1.15 The Benders

Important safety tip: when you are impersonating a police officer, don’t go to the local cops for help. They tend to catch on, which is a problem when your little brother has been kidnapped by the local cannibalistic serial killing family of cliches.

Pre-show notes

I got nothing.

Episode notes

Fake IDs are back – they are pretending to be state cops. A boy reports seeing a monster abduct a man. His mother thinks he’s making it up. Sam’s done some research on the area and there are an unusually high number of missing persons. They are in a bar talking it over. Sam heads out to the car on his own. He hears a weird sound and gets scared by a cat. By the time Dean gets there, there is no sign of Sam anywhere. Did the cat get Sammy?

Morning, Dean is at the local sheriff’s using his fake ID to get their help. That’s bold. The deputy is happy to help and looks Sam up on the computer, which of course flags up Dean’s apparent death from Skin. Interesting that it doesn’t flag up Jessica’s death also. Sam would have been a suspect, even if it were only briefly. She wants Dean to file a missing persons report and Dean really doesn’t want to. Not sure his charm is gonna work on this lass…

Sammy wakes up in a cage and the missing dude is in a cage right next to him. Sam is shocked that their captors appear to be “just people”. Alvin thinks they are “psycho hillbilly rednecks looking for love in all the wrong places” – cause that’s what this show needs; a bit of homophobia to spice things up.

Meanwhile Dean is with Deputy Kathleen and she’s caught him out on the fake ID. Naturally she’s gonna arrest him. Dean just wants to find Sam first. He’s convinced some kind of monster got Sam.

“When we were young, I pretty much pulled him from a fire. And ever since then I’ve felt responsible for him, you know, like it’s my job to keep him safe.

Dean

Wow, Dean’s more convincing than I thought…or the cop is a soft touch, maybe.

Sam is working on escaping and as he yanks something down from the ceiling the other cage pops open. Alvin makes a run for it, promising to send help. Sammy thinks that was way too easy and since all the bolts re-engage after Alvin leaves, I’d say he was right. Alvin finds a knife…yeah, Sam was right. This was so a trap. Alvin go squish.

Speaking of traps, Dean should know better than to shake hands with a cop, especially one who already knows he’s a criminal. Handcuffed to the patrol car! Man, this episode is reviving my bondage kink. Unfortunately, Deputy Kathleen is heading into trouble. This is looking like a video nasty. She’s no match for the psycho hillbilly rednecks. So now she’s in a cage, but at least Dean has a neat way with a lock pick.

Dean finds Sam and Deputy Kathleen much too easily, and just has to tease Sam about being jumped by “just people”. Lucky he doesn’t know about the cat, too, Sam would never live it down.

“With our usual playmates there’s rules, there’s patterns. But with people – they’re just crazy.”

Dean

Dean goes into the house in search of the key to the cages. There’s a lot of weird stuff. Polaroids of dead people. Human bits in jars. They’ve even got a mobile made from human jawbones. Dean, I hope you’re armed, man. He’s found a key, but takes too long about grabbing it and Missy Bender catches him. Taken out by a little girl!

Dean seems shocked that this is about hunting. There’s a certain irony in that which I don’t think he’s seeing.

One of them goes down to kill Sam and Deputy Kathleen, but Sam isn’t an idiot and he gets out of the cage. They’re going to get their hunt after all. Kathleen knows they killed her brother so she’s pretty motivated. And Sam’s not as helpless as they think so this doesn’t go the psycho hillbilly rednecks’ way.

Kathleen calls in more cops, but she lets the brothers take off.

Associations

When I was about 5 years old, my favourite show on TV, hands-down, was Dick Turpin, which re-imagined the titular highwayman as a kind of Robin Hood figure. There was one episode called The Fox, in which Dick was taken prisoner by an aristocrat who, rather than hand him over to the magistrate, instead hunted him through the countryside, human prey. I don’t remember a lot of details, but I do remember that at one point Dick was shot in the shoulder and that started my lifelong interest in human biology.

No matter how common the horror trope of the weird back woods family that kills people for sport, that childhood favourite will always be my strongest association when the subject is humans hunting humans.

Wolf Creek was made in 2005, so can’t be an inspiration for the episode, but there are some close similarities. The film was inspired by true events, though, so maybe the inspiration came from a similar source. And let’s not forget The Hills Have Eyes.

There are two other associations for me. There’s the Cabin in the Woods scene where they are placing bets on which monster will be invoked: “Yes, you had zombies. But this is ‘Zombie Redneck Torture Family,’ see? They’re entirely separate species. Like the difference between an elephant and an elephant seal.” So the Benders are not zombies…well, not yet. Who knows what a mess our heroes left behind them.

My last association is the X-Files episode Home, which is probably the most disturbing episode in the canon: another zombie redneck torture family who are not actually zombies. The episode begins with the body of a terribly deformed baby, and ends with the implication of multiple generations of incest with a mother/sister who is essentially quadriplegic. Like I said, disturbing.

Final thoughts

Riddle me this. The Benders have abducted and murdered, at a conservative estimate, at least 60 people over the years (based on Pop Bender’s age and his claim that they took one or two a year). Angry spirits are made by a violent death – being kept in a cage then hunted like an an animal should qualify. Even if not every violent death creates an angry spirit, you’d think on those numbers that it would happen a few times. So why is there no spirit hanging around the Benders’ property? In the real world it’s not even a question, but in the world of Supernatural, it’s very strange.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice, but the Benders are essentially a twisted version of the Winchesters. When Dean’s being interrogated by Pop Bender, Pop asks Dean if he has ever killed. Dean has, of course, many times – maybe not humans, but certainly some of the creatures they hunt are sentient. It’s significant that Dean doesn’t actually answer the question.

Pop Bender talks about how killing humans makes him feel powerful, and later he tells Kathleen that they do it because it’s fun. That’s a decent take on John Winchester. Mary’s death made him powerless; hunting makes him feel like he’s in control of something. And he wouldn’t have been doing it for two decades if it wasn’t fun at least some of the time. Actually, we’ll see that in him in an episode that’s not far ahead.

The big question is how far the Benders reflect Sam and Dean. They are the ones inheriting their own hunting tradition from their father. They have a not entirely healthy family relationship and their nomadic lifestyle isolates them from more normal connections. At the least, this counts as a cautionary tale.