A few years ago, my friends and I decided to watch Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior, the direct-to-DVD prequel to the 2002 Dwayne “The Rock†Johnson vehicle, The Scorpion King. The film is campy in that delightful way only direct-to-DVD action movies starring a bunch of WWF wrestlers can be. Its most memorable attribute is its denouement, which — spoiler alert! — features a battle between the soon-to-be Scorpion King and a scorpion that, in addition to being partially invisible, is one of the worst CGI jobs I’ve ever seen. (The scorpion looks like this.) When we saw this scorpion scuttle across the TV screen, we laughed so hard we cried. We still talk about it at parties. I have described it in great detail on more than one first date. And so it was with great shock that I took in this week’s big reveal on The Winchesters, which is that the Akrida look JUST LIKE THE SCORPION. I am begging the CW to either up this show’s budget or demand that it follow in Supernatural’s footsteps and make all the Big Bads humanoid. Please, I can’t take it.
But I digress. This week’s installment has a few fun moments and some overly heavy emotional stuff we’ll get into later. It’s also noteworthy that the John-Mary romance is starting to gel together a bit, which is a relief after four episodes of dead chemistry. There’s hope for The Winchesters’ love story, if not for the bad CGI spiders. So let’s dig in.
In the cold open, a councilman has a bad dream about getting killed by a monster, then wakes up only to die of a terrible headache. On the other side of the credits, ghost Dean talks about how a lifetime of fighting monsters takes a toll and you have to let the pain out. This is not something a single Winchester has ever done, but it’s good that at least in car heaven, Dean knows his coping mechanisms aren’t healthy.
John and Mary are at the Winchesters’ garage working on a bike Millie apparently bought Henry for his birthday right before he disappeared. John and Mary do some flirting and he offers her a job at the garage after she quits hunting, though she declines because she wants to leave Lawrence once she hangs up her holy-water shotgun. She probably won’t do this, of course, since the show dictates that she’ll fall in love with John, stay in her hometown, and eventually die there at the hands of a yellow-eyed demon. But John hasn’t watched Supernatural yet, so this revelation bums him out.
For now, though, there’s a hunt afoot. The councilman with the killer headache turns out to be one Gordon Baxter, and according to the local Lawrence newspaper, his brain was beaten to mush from the inside. The Monster Club, dressed in their finest Nixonian regalia, head to Baxter’s campaign headquarters, where his aide tells them Baxter had been acting strangely and was suffering from nightmares. The crew peg the culprit as a djinn, which in the Supernatural-verse produce powerful hallucinations to lull their human victims into complacency as they feed.
Acting mostly on vibes, the Monster Club members head to a warehouse where they suspect a djinn is hiding. Conveniently, the djinn is there — and he’s Ada’s son! This explains why Ada’s been acting sketchy in this episode, although it doesn’t quite clarify why she’s been behaving strangely for the entire series so far. But the gist is, Ada fell in love with a djinn and now she has a half-djinn son named Tony, who ran away from home after he dream-walked into Ada’s mind and discovered that she’d been keeping his djinn heritage a secret from him.
Tony flees the warehouse, but comes to Ada in her dreams, telling her he never hurt anyone and that another monster was hiding out in Councilman Baxter’s head. After getting some intel from John’s ex, Cop Betty, the Monster Club make their way to yet another warehouse, where they have a run-in with the horrible CGI Akrida and deduce that these Windows 95 spider creatures have the ability to crawl into people’s brains and possess them. This feels a bit like an Animorphs rip-off, but I’ll allow it.
Unfortunately, the Akrida bites Mary, and now she’s on the verge of possession. Ada hunts down Tony and convinces him to come help her and the Monster Club; he suggests that John enter Mary’s brain and assist her as she works through her trauma to find the Akrida’s stingers (??), which are hidden somewhere in the darkest parts of her mind (???) and need to be destroyed so she becomes unpossessed.
Inside Mary’s mind, Mary and John try to open literal doors to Mary’s trauma. Behind one locked door, a young Mary stands over a werewolf she killed that had morphed back into a human right before she ganked him. In another, 5-year-old Mary has just learned that the monsters in the dark are real, an experience adult Mary credits as the moment that set her on the path to becoming a hunter, and one in which her childhood was taken from her forever. This is the traumatic memory in which the Akrida stingers have embedded, so after some self-soothing, Mary and John are able to destroy the stingers and free Mary from the Akrida’s hold.
I’ve been trying not to compare The Winchesters to its predecessor too much, but this scene wants you to, so I’ll go ahead and do it. A key reference here is young Mary’s parents telling her that monsters were real — it’s a callback to the Supernatural pilot, when Sam tells Dean, “When I told Dad I was scared of the thing in my closet, he gave me a .45.†Of course, John Winchester in The Winchesters is not the grief-stricken John Winchester from Supernatural, and this one tells Mary, “No kid should ever have to go through that.†Lucky for this John, he’s going to be retconned, so he’ll never have to eat his words.
Supernatural did a lot of mind-trauma mining in its 15-season run. Season eight’s “Pac-Man Fever†feels most comparable to this episode, with a similar djinn plot and Winchester trauma-assist. There’s also season 12’s “There’s Something About Mary,†in which Dean enters a resurrected Mary’s mind in hopes of freeing her from the British Men of Letters’ mind control. (In retrospect, this television show was simply batshit.) My favorite dive into the Winchesters’ memories, though, was season five’s “Dark Side of the Moon,†when the brothers drive through heaven and relive some of their greatest hits. The emotional moments landed in that episode because by the fifth season, we knew Sam and Dean well enough to understand why certain memories meant so much to them. Dean’s memory of his dead mother making him a sandwich still makes me cry. But once again, Mary’s trauma dump here doesn’t really work for me. We still don’t really know her or her motivations other than her desire to leave hunting, and The Winchesters still feels like it’s forcing unearned melodrama on the audience in order to pull at the emotional weight Supernatural took its time to cultivate.
Back at Monster Club headquarters, the gang suspects the monster signal is coming from a radio tower. They search through city records and quickly land on Radio Roxie, the Akrida Big Bad who’s been putting out a beacon to the weird monsters around the world. Roxie’s onto the Monster Club — a lackey laments that they failed to get Mary Campbell, and that these meddling kids are sure to be a problem — but that’s something the show will likely get to in the episodes to come. Next week, there’ll be werewolves!
Family Business
• Director Lisa Soper is probably best known for her work on The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and this episode captured that show’s wacky, spooky vibe.
• The Henry Winchester from Supernatural would never have ridden a cool motorcycle, so I’m going to assume his whole character is getting a Winchesters glow-up/retcon.
• I’m still iffy on whether the costuming and overall vibe of the show captures the 1970s, but I do love Carlos’s platform boots.
• “I feel like every warehouse we enter just gets bigger and bigger and bigger†— I’m going to assume this is a production in-joke about the ever-expanding sets.
• Tony seems like a dream-walker/djinn mix, right?
• “Maybe it’s just the DMT talking from this past weekend, but …†They’re giving Carlos some good lines.
• “It’s okay to be scared. It’s good to be scared.†This is a nice moment that shows what Mary would have been like as a mother to Dean and Sam if she hadn’t ended up skewered on the nursery ceiling.
• Little flirtation between Tony and Lata, which I ship. Lata deserves love!!!!