Monsters of Television

“So if we’re going to figure out what’s going on now, we have to figure out what happened back then.”

I’ve already seen the episodes that follow this one, up through, as of this writing, “Faith.” While I was watching, I was tweeting little bits about my enjoyment (and I really love this run of episodes as you’ll see), and regular commenter on this First Watch, Charlotte Howell, noted that this run of episodes is where she no longer needed convincing about staying with the show. I was pretty sold after “The Phantom Traveler,” but “Home,” “Asylum,” and “Scarecrow” have me fully committed to Supernatural. In that spirit, each one gets its own write-up, starting with “Home.”

Which starts off this: Damn. Just damn.

After a run of procedural episodes, the series returns to the big questions that started it: What happened in the Winchester home 22 years ago? What or who killed Mary? Why is John such a horrible father to his sons? I liked the the show came back to these questions before the finale, and not even in the run up the finale, but at the midway point of the season. It allows narrative tension to relax and then build again, starting anew, as it were, for the second half of the season.

But I think the reason “Home” works as well as it does is that instead of having Dean and Sam run into in John somewhere, following a clue or even by accident, they go back to their boyhood home. It goes back to the wound that infected the Winchester family, driving Sam to college, Dean deeper into hunting, and John into becoming, as we see a bit at the end, a grief-stricken and obsessed man. It pays off the air of doom that clouds the brothers’ relationship with one another and provide some sense of resolution.

Likewise, though, the episode’s emphasis on revisiting traumas feeds into the oh-so-common approach of looking at horror through the lens of psychoanalysis. Already with a disrupted family unit, the men of the Winchester clan are adrift, unable to reconcile themselves. But one of the goals of psychoanalysis is to revisit traumas to remedy them. And with “Home,” the episode allows that to happen, allows all the Winchester family, all of them including Mary, some psychological (and spiritual in Mary’s case) closure.

And “Home” also makes clear that the house is the last place any of the Winchesters want to venture near. Dean’s smooth-talking bravado collapses at the very idea of entering the house again. He calls John not because he’s unsure of whether or not he can handle whatever is in the house, he can, it’s that he can’t handle the house as a place onto itself. Traveling all over the Midwest, hunting and never putting down roots, is Dean’s way of coping with the loss.

Likewise, John can’t bring himself to go near the house or seeing his boys, hiding with Missouri instead. If Dean is afraid but willing, then John appears simply paralyzed by the fear of even seeing the house again, let alone venturing into it. Sam, with little to no memory of what happened, is probably the least traumatized, which my be why his  “weird-o visions” are not only vivid, but haunt him: he, because he is more…innocent, for lack of a better term, he is more open to the supernatural around him than Dean or John may be.

But leaving Mary out of this constellation of grief would be painfully remiss. Like Godot, Mary is a pivotal off-screen character: Her violent death is responsible for the entire series. She matters. She haunts the Winchester home (or was trapped, I’m not exactly sure), in agony due to her death and, maybe?, not knowing what has happened to her family since then. The peace seeing her boys again allows her to let go of them and banish whatever evil was left in the house.

So while “Home” doesn’t resolve all the trauma of that night 22 years ago, after all the culprit is still out and there and itching to ruin the lives of the Winchesters, the episode does put a salve on that wound.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• I know I didn’t say anything about Missouri but that was largely because I have nothing to say. It’s nothing against the character, and her backstory with the Winchesters, while interesting, felt like it existed only to have John show up at the end of the episode.
• Liked that, despite the arc feel the episode has, that it worked within the monster of the week format. Jenny and her family as stand-ins for the fractured Winchesters, creates external conflict helps the episode from being just about Sam and Dean. Indeed, the serial and the procedural aspects of the show really come together in “Home,” and in ways that I, as someone who loves both sorts of narratives, particularly enjoy.
• “Please, God, don’t let it be rights.”
• “Missouri did her whole Zelda Rubinstein thing.”
• So whose idea was it to flight a stunt person on fire while green screen suit? Because that was awesome.