{"id":3006,"date":"2013-11-13T13:00:18","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T21:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/?p=3006"},"modified":"2013-11-13T11:57:14","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T19:57:14","slug":"mark-watches-supernatural-s01e07-hookman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/2013\/11\/mark-watches-supernatural-s01e07-hookman\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Watches ‘Supernatural’: S01E07 – Hookman"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the seventh episode of the first season of Supernatural<\/i>, a pervasive urban legend becomes frighteningly real for a young woman confused by her place in the world. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to watch Supernatural<\/i>.<\/p>\n

This is certainly a lot stronger of an episode than most of what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen before. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s scary, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fully resolved, and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s way more character development for this week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153victim\u00e2\u20ac\u009d character. Truthfully, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m actually drawn to the character of Lori Sorenson because I spent a good deal of my life struggling with what religion meant to me, which included feeling conflicting emotions about what other people in my life were doing. So, HEADS UP: TONS OF PROJECTING ALL OVER LORI.<\/p>\n

But let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s start with that cold open. I regret nothing in my video commission for this episode, even all the outright screaming<\/i> I did at Rich. HE MADE SO MANY TERRIBLE HORROR MOVIE MISTAKES, ONE AFTER ANOTHER. Oh, he was so<\/i> dead. DEAD. Well, then he refused to listen to Lori telling him no, so I had virtually no need to see him survive this because you need to stop when she says stop<\/i>. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gross, and no<\/i>. But I had no idea that this would actually be part<\/i> of the plot itself! I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d just assumed that this was a straight version of the Hook Man Legend, one I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d heard myself when I was just a child. A man with a hook for a hand terrifies people making out in cars, scratching the side of the vehicle as torment, and leaving his hook behind as a message. However, John Shiban adds a much more personal and emotional twist to this tale, and while I think the execution suffers a few times, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actually an improvement on the legend.<\/p>\n

ALSO: THIS EPISODE IS SO FUCKING SCARY. I jumped a lot<\/i>, I shrieked a few times, and I spent at least a third of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hookman\u00e2\u20ac\u009d repeating my own personal mantra: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153No nope nope no no no no no.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I love the idea of making him a vengeful spirit who attaches himself to people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s repressed confusion, and I love that because he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a spirit, he is often invisible<\/i>. All those sequences where you just see his hook scratching the wall or the car? A billion nopes until the end of time<\/i>.<\/p>\n

However, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the way Lori\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s personal crisis fits into this that I found most striking. If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not familiar with my own past, I converted to Catholicism in a failed attempt to hide my own homosexuality and to get closer to my Mexican heritage which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been denied since I was adopted. It was a failure and a misguided attempt at finding happiness for a lot of reasons, but one of the more upsetting aspects of this experience was my inability to rationalize my own desires and the moral choices of the few friends I had with what my faith taught me about the world. Now, I fell in with a very particular crowd through the Church, and that meant that the kind of Catholicism that I was exposed to was heavy on the guilt. Well, okay, the Catholic Church is big on guilt in general, but my godfather\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s family and their circle of friends\/parishioners were almost entirely immigrants from Mexico and Central America. All my education was in Spanish, and there was also an aspect of mysticism drawn from the many indigenous cultures that culminated in that group. This is all my attempt to explain that these people were extremely friendly, that they welcomed me into their group with open arms, and once I was accepted into their culture, I learned just how much we were supposed to judge one another.<\/p>\n

It was a jarring, confusing experience for me, because I was taught to hate the very music that had kept me alive while I was at home with my parents. I was taught to judge the clothes that people wore. I was taught to judge my fellow students for dating outside of the church. And I was most definitely<\/i> taught to hate myself, to despise the urges and desires that I kept hidden because these people (and my city, too) were so virulently homophobic. It was, frankly speaking, an utter disaster. So it was hard for me not<\/i> to see myself in Lori, who was raised with a specific moral system and then struggled with what that meant for the people in her life. She hated that her father was such a hypocrite, but does that mean she wanted him dead? She wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t comfortable with the way that Taylor pressured her into doing things she didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want, but that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean she deserved to die, either. Even Rich, who was<\/i> gross and rude to her, didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t deserve the treatment he got.<\/p>\n

This episode\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s horror plays out as the unwilling manifestation of Lori\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s confusion, and I think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a fascinating story choice. Like I said earlier, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s executed perfectly. I wanted a bit more confirmation from the text that Taylor herself wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t immoral, as I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think Lori really expressed all that much regret that she died. On top of that, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lack of closure for Lori at the end of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hookman.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d She suspects that she was inherently responsible for the three attacks in this episode, but she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sort of let off the hook in the end. Which is fine! She didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t actually kill anyone, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m glad that the writers didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t force her into an uncomfortable position of culpability. Her guilt was portrayed well, too, but I felt that this story needed<\/i> Lori to come to terms with her own moral confusion. For me, it felt like this was an incomplete character development. The episode introduces this crisis she has, forces her to face how her judgment of others can be harmful (albeit in a vicious and brutal way), and then\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 nothing? She doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t learn anything, we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know if she changes, and we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know if she even senses<\/i> that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a new path for her to take when it comes to her faith. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not lost on me that this is yet another<\/i> woman character on the show who isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t given full development, but at least Lori was absolutely vital to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hookman.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The story depends<\/i> on her existence. You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take her out of it.<\/p>\n

Mostly, episodes like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hookman,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Dead in the Water,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bloody Mary\u00e2\u20ac\u009d give me an idea of how Supernatural<\/i> can be a great show, but they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re glimpses of a potential I feel the show hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite reached. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still finding its voice and exploring emotional serialization in the Winchesters. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s some neat stuff here about Sam empathizing with Lori because he watched a loved one die in front of him, but I find myself longing for something a bit more substantial at times. Still, this show is very new to me, and I love giving things time to develop, to find themselves. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m interested in the characters, the setting, and the narrative framing of the Winchesters. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m also hoping that by the end of this season, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll start to understand why so many people find Supernatural<\/i> so beloved.<\/p>\n

The video commission for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hookman\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can be downloaded right here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n

– If you would like to support this website and keep Mark Does Stuff running, I’ve put up a detailed post explaining how you can!<\/a>
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