SUPERNATURAL: Sex and Violence

Well, like the title says, this episode had some sex (go Sam – Dean’s not the only one who has a way with the ladies) and lots of violence. This was another really interesting and entertaining episode of SPN, and though the baddie of the week is gone, its effects are going to be felt for a long time by both Sam and Dean and by us fans. There were a couple of really interesting twists that I didn’t see coming at all, a murder scene that was the least graphic in the show’s history, yet was the hardest for me to deal with, and some set-up for what is shaping up to be an epic battle that will pit the Winchesters against one another towards the end of the season.

Dean and Sam are in town because of a string of domestic murders – husbands have been killing their wives in gruesome ways despite happy marriages. These were some pretty tough scenes to watch, but one in particular was so brutal I had to turn the sound down, and you couldn’t even see anything. I’ll get to that in a bit. After some research on the men involved, the brothers determine that they have all been frequenting the same strip club. Thanks to a quickly formed alliance with the (young, attractive, female) county coroner, they are also privy to information that shows a high level of a certain hormone was present in each of the men’s blood that can’t be explained. Sam concludes that they’re dealing with a siren, a figure of Greek mythology that would lure fishermen to the shores with her songs only to cause them to crash violently into the rocks.

The siren is able to take the form of whatever the man she’s targeting desires, and so each man has been tricked into thinking he’s found his perfect woman…until she convinces them to kill their wives. In one case she went home with a young guy who was caring for his ill mother. This is the scene I mentioned above. I am generally not at all bothered by the violence and gore on the show (watching horror movies since childhood has pretty much desensitized me), but this scene, in which the siren convinces the guy to kill his mother so that the two of them can be together forever, was so hard to watch despite the fact that you couldn’t see anything. I literally had to mute the television until it was over.

At the coroner’s office, the guys meet an FBI agent (the same cover they’re using to gain access) who questions their credentials but thanks to Bobby and his wall of labeled telephones, they manage to squeak by. I love Bobby, and I especially love him when he’s referring to the brothers as a couple of “idgits”. Dean and Sam split up, with Sam working with the sexy young coroner and Dean talkin’ cars and music with his new best friend the federal agent. Through working with the FBI guy, Dean begins to suspect the female coroner as the siren and when he speaks to Sam and hears that they two just finished, um…getting to know each other, he’s sure that his brother has been infected, leading to the best line of the episode for sure (“What is it with you and banging monsters??”, in reference to Ruby as well as Madison the werewolf from “Heart”).

I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I did start suspecting that the FBI guy wasn’t on the up and up – I thought maybe that he and the coroner were a team because I didn’t trust her either. We soon found out however that the siren was the Fed after he infected Dean with his saliva (no, Dean didn’t switch teams; they shared a flask). At first I was wondering, are they about to reveal a huge secret about Dean’s sexuality? However it was clear that Dean’s desire wasn’t sexual, but rather a need for a brother he had more in common with and whom he could trust. FBI started in right away, trying to convince Dean to take out his brother so that he and Dean could be bothers forever. After all, they had more in common and unlike Sam, FBI would respect and admire Dean like a younger brother should. Ultimately the brothers went head to head and once FBI grotesquely shot a stream of saliva from his throat into Sam’s mouth, infecting him, it was a battle to the death. Luckily Bobby interfered killed the siren before Dean could do major damage with the ax he had poised over his brother.

We were lead to believe that things had been resolved and the boys were ready to move on but it certainly won’t be that simple. Although they were under the spell of the siren, they both said things to each other that they truly felt and that have been keeping them slightly at odds from each other for a while now. Dean is really pissed that Sam is still talking to Ruby and not telling him about it; he hates that Sam is exploring his dark side and there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do about it. Sam on the other hand thinks that Dean would rather bury his head in the sand and fixate on drinking and girls rather than do what needs to be done to try to put an end to the evil (aka take out Lilith). This line was drawn in the sand back towards the beginning of the season and I think we’ve all been waiting for it to come to a head, which more and more seems to be what the season is building towards. Personally my opinion has somewhat shifted since early in the season and I’m curious to hear your takes on this issue.

The way I see it, Dean has always sort of been painted as the more heroic, ballsy and confident of the Winchester brothers. It made sense because a) he was older, b) he had always wanted to emulate his dad and follow in his footsteps, and c) he never broke from the hunting life, while Sam did. However this season I feel like the writers have been asking us to skew the way we see Sam and Dean, because Dean has been coming off as kind of juvenile and often in denial about the big picture. Whereas Sam has definitely been evolving into a more mature and confident hunter and kind of entering manhood and leaving juvenile things behind. I’m curious if you guys agree with this assessment, and if so what kind of impact you think it will have when they do ultimately find themselves on very different sides of how to stop the coming Apocalypse.

How did you guys like “Sex and Violence”? What are your thoughts on the Sam/Dean divide and it’s impact on the rest of the season? Are any of you starting to take sides yet? How many of you are just dying to see Castiel again? He’ll be making a return soon enough, don’t worry. There is no new episode next week, but I’ll be back for the next one when it returns and in the meantime we can discuss theories and guesses (no spoilers please!) in the comments below.

Nicole is a lawyer with an unhealthy t.v. obsession and many t.v. boyfriends. If she had a locker at her office it would be covered in photos of Zachary Levi, Jensen Ackles, Lee Pace and John Krasinski. She lives near Toronto and is spending the winter cursing that fact while trying to convince her friends to do a group move to a warmer climate. So far it’s not working.