8.12 As Time Goes By: As Long As We’re Alive, There’s Always Hope
8.12 As Time Goes By: As Long As We’re Alive, There’s Always Hope
What if your whole past
Isn’t what you always thought?
What’s your legacy?
Commentary and Meta Analysis
While this episode was beautifully shot and had some powerful emotional beats, I had real problems with it because it seemed to radically change things we thought we knew and add many new, mostly derivative ones without providing much logical supporting structure for them. I felt like last week’s Maria, aka Gholandria the Wicked, watching a surprise genre mash-up of Supernatural, Buffy, Highlander, and Warehouse 13. I’ll be curious to see how they smooth over the story seams in upcoming episodes since they’ve already started down this the road, but in the meantime, I’m working hard to find ways to make what I saw make sense in the context of show canon as I’ve perceived it. And this season is all about perception, isn’t it?
In this commentary, I’m going to discuss my difficulty dealing with John’s sudden acquisition of issues with paternal abandonment; the problematic legacy of the super-secret Men of Letters; and the latest wrinkles in the show’s systems of magic.
Either Way, Dad Hated That Son Of A Bitch
For me, the most jarring aspect of the whole story was the brand-new discovery that John’s dad had disappeared without explanation when he was very young, and that John had hated his father for apparently abandoning him and had shared that information with his sons. In seven and a half seasons, we’d never been given any indication that John had any issues with his biological father. And given all the issues Dean and Sam had with John, a continuing family history of daddy issues should have been referenced before now, if it existed. I have a hard time reconciling the new with the old.
My issues are both emotional and practical ones, given what show canon told us up until now. I’ll start with a quick note on what little mention the show had made of the pre-brother Winchester family up until now, the stories I’ve told myself to try integrating the new and old information, and the emotional and practical problems I still have with this new addition.
The only mentions we ever heard of John’s dad came during In The Beginning. Shortly after Dean entered Jay Bird’s Diner in 1973, an older man walking in called John by his last name and remarked on his pleasure at seeing John, having heard he was recently back from military service. In parting, the man told John, “Well, say hello to your old man from me,” and John, smiling, responded easily, “You got it, Mr. D.” Later, talking with Mary and speculating about why her father objected to him, John asked if he didn’t want her to, as he put it, “Hook up with a mechanic from a family of mechanics?” The impression I was left with was that John was comfortable with his still-living father, who was a mechanic just like him.
The obvious, immediate story I began devising to explain the apparent discrepancy between that episode and this was that John’s mechanic father living in 1973 was his stepfather, not his biological one. But that raised practical and emotional issues of its own. Given the way Henry disappeared, his wife, John’s mother, would either have needed to divorce him for abandonment or have him declared dead after the statutory time had passed – seven years, in most places – before she could have remarried. Either way, by the time he acquired a stepfather, John would have been at least several years older than he was when Henry vanished, which could have affected how well he bonded with his new stepfather, whoever he was. Also on the practical end, back in the Fifties and Sixties, a remarriage with children most often included formal adoption of the children by the new spouse, which would have meant John’s last name would have ceased to be Winchester. The main reasons not to have done that would have been either to avoid jeopardizing an inheritance or to retain the surname of a loved father. If John indeed hated Henry for leaving him, that latter reason wouldn’t have obtained. John seemed straight blue-collar when we met him, so if there had been an inheritance at issue, it evidently wasn’t a lot. So, why was he still a Winchester? The best thought I can come up with is that John’s mother still loved and believed in Henry and kept his last name for John in memory of the boy’s father and in the hope John would outgrow his anger.
The emotional side is even knottier for me. I really could see how John feeling abandoned by Henry could have led to adult John’s intense dedication and commitment to family and his determination to protect his sons and keep them with him, especially after Mary’s horrible death. John’s passionate belief in what fatherhood meant, delivered to Sam in The Song Remains The Same when he savaged their father for having dragged them into hunting, could also have grown out of juvenile feelings of abandonment by his own father. But that bitterness existing in his own life, combined with his passion to keep his family intact, makes it hard for me to factor in John once having walked away from his wife and sons during the argument we briefly saw in Dark Side Of The Moon. I would think that type of separation would have seemed anathema to a man who had dealt with feeling abandoned by his own father. Fighting with Mary, sure; most couples have disagreements. But walking out on his boys even for a short time, when he remembered his own deep and abiding anger over his own father having left him? Doesn’t compute for me.
That bitter past also just doesn’t resonate with the emotional picture of John Mary painted for Dean during In The Beginning. And yes, a woman in love will see the best side of the man she loves, but it’s also the vibe I got from John both in that episode and in The Song Remains The Same. Prior to the supernatural crashing in on him, John came off as balanced, secure, and generally happy, apart from his job and monetary worries in 1978. I always loved Mary’s description of him: “He’s sweet, kind. Even after the war, after everything, he still believes in happily ever after, you know?” Maybe that optimism came from happy stability he’d found with a stepfather after his real one let him down, but, that really doesn’t comport with Dean and Sam vividly remembering John having hated his real dad so much that he had told his sons about that hate with enough passion that it infected Dean. If John had found happiness and security with a stepfather, it seems he’d have shared that positive experience with his sons, rather than dwelling with vitriol on his missing biological father. Dean’s brutal recitation to Henry of how hard a time John had after being abandoned had nothing in it that matched the psychological makeup of the happy, gentle John we met in his pre-demonic past.
For all these reasons, this new story of John’s daddy issues and deep-seated anger over them simply doesn’t ring true to me. Thanks to the writers of earlier episodes and the vivid portrayals of John by both Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Matthew Cohen, I have too strong and solid an image of John in my head from past episodes to see him so very differently now. That’s just my perception, but it’s not one I find easy to change.
We’re Preceptors. Beholders. Chroniclers Of All That Which Man Does Not Understand.
My second major issue was the episode’s simultaneous creation and destruction of the Men of Letters and their elite network of carefully selected hunters. Have to say, I agree with Sam: “If you guys were such a big deal, why haven’t we – or anyone we know – ever heard of you?”
A highly skilled secret society with considerable resources that endured over a thousand years only to be wiped out without a trace in a single night by a single scary demon simply doesn’t pass my laugh test. That society leaving behind a hidden stronghold chock-full of a thousand years of artifacts and information meticulously warded against every form of evil that only a single key could open – defeating all the wards in the process – doesn’t make any practical sense, either. And if all the society’s other elders, initiates, and chosen hunters somehow died in Abaddon’s assault, no matter where they all were, I have to wonder how badly injured, blinded Larry Ganem, with no support except his wife, managed to arrange his coded fake grave and new identity. And if Larry’s wife knew about the Men of Letters – which I would presume she did, since Larry had no hesitation in speaking about them and demons in front of her – why didn’t Henry’s wife know, and tell secret hero stories to her son of his father gone missing in the fight against evil? Was Henry’s wife totally in the dark about his secret society membership, just thinking he belonged to some gentlemen’s club? I’ve got all kinds of logic issues with the concept.
I’m hoping that as the brothers locate and explore their new legacy, we’ll find out more about what actually happened to wipe away all traces of the Men of Letters, and learn sensible answers to the questions this episode raised in my head. In keeping with the season’s theme of perception, I’m well aware that all we think we know now is based purely on Henry’s limited knowledge, which stopped short of knowing about any destruction beyond the immediate chaos Abaddon had made of his and Josie’s initiation ceremony, and on what blind, elderly Larry Ganem chose to share with a hunter he didn’t know who said he’d found Henry’s journal and wanted to fill in the gaps. We have a lot more to learn, and the story may make much more rational sense once we do.
The show has played with some of these ideas before in much smaller ways. Hunters themselves have been presented as being generally secret, living mostly on the outskirts of society and hiding their knowledge and deeds because they couldn’t fit into the mainstream. The Campbells took that to an extreme, being introduced to us as an entire family of hunters who’d conducted their business without even mixing with or generally becoming known to hunters outside the clan for many generations. They kept their own counsel and didn’t share with others the information they acquired, such as the cure for vampirism revealed in Live Free Or Twi-Hard. The breadth of the Campbell family library revealed in Frontierland amazed even Bobby, who’d amassed an impressive collection of his own and proceeded to duplicate and add the Campbell stock to it, as we learned in Let It Bleed. In their own way, the Campbells amounted to a secret society even within the broader secrecy of the hunter culture.
Harvelle’s Roadhouse, introduced and destroyed in season two, illustrated a potential networking connection for hunters to share information, a place that kept tabs on monsters and potential cases and could foster cooperation among hunters. Unfortunately, over the course of the season the Roadhouse turned from an occasional postal drop for data exchange into a juvenile clubhouse where far too many blatantly suspicious blue-collar loners congregated, cagily studying their notes, nursing drinks, cleaning weapons, and glancing furtively around at each other, robbing it of any realism. The networking function of the Roadhouse resurfaced in Bobby’s wall of phones and spiderweb of connections throughout the hunter community, a role Garth has now assumed.
The idea of stashes of magical and supernatural implements and devices being scattered around the country also isn’t new. John’s storage unit, first revealed in Bad Day At Black Rock, served notice that many if not all hunters were likely to have similar hidden collections of artifacts, weapons, and information. For example, Jody brought Sam boxes from one of Bobby’s storage lockers in Time After Time.
The “supernatural mother lode” of the Men of Letters appears to lump together under one roof the functions of panic room, library, storage unit, and networking command center on a scale far grander than anything we’ve seen, and it’s precisely that grand scale that makes it hard for me to buy. Building and maintaining such a stronghold and using it to direct the actions of elite hunter strike teams would have required significant organization, financing, and infrastructure. The bigger and more complex the organization, the harder it is to keep secret, and the harder it is to destroy it completely in a single surgical strike. According to this episode, however improbably, both of those things happened.
Perhaps we’ll learn otherwise as time goes by. Perhaps Henry vanishing into the future with the only key deprived the remaining Lettermen and their pet hunters of their stronghold and disrupted their network. (As I noted before, having only one key would make no practical sense at all…) Perhaps Abaddon, before riding Josie Sands to her final initiation ceremony, had used the knowledge in her brain to target everyone else Josie knew in the organizational structure, sending other demons to take them out simultaneously with her attack on the ceremony. Perhaps anyone left alive after the first-stage strike, with all the resources of the stronghold suddenly beyond their reach, did the same thing as Larry Ganem, going into hiding under a new identity and burying any knowledge of the existence of the Men of Letters. That’s a lot of perhaps.
I had another very basic problem with the Men of Letters. As soon as Henry gave his explanation, I flashed on both the Watchers of Highlander and the Watchers in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The first were presented as human chroniclers of the Immortals who were supposed to observe and record what they saw, amassing and preserving knowledge, but not getting involved; the second were supposed to be carefully educated, observant loremasters who would train and supervise each successive Slayer. Brains, not brawn, and brains connecting with elite, selected brawn; sounds a lot like Henry’s description. Add to that a hidden stronghold full of relics, magical devices, and information needing protection, and it suddenly felt like a crossover into Warehouse 13. I’m accustomed to Supernatural putting its own distinctive stamp on myths and legends, but this felt less distinctive and more of just a stamp. Additional development in upcoming stories may well change that, and I hope it does, but my first unfortunate out-of-the-box impression was that I really had seen this before and wasn’t impressed to see it again in essentially the same clothes.
You Tapped The Power Of Your Soul To Get Here?
Stories of magic and spells have been a Supernatural staple from the very beginning of the show. We’ve seen its depictions of witchcraft, hoodoo/voodoo, and other theories of magic in numerous episodes. This episode went deep and silly at the same time, making me applaud the one and bemoan the other in the very same episode.
The deep was the thing I loved: Henry saying he needed a week to recharge his soul, indicating he’d used it to power the spell that jumped him into the future. Sam was amazed and intrigued, saying he thought only angels could do that.
Sam’s comment reflected what we knew. When Dean traveled into the past for In The Beginning and told his possessed grandfather he’d come from the future, Azazel said he only knew one thing that had the juice to swing something like that, and observed Dean must have friends in high places, clearly referring to angels. All the time travel we had seen up to this point had been accomplished by angels. In Frontierland, with Castiel weakened by his injuries, he siphoned power from Bobby’s soul to bring the brothers back to their home time.
Souls being the energy source that powered Heavem, Hell, and Purgatory was the main theme of all of season six. While time travel had been the exclusive province of angels until this episode, we’ve known for a while that demons could also use the power of human souls to do other things. In his conversation with Bobby in The Devil You Know, Crowley was pretty explicit about crossroads demons using the power of the soul being traded to accomplish the goal a person traded for. That conversation was very enlightening.
Crowley: “I need a little something to get the magic going.”
Bobby: “And what’s that?”
Crowley: “You make a wish. I can give you anything you want, mate, up to and including Death’s coordinates. All I need is…”
Bobby: “My soul.”
Abaddon’s use of Henry’s door rather than one of her own, combined with us never having seen a demon initiate time travel, suggests that even though demons can use the power of the souls they acquire to do things, the specific mechanics of time travel may escape them. Abaddon clearly didn’t lack the knowledge: the demon had access to everything Josie had learned, and she, as an initiate along with Henry, must have learned all the spells he did. Tapping those memories, Abaddon even taunted Henry, saying he’d never been particularly good at spells. And yet, Henry had learned a spell capable of carrying him through time. I’ll admit, I’m bothered that, with time supposedly being such a delicate thing, jumping into the future was the first idea that popped into Henry’s mind, but I’ll let that go.
Even apart from time travel, Henry’s ability to use soul power to supercharge spell components opens up a whole new realm of study. I’m betting Sam will essentially be going to college in the stronghold of the Men of Letters, learning the skills Henry’s gift opens to the brothers. I wonder if Sam will gradually become more of a wizard as Dean becomes even more a knight. The thought that humans could consciously tap into and use the power of their own souls to energize magic struck me as something new with serious potential ramifications for the future. I hope we learn a lot more along with the brothers about how this aspect of magic works.
That same time travel spell, however, also pointed out the extremely silly aspect of magic as depicted in thie episode. Angel feathers? Really? And Dean had a carefully numbered stash of them in the Impala’s trunk? Since when? We’ve only ever seen the shadows of wings when an angel died by sword or began to manifest its essence on Earth despite being contained within a human vessel; we’ve never seen material wings with material feathers. And given the strictly hands-off, observation-only policy angels supposedly had with regard to their surveillance of Earth after the time of Christ until the looming apocalypse, as described by Castiel, Anna, and Uriel in multiple episodes including Heaven And Earth and The Song Remains The Same – apart from the limited interference of the lesser variety of cupid angels in My Bloody Valentine – where and how would the Men of Letters have acquired the stock of angel feathers Henry raided for his jump to the future? Also, the Men of Letters and a random local contemporary little apothecary shop stocked tears of a dragon (despite dragons having vanished from Earth for at least 700 years, according to the Purgatory native masquerading as Ellie Visyak in Like A Virgin), and pinches of the sands of freaking time? Really?
Up to now, the spell components mentioned in episodes, while frequently oddball, had some rational source: human or animal bones, organs, or blood; myriad herbs and exotic spices; special oils; and things purified, distilled, blessed, or endowed with power through certain rituals, like holy water. This was the first episode I can remember to fall off the fantasy novel deep end and cite utterly nonsensical spell components. True, we learned from Dr. Visyak that a sword needed to be forged with dragon’s blood to be able to kill a dragon, but she wryly noted the absence of dragons tied in with the great age and current scarcity of such swords, keeping things at least marginally real. Unless the dragon’s tears and sands of time were fanciful names for otherwise mundane concoctions, they – along with angel feathers – crossed a line the show had never actually crossed before; they removed a little element of reality the show had always preserved even in the midst of its blatantly unreal supernatural elements. That disappoints me.
In the same episode, Supernatural advanced a fascinating concept of magic theory – humans accessing the power of souls – and threw away any concept of magic adhering to reality. I sigh.
Production Notes
As you can tell, I’m conflicted about this episode. It was beautifully visualized; Serge Ladouceur’s directorial debut was a definite success! Henry’s nighttime arrival at the street entrance of the initiation ceremony for the Men of Letters was a particularly gorgeous shot, and I commend Brad Creasser, acting in Serge’s normal role of cinematographer, for lighting it perfectly. The difference in color and tone between the past and present day scenes defined them well. Sam and Dean bonding with Henry as he died and talking afterward at his grave was potent. The script by Adam Glass had some scintillating lines, and the episode rocketed from beginning to end; it’s one of the fastest hours of television I can remember watching. Jay Gruska’s family theme musical cues were heartbreaking. The effects crews did a bang-up job especially with the blood sigils and Abaddon’s new demon smoke interrogation technique; I loved the energized sigil lighting Henry’s face. The set decoration detail was amazing, especially the transformation of the gentlemen’s club into Astro Comics, and creating two unique motels.
On the other hand, as my commentary and meta section indicates, I have major issues with the base concept story that go way beyond just the script for this episode. Right this moment, I can’t understand why the creative team chose to introduce a family history for John that feels so emotionally inconsistent with the man we knew, and I have reservations about building the show’s future around the relics of the Men of Letters when their very existence raises so many questions, issues, and logical discrepancies. To my mind, way too much new data got rammed into the episode’s 42 minutes; perhaps if the pieces had been more deliberately introduced they could have been accompanied by supporting information that could have buttressed the structure and provided some rational explanations to encourage more acceptance. I will wait to see where and how things go from here, and how what we learn as the brothers get more information may resolve the myriad questions this episode raised, but I’m concerned about them.
I enjoyed both the idea of Henry Winchester as an intellectual and armchair adventurer thrown in over his head and the way Gil McKinney played him. I loved the humor beats in Henry observing and trying to adapt to a world so socially and technologically different from his own. I enjoyed seeing Henry’s unconscious arrogance gradually broken down as Sam and Dean confounded his accustomed notions of hunters as brainless monkeys and as he faced up to the cost to his family of his commitment to the Men of Letters. His death was affecting, even though we knew it was inevitable from the very beginning. Henry’s burial, however, is another one of those niggling details that make me judge this definitely not Adam Glass’s best script. I get that the brothers wouldn’t have given Henry a hunter’s pyre even to be safe since Henry thought so little of hunters, but, burying him in a cemetery next to his fallen comrades? The overnight appearance of a random brand-new grave in an established cemetery is going to attract attention and exhumation and lead to a criminal investigation, especially when it’s right next to a recently desecrated grave. No peaceful rest for Henry’s bones, so the burial there was a dumb idea, when you think on it. At least Sam and Bobby buried Dean in the middle of nowhere where people weren’t likely to stumble across his grave and might have thought his marker cross to be just another roadside memorial to a traffic fatality.
Abaddon was a disappointment to me. As one of the first fallen, first-born demons, a knight of Hell established before Lucifer got locked away in his prison cage by Michael the first time, Abaddon was presumably of a power level analogous to Lilith, Lucifer’s first. At the very least, she would have been more than a match for Alastair, given the way she shook off the effects of being stabbed with what we now know is an “ancient demon-killing knife of the Kurds.” However, as played by Alaina Huffman, there was nothing distinctive about her personality or manner. Apart from her cute new interrogation trick of infusing part of herself into a victim to view their memories and her ability to follow Henry through a time door, Abaddon felt like just a run-of-the-mill, self-important evil bitch, and her propensity for screaming wordlessly at random moments made her more irritating than frightening. The way Dean and Henry took her down just reinforces the problem I have with the idea that Abaddon could have totally wiped out the Men of Letters, if they were as potent and resourceful as they were supposed to be.
The only truly interesting aspect of Abaddon for me was Larry’s comment that she had been a hired gun. That implied Abaddon wasn’t the brains behind the assault on the Men of Letters in 1958, and that makes me wonder who could have employed a Knight of Hell as a tool and either given her orders or made her think she was pursuing her own desires. Lucifer wasn’t in play at the time, and while Azazel was looking for his master’s cage, he hadn’t found it yet; that didn’t happen until 1972, as we saw in Lucifer Rising. Lilith was still buried deep in the pit, with Azazel not yet knowing he needed to get her out in order to free Lucifer. Crowley was presumably king of the crossroads demons, but not yet positioned to jockey for rulership of Hell. So: who decided it was time to destroy the Men of Letters and figured out how to do it using Abaddon, and why? I am hoping we learn more about that as time progresses.
In summary, I really wanted to love this episode, and I really can’t. I am looking forward to learning more about the Men of Letters and their fate (anyone care to bet we find out Eliot Ness was one of their elite hunters for a while?), and I do think what we learn could change my first impressions as new data answer questions and fill in currently missing logic. The show never fully paid off such things as John’s and Bobby’s storage unit caches of relics or the Campbells’ extensive library; the Men of Letters’ stronghold offers a new opportunity to expand on those concepts as a way to make the brothers more knowledgeable and powerful and to open up new avenues for research. The brothers have also never had a truly safe retreat to give them the chance to stash treasures or lick wounds. Depending on how this stronghold is designed, they might finally have a refuge in time of need and the chance to offer respite to allies like Kevin and Mama Tran. I wonder if they’ll consider the feasibility of recreating a version of the Men of Letters and their hunter elite to increase their chances of pursuing and translating the tablets of the Word of God; having more organized help could totally change the dynamics of their hunt, hopefully without falling into the Roadhouse trap. Having the brothers openly assume leadership positions in the hunter community could be a fascinating change of role for them, if the writers could make it work. I’m curious to see where this may go.
I don’t think anything is going to get me to accept John’s new backstory, though. The good thing is, that probably doesn’t matter any more than some of the other loops the show’s thrown me for over the years, because I suspect it won’t be mentioned again. It already served the only two purposes I could see it having: giving the brothers – particularly Dean – a reason to greet Henry initially with antagonism rather than even cautious familial acceptance; and explaining why John would have been totally ignorant of his intellectual supernatural legacy. I wish the writers’ room had handled those things differently, but what’s done is done, and that much of it is over with. In my mind, it falls into the same “stupid award” bin as Kripke having had an angel physically rip out her “grace” and literally fall with it from Heaven as two meteorites streaking across the North American night sky in Heaven And Hell. We never heard about that dumb notion again, and I’m betting John’s newly acquired daddy issues will go silently back into their closet exactly the same way. And I would be fine with that.
After all, only the fundamental things need apply as time goes by.
Your article was very interesting and you addressed many of the problems I too found with the episode.
X
The ret-conning of John, for that’s what it amounts to, was obviously needed in order to introduce Henry, as John had had to be young enough not to have been informed about the history of the ‘Men of Letters’ by his father.
Therefore the writers couldn’t have made him disappear after ‘In The Beginning’ to keep continuity, as one would assume that by that time John would already have been privvy to Henry’s secrets.
X
I was actually rather sad about this new development as I really liked the original twist when we found out that uber hunter John was from a family of mechanics and it was actually the seemingly naive Mary that was the hunter.
X
I wonder if we will get John’s mother jumping in sometime. Did she know about the secret society? She wasn’t mentioned. Could she still be alive?
X
X
The’ Men of Letters’ was pretty difficult for me to accept too, coming out of nowhere as it did and it sounds honestly a bit cliched!
Henry exhibited amzing powers, getting out of handcuffs, disappearing, travelling through time and using the power of the human soul.
These all seem very akin to angel powers and rather unbelievable for any merely human secret society to be in possession of.
X
The theory of the brains and the brawn bothered me too. The Campbells might have been ‘ape-like ‘ hunters but they were certainly intelligent.
I believe that was supposed to have been one of the reasons for Samuel’s resurrection in season six, precisely because of his great knowledge of the supernatural and of hunting.
To me it seemed that John was more the one who came over as the brawny hunter, all fixated on the job and with little time even to dedicate to his children.
X
However it’s done now and it all depends where the writers are going to take this.
I don’t mind the brothers having a base. I think they deserve it after living for thirty years in a car. 🙂
X
I repeat that it all depends where the writers go.
I have to say that I have not been impressed with this season. There have been many continuity problems and ret-cons of what has gone before.
X
However I loved this episode because it had the feel of the ‘true’ Supernatural, when the brothers were at the fore-front of the episodes and on-screen interacting together without having to be wallpaper for the guest stars, which has been their fate in all the previous, for me AU, episodes based on the falsehood of Sam not looking for Dean.
Thanks for coming by!
I am looking forward to seeing where we go from here, and I do hope some of my issues will get addressed along the way. There’s a lot of opportunity!
I didn’t have nearly as much trouble with Henry having disappeared when John was very young as with John hating on him for it vehemently enough to have infected Dean with a commensurate level of blame. It’s the hating on Henry that threw me the most because we should have seen that before now, if it really existed, and the only reason for it was to raise a high bar of antagonism between Dean and Henry. To my mind, that was unnecessary; there could have been plenty of conflict without it. Say, for example, that Henry had been listed among the dead in the “gentlemen’s club” fire: the brothers would have been wary of dead grandpa showing up and claiming a whole magical history, and Dean’s anger could have been for his having kept the truth of the supernatural from his wife and son, leaving John unprepared to face what later took his wife and overturned his life.
Henry’s jaundiced view of hunters as mere brawn was a stupid prejudice in light of all we’ve seen over the years. I think we can all agree that while the show has consistently played hunters as blue-collar types, there’s been a lot of learning also on display. And the Men of Letters could have used more connected brawn along with their vaunted brains. Must say, the Winchester brothers demonstrate both!
Henry’s facility with handcuffs made me smile. When I saw the preview clip, while I was starting to wonder how to reconcile the past with this urbane Winchester grandfather, I laughed out loud at the handcuff slip because that made Henry a mechanic, if of a somewhat different tradition than John! In the world of stage magic, an operator who is particularly adept at close-range sleight of hand, including card tricks, pickpocketing, and handcuff slips, is referred to as a “mechanic.” I appreciated that little connection!
Great article, Bardicvoice. Thanks.
One of my biggest problems with the whole Men of Letters and Legacy concepts is that it seemingly negates most of their previous struggles.
If the Winchester boys are part of a “Legacy” then there never really was any “Free Will”, was there?
Yeah, the free will and destiny thing did become muddled, I thought.
Thanks for chatting!
I’ve had occasional issues with the show’s manipulation of the concepts of destiny and free will, but Henry declaring the brothers to be “legacies” isn’t one of them. My biggest gripe – and I voiced it at the time – was the cupid’s declaration that making John and Mary fall in love was arranged by Heaven because the brothers had to be born. That, of course, was orchestrated by the rebel angels to create the ideal circumstances fitting prophetic terms to produce fitting human brother vessels to embody Lucifer and Michael in their apocalyptic conflict.
While I had major issues with John and Mary being manipulated into their marriage, the saving grace for me was always the belief that despite the machinations of angels and demons, free will still existed because even though humans were put into situations, the outcome of the situation still depended on the choices people made. Ultimately, Dean refused Michael and remained himself, and Sam, while he said yes to Lucifer, did it with intent to spike the angels’ and demons’ plans, and ultimately succeeded because of the brothers’ steadfast love for each other. We can’t control many of the things that happen to us, but we can control how we react to them; that, to me, demonstrates our free will. Others who know us well may be able to predict how we would react in a situation and set it up accordingly, but that wouldn’t preclude us from choosing differently when the moment arrived. So, we can be herded, we can be shaped — but we can also jump the fence or double-back on our herder. That’s still in us.
I think Henry’s use of the term “legacies” in connection with the brothers was even less manipulative than that: he meant simply that any son of his would have been intended to be inducted into the Men of Letters, as he himself had been. The family business. I’ll bet Henry would never have contemplated marrying his son off to the daughter of hunters, given his prejudices on the matter! The angels had other ideas … and apparently to achieve very different goals.
We’ll see!
[quote]
I think Henry’s use of the term “legacies” in connection with the brothers was even less manipulative than that: he meant simply that any son of his would have been intended to be inducted into the Men of Letters, as he himself had been. The family business. [/quote]
I’d agree with you, Bardicvoice, except for the exchange between Dean and Henry, when Henry expresses regret for not being there for John, stating
“I was a Legacy. I had no choice.”
Sounds very much like heading down that road again, to me.
I took that comment differently. I thought Henry saw his duty to the Men of Letters as an obligation he couldn’t in conscience have denied, not a fate to which he was condemned. I see that differently from a fate or destiny one can’t evade; to my mind, it still represents a choice, not a doom. 🙂
I can accept that, Bardicvoice. As the expression goes, mileage varies.
And honestly, if they’d work toward dealing with some of the other issues I’ve had with this season, I could ignore a lot of these little points. They’re just adding up, and making me irritable.
Thank you for your review, Bardicvoice, I always antecipate it a lot. Really missed you last year.
I’m sorry to read you didn’t enjoy the episode as much as I did. I concede, though, there is a lot still to (hopefully) be explained by the writers.
I’m specially puzzled by two things: first of all, Henry’s wife / Sam and Dean’s grandmother. She was never, ever mentioned, not even in this episode. It’s like she never existed, which is obviously impossible. And since Henry said John was “everything” to him (ok, but what about your wife, Henry?), that best explanation I could think of is that either Henry was a single dad (that would be interesting in the 50’s) or he was already a widower when he left John in 1958. That may explain the father/son/family photo without a woman. And maybe John was raised by an aunt/uncle, what would explain “the old man” mention in the “In the Beginning” episode, and the preservation of the Winchester name (if the writers even remembered it at some point. They should hire a fan as a consultant, we usually know everything, every single line – me included. Ha!) . But, of course, I’m just speculating, me, trying too hard to make sense of things. I need some help from the writers.
But the most intriging to me is to know how much knowledge this “Man of Letters” have stocked, and how much of this is novelty and useful to the boys. Few people might have known about Angels, dragons, time travel, the power of souls and Purgatory in 1958, and all of these things were totally knew to the boys and the hunting community in general until it exploded in their faces, but now… After all what happened… We will have to wait and see.
All The Men of letters being a handful of guys in a room is also annoying, I hope they were being attacked worldwide for some time and were the last men standing.
But the other thing that I’ve been reading for some time in the comments here and that you also brought up in your review, and that is making me a little uneasy, is the thought that John hadn’t shown signs he was abandoned by his father in earlier episodes, because he looked happy and well balanced before Mary’s death. Shouldn’t he be? Should he be angry man or unstable at some length? I’m just asking because it is a personal subject to me, because I was abandoned by my father when I was about John’s age and, although I’m still angry and resent him, and unfortunately I’ll now never be able to understand his reasons because he died a few years back, I still find myself to be a reasonable balanced girl, and capable to be happy. I do not show angry signs in a daily basis, I think. What am I missing? Sorry if I misunderstood you, if that was the case.
Thanks again for your thoughts!
I’ve always assumed that Garth took over Bobby and the Campbell’s extensive library, since he is now Bobby 2.0. That always rubbed me the wrong way; but, of course, those two things may have just been forgotten by the writers. It is a big deal, though, because Sampa Campbell said the Campbells had been hunting for a thousand years, so the information they amassed should have been ancient texts.
Since Bobby was there the one time the Winchesters made use of it (Frontierland), I have to assume that Bobby assimilated that into his collection and Garth has it now.
We know Bobby assimilated the Campbell information: we learned in [i]Let It Bleed[/i] that he had copied the Moishe Campbell diary that had the information on Lovecraft having opened a door into Purgatory.
I expect Garth does have all that information now; he is clearly a lot better informed than he used to be, when he was silly enough to call Bobby’s fake FBI phone line when Bobby told him to contact the real FBI back in [i]Weekend At Bobby’s![/i] I don’t object to Garth assuming the role of coordinator, so long as he doesn’t presume to take on the role of father-figure to the Winchesters. And I don’t think they’ll let him get away with that. 🙂
Thanks, Ale! I’m glad you’re mostly happy and intrigued. Despite the issues I raised with this episode, I’m mostly that way too — but I have very high quality expectations for this show, so when it falls short in my regard, it hurts. That’s a good thing.
I suspect the story being built exclusively around daddy issues simply left no room for developing Mrs. Winchester. I didn’t appreciate that any more than you did, and I wish they’d made different choices on this whole backstory issue about John and his parents. I can see ways they could have accomplished the same ends without the things that struck me as being so wrong.
My issue with not having seen any prior signs of John’s deep-seated anger with his father is rooted precisely in the way Dean expressed it. Dean’s reaction was vehement, suggesting that John had expressed real hate for his father when talking to his kids. It wasn’t a “Dad was abandoned and resented his father for it,” it was, “Dad [i]hated[/i] that son of a bitch.” There was a degree of rage there deep enough to have rooted itself in the next generation. Given what you’ve said about your personal situation, I’m betting that when/if you have kids, there may come a time when you tell them about their grandfather and say that you didn’t know why he left and always resented him for it, and you were sad you never got the chance to find out why he left. That’s a world different from saying you hated him over 20 years later with enough passion to have it resonate with your kids. And THAT’s the aspect of this piece of John’s backstory that has me really unable to accept or process it. That degree of pent-up, deep-rooted,[i] lifetime[/i] rage for anything other than what killed Mary just didn’t fit with having been totally hidden within the man we met. For me, it’s a perception problem.
We’ll see where things go from here!
Bardicvoice, I could be wrong but I think that Dean said his father hated his own father, I don’t think there is any indication that he necessarily told Sam and Dean that. Parents often don’t think about what they say around their kids and Dean was old enough to understand his parents by the time his mother died (since he tried to support his mother when his father left).
It is possible that he overheard a conversation at some point when his father was angry that he read too much into and then stored away. Clearly the Winchesters are bad about sharing their history with each other so it might never have been mentioned by John again and why would Dean ask? Especially if his dad was prone to going drinking when he was in a bad mood (As is mentioned by Sam in the pilot episode) Dean wouldn’t bring up a subject he thinks might anger him (Sam doesn’t seem to have been much in the way of heart-to-heart conversations with his dad either).
Sam’s younger brother status has always meant that he has had to rely on information about everything from Dean and would have no reason to doubt it. All of a sudden John has major issues with his dad that he might be surprised to hear about…
Not saying that any of that is the case it just seems plausable to me.
I agree they really should have accounted for the ‘say hello to your old man line’ in this episode.
I must admit I have so many issues with the continuity and logic this season that this one doesn’t worry me too much. If I believed that there was that much thinking gone into it I would nearly say that they all got bounced into an alternate timeline at the point of the explosion in the office block. It would certainly account for a whole lot of things that don’t seem to follow from previous seasons.
Many, many things are possible. 🙂 I’m not judging; I’m just saying that, on the basis of my perception, John’s new backstory just doesn’t comport with what I’ve seen of him, and that’s why it doesn’t resonate with me. That’s my problem, no one else’s.
And I’m really looking forward to the rest of this season and all we’re going to learn!
Thanks for joining in!
Talk about perceptions, Mary, your’s and mine couldn’t be further apart on this one. I loved the episode, and the more I watch it, the more excited I am about how the show goes forward.
Regarding John: I’ve always bought that John loved the boys, but I also feel he was an abusive father emotionally and, in all likelihood, physically. I was glad at this attempt to somewhat rehabilitate John’s character, so I’ll buy into the John having been raised by a step-father and having daddy issues. I’m also always happy to get mentions of John, as he was such a strong force in the show.
I’ve always felt that Dean was the brother most harmed by John, and that Dean got his ingrained sense of family from the relationship he had with his mother. Dean loved his mother, period, and had mostly happy times with John, up until Mary died, but he still knew John’s failings (Dark Side of the Moon). After Mary died, I buy into Dean clinging to John, worshipping him even, as arising out of a fear that he could/would lose his only remaining parent.
I didn’t think this revisiting of John was anything close to the abrupt assertion of Lisa into the Show; or, for that matter, Sam finding Amelia the love of his life and something he’d never had before to the point of not giving Dean a second thought (implosion or no implosion). I’ve never bought into that one, and nothing has been show to date to make believe it or want to believe it. (ETA: Or Garth being elevated to Bobby 2.0, either).
I also see why Sam would immediately warm up to Henry, while Dean did not. Dean has always had a complex relationship with John, but the brothers are now grown men and, quite frankly, after eight years, it’s time they reconciled their daddy issues and moved on. If being ‘legacies’ is what it took to do that, yea. Besides, it’s long past due that the Winchester brothers are moved to the royalty of the hunting community. It’s been hinted at for years, and I liked how they did that here.
I also liked Abbadon. I thought she was on the level of Meg1-like evilness. I sure bought into her being a worthy adversary more so than Crowley, who does nothing more than torture and yell a lot these days. (Oh, how I miss swarmy frenemy Crowley.) Also, I kind of think Naomi was the one controlling Abbadon, and there’s probably other things out there who are under Naomi’s control, too.
What I’m trying to say is that I welcomed the potentiality this episode brought to the show — the possibility of the show getting into mysticism, expanded mythology, and the occult is exciting, and I can think of any number of ways the show could take on fresh stories.
I welcome this especially, since I’ve found Samelia an atrocious story, Purgatory fully undeveloped, the brothers issues unsatisfactorily resolved, and the mytharc extremely weak at this point, so this episode pumped new blood into the season and the show for me.
And I did think the production was beautifully done. Really liked how they used the song “As Time Goes By” in the episode (even if it isn’t classic rock).
[quote]
Regarding John: I’ve always bought that John loved the boys, but I also feel he was an abusive father emotionally and, in all likelihood, physically.[/quote]
Hi Ginger, can I ask, why do you think he might have been physically abusive? I haven’t seen any evidence of that in the show? In fact at the point where he was at his most angry with Dean (when Sam nearly got killed by the Striga) there was no indication at all that he was going to do any more than yell.
Even that was just a stressed parent freaking out, though Dean didn’t understand that and it scarred him, it might be called emotional abuse I guess but I don’t see where you are getting the physically abusive idea from.
Both Dean and Sam loved their father and respected him even if he made them angry. They were always waiting for him to come home from hunts. Those emotions wouldn’t really match with a parent they were afraid of.
We know that John was negligent (leaving the brothers quite young for long periods, not checking in, even to the point that Dean went without food (Metamorphosis), and we know that John was a mean son-of-a-gun (couldn’t get along with anyone), and he drank too much, especially on the holidays (A Very Supernatural Christmas). And we have Dean’s comment in Dark Side of the Moon about ‘when Dad came home.’ We also know Dean has an explosive temper, which I don’t see coming from Mary.
The show has never implicitly said one way or the other, and that’s why I said ‘in all liklihood;’ but in my mind, putting that all together, it’s not too hard to envision John knocking Dean around occasionally in his teen years if he didn’t think Dean was stepping up.
Well their diet was definitely a sin against nutrition for sure…
I just don’t see the rest of it. Though I accept your examples they don’t really add up for me.
They had a negligent childhood that is true however where the line is between that and ‘physical abuse’ is something I am not going to even try to speculate on.
Thanks for clarifying for me.
Taking into account you said ” in all likelihood”, that thought had never crossed my mind. I get angry every time I think about John leaving those children alone and think he damaged the boys in many ways in the name of protecting them and getting revenge. The idea of them getting knocked around by their dad wasn’t a leap I took. I do think one of them, Sam in particular, would have thrown that in the conversations about why he left home and why family didn’t mean the same to him. Neither one has alluded to anything like that. I can see where one could make that jump. I just never saw any red flags.
I think in the first season’s Nightmare episode (Max Miller uses his psychokinetic powers to kill his abusive father and Uncle), it was indicated that John wasn’t physically violent. Towards the end of the episode, Sam told Dean they were lucky, that things could have gone a whole other way; a little more tequila, a little less demon hunting…
If we all thought the same, this would be a very boring world!
I never thought John was physically abusive; Sam suggested otherwise pretty clearly in [i]Nightmare[/i]. I do think Dean bore more of John’s anger than Sam ever saw and suffered because of it – his comment to Sam in Dark Side Of The Moon about John coming home to discover that Sam had run away on Dean’s watch was stomach-dropping – but I never thought physical abuse was a factor. Again, since we never actually saw what happened, it’s all a matter of perception. 🙂
Our views on Lisa and Amelia are also obviously different. I never saw either of them as the brothers’ one true loves, and don’t believe they did, either. To me, it seemed Dean first looked back on Lisa just as an amazing sex memory, and after he saw her as a mother, she became his mental image of what he was fighting for: an ideal he didn’t really even know. Sam sending Dean to her in [i]Swan Song[/i] wasn’t a recognition of Lisa as the love of his life – she wasn’t – but an understanding that without someone to bond to and care for, Dean, being alone, would have committed suicide by monster. Dean living with Lisa and Ben is what really built the caring among them all, at least as I saw it. And I’ve been open about thinking Sam’s relationship with Amelia was founded in both of them being damaged and needing to connect with someone else, not in either of them finding the other as being the their life’s love. So, I don’t have the same problems with them you do. And I’ve written before about my thoughts on why Sam didn’t search for Dean, so I won’t go into that again. Suffice it to say, different perceptions; different bases.
Similarly, I don’t have a problem with Garth trying to fill Bobby’s shoes as a tribute to the man who helped him. Garth is very young and very imperfect, but I can buy the motives he asserted in [i]Party On, Garth[/i]. I don’t see Dean or Sam accepting Garth in Bobby’s [i]in loco parentis[/i] role for the two of them, but as a hunter coordinator and resource? Yes, I can buy that. 🙂
I do look forward to learning more about the Men of Letters and all the neat potentials this episode brought in for the future. I just hope the MOL get fleshed out a LOT more than they were in this episode!!
Thanks again! And I LOVED the use of “As Time Goes By.” I’ve loved that song literally all my life.
Thanks for the review… you’ve made so many interesting points that I hadn’t considered before.
But I really loved this episode. Even though I was initially skeptical about the Men of Letters, I think I just needed time to absorb all the information thrown at us in 42 minutes. Now I’m really excited by the possibilities.
I also don’t have a problem with the ‘new’ Winchester family history. I understand your reservations, but the truth is that we know very little about John’s life growing up – how he reconciled with the loss of his real father, how growing up with a step-father (or Uncle, as Ale suggested above) impacted on him. He may have had a great relationship with this second father-figure, but still resented his birth father. People are complicated. So, given how little we know, I don’t find it too hard to accept what the SPN writers have given us in this episode.
On a side note, I really loved that scene where Henry told Sam & Dean about John being afraid and how he gave him the music-box playing ‘As time goes by’. The expression on Sam’s face when he was visualizing his Dad as a child, scared of something! Melted my heart :sigh:
I also agree with your comment’s about Larry’s statement that she was a hired gun – this is very interesting. I admit, I hadn’t thought much about this until reading your review, but now I’m wondering who was behind it all… and do they still exist? Also, I doubt Abbadon was the only hired gun. I imagine there was more than one meeting place for the groups of ‘Men of Letters’ (given they had a central headquarters) and they would’ve been attacked simultaneously on that night. But Abbadon was the one that got closest to retrieving the key (which seems to be their objective).
It does seem strange that there was only one key to their headquarters, but it would make sense that the ‘Men of Letters’ scattered after the attacks and the search for the key was also abandoned by whoever orchestrated it. Because, if Henry disappeared into the future and no-one knew what happened to him, the same could be said for Abbadon. She didn’t return either because Sam & Dean have trapped her in the body and buried her in the future.
There are lots of questions, definitely. But I really love this… because it has given the writers so much scope to work with and it makes seasons 9 & 10 seem possible! Gotta love that 😀
I’m with you in loving and enjoying all the new potentials! I can’t wait to see where this goes, despite the reservations I expressed in this review. I still love my show, and always will. More seasons would make me very happy!
And I’m right with you in loving the scene where Henry talked about little John’s fears and the music box. Stellar!
I honestely and sincerely thought way back in Season 4….heck even before Season 4 began when I learned Kripke was installing Angels I thought a secret society would be perfect for s4. A society who knew about the phrophecy of two brothers destined to be the meatsuits for Lucifer and Micheal that would herald the apocolypse.
ANd I thought Bobby would be perfect as a member who knew everything and was the one who identified Sama dn Dean as the brothers.
I honestly tbhought this for S4 and hoped for it. Course I also thought it would be cool if Sam was forced by the Angels to be an undercover Agent with the promise if he did what they wanted they would save Dean. All he had to doo was pretend to let Ruby manipulate him so he could gain intel on Lilith and Lucifers plans.
I think i have the same problems as you do about the plot points. But I think MOL whiel it has its weakensses does one thing really well: It brings the humanity back to Supernatural. It brings Sama dn Dean back to the forefront.
I just hope Sam doesn’t get locked inside the warehouse never to interact with anyone again…his sole perpose to research adn relay information to Dean and whomever Dean chooses as his new better brother and partner to investigate and hunt.
Interesting thoughts on secret societies! I really do look forward to all we’re going to learn about the Men of Letters, what they knew, and what really went down in the past to make them so unknown in the present.
I sincerely doubt Sam would ever get locked away. Dean and Sam are the Winchesters; no one will EVER be a better brother for either than the other. And that is most definitely what I believe in my deepest heart of hearts.
Hey Bardicvoice, I’m not sure if this will help in the believability of the Men of Letters just suddenly appearing, but Ben Edlund did address it in our conference call this afternoon. I just transcribed it. You’ll have to let me know if you buy his explanation or not:
[i]We have a thing we usually say about Bigfoot is that it just doesn’t exist. The hunters just all know, Bigfoot is not real. For Dean, his position is that hunters felt they knew that secret societies didn’t exist. Not all hunters because there’s a dispatch of specific hunters that worked for the Men of Letters, but in general they’ve done such a good job of staying secret that for this number of seasons there wasn’t any indication of their presence nor was there an indication of the presence of other secret societies. They only came to life through the storehouse of the information available through the Men of Letters.
[/i]
Now I’m going off to read your interview with Ben Edlund, Alice!
But in the interim, I’ll just say … I really hope we learn more about what actually happened to hide the Men of Letters from the world we know! It’s not Dean’s or hunters’ perception of the existence of secret societies I’m concerned about: it’s mine. We’ll see what Ben and the rest of the writers’ room do to explain our ignorance! *grin*
Any show that lasts a long time has to add changes and there will always be plot holes. Shows like Lost and Fringe had fans complaining about that. TV shows are not novels where the author and an editor can go over the manuscripts and find problems. I really don’t have a problem just going with it. I do see similarities with Highlnder and Buffy, but I don’t get your anology with Warehouse. Also, Bardicvoice, I to wonder if maybe there are others out there who know about MOL. A secret society that has been around for thousands of years should have some who are aware of it. I may not agree with you about this episode, but I value your insights.
Any show that lasts a long time has to add changes and there will always be plot holes. Shows like Lost and Fringe had fans complaining about that. TV shows are not novels where the author and an editor can go over the manuscripts and find problems. I really don’t have a problem just going with it. I do see similarities with Highander and Buffy, but I don’t get your anology with Warehouse. Also, Bardicvoice, I to wonder if maybe there are others out there who know about MOL. A secret society that has been around for thousands of years should have some who are aware of it. I may not agree with you about this episode, but I value your insights.
Thanks, Daisymae! I’m well aware of the collaborative and iterative nature of television story development, as well as the difficulty of keeping track of all the threads woven into an over 100-episode and still growing tapestry. I welcome new twists and possibilities and often have fun figuring out in-canon ways to account for apparent discrepancies that make them *not* discrepancies; it’s a favorite pasttime that never gets old. And I do hope and expect that as the Men of Letters story gets further explored, we’ll learn a lot more, perhaps including discovering other survivors or descendants of the MOL and their elite hunter cadre or good reasons why such don’t exist.
As I said, I think a lot of my issues with this episode itself arose simply because it tried to do so much all at once that it couldn’t put enough detail into its groundwork to make the image hang together for me. The seeming holes in the structure – like the point that a long-established, sophisticated secret society should have *some* surviving presence – just distracted from the shape of the building. But while I’ll point out issues I have with episodes as they get presented, I’m more than ready to see how later episodes add to the picture and complete what the first story brushstrokes began. 🙂
Oh, and my Warehouse 13 thought came from Larry’s comment that the box held the key to every object, scroll, and spell ever collected by the Men of Letters over a thousand years. Just given the number of curse boxes we saw in John’s storage unit in [i]Bad Day At Black Rock[/i] and in Bobby’s upstairs linen closet in [i]Are You There, God? It’s Me, Dean Winchester[/i] I can’t help but think that the stronghold’s basement is going to contain a staggering number of cursed objects and magical relics. Ark of the Covenant, anyone? Just a funny thought …
Hi Bardicvoice
On the whole I really enjoyed this episode, although there was a lot to absorb.
I loved how the brothers were, the way they worked together and seem to be in sync with each other.
I liked Henry and his reaction to modern world. His expression of today’s cars and strollers was priceless.
When Henry took Sam’s phone and requested the operator to connect him to a specific number and Dean’s reaction of ‘Who are you not calling’ had me giggling.
And that handcuff trick was pretty awesome.
It was really sad when Henry realized that he never returned from his visit to the future and learned how that affected his son.
Abaddon was fun to watch, especially with that whole ‘Tell me what you saw’ trick.
I do agree with some of the issues that this episode presented.
It does seem odd that this MOL society that had existed for a thousand years would suddenly become non-existent because one location had been compromised.
It almost makes it seem that this society was only in Normal, Illinois and those at the initiation were the only existing members.
However it does have me intrigued and anxious to learn more about this.
The spells ingredients did come across a little silly. I have to admit when Henry mentioned the sands of time, I couldn’t help but think of the opening for ‘The days of our Lives’, something about ‘Sands of the hourglass these are the times of our lives.’ Is that the Soap Opera Jensen was in?
And the thought of Dean storing Angel feathers in his trunk had me picturing Dean giving Cass a hard time for molting in his car. However I will say that Dean having the odd feather didn’t strike me as too far fetch. I know we’ve only ever seen them in a shadow or ash like form but we have always heard the fluttering of wings when ever Cass or any other Angel would leave the room, so it is possible that one may have fallen here or there.
I was taken by surprise about John’s daddy issues. I immediately thought of ‘In the Beginning’ and how John didn’t appear to have any issues at all with his dad.
But with this new information one does have to rethink this. The term ‘the old man’ usually refers to ones father, however I’m also willing to believe it can refer to the father figure of the house.
John’s mother could have remarried and they were referring to his stepfather or possibly an Uncle. However I was thinking that it could have also been his grandfather from his mother’s side.
Being 1958 and the probability that his mother wasn’t working at the time of Henry’s disappearance, it wouldn’t be unrealistic that she would have sought help or support from her own family.
It’s quite possible that her parents took her and John in and they simply stayed. This could explain how John ended up in Lawrence Kansas as his mother’s family could have been from there.
I was also thinking that maybe John’s hatred for his dad was not only because of the abandonment issues but also the affects it had on his Mother and their family reputation.
The night that Henry disappeared, so did Josie the woman that Abaddon had taken over. I can only imagine what was presumed and speculated by the police and the town with having a man and woman that knew each other both going missing on the same night.
Anyways thank you for the review, I always enjoy reading everyone’s reviews from this site and the comments. I like getting other perspectives and learning something I may have missed.
[quote]It’s quite possible that her parents took her and John in and they simply stayed. This could explain how John ended up in Lawrence Kansas as his mother’s family could have been from there.
I was also thinking that maybe John’s hatred for his dad was not only because of the abandonment issues but also the affects it had on his Mother and their family reputation.
The night that Henry disappeared, so did Josie the woman that Abaddon had taken over. I can only imagine what was presumed and speculated by the police and the town with having a man and woman that knew each other both going missing on the same night. [/quote]
That’s a very interesting catch!
[quote][quote]It’s quite possible that her parents took her and John in and they simply stayed. This could explain how John ended up in Lawrence Kansas as his mother’s family could have been from there.
I was also thinking that maybe John’s hatred for his dad was not only because of the abandonment issues but also the affects it had on his Mother and their family reputation.
The night that Henry disappeared, so did Josie the woman that Abaddon had taken over. I can only imagine what was presumed and speculated by the police and the town with having a man and woman that knew each other both going missing on the same night. [/quote]
That’s a very interesting catch![/quote]
I think that only works if HEnry adn Josie knew each other and interacted outside iof the MOL. I can’t imagine any of the MOL would hang out socially after work per se. It would bring a bit too much attention to them and the MOL.
And even if Josie and Henry disappeared on the same day (do we have evidence that suggested they were reported missing on the same day?)….depending on the size of the town of NOrmal…..well not all people who disappear on the saem day or people who are murdered on the saem day are going to immediatly be connected to one another.
If Normal is a small town where everyone knew everyone else then maybe. But we dont know the population. We dont know the crime statistics. We dont know enough to decide the police or local gossip tied the two together.
No, we don’t, for now it’s just gossip! 😉
Didn’t I read in here that someone is from Normal?
As per Wikipedia, its population was 52.497 in 2010. Of course, we don’t know the population in 1958.
Very nice review Bardicvoice, yours are always so thorough and detailed. I did like the episode more than you and wasn’t troubled quite as much by some of the a-hem ‘creative’ finagling that they did with certain known plot details; in particular issues surrounding John. The PTB did open up a can of worms by messing with the established canon, but I think that some of the clunkiness can be worked out satisfactorily. As Karen said in the above quote, it would not be too outside the box to assume that Henry’s (as still unnamed wife) and John went to her family after Henry’s disappearance for help and to avoid scandal. The ‘Old Man’ referred to in In the Beginning could very likely have been John’s grandfather or uncle. It seems unlikely that she re-married as John still carried the name Winchester and had she done so, he most likely would have had it changed. My head canon is telling me that Henry’s unnamed wife did in fact know all about what Henry was doing, was maybe a part of it herself, and when she got wind of what happened on that fateful night, took John and ran to her family and told John his father left them, as a method of protecting him and cutting them both off from the group that took her husband and John’s father from them. I am hoping that we learn more about this in future episodes, and that they just didn’t have enough time to cover that angle in an episode already jam-packed with new information. I also have a different take on that scene in Dark Side of the Moon that showed John and Mary in a period of separation. For you his walking away did not jibe with how dedicated a family man John was shown to be; yet there is no indication in the scene that he DID walk away. Perhaps Mary kicked him out for one reason or another and he was pleading with her during that phone call to let him come back? There was so little information there that we can’t tell who left whom.
I also agree with you that it would have been nice if some of the details surrounding the spells had stayed within the realm of the ‘real’. Supernatural has always walked that fine line between fantastic and factual, and it did seem to be straying a little into the fantastical which is out of the norm for them. I hope that they try to keep it as grounded as possible in the future.
And even though this isn’t an issue that you tackled in this review, I definitely agree with some of the other critics that the whitewash being done to Sam’s past as a lucifer vessel, 180 year resident of hell, carrier of demon blood and psychic kid is problematic. I am really hoping that the PTB will address these events even in a small way at some point.. these character elements are intrinsic to the entire series and are important to Sam AND to Dean. It’s a mistake IMHO to go about the next few seasons as if none of that took place or shaped the men Sam and Dean have become.