Sorry it took so long to get this up! I warn you, it's gonna be a wait for Season Two, Part II.

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Season One, Part I: Introduction, The Call to Adventure (John, Dean, Sam), The Refusal of the Call (Sam, Dean), Supernatural Aid (Sam, Dean)

“Why do I hafta be some kind of hero?”

A Hero’s Journey Analysis of Supernatural

Season Two, Part I

Season Two: The Initiation

The first image of Sam and Dean is from behind the fire of their father’s pyre. Their faces are hazy, warped by the flame. Sam openly fidgets, tears streaming. Confused, he asks his brother if their father said anything. Dean stares blankly into the fire. “No,” he answers, after a pregnant pause. A tear betrays his inner grief despite the straight face.

                The cinematographic decision to place the pyre between the camera and the Winchester boys indicates the beginning of the Initiation. The Special World contrasts heavily with the Ordinary World of the hunting life from Season One. “A Special World…has a different feel, a different rhythm, different priorities and values, and different rules…there is a movement and change as new emotional territory is explored” (Vogler 136). For precisely the “different feel” of everything, Season Two is the Special World. First of all, the brothers are without their father, who defined their entire lives. Secondly, hunting is no a longer black and white ethical action. Third, even their selves – who and what they are – becomes unstable. And at times unreliable. The camera shot through the pyre symbolizes this uncertain new ground.

Specifically, the pyre-shot indicates the Road of Trials. “Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials” (Campbell 97). Sam and Dean are depicted hazily because their selves – mentally, emotionally, spiritually – have lost their stability. Now it isn’t clear where their path leads. They lost their anchor (John), their purpose (the Yellow-Eyed Demon), and means (the Colt).The flame-wavered image of the boys symbolically depicts this ambiguous Self.

                The sense of floating helplessness continues in the next scene. Like all confused heroes, Sam and Dean hole up at their Mentor’s to recover. Sam and Dean’s new Mentor is Bobby Singer, shrewdly introduced in the Supernatural Aid stage in Season One. “The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region” (Campbell 97). Three weeks after burning John’s corpse, at Bobby’s truckyard, with Bobby’s tools, Dean tinkers underneath the bare skeleton of the broken Impala.

                Sam approaches his big brother and tries to get Dean to open up. To deal with their father’s death. His brother snaps at him sarcastically.

                So Sam becomes equally snarky and points out their inaction. All Dean has been doing is working on the Impala. “Another Test of the hero is how quickly she can adjust to the new rules of the Special World” (Vogler 139). The Winchesters can’t adjust. Dean hasn’t been out gathering intel on supernatural activities. He hasn’t been scanning obituaries. He hasn’t been cleaning his guns. He hasn’t been consulting with Bobby. He hasn’t been doing anything save repairing the Impala. But it is both boys who have been floundering in the new world. The Special World. The world without their father.

                                Sam: Say something! Alright? Hell, say anything!

            Aren’t you angry? Don’t you want revenge? But

            all you do is sit out here all day long buried under-

            neath this damn car!

…

Sam: I don’t care how you deal with this, but you have to

            deal with this, man!

…

Sam: And I’m not alright. Not at all. But neither are you.

(“Everyone Loves A Clown”)

Just as Dean rebuilds the Impala to rebuild his soul, Sam rededicates himself to the family business to rededicate himself to his family.

                Unfortunately, the new world demands more than good intentions, and the skills the heroes successfully used in the Departure are just not going to cut it. Dean clearly states their almost utter lack of ability to find their ground again, even using their previous skills as hunters:

                                Dean: Revenge, huh?

                                Sam: Yeah!

                                Dean: Sounds good. You got any leads on where the

                                            Demon is? Makin’ heads or tails on any of Dad’s

                                            research? ‘Cause I sure ain’t. You know when we

                                            do finally find it – oh, no wait. Like you said: the

                                            Colt’s gone. But I’m sure you’ve figured out another

                                            way to kill it. We got nothin’, Sam. Nothin’, okay?

                                            So the only thing I can do? Is I can work on the car.

                                (“Everybody Loves A Clown”)

                Their hunter methods of detective work will not suffice for this completely unexpected world. The shock and confusion of the Special World is too much for Dean and he falls back on the one thing he can do: repair the Impala. He realizes more than Sam that they are utterly helpless and unprepared. “No matter how many schools he has been through, he’s a freshman all over again in this new world” (Vogler 135). The elder Winchester may have a lifetime of hunting under his belt, but nothing will succeed and he is at a loss. Even their Mentor is not enough. They need allies to face the new challenges.

                Borrowing Mentor Bobby’s spare van, the Winchester brothers visit a bar called the Roadhouse, whose address Sam gleaned from hacking John’s cell phone. Inside they meet Ellen and Jo Harvelle, the mother and daughter who run this truck-stop for hunters. The Roadhouse is the watering hole where hunters stop by for a beer, gather information and grab a job. Vogler notes “bars are natural spots to recuperate, pick up gossip, make friends, and confront Enemies” (140). Sam and Dean need the Roadhouse – its stability, centrality, connections, allies and enemies therein – to recuperate from a tragic loss. They need it to ground them in the frighteningly vast, foreign landscape of the Special World.

                Ellen Harvelle is the primary ally of the brothers Winchester. The boys are surprised to learn that their father knew about her, collaborated with her, and in fact knew about a whole network of hunters. Ellen initiates them into all this knowledge, and also into a new set of rules that govern this “hunter underworld,” this hunter subculture.

                In the second episode of Season Two, “Everybody Loves a Clown,” Sam whips out his cell phone when the boys are stuck on a job. “Maybe Ellen or that guy Ash will know something,” he says as he dials. Nothing in John’s Journal seems to match the current creature they are hunting - nothing in their former training or knowledge seems to match the creature - and so the boys have to reach out to their allies for help. Just as Dean notes that they are helpless, so Sam admits that they are helpless: “So look, if you can help, we can use all the help we can get.” And in response, Ellen points them to Ash.

    Ash is a scruffy “don’t-judge-a-book-by-it’s-cover” character that wears “hillbilly” on the outside and harbors an MIT education on the inside. Sam and Dean hand over John’s research on the Yellow-Eyed Demon to Ash for him to compile. For him to make sense of. Because nothing in their former training or knowledge helps their understanding of it. The heroes reach out to allies to help them in this new world, a place where their Departure skills won’t take them all the way.

                Note that in Season One, the only one they could contact for help was their father. And then Bobby, much later in the season. Both their Mentors. In Season Two, they have a wider variety of new people to assist them. Most importantly, these new people have an equal relationship with them. Their interactions are not as tense with the “teacher-student” atmosphere, and the behavior is much more casual. This indicates that Season One is the Departure, and Season Two is the Initiation.

                    Ellen specifically warns them about Gordon Walker.

                                Sam: Got a question.

                                Ellen: Yeah, shoot.

                                Sam: You ever run across a guy named Gordon Walker?

                                Ellen: Yeah, I know Gordon.

                                Sam: And?

                                Ellen: He’s a real good hunter. Why you askin’, sweetie?

                                Sam: Well, we ran into him on a job, and we’re kinda working

                                        with him, I guess.

                                Ellen: Don’t do that, Sam.

                                Sam: I thought you said he was a good hunter?

                                Ellen: Yeah, and Hannibal Lector’s a good psychiatrist. Look,

                                         he is dangerous to everyone and everything around him.

                                        If he’s workin’ on a job, you boys just let him handle it

                                        and move on.

                                        (“Bloodlust”)

Ellen tips off the boys as to the hidden nature of Gordon, a fellow hunter. The brothers learn that though hunters may be skilled, they also may be frightening. The side of the “good guys” (i.e. hunters) is not always populated by the most stable of minds and the most clean of souls. Some hunters – and especially Gordon – are enemies. This category of their life violently hits them an unexpected angle. But Ellen serves to gently wean Sam and Dean, who as essentially newborn infants into this society need help seeing things clearly with their blurry newborn vision. So they know not to touch hot stoves and to steady them when they stumble out of the threshold’s belly.

                Dean falls out of the gate first into a pitiless plunge into the spiritual labyrinth of the Initiation. Closer to his father than Sam, he feels John’s death like an ice-cream scooper gouged a piece out of his soul. (This spiritual “hole” is discussed later.) The price of the Journey is the non-comfort of the hero. Growth is both outward and inward in the Initiation.

                                And so it happens that if anyone – in whatever society

- undertakes for himself the perilous journey into the

darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally,

into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he

soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolical figures.

                                (Campbell 101)

Like Sam struggling with his destiny, Dean will wrestle with not only the monsters of the dark, but his own inner darkness. Both brothers have to come to grips with their own souls, and to do that requires a painful Journey within. They must scrutinize who and what they are as a human and as hero to Journey forth. They partially don’t want to visit the unseeable depths because they were comfortable in the world of the Departure. Dean had his father and his brother, together as a family for a brief blip of a few episodes, and every decision was simple: if it’s evil, then it must die. Sam finally rediscovered his family and found the creature responsible for Jessica’s death, and his simple mission of revenge was only about her. In Season Two, the brothers are ripped out of this comfort and forced to face their inner demons (pun truly intended).

                They face a whole new world, where the stage and players are far more vast than they could have imagined. But however large the mythos grows, it is the internal turmoil of navigating the frightening passages of their own spiritual labyrinth that the brothers Winchester drive their Hero’s Journeys.

                The first stage in the Initation, the Road of Trials, is fraught with just that: trials and ordeals. These are the episodes where Sam and Dean hunt a creature, and through that hunt, grow out of their prior places in the world. In Season One, by the single fact they sought their father marks both Sam and Dean as the archetypical “Son.” Now that their father is not among the living, they must redefine themselves.

                So what is easiest to those wallowing in the groundless space of finding themselves?

                The job they’ve always done.

                It is through the routine of the job that the Winchester brothers have to learn to grow up. “In our dreams,” Campbell writes, “the ageless perils gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered.” Now, however, the heroes see a reflection of their past and future. They could hunt with all the same manners of the Departure, of Season One. But in the Initiation, though they see all the usual manner creatures as before, they see them in a different light.

                Sam performs as Dean’s conscience in his battle reconceiving the world. Basically, he stays his brother’s hand by injecting grey into Dean’s black-and-white ethics.

                Yet Dean has already been wavering from his polarized, comfortable morals. In “Devil’s Trap,” Meg’s exorcism raised a problem he never considered possible: that the family motto of “saving people, hunting things” is a paradox. Since childhood, hunting things always led to saving people. The exorcism saved Meg from a life of self-imprisonment. Unfortunately, that free life was all of five minutes – her body was too broken. In truth, it was a mercy killing.

                In “Faith,” the boys’ hunt was halt a preacher’s wife from using a Reaper to murder people she deemed wicked. She traded these innocents’ life force to save those with terminal illnesses. By their hunt they stop her from playing God. However, in the process, they deprive the fated of their salvation.

                These two actions left Dean in a new ground. The Winchester creed was no longer a promise: it was, at best, a hope. No longer was saving people a necessary consequence of hunting things, a plain equation. Now there was grey.

                In the episode “Bloodlust,” the Winchester boys face vampires who refuse to feed on humans. Dean immediately falls on instinct to guide him, because it is the training of his father. He also tries to fill the dark, deep hole that both John’s death and Dean’s own unnatural revival left.

                                Sam: Dean, you really don’t remember anything?

                                Dean: No. ‘Cept for this pit in my stomach. Sam, something’s

                                            wrong.

                                (“In My Time of Dying”)

                                Dean: I feel like I have this…

                                Gordon: Hole inside you? And it keeps on getting bigger

                                            and bigger and darker and darker? Good. You can

                                            use it. Keeps you hungry. Trust me, there’s plenty

                                            out there that needs killing, and this will help you

                                            do it.

                                      …

                                Sam: You know, you slap on this big fake smile, but I know

             how you feel, Dean. Dad’s dead. And he left a hole and

            it hurts so bad you can’t take it.

(“Bloodlust”)

Dean tries to fill his emotional hole with violence – clean, decisive violence. It is action. It is satisfying. “When I killed that vampire at the mill, I didn’t even think about it. Hell, I even enjoyed it” (“Bloodlust”). It seems to root the cloudy, ambiguous world of the Initiation in The Usual.

                Until Sam confronts him with the ambiguity and forces him to stop. To think. To observe the facts instead of proceeding with childhood teachings. It is time for Dean to grow into a fully autonomous individual, instead of using daddy’s black-and-white lenses.

                Dean and Sam were raised to see the supernatural as black and white.

                                    Dean: What if we’ve killed things that didn’t deserve

killing? You know, I mean the way Dad raised us…

to hate those things. And, man, I hate ‘em. I do.

(“Bloodlust”)

Sam never accepted it. Dean took it to heart – it was instinctual. It is a “process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past” (Campbell 101). But now he has to outgrow these ‘infantile images’ and think on his own. Daddy’s rules are not enough in this new world.

                Why, though, should the Winchester boys go through torment? Just because the Hero’s Journey requires them to? Shouldn’t they remain with the black-and-white perspective? Doesn’t that produce more decisive action? They do need to find some way to track down the Yellow-Eyed Demon, kill it and finish their father’s work. They can’t just pussyfoot around until they feel better.

                The heroes never “feel better,” anyways.

                The whole reason the boys are pulled through the ethical ringer is because there is a very difficult decision to prepare for. Every hunt they proceed through quavers Sam and Dean’s ethical stance because of the hunt’s essential grey nature.

                And every thing they hunt Dean sees reflected a looming situation.

                It is first apparent in “Bloodlust,” when Gordon tries to convince Dean that the good vampire Lenore is deceiving him. Gordon finally finishes the story of how he came to be a hunter.

                                    Dean: The vampire that killed your sister deserved to

                                                die, but this –

                                    Gordon: [laughs] Killed my sister. That filthy fang didn’t

                                                kill my sister. It turned her. It made her one of

                                                them. So I hunted her down and killed her myself.

                                    Dean: You did what?

                                    Gordon: It wasn’t my sister anymore. It wasn’t human.

                                                I didn’t blink. And neither would you.

                                    (“Bloodlust”)

Sam continues the conversation with Gordon while Dean stares at his brother in mild shock. He stares not at Gordon. At his brother.

                Why?

                Because he is now gauging whether he could kill his little brother. Without blinking.

                Dean is lost for a good twenty seconds, face completely raw with his fear. He already knows he couldn’t. He couldn’t unhesitatingly pull the trigger on his younger brother. It is the exact image of him executing “turned” Sam that has mouthy Dean speechless.

                And it would have been a hollow speculation if not for John’s final Order to Dean.

                It is the whispered secret of the season opener, “In My Time of Dying.” John smiled bitterly while Dean appeared shell-shocked. And then Dean didn’t tell Sam. No one heard it save for Dean; even the audience knew not what John’s last words were.

                But this is the first moment that hints as to what that secret is.

                The ethically ambiguous hunts are necessary because they closely resemble the emotional and mental situation Dean is in. He must proceed through them in order to discover how he eventually will deal with Sam. And Sam must proceed through them in order to discover how he will eventually deal with himself.

                Because some day Dean will have the gun to his brother’s head.

                John’s final order: save Sam, or you will have to kill him. At this point Dean cannot think of anything more than the Order, and how it’s “screaming in my head all day” (“Hunted”). He is in shock. But by having to make grey decisions in formerly black-and-white situations, Dean learns of his capacity to carry out the Order. If Sam turns evil, will Dean kill him (because Dean believes everything evil should be killed)? And is it “courage” to kill an evil Sam, or will Dean feel like he’s failed his little brother? What constitutes “evil,” and is Sam still Sam?

                Once Dean revealed the Order to Sam in the beginning of “Hunted,” Sam must also discover his own nature. He struggles with the philosophical giants of free will versus determinism: Is his evil turn inevitable? Could he stave off and perhaps counter-weight it with good deeds, like he says he’s trying to do in “Playthings”? Is the individualistic, self-governed hero in reality destined?

                                The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman,

the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers

and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self)

either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. One by one

the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride,

his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the

absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his

opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh.

(Campbell 108)

Sam fears he will turn evil. He struggles against the faceless inner demons. But to pass through the Initiation he needs to realize that whatever he is, he is. He must reconcile with himself, no matter who or what he may truly be.

These are the questions Sam sees reflected in their hunts (“Simon Says,” “Hunted”), just as Dean sees the “shades of grey” questions reflected. This is one of the essential inner journeys of the Road of Trials. “In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers and intrusive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the due to what we must do to be saved” (Campbell 101; emphasis mine). Sam and Dean are not tortured ethically and emotionally just to see some angst and drama on the screen. They are both searching for a way to be saved. Both boys are fighting to save Sam from turning evil, and both boys are fighting to save Dean from his own knee-jerk, virulent judgment. The Winchesters are fighting to save their souls.

        Dean: Sam, when Dad told me that I might have to kill

    you, it was only if I couldn’t save you. Now if it’s

    the last thing I do, I’m gonna save you.
(“Born Under A Bad Sign”)

All these “initiatory quests and moments of illumination” (Campbell 109) are part of the Road of Trials. And even within the strife, “there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land” (Campbell 109).

This is better known as the bittersweet stage of Meeting With the Goddess.

Sam and Dean encounter the Goddess separately: Sam in the episode “Heart” and Dean in “What Is and What Should Never Be.” The fact that they go through this stage separately indicates they are the hero in themselves. This is not to suggest that Dean didn’t grow from the emotional milestone that was Madison’s death in “Heart.” Simply, the episode was a grotesque reminder of the presence of the Order, ominously shadowing the boys as the hand of destiny. Dean suffered a preview of what he will eventually have to do.

“Heart” is more than the Order and its consequences for Sam. The episode’s “saved person” is San Franciscan and Pretty Girl Madison. Its “hunted thing” is a werewolf shadowing her. After a pitifully uncreative game of “Rock-Paper-Scissors” on Dean’s part, Sam stays with Madison to protect her while Dean does the legwork and hunting. It is during the uneventful hours that Sam bonds with Madison.

While Dean is a rake, Sam is shy and awkward. At first he can’t even speak to Madison. After a while, they begin to talk. Madison tells him about her newly discovered self-dependence after she was mugged. Sam is impressed, clearly seeing her breakup with her “scary” boyfriend as a reflection of his own breaking away from his family.

The emotional connection drives Sam and Madison’s fervent attraction. Madison reawakens Sam’s sleeping desire. He had a moment similar to this with Sara in Season One’s “Provenance.” Like Jessica, like Sara, Madison is the “paragon of all paragons of beauty, the reply of all desire, the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero’s earthly and unearthly quest” (Campbell 111). Sam ultimately desires a True Love. He can never have Jessica back, but his heart still needs to be filled. “Time sealed her away, yet she is dwelling still, like the one who sleeps in timelessness, at the bottom of the timeless sea” (Campbell 111). Jessica, by virtue of her place within his heart and quest, is the idealized figure that will forever be preserved within his mind like Snow White in her glass coffin. At the end of Season One, Sam knows revenge will not fully satisfy him and cannot be his only drive. It would kill him. Revenge saps life.

Madison – the Goddess – makes him feel alive. To emphasize the point, Sam and Madison have sex. Sex: here being the pleasant visual symbol of humanness, of carnal impulse. It is fleshy and sweaty, blush with blood. It is more alive than anything else to do with human existence. The body has been traditionally seen as “worldly” and the mind as “otherworldly,” the body as the living prison of the immortal soul. The life-affirming (and perpetuating) ritual of sex marks “Heart” as the stage of the Meeting With the Goddess.

Or maybe it was just time for Sam to get some.

Life is the Goddess’ essence. “She encompasses the encompassing, nourishes the nourishing, and is the life of everything that lives” (Campbell 114).

The Goddess encompasses everything about life. Including mortality. “She is also the death of everything that dies. The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway…She is the womb and the tomb” (Campbell 144). The Goddess is the destiny of the living, inseparable from bliss, necessary and inevitable. And “Heart” sticks to this.

Despite the efforts of Dean, there is no cure for Madison’s affliction of lycanthropy. This fact parallels Sam’s season-long struggle against fate, against destiny, against determinism. There is an even more frightening parallel. The Supernatural universe’s version of werewolf is a human oblivious to his condition. They have no memory of the murders they commit: the entire transformation is unconscious. This, paralleled with Sam’s situation, seems to imply that no matter how hard he tries, he will become something evil. He may think that he is the same, but unconsciously he is different. Sam has no control over his fate. The fate is inevitable, absolute, and incurable. And to journey through the stage of Meeting With the Goddess, the hero cannot “defeat” the Goddess’ “dark side.” That isn’t the lesson. Successful heroes must accept the Goddess, through and through. Life is beautiful, and it ends. The Hero is mortal. “Only geniuses capable of the highest realization can support the full revelation of the sublimity of this goddess…Fully to behold her would be a terrible accident for any person not spiritually prepared” (Campbell 115).

And it is terrible, indeed. There is nothing restrained in Sam’s horror when Madison asks him to kill her.

            Sam: We can find a way, alright? I can. I’m gonna save you.

            Madison: You tried. I know you tried. This is all there is left.

                            Help me, Sam. I want you to do it. I want it to be you –

            Sam: I can’t.

            Madison: I don’t wanna die. I don’t. But I can’t live like this.

                            This is the way you can save me. Please. I’m asking

                            you to save me.

            (“Heart”)

Not only is this against the very ethics of Samness (not killing innocents), it also is (1) too much of a reminder of the now-ambiguous “saving people, hunting things” motto, and (2) a horrific preview of how Dean will eventually have to kill Sam to “save him.”

                It is too much for Sam. This is the potential danger of how great the Goddess is: she is blinding in both her beauty and her revulsion. “…the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters” (Campbell 116). Sam is not yet capable of understanding the Goddess. He cannot accept both the evils and joys “with equal equanimity” (Campbell 114). He has seen too many loved ones die. Everything he has seen so far picks away at his emotional and spiritual stability (for the latter, see the episodes “Houses of the Holy” and “Roadkill”). He fears he himself will turn evil…instead of just being “Sam.” He frets over whether his actions are “evil” or “good” so much that he cannot live. It is too much for him to process – he is too tortured.

                Why does Sam need to be tortured so? Because the Meeting With the Goddess is where the hero must grow up from a childhood viewpoint.

Through this exercise his spirit is purged of its infantile,

inappropriate sentimentalities and resentments, and his

mind opened to the inscrutable presence which exists,

not primarily as “good” and “bad” with respect to his

childlike human convenience, his weal and woe, but as

the law and image of the nature of being. (Campbell 114)

The adult viewpoint understands that the world has a broad machination in place, whose workings are too vast for ephemeral mankind to comprehend. Nature, Life, the Goddess, is a paradoxical koan that illuminates the world. The world’s ways are not to be judged or categorized – that isn’t the point. The Meeting With the Goddess teaches the hero that there is good even in the evil, and therefore nothing really is polarized. Sam has to quit worrying if he will turn evil and begin to live in the present. For it is in his human action does Sam grow into his hero boots.

Watch it again.

Because you know you missed something. Something that further exalts the nit-picky detail the Supernatural crew put into each episode.

The Seven Sins are color-coordinated for your identification convenience.

In “The Magnificent Seven,” the show’s season three premiere, the recently-freed Seven Sins possessed some fortunate bodies and proceeded to clothe themselves in their favorite color.

Around in Medieval times there came to be an associated color for each sin. For Pride, it was purple. For Lust, (contrary to layman’s first guess) there is blue. For Wrath, it was red. Avarice (or Greed) is yellow, and Gluttony is orange. For Sloth there is a light blue and of course for Envy, green. These color associations are pretty variable depending on which source you cite from, but I chose these associations because they were the colors chosen for the Seven Sins’ wardrobe.

Pride: Purple tie and dress shirt

Lust: Blue tank top (underneath her white vest)

Wrath: Red muscle shirt (underneath a black vest)

Avarice/Greed: Pale yellow shirt

Gluttony:

This is interesting. The demon Gluttony wears a plaid shirt that includes, but is not exclusive to, orange. However, Isaac, doomed to die by the touch of this demon and his subsequent drinking of the Drain-O, wears an solid orange collared shirt. I will return later to the wardrobe of the characters other than the demons.

Sloth: a light blue, worn-to-hell T-Shirt (XXXXL)

Envy: A sage green/ faded green T-shirt (underneath a grey collared light jacket)

So it is very convenient to put in these little wardrobe clues about the demons, but what about the other cast members? Well, as I stated before, Isaac's orange jacket probably attracted the attention of Gluttony, as it is his favorite color. Tamara seems to be the only one not following along in this thematic vein (She has a green/grey jacket and a blue T-shirt...nothing Wrath Red about it).

Dean? That boy is marked. Notice the color of the jacket they choose for him to wear:

Blue. The color of his sin. He certainly willfully indulges in it in "The Magnificent Seven," and then he's paired off with Lust as his make-out fighting partner.

Sam? Good 'ol green jacket, faithful companion that it is:

Sam has worn this before. Many a time. The boys only have a few pieces of clothing.

But envy, though?

What about that he's brother's so carefree, that his "big job" is done, that Dean has no guilt. Or how about this: Sam has felt destined and doomed since the "Pilot." Finally Dean with his "year to live" demon-pact would feel the same. But no, he doesn't. Dean gets an awful destiny, and then unlike Sam, doesn't fret or brood about it (and certainly doesn't make the pissy little face Sam is making in this screencap). Sam is envious that Dean can take a Bad Destiny and spin it into a positive. Sam certainly can't.

Now finally to Bobby, our curmudgeonly 'ol hunter. Bobby doesn't seem to have a sin.

Yet he does seem a little too touchy with regards to "settling down" Tamara. Bobby screams in her face that they are going to sit still and think about what they're next move is. We discover that Tamara seems intimately tied to Wrath: she feels no mercy when the host died while exorcising Envy, and Envy taunted her with Wrath as her sin. Perhaps Bobby, who knew Tamara and Isaac and presumably their past, felt the whole revenge situation (Wrathful in essence) hit a little too close to home. Yes, this is a long shot. But it takes a lot for Bobby to raise his voice. Hell, Dean had to sell his soul before Bobby ripped into him.

Then perhaps Wrath for Bobby? Beware for some nit-picky wardrobe spotting and extreme extrapolation:

Okay, I'll allow a few seconds to let Hatless Bobby sink in. I know I needed a few seconds to recover.

Notice his tie: striped red and light grey-purple. Supernatural's wardrobe department has used the dress-shirt and tie combo before with Pride to identify the Sin. This is the only time (so far) Bobby wears something other than plaid and a camper's vest. And he becomes extra emotional at one point in this episode, which was a bit out-of-control and smacked of Freudian slippage. Thus, that nice crisp suit reveals something more about Bobby's character than that he can pull off "The G-man."

“Why do I hafta be some kind of hero?”

A Hero’s Journey Analysis of Supernatural

Season One Part II

“Devil’s Trap” is the Season One finale and final stage of the Departure: Crossing the First Threshold. There are three reasons for this identification: (1) the emotion at the beginning of the episode, (2) the villain’s changing the rules, and (3) the confrontation with not one, but two threshold guardians. And all of this in fewer than fifty minutes!

After the demonic Meg cruelly informs Dean he will never see his father again, he quickly slips into “’panic’ fear, a sudden, groundless fright” (Campbell 81). Here Campbell is describing the effect of the god Pan, whom he cites as a traditional threshold guardian. The demon possessing Meg – hereafter simply referred to as Meg – is one of the two threshold guardians in the season finale. And she functions as Pan well: Dean bolts to his bag and begins hastily packing. He orders Sam to flee with him.

The panic is more than warranted: the Winchesters’ plans have been obliterated. Now one of the family is in mortal danger. Meg is an "external force which changes the course or intensity of the story. This is equivalent to the famous ‘plot point’ or ‘turning point’…A villain may kill, harm, threaten, or kidnap someone close to the hero, sweeping aside all hesitation” (Vogler 128). Where the Winchesters are on the offensive in the previous episode, in “Devil’s Trap” all mental and emotional states are shot from the hip, whirled into being in a moment and having to be dropped, unprocessed, as the next situation flings itself up. There are two segments where Sam and Dean are proactive and in control: Meg’s exorcism and rescuing their father. Both succeed. But the consequences are morally ambiguous and only temporarily – ignorantly –victorious.

Meg is the first threshold guardian in “Devil’s Trap.” The audience has been previously introduced to her and can see her coming as a force to be fought. She has always been a progress blocker; it just escalates from persuasion to outright violence. In “Scarecrow,” still disguised as Fellow Human, she tries to turn Sam from his family by playing on his independent nature. In “Shadow” she sics devas on them…after failing to seduce Sam. Finally she captures John and tracks the boys down, intending to rip them open to find the Colt.

            Luckily, Meg walks under a Devil’s Trap sigil on Bobby’s ceiling and is imprisoned. “The task for heroes at this point is often to figure out some way around or through these guardians” (Vogler 129). Meg is their only information source, and Dean spots a path to their goal. Even if it is a questionable act of mercy. He orders Sam to perform an exorcism. Both the youngest Winchester and Mentor Bobby jump up against him, citing the demonic possession as the only factor keeping Meg’s body (and trapped, innocent human soul) alive; in previous episodes she fell seven stories and was shot.

            But Dean pushes his point through: he would rather put her out of her misery than let her live confined in her own body. With weighty moral debate temporarily won, Sam continues the exorcism. Meg’s demon gave up its information for naught and is sent back to Hell. They release Meg from her bonds and as they lie her down she does thank them. Yet its tone becomes ironic and ambiguous when she dies, mouth stilled in the midst of telling them where their father is being held.

            Meg’s exorcism is more the threshold guardian than the demon itself. Throughout the season the Winchester motto of “saving people, hunting things” has not been an intrinsic either – or. Sometimes they did lose people, and it tore them up emotionally. Especially Dean. In the episode “Faith,” their successful hunt meant the death of all the terminally ill they may have had their lives restored by an enslaved Reaper. Dean struggled as Sam tried to explain that no one had the right to play God. In “Devil’s Trap” they are precariously close to that action. Therefore, the hesitation. The exorcism foreshadows a Season Two theme: the moral strife of killing someone to save them.

            The second threshold guardian of “Devil’s Trap” is the Demon: the Winchester family’s arch nemesis. This is the episode in which he finally manifests. In “Salvation” he was but a blip.

            Sam and Dean rescue John from the demonic guard. In the alley, the possessed man who had accompanied the demon Meg jumps Sam and begins to beat on him. Dean rushes to help and is easily thrown aside. So he fires the Colt. Only two bullets are left. Sam is saved. And another possessed human is simultaneously saved and killed.

            Dean begins to feel the moral stir of his actions. Far escaped and holed up in an abandoned shack in the country, the Winchesters recover. After Sam thanks Dean for saving his life, the elder Winchester’s memory is reopened and he suffers the meaning of the exorcism and the bullet. It is a rare glimpse into Dean’s character, unveiled from joke, anger, or even grief. It is the precise moment he realizes he murdered:

Dean: Killing that guy, killing Meg…I didn’t hesitate, I didn’t even flinch. For you or Dad, the things I’m willing to do or kill…It scares me sometimes.

(“Devil’s Trap”)

Though murder is disturbing, what is more disturbing is the violence of Dean’s protection, that he had no limits defined when his family is endangered. The bare shock of this realization stills his usual flamboyant behavior. John walks into the room, reassuring Dean that his behavior shouldn’t scare him, because he “looks out” for the family.

            Dean blinks in puzzlement at his father’s attitude. He knows John’s temperament, and he would be furious Dean used a bullet. But although he is suspicious, the approval is just as overwhelming. After a brutal day, Dean would rather accept the rare paternal warmth.

            The moment, of course, is all too fleeting. This is the stage of rapidly changing and wildly shifting centers of emotional gravity. The shack’s lights begin to flicker and a wind stirs: signs of the Demon’s presence. The seasoned hunters immediately leap to action. John stalks to the window, flipping into the general. He orders Sam to go recheck the demon-halting salt lines in front of every door and window. His youngest walks off. Then he asks Dean where the Colt is.

            Initially, Dean pulls out the gun. But the prior odd sense is stirred when John demands the Colt…a little too harshly. Dean backs up, gaze fierce from fear and panic. He cocks the safety, points the Colt at his father, and rasps “You’re not my Dad.”

            Sam walks in on an impossible scene: Dean insists their father is possessed, and John tries to persuade Sam to trust him. By a bond forged through months of physical and emotional trial and assisted by enduring mistrust, Sam chooses to believe his brother. John, passing through shock and bargaining, says, “If you’re both so sure, go ahead. Kill me.” He hangs his head. This surrenders tears Dean. It pains him to doubt his father and see himself pointing a gun at his Mentor. The supposed demon within John wasn’t fighting back, causing Dean to waver.

            As soon as the Colt’s barrel dips, an eerily croaking voice comes from John: “I thought so.” He looks up with demonic yellow eyes and a triumphant smirk. The Yellow-Eyed Demon flings Sam and Dean against the wall with an force pressing them still. Their arch-enemy in their father’s body, the Campbell theme of father as villain is literally represented. “For the ogre aspect of the father is a reflex of the victim’s own ego…sealing the potentially adult spirit from a better balanced, more realistic view of the father, and therewith the world” (Campbell 129). Dean’s perception of his unbreakable father is destroyed. The “godlike father” is a child’s view. John is infallible and immortal in Dean’s eyes, a father in every protective sense. John was physically hurt in “Shadow” and “Dead Man’s Blood,” but for Dean to see that John’s spirit has been compromised drops him into oblivion. The “father as villain” is the hero coming to grips with the imperfect father and the inherently virulent aspect of life. And Dean is clearly not ready for that.

            The Yellow-Eyed Demon saunters around the shack, relaxed, in control and enjoying the Winchesters’ pain. Like all good villains, the Demon talks a lot when he has the heroes under his thumb. He teases Sam about his powers. He mocks John’s helplessness. He scoffs at God’s absence. He also fumes over the fates of his son and daughter – the alley demon and the Hell-exiled demon inside Meg. Then he insults their mother’s memory.

            Before Dean explodes, Sam asks the Yellow-Eyed Demon why he killed their mother and Jessica. The exchange that follows would feed the arching plot for another season.

Yellow-Eyed Demon: You wanna know why? Because they got in the way.

Sam: In the way of what?

Yellow-Eyed Demon: My plans for you, Sammy. You…and all the children like you.

(“Devil’s Trap”)

Rightly, this is turned into a teaser. A little hint of information about a deeply lurking plot to pull the heroes into a world they couldn’t even have fathomed: the Initiation, the Special World. Season Two.

            Dean cuts the Demon off with a quip, and possessed John spins around with a response on his lips to cut deep into Dean’s heart:

Yellow-Eyed Demon: Funny. But that’s all a part of your

M.O., isn’t it? Mask all that nasty pain. Mask the truth…You know, you fight and you fight for this

family,  but the truth is…they don’t need you.

Not like you need them. Sam? He’s clearly John’s

favorite. Even when they fight, it’s more concern

than he’s ever shown you.

(“Devil’s Trap”)

            The biting speech is every truth of Dean’s inner fear. It’s scathing that the Demon, having access to John’s mind, claims Sam is their father’s favorite. Dean’s whole life has been an endless toil to not let his father down. To be needed by the ones you love most is not as important. But the Demon hits the mark exactly: Dean needs his family. Whether or not they need him isn’t the point. He will always be there for them. Rather, it is what could come about from their independence: that they will abandon him.

                        Dean: And sooner or later everybody’s gonna leave me.

                        Sam: What are you talking about?

                        Dean: You left. Hell, I did everything Dad asked me to

and he ditched me too. No explanation, nothin’, just woosh. (“Skin”)

Sam already did. John did also. The actions of those closest to him reaffirm that he will be alone. And he desperately doesn’t want to be alone.

Dean’s emotional repression is the greatest character conflict the Yellow-Eyed Demon exposes. This flaw becomes the main battle Dean fights with himself in Season Two. And rightly so, because the atonement between the impulsive id (Dean’s emotions) and controlling superego (Dean’s “game face”) is a stage in the second portion of the Journey – the Initiation.

So in one scene, the writers have set up two main conflicts of Season Two and the Initiation. First, the Winchesters hear a secret plan set in place for children like Sam. Digging into this mystery is the outer Journey. Sam’s inner Journey is reconciling his independence (free will) with an apparent manipulative plant put into motion since birth (determinism). Second, dealing with Dean’s emotional bottling, which manifests outwardly as a polarized morality. A slated reconciliation between guilt, responsibility, duty, loyalty, and love awaits Dean on his inner Journey. Throw in even more horrific creatures for the Winchesters to overcome – some of the creatures being fully human biologically – and Season Two bursts open with all the philosophical and ethical issues it ambitiously seeks to undertake.

But first Sam has to finally listen to his brother.

Dean, of course, pushes down his pain and goads the Yellow-Eyed Demon. In response, the Demon lazily draws invisible claws through his flesh, bleeding Dean so much he passes out. John gains control over his own body again through the sheer agony of watching his son tortured. Sam is released, and with a well-placed flesh wound, he weakens the Demon’s grip on John’s consciousness and body. Dean is released and knocked awake from the drop.

            Then Sam’s soul is ripped in two.

            John begs his youngest to shoot him in the heart. To end it all. Sam cocks the Colt and aims…but hesitates. This is the exact moment where Sam’s inner beasts of the first season must be overcome. This is where he must distinguish himself from his father. This is where he listens to his vengeful, bleeding heart, or his pleading, bleeding brother.

            John is convinced this is the end of the Journey for him. Willing to die, John holds onto the Demon inside him, trapping the Demon in flesh to kill it. All of twenty-two years of self-imposed exile, horror and death would come to an end.

            If only his son would kill him.

            Sam’s mind at this fateful (fate-filled) moment is echoing. It’s echoing with John’s strained screams to kill him. It’s echoing with the strangely resonant whispers of Dean’s pleading not to kill. It’s echoing with his own promise to find and finish his true love’s killer. And it’s echoing with Dean’s consistent deeds and words of months upon months about how family is most important.

            He listens to his brother. John cannot hold the Demon forever, and it expels from him in an oily cloud of darkness. With a face contorted in grief, frustration and disappointment, John glares at Sam. But Sam made his choice. He answered his emotional conflict for Season One.

            The Departure isn’t about to wrap up just yet. First of all, the Departure doesn’t “wrap up” like a gentle fold of bathrobe. Like every threshold of the Journey, it requires violence.

            It requires death.

            It requires a semi-truck.

            Sam drives Dean and John down a dark road, racing to the hospital. John beside him rebukes Sam again for his priorities. Sam glances at the rearview mirror, at the barely conscious Dean, whose face is lost in blood. No, family is most important.

            And before he can finish the reassuring speech, a semi-truck barrels into the Impala, scraping it across the asphalt.

            The last image left to the audience is an agonizing pan across the still bodies of John, Sam and Dean. Swathed in blood, cocooned in twisted steel.

            This is not the willful step into the Special World after the meeting of the threshold guardian. It is shock. It also successfully replicates the realm of the unknown in the hearts of the audience, who had to wait months to learn the fates of the Winchesters.

            If they were even alive.

            The Winchesters did not even conquer the threshold guardian. The Yellow-Eyed Demon merely fled before a Colt-wielding Sam. “The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died” (Campbell 90). This is the special transitory stage between the Crossing of the First Threshold and the second portion of the Journey. This is the Belly of the Whale. “The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale” (Campbell 90). The Impala can be seen as a protective womb for the boys. It traveled from their childhood with them, and is the only familiar ground for the nomads. The Impala is their only Home. It is only fitting that the Winchesters would be sent off the threshold’s precipice in the car. Winchesters trapped in its sturdy hulk, the protective shell mutates into the harrowing belly of the whale.

            Vogler recognizes the death at the threshold. In fact, he seems to be channeling the exact scene of the mangled Impala: “Heroes don’t always land gently. They may crash into the other world, literally or figuratively” (Vogler 131; emphasis mine). The Imapala is the last image of the Ordinary World that the Winchesters see. The crash may have been literal, but figuratively, it delivers them into the Special World.

            Again, there may be problems with the fact the Winchesters have lived in a Special World (according to the audience). It is their World Navel – their Beginning Point or Ordinary World. How do the writers on Supernatural concoct a foreign world to those who have seen it all?

            Rip away all emotional and mental stability and make their very values questionable.

            And for good measure, hit the third angle and destroy the physical.

            Oh, hell, just take everything.

            Season Two opens with the episode “In My Time of Dying,” everyone still firmly falling into the unknown. Everyone – Sam, Dean, John, viewers – remain swallowed in the Belly of the Whale. In the pile of ex-Impala.

            After scaring away the demon inside the possessed semi-truck driver, Sam yells incessantly for his father and brother. Even as his body is broken. Will he lose them just when he rediscovered them?

            At the hospital the doctors must toil to bring Dean to a living state. But they cannot bring him to consciousness. Sam watches his comatose brother as the doctor spells out a diagnosis of severe cerebral edema. Basically, Dean will never wake up.

            The Belly of the Whale is a spiritual, emotional and mental death. It just so happens a physical one is thrown into the episode, but that’s because a certain Winchester’s Journey is further along than the others’. But that is discussed later. Campbell says the lesson of “the passage of the threshold [is that it is] a form of self-annihilation” (Campbell 91). The self he means is an individualistic temperament that refuses to reconcile with its impulses – whether because of fear or disgust, it doesn’t matter. For Sam, this means pitting his individuality against his family. For Dean, this means throwing out his desperate need to be useful, his self-destructive drive.

            The Season One’s finale worth of threshold guardians fufill the purpose of “ward[ing] away all incapable of encountering the higher silences within” (Campbell 92). And Dean enters the temple of inner silence, where dwells the impulsive beast. His body is deep within a coma. The physical is stilled as the mental, spiritual and emotional walks about the hospital in an out-of-body experience.

…instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the

 visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again.

The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshipper

 into a temple – where he is to quickened by the recollection

of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes. (Campbell 91)

The lesson Dean must learn? That he is mortal.

The coma is necessary. Dean’s manifestation as a spirit close to death is necessary. Dean is a physical character. He expresses himself through capability, dependability, and action. His deepest, most desperate insecurity? That he is useless. That he cannot protect his family. He is now unable: stripped of all power, helpless, he stands before the awaiting Reaper.

            Dean: I’m serious. My family’s in danger. You see, we’re

                        kinda in the middle of this, uh…war…and they need

                        me.

            Reaper: The fight’s over.

            Dean: No, it isn’t.

            Reaper: It is for you. Dean, you’re not the first soldier I’ve

                        plucked from the field. They all feel the same. They

                        can’t leave. Victory hangs in the balance. But they’re

                        wrong. The battle goes on without them.

            Dean: My brother…he could die without me.

            Reaper: Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t. Nothing you can do

                        about it.

            …

            Dean: There’s no such thing as an honorable death. My corpse

                        is gonna rot in the ground and my family’s gonna die.

            (“In My Time of Dying”)

When Dean refuses to go with the Reaper, she warns him he will remain disembodied. He will turn into a vengeful spirit: just like something the boys hunt. The consequence helps Dean step back from antagonism and rethink his position. “…the devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis…Once inside he may be said to have died to time” (Campbell 92). Dean appears withered before a grand decision, one with grave consequences. It is a choice. Dean chooses what to be. She gently coos: “Moment of truth. No changing your mind later. So what’s it going to be?” Dean pauses.

Then he turns to her.

This is the moment where Dean either lets go or stays. It is the moment where he accepts his mortality and fate or his stubborn anti-determinism. This is the moment where he remains with family whom he cannot protect or “gives up the ghost” because he cannot bear losing control of himself.

He appears ready to speak – and is interrupted by flickering lights. The Yellow-Eyed Demon possesses the Reaper. The Demon presses the Reaper’s hand against Dean’s forehead and he wakes up, gasping, back in his body.

We never hear Dean’s choice.

The doctor pronounces Dean completely healthy. Alone in the room with Sam, Dean professes that he does not remember anything from his out-of-body experience. He does not remember, and therefore cannot process the lesson of the experience. He cannot reconcile his impulses with his mental control. Before they become too concerned about how Dean managed to slip a Reaper’s grip, John walks in.

The entire time John was away. Plunged into his own Journey. And he is about to finish a stage…and the Initiation.

John is passing through the last bits of Apotheosis.

What spirit-Dean perceived as uncaring inaction, and Sam took as uncaring, unhealthy obsession was all along John’s essential realization: he is father first and foremost.

And he had to save his son. Before himself, before everything.

John secreted away to the hospital’s boiler room. He summoned the Yellow-Eyed Demon and with the Winchester arch-nemesis bare feet away, lowered the barrel. The trade is simple: the gun, remaining bullet, and John’s life for the life of his eldest. Then the Demon departs to snatch Dean from Death.

Their father stands before them in a rare un-provokable mood. He beams at his sons. “’When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change” (Campbell 151). Seeing Dean alive and his wayward Sammy beside him fills him with un-breachable peace. John knows his real life mission: to save his sons. To protect them. He has given all a father could; he has given his soul. “Needless to say, the hero would be no hero if death held for him any terror; the first condition is reconciliation with the grave” (Campbell 356). Of course John would fear his approaching death: it is Hell. But he is reconciled with his death.

Sam’s belligerence cannot even phase him. When he bluntly pushes off Sam’s stab for a fight, Sam suspects something is up.

Like Dean, Sam is in the Belly of the Whale. At the brink of losing his brother, Sam stands by Dean’s comatose body and weakly asks for him to return. “We were just getting to be brothers again,” Sam whispers. Just when he realizes what a treasure family is, it is taken away. Sam is floundering in a realization of the ephemeral, just as Dean is.

Sam is helpless, just as Dean is helpless.

And right when Sam gains back his brother, he loses his father.

John asks Sam to get a coffee for him. Alone with Dean, John bestows love and pride upon him. Lavishly. Uninhibited. His tears – like his self-drawn blood in the summoning ritual – is the flow which “shows that the old men have the source of life and nourishment within themselves; i.e., that they and the inexhaustible world fountain are the same” (Campbell 155). This references the world fountain at the base of the world tree, the eternal spring of life. Within himself, John found the way to save his son. His life was the source of life for his son. “That father was himself the womb, the mother, of a second birth” (Campbell 162).

And wasn’t that the only way for Dean to return? “…to be born again” (Campbell 91)?

John simultaneously travels through Apotheosis and The Ultimate Boon. In this Hero’s Journey, the boon is not a magical sword or the holy grail, because it never really is. It is not even the Colt. Campbell’s boon is life energy. In other stories it manifests “simply as a symbol…stepped down to the requirements of a specific case” (Campbell 189) and thus becomes a blade or cup.

But in Supernatural, it is pure.

The long-struggling John Winchester had to put down his weapon and seek life over death. Giving over taking. His son Dean over an avenged Mary. “The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth” (Campbell 190). It broke his being. It broke his obsession. And the id and ego are reconciled.

John Winchester, the Mentor, can bestow his final gift – life – as a father. Which is all he ever wanted to be.

“Why do I hafta be some kind of hero?”

A Hero’s Journey Analysis of Supernatural

Season One, Part I

                      "Heroes ain't born; they're cornered."

                                                                 - Redd Foxx

                        “Your happiness for all those people’s lives, no contest.” Right?

                        But why? Why’s it my job to save these people? Why do I hafta

                        be some kind of hero? What about us, huh? What – Mom’s not

                        supposed to live her life, Sammy’s not supposed to get married?

                        Why do we have to sacrifice everything, Dad?

     - Dean Winchester

“What Is and What Should Never Be”

            There is nothing like the Monologue at Father’s Grave to set a hero straight.

At this point in the television series Supernatural serious doubt as to the fight’s value are raised. Here Dean Winchester reflects upon his – and his family’s – life path of hunting the supernatural. He reflects on the personal cost to his family. But above all, he reflects on the idea of the “hero.”

            Because that’s what Sam, Dean, and even their father John Winchester are. At least in the Joseph Campbell sense of the word. In the monomyth narrative Campbell lays out in “The Hero With  A Thousand Faces,” there is a certain path the Hero archetype travels. It is referred to as the Hero’s Journey, and it is studded with clear signposts. The stages the Hero undergoes are essential to the cyclic renewal of the world, and the Journey is completed mentally and emotionally, physically and spiritually.

            In the case of Sam and Dean, it’s completed in a black ’67 Chevy Impala. It’s not – just – a questing knight’s horse. It’s three hundred twenty-five horses.

            The Impala carries the brothers on a continual road trip through supernatural truck-stop America. Which is a convenient storytelling device: it keeps them moving, setting them up with new scenery, people, and things to kill. It keeps the weekly energy fresh. It is also a completely overt symbol of the Hero’s Journey. Just as Middle Age peasants journeyed on pilgrimages from church to church, seeking to gain understanding, the boys journey from town to town hitting the exact emotional milestones of the Journey.

            They just have a classic American muscle car to do it in.

            The road-stops the Impala travels through in the Hero’s Journey are clearly marked in the series: certain episodes equate snuggly with their appropriate stage. More importantly, entire seasons equate with their appropriate part. The Hero’s Journey is sectioned off into three: the Departure, the Initiation, and the Return. The link between each is a threshold, an in-between, a struggle, and a death. Due primarily to emotional factors, Season One is the Departure. Season Two’s premiere, “In My Time of Dying,” is the in-between stage of The Belly of the Whale. From the premiere onwards until the Season Two finale is the Initiation. All the stages within each part, all the hero-tasks, are recognizable within their respective seasons. In fact, the stages come in stereo: Sam and Dean travel through the Journey as their own distinct Hero.

            Both the brothers perform the deeds of the hero-task and also face these story-steps in different ways. It can be perceived they together create a composite archetypical Hero, filling in the gaps the other one leaves. Yet in fact, each is traveling his own Journey, which is impossible to advance without the other. Each is an essential catalyst to the other, a mirror of character.

            Sam and Dean are riding in the same car, but they’re traveling two separate roads.

Season One: The Departure

            Campbell describes the childhood of the human hero as miraculous. Both Sam and Dean’s first Journey began when Sam was six months old and Dean four years: their mother’s death, and the Fire. It is also their father’s – John’s – Journey that begins. Out of the Ordinary World that is simply a happy suburban family arrives the ghastly Call to Adventure.

            One night their mother Mary is awoken by baby Sammy’s cry on the monitor. At the nursery doorway she spots a figure hovering above the crib – a shadow she assumes is her husband. Mary turns to return to the bedroom, but then notices a light flickering down the hall. She approaches it curiously and gives it a few experimental taps until the light steadies. Then – again – another light catches her eye. The ghostly blue of the flickering television screen and muffled sound lures her down the stairs. She turns the corner and spots John asleep in front of the television. Panic strikes through her. She bolts up the stairs to save Sam from the strange shape.

            John awakens to his wife’s scream. He stumbles into the nursery to find nothing. Sam gurgles serenely. John signs out the adrenalin from what seems a dreamt sound and walks over to his son. A dark spot drips near Sam’s head. Confused, John reaches out to touch it. Three more deep red drops drip on his hand. He looks up to the horrified face of Mary, pressed against the ceiling, midsection bloodied. Before he can even fully register the gruesome scene, Mary bursts into flame. John yells, cringing at the flood of fire. His moment of terror is broken by Sam’s screams. He grabs his son, and running out into the hall, intercepts little Dean. Quickly he hands Sam to Dean’s care, giving him the enduring Order:

            “Take your brother outside as fast as you can! Don’t look back!”

            Dean carries his infant brother outside while John returns to the nursery to save his wife. But it is far too late. A spit of flame licks out to consume him, yet he emerges at Dean’s side in the front yard, snatching his children away from the house as the nursery windows explode. The prologue ends with the Winchester boys huddled together on the hood of John’s Impala as the emergency crews swarm.

            The Call to Adventure is a dying and rebirth. Old concepts and ideas - the whole World as once was known – “no longer fit” (Campbell 51). John begins to keep a journal after the Call, and his entries echo this sense of detachment from reality.

November 6, 1983…I feel like I’m going crazy…I’m

wandering around, alone and lost and I can’t do anything…

November 17, 1983 …My friends think I’m going insane.

Who knows, maybe I am… (Super-wiki, The Journal)

What he witnessed doesn’t settle into the rationalizations of the former World. His behavior is inconsistent, erratic, and his whole being is bent on finding an explanation. The Call is always unsettling and “signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown” (Campbell 58).

            John meets Missouri Mosely, a local psychic, who initiates him into the esoteric knowledge of the supernatural world. “December 17, 1983…then today, I went to Missouri…she told me she believed me…I think she can help me” (Super-wiki, The Journal). Missouri takes the Journey’s role as Mentor to John, a figure in the stage of Supernatural Aid. This seems to skip the stage of the Refusal of the Call, but “for those who have not refused the call, the encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure…who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass” (Campbell 69). John never wanted to settle for the police report’s version of events; faulty wiring could not explain away the disturbing image of Mary pressed against the ceiling, nor how the flame seemed to “reach for” him. Campbell describes the Refusal as “essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest” (Campbell 60). John’s Call is so strong, and his family loyalty so pervasive, his own interest transforms into what is in the best interest of his family. For him, this means protection against whoever murdered Mary. After Missouri’s instruction, this widens to protection against all supernatural forces. And since John’s character is not one to waggle amulets and sit around passively, his Marine spirit infuses his quest to exterminate the “dragon forces.” Protection manifests as hunting.

            And as hunters Sam and Dean were raised. Theirs is an Unordinary World. They are privilege to special wisdom and training. In the pilot episode, Sam doles out the exposition:

Sam: When I told Dad I was afraid of the thing in my closet, he gave me a .45.

                        Dean: So?

                        Sam: So? I was nine years old!

                        (“Pilot”)

He later sums it up with “We were raised like warriors.”

            But Supernatural’s main character is not John Winchester. His Journey is essential, but it is through the eyes of his sons that this story is told. This fact brings up a large problem with the Journey meshing nicely into the show. Sam and Dean’s childhood is nothing but the Supernatural World. This is not the departure point that the audience can relate to.

            Luckily, the hero’s childhood includes the “infant exile and return” (Campbell 323), “a long period of obscurity” (Campbell 326). In the pilot episode, directly after the fire prologue of “22 years ago,” Sam pops his head into the scene. A college student and happy in love, Sam is soon to interview for law school. He left his father, his brother, and the hunting lifestyle two years prior to live his own independent life. Away from the controlling father and an endless crusade. Sam lives as a normal twenty-two year-old, where exams – and not spirits – are the most imposing part of his day.

            The audience thus begins with a day in the life of College Sam. It is familiar ground for a diving board. This is “the remote land of exile from which he returns to perform his adult deeds among men, [this] is the mid-point or navel of the world” (Campbell 334). The college experience is the Ordinary World Sam departs from.

            But what about Dean?

            The older brother Winchester introduces himself. Sam wakes up in the middle of the night, and spies a shadow breaking into his home. He confronts the burglar in the dark and a fight ensues. The silhouettes skillfully swap blows and blocks. They slam into the walls. Finally the burglar pins Sam to the ground, who finally sees his brother’s face. The scene illustrates the special training of the Winchester boys and that it has never left Sam.

            Dean comes as the herald of the Call: their father is missing, and he wants Sam to help find him. This premise drives the story for Season One. The simple, yet powerful, two-word motivation of “Find Dad” threads Season One as the Departure of Campbell’s monomyth. Here is Sam’s Call from his Ordinary World back into the Supernatural World, the realm which he left in self-imposed exile.

            But how close are we adhering to the steps of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey in terms of Dean Winchester?

            Dean never left the special childhood. He was always comfortable with the life of a hunter, and from his father’s first order to him at four years old he is bound to an obedience that Sam does not share. “I had to stay home. With Dad” (“Skin”). He has embraced the rather claustrophobic Special World, where his only companions have been his father, and until two years ago, his brother.

            Considering this, the hunting life is Dean’s Ordinary World. Therefore, the Call (his father’s disappearance) would only be beckoning him into his usual hunt?

            Or is it?

            Even though Dean has been out working jobs on his own, the watchful eye of his father infuses his Ordinary World of the hunting lifestyle. John was the stabilizing force in the unpredictable Special World. Dean subsisted on the structure of John’s training and John’s orders, and probably had a hearty bowl of “Dad’s Rules” for breakfast each day. When his father vanishes for too long, Dean’s world is now made anew, “The familiar life horizon has been outgrown” (Campbell 51). There is no longer any familiar fatherly strength for Dean to check in with, use for backup or information. His world has always been socially small. Losing Sam to college was constricting, but losing his father is too lonely a world.

                        Dean: I can’t do this alone.

                        Sam: Yes you can.

                        Dean: Well, I don’t want to.

                        (“Pilot”)

            The elder Winchester’s transition is defined more as a subtle emotional shift than the dramatic lifestyle overhaul Sam experiences. Nevertheless, Dean’s World Navel he is Called out from differs from the Special World he and Sam strike into.

            Because Dean’s emotional and mental stability have been compromised, he feels the Call intensely. Sam, however, cut himself off from emotional dependence on his brother and father; he re-latched it onto his girlfriend Jessica. Obviously, he Refuses the Call. To compound the weight against the Journey, he has an interview for law school in two days: “It’s my whole future on a plate” (“Pilot”). He means, it’s his whole “normal” future at stake. Sam essentially is faced with two contrasting and conflicting Calls. Only with Dean’s silver-tongued convincing does Sam see that their father may truly be in danger. Yet he tags on an ultimatum. He will plunge into the Special World for two days, and two days only.

            To find John, Dean proposes they hunt what John was hunting before he disappeared: a phantom hitchhiker in Jericho, California. The hunt is both theme and foreshadowing for the show. The spirit of Constance Welch haunts a five-mile stretch of road, hitchhiking with unfaithful men and luring them to the house where she drowned her children. At the spot, she murmurs a watery, “I can never go home,” and rips the men apart. In parallel, Sam is unfaithful to his own family and their cause. When Constance says “I can never go home,” it echoes Sam’s stubborn stance, the Winchesters’ emotional reality, and prophesizes the fate of those who persistently refuse the Call. For those who are destined cannot escape their destiny.

            Sam is Dean’s foil in respects to his inner motivations. Just as Dean is John’s protégé and obedient soldier, Sam shucks controlling authority figures. His individuality clashes with Dean’s responsibility. Sam is Campbell’s “Hero Today,” the “democratic ideal of the self-determining individual” (Campbell 387). The brothers are two very distinct type of hero.

            Even through the friction, Sam can see the value in hunting and spending time with his brother. The boys “make one hell of a team,” and help save people from a world which they don’t want to know about and couldn’t possibly handle. Without the Winchesters, many would die.

            After the hunt is over, Sam traces the coordinates that their father left behind in his journal. John’s journal is the physical symbol of the Call and the gift of their Mentor (who has always been their father). It is only when Dean spots it, sans John, does he realize how significant his father’s departure is. John’s journal holds all his hunting knowledge and always is close by. Overtly leaving it to Dean is John’s order for him to “take up where he left off: saving people, hunting things” (“Wendigo”). Now it is apparent the torch of heading up the “family business” has been passed off to Dean. Now it is apparent John has moved on to some higher hunt and more dangerous territory. Clearly in the back, on the notepad, is written “Dean 35, -111”: John’s covert Marine method of directing his son.

            Sam identifies the locale as Lost Creek, Colorado. Dean says if the “shag ass [they] can make it there by tomorrow,” eyes already knowing Sam’s answer. Dean somehow is still hoping for the adrenalin of the hunt to carry a gung-ho momentum. Sam, of course, insists he has to get back in time for the law school interview. The faint tinge of regret carries on his voice, however.

            Here is the persistent Refusal of the Call: Sam watches Dean pull away in the Impala from the front of his home. He watches and wonders, and ultimately turns to enter back into the Ordinary World. Christopher Vogler, in his writer’s guide to using the Hero’s Journey, “The Writer’s Journey,” pinpoints Sam’s exact action. It will lead to tragedy. “Looking backward, dwelling tin the past, and denying reality are forms of the Refusal” (Vogler 109). Campbell insists that Refusal is rooted in the hero’s perception that the Ordinary World is in his best interests. Sam has love: Jessica. Sam has friendships. Sam has a legitimate, Normal future that most importantly he chose. Nothing could convince him to leave the Ordinary World.

            Nothing he could possibly foresee.

            Destiny is a godlike force working in the Hero. Sam’s individuality will always crash with his fate: a controlling father he could walk away from; a controlling abstract force he cannot. Sam must be severed from the Ordinary World he would not leave voluntarily. Nothing can keep his heart there.

            The fateful drop of blood sprinkles down on Sam’s forehead. He flinches, and like John in the prologue, it takes more than one drop of the terrible reality to turn his eyes upward. Jessica is pressed to the ceiling, stomach slit. As Sam shudders with his scream, a liquid fire consumes her body. And even as his own hero in his own Journey, Dean is the personification of destiny when he kicks in the front door and grabs the shocked Sam. In continual parallel with the portentous childhood fire, Dean pulls his baby brother from the supernatural flame.

            The Call to Adventure is the fearsome force of Nature. Mortal man crumbles before it, yet the hero will physically survive. But not even the hero can Refuse his destiny forever. It will either convince him to Journey, or cleave him from the Ordinary World. Sam is an obstinate character. So his persistent refusal required the most cruel of Calls: the murder of a loved one. His bright hope for normalcy and love, his Jessica, was the sacrifice for the Hero’s “first step into the unexplored” (Campbell 78). It is a bitter element, but it does reset his priorities.

            The pilot episode of Supernatural is its own encapsulation of the Departure. All Stories turn into themselves with repeating and layering of miniature Journeys, like the Golden Ratio twirling a nautilus shell towards an infinite point. Each episode, for example, contains the basic plot of (1) the Departure (Sam and Dean answer the Call of a specific hunt), (2) the Initiation (Sam and Dean hunt), and (3) the Return (Sam and Dean save a life and restore order). Expanding the mythic structure into what creator Eric Kripke calls the “mytharc,” Season One is Supernatural’s Departure. When Kripke speaks of the mytharc, he speaks of the grand view encompassing many seasons.

            The primary reason Season One is the Departure of the show is that beyond the first threshold is a realm unknown to the hero. Both Sam and Dean may be in new ground hunting without their father, but John is still alive in the world and their life’s goal is strong. Additionally, the act of hunting is nothing foreign to the boys. There are moments where Sam and Dean initially appear out of their depth (“Home,” “Faith”), but through prior childhood training and their father’s journal, these tasks are overcome.

            What occurs in Season Two is “beyond the limits of the hero’s present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown, and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant” (Campbell 77; emphasis mine). Only when Sam and Dean lose their father do they cross the first threshold.

            Supplement reasons for Season One as the Departure relate to the steps required therein: Supernatural Aid, Dean’s Refusal of the Call, Crossing the First Threshold, and Belly of the Whale (Season One to Season Two transition).

            The theme, the Ariadne’s Thread of Season One sets on “Find Dad.” Sam and Dean are essentially seeking their mentor, or Supernatural Aid. John is the hero of his own Journey, a path that began with the 1982 fire (his Call to Adventure). He is the “Mentor as Evolved Hero” according to Vogler, who has “been down the Road of Heros one or more times, and [he has] acquired knowledge and skill which can be passed on” (Vogler 125). Dean certainly perceives his father as such.

            Sam perceives his father differently. “The Mentor-hero relationship can take a tragic or deadly turn if the hero is ungrateful or violence-prone…”(Vogler 122). After briefly re-uniting with their father in “Shadow,” the Winchester three are attacked by devas. Sam rips open a flare to scatter the shadow-manifested creatures. Bracing on each other, the boys and their father escape the building. When Dean insists that they split up again for their father’s safety, Sam’s contrary attitude is stirred. He clamps down on John’s shoulder and nearly demands he stay. This scene is only hint of the conflict resonating between Sam and John.

            Dean fears this conflict erupting because it was the exact catalyst of the family scission. In “Dead Man’s Blood,” Sam and Dean again team up with the Mentor of the Story. While John speaks to the police up the road at the crime scene, Sam grumbles to Dean his irritation that John is not fully disclosing all the details of the hunt. He expects to be treated like an adult, a hunting partner. Without all the information, Sam fumes that John is making decisions for his sons. Again.

            When Sam cuts John’s truck off with the Impala and forces the hunt to a halt, the Mentor-Hero conflict breaks open to reveal its gory pus – an unhealed and ancient wound that was never tended to. It was ignored, avoided, and infected by time. Dead man’s blood is like poison to vampires. The theme of the episode is about revealing wounds and exposing weaknesses. Dean’s greatest fear is losing his family, and he has to literally pry his brother and father apart to keep them from destroying each other. Sam doesn’t understand how strong-willed Dean, decisive and persistent for months during their hunts, could voluntarily hand over the reins to John. To smile while accepting a child’s position. In “Scarecrow,” Sam yells at Dean “I don’t understand this blind faith you have in the man!” The young Winchester judges “that not all Mentors are to be trusted, and that it’s healthy to question a Mentor’s motives. It’s the one way to distinguish good from bad advice” (Vogler 122).

            In this case, Sam’s stubborn nature pries open their father’s plan, and John tells them about the Colt: a semi-mythical revolver Samuel Colt made especially for a hunter in his day, The weapon and its limited, specially-made bullets are believed to have the power to kill anything. John seeks the gun to kill the Demon, the murderer of Mary. It is the Demon’s weakness.

            For twenty-two years John’s entire existence has been bent on the destruction of Mary’s killer and the defense of his family. He protected his sons by training them.

John: I wanted you prepared. Ready. It’s just somewhere along the line I…I stopped being your father and I became your drill sergeant.

   (“Dead Man’s Blood”)

John evolved from a friendly Mentor into an oppressive one. “Mentors, like parents, may have a hard time letting go of their charges. An overprotective Mentor can lead to a tragic situation” (Vogler 122; emphasis mine). John does not acknowledge Sam and Dean as self-sufficient adults because he is afraid for their safety. Sam does not accept that excuse.

                        Sam: You know, I don’t get you. You can’t treat us like this.

                        John: Like what?

                        Sam: Like children.

                        John: You are my children. I’m trying to keep you safe.

                        (“Dead Man’s Blood”)

            John’s role as Mentor is in danger at this point. Even Dean points out that John has sent them on hunts himself; John here is a Mentor, “…teaching, training, and testing…” (Vogler 124). It is when John is pulling them back from the Journey does he fail as a Mentor. His function “is to get the story unstuck by giving aid, advice, or magical equipment” (Vogler 124). Because Sam and Dean rescue their father at the end of “Dead Man’s Blood,” John finally realizes that they are indeed “stronger as a family.”

In the midst of Supernatural Aid comes Dean’s Refusal of the Call. In “Salvation,” the Winchesters track down the Demon to Salvation, Iowa, and are preparing to shoot it with the Colt when it shows up to torch another mother. However, an old friend calls. Meg Masters met up with Sam in the episode “Scarecrow,” and the boys discovered she is a demon in “Shadow.” She threatens John’s friends and family unless he gives up the Colt. He drives off to trade a fake version, ordering Sam and Dean to confront the Demon without him. The boys rush in just in time and hustle the targeted family out. Out on the lawn, Sam spots the shadow within the flame flowing out of the nursery window. Dean has to physically restrain him from charging back inside. Back in the hotel room Dean admonishes Sam for such reckless stupidity. Sam fumes – killing the Demon has been their life’s purpose. Has Dean forgotten that?

Dean: Sam, I wanna waste it, I do. But it’s not worth dying over. I mean it. If hunting this demon means you getting yourself killed, then I hope we never find the damn thing.

(“Salvation”)

Dean Winchester’s first priority has been and will forever be the well-being of his family. Hunting will always fall away when family is threatened. When John is kidnapped at the end of “Salvation,” Dean bursts out: “Listen to me: everything stops until we get him back, you understand me? Everything.” The emotion is repeated in Season Two’s season finale, “All Hell Breaks Loose, part two.” It is the core of Dean’s Refusal of the Call. He will not Journey without family.

The stage of Supernatural Aid , or Mentor-seeking, continues after John is kidnapped. Confused and needing solid ground to regroup from, Sam and Dean seek out Bobby Singer, fellow hunter. Not only does this action prove they are still in Departure, it cleverly sets them up with a second Mentor. The first image of Bobby is a shot of him handing Dean magical equipment: a flask of holy water. Bobby is a man who commands the adjective “grizzled” and was born with a trucker’s cap on his head. He gives the Winchester boys his own Mentor gift: the Key of Solomon. The book holds many magic sigils, including the Devil’s Trap, which incidentally is the title of the episode. It is also, incidentally, a play on word emphasis.