Monsters of Television

Figures the very next episode would go and poke a hole in my emphasis on “the local” argument. But I’m okay with that because “Phantom Traveler” is terrific episode that deals well with a sense of a place and applying the horror genre within it, especially in a setting that doesn’t often get horror applied to it: airplanes.

Airplanes, and airports in general, are anxiety-filled places. There’s people rushing to make a flight, people nervous about flying, people anxious about getting felt up by the TSA (or looking forward to it), and then there’s just the massive amounts of waiting that happens at airports that can be anxiety-inducing in other ways (“Can I take a nap? What if I sleep through my connection?” “Why is a single beer $12?”).

Horror stories don’t typically hit on airplanes. The most classic example is, of course, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, a story made famous from the Twilight Zone series and movie. Both versions are iconic examples of being petrified on a plane. There’s “The Langoliers” as well, a Stephen King story turned into a pretty bizarre TV-movie. I’m sure that there are others, but I’m not well-versed enough to know them.

But that lack of knowledge does help in making “Phantom Traveler” seem very fresh. And even if it weren’t, the episode is still very smart in its own right. All the elements I’ve already addressed in regards to the procedural aspects are here and still in spades (though I was disappointed to see Sam bring out his laptop; no libraries in the Pennsylvania?), so I’ll not harp on those and shift gears.

I mentioned in my entry on the pilot how well the episode deploys horror to create style and tone, and I want to expand on there a bit here, since the episode manages to carry those traits onto an airplane without making you question say the smallness of the airplane (and it’s very small). And I should add that, while I was drafting this, Charlotte Howell chimed in with a comment on my entry concerning the pilot with some ideas I really like, and want to address a bit more since it was where I was going anyway.

I think one of the real pleasures I drew from “Phantom Traveler” was the show’s acknowledge of demonic possession narratives, particularly the pea soup from The Exorcist. One of my curiosities of the show was whether or not the show existed in a world where stories of demons, evil spirits, etc. had been told in popular culture (The Walking Dead, for example, takes place in a world like ours, except George Romero never made Night of the Living Dead and thus no one has any knowledge of the contemporary zombies).

So even though the episode engages in flickering lights, dark corridors (or, in this case, a fuselage) for the look of the episode, the brothers acknowledge demonic possession in popular culture, but in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself in the way that, as Charlotte notes, Community does when it does these sorts of pop culture references. Community‘s meta-ness allows commenting on the genre and, to a certain degrees, distancing from the genre. But in Supernatural, the mention of The Exorcist not only shows Sam and Dean as pop culturally aware (even if Dean’s music collection stops with Metallica) but also that the show is willing to acknowledge its influences even as it modifies them.

“Phantom Traveler” doesn’t revel in these references, but uses it both to prepare us and to frighten us more for the horror. Have you seen an exorcism story take place on a plane before? I haven’t, and there’s a great deal of novelty that the show mines from the premise while still making the airplane feel claustrophobic, dark, and subtly creepy in the traditional horror ways. I also appreciate the fact that the demon didn’t move into Dean, which is something I was expecting given his fear of flying. Admittedly, I think it’s too early to have one of the brothers be “evil”, but it would have also been an opportunity for Sam to fully get back to his hunting roots, and without Dean to back him up.

All in all, if the pilot hadn’t already gotten me into the series, “Phantom Traveler” would’ve sold me.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• Eerie that John was able to get Dean’s cell phone number. But then again, the rational idea being that he probably saw it on the caller ID and changed his outgoing message. Still, you can take the time to change your outgoing message but can’t take the time talk to your sons?
• I had other thoughts, but I accidentally deleted my notes in my Google Doc, so, I guess that’s it.