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destielshippingnews · 2 years

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x12 Nightshifter

Episode 2x12 Nightshifter is Ben Edlund’s second screenplay for Supernatural, and similarly to 2x05 Simon Said it is not a stand-out episode, at least in my opinion. It is one of the fan-favourites, but it generally leaves me cool: 1x06 Skin had a better shapeshifter, and it has only been a handful of episodes since Dean and Sam’s last run-in with the police in 2x07 The Usual Suspects. It is one I considered skipping, but after deciding not to I saw that there are some aspects of it which I do enjoy.

The main thing which stood out about this episode was the rapport Dean and Ron had. Ron is presented as a loon and conspiracy theorist whom people dismiss. The police called him a ‘post-traumatic case’ and Sam talked to him like he is an idiot. He is a bit of an idiot, but not because of his conviction that ‘mandroids’ exist or his wall covered in maps and pictures. We are probably supposed to think he is off his rocker, but given the context of the show taking place in a world where the supernatural (pun intended) is very much alive and hunters such as Dean, Sam, and John do exactly what Ron did in order to find and kill monsters, Ron ends up looking like he is on the right track but is lacking one of two vital bits of information. If someone were to see John’s maps in 1x01 Pilot or 1x21 Salvation without knowing that monsters exist, s/he would think him a madman. Dean himself points this out to Sam after meeting Ron.

Dean and Sam visit Ron while investigating a string of apparent thefts and suicides. Ron was a security guard at a jewellery shop which was robbed by one of his colleagues named Juan. Ron copied the security tapes before the police took the originals as evidence, and based on his seeing Juan’s eyes flash in the videos, he eventually concluded Juan was not Juan but a mandroid. Whilst sitting across from Ron in their FBI get-up, Dean and Sam’s reactions to him are quite different. For all that he claims to think there is something wrong with him, and all the times later in the show he will call himself a freak and such, Sam gives the impression of being a completely normal, average, typical guy listening to somebody whom he regards as several different kinds of deficient. His entire bearing is unsympathetic and cold.

Dean on the other hand seems almost perfectly at ease with Ron, and is capable of meeting him on his own wavelength. This is far from the only time Dean will show a kinship with people others deem ‘crazy’, 1x10 Asylum being a particularly striking example. Sam seems like a neurotypical person impatiently listening to an autistic guy talk about his hyperfixation, whereas Dean is the other autistic guy who gets it.

This is why what you show is more important than what you tell. You can tell me Sam is a ‘freak’ as much as you want, but if I see something which says the opposite, I am going to trust what I see.

Anyway, Sam decided unilaterally to essentially tell Ron he was crazy and that he was just trying to avoid accepting that his friend robbed a band and killed somebody. Dean looked completely taken aback by this, apparently convinced Sam would induct Ron into the hunters’ life. Why Sam thought it unnecessary to consult Dean in the hallway for a minute or two before telling Ron anything is beyond me, but it ended up being a very bad idea.

Sam’s idea ended up getting people killed, but this time the blame cannot be placed at his feet. Unlike all the times he refused to pull the bloody trigger, he could not have known that Ron would lock himself in the bank with a rifle and a load of hostages. I wrote earlier that Ron is a bit of an idiot, and the reason for that is his complete obliviousness regarding the consequences of his choices. He took a bank hostage with a rifle, failed to ensure that nobody contacted the outside world, and was surprised to learn that the police had shown up with SWAT teams. On top of that, he was told to stay out of the light, but what did he do? Stood in the light long enough for a sniper to ventilate him. He also sounded utterly clueless when speaking to the police on the phone. That is all his responsibility, and given his incompetence, his death was no great surprise.

That being said, it could perhaps have been avoided had Ron been furnished with a bit of knowledge about the truth behind the ‘mandroids’ before things escalated like they did. Ron’s actions were those of a desperate man driven into a corner. Had Sam done what Dean clearly wanted to do, they could perhaps have worked with Ron, or told them the truth about why they were there and what they were hunting.

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The hunting life is an apt metaphor for living with any kind of serious trauma, mental illness, or neurodiversity. Hunters are inducted into the life either through a horrific event (personal trauma) or through being raised in the life by parents and carers (generational trauma), and those not inducted into the life cannot see what is hiding at the periphery. They also cannot see the hunters fighting ‘demons’ and ‘monsters’ every day of their lives, and would say they are crazy if the hunters told them what they were dealing with.

Ron had been introduced to the hunting life through witnessing a shifter in the shape of his friend rob his bank, beat him up, then apparently die by suicide afterwards. Dean wanted to extend Ron a hand of understanding and support, but Sam decided it best to keep Ron in the dark in order to keep him safe. If Ron knew about monsters etc, he would just go after them, or so Sam concluded. This might seem like wisdom were it not for the fact that monsters find people regardless of whether they know about them or not. How many people in this show have been victimised by the supernatural out of the blue through no fault of their own?

Sam’s decision is akin to telling somebody who been through a traumatic event that their flashbacks and triggers are not actual problems at all, that it is all in their head and they should ignore it, because actually understanding, acknowledging, and facing the monsters in your mind might be dangerous. Never mind the fact that forewarned is forearmed and that the monsters are there anyway. Sam really should have learnt by now that decisions he makes end up getting people hurt and killed, but Dean could and should have gainsaid him right then and there.

This seems to be a trait of Dean’s which is likely related to his tendency to abase himself and apologise for Sam’s mistakes in order to keep Sam with him. Dean does not likeactualarguments with Sam and generally avoids them if he can. He snarks and takes occasional potshots, but he generally tries to avoid head-on conflict with Sam. I wonder whether this is a trait of Jensen’s which the writers started writing into Dean’s character, since Jensen is also conflict-averse.

Returning to Ron, his hijacking of the bank is like a traumatised, mistreated person finally snapping and doing something irrevocably moronic out of anger, hopelessness, and even fear. “You don’t believe me,” he says. “Nobody believes me. How could they?” When looked at like this, Ron’s reaction to learning he is not crazy is completely understandable: he had spent weeks being told he was insane and had ended up thinking that about himself. He believed he was the problem, even while simultaneously being able to see the evidence that led to his conclusions right in front of him. Relief was his response when he finally learnt the truth. He had finally been given proof that he was not crazy, that his grasp on reality was not faulty, and that everybody else had been wrong to dismiss him. After having spent years being sneered at, mocked, and called delusional by a certain section of the Supernatural fandom, every single time Jensen and Misha say something at conventions which as good as confirms I and millions of others were right to see the subtext, I feel relieved.

Note once again that it is Dean who manages to get through to Ron in the bank. Dean is very compliant with Ron’s demands, but does not humbly submit. Rather he takes advantage of the situation to build what little rapport with him he can, then win him over by saying ‘I believe you. You’re not crazy. There really is something inside this bank.’

While Dean is busy saving the day, the purported main protagonist of this show Sam is useless. This is of course not a problem in itself, but given it is so often Dean doing the dirty work and getting beaten up while Sam gets to swoop in at the end and save the day with minimal effort, it emphasises Sam’s weakness. It is funny, then, that Sam’s response to Ron is to try shouting at him when Ron has the rifle pointed at him. Was this in the script or was it Jared’s acting choice? Either way, it emphasised Sam’s powerless in that situation. He did exactly the same in 8x06 Southern Comfort when civilwar!Dean pointed his pistol at Sam. Maybe it was a fear response.

And yes, I did notice Dean’s smug told you so look at Sam when Ron said ‘You SHUT UP! I ain’t talkin to you, I don’t like you!’ That line filled me with a warm, giddy, tingling sensation. It was almost physical, like when Sam got flung across the room in 1x09 Home. After Sam’s behaviour for the last few episodes and Kripke’s refusal to allow him face the consequences of his douchebaggery (including in this very episode), that was the least of what Sam deserved. I also noticed Sam give Dean a weird look when the guy frisking Dean found a silver blade tucked into his boot, as if it is a bad idea to be armed when investigating the bank they know a shapeshifter is targeting. What even is Sam? Why do he? And how?

Returning to Ron, It is hard for me to say Ron did not deserve understanding or sympathy after holding a bank up with a rifle because he did not intend to kill anybody and he had been driven into that state of desperation by people’s dismissal of him, including Sam. Maybe my thirty one years of experience as a neurodivergent homosexual have made it too easy for me to associate with the outsiders and rejects because somebody has to. I suppose he is a bit of a warning to people both with and without similar experiences.

Anyway, he died about halfway through the episode. The entire situation of the bank being locked down and surrounded by police and snipers was his responsibility, and there really was no way he was going free afterwards unless it was with Dean and Sam. I still do not want to say he got what he deserved, because he was just a misguided fool with no understanding of what he was getting himself into. Still, he died a stupid death which could have been avoided had he been more conscientious about staying out of the light. He seemed to die quickly, and it was touching to see Dean insist on commiserating with and paying what respects he could to Ron’s dead body before taking his dropped rifle.

Dean was right to say Ron did a good job tracking the shapeshifter. If he had been able to enter the hunting life, he might have been a good working partner for Ash in tracking monsters and coördinating hunts. I wonder also whether Dean’s seeming affinity for Ron is based in seeing a kinship of a sort: both are ‘weirdos’ on the fringes of society fighting things nobody else even knows about or wants to acknowledge. Dean certainly seemed affected by Ron’s death, but then again Dean blames himself for every single person he is unable to save.

After just over 2,000 words and almost five pages of discussing Ron and Dean, it is time for something I really did not like in this episode: the police and the FBI. By Loki’s fuzzy navel, I do not care about law enforcement in a show like Supernatural. I like The X-Files and Hannibal, and the few occasions the police were involved in Buffy and Angel were effective, in part because it was so sparing. But if the premise of a show is a conflict on the margins of society between monsters and humans, there is very little suspense or interest in being wanted by the FBI. The show is not going to end with the brothers being locked in prison to live out their days, or being sentenced to execution in Texas, so why should I care? An ending like that would be almost as risible and insulting as a vampire wearing a clown mask impaling Dean on a conveniently placed iron spike in a barn in the final episode of the show. Can you even imagine anything that stupid happening? The only thing which would make it even stupider would be if one of the vampires from 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood came back and the audience was expected to remember who she is.

Henriksen is presented as a serious threat and challenge to Dean and Sam, as well as a ruthless commander of his forces and a total douche to the local policemen. The fact he knows a lot about Dean and Sam’s past as well as John’s is supposed unsettle the viewer, as it does Dean. However, even one year after this episode was aired, the storyline was completely redundant. Henriksen appears in perhaps one or two episodes after this, and then 3x12 Jus in Bello happens. Goodbye, Henriksen.

The effect of this is to further frustrate me: this banal intrusion in my supernatural show demands my attention and insists on itself, but ultimately leads absolutely nowhere. The heavy-handed music cue and Dean’s repeated statement ‘We are so screwed’ after he and Sam escape in SWAT uniforms is also supposed to build suspense, which would be fine if this were The X-Files. The episode set up a cat-and-mouse conflict between Dean and Henriksen which got abandoned, probably because Kripke is a big fan of introducing plots and then dropping them.

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It was also a bad idea for Henriksen to tell Dean over the phone that he has one hour to hand himself over, and then to tell his men they are going into the bank in five minutes. That is a good way to get a lot of people killed.

As for the shifter, its counterpart in 1x06 Skin was a Dean mirror, made obvious by the fact it spent a large section of the episode masquerading as Dean. The shifter in that episode was used to explore middle-class, white-skinned American suburbia’s fears and anxieties surrounding poor, working-class men and heterosexuals’ (especially women’s) fears of bisexual men. The shifter in this episode does not transform into Dean or anybody Dean-adjacent, but does spend a lot of the time as women and minority men. The link between this shifter and Dean is much more tenuous than in 1x06 Skin, and to be honest far less interesting. No Hannibal-references here, unfortunately.

Paula R. Stiles’s suggestion is that maybe it reflects or exaggerates prejudices Dean has or could have towards said groups, but I do not really think it is that deep for once. Dean was raised in a homosocial environment with little opportunity for social interaction with women and girls. He is shown throughout the show to be charming enough to make women swoon, but he does not really socialise with women much. Even when he was in the god-awful, anhedonic forced performance of a relationship with Lisa in series six, he did not really seem to have anything particularly real or deep with her. There was also his neighbour who had been buying him drinks for a year, so… Dean generally treats women the same as men, but he seems more emotionally distant from women. Taken to an extreme, this could become misogyny, but what relevance does that have to bank robberies and jewellery heists? I have no idea.

Perhaps it could be interpreted as a metaphor for middle-class white-skinned Americans’ possible discomfort and apprehension of minority men who rob their banks and jewellery shops, then kill their women, but I do not care nearly enough about this episode to bother going into more depth on that subject. It ain’t that deep.

While talking to the policeman, Henriksen essentially called Dean a monster and a bigger threat to the hostages than anything else in the bank. I am not of the same opinion, but Dean does show some behaviour in this episode which is cause for concern. Let me take the scenic route before telling you what that is.

Soon after Ron takes everybody hostage, he gets most of them to hole up in the bank’s vault whilst following Dean’s advice and keeping him at hand. One of the people in the vault is a young woman named Sherri whose fawning fan-girling of Dean – ‘he is so brave – sounds exactly like me in these analyses.

The events of the episode lead Dean to eventually find Sherri’s dead body on the floor in the office (wearing only a nightie, or whatever that item of women’s clothing is called) with her throat cut. He and Sam take what they assume to be shifter!Sherri out of the vault and into the office, where she sees her dead body, screams, and faints. Dean wasted no time in preparing to stab her with the silver letter opener, and would have done so had Sam not stayed Dean’s hand and worked out that the dead body was actually the shifter pretending.

The concerning behaviour here was the ease with which Dean was about to murder a person. He justifiably thought her a shapeshifter and most people would have come to the same conclusion Dean did. Some people say Sam is the brains of the operation, but I disagree. Dean is just sometimes quicker to action and quicker to make decisions which is sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. Remember, Sam’s indecisiveness and hesitation keeps preventing him from firing the bloody gun. This time, however, Sam being slower to action worked to their advantage and prevented Dean killing an actual innocent. Dean is not a monster, but seeing how easy it would have been for him to stab something which looked like a normal human is a clear indication that he could one day become a monster.

Like I said ages ago, Dean really should have been the Big Bad at some point. Not Dean possessed by an angel, or Dean turned into a demon, just Dean. Regular, normal Dean as an antagonist.

Sam was mostly annoying when he did anything in this episode. He did prevent Dean becoming an actual murderer (The Loquacious Terminator from 1x22 Devil’s Trap does not count, he was possessed by a demon at the time and left little recourse. Beverley in 2x09 Croatoan is debatable since she was very likely still infected. Sherri would have been a murder, though). Other than saving Dean from becoming an actual murderer, Sam was unnecessarily shouty, aggressive, and pissy throughout.

As this analysis comes to a close, it is time to discuss another issue, that being Sam. Yes, Dear Reader, I am going to bitch about Sam. I have already discussed his unwise unilateral decision to keep Ron in the dark, but immediately after that Dean starts giving him a hard time, then rather quickly becomes agreeable and compliant to a point where I thought ‘That is not what Dean would say in that situation’. Sam claimed it better to be kept in the dark and be safe than know about monsters and get killed, but that is utter horse crap because the shifter kills people in this episode who presumably knew nothing about monsters, as has been happening since 1x01 Pilot. Dean knows this, but rather than saying so, agreed it probably for the best that Ron not be told the truth.

One good thing about this episode is that Sam’s choices are shown to have negative consequences and characters make sure he knows it. Dean gets irritated with Sam for making him go into the bank without weapons (though why did Dean comply? He took the colt with him in 1x22 Devil’s Trap), and Ron makes it very clearly that he does not like Sam.

If there had been more of this on the show, and if Sam had learnt from his bad behaviour, I might have been able to like him at some point, but such is alas not the case.

And the last thing before I finish: I do not it when the cold open shows us an exciting, tense, dramatic scene, and then goes back in time 24 hours or something. It makes the actual episode feel slow and less interesting.

Thus endeth this analysis. Next is another script by Sera Gamble which is seen as a spiritual successor to 1x12 Faith by many, but which falls far short of that in my estimation.

And did I forget to mention Dean’s we little outfit?