“After school special,” indeed. This episode of Supernatural was all about loneliness, and responsibility, and fitting in, and finding yourself: all themes that harken back to the after school specials I remember from my childhood. (Are there any ‘after school specials’ anymore? If there are any featuring homicidal ghosts, perhaps I should start tuning back in). The episode begins with a typical school lunch scene – Cheerleader Taylor is teased by her cheerleader friends and is accused of being a slut. She takes her tray to the Unpopular Table, where she rejects the sympathy offered by a girl she considers to be a “fat ugly pig.” Unfortunately for Taylor, things get atypical fast: the “fat ugly pig” kills Taylor the next day in the girl’s bathroom while admonishing “I’m not ugly!” – Death By Swirly. This marks the second time this season on Supernatural that a cheerleader is dispatched via drowning in a small tub of water – the first was the apple bobbing incident during the Samhain episode in October. Both events utilized the same under-the-water camera perspective, and both were equally visceral. If it works, stick with it.

Sam and Dean arrive on-scene to interview the murderous girl. Posing as an orderly at the facility now holding the girl, Sam learns from her that she felt trapped within her body but that she neither saw black smoke nor smelled sulfur. Something is going on, but it doesn’t sound like typical demonic possession. Sam and Dean are on the case. Only, this time, it involves investigating Truman High: very same high school they themselves briefly attended in 1997, when Sam was a freshman and Dean a senior. The episode then begins skipping between the present and flashbacks to 1997, as we are afforded glimpses of how Sam and Dean were 12 years ago and we are given further insight into their character.

In the flashbacks, we learn that Sam and Dean took very different paths through school. Dean, full of bravado, is outwardly a cool rebel but is ultimately and accurately labeled by his spurned high school love interest as a “sad, lonely little kid” despite his protestations that he is a Hero. Sam is the quiet one. While watching this episode, I was struck by the casting selection for Young Sam and Young Dean. Young Dean seemed too old for high school. Part of that might have been his height, but he just seemed more mature than your typical 18 year old. His physical appearance was pretty close to Dean, though, and the timbre of his voice and inflections were reasonably spot-on. Young Sam, on the other hand, seemed too young. He was regularly referred to as a shrimp, and certainly plenty of people have great growth spurts later on, but he looked much younger than I recall most high school freshmen looking. Then again, I’ve been out of school for a long time now and maybe I’m off-base. I also didn’t think young Sam looked much like Sam. It wasn’t until I started pouring through screencaps, in the process of writing this up, that I really was able to see any resemblance between the two. 

Young Sam’s diminutive stature makes him an underdog despite his ability to hold his own. He quickly befriends Barry Cook, the class nerd. Sam defends Barry against the class bully, Dirk McGregor. Sam and Barry become friends even as Dirk transfers his angry attention away from Barry and toward Sam. Sam is more than capable of defending himself but he resists being drawn into a fight by Dirk, allowing Dirk’s taunts to roll off his back. He doesn’t seem to mind that Dirk teases him about his short stature. As he explains to Dean, he just wants to fit in. He wants to be normal. This is something we have seen in Sam since the show’s inception: whether it is rebelling against the family business by breaking ties and going off to college (a decision that we learn, in this episode, was prompted by the advice of Mr. Wyatt, his English teacher, who told him to make his own choices and follow his bliss), or his very recent decision to hunt down Lilith to end the looming apocalypse so that things can be Normal. It’s not until Dirk calls Young Sam “a freak” that it comes to blows. These, to Sam, are fighting words. He quickly and easily takes Dirk out, forever labeling him as “Dirk the Jerk” in the process. We see that despite Sam’s desire to be Normal, he ultimately does wind up stepping up to the plate to take on the Big Bad Guy. This has repercussions for Dirk, as it causes Dirk’s life to spiral downward. We learn that Dirk wasn’t entirely a bad kid – he was just filled with anger over the death of his mother to cancer some five years previous. Being a caregiver for his dying mother took a huge toll on him, and he displaced that anger on his classmates. Sam’s beating him up and labeling him as “Dirk the Jerk” stripped him of that coping mechanism and his life unraveled thereafter. He turned to drink, then drugs, then too much drugs. Then he died and became a vengeful murderous spirit. One has to wonder what the results of Sam’s fight with Lilith will be, and whether there’s a chance that Lilith is just misunderstood, too. Certainly thus far Lilith has seemed to be unrepentantly Evil, but episode after episode we are being fed Monsters of the Week that are ultimately revealed to have sympathetic characteristics. Supernatural consistently blurs the line between good and evil; leaving us feeling both sorry for the villain and pleased that it was vanquished. When Lilith is vanquished, will we ultimately learn that she had some redeeming characteristics, too?

In the present, the episode tracks Sam and Dean’s investigation of the school’s ghost. They initially suspect it to be the ghost of Sam’s friend Barry Cook. Barry couldn’t take the pressure of school and his parents’ divorce, and so he killed himself in the girl’s bathroom one year after Sam left, in 1998. Since that’s where the first attack took place, it seems a reasonable logical leap. However, Sam and Dean quickly determine that the school tests clean on the EMF reader, and the attacks continue even after they have salted and burned poor Barry’s bones. They go deep undercover at the school to ferret out the truth; Sam as a janitor and Dean as Substitute Coach Roth. In one of the most amusing scenes all season, Dean has his students play dodgeball. He beans one of them in the stomach, and tells another to just walk off his injuries. Sam and Dean witness two further attacks at the school. In the first, a jock’s hand is forced into a food processor during Home Ec and is mangled. The second attack is on Sam himself. The possessed girl calls Sam by name. She gets a few good blows in before Sam is able to dispell the ghost by force-feeding her salt, aptly illustrating just how dangerous a high sodium diet can be.

Sam and Dean eventually determine that the ghost is haunting the school bus, not the school. It is possessing kids on the bus and walking them into the school. Further, they determine that the attacks started at the same time that Dirk McGregor Sr., took over as bus driver. From there, Sam and Dean quickly and correctly determine that the ghost is actually that of Dirk the Jerk. In a highly amusing yet very poignant scene, Dean gleans from Dirk Sr. that although Dirk the Jerk was cremated following his death, Dad keeps a lock of his hair as a keepsake in his bible, on the school bus. That evening, Sam and Dean run the bus off the road and win a climactic battle with Dirk’s ghost as the incredibly passive football team sits idly and patiently on the bus while shotgun blasts ring out. Ultimately, Dean is able to find and burn the lock of hair, dispatching Dirk’s ghost and saving Sam. During the fight, Sam admonishes Dirk that life gets better after high school and that you just have to suffer through it, but certainly Sam is not quite evidence of that and it’s not clear that Sam believes it himself: in the final scene of the episode, Sam thanks his teacher, Mr. Wyatt, telling him that he did eventually join the family business, after all. Asked if he is happy, Sam’s non-response is deafening as the episode cuts to black. 

Rating: B+  (Let’s call that 4 out of 5 Metallicars).