If you could have any wish granted, what would it be? In the Supernatual episode “Wishing Well,” (OAD 11/6/08), the answers for the residents of the town of Concrete, Washington, are varied: The love of a beautiful woman. Winning the lottery. A teddy-bear come to life. A trip to Bali. The power to be invisible. Revenge against bullies. For Dean, it’s a foot-long italian sub with jalepenos. For Sam, though he doesn’t actually formally wish it, it would be the demon Lillith’s head on a plate, bloody.

Rare are stories where wishes come without a price, wind up as intended, or improve the circumstances of the wisher. This episode is no exception. In the grand tradition of W.W. Jacob’s 1902 horror classic “The Monkey’s Paw,” the wishes in this episode of Supernatural, made on a cursed Babylonian coin bearing the visage of the serpent god Tiamat, quickly sour: The beautiful woman’s sycophantic fawning is ultimately not to the wisher’s liking. The lottery ticket turns out to be fake. The trip to Bali results in some major sunburn. The teddy-bear is more Stay Puft Marshmallow Man than Teddy Ruxpin: His owner, Audrey, describes him as “ouch-in-the-head sad; he says weird stuff, and smells like the bus.” Sam and Dean accurately and unmercifully describe him as an alcoholo-porno addict – a “deep woods Duchovny.” The Invisible Boy is sideswiped by the Metallicar, the victim of an inadvertent hit-and-run. Young bullied Todd, in the process of fighting his own monsters, becomes a monster himself. And poor Dean’s italian sub doesn’t stay down for long. Fortunately for Concrete, Sam and Dean arrive and are able to intervene before the town destroys itself as have other towns before it.

Lucky coins and wishing wells have long and storied histories, and Ben Edlund, the writer of this episode, manages to tie the two together quite well. Because no episode of Supernatural would be complete without some reference to a monster, brief mention is made of the Babylonian god of primorial chaos, Tiamat. All three actually tie together quite nicely.

LUCKY COINS

Find a penny face up and it is lucky. Or manufacture your own good luck: put a dollar’s worth of quarters plus one penny into a machine, turn the crank, and you’re one dollar poorer but – maybe – much luckier. Or hunt for your very own virtual lucky coin in World of Warcraft. There is no shortage of lucky coinage out there. Some lucky coins originate as advertisements, others as souveniers. Some are borne of circumstance: the Confederate Lt. George Dixon carried a lucky $20 U.S. gold piece with him in his pants pocket everywhere he went after it deflected a bullet on April 6, 1862, during the Battle of Shiloh. His lucky coin made the news back in 2001, when it was found along with his remains amidst the wreckage of his scuttled submarine, the H. L. Hunley, in Charleston Harbor. Considering that his coin accompanied him to the bottom of a watery grave, how lucky was it really? Another, more recent but similarly ultimately unlucky coin would be the one owned and carried by unsuccessful Presidential candidate John McCain. His coin is a penny he’s carried since finding it face-up the night of the Republican Primary in 2000.

WISHING WELLS

Unlike Lt. Dixon, most people don’t throw themselves in the water with their lucky coin; just the coin alone suffices. Some don’t throw coins at all, and instead rely on the spiritual powers of the water source itself when looking for their wish fulfillment: Wishing wells have been around for as long as there have been wells to wish in. These days its near impossible to find any man-made body of water without coins within it. From fountains at the local mall to virtual wells on-line designed to accept payment through Amazon.com, wishing wells are everwhere. If it’s got water, chances are there are more than a few coins lining the bottom. The practice actually dates back thousands of years and is one shared across different cultures. It likely stems from the fact that water is associated with life itself. Find a good source of clean water, and life flourishes. Be it the Nile or the Mississippi, civilization springs up around fresh water. Sources of clean standing water became gathering places for members of early civilizations, and life-sustaining wells and springs came to be associated with health and luck. Over time, some European cultures came to believe that wells housed dieties or were blessed by the gods, and the practice of placing a defeated opponent’s armor within the well as an offering grew. Wishing wells play a prominent role in Norse myth, as well: Odin sacrifices his right eye to Mimir’s Well, the “Well of Wisdom,” to gain omniscience.

TIAMAT

What does Tiamat have to do with wishing wells and lucky coins? Not much. And not much effort is devoted in the episode to trying to draw a connection. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see what connections there may be. Tiamat, as Sam mentions, is a Babylonian god – a goddess, more precisely. She’s associated with the sea and is the embodiment of primordial chaos. Just as from water springs life, according to Babylonian creation myth from Tiamat springs the first generation of gods and, ultimately, heaven and earth itself. From her crying eyes come the Tigris and Euphrates, the two rivers which join at the Fertile Cresent to form the cradle of civilization. From watery chaos, life.

If this episode of Supernatural has a moral, it is that life is about wanting and hoping, not getting. Once you get what you hope for, you risk losing your bearings and can go crazy (like Michael Jackson or David Hasselhoff). It likely wasn’t coincidental that the person responsible for starting the town on its downward wishing spiral was a getter – a coin collector. Nor that the object of his affection, and the coin’s first victim, was named Hope.

Supernatural is normally rife with pop-culture references both direct and oblique, and this episode was no exception. I caught the following movie references in this episode, and have no doubt that there were others still that I missed:

• Poltergeist – “This house is clean.”
• Forrest Gump – “Run, Forrest, run!”
• Harry and the Hendersons
• Superman II – “Kneel before Todd!” (best moment ever).
• Spiderman – “With power comes great resp…”

The suicidal teddy bear and Sam’s sudden lightning-strike death were both a bit too absurd for my liking, but otherwise I think the episode maintained a fine tone and pace throughout. For an episode that was neither Monster-of-the-Week nor Main Story Arc, it still managed to be very enjoyable. I wouldn’t have wished for much better. 4 out of 5 Metallicars.