John makes contact, and that tears the brothers apart. Sam encounters a dangerous woman, and Dean becomes an unwilling sacrifice.
Pre-show notes
The last one ended on a cliffhanger as Sam takes a late-night phone call from their missing father.
This is also the episode where we first meet Meg, who was my favourite character in the show until they recast her. Nothing against the recasting: it made sense, but I loved Nikki Aycox in the role so much! In Scarecrow, we don’t know she’s evil, but her interactions with Sam are a subtle seduction.
The other thing that sticks in my memory about this episode is its use of a Pagan “god” as the monster of the week. As a Pagan myself, I take a little offence at that. There is very little evidence that European pagans conducted human sacrifices as depicted here. It’s mostly a case of the victors – Romans and their Christian successors – writing the history books.
Episode notes
John’s phone call condenses a huge amount of information into a few minutes. There’s what he actually says: The “thing that killed Mary” is a demon. He is tracking it, but won’t allow his sons to be part of the hunt.
You can’t be any part of it. This is bigger than you think. They’re everywhere.
John
“They’re everywhere” must refer to demons, from the context, but just a few episodes back in Phantom Traveler, we were talking about how rare demonic activity was. This has to be no more than six months later – now “they’re everywhere”. Ominous.
John gives Dean a list of names: they are couples who have gone missing, always at the same time of year, always in the same part of Indiana. He wants the brothers to investigate. Dean is happy to take the job, and full of admiration for John who identified the pattern from minimal information.
Sam isn’t interested in taking John’s orders. John has given him a lead on his own hunt for Jessica’s killer. He needs to follow that lead, and has no regard for what John wants. It’s understandable. Sam is an adult, and has been making his priorities clear for a long time. Dean sees Sam’s decision as selfish: lives are at stake and they have been tasked with saving lives. I can see his point of view, too, but I am judging him a little bit for not going with Sam. After all, Dean pitched “finding Dad” as the mission in the first place.
There is no way to reconcile their points of view, so the brothers go their separate ways: Sam is headed for Sacramento, where he hopes to find John. Dean is heading for Indiana to find out why couples are vanishing every year.
It’s a really weird town right from the beginning. The vibe is very much the suspicious country yokels of horror movies like Wicker Man, or the more recent Midsommar. Dean doesn’t help himself by using the alias John Bonham when striking up a conversation with a man of the right age to have been a Zepplin fan in his youth. The guy immediately calls him on it. Why did Dean use an alias anyway? It’s not like he had a credit card in that name, and it’s not like his real name would have raised any red flags. He basically sabotaged his own mission the instant he opened his mouth.
Meanwhile Sam encounters Meg hitchhiking at the side of the road. She treats Sam like a potential sex criminal – reasonable, for a pretty girl travelling alone – and it neatly puts him on the wrong foot. He’s going to remember this particular pretty blonde.
Dean finds the orchard and the scarecrow. He examines the scarecrow and recognises the tattoo on its arm, so at the very least it’s made of human skin. Ew.
So Dean heads back into town and discovers there’s a new couple in danger. They are no more vulnerable to Dean’s dubious charms than the suspicious townsfolk and Dean struggles to find a way to talk them into getting the hell out of town before sundown. He says Sam would find it easy, but Dean’s selling himself a bit short. He’s usually smoother than this.
There seems to be a weird element of consent in this human sacrifice deal. If the targeted couple accept the locals’ hospitality, they are doomed. That implies a flip side: if they refuse, they cannot be sacrificed.
Sam has walked all the way to the nearest bus depot and finds Meg there, waiting for the same bus he needs to get. Wow, what a coincidence. Since they have hours to kill they start talking, and apparently Meg no longer thinks Sam is a rapist. She has her own story to tell, and she’s hitting all the right beats to get Sam to empathise with her without making the manipulation obvious.
Back in the orchard, our sacrificial couple have car trouble and are hunted by the scarecrow. Dean to the rescue! Although the shotgun doesn’t seem very effective. He gets them out of the danger zone anyway.
In the morning, the brothers finally talk on the phone. They can’t punch each other or hug it out by phone so they actually have to use words, and each agrees the other has a valid point of view. But they agree to part ways, Sam still heading for California. Meanwhile Dean is consulting a local professor in the hope of identifying what kind of beastie turns its sacrifices into murderous scarecrows. Unfortunately the professor turns out to be the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files. Now, I know an actor has to work, but with so many connections behind the scenes between Supernatural and The X-Files, this casting can’t be neutral. He’s got to be a bad guy!
Back in town, we see some seriously ominous conversation among the townsfolk. Dean and Emily, an orphaned girl living with townie relatives have been chosen as the next sacrifices. Obviously they have chosen Dean because he spoiled last night’s sacrifice. Emily seems to be the only female from out of town. Her relatives don’t want to choose her, but they don’t put up much of a fight. But here’s where this is looking like it won’t work. Emily has accepted hospitality from the town, but Dean hasn’t. Just the opposite. So if that weird consent issue is valid, Dean can’t be the sacrifice. Also Dean and Emily are not a couple.
“I hope your apple pie is freaking worth it!”
Dean
Dean and Emily are tied up in the orchard. Dean doesn’t have a plan (he does, but it doesn’t include him being tied to a tree). It looks bad for about half a second, then Sam shows up just in time. The Scarecrow kills a couple of the townsfolk instead – see, they have to consent – and the cycle is over for the year. It doesn’t really feel like a victory, but the next day Dean, Sam and Emily burn the sacred tree, ensuring the next year will be sacrifice-free.
Emily leaves town (wise choice, girl). Sam has a tough choice to make. Dean will let him go again (but I notice that Dean doesn’t offer to drive him to California). Sam chooses Dean. While it’s a beautiful moment and it underscores how important Dean is to Sam, it doesn’t feel like a choice that will sit easily with Sam.
Finally, we have the sinister episode coda. Bad Company is playing, and Meg is hitchhiking again. She slashes the driver’s throat to “make a call”.
Sacrifice again, if a different kind here: she uses shed blood to “power” her “call”. We only witness Meg’s side of the conversation. She says she could have stopped Sam – why let them go? And she calls whoever she’s talking to “Father”.
Associations
The Wicker Man is the original weird-village-sacrificing-people-to-pagan-gods movie. In the film, a stranger comes to town searching for a missing girl, not unlike Dean in this episode. But in Wicker Man the human sacrifice happens when the harvest fails; these townspeople sacrifice every year, just in case.
Above I mentioned that the whole Pagan god thing bothers me, as a practising Pagan. But re-watching, I am reminded of American Gods. Gods “travel” with their worshippers from all over the world to America but they are changed by America. In some cases the changes are small, but others become much darker and more bloodthirsty. So maybe a relatively benevolent god in its place of origin became monstrous in the same way.
Final thoughts
Meg is able to interact with Sam because this is the episode where the brothers’ differences finally lead them to part ways. At the beginning they were more or less united in their mission, but their motivations were always different, and that difference has been building up to their split in this episode. Dean was always more committed to hunting and has been content to search for John slowly, taking on “jobs” along the way. Now that he knows John is alive, he’s more content to take the long road. But Sam‘s need to find Jessica’s killer is driving him, and that’s more important to him than finding his father. Finding John is a means to that end. And while Sam has been content to hunt alongside Dean, that’s not why he’s in it. Seeing Mary’s spirit may have given him even more motivation.
So when John finally makes direct content, it’s predictable that it would drive a wedge between the brothers. That can’t have been John’s intention: he really doesn’t understand Sam, does he?
Remembering that in the pilot, Sam and Dean had been apart for several years, it says a lot about the strength of their relationship that they are on the same page by the end of this episode. (Yeah, that’s why this became one of the most slash-focussed fandoms ever.)
