Family Matters and Caged Heat, we came to understand just how much he was being manipulated rather than being in control as he’d pretended to be all along, but he just didn’t feel like the same character throughout. He never particularly seemed to care about the losses his little family-focused hunting group was sustaining and they lost people every time we encountered them, except during Unforgiven, which made his family speeches ring hollow to me even before he betrayed the brothers to Crowley in Caged Heat. That made it hard for me to buy him right from the start as a leader charismatic enough to have kept his hunting group together out of family loyalty. If you don’t feel that someone really cares about you and your welfare, you’re not inclined to go above and beyond for him, or trust him to lead you when his origins and motives are hidden, especially not if you’re a hunter trained to be suspicious by nature. And we never really got to know much at all about poor Gwen, so her death meant little to us beyond knowing Dean would feel bad about having killed her. We were starting to see Gwen questioning her faith in Samuel, but her life was cut short before that journey amounted to much.
I still hope we might yet learn more, perhaps as Sam begins to recover memories from his lost year, at least to explain why Samuel in particular was brought back in the first place and to allow the brothers access to the information sources he had that were never available to anyone else. An antidote to djinn poison, a cure for vampirism, lore on the Alphas, knowledge of Eve’s history, all these things came from Samuel, and nowhere else. I think his utility was being the oldest hunter with the longest family history and thus an unbroken line of direct knowledge beyond the means of most hunters, and his uniqueness was sharing blood family with the Winchester brothers, but I think we’re missing something else. I hope it’s a missing piece that will come into play before the season ends, not one that got left out of the puzzle box entirely. I’m hoping we’ll see into Sam’s year-long shared past with Samuel and the Campbells to be able to understand how a hunter family truly worked, or that the Campbell family information stash, like John’s secret storage unit, may be uncovered and come into play. I really want to understand particularly why the Campbells always held totally aloof from other hunters and didn’t share information to help others in the fight; that still bothers me.
I was also singularly unimpressed by Eve. Her ability to create new kinds of monsters and presumably to alter the profiles of existing monsters, given the way they’ve been acting out of character is a fascinating and scary one, especially since it means hunters won’t know the guaranteed ways to kill or otherwise deal with them or with her, but her expressed intent in creating the Khan-worm was laughable. As explained by the worm possessing Bobby, she created the worm and planted a blatant trail of other monster activity leading to it simply to send a taunting message to hunters, the only people aware of her that she was back and her planned endgame was to take over the world by making monsters outnumber people, causing pain to hunters and other humans along the way. That served no purpose except to demonstrate that the Mother is a classic megalomaniac, the kind of mustache-twirling villain who can’t resist boasting to the hero about how she’s going to torture him before killing him. And that mustache looks pretty silly on a woman. That aspect of the Mother was disappointing. The only sense I can make out of it is that she’s driven by a desire to show off her prowess by winning games she creates – and I’m sorry, but that’s a pretty petty urge, and leads me to wonder who created Eve, and why. She comes off as a high-level demon’s wet dream of yet another way to play with humans by making them into other twisted things.
In retrospect, I also had a little trouble with the Khan-worm. Admittedly, the writer and director were always careful to ensure that people were only attacked and taken over by the worm when they were alone, so no one else could notice the worm scooting up someone’s leg or back and give warning but man, anything crawling up my neck in the vicinity of my ear would get swatted fast! I enjoyed the psychological tension of a monster that could surreptitiously take over people, though, so I’ll give them a pass and guess the worm was just too quick on its final strike for human reflexes to block it.
Two little production points made me laugh out loud, just because they were amusingly incongruous. First, listen carefully when Rufus cuffs Sam; what my ears heard were standard metal handcuff noises, not plastic zip-cuff ones! I think we’re so conditioned to hearing metal cuffs snap that a plastic ratchet just wouldn’t leave us with the right mental impression. The second chuckle came from the thought that Khan-worm goo was evidently a great solvent, because how else would you explain Sam having been able to simply brush duct tape off Bobby’s face without also removing his beard? I dare say Jim Beaver was very grateful the prop tape wasn’t up to Home Depot’s or Lowe’s normal stickiness standards!
Enough with the criticism, on to the good stuff! I loved the way this script, with its illumination of the history between Bobby and Rufus, remained consistent with all we’d seen before, while at the same time forcing a new and dramatically different interpretation of what we’d thought we’d seen. If you want to see what I mean, watch Weekend At Bobby’s again, and see if you take away an entirely different impression this time of all the exchanges between Rufus and Bobby now that you know what happened in their past. I also enjoyed all the small touches that preserved the character consistency, including discovering that Rufus had been Jewish, hinted by his I know what I want for Hanukkah! joke when he saw Bobby’s backhoe in use digging the okami’s grave and seeing Bobby pour his libation tribute in Johnnie Walker Blue, the only alcohol Rufus bothered to drink, as we learned when we met him the very first time in Time Is On My Side. At $250 a bottle, Blue is the most expensive but still generally readily available Scotch; if you order it from the distillery, they’ll even engrave the bottle.
I also truly loved seeing Sam with his soul back first protesting and then having to turn away from watching Dean torture the worm in Bobby’s body. After all the time we’ve spent totally missing Sam’s gentle, empathic side from Sam deliberately setting out during season three to try to harden himself to fight a war alone, through being led down the well-intentioned path to Hell in season four, jumping into it in season five, and being soulless for the first half of season six, I felt both grieved and relieved to see him so tormented by Bobby’s pain and appalled that Dean was inflicting it, while simultaneously realizing and accepting there was no other choice. Jared Padalecki did a spectacular job of piling layer upon layer of emotion throughout this episode, but especially in that torture scene and at Rufus’s grave. Similarly, watching Jensen Ackles convey the changes in Dean that let him do what he had to do, drawing on the ugly skills he’d learned so horribly well in Hell while simultaneously loving Bobby and holding to the essential goodness that makes Dean, Dean, left me in awe of how skilled an actor he is. Jim Beaver as Bobby and Steven Williams as Rufus were exactly the men we’d come to know and love, while also being different men than we’d ever known they were. Tour de force all around. One of my absolute favorite memories from this episode will always be the four men meeting outside the cannery at night to hunt together; it’s been a long time since we saw such smiles and perfectly shared happiness, particularly on both Sam’s and Dean’s faces, and I’m afraid it will be a long time before we see that again, given how very dark this very noir season has been.
While there were aspects of this episode that let me down, the good things definitely outweighed them for me, and particularly since I suspect there are still many things hidden from us that will change our perspective as we learn them, much as this episode changed my understanding of what we saw in Weekend At Bobby’s by providing character context we hadn’t known at the time, I think this entire season may look very different when we re-watch it with wiser, more informed eyes after we get to the season’s end.
In the meantime, I think I’m going to take a page from Dean’s book and work on loving and living harmoniously with all the members of all my families: the born, the made, and the Supernatural.
Life’s too short to do anything less.
[b]Very well written!!! 🙂 [/b]
Good one.
I’m sorry to lose Roops and Grandpa too. The formers back-story with Bobby was starting to look really fascinating and Ol’Eyebrows and his mysterious-but-definitely-dodgy hidden agenda was the most entertaining thing about this season so far.
I can’t work up much interest in Eve … Standard SPN issue decorative monologing murder minx. I hope she dredges up some hidden depths soon or the rest of the run’s going to be a bit short of properly hissable baddies!
Bravo! This was well written and very enjoyable to read. I agree with your assessments. I hope that the Campbell history is not lost. Samuel’s journal and his grandfathers must hold a wealth of knowledge that Bobby, Dean and Sam could use. Someday, I hope that we get to know more about John and his family.
Another excellent article. You are so positive, even in your criticisms. I hope you are right about some explanation about the Sampa; why was he brought back, why and maybe even how he hooked up with Sam…some kind of explanation as to why the Campbells were even in the season. As it was left, it appears as of now that this was a lost opportunity to flesh out an interesting story.
I’m still disappointed that Rufus was killed, especially since death of any kind is no longer a surprise or suspenseful event in SPN. The show has taken death as something surprising or shocking off the table by bringing everybody and their grandfather back.
I did like the episode…especially dark Dean, who is oh so much scarier than that silly Eve…and sweet Sam…and the brothers working together. Two episodes of that now, but that is probably not going to last much longer.
Excellent review. I always love them.
“One of my absolute favorite memories from this episode will always be the four men meeting outside the cannery at night to hunt together; it’s been a long time since we saw such smiles and perfectly shared happiness”
I’m so glad you mentioned it! It was my favorite scene of the episode. It seemed so natural, like they were actually having a good time, even if it was just for a second.
Wonderful review, as always! See ya in two weeks! 😉
Loves your assesement. But I wonder about the Khan worm’s confession. I wonder if it told the boys what it did while there is something far more insideous. The trap set for the hunters inside that cannery…what if Eve set it up so she could see how Hunters; specifically the Winchesters acted when no one could rely on each other,knowing that any moment one of them could be possessesed; manipulating the others. And what if Eve was psychically linked to the khan worm? She could see how easily humans mistrust each other in the face of the unknown. Of course she might be discounting these 4 hunters experience and personal history.
Also…when Sam got seperated and he and Dean shouted out each others names several times it was like their own version of MArco Polo and their own way of letting the other know they were there and not alone.
Amy
Hi Bardic!
Your analysis of Rufus & assessment of his backstory made me love his character & mourn his loss as part of the extended Winchester family even more. I will truly miss him!
I mourn too for the relationship the guys could have had with their grandfather & the Campbell clan. Samuel certainly did destroy that with his obsessive desire to get Mary back. He was a pawn of demons, yet he used his grandsons & all of his extended blood family as pawns also. How did seemingly all the current members of the Campbell clan readily accept the reappearance & leadership of a man they had believed dead for decades? I agree that we need to see more of the Campbell clan; the history of a centuries-old family of hunters is too tantalizing a carrot to dangle before fans, then simply drop it without further mention.
I think your explanation of Dean’s definition of family is spot-on. His speech at the cemetery made me think about how trivial are some of the squabbles I’ve had with my loved ones, & how my own family doesn’t end with blood either.
Dawn
Wow Mary, well worth the wait! I think this is your best, most insightful review yet. And that’s saying a lot because I’ve enjoyed every single one of your reviews. Your analysis of Dean’s speech at the cemetery has me thinking of my own families and how I want to interact with them. Thanks for that, m’dear!
Cheers, Rose