This episode was not at all what I was expecting, and so perhaps it is inevitable that I felt a bit let down by it. The episode’s title, “Jump the Shark,” is, of course, a reference to the turning point in a series where some particular contrivance or plot device serves as a bellweather of diminished quality to come. The term refers to the episode of Happy Days where Fonzie executes a dangerous waterski jump over a shark. Knowing nothing about this episode of Supernatural save for its title and the fact that it involved Sam and Dean’s discovery that they have a long-lost brother, I assumed that the episode was going to be one of the series’ lighter entries. I imagined an episode where the writers poked fun at the way other series have jumped the shark – I envisioned a Very Special Supernatural episode featuring guest stars, arbitrarily substituted actors for longstanding characters, set on location in Hawaii, with plot contrivances galore – all done tongue planted firmly in cheek in the manner Supernatural can pull off so ably. Maybe it would even feature Ted McGinley in a cameo, or be a musical! My mind raced with the possibilities. Alas, it was not to be. Maybe it is not fair of me to judge it for what it was not, instead of what it was. But that’s what I found I did as I watched: I judged it based on what it did not contain.

The plot of the show involves Sam and Dean receiving a call on their father John’s cell phone. It’s his son, Adam Milligan. What? His son?! The boys race to find out what is going on. Suspicious that their new ‘brother’ may be a shapeshifter, a demon, or some other beastie, they set out traps. They meet up in a diner and substitute out his water for a glass of holy water. They switch out his cutlery for real silverware, silver being harmful to shapeshifters. But Adam seems to be the real thing. He shows the boys photos of his happy days with his John, and Sam is able to confirm that there are pages missing from their father’s journal that coincide with this time spent with his second family. But it is not a happy family reunion: Adam was reaching out to John because Adam’s mother has gone missing. Sam and Dean determine that a series of grave robberies years back, that his father came into town to investigate, must be related. The grave robberies have started again, only this time living people are going missing. After some hemming and hawing over whether and how to execute the hunt, Sam and Dean set up a trap to lure whatever being is doing the robbing. The tables are turned on the boys when it is shockingly revealed that ‘Adam’ is not really Adam, but one of the two ghouls terrorizing the town. The ghouls were trying to lure John back to town, to take vengeance on John for killing their father during the first spate of grave robberies twenty years prior. Adam and his mother fell victim to the ghouls prior to Sam and Dean’s first arrival in town.

Perhaps part of why I didn’t care much for the episode is that it omitted two of the three parts I like best about Supernatural. The first part is the show’s overall mythology and arc. The arc was pretty well entirely absent from this episode apart from a throwaway line at the end, where Sam and Dean briefly discuss and dismiss “calling in a favor from Cass” to ressurrect their fallen newly-discovered brother. (While I’m on this uncharacteristic Supernatural rant, allow me to mention how much it bugs me when the boys refer to Castiel as “Cass,” like he’s their bro. Castiel is an angel. In the context of the show angels are supposed to be inhuman badass warrior beings. Castiel is on a very interesting character arc as he is flirting with Falling, emotions, and free will, but he is not Sam and Dean’s buddy. I dislike that Sam and Dean use a nickname for him, because I think that it personalizes him in a way that serves to diminish him. Maybe that’s why the boys do it, I suppose).

The second part of the episode that was missing here was the “monster-of-the-week” component. Yes, the featured monster of the week was ‘ghouls’. Yes, we learn (briefly) that ghouls are scavengers that prey on corpses (mostly) and that take the form of their latest victim. We learn that they are best dispatched with headshots. But we learn all of this in abbreviated fashion, late in the episode. We learn how to kill them after the fact – “Ghouls. That means headshot.” It all seemed kind of rushed and cursory. The best episodes of Supernatural manage to combine the overall arc with a strong monster-of-the-week storyline. This episode did neither.

So what are ghouls, anyway? They are denizens of ancient Arabian folklore. They are said to dwell in and around burial grounds, traditionally residing in deserts and in largely uninhabited areas. They have the ability to shapeshift, particularly into animal form. They rob graves, consuming the dead, and like to prey on young children. Check out the Wikipedia article on them for more. As usual, Supernatural gets the particulars right. I just wish it had given them a bit more attention, rather than treating them almost as an afterthought.

The third part, the part that the episode did explore, is Sam and Dean’s relationship with each other. We see that Dean now recognizes that Sam is more like their father, John, than Dean will ever be. Dean acknowledges that he grew up trying to emulate their father, but that Sam in many ways became the same person as their father. We see the further development of the schism between Dean and Sam, and we see more evidence of Sam’s downward spiral: Dean wants to keep their new brother safe. He wants to remove him from the situation – to drop him off with Bobby – and then to come back and finish the hunt alone. As much as it pains Dean to see the difference between how John treated Adam (baseball games and birthday celebrations) compared to how he treated Sam and Dean, Dean wants to respect his father’s decision to keep Adam away from the ugly non-glamorous, danger-filled life of a Hunter. He doesn’t want Adam to have to give up his friends, his normalcy, in favor of a life filled with demons, death, bad tuna sandwiches and nights spent sleeping in the back of the car, miles from anywhere. Dean longs for, and is perhaps jealous of, the normalcy Adam was afforded. Sam, on the other hand, wants to keep their new brother around. He’s eager to train Adam as a hunter. As it turns out, Sam has ulterior motives –  Sam wants to keep Adam around not so much as a brother but just as bait. Nice.

Of course, keeping Adam around as bait turns out to be moot, as Adam is the monster (or, more precisely, one of two). He and his sibling have been hunting down the individuals responsible for their ghoul-father’s death. It is a path of vengeance that has lead them to Sam and Dean by way of John’s involvement. The episode explores Sam and Dean’s characters and lives by making an obvious contrast to that of the ghouls. The two ghouls are siblings (not mother and son; mother and son are just their two most recent victims) on a quest for vengeance following the death of their ghoul father. As they explain it, a monster killed their father. A monster named “John Winchester.” Now they’re going around trying to take out the people involved in the destruction of their family. It’s a nice parallel to Sam and Dean’s own path – hooray for literary symmetry – but to have the ghouls directly explain it through exposition cheapens it a bit. I think the episode would have stood on its own a bit better had the writers not felt the need to attach big blinking lights to the border of the dark, distorted mirror they put in front of Sam and Dean. We get it, and sometimes less is more.

Supernatural did not jump the shark in this episode. There was nothing terrible about it, but neither was there anything particularly noteworthy. It’s certainly not an episode I would use to introduce potential fans to the show. Ironically, it is one of the few episodes of the series that my wife has watched. She tuned out after the first few minutes, listening more than watching. Even still, she had Adam pegged as  the monster well before the reveal. “You know it is going to be him,” she said as she gave up and walked off into the other room. “No,” I defended. “This show is better than that. You’ll see – there will be a further twist that takes it a step beyond what you’ve figured out.” She left, didn’t watch the end, and I don’t think she missed all that much. Fortunately she was spared seeing Sam’s bloody torture at the hands of the ghouls, which was painful to watch (in a good way) or his recovery thereafter (painful to watch in a bad way – in the world of Supernatural just about any wound can be healed so long as you get some dirty rags and ‘put pressure on it’ quickly enough, apparently). 

It’s perhaps ironic that this middling entry hit on the tail end of a string of absolutely phenomenal episodes. Rather than jumping the shark, this episode just kind of reached out and tagged it, then ran away. My score on this one? 2.5 out of 5. Am I alone in feeling this way?