The Supernatural episode “It’s a Terrible Life” opens with Dean, a well-respected and besuited man, measuring out his life in coffee spoons. He listens to NPR on the drive over to his job as Director of Sales and Marketing at Sandover, a corporation large enough to have departments devoted to construction, investing, and handling printer tech support. It’s odd to see Dean relishing the existence of an office drone, and things go from a bit bizarre to flat-out weird when the placard on his office door reveals his surname to be “Smith” rather than Winchester. Weirder still is seeing Sam, referring to himself as “Sam Wesson,” handling phone tech support at the same company. The opening closes with Sam and Dean on an elevator together, neither recognizing the other though Sam thinks Dean looks familiar.

You don’t have to be Miss Clavel to know that “Something is not right!” here. Are the boys undercover? Are they living out their lives in some djinn-feuled alternate reality (Season 2, Episode 20: What Is and What Should Never Be)? Are they in some sort of Matrix? Are they victims of some hallucination-producing giant fungus that has them trapped underground, a la the 1999 X-Files episode “Field Trip“? Or are they being taught an object lesson courtesy of the angels, being shown that they cannot dodge destiny? Surely not that last – after all, that was the subject and moral of this very season’s episode “In the Beginning“, in which Dean was sent back in time by Castiel only to receive an angelic lecture at the episode’s end that destiny cannot be changed or avoided. Yet in fact that’s exactly what this jaunt into alternate reality turns out to be. Another lecture, this time from Castiel’s boss Zacharia, that Dean is what he is, and that there’s no escaping it. The twist is that this time it’s not actually an alternate reality – it’s real life, a real company, a real haunting. Zacharia just plopped Sam and Dean down in the middle of it without the benefit of their Hunter memories. I’ve got to hand it to Supernatural, though: the show has managed to use the same plot device two times over a span of just 14 episodes, yet the two episodes are both fantastic and are different enough from each other that their fundamental similarity escaped me at first.

The plot of the episode is basic Monster-of-the-Week fare, elevated to a new level by the fact that Sam and Dean don’t have their memories for reasons unexplained until the episode’s end. This allows us, the viewer, to experience The Hero’s Journey in the span of a single episode as Sam and Dean “venture forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”[1] It’s all pretty satisfying stuff, and very well done.

It all starts with Sam, plagued by dreams of hunting ghosts and vampires with Dean at his side, revealing his dreams to his co-worker, Ian. Ultimately, he confronts Dean himself, cornering him in an elevator and asking him if he believes in ghosts. Dean dismisses the idea, and Sam, until he himself sees a ghost. That’s all it takes for the boys to start researching how to become ghost hunters (a task made possible thanks to some instructional web videos courtesy of the Ghostfacers, who play the role of Magical Guide in this version of the Hero’s Jorney) in order to take on the ghost of P. T. Sandover, the late magnate of their employer. P. T. Sandover was so invested in his own company, Sam and Dean learn, that he essentially lived it and breathed it. Its blood flowed through his veins. When he died, in 1916, his ghost remained behind; his spirit bound to the building by some DNA left over in a pair of his gloves kept on display. In times of grave economic stress, his ghost reappears to demand extreme employee loyalty and to punish slackers. His ghost first appeared during the Great Depression, in 1929. Now, in 2009, it is back. Very topical. The Ghost of Sandover takes out Ian, Sam’s friend from tech support, and Paul Dunbar. It attempts to take out a third tech support yellowshirt, and succeeds in grusomely killing a security guard, but before it can do much more damage Sam and Dean are able to stop it. 

Successful in their ghost hunting effort, Sam and Dean realize that they had a blast hunting down Sandover’s ghost. Sam admits to Dean that in his dreams he is a Hunter with Dean at his side, like a brother. He tells Dean that he would like to hit the road with Dean and pursue Hunting as a full-time profession. Dean is too practical for this. He does not like the idea of a life filled with restless nights in one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants. He prefers to stay grounded in reality. Sam questions whether what they see around them is reality. He questions whether Dean has spoken with any of the family he claims to remember. He points out that when he tried to make a similar call, to Madison, he reached an animal hospital. Dean doesn’t want to hear any of this. Sam feels his destiny is elsewhere, that he is fated for something different. Dean, on the other hand, tells Sam that he doesn’t believe in Destiny: he believes in dealing with what is in front of you. Dean wants normalcy.

Ultimately, of course, Dean comes around. Offered a $5,000 raise by his supervisor, and the additional promise of the possibility of becoming Senior Vice President of the Eastern Great Lakes Division (after just eight to ten years of 7-day/lunch-at-your-desk weeks), Dean declines. He tells his boss that he believes he is destined to do something else. It’s a much more half-hearted acceptance of his destiny than Sam (who demonstrates his resignation by dialing his phone with a fireplace poker, repeatedly and dramatically). But it’s enough of an acknowledgment for his boss, who taps Dean on the forehead and, so doing, brings Dean’s memories back. The color palate shifts ever-so-slightly, and we’re now back in Reality. Dean’s boss explains that he is Castiel’s superior, the angel Zacharia.

Unlike Uriel, and Castiel, whose names can be found outside of the world of Supernatural in reference to angels, there does not seem to be an angel Zacharia. There is, however, a biblical parable concerning a Levite priest named Zacharias, who was visited by an angel. (Luke 1:5). In Luke, Zacharias was visited by the angel Gabriel and was told that his wife would bear him a son. As Zacharias and his wife Elizabeth were both elderly, Zacharias questioned the validity of this. Due to his disbelief, Zacharias was stricken dumb and unable to speak until such time that he believed once again. It seems that that’s pretty much what we have in this episode. Dean is resistant to the idea of standing up and accepting his destiny. He doesn’t accept what the angels tell him. He disbelieves that he has the ability to stop the apocalypse. And so the angel Zacharia strikes him dumb to teach him that he really is a Hunter at his core, and that he cannot escape his fate. Once Dean sees this, despite his desire to be normal, his world returns to abnormal and he is dumb no more.

Zacharia explains to Dean that Sandover is real, that the haunting was real, and that Sam and Dean were plopped down in the middle of it to prove to Dean that Dean is a Hunter to his core. It is in his blood and he will do everything he is destined to do, like it or not. Zacharia attempts to make the case that Dean should like it: after all, he gets to change things, to save people, to save the world. He gets to drive around in a classic car and fornicate with women. It’s not a curse, Zacharia explains; it’s a gift. He tells Dean to stop whining about his fate; to stand up and be who he really is. A very similar lecture to the one Dean received in “In the Beginning,” from Castiel. It’s worth noting that Castiel’s lecture in that episode also focused on Sam, and served as a warning to Dean that Sam was headed down the wrong path. If anything, recent episodes have reinforced this and shown that, if anything, Sam is further along that path than even the angels expected he would be (as evidenced by Sam’s killing of Alastair and Castiel’s reaction).

If this episode is entitled “It’s a Terrible Life,” it begs the question which life is terrible? Smith and Wesson’s lives as Sandover employees, or Sam and Dean’s lives as hunters? Which is the good life, and which is the bad? The answer is clear, for Sam: the life of a Hunter is the life for him. Even before he knows what is going on, he knows that he feels destined for something else. He doesn’t like his life, he doesn’t like his name, he can feel that he is fated for something different in his blood. And later, after having hunted Sandover’s ghost, he is quick to try to convince Dean that they should take their show on the road. For Dean, on the other hand, the answer is not so simple. The episode opens to the tune of The Kink’s “Well-Respected Man,” and Dean seems to enjoy being one. Dean tells Sam that he doesn’t believe in destiny – he believes in dealing with what’s in front of you. He dismisses the idea of taking off his tie and becoming a full-time hunter; he questions the practicality of it. Dean accepts his destiny much more reluctantly, and with less zeal, than Sam. I think that for Sam, being Sam Wesson is the “Terrible Life.” For Dean, on the other hand, it’s the life of the Hunter that’s Terrible. Episode after episode, we are being shown that Dean just wants to be normal. Zacharia tells Dean that he must stop whining about his fate; that he must stand up and be who he truly is. I have no doubt that Dean will do so, but there seems little doubt about whether it is what he wants. Dean is a reluctant hero, and that makes his sacrifices all the more noble.

The Russian playwright and author Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is known, among other things, for espousing the idea that each component part of a story should have meaning. Chekhov felt that stories, and especially short stories, should have no unnecessary parts. A loaded rifle should not be put on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.[2] If a pistol is displayed on the wall in the first act, then in the following act it should be fired – otherwise, it shouldn’t be there.[3] This literary technique, a variant of foreshadowing, has come to be known as “Chekhov’s Gun.” The writers of Supernatural are big fans of the technique, and nowhere is it more evident than in this episode: Zacharia makes a brief appearance, in the guise of Dean’s boss, at the beginning of the episode – he doesn’t just come out of nowhere at the end. A seemingly random bag of popcorn pulled from a microwave, shown from inside the microwave looking out so as to better attract the viewer’s attention, becomes more meaningful when in the following act the microwave is used by distraught near-retiree Paul Dunbar as a means of suicide. Some pencils shiftily pocketed by tech support slacker Ian become more meaninful when in the following act Ian pulls a pencil from his pocket and uses it to off himself. When in the opening act of the episode we meet Dean Smith, and in the second act we meet Sam Wesson, it’s a foregone conclusion that Checkov’s Gun is a Smith and Wesson, and that Sam and Dean will be joining up in the third for a firefight.

This was another fine episode. So fine, in fact, that I’m considering abandoning the whole rating system for this show. Since I keep giving everything 5 out of 5, it’s becoming rather meaningless. The thing is, we’re in the midst of a string of fantastic episodes and I feel like giving credit where credit is due. So this episode gets 5 out 5 Metallicars from me. 

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[1]. See, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth and 

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html

[2].  Letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev, November 1, 1889.

[3].  From Gurlyand’s Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov, in Teatr i iskusstvo 1904, No. 28, 11 July, p. 521