In the sixteenth episode of the sixth season of Supernatural, an attempt to track down the Mother of All leads to tragedy. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Supernatural.
Trigger Warning: For body horror/consent.
I’m so upset.
It’s clear now that this episode’s title is referencing the infamous Agatha Christie mystery in a number of ways. Namely, both that book and this episode feature the brutal murders of a procession of characters, each at the hands of another. As the story progresses, the pool is whittled down until there’s only one left. Thankfully (I guess???) we never quite get to that point, but “…And Then There Were None” channels The Thing while shocking us with one awful death after another.
It’s not the first time the show has done an infection scenario in a closed room before, and in that sense, this episode goes through the motions for a while until it becomes something much more than that trope. It’s nerve-wracking, I admit, but it’s not until this episode begins to explore the emotional shit at stake that it feels so much bigger than I thought it was going to be. Even then? Lord, this episode tricks you into thinking a lot of things, only to consistently pull the rug out from under us.
I mean, the cold open of this episode and the subsequent scenes made it seem like this would be an episode focusing entirely on Eve. I suppose it does in an indirect way, but I wrongly assumed that Eve herself was infecting people with something that made them act out horrifically towards other people. It took a while for me to piece this together, and I didn’t even truly understand how fucked up Eve’s creation was until the episode ended. The unnamed creature she made was designed to cause people to lash out at others, violently so. It’s now obvious to me that all the monsters along I-80 were specifically meant to draw Sam, Dean, and any of their hunter buddies out so that Eve could wipe them all out at once. (OMG Sandusky, Ohio, I was just there this summer. I had a similarly awful experience there, but it had to do with Greyhound, a monster just as terrifying as the one here.) Sure, she wanted to pass along a message to the Winchesters, but they didn’t even realize that she’d already done so. She is going to kill everyone they care about, and then she’s going to kill them.
That’s accomplished by the utterly awkward reunion between Rufus, Bobby, Sam, Dean, Samuel, and Gwen, who are all drawn to the same cannery, falling right into Eve’s trap. It’s hard not to draw comparisons between this and “Abandon All Hope” from last season, since the bloodbath feels so similar. But it’s not long before the creature that had infected two cannery workers finds its way into the most trigger happy person first, which I think was entirely deliberate. Who would turn on someone else quickest? Dean. Unfortunately, the person he turns on is Gwen, right after SHE COMES TO DEAN TO DEMONSTRATE THAT SHE HAD NO IDEA WHAT SAMUEL HAD DONE TO THE WINCHESTERS. GOD. WHY. WHY THEN. WHY MUST YOU BE SO CRUEL.
But cruelty is at the heart of this episode, since each subsequent death highlights the mistakes and brutality that each of these characters has faced at the hands of another. Dean and Sam confront Samuel about his selling out of them to Crowley, and it is just the first of a few intensely awkward and uncomfortable scenes. I wonder, though, if what Samuel said during that sequence was his honest opinion. Did that parasite thing make people more hostile than usual? There’s a big part of me, though, that believes that Samuel really wasn’t apologetic about what he’d done to his grandsons. We knew from “Caged Heat” that he didn’t particularly care for Dean, and after watching Sam’s descent into soulless ambiguity, he probably wasn’t all that attached to Sam either. He’s always been portrayed as a pragmatist, interested in survival and his own wants. So it makes sense that he wouldn’t apologize for what he’d done when he believed he could get his daughter back.
His death was genuinely shocking to me, then, because I believed there was more story to tell. Well, it’s not just that, of course. Because no one is certain whether or not Samuel was infected when he died, we’re forced to consider the uncomfortable possibility that Sam just killed his grandfather when he didn’t need to. Which is upsetting in light of Sam just getting his soul back, you know? SAM DOESN’T NEED THIS, IT’S SO UNFAIR. And then this episode really starts referencing The Thing, which I’m perfectly okay with because I adore that movie a great deal. DON’T LET ME TALK ABOUT THE THING BECAUSE I WON’T STOP.
But shit, y’all. I am so devastated about what happens between Bobby and Rufus. Like Samuel’s role in this episode, Rufus also has an unsettling confrontation of his own with Bobby. While we’re purposefully given only ambiguous details, it’s easy to infer a terrible story here: Bobby did something on a hunt that led to the death of someone Rufus cared about. A wife? A daughter? We never find out; all we know is that Rufus has no plans to ever forgive Bobby for it. What’s fascinating to me is how much that confrontation later mirrors Dean’s point at the end of the episode. It was clear throughout “…And Then There Were None” that Rufus really enjoyed Bobby and his company, and he did so in spite of whatever unforgivable act Bobby had committed. In that sense, wasn’t Rufus behaving in a way that unintentionally fell in line with what Dean wanted? This episode unearths ugly truths while keeping others a secret, and at the end of it all, Dean reasons that life is too short for hunters to hang on to grudges and hatreds.
I imagine that’s what Rufus did, but goddamn it, y’all, we’ll never know.
It was right after Rufus’s death that I realized how serious the writers were about sticking to the concept of Agatha Christie’s novel, and I was fully convinced that Bobby Singer was about to die in this episode. How could he survive? Why would the worm let him live? This was, again, a demonstration of the power Eve had over the lives of humans. It was the start of something horrible, and what could be more horrible at this point than Bobby dying? On top of that, we witness Dean and Sam’s commitment to the hunt. They’re willing to electrocute Bobby to stop Eve’s worm.
Which then ends in that horrific fake-out where we’re supposed to believe Dean and Sam are staring at Bobby’s grave. FUCK YOU, SUPERNATURAL, THAT IS SO RUDE. But this whole episode is rude. Gwen, Samuel, and Rufus are all taken out in one episode. Ugh, I’m so upset, I AM SO UPSET.
The video for “…And Then There Were None” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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