Supernatural Talk

Tarts talk about Jump the Shark

By Suzette Chan
June 1, 2009

Welcome to Supernatural Talk, where Tarts talk about Supernatural, their favourite show about demon-hunting brothers. This week: episode 4.19, "Jump the Shark."

Sam and Dean meet a young man who claims to be John Winchester's son. The boy, Adam Milligan, called John to help find his mother, who has gone missing. Dean thinks that Adam is really a monster, and tests him with holy water and silver. Sam believes Adam is the real deal, and teaches him John Winchester's no-compromise demon-killing ways. It turns out that "Adam" and his "mother" are sibling ghouls whose father was killed by Papa Winchester. But since John is dead, the ghouls attempt to take their revenge on the younger Winchesters. Sam and Dean almost die when, as Dean is trapped in a crypt, the ghouls slice open Sam's forearms. But the cut that goes the deepest: the ghouls' revelation that Adam Milligan was really Sam and Dean's half-brother, and had the all-American relationship with the Winchester patriarch that Sam and Dean never had.

At first, Sam thought Adam might really be their brother, while Dean thought Adam was a monster — turns out they were both right! What was your theory about Adam, and how did this week's ghoulish monsters of the week relate to Sam and Dean's situation?

Patti Martinson, Staff Writer: I was spoiled about this episode prior to watching it and I had thought Adam was indeed their brother; I thought there was going to be some twist of some sort, but I wasn't sure what that twist was. I thought Dean's reaction to Adam at the end was a bit overboard, although testing him was certainly a smart move. I was initially amused about how Sam got to be the big brother to Adam, until it turned cold at the end when it was clear that Sam was turning into his father.

Katherine Keller, Culture Vultures Editrix: I, like Sam, believed that Adam was their brother, especially after I saw all the pix in the house, but I began to think that Adam also might somehow be the MotW or have something to do with it when I noticed that all the attacks tapered off during the several days that Sam and Dean were training Adam to fight.

That was too coincidental and raised a red flag for me.

And how did the situation with Adam relate to Sam and Dean? As Sam said early on, "He's a Winchester, he's cursed." (Little did he know!) Also ... all of the Winchester brothers have been killed at one point. Only, two of them were (un)lucky enough to come back. Cursed indeed.

Wolfen Moondaughter, Assistant Reviews Editrix and Den Mother: I was with Sam at first, until we saw Adam's mother's body. Then I suspected they would find Adam there too, that he was a fake. That was a fantastic twist, though! And as my dad said, it was a great way to have the show not actually "jump the shark", yet still allow them to explore a new family dynamic, similar to how they did when Dean thought he'd found his son.

I thought it was interesting how the monsters were a mirror of Sam and Dean. The brother and sister were devoted to each other, and to the memory of their parent. They were vengeful, something the Winchesters have proven themselves to be. They admitted that they only used to feed on the remains of the dead, but after losing their parent, they started feeding on the living, deciding that there wasn't any reason they shouldn't; Sam's been asking himself "Why not?" a lot of late, like when feeding on Ruby.

Besides being a mirror, Adam, when he was still perceived as a brother, also prompted the boys to reveal interesting things to us about themselves — namely, how much they've changed since the series started.

Sam was quite willing and able to step into Dean's shoes and play big brother to Adam, teach him all he knew. I think the rift that's been forming between Sam and Dean is starting to take its toll on Sam, too — I think that he craves that brotherly bond, just as Dean did with the siren, and has reached out to Adam to find what has been lacking of late.

Dean's losing his sense of trust. Not that he was ever all that trusting to begin with, but he once trusted Sam and his father unequivocally, and now he doesn't trust either, at least not as far as their judgement goes.

And of course it's all further proof of the trend that's been going for a few episodes now: Sam and Dean are trading roles, with Sam becoming the gung-ho hunter and Dean the reluctant one. They're like magnets that are side by side — when one flips his polarisation, the other has to as well, so that they stay opposing poles. Even when it came to Adam, their attitudes about the situation were reversed in a sense: the story started out with Sam wanting to protect their brother and Dean wanting to kill him, and moved to Sam wanting to put their brother's life at risk and Dean wanting to keep him safe.

Suzette Chan, Assistant Copy Editrix and Staff Writer: Because of the episode's title, I was expecting more hilarious meta about shows doing desperate casting moves when they've outlasted their welcome. I was thinking about how The Simpsons once inserted a brother without comment, or when Buffy the Vampire Slayer introduced a sister by mystical means. But instead of using surrealism to goof around on a trope, the show went down a dark, ultimately depressing path by using realism: Papa Winchester was not a monk!

The ghouls took on the appearance, thoughts and memories of others. They didn't just kill people, they consumed others to take their identities. This creates a metaphor that's highly applicable to Sam, who has turned out to be much more like his father than Dean has. To challenge his father as profoundly as he did, Sam had to have a deep understanding of John's ideas. In a reversal of the myth of Cronos eating his young, Sam "ate" the memory of his father to first separate himself from John, then to take his place. In this way, Sam internalized John's ideas in a way that Dean never felt he had to. While Dean wears his father's mantle (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), it's Sam who has become John Winchester from the inside out.

I liked the overt parallels between the families in this episode. The ghouls were robbed of their childhood when John Winchester killed their father, and Sam and Dean's childhood was robbed when John decided to turn them into hunters. Also, Adam's childhood seemed fairly idyllic until he and his mother were killed because of their connection to John. So really, Papa Winchester ruined all three families in this episode!

Anyway, the ghoul siblings and the Winchester brothers can't help but follow the family ways — a very determined Sam couldn't even escape. But the female ghoul had a point: their family fed on the already expired, while the Winchesters kill sentient beings. You can't even say that they're doing the world a favour by ridding it of the supernatural, since they've both been supernaturally resurrected, and Sam, for all intents and purposes, is part demon. In this light, the ghouls may be scavengers, but the Winchesters are murderers. Does this call into question their heroism? In the abstract, yes, if you subscribe to the idea that sentient beings have a right to their own self-determination. But in practicality, no, because Sam and Dean believe the enemy is any supernatural thing that threatens human life. So they themselves may not exactly be human, but they act as supernaturally-oriented interlopers who protect human interests. In any case, the Supernatural brand of heroism is not glorious. It's a damn dirty job.

Even though he wasn't in this episode, John Winchester was the subject of a lot of development, as was his relationship with Sam and Dean. What does John's relationship to his secret son say about his relationship with Sam and Dean? Did he do right by the boys, as Sam says?

Patti: I think Adam revealed more about the brothers' relationship and their relationship with John and did it in the worst way possible. Sam took to Adam pretty quickly, while Dean was very hostile. However, Dean became overprotective later while Sam wanted to harden Adam to the hunter life. The roles of Sam and Dean have been reversed, Sam has almost become John and Dean is now in the position Sam was at the beginning of the series, really seeing what Sam saw about his father.

John's relationship to Adam is not very clear. In some ways Adam had it better than the brothers since it didn't appear that Adam was taught the hunter life that Sam and Dean experienced. It may be that John realized how wrong he was with Sam and Dean and was attempting to be more normal for Adam. However, the fact that the original Adam died is pretty clear that however normal Adam's life was, he was far less prepared to deal with the supernatural. So it isn't clear which way was the "right" way, since neither Sam, Dean nor Adam had an idyllic time growing up.

Katherine: What this says to me is that John Winchester was a very human man with feet of clay. For all that he was a hardened hunter, a part of him still hungered for a "normal" life and I think that it soothed places in his soul that he could do typical all-American father-son activities with Adam.

Yes, I understand that Dean is hurt that John never did these things with him (and Sam), but at the same time, I think that Sam was right in that John raised them the way he did as an act of protecting them, and it speaks to the ways in which Sam is like John that he wanted to train Adam in the ABCs of hunting.

John did not raise Adam, Adam was not Mary's son, so it makes sense that his relationship with Adam was completely different.

It doesn't mean I give him a pass on the mistakes he made with Sam and Dean, though.

Wolfie: I don't know that "right" is necessarily the issue; I don't think he really had a choice. He knew the demon would be back for Sam, and that he needed to have someone else around to protect the kid, Dean being the obvious choice. Is it right to place your children in harm's way, or place the sort of burden on them that he placed on Dean? No. But that wouldn't change that the demon would come back or the fact that there was no one else to protect Sam if anything happened to him.

And while I don't think it was fair to force them to be hunters, rather than just teaching them to protect themselves, the boys did have a personal stake in it all: what happened to their mother (and, for Sam, what happened to Jess). Not that they should have to seek revenge, but I can certainly see why John would think they ought to, especially if it meant keeping the same from happening to someone else. Again, who else was there to do it?

But with Adam, there was no reason to include him: he had no direct personal experience with the situation. If John couldn't do right by his first two boys, he certainly had no reason to not keep Adam out of it, safe, and let him have the normal life. Why subject the third child to that life "just because"?

I think it's interesting how the boys were reversed here as well. Dean was obviously jealous at first — whatever Zachariah said about hunting being Dean's nature, I think Dean wishes he could have kept the normal life, that it hadn't been his nature to hunt. And I think he resented Adam having the chance he never did to know their father as the kind of father normal boys have. Sam, on the other hand, felt sorry for Adam not having been included in the family business, that the boy never got to see the hunter side. Sam's acting as big brother was also, as my sister Tarts said, him acting like John, being the sort of father-figure John had been to our boys. But Dean also became a father figure — acting as the father John had been to Adam, wanting to protect him from that life.

They've been telling us that Sam's the one who's really like John, and I can see that: John started out "normal" and was forced into the hunting life, while Sam tried to be normal too and was sucked back in. But that doesn't mean that Dean was only superficially like John because he was a hunter like the man they grew up with; Dean is becoming the wise man John was getting to be at the end. And maybe that's the secret: Dean opened the seals because he failed to be like his dad in Hell, failed to resist the temptation to torture others and enjoy it. Maybe he needs to keep walking in John's footsteps and become the man John did.

Thing is, these events served to further show Dean just how far from perfect their dad had been: in the disparate ways he had raised his sons, and by the fact that he had killed monsters indiscriminately. If John hadn't done that, Adam and his mother would have still been alive, and the ghouls would likely have left the living alone. (So what if they fed off the dead? So do worms and grass!) Well, maybe Dean doesn't need to see his father's good points to find those points in himself; in fact, these events may have made him realise how it can be good to show compassion even for monsters and think out the long-term consequences of his actions. I'm hoping he'll make the mental connection that if his father had been so imperfect once yet was able to be the man who resisted opening the seals, there's hope for Dean to become that man, too, in time.

Suzette: The introduction of Adam affords an opportunity to show the different views Sam and Dean hold about their father. While Sam, who has fewer illusions about John, trusts the objective evidence, Dean wouldn't even entertain the idea of Adam being his real half-brother. Dean has idealized John so much that he refuses to think of the possibility of "dad sex", or that John would have kept a second family secret from him. That's why it's Dean who has to descend into the familial crypt to discover the truth: it was like a Freudian spelunking expedition into the depths of his father's memory.

The episode also reinforces something we already know: that John did not give his sons a choice when it came to the hunter lifestyle. John didn't want his boys to be as ignorant and defenceless as he was when he was killed by the Yellow Eyed Demon ("In the Beginning," 4.03). Mary's desperation to resurrect John led her to enter into an unholy deal that sold out her future second son. But Adam was living a peaceful life with Kate, and John saw no reason to upset this domestic bliss, which is something that he could never give Sam and Dean. John could drop in and be the kind of white picket fence dad that made Dean jealous of Adam. The episode (written by Andrew Dabb and Daniel Loflin, directed by Phil Sgriccia) did a great job of first showing Dean betraying his quotidian hopes for a normal boyhood, then later, when he attacked the ghoulish Adam, bashing in the face that represented everything he didn't have. Dean is so lost in his sadism that he almost forgets that his real brother is bleeding to death in the next room!

Ultimately, John did do right by Sam and Dean: look what happened to poor, unsuspecting Adam — as well as Jessica, Sam's unsuspecting fiancée. Both were being sheltered from the knowledge of what was out there, and they both wound up being gutted by supernatural entities whose aim was to extract the maximum amount of psychological damage on John and Sam, the hunters that Adam and Jessica didn't realize they were associating with.

Although Sam and Dean disagreed on whether to train Adam, they agreed on one thing: that Adam did not have a choice. For all the postmodern touches that the post-human Sam and Dean have introduced to hunting, they're still products of the patriarchy that their father reinforced. Knowing that their own mother was a hunter — and was for years before John became one — why didn't Sam and Dean declare that Kate also deserved to be buried like a hunter?

In this episode, there's a running debate about authenticity (What is Adam really? What constitutes a real life? Are hunters born or are they bred?) How does this discourse relate to Sam and Dean as characters, and to the overall myth arc?

Patti: One definition of authenticity is being true to oneself. However, it seems like a lot of what the characters once thought about themselves as true is wrong. Castiel thinks himself as a loyal angel, but that faith in himself and God is being shaken. Dean thought he didn't have a higher purpose or meaning to his life and that is being shaken. Sam is deluding himself, thinking that he's now becoming his true self.

I guess the whole theme of this season is that the truth of oneself is a hard thing to grasp and deal with.

Katherine: Even though Adam was actually not-Adam, a ghoul, since ghouls take on the personality and memories of their last meal, I'll say that what went down with not-Adam was a very good indication of how Adam would've acted and reacted to the situation, and how he would've felt about discovering he had brothers.

As for the ghouls, I felt a bit sorry for them. In their world, John Winchester and the hunters were the monsters, and John took their father, who hadn't hurt another living person, away from them. Of course, that doesn't justify their murder of Adam and his mother. But I think that their pain and trauma as children was just as authentic as anything Sam and Dean ever felt.

Are hunters born or made? Made. Everybody has to learn hunting, and some more swiftly and harshly than others. At one point or another, every hunter has it thrust upon them.

And in terms of the myth arc? This entire episode was all about family and love, and that without family, you have nothing.

Wolfie: Dean kept insisting that Adam didn't have what it took to be a hunter: was that because their mother, who was the true hunter in the family, wasn't the boy's mother? Dean seemed to have conveniently forgotten that their dad didn't become a hunter until the night his wife was killed, at an age older than Adam is now! And John has been every bit as dedicated and capable as his wife's family was. Not that I don't believe that some people are born more capable of becoming hunters than others; if Zachariah is to be believed, Dean was born with an added edge in that department, probably like his mother. But obviously John — and Sam, I think — prove that hunters can be bred with the right motivation. True, Adam didn't have the circumstances Sam did growing up, but as I said, neither did John.

And then there's that lesson, like I started talking about in the last question and as Katherine touched upon, that monsters can have lives too, that they will defend just as fiercely as humans, and can lose just as much — their lives are valid.

As far as the boys themselves are concerned, Dean is continuing to learn that there's something to be said for a simple, peaceful life; hunting is no longer the fun and games it had once been. What was a career choice has now become a terrible duty, a grand destiny. Sam, meanwhile, continues to learn that hunting is a valid way of life, something just as respectful and full of meaning as a "normal" life — perhaps more. It's something he'd want to do regardless of Fate now, I think. Reality is in the eye of the beholder, and also ever-changing.

As I said before, the more the boys come to understand each other's old points of view, the more they grow alike in their thinking, the more they somehow grow apart.

And like I said, Dean's growing less and less able to trust anything he encounters, even when the info comes from Mr. Research, Sam, so for him, very little can be seen as authentic — not even his bond with Sam, much less a brother he never knew. So it's actually a pretty big deal that he accepted Adam so heartily as a Winchester by the end, especially as, even as he accepted the boy as a brother finally mid-ep, he still wouldn’t accept him as a hunter.

Suzette: As Sam and Dean tell Adam, the monsters you hear about in stories are real in their universe. That's why the hunters exist: to kill these very real monsters. But to us, the monsters are still fiction, and that's why the show exists, to represent the slaying monsters that signify a range of cultural and pop culture anxieties.

But while Sam and Dean accept the reality of these supernatural -- and therefore external — monsters, they have a harder time dealing with more human issues of authenticity. When Sam walked out on John and Dean, he didn't just turn his back on hunting: he constructed a whole other identity, one that had no grounding in his family history. It was an elaborate mask that held up until Dean's reappearance cracked it. Now, years after Sam's return to hunting, he's becoming the merciless hunter that John trained him to be — as much as he's becoming the demon warrior Azazel chose him to be. The changes have Dean wondering, where is the authentic Sam? But did Dean ever know the authentic Sam? Sam was infected with demon blood when he was six months old.

In this episode, it's Sam who disses the inauthenticity of his middle class persona, and Dean who points out that that he only ever dressed like his father. They both acknowledge that on these external levels, they have both engaged in inauthentic behaviour to establish identities for themselves: Sam as a normal civilian (something he wasn't), and Dean as the son who took after his father (someone he wasn't).

However their methods, both Winchester brothers are incapable of ignoring the impulse to rectify what they perceive as moral wrongs, or to challenge the kind of inauthenticity represented by supernatural beings that take on a simulacrum of human life. The ghoul siblings may not have been "hurting anyone" when they were eating corpses, but since they've switched to M.O. — to killing living people and usurping their identities — they have crossed two lines that Sam and Dean can't ignore.

Authenticity has been a sub-theme of other recent episodes, most obviously in "On the Head of a Pin (4.16)" — which Dean Winchester will show up, the sadistic torturer or the righteous hero? — and "It's a Terrible Life (4.17)" — can Dean really settle for an inauthentic but comfortable life over his gut reaction to quell disorder on the borders of the natural and the supernatural? While these episodes focused on Dean, they seemed to be building to a fundamental question about Sam that's been kept in abeyance for much of this season: Has Sam become such a diffuse — and powerful — entity that he's become something that Dean would hunt down?

Besides what you've already mentioned, what did you find notable about this episode?

Patti: I think what was extremely notable — and perhaps what really defines the entire episode — was Dean's statement to Sam that he was so like their father now. It's pretty clear that isn't a compliment and Sam knows it, although he pretends it was. That spoke volumes.

Katherine: That Sam and Dean, though very different in their reactions to discovering Adam, were in some ways very united, more united than they've been in ages. They both wanted to protect Adam and do right by him, even though they had different ideas about how to do this.

And the fact that John took vacations (if you will) from hunting for a week or two of normal life shows that yeah, he wanted it, and so, no it's not surprising that Sam tried to turn his back on hunting and have a normal life. It's what they both wanted, more than anything. Dean's right in how he pointed out how Sam and John had a lot in common.

I think that by having an episode built around the theme of family, we're getting a huge foreshadowing of what's to come. The fate of the world is going to rest on whether or not Sam and Dean act on the notion that blood is thicker than water.

Wolfie: Loved the little jibes at the concept of "jumping the shark" — a gimmick to boost ratings that generally indicates that a show is past its prime — in the episode. The name of the diner they ate as was "Cousin Oliver's Diner", a reference to the cousin that was brought on to The Brady Bunch (Adam could have been a Cousin Oliver if he'd stayed). Inside the diner was a poster that read "31st Annual Fonzarelli Skiing Championship", a direct reference to the episode of Happy Days for which the term was coined in the first place (Fonzie jumped over sharks on water skis). There was an ad for the Sonny "Bouno" lounge, a reference to Sonny Bono leaving Cher for a solo career (incidentally, the picture on the ad is of late director Kim Manners). They even start the ep at a beach (where one would possibly find sharks), with Dean turning his nose up at a tuna sandwich (something sharks would eat)!

I found it odd that Sam was showing the signs of the effects of blood loss one moment, and then later seemed perfectly fine. Did he get a transfusion somewhere?

Loved that Dean used Nugent as his FBI alias. And loved the bit where the cemetery guy asked Dean if he ever thought about where he'd like to spend eternity, and Dean replying, with a pained expression, "All the damn time."

Love that the bar owner's wife saw Dean as an FBI agent without him even trying, saying he had that "law and order" vibe. Especially since "Order versus Chaos" is another ages-old war like the one between Good and Evil — and in some ways are terms better applicable to the battle between the angels and the demons.

I liked that Dean had to come in and rescue his little brother Sam, a nice reminder to the brothers — at a rather pivotal time — of the role he once played. Also, I loved that he was essentially saving Sam from tentacle-rape!

You know, I'm actually kind of sad Adam died; I like the actor, and the boys having more family would actually be nice in my book. Just so long as he wasn't on all the time or saved them or anything. Well, there's always a chance that John — or Dean — had another kid somewhere ....

Suzette: Sam's non-use of demon TK was a mystery to me. There were several close-ups of his fists straining at the ropes. So does he have to gesticulate to use his powers?

The best action shot was when Dean pulled himself out of the crypt using the shovel as an overhead bar. If this were the Olympics: 10/10!

I loved the callback to the scene in "Heart (2.17)" where we learn that Dean never wins at Rock, Paper, Scissors. Back then, Sam said, "Dean, Dean, always with the scissors!" This time, Sam just sighs as Dean throws a hissy fit!

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