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hellerfanboy91 · 2 years ago

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 3x15 Time is on My Side

Contains spoilers for 3x16, 4x11, and 4x16, as well as discussions of sexual violence.

The penultimate episode of series three is a monster of the week episode whose grimness feels slightly out of place. Supernatural sloughed much of its early horror aesthetics and vibe with the beginning of series three in favour of being more like Buffy with an age rating of 15, but this episode is a return to the original mission statement of a mini horror film every week. While it is a bit frustrating to have the second to last episode before Dean’s death be a MOTW, the story shows a level of planning unusual to Supernatural and would be more at home in Buffy. The monster in this week is an immortal man inspired by folklore and possibly Lovecraft: the man’s key to immortality involves harvesting living organs from humans in order to replace his worn out ones. Such a thing could (theoretically) get Dean out of his deal, but the cost would be to sacrifice his humanity and let an untold number of people die in order to save him from Hell.

This episode is used to present Dean with a possible way out at the eleventh hour as a test of his moral fortitude and character. Consequently, it does serve the overall plot of the story almost as much as plot-arc episodes, and means that – though the formula would likely not have saved him anyway – Dean chose to die again. If you have read my analysis of 2x20 What is and What Should Never Be, you might remember the comparison between Dean’s sacrifice of his dream world and Jesus’s acceptance of his death by crucifixion in the Bible. A similar comparison comes to mind here.

But all in good time. 3x15 begins with a plastic surgeon being kidnapped on his way home from what appears to be a gym or health centre. The next the audience sees of him is an untold length of time later when he appears at an A&E in nothing but a coat. The scene is unpleasant (and we later learn that the man died of his wounds) but the nurse’s behaviour was unrealistic: the man was clearly concerned about much more than his ‘modesty’ and a nurse should have recognised he was putting pressure on a wound at the very least and let him keep doing it. Also unrealistic was the nurse’s reaction to what was presumably his intestines falling out: nurses have seen stuff: it takes a lot more than that to make them scream. This show has never been all that great with portraying medical professionals, though, so onwards and upwards…

Directly after the title card, Dean and Sam are shown interrogating yet another demon for information. As is par for the course on Supernatural, the demon is snarky and clearly has not learnt that Dean and Sam are to be taken seriously. I understand the writers intend for the demons to seem derisive of the brothers in order to make the demons look like serious threats who are unfazed by being captured and tortured. The result, however, is to make the demons look like try-hards who are a few brain-cells short of a picnic. The show also never explains why precisely the demon was more afraid of Lilith than Dean or Sam.

The scene was not simply another generic demon torture and exorcism: it is one of precious few moments where some of the real horror of Hell is revealed for the audience. This was in both the demon taunting Dean about how much it and its friends were looking forward to torturing him, as well as in the helpless terror in Dean's eyes.

The word ‘torture’ has been used so many times that it has become somewhat of a cliché, so it is worthwhile to think of it differently. What came to mind first when the demon threatened Dean was prison rape or rape as a weapon of war. One of the first thing conquering armies do is rape civilians, the point being humiliation, dehumanisation, and breaking spirits. It is a complete violation of integrity and autonomy, and studies have indicated victims of rape are much more likely to experience PTSD than combat veterans. This is not to mention the physical damage a person can sustain. I once read a story about a Congolese man who was not only permanently incontinent, but had to wear sanitary towels because his rear end never stopped bleeding after being raped three times a day for three years. Other men like him who were captured by enemy soldiers were raped to death. (Edit: I finally found the story here.)

In Stephen King’s Finders Keepers, the character Morris Bellamy (disappointingly not a red-haired blue-eyed man in television adaptation) was imprisoned for home invasion and murder. While in prison, he too was repeatedly gang-raped and is described as shaking and sweating in fear while waiting for it to happen. It is never made explicit in the novel, but I expect his motivation in the main story of the novel is to try to make the trauma he experienced meaningful. (For a more in depth discussion of depictions of male victims of rape and sexual violence, you can read 2x15 Tall Tales Part II.)

As well as this, a handful of scenes from Sofi Oksanen’s book (and film) The Purge came to mind, scenes involving Soviet officers using rape and the threat thereof to interrogate, terrorise, and torture their Estonian subjects. One scene involves the protagonist Aliide being gang-raped by Soviet men in the town hall’s basement as punishment for refusing to coöperate with the Soviets. A later scene involves Aliide being forced to enact sexual violence on her niece Linda, the trauma of which left Linda non-verbal for the rest of her life.

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The point of raising this topic was to drive home some of what is waiting for Dean. The show never states it explicitly, but there are definite ‘sexual’ undertones to some of the things Alistair says to Dean in 4x16 On the Head of a Pin.

Meg is also shown to be tortured much later in the show (6x10 Caged Heat, if memory serves): strapped naked to a table, the torturer’s knife is shown travelling to below her midriff and then cutting noises are heard off-screen while Meg screams. This is all the evidence we need that sexual violence is part of torture in Hell. ...As if we need evidence. The reason it was necessary to raise this topic is because the show itself never truly delves into the horror Dean endured nor the damage it wrought on his psyche to be debased, dehumanised, and violated again and again and again. In 4x11 Family Remains he makes vague references to having been cut until nothing was left, but other than that, very little is stated.

I raised the subject of sexual violence first because it is one of few forms of violence which the average person can read about or watch and be deeply affected by it. We can watch shows like Hannibal which are full of violence and not be especially perturbed by any of it, but the idea of a similar show with a serial rapist instead of a cannibal psychiatrist would be a much, much harder sell. ...Unless the rapist is a woman and the victims are men á la the painfully unfunny Norsemen, in which case it is apparently a laugh riot. Somehow I doubt the idea of a man wearing a necklace made out of the clitorises of women he had raped and killed would be considered funny, but clearly a woman raping and killing men then wearing a necklace made of their penises is hilarious. I stopped watching at that point.

But sexual violence is by no means the only form of violence which would be inflicted on Dean in Hell. The damage done by rape is serious, but so is other damage. In my analysis of 3x07 Fresh Blood, I discussed the Arabic trade in slaves from Europe and Africa and the fact that a huge proportion of the millions of white and black men sold as slaves into the Muslim world were either castrated or had their entire set of genitals removed without anaesthetic. Most men subjected to this treatment died, and those who survived were left with severe physical trauma. History does not record their mental trauma. I have elsewhere also discussed the links between the relatively minor surgical procedure of routine infant male circumcision and both cot death/SIDS and PTSD-like traits in adulthood. Men might not remember being strapped down and cut up by doctors when they are a few days old, but their brains and bodies can be fundamentally affected by it.

This is relatively minor, but I have had the misfortune of having to talk a young man out of suicide once; the root of his suicidal ideations was circumcision grief. The humiliation, dehumanisation, anger, betrayal, and hopelessness he expressed were exactly what one would expect from a rape victim.

While I greatly dislike graphic violence and gore on my screen, the lack of it in showing what happened to Dean in Hell is disappointing. I have no especial desire to see, e.g. Dean’s entire body being cut up three inches at a time starting with his left foot, but there was a time when he had just arrived in Hell. There was a time when he was first strapped to a torturer’s table, and a first time when his torso was cut open and his organs ripped out. There was a first time when he choked to death on his own blood, or screamed so loud he burst his eardrums. And he woke up the next day, his body whole but his brain remembering everything. This is far from ‘relatively minor’, and Dean had to endure it every day for thirty years. Take a moment to think about that.

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The reason for writing several hundred words on this subject was the fact that the show goes to all this effort to tell us how horrific Hell is and hints at everything Dean endured… but undermines the gravity of this in order to make a joke about a bloody Pomeranian in 4x06 Yellow Fever.

I have had this on my mind for a long time, ever since first writing about castration and emasculation in 3x07 Fresh Blood and the Tolkenian orcification process in 3x09 Malleus Maleficarum. I am agog at how badly handled this storyline and its effects on Dean were. At the end of the demon-torturing scene, Dean is terrified and trying to cope with the knowledge that all power, agency, and integrity is to be stripped from him and demons are going to laugh while they defile and destroy his body over and over again. There was so much material available there for future usage, but most of it was squandered.

Supernatural really is the show of wasted opportunities.

That said: Jensen’s acting, Dear Reader! Dear Reader, Jensen’s acting!

Moving on, this episode was important for Sam and Bela as well. Usually I enjoy heaping scorn on Sam, but I actually empathised with, understood, and almost liked him this time. His intention in going on the Benton case was to try to find the secret to Dr Benton’s immortality in order to help Dean escape is deal. This was well-intentioned of him, and is how he should have been acting earlier in series three instead of screeching at Dean like a fishwife or trying to guilt trip him for ‘not wanting to be saved’. Though I do not understand people saying the show is ‘about the brothers’, I would have liked to see far more of how their brotherhood is depicted in this episode and much less of how it is elsewhere.

That being said, Sam’s hope that Benton’s secret would save Dean was likely as desperate and ironically hopeless as Dean hoping ’John’s’ advice in 3x14 Long-Distance Call could save him from his deal. Even the argument between Dean and Sam around halfway through the episode was completely believable and not especially irritating: both brothers had good justifications for wanting to do different things. Dean wanted to go see Rufus in hopes of finding the colt, whereas Sam wanted to stay and find Benton (and thereby the formula for immortality). Sam’s behaviour in the argument was also unusual for him: rather than bitching at Dean, he let Dean do what he wanted but just refused to go along with him. This made Sam’s wishes plain and gave Dean the freedom to choose for himself. Things did not turn out how Sam wanted, but such is life when dealing with independent adults.

This is an exception for Sam in this episode because the rest of it is full of bad decisions. One such bad decision is gong to Benton’s cabin alone at night, and another is not reversing the car over Benton’s prone body over and over again then burning the remains. It is almost as if Sam learnt nothing from not shooting Gordon in 2x10 Hunted, or not smashing Jake’s skull in 2x21 All Hell Breaks Loose Part 1 when he had the chance. If he had killed Jake at the first opportunity, Dean would have never made his deal in the first place and they would not be in this mess at all.

Of course, that raises the question of how on Earth it was possible for Benton to sneak up behind Sam when Sam was in his own room without even any headphones on, not to mention how Benton managed to find out where Sam was in the first place.

Before we continue: note that once again the only people to die in this episode were men, while Benton’s female victim was saved at the last minute.

Tv Tropes had this to say:

If the story requires random anonymous characters to die just to move the plot forward, they'll likely be male. If the plot requires a tragic death that motivates the protagonists or shows how evil the villains are, the victim will be female. One exception to this is a Heroic Sacrifice that is commonly committed by a man and often for a woman and/or The Hero. Similarly if the story demands random mooks get a beat down by a character to up the sense of danger or because they are generic enemies in a video game, or just show off how awesome the protagonist is, they will be male.

Rufus makes his entrance in this episode. Since he makes so few appearances in the show, I do not especially care for him, but I do think the show could have benefited from making better use of him. Mostly I like him when he does appear, and his relationship with Bobby is usually fun to watch.

Bobby probably called ahead of Dean to let Rufus know he was on the way and there is a very food chance Rufus was just messing with Dean, but this time his act grated on me a bit. I really dislike when I have to do all the work in a conversation and still get nothing in return. It reminds me too much of dating apps. Inside Rufus’s house, Dean is surprised to find out Rufus knows about his deal, though as Paula pointed out in her analysis: ‘Sam and Dean spent all season three talking to everyone in their hunting world about Dean’s deal. Not like it was a secret.’

Dean also receives a lot of pessimistic negativity from Rufus about the lot of hunters and how it either ends bloody or lonely for them. This is in essence exactly what Dean was raised to believe his life would be, one more reason why 15x20 is an utter shambles. Anyway, after Dean gets Rufus nice and lubed up (stop it!), Rufus presents him with a folder of information on Bela he acquired from a friend of a friend of a friend, as well as information on her whereabouts: Hotel Canaan, room 39.

Generally speaking, Rufus is quite a lot like Dean if Dean had survived to his late fifties and were living alone. Rufus presents a tough, world-wearied facade, but his actions belie the conclusion one might draw from that: Rufus did let Dean into his home, did provide him with vital information, and had Bela’s information printed out and neatly organised in a folder for Dean. He clearly cares a lot more than one might first think, which leads on to the possibility that Rufus actually remembers Dean from when he (Rufus) and Bobby used to hunt together.

As for Rufus’s eventual death: why? What was the narrative point? That was one of the stupidest deaths I have ever seen. And I watched 15x20!

Anyway, Rufus points Dean in Bela’s direction and he finds her packing and panicking in her room. There follows a scene where Dean finally gives Bela the treatment she deserves after her shenanigans.

Something which was news to me is that apparently some people saw the threat of sexual violence in that scene, and that apparently some people see Dean’s treatment of Bela as evidence of misogyny. It is very strange to me that some people think Dean is a woman-hater because it is clear that he treats women exactly the same way he treats men. What I see in Dean is the lack of benevolent sexism with which many women are accustomed to men treating them: being extra nice, gentle, friendly, and warm with them because they are women, for example. The catch to this benevolent sexism is that it and malevolent sexism are often two sides of the same coin: men who think women should be afforded special treatment because they are women tend to also treat women as if they are weak, stupid, and in need of special protection.

Dean does neither of these things, but rather treats women as his – and other men’s – equals. He does not treat women with any especial friendliness nor especially value them simply because they are women. He does not treat them as ladies: he treats them as equals, and they get exactly the same treatment from Dean that a man would. If that perhaps seems cold, harsh, cruel, and threatening to you… welcome to being treated the same as men, I suppose.

Dean’s treatment of Bela in this scene is, however, pretty harsh, but she does deserve it. Other than getting people killed in 3x05 Red Sky at Morning out of spite towards Dean and Sam, she blithely put them at risk of a Gordon-induced death in 3x07 Fresh Blood, then stole the colt in 3x10 Dream a Little Dream of Me while pretending to help them. The colt was Dean’s best chance of surviving his deal, and the penultimate scene in 3x16 No Rest for the Wicked could have been a lot different if either Dean or Sam were appropriately beweaponed to face Lilith.

I cannot remember whether this has been made explicit in the show, but there is a very good chance that Bela is completely aware of Dean’s demon deal. Dean and Sam have, after all, been talking to every magic man and mystic in America for the last year trying to find a way out of the deal: Rufus knew about it, so Bela probably did too. She stole the colt hoping it would save her while knowing full well it would doom Dean to Hell. In case you missed that, she screwed Dean over to save herself. Compare this to Dean’s refusal to even consider becoming like Doc Benton to save himself, and it is plain to see who the better person is here. Dean had every right to kill Bela then, as she had essentially done the same to him, and would try to kill him AND Sam at the end of the episode.

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However, Dean’s revenge on Bela is not to shoot her, but to let her be killed by Hellhounds and get dragged to Hell, exactly the fate she tried to avoid. This is poetic justice, and is one of two instances of Dean passing judgement on humans in this episode.

As much as I loathe Bela’s character, I like Lauren Cohan, and mostly because of that I do find Bela’s end rather sad. Her history of abuse at the hands of her parents (or at least her dad: nothing is said of her mum) is gross, and I can see the path she took from abused child to fiercely independent adult trying to save herself from a decision she made as as a scared child. However, as I said with John, trauma is an explanation not a justification, and her suffering vomit-inducing abuse as a child does not let her off the hook for using other people as tools in her quest to save herself. The men in 3x03 Bad Day at Black Rock died because of the rabbit’s foot, something she knew would happen but let happen anyway, and this is just one instance. How many other people has she done the same to over the years? As Paula wrote in her analysis:

‘To say that this is a disgusting stereotype that is disrespectful to victims of child abuse (especially those who apparently “got lucky” for not having suffered sexual abuse) would be an understatement. I know I’ve talked before about how the relative lack of life experience shows through with some of this show’s writers, but I have to say this is one of the few times (and arguably the worst case) when the episode’s writer made me really angry at him/her. If you don’t know enough about a real-life trauma like this to treat it with the respect it needs in order to be done properly – stay the hell away from it.’

Dean gave Bela what she deserved and he was rather scary about it, not to mention possibly vindictive in calling her at the end just to tell her he knows what it going to happen to her and that he let it happen. That said, I would have liked to see her back in some capacity, perhaps after Bela had become a demon. There were actually plans for that very thing to happen, but unfortunately Lauren was busy with The Walking Dead at the time and could not make an appearance.

This was perhaps for the best, though: the writers did a bad job with Bela. She could have been a fantastic character if written well, but the writers actively sabotaged her and in the end completely mishandled the story of a woman who was taken advantage of by both her parents (or, at least her dad) and a crossroads demon leading to her gruesome death at age 24. Perhaps it is best that Bela's story ends here, though as Dean's parting words to her suggest, he may well have seen her again in Hell.

Dean’s recognition of the Hellhound repellent above Bela’s door once again shows his knowledge of the supernatural Otherworld is a lot deeper than a lot of people seem to give him credit for, but his feint and trickery in stabbing Benton with a chloroform-soaked knife showed how cunning he can be. His chosen punishment for Benton is also almost as chilling as what he did to Bela: burying Benton alive in a fridge. Whether or not Benton would slowly degenerate and eventually die is never made explicit, but Benton’s need to periodically replace his organs strongly suggests he will eventually die in the fridge.

As for why Dean and Sam did not simply kill Benton, the answer is possibly because he is still human. Killing humans is a line Dean does not like to cross (remember how affected he was by killing The Loquacious Terminator in 1x22 Devil’s Trap), and in spite of how monstrous Benton had become, he was still a human. This raises the question of whether Dean really would have shot Bela if he had not seen the talisman above her door.

Returning to Bela for a moment, both she and Dean are clever and tricksy, and this episode showed that ultimately Dean is a match for Bela. She did lure Dean to the hotel room to get information from him, but in the end he got the better of her. This episode features two representations of aspects of Dean he is battling with: his ability to use his brains to outwit others for his own benefit and his desperation to find some way to save himself, even if it hurts others. Bela is what Dean could be if he decided to be self-interested, callous, and British. As for Benton, he is a representation of what Dean would become if he chose to harm others in order to save himself. By the end of the episode, both are dead or as good as dead, meaning Dean has killed those two parts of himself.

Sam for his part saw precisely what would happen to Dean if he chose Benton’s path, and knew exactly what it would entail (see his line about needing a new pancreas in fifty years), but still wanted Dean to go through with it. In spite of this being the ‘immoral’ choice, that Sam wanted Dean to do it made Sam a bit more relatable and human. It also foreshadows some of the things he will do near the end of series four, but I do not think he is being influenced by Ruby or ‘having come back wrong’ here. He is just a man who wants his brother to live, and I liked this far more than any other story Sam has been given.

Regarding the alchemy in the episode, one of the common goals of alchemy was to try to find the secret to eternal life. This should be familiar to anybody who has read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which should actually be named neither Philospher’s Stone nor Sorcerer’s Stone, but rather and the Alchemist’s Stone. Same referred to alchemy as ‘weird science’, and that is in a sense exactly what alchemy is. Like science, alchemy was an attempt to understand the world in a methodical way, and like scientific consensus, there were alchemical theories and concepts which eventually proved to be wrong. Alchemy in the end failed and fell apart, to be replaced by the new study of chemistry. Funnily enough, the ‘chem’ in both alchemy and chemistry could be derived from an ancient name for Egypt, ‘Keme’, the birthplace of alchemy. The word has come to us in the English language through Arabic ‘al-khemiya’ meaning ‘the Egyptian science’.

One prominent symbol featured in the episode in the ouroboros, or the snake eating its own tail. This represents the cyclical nature of things such as life, death, and rebirth, as well as fertility and immortality. The motif of the autovorous serpent appears in myths all over the world, with one of the most famous being Jörmungandr from Norse mythology, the child of Loki and Angrbođa who is so long that he encircles the whole world and chews on his own tail. In Norse myth, he can perhaps be thought to represent time and stability keeping the world together: one of the events of the Norse apocalypse is Jörmungandr coming up out of the sea as the world ends, perhaps a representation of the cyclical nature of life and death being broken as the world falls in to chaos.

But do let us save the Norse mythology for much later on in the series when the writers show their knowledge of the myths goes no further than the Marvel films (hint: Loki is Odin's blood brother, not his son). This episode was not one of my favourites, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed watching and analysing it. It is a grim story and does not bode well for the end of series three. I was also a bit sad to find out in writing this that Billy Drago (the actor who played Benton) died of a stroke in 2019 aged 73). I remember him from Charmed and the episode of The X-Files which taught me what voodoo dolls are actually intended for (7x14 Theef). I wonder how many other deaths I will have to comment on before I have analysed every episode of this show: the first I learnt of was Nicki Aycox (Meg 1.0), then the actress who played Susan in 2x11 Playthings. I hope not many more at all.

You can read more of my analyses here:

Series 1

Series 2

Series 3

Sundry

And you can read Paula's here.

#edvard's supernatural guide #supernatural #meta analysis #spn meta #spn #spn 3x15 #time is on my side #s03e15 #dean winchester #bela talbot #sam winchester

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