.................................................................................................................................
Something Wicked - Recap
Episode eighteen opens in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, with a young girl reciting her prayers before bed. She asks her father if her mother will be home that night and he tells her she's staying with her sister at the hospital. The lights are turned out and the shadows of a tree seem to claw at the window. Scared the girl runs and shuts the drapes but a skeletal hand can be seen opening the window and letting itself inside the room. A dark shadow looms over the bed and the girl screams as we cut to outside where the wind tosses the branches against the window.
Sam and Dean have been sent new coordinates from their father, Fitchburg, Wisconsin, but at the moment they can't figure out what they are there for. Police reports and usual sources aren't coming up with any oddities. Dean is sure if their father has sent them there that there is something to take on, but Sam isn't so sure. Until they notice the distinct lack of children everywhere they still have no clue. It turns out the children are getting sick and parents fear that it's contagious. There are five or six children in the hospital because of it.
So the brothers masquerade as members of the Center for Disease Control and pay a visit to the hospital. The doctor and nurse tell them that the children have pneumonia but it's strange in the way it hits. It goes through families one child at a time before moving on. There is also a strange old woman with an inverted cross in her room. Interviewing the parents only tells them that the window was open when the children fell sick, which seems to back up the pneumonia diagnosis.
After speaking with the parents they examine the house of the latest victim and find a strange muddy handprint on the windowsill two stories up with no ladder or ledge. Dean has seen something like this before, long ago when his father was hunting and he and Sam were about the age of the girl from the opening scene. He thinks their father has sent them to finish the job he started years ago. The thing they are chasing is a Striga, a creature from Albania and a sort of witch.
The boys check into a hotel to research and rest, the hotel is home to a pair of brothers the same age that Sam and Dean were when their father hunted the Striga. The brothers obviously remind Dean of he and Sam.
The striga's feed off of life force and have been heard of clear back to ancient Rome, they are immune to weapons forged by god or man, although they can be killed by consecrated iron while feeding, and in between feedings they masquerade as a human. Often they appear to be an old crone like woman, which immediately makes Dean think of the strange old woman in the hospital.
They sneak back into the hospital, almost running into the doctor in charge of the children on the way in, but the old woman turns out to be a dead end. But while Sam and Dean are at the hospital the shadowy figure invades the hotel and feeds off of Asher, the younger brother living at the hotel.
While Dean takes the mother of the boy to the hospital Sam researches the history of the area in the local library. The disease has cropped up in many places over the years clear back into the 1800s. Sam turns up an interesting picture from the oldest case, Dr. Heidecker the doctor in charge of the children at the hospital now in a picture over a hundred years old.
Dean has a plan at this point, and Sam doesn't like it. They are going to use Asher's older brother Michael for bait. Sam doesn't understand the intensity Dean has about this case, and why he keeps saying it's unfinished business for him. He finally tells Sam the story of how he left Sam alone in the hotel room for a while and when he returned the Striga was trying to feed on Sam. He picked up a gun but he was slow to shoot the creature. Their father burst into the room and shot the creature several times, driving it away but not killing it. He was furious with Dean, he was supposed to be protecting Sammy and he had disobeyed orders, leaving him vulnerable to attack. John packed them up and left town then dropped them at Pastor Jim's before going back but the creature was already gone.
Michael thinks they are nuts at first but he agrees to help them in the end in order to help his brother. They set up a camera and wait in the other room for the Striga to come and try to feed off of Michael. When it comes to feed they burst into the room and shoot the Striga while Michael hides under the bed. In true Hollywood fashion the monster is not dead and latches onto Sam to try and feed. Dean is able to shoot I while it is feeding to kill it. And just to be safe he follows up with a few more shots once it's down to make sure.
Now that the Striga is dead the children are starting to recover, and there is a new doctor watching over the children since Dr Heidecker didn't show up at the hospital. Michael and his mother go to the hospital and the brother's head out of town and on to the next job.
Review :
This episode preys on fears that almost everyone feels, that not being safe alone in the dark fear, and the fear of something beyond your control harming your family. Everyone does what they can to protect themselves and their family but there are things in the world outside our control that can still take what we love away without warning. We don't fear the dark itself; we fear what may be hiding in it that will take away the things we protect.
You see some of the family dynamic in this episode from when the boys were younger and not quite as defined in the roles they are now. Although one thing has stayed the same and that is the protective role that Dean has taken with Sam. That was probably cast in stone the moment he was responsible for carrying his little brother from the burning house to save his life. Dean is unable to deny his little brother anything, even the last bowl of Lucky Charms when he hasn't had any yet, but Sam does give him the prize out of the box.
There is a continuation of the theme that Dean does not like emotional moments when Sam tries to apologize for giving him a hard time about following their father's orders over the years. Dean rolls his eyes and changes the subject with a smart remark. This goes back to the no chick flick moments remark in the very first episode. We have learned over the season that Sam wears his heart on his sleeve and is easier with discussing matters like this, while Dean rarely indulges in emotional displays.
When Dean talks about having disobeyed orders and leaving Sam alone when they were children, it's obvious that his fathers feelings about it made an impact on him, and it goes a long way towards explaining why Dean is so insistent on following orders. But you get the feeling that the real issue wasn't that he had disobeyed; he probably could have done that and got caught without it being as serious. The factor that made it a life-long impact for him was that it had almost hurt Sam, and as we saw with the Lucky Charms scene there is almost nothing that Dean will not give up for his brother, including his life as we have seen in other episodes.
This episode was a full circle episode for Dean, he hesitated when they were children and Sam was being attacked, but this time he was able to react and he killed the monster, saving his little brother and finishing what he started so long ago. Sam tells Dean that he wishes sometimes he was still innocent of knowing what is out there in the dark, now that Michael knows what is out there, and Asher was saved through his help, maybe they can be that, the older brother who knows and protects and the younger who holds to his innocence.
We probably were given a deeper look into the family relationships as preparation for the upcoming season end with the return of John Winchester and Meg. I have the feeling that the things we are learning now will be important to the understanding of how people react over the next few episodes.
Direction of the episode was interesting but not my favorite. I did like that the scene driving into Fitchburg focuses on the city sign like the sign in Home since this episode in many ways is a homecoming or return to childhood for Dean just like in Home. It was one of the other pivotal moments of his childhood so having a similar theme was a nice visual clue.
The Striga itself I wasn't happy with. It was too visually similar to the Ring Wraiths in the Lord of the Rings and the Dementors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. There is only so many ways you can deal with figures in a ragged black cloak and skeletal hands without being repetitive and losing your scare factor. What should have been a scary thing, the creature that takes you from your bed and family in the dark, was more a regurgitated visual image. Overall I was happy with it visually, there was a nice mix of day and night scenes, we so rarely get to see the brothers moving around in the daylight it was a nice break creatively, and this week the usual desaturated colors were saved for the flashback scenes which lent a more vibrant realness to the current day scenes.
Trivia
Two other cities mentioned by Sam as having been hit by the disease before are Ogdenville a North Haverbrook were in the Simpson's episode Marge Vs the Monorail. They were the two cities before Springfield to get the monorail.
Something Wicked, the episode title refers to the Shakespeare quotation: “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” In MacBeth, as quoted by the second witch in the opening scene.
Striga is as plant known as “Witchweed” for it parasitic properties of attaching to other plants by the roots and robbing them of their nutrients, killing them and taking over whole fields in the process. It is also a term for a blood drinking creature that resembled an old woman but could turn into a bird of prey, usually screech owls. This probably gave rise to the legends of witches familiars and witches being able to fly.
