Tales of Epic Heroes: Supernatural Season One vs. The Odyssey

ByRandal
MISSOURI: John Winchester, I could just slap you. Why won’t you go talk to your children?
JOHN: I want to. You have no idea how much I wanna see ’em. But I can’t. Not yet. Not until I know the truth.
 
Quite a wrinkle.
 
The island hopping continues in Asylum, this time by phone where Caleb, Jefferson nor Pastor Jim has heard anything about the whereabouts of John Winchester. But they presume he’s alive, for yet another set of coordinates comes in, and by the end of the episode, they know for sure.
 
1.11: The Episode We Make Contact
 
Seems you prophesized all of this would end
Were you burned away when the sun rose again?
– Alice In Chains, When the Sun Rose Again
 
JOHN: Look, we don’t have time for this. This is bigger than you think, they’re everywhere.
Even us talking right now, it’s not safe.
SAM: No. Alright? No way.
DEAN: Give me the phone.
JOHN: I have given you an order. Now, you stop following me and you do your job.

You understand me?

 
Their ultimate goal, the reason that Dean came to get Sam in the first place, was surprisingly burned away by the object of their search himself, dissension growing out of the ash. The range of sibling conflict is wide, from such battles eventually resolved like that of Orlando and Oliver in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, to more disastrous fare like Richard I and John Lackland, The Iliad‘s Hector and Paris, or, among the worst, the quarrel between Eteocles and Polynices over the Theban kingship leading to open warfare. Hell, even the bitterness between Ray and Dave Davies was a hallmark over the career of The Kinks. Sam nearly snuffing out his brother’s life in When the Levee Breaks à la Cain or Romulus is something else entirely, but thankfully at this point in the tale, we’re not quite sinking into those tenebrous depths, for in the very next episode, it isn’t John who comes to Dean’s aid, but his brother.
 
We have met the enemy and she is, hey, I know you!
 
“but then someone made him rash,
so that he sailed away to sandy Pylos
to hear news of his father. Now the suitors
lie in ambush on his homeward track”
– Eumaios the swineherd to a disguised Odysseus, The Odyssey, book XIV
 
Aside: Is it me, or could we consider the Benders as this story’s Laestrygonians? Tastes like chicken.
 
Meg is a certainly a complex character, an amalgamation of multiple traditions (femme fatale, devoted child, skilled soldier). The trap cited above was for Telemachus, whereas the trap here was for the father, with the sons as bait, the crucial difference being that the forces of evil in The Odyssey presumed that Ithaca’s king was dead. Meg knows that John is not. With her demonic powers and aptitude in summoning magic, she could be seen as this story’s Circe, a sorceress who was daughter of the Sun, the god Helios. There’s another inversion at play for, though she is a daughter (of a sort) as we later learn, she is not the offspring of light, but of darkness, of the Black Sun, that alchemical, and later, Jungian, symbol of misery, rot and death.
 
Her “father” is no less than Azazel, who in 1 Enoch 8:1-3, “taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways.” One could say the mirror image of another teacher/pupil relationship, John Winchester and his sons, and observe the flowering element of corruption, the mortificatio of the Black Sun in the persons of Sam, Andy, Ava, Jake, and so on.
 
But is Meg pure, undiluted, nihilistic darkness? “I’m doing this for the same reasons you do what you do. Loyalty. Love.” Like the Greek gods, the demons have their own desires (alright, mostly destructive) and foibles and personality traits, save for the endless cavalcade of subdemon number threes. Witness Casey the bartender and even Ruby, for after her two-year deception culminating in the coming of Lucifer – the ultimate suitor(s) who wished to take control of this worthy kingdom, that of humanity – she wasn’t about to throw Sam to the side as the discarded means to an end, but sincerely felt that he deserved his reward. Contrast such sentiment with Meg who, even in season five, wishes for the Winchesters’ destruction.
 
And we certainly can’t ignore one further inversion, the sexual interplay not between sorceress and hero, but sorceress and son, Meg and Sam. Good thing they didn’t bump uglies or we’d have a second Antichrist running around. Or crawling, at any rate, though I imagine he or she could throw a mean tantrum.
 
Back in ancient Greece, Odysseus returned home in disguise, whereas John reunited with Sam and Dean moving stealthily in shadow. The three of them together, this is their home and this is all it will ever be, wherever they may roam. But how can this abstract abode be protected? Of course, through other classic tropes that Supernatural uses to great effect, the quest within the Quest and foreshadowing:
 
JOHN: It knows I’m close. It knows I’m gonna kill it. Not just exorcise it or send it back to hell.
Actually kill it.
DEAN: How?
JOHN: I’m workin’ on that.
 
We don’t see the fruits of John’s labors until Dead Man’s Blood, but like Perseus collecting the head of the Gorgon, Beren retrieving a Silmaril from Morgoth’s Iron Crown or Thor stealing back his hammer from the giant Thrym, these mini-quests serve to propel the narrative forward or foreshadow events to come, as we also see in Sigemund’s mead hall tale within Beowulf. The long-term problem for the brothers, both personally and within the wider range of the war is foreshadowed as well:

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

thewinchesterfamilybusiness