Tactics and Strategies in the Supernatural World
I have another great one to share today (but hey, isn’t everything here great? ). No, this one is really good, honest. Faellie sent this to me a week and a half ago and I finally have the right occasion to share it. Enjoy her indepth and well written analysis on the roles of tactics and strategies in Supernatural. This can also be found at http://shopstewardess.livejournal.com/. Please, if sharing, link to this or Faellie’s livejournal site.
Tactics and Strategies in the Supernatural World
- This article explores the different roles that tactics and strategies play in the Supernatural world, and suggests that while the Winchesters are expert tacticians, it’s their problems with strategy that have been causing their troubles, both personally and with the apocalypse.
OK, once again starting at the beginning with the definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, tactics is “the art of deploying military, air, or naval forces in order of battle, and of planning and executing military manoeuvres in actual contact with an enemyâ€. Strategy is “the planning and direction of the larger military movements and overall operations of a campaign” and “the art or skill or careful planning towards an advantage or a desired end.” So tactics is about fighting the battle that’s immediately in front of you, strategy is about putting together a series of steps with an overall goal in mind. In Winchester terms, it’s the monster of the week (tactics) and the season’s story arc (strategy).
Tactics: saving people, hunting things
At the start of Supernatural, the world of the hunters is one where they deal with what’s in front of them at the time. Hunters are mostly solitary: the only, very limited, co-operation we see is ad hoc partnerships and, as it later emerges, the information exchange through Harvelle’s roadhouse and Bobby’s contacts. There is no evidence of long-term thinking, no overall plan.
This approach has been fine for dealing with the supernatural entities that hunters have come across up to the start of Season 1. At this point none of the supernatural nasties have much in the way of long-term goals, or of strategies to meet those goals. Many of the things hunters fight, principally spirits and ghosts, act to a predictable and unchanging pattern in a limited geographical area. The actions of even those which are capable of independent motivation have a limited range of purposes: survival (the Wendigo, the Shtriga in Something Wicked, the Djinn in What Is and What Should Never Be, the changlings in The Kids Are Alright), revenge (murdered priest in Houses of the Holy, ghouls in Jump The Shark), greed (shapeshifter in Nightshifter, witches in Malleus Maleficarum) or just being evil sons of bitches for the pleasure of it (shapeshifter in Skin, serial killer ghost in No Exit, siren in Sex and Violence). Even the pagan gods usually limit their activities to survival (Scarecrow, A Very Supernatural Christmas), or in the case of the Trickster (as he was thought to be in Tall Tales and Mystery Spot) and the Leshi (Fallen Idols), to the next interesting thing to come along.
John Winchester comes into the world of the hunters with the death of Mary. He is revenge-driven, as are many of the hunters (Gordon Walker in Blood Lust and Fresh Blood, Isaac and Tamara in The Magnificent Seven). John’s plan for the Yellow-Eyed Demon, which turns out to be rather longer-term than anyone could have expected but is still essentially simple, is “find it and kill it”. And while finding it, find and kill other supernatural nasties which prey on humans. These essentially simple aims can be dealt with through good tactics: locate the battle and then fight it using the appropriate means. At this tactical level, John is obviously expert at dealing with the supernatural, as is shown by Sam’s surprise in Something Wicked that John should have left the Shtriga alive rather than dealing with it once and for all. John has passed his knowledge and skills onto his sons, and they not only have the technical abilities necessary to defeat in battle whatever comes in front of them, but are also skilled and experienced in working as a team.
Sam and Dean’s good tactical team work is strikingly obvious from the start. In the Pilot, Sam and Dean haven’t seen each other for two years or more, and yet when hunting the Woman in White they smoothly put into practice well-honed methods of getting out of trouble and solving the case: Dean makes the phone call that keeps Sam from being arrested, Sam continues the research while Dean is under arrest and then makes a fake emergency call that enables Dean to escape, Dean fires at the ghost through the car’s side window (the Impala’s side window no less) to save Sam. To put these sorts of tactics so smoothly into place after two years apart and with no prior discussion shows a high level of expertise with the methods they are using, and solidly good training for Sam and Dean to be able to move back into using them so easily.
The Winchester brother’s expert tactical team work continues in an almost unbroken line from then on. In Wendigo, without needing to say anything Dean sets himself up as a distraction so Sam can get the victims out of the Wendigo’s larder. In Roadkill, there is a smooth (and again undiscussed) change of tactics near the start of the episode, in order for Sam and Dean to deal with the unexpected realisation that they are dealing with a ghost who doesn’t realise she is dead. In Season 2’s The Usual Suspects, Dean’s well executed manoeuvre over a false confession gets Sam out of custody, and well-established practices then allow contact to be made with Sam while Dean is still in custody. In Season 4’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, Dean and Sam support each other in the fight against Alistair in the church, and then in the middle of the fight are able to decide without words both on the time to retreat and the way to do it – with a spectacular crash through a stained-glass window. Perhaps most notably in Season 4, in It’s a Terrible Life, Zachariah uses a “monster of the week” to get Dean back into fighting mode. By taking away Dean’s disabling memories of hell and of the events of On the Head of a Pin, and giving Sam and Dean familiar roles in finding, and then fighting, the kind of tactical battle in which they excel, Zachariah has chosen the perfect approach to bringing back Dean’s mojo.
Winchester Team tactics are particularly noticeable when Sam and Dean trade off their people skills, as there are numerous examples of one brother’s failed approach being followed up by the successful methods of the other. Sam fails to establish a relationship with Ron in Nightshifter where Dean later succeeds. There is a striking example in Asylum of this being worked out in advance, rather than on the fly as appears more usual: in Asylum Dean is the intrusive reporter questioning the cop and kicked out by Sam, who then gets the necessary information from a friendly chat. That Sam and Dean can easily swap the roles they take in establishing these relationships is shown by contrasting Death Takes A Holiday with I Believe the Children are Our Future. In both it was necessary for Sam and Dean to persuade a young boy round to their way of thinking, but in Death Takes a Holiday Dean failed by telling the truth, Sam succeeded with the comforting lie, while in I Believe the Children Are Our Future Dean failed by telling the comforting lie, Sam to some extent succeeded with the hard truth.
Winchester team tactics also make excellent use of the different approaches and qualities Sam and Dean have in a physical fight. Dean, once he makes up his mind to action, follows through quickly and decisively without stopping to re-think. An example of this is that when the time comes for fighting, Dean almost always starts off on the front foot, going forward. It’s this forward momentum into the fight which so often results in him being thrown around so spectacularly, as the bad guys use that forward momentum to deflect him away. Sam, by contrast, is still thinking and processing even in the middle of the battle. On the one hand, this often results in him being on the back foot at the start of a fight (so providing the bad guys with lots of opportunities to strangle him). On the other hand, Sam’s ability to keep thinking means that he often comes up with new ideas as to how to deal with the situation which then create the means to a successful outcome. Examples of this are It’s The Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester, where Sam improvises Halloween masks with blood to fool Samhain and Jump The Shark, in which even under torture Sam deduces that the bad guys are ghouls, and passes the information on to Dean, allowing Dean to use the appropriate method to kill them.
Goals and strategies: a new challenge for the hunters
The hunter’s concentration on good tactical skills works well until the supernatural baddies start to disclose some long-term planning, first the Yellow-Eyed Demon, then Lilith, then Lucifer. This is where hunters in general are left not understanding or recognising the problem: the bigger picture completely eludes them. And the Winchesters, who do begin slowly to understand this bigger picture, are left without the self-knowledge, training and experience to put together the long-term campaign necessary to deal with it.
The first hunter to realise that a more strategic approach is required in John Winchester. John finds out, just before the start of the Pilot, that it was the Yellow-Eyed Demon that killed Mary, that the Yellow-Eyed Demon dripped blood into Sam’s mouth, and that all the Winchesters are in danger. But beyond those realisations, John is left struggling to find an appropriate strategy to deal with the situation. His immediate reaction to the danger presented by the Yellow-Eyed Demon is to disappear from view, and to communicate with Sam and Dean only by text messaging co-ordinates to the monsters of the week that John himself is no longer in a position to fight. However hard this was on Sam and Dean, it seems to have been the right thing to do, as it’s unlikely to be co-incidence that almost immediately after John first speaks by phone to Sam and Dean (at the start of Scarecrow), the Yellow-Eyed Demon’s daughter, Meg, is able to make contact with Sam. Later in Season 1 John is beginning to put together a plan for dealing with the Yellow-Eyed Demon (Shadow, Dead Man’s Blood, Salvation, Devil’s Trap), but he is always on the back foot. By Season 2’s In My Time of Dying John has run out of time, and all he can then do is make a deal to save Dean, and tell Dean either to save Sam or kill him.
Like John, Sam and Dean, although highly expert in tactical situations, have had no experience in dealing with longer-term, strategic issues, and have never learnt to work together at that level. The brothers’ lack of training and experience is compounded by the fact that their different personalities mean that they naturally implement strategic thinking in different ways. Unfortunately, they don’t understand this, and so haven’t learnt, as they have with their battle tactics, to use each other’s strengths and cover each other’s weaknesses. After John’s death, their long-term goals sometimes diverge, but even when they have the same goal they have difficulty identifying and implementing a joint strategy that will allow them to work cohesively towards that goal.
Sam’s approach to a long-term goal is that of a steady worker, putting in a measured and constant effort. Along with his undoubted intelligence, this is one of the reasons for Sam’s academic success: his ability to put aside short-term distractions (such as the Halloween party in the Pilot, which Sam attends only at Jessica’s urging) in favour of a steady workload. Not one of life’s last-minute crammers, Sam, and this approach works well for him in academia. Arguably it works less well in the more fluid world of Supernatural, where much of what happens is out of the control of human agency, and methodical research and a steady workload will not always make the necessary information available or produce an appropriate course of action. The result is that, in the world of the hunters, Sam is sometimes inclined to keep working on his main goal past the time when this is productive. At the start of Wendigo, Sam and Dean have spent a week unproductively in Stanford trying to find out about Jess’s death, until Dean pulls them away to find the Wendigo at the co-ordinates left by John. In Scarecrow, Sam wants to chase after John to California on the basis of a telephone call from a Sacramento pay phone, rather than follow up the (time-critical) clues to the Scarecrow killings. It’s the different styles of dealing with their long-term goals that separates the brothers here. It’s only the strength of the personal relationship between Sam and Dean that leads Sam back to Dean just in time to save him from the Scarecrow.
By contrast with Sam, Dean’s natural approach is to carry on with the various monster of the week hunts while waiting for developments on his long-term goals. So in Season 1, even when Sam and Dean have the same overall goal, “find Dad”, their strategy for doing this is entirely different. This difference in approach is the cause of disagreement between the brothers to the point where, at the start of Scarecrow, they temporarily part. In Season 2, Sam and Dean again have the same overall goal, that of killing the Yellow-Eyed Demon. But in Everyone Loves a Clown, Sam complains that they’ve been at Bobby’s for a week and all Dean can do is work on the Impala, rather than follow the main goal. Dean’s response to Sam’s complaint is heartfelt:
“Sounds good. You got any leads on where the demon is? Making heads or tails of any of Dad’s research? Because I sure ain’t. But you know, if we do finally find it – oh. No, wait, like you said. The Colt’s gone. But I’m sure you’ve figured out another way to kill it. We’ve got nothing, Sam. Nothing, OK? So you know the only thing I can do? Is I can work on the car.”
Faellie, I loved this, what a great piece! A while back I’ve been interested in military tactics and strategy (basically to understand why people like to go to war so much), and read a lot about it. I think you summed up a lot of it beautifully and transferred it to planet Supernatural.
As you touch on Dean’s ‘forward momentum’ – I sometimes thought about this, too, believing I’d like to send Dean to Aikido-class a bit, as that martial arts technique specifically uses the opponent’s forward momentum against that opponent. Might be useful for our dear older Winchester.
Without wanting to sound derogatory to the characters – Sam often served as the brains of their team (and was conceived so by others, after all, he is the one with the higher education. Going to university will do that to you…often complicate your way of thinking), while Dean was the weapon, the army. His mind does not work with highly complex convolutions as Sam’s does. His intelligence is of a simpler nature (just to make sure: don’t misunderstand me here: I don’t mean to say that he is less intelligent, just endowed in another way, yet: he does read Vonnegut, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he read Sun-Tzu as well), his instincts are often sharper, more carnal, which is important in a life-or-death situation when you have to react in a heartbeat – no time to think here. Your instincts have to kick in.
At one point I don’t wholly agree with you – though I second that Sam finds security in following a long-term goal, I’d say that Dean did change in hell. He still is essentially himself, of course, but considering his deeply vulnerable nature (which he likes to hide behind that well-known façade of HanSoloesque behaviour), being tortured for thirty years and then torturing himself (something that goes against everything he believed in) did a lot to Dean. He was weaker, confused, and if he felt self-pity at some point, he was entitled to. That he kept his sanity after all that is a mere miracle (I’ve seen worse when speaking to people who underwent much ‘lesser’ ordeals). He’s coming back to his former self slowly, but the cracks in his souls are still visible (I plan to touch on that more profoundly in an article I’m working at).
I believe Sam really tries to help and take the burden of Dean’s back – probably fearing that Dean wouldn’t survive that battle (and he in all likelihood dreads the possibility of losing his brother again- would he survive that pain a third time?).
To their credit, they are able to alter their approach to the situation at hand which you wonderfully explained. Both have grown and accepted that, accepted each other more after their fall-out in season four and beginning for five.
Perhaps killing Lucifer is not the way to do it. There might well not be a weapon capable of doing that. Maybe they will have to cast him back down to hell. Okay, I’m at a loss here. I have not idea how to do it without Dean giving in to Michael.
Lucifer’s biggest weakness might well be his hubris. I hope they’ll find a way to challenge that. Is it January already?!?
Again, Faellie, thanks a lot for this, Jas
Wow Faellie, what a great article! A very good analyses of the Supernatural “art of war”.
I’ve enjoyed the reading and it helped me to better understand some points of the show, that I hadn’t given such a deep analyses (maybe because I only had one year of psych *and already forgot the most of it* and none in tactics or strategic *don’t think games count*).
Anyway, thanks again for this.
Faellie,
Thank you for this extraordinary article. You’ve plumbed the depths of four and a half seasons to prove your point and done it (from my vantage point) effortlessly. By analyzing this aspect you have shown a cohesiveness to the overall story (despite what sometimes appears to some as fits and starts) that until advanced in this way were not fully clar.
I’ll be rereading and then analyzing the various episodes with a fresher eye in the future.
Thank you for putting this together, no small achievement I would say.
🙂
There’s some really interesting stuff there, Faellie … I hadn’t thought about it like that before ( being too distracted by all the gore/angst/snark and prettyness flying around ) but you’re quite right, up until now it’s been all reactive … Hunt down threat, bust it’s chops, home for tea and medals … But now they need to get proactive ( horrid word, just oozes middle-management Twat-Babble ) to save the planet and it’s pretty much uncharted territory.
Personally I suspect the longer-than-usual Hellatus is due to Kripke having no idea how it’s all going to pan out either and needing extra time to wrack his brains in! 😆
Hot damn, I absolutely loved this mapping out of the initial (and still existing, though to a lesser extent) differences in style each carries, and when each is more/less appropriate. You really captured the fluid nature of the show and how external events seem to be getting the brothers on board the same boat, how they learn from their experiences. That said, if I was in their shoes, and I had the Colt, I might have done the ‘find it/kill it,’ too. Maybe it’s a guy thing. 😎
Great, great stuff.
This is great!
Well observed, well analyzed, well written, so interesting and very logical!
Thank you!
Thank you all for your kind comments. The articles I write tend to come out of trying to make sense of something I don’t understand, and in this case it was the difficult conversations between Sam and Dean in Fallen Idols. I was surprised to find that other difficult things, such as John’s silence in Season 1 and Sam thinking of Dean as weak in Season 4, fitted into the answer I came up with.
Jasminka, I am only an amateur observer of the human condition, and I think you’re likely to be right about Dean. There is an article on the psychological effects that hell had on Dean at http://randomness.liquid-deception.net/sn411a.php that I found interesting (the site was previously recc’d here by PetraO). I’ll look forward to reading your take on the subject.
Hi Faellie, thanks so much for that link, I’m always interested.
Of course I know that you are ‘an amateur observer of the human condition’, and I didn’t mean to criticize, only to add.
I’m just always in awe when I look at this show and find the characters reactions in accordance to their psychological state. I’ve seen some of those reactions on the faces of my patients, especially when I’m dealing with people who have been tortured. Or who were forced to do the torturing. I try not to look at this show with a professional eye, but sometimes I can’t help it. It will just pop up…
Loved your article! Thank you again, Jas