Supernatural Review: Don’t Scratch That Itch Sam

Boy scout Sam (Jared Padalecki) is back and this week he learns about some of the things he did which leads to more monsters and a flash into his memories from hell. That’s right, Dean (Jensen Ackles) told you not to do it but the righteous younger Winchester’s moral compass is back with a force.

The episode plays like Memento, where Sam has no memories of what happened in this little town in Rhode Island but people clearly remember him (as the FBI agent he was pretending to be). He must retrace his steps and try to remember what happened last year when he was here with Samuel (Mitch Pileggi).

In a flashback we see that Samuel and Sam are leaving after what seems like the end of a job. Sam has an injured shoulder but he shrugs it off, ready to get out off town. As they make their way out, a local deputy pulls them over, demanding to find out why his sheriff isn’t answering the phone. He’s insisting that they come with him when Sam sets lose his fists of fury and just pummels the poor guy till he’s lost consciousness. Samuel asks his grandson if there could have been a less violent way to handle the situation, but Sam shrugs it off feeling that this was the fastest way to get out of there.

Back in the present Sam gets a mysterious text of coordinates that turns out to be this same town. After a quick search it turns out that the town has had three girls disappear suddenly. Despite Dean protesting that it was not a good idea to go following a text from someone they didn’t know, Boy Scout Sam felt obliged to go.

Turns out, Dean was right because this case was opening a can of worms. Sam in his quest to right the wrongs he did last year discovers that he had been there before and gets arrested when the deputy whose brains he bashed, recognizes him and locks him up. The sheriff’s wife confronts him, demanding to know what happened to her husband. Sam pleads with her, explaining that something happened to him and that he has no memory of her or her husband, much less the events that transpired last year. He came back though because he wants to get some answers and if he were lying would he really come back if it looked like he was the killer?

Sam does get another flashback of Samuel and him telling the sheriff and his wife about their lives as hunters and how they were here because they believed that there was a creature that was behind the disappearance of five men in their town.

Meanwhile another woman has disappeared and Dean puts together that the common factor is Sam. All the victims were women Sam had slept with when he was last there.

After visiting the sheriff’s wife in her house to get the files from last year’s missing persons case, Sam begins to get even more flashes of men in cocooned in spider webs. He returns to their hideout where the brothers put together a visual board (much like in cop dramas) to figure out what happened.

Finally Sam gets a big surge of memory juice and he finally recalls using the sheriff as bait to lure the Arachne monster to them. In Greek mythology, Arachne was a woman with incredible weaving talent who offended the goddess Athena (goddess of war, handicraft, foresight, and practical reason). After a weaving contest, Athena was enraged by Arachne’s skill and the content of her work (the amorous activities of the gods) that she tore the tapestry to pieces. Arachne was so distraught she hung herself using the torn looms causing the goddess to take pity, transforming her into a spider.

Sam lets Sheriff Dobbs get taken because he had turned on the GPS signal in his cell phone so they could track him back to the creature’s lair. There Sam manages to take the Arachne’s head off and then proceeds to shoot the victims (including the sheriff), who were still alive. He then torches the whole place rationalizing that the poison already got them and that they were essentially dead men walking.

But, that’s not actually the case. The monster abducting the girls in the present is none other that the sheriff. As with the monster reproduction efforts we’ve seen all season long, the Arachne wasn’t abducting victims for food but for mates. She was biting them to create more of her kind. So the bullets and gas did little to the sheriff and the rest. They escaped and ran for their lives. The sheriff though wanted revenge on Sam and so he set up this little trap for the younger Winchester.

Sam is able to kill the sheriff for good this time, decapitating him in front of his wife who now has to deal with the death of her husband for a second time. No amount of apology from Sam can really erase what happened.

As the brothers prepare to leave, Sam suddenly collapses, writhing in pain because he’s just had a flash of his soul, burning inside the cage of fire in hell. Dean told you so Sammy. Your noble self is good and all but do you really understand what your risking by pushing at those memories behind the wall?

This week’s episode was great in the sense that we got to see clearly how different the two Sams have been. It was interesting to see Dean still be the voice of reason for this version of his brother as much as the other one. It almost seems like two extreme sides of Sam – the one with no moral compass whatsoever and then one with too much emotional need to do the right thing. In this case, Dean tries to get his brother to see that being too good could still lead to trouble and cause more damage in the process. Still if he were in Sam’s shoes, would he choose to do the same thing? Sam thinks so.

The lessons of the day were: don’t use the same crapper twice and always finish a job. In this case, was it worth it for Sam to start remembering the things he did last year? Probably not.

Season 6, Episode 13: Unforgiven (originally aired February 11, 2011)

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Images courtesy of The CW, Michael Courtney, and Jack Rowand