By the pricking of my thumbs – something wicked this way comes! (Shakespeare, Macbeth).
Pre-show notes
“Something wicked this way comes…” is actually spoken by Shakespeare’s wyrd sisters, not about them. I admit, I was braced for an episode about evil witches. Being a pagan witch myself, I just wanted to get through it.
What this episode really is, of course, is the best insight yet into the brothers’ childhood as we see actual flashbacks to an old hunt. I remember the fandom really hated on John after this one, and I know he’s unfair to Dean but at the time I was one of those defending him. But I am older now and while I’m not a parent, I think age might give me a different perspective on John’s actions here. Better or worse? Let’s see.
Episode notes
Spooky tree tapping on a little girl’s window. She’s scared. The branches form the shape of a long-fingered hand, which somehow opens the window. The scary thing is in the girl’s room. It touches her and she screams.
John has directed the boys to the town, but they don’t know why. Sam has done the research and can’t find any signs of the supernatural in town. Talking to the townsfolk Dean finds no signs either but Sam notices an almost empty playground, which is odd at four in the afternoon. Dean wanders over to chat with the only mom there and she tells him about a lot of sick children in the hospital.
The brothers evidently have no fake IDs to cover this situation. Dean makes Sam use an ID with “bikini inspector” on it, telling him no one will look that closely. I guess the prank war isn’t as over as we thought. Sam claims to be from the CDC and gets directions to the paediatrics floor. On the way Dean spots an elderly woman in a wheelchair with an inverted cross on the wall of her room. He looks suspicious.
The doc doesn’t ask for ID, evidently, despite Sam, at least, not being old enough to be a doctor. He gives them the details of the illness, essentially a wasting disease. They can’t talk to the children because none of them is conscious, so they talk to the dad instead. He mentions that his daughter’s window was open the night she took sick. She must have opened it herself. Sam isn’t sure this is supernatural, but Dean says that since John sent them there must be something to find.
They head to the girl’s home to look for traces and Sam finds a weird handprint on the outside window sill. it matches something Dean remembers.
Flashback: John is getting ready to leave and is going over the rules with a very young Dean. Don’t answer the phone. Lock all the doors. Watch out for Sammy. If something tries to break in, shoot it. That’s a hell of a burden to put on a kid.
In the present, Dean looks like he wants to throw up. He tells Sam that Dad faced this creature before, and he wants them to finish the job.
It’s a shtriga, which Dean says is a type of witch. Dad hunted one sixteen years ago. Sam doesn’t remember it and asks the same question I did – if John hunted this thing before, why isn’t it dead? Dean says it got away – which just raises more questions.
They head to a motel, which is apparently run by a sassy homophobic child. The kid’s mom appears and checks them in while Dean watches the boy take care of his little brother. Obviously Dean’s going to see himself in the kid.
Flashback: Little Dean is making dinner for Sammy who is being a bit of an ass about it.
In the present. Sam is researching Shtriga and describes them as a kind of witch in ancient legends. They feed on spiritus vitae – the life force. Their preferred prey is children, and the lore says they are invulnerable to all weapons. Dean says that’s wrong: the shtriga is vulnerable when feeding – you have to use consecrated wrought iron.
(That’s an interesting wrinkle – usually cold iron is the preferred weapon against the fairy folk. They are almost the same thing. Cold iron means iron shaped when solid rather than from molten form. Wrought iron is iron with certain impurities added so it can be shaped when solid. So I guess it tracks.)
They also have to find it first, and if they can only kill it while it’s feeding that’s not going to be easy. But Dean remembers the suspicious old woman in the hospital, and the locations of the victims are all close by. It’s all they’ve got so they head back to the hospital.
Well, that was a bust.
There are spooky trees at the motel, too. The shtriga is after the homophobic kid or his brother. In the morning the Winchesters learn that the little kid is in the hospital, and it’s easy to connect this case to the other sick kids. Dean is determined to find and kill this thing.
Sam’s research superpower comes through again! He’s found a picture of the doctor from 1893.
Dean wants to use Michael as bait – they know the shtriga will come after him. Sam is not on board with this plan.
Flashback: Dean leaves the motel room, leaving Sammy asleep. He just wanted to get out of the room for a while. But when he gets back, he finds something there, leaning over Sammy. Dean’s got a shotgun ready to fire when John bursts in and empties a clip into it. After ascertaining that Sammy is unharmed, John chews Dean out for leaving Sammy alone.
Sam reluctantly agrees to Dean’s plan. But to make it work, they need Michael’s cooperation. Dean is really good at talking to children and he is very persuasive. He promises they will kill it if Michael helps.
“I’d give anything not to tell you this, but sometimes nightmares are real.”
Dean
Michael may be a homophobic ass, but he’s a brave kid. The plan is simple: Michael goes to bed, they watch with a night vision camera, and when the shtriga shows up, they’ll blast it. It almost goes to plan, but their first attempt failed because Dean warned it like an idiot. It went after Sam, which gave Dean the opportunity to kill it.
Killing the Shtriga has cured the sick children. The brothers hit the road, Sam mourning his lost childhood (again), You know, I’m usually on Sam’s side with this – the way he was raised it awful. But innocence isn’t something to mourn the loss of. Why would you want to live in ignorance? Sam should be grateful he was given tools to defend himself.
Associations
The branch tapping on the window, twigs and branches making spooky shadows on the glass, that’s in so many horror movies I can’t count them. An old black-and-white movie called The Uninvited comes to mind, but I could be misremembering – most of those old black and white movies are blurred together in my memory. And there’s a similar spooky tree in Poltergeist, of course.
I really want to know why the shtriga looks so much like Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars movies. That look is too iconic for the resemblance to be coincidence.
But let’s talk about “witches” here. On the one hand, Supernatural’s thing is taking urban legends and myths and giving them a twist. On the other, stories about witches have done real harm over the centuries – on both sides of the Atlantic – and I worry when a story makes light of that.
The old woman in the hospital: Dean assumes on extremely flimsy evidence that she could be the shtriga and actually heads into her hospital room, armed, intending or at least prepared to kill her. That’s exactly the pattern that saw a lot of innocent people murdered after hysterical accusations of witchcraft and I’m somewhat pissed off that Dean faces no consequences for that. Sam, too, but in this case he’s only following his brother’s lead.
But if we look at the wider meaning of “witch” in European folk stories, it doesn’t really mean a human being at all. Oh, they resemble humans: two arms, two legs, a head with a face. But they are something else. This shtriga is one: a vampiric creature of the forest. My personal favourite is the Slavic Baba Yaga, who rides around in a mortar and pestle and has a house that walks around on chicken legs. Would love to see the Winchesters chase that one down!
Not until the Brothers Grimm got their revisionist hands on the stories did the witches become more human: the witch in the woods of Hansel and Gretel and the various evil stepmothers of fairy tales do rather lack the power of their forebears.
Final thoughts
In the episode we see John in effect using his own children as bait for the shtriga. That’s a choice. In one sense, it’s logical for the same reason Dean chose to use Michael: the shtriga is only vulnerable when it feeds, so in order to kill it, it’s necessary to provide it with bait. But John could have walked away from that hunt. He did have that choice. That he chose to use the boys, in my opinion, tells us two things.
First, that between Mary’s death and the time of these flashbacks – five or six years – John’s mission has become hunting evil, not just hunting Mary’s killer. And he’s ruthless in that mission. Using his own kids is pretty cold.
Second, he really, really trusts Dean to take care of Sam. He didn’t leave the boys unprotected: he left Dean there with a shotgun and pretty clear instructions to shoot any intruders. Now, I’m not suggesting it’s in any way okay to put Dean in that position, but I’m saying John felt he could – that Dean would be a competent protector. And that says a lot about Dean as well as John.
Since the boys were bait, John couldn’t have gone far. He had to be keeping watch, waiting for the shtriga to show itself so he’d have his shot at it. So what are we to make of his response when it does attack?
We know that Dean feels that John blamed him, because he left the room, and that John never treated him the same after that. That last could be in Dean’s head but if it’s not it might just mean that John quit treating him like an adult when he wasn’t one, or it could mean the reverse: that it was a kind of rite of passage that drew Dean deeper into the hunters’ world – too young.
Certainly, John blamed Dean in the moment. But anyone who is a parent or has been around kids for a while knows that adults get mad when they’re scared. John put his sons in danger and he was almost too late – he almost got Sam killed. He’s angry with himself, not with Dean.
Here’s the part I didn’t appreciate before: John never set Dean straight. Maybe he didn’t realise how much Dean put on himself, but he never let Dean know it wasn’t his fault. He never let Dean know it was okay. And that makes John responsible for a terrible decision Dean is going to make some way down the line.
In Shadow, Sam and John have a conversation that is essentially an apology on both sides, though neither man actually says sorry. They both understand the other means it. But John never even gave Dean that much. Sending him after the shtriga now…I think maybe that was intended as a gesture of trust: you know what to do, you can kill it. But Dean takes it as unfinished business – a subtle rebuke for an earlier failure.
These men are truly messed up.
