Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x15 Tall Tales, Part 1
Spoilers up to 5x08 Changing Channels
This is Supernatural’s second attempt at a ‘comedic’ episode, with 1x17 Hell House being the first. However, given the fact it is a fan favourite and one which many will tell you is hilarious, it may surprise you to learn that it only tickled my funny-bone once or twice. In stark contrast to its intention as amusing, I once again came away from this episode unsettled by the fact that sexual assault of men and boys can be played for laughs so blatantly. I will leave discussion of that for part 2 of this analysis because it will get heavy and unpleasant. Expect discussion of male victims of rape and sexual violence in the context of Supernatural, The Boys, other television shows, and in real life. I will keep the age rating at 15.
First things first: this is once again an episode where a lot is told in retrospect, but unlike 1x06 Skin and 2x12 Nightshifter this does more than tease the viewer with an event in the cold open then wind back the clock 24 hours. Rather this episode lives up to its apt title Tall Tales by having Dean and Sam relate much of the events to Bobby, but their versions of events differ and feature much exaggeration to the point where the viewer is left uncertain exactly what to believe. Men are dying or being repeatedly raped in scenarios taken straight from urban legends: sewergators, alien abduction, and haunted university buildings. The culprit behind this is a figure named The Trickster, who will later be revealed as Archangel Gabriel and Loki’s doppelgänger.
Regarding the overall plot of the show, 2x15 Tall Tales does not do much except introduce Gabriel, though it will be a further 60-something episodes until the viewer learns who ‘The Trickster’ really is. In fact, it has been a fair while since the show had a plot-centric episode and any steam built up has long since dissipated. 22 episodes per year seems long nowadays with the popularity of Game of Thrones and even The Walking Dead, which pack more plot and story into 10-16 episodes than Supernatural does into 22 (except the lamentable mess that is The Walking Dead series 2). The downside of its length, therefore, is the diluted, thinly-spread nature of its storytelling. A fair amount was packed into Supernatural 2x01-2x10, but most of that was related to developing character motivations and themes and included a lot of monster-of-the-week episodes. Of course it is fun to see the characters doing side-quests but I need more story to keep the momentum going. Azazel has plans, but he is taking his sweet time bringing them to fruition and in the meanwhile the brothers are not doing anything to try to discover or foil his plots.
Compare this, if you will, to the conflict between the Scooby Gang and Angel, Spike and Drusilla in Buffy series 2, where the build-up and conflict take centre stage for a lot of the 22 episodes. The conflict even takes the lives of very important characters when least expected, so the threat is always present and threatening. In Supernatural, by contrast, I do not really care about whatever is happening to Sam or what Azazel is plotting because it plays little role. I care that Dean is so broken up with grief and the fear of having to kill his brother, but if this were a novel I would be getting frustrated, and I read ALL of Wise Man’s Fear.
This episode continues Supernatural’s love affair with Neil Gaiman which started in 1x11 Scarecrow. Some people love this but Neverwhere bored me and I could not get past page 200 of American Gods. Coraline, Stardust, and The Graveyard Book pleased me but his stories involving ‘gods’ feel anhedonic and banal to me. I get that some people enjoyed having gods be part of a story with mortals in this manner, but I have little interest in a Norse deity (and it is frequently a Norse deity because they are in vogue) reduced to a man in a suit on an aeroplane, or a figure with the oh-so-clever name of Low Key Lyesmith.
A character who is a deity should act like a deity, not your average Tom, Dick or Harry. If the writer puts no effort into making the characters godlike, the divinity essentially stops being a divinity and becomes any other character. They become banal and dull, with their divinity reduced to a gimmick.
Having said that, it can be done exceedingly well. It is likely not to everybody’s taste, but Joanne M. Harris won a place on my list of favourite authors with her books The Gospel of Loki, Runemarks, Runelights, and The Testament of Loki. Her versions of the Norse gods are very true to the Eddic sources, but with her own spin and flair added for good measure. And it is a VERY good measure; her Norse gods rub shoulders with mortals, but they are not shopworn characters who are gods in name only. Whereas American Gods and Supernatural tear their deities from their mythological context and thereby remove the flavour and character (is Odin still Odin with no Valhalla, Fenrir, or Einherjar?), The Gospel of Loki etc mostly preserve the mythological context and have gods as characters who actually are gods.
Buffy and Angel toyed with gods as characters as well, but whether these gods were actual deities or simply apex demons so powerful and influential their minions believed them to be gods is left unclear. The Celtic mother goddess Danu brought water to the world, and Ogmios the psychopomp escorts the dead to the Otherworld. Lugus is god of the sun and creator of all arts, but whether Glory and Illyria in Buffy and Angelhad either any hand in creating their respective worlds or were close kin of creatures who did is never specified. For that reason, Illyria and Glory work for me where American Gods and Supernatural’s deities do not.
Because actual ‘gods’ being portrayed as only slightly more supernatural than the average monster is not to my tastes, I did not like this episode as much as the general fan base appears to.
Episode 2x15 Tall Tales starts with Dean being a complete douche and irritating the hell out of Sam by listening to music on the radio and eating chicken noisily on the hotel bed. Sam is trying to do research with paper and books because somebody Sam assumes was Dean stole his laptop. Sam’s justification for assuming his brother was to blame was that Dean was supposedly the only other person with access to the room: the door was locked and the hotel does not have chamber maids, supposedly. One has to stop and wonder whether Sam has actually learnt anything at all over the last 37 episodes because any kind of monster or ghost could have crept into their room through an air vent or a window, as could any of the seedy people staying in the seedy hotel have picked their lock and sneaked into their room.
In Sam’s defence (what’s that, me calling Dean a douche and defending Sam?) they have pulled silly pranks on each other in the past, but why would Dean have hidden a vital tool like the laptop? Knowing Sam as I do, it looked very much like wanting a reason to metaphorically kick Dean and seizing the opportunity to do so. His later statement that ‘...I’ve put up with a lot from you, Dean’ gasted my flabbers: I can see that Sam believes that and he clearly has a lot of resentment, anger, and other whiny, self-centred complaints festering, but do let us remember that Dean’s fiendish japes and comments about Sam’s girly hair do not in any way compare to e.g. Sam threatening and almost getting Dean killed in 2x10 Hunted, for example. He really has no right to bitching about ‘putting up with a lot’, so go on Dean: keep being a douche. Sam deserves nothing less than your douchebaggery.
Bobby soon turns up at the door, at once both welcome and unwelcome. As I said when he was introduced in 1x22 Devil’s Trap, I have much more time for him than I do John and I can tell he actually cares for Dean and Sam (if I remember, he even called Dean his favourite at some point), but his crochety attitude grates against me. For one thing, I do not appreciate the 27 and 23 year old protagonists of my story being treated like little boys by a character who has only just been introduced (looking at you, mega-bish Missouri), and for another it gets old fast. On my first watch of this show, I cared little for him and I still do not especially care.
On the other hand, Dean and Sam need more than just Dean and Sam. I love Dean to bits and I would watch Dean eating a sandwich for 40 minutes every week, but I hate their co-dependant abused / narcissistic abuser dynamic with a passion. Judging by the huge drop off in viewership in series 7 when Sera Gamble tried to kill Castiel off, so did a huge part of the audience. Some friends who are just now watching the show for the first time: they have just reached 2x05 Simon Said and have noted that because there is just Dean and Sam, there is little for the writers to do in order to introduce conflict than have Dean and Sam argue. Often there is no apparent need for them to argue and it gets tedious. The show needs more, but even with the eventual introduction of Castiel the show still had to be about the brothers, no matter how much Sam hates Dean or how suffocated Dean is.
Back to Bobby, he sits and listens to Dean and Sam tell their stories, their versions differing in small details usually with the intent of mocking the other. I believe this is the aspect of the episode which people find funny, because men in their mid twenties acting like preteens is amusing or something. Maybe if I were watching this once a week as a casual viewer and not really paying attention it would amuse me more, but the fact the episode uses sexual assault against a man for laughs puts a dampener on the whole experience. If that makes me a buzzkill, then I suppose your buzz deserves to be killed. Whatever the case, Bobby soon works out that a Trickster is behind everything.
You might remember long long ago in the first paragraph that I mentioned the episode tickling my funny-bone once or twice: both occasions were very early on. The first occasion was when Dean’s date said that looking at him was like staring into the sun, and the second came right on the heels of that moment as Sam interrupted him. Dean’s version of Sam is not too much of an exaggeration which is what made it so funny. Jared chose to do the prissy, sissy fag act with effete body language and pursed lips which is not how I see Sam, but other than that his nagging and blah blah blah were pretty accurate to how much of Sam’s whining and bitching sound to me. Sam objected to Dean’s portrayal of him by saying ‘I don’t sound like that, Dean!’ to which Dean replied ‘That’s what you sound like to me” and I must wholeheartedly concur.
Whilst on that subject, this episodes shows and suggests some serious character issues with Sam. On the one hand, he is very concerned with using the proper politically-correct language such as when he corrected Dean for saying ‘Siamese twins’ instead of ‘conjoined twins’, yet he smirked and hid his face from Curtis after finding out Curtis was ‘anal probed’ by aliens. Sam has the proper vocabulary, but like his real life counterpart Eric Kripke (whose writing in e.g The Boys is far less ‘progressive’ than his use of terms like ‘toxic masculinity’ might suggest), Sam is not the ‘sensitive, intelligent’ brother people think he is. More on that in the later discussion, as well as Dean’s reaction.
Further to the point of the brothers’ stories, the young woman whom Dean was drinking with and presumably canvassing for information on the dead professor is very different in both versions. The ‘Starla’ of Dean’s version is a PhD student in folklore and mythology, well-dressed, well-kept, and classy. Dean clearly exaggerated a lot with how into him she was, and his own behaviour in that version induced much cringe, but other than that she was believable. Sam’s ‘Starla’ was much more negative, at least from the perspective of somebody like Sam: much more ‘low rent’ than Dean’s version. Sam seems very quick to perceive Starla as a loose drunk and Dean as a horny slut for being interested in a woman like her… or perhaps the other way around: his estimation of her plummets when he sees she is sexually interested in Dean whom Sam regards as a slut. Yikes. Either way, Sam seems to have an issue with women who enjoy sex.
What the truth is is likely somewhere between, but based on the kind of woman Dean has been seen to pick up and hit on (e.g. the jeweller in 2x12 Nightshifter), I would guess he only exaggerated on his cringy James Bond-smoothness and her staring into the sun line.
The sibling squabbles between Sam and Dean in this episode were also a source of mirth. It was quite droll to see the brothers through each other’s eyes; Dean as the slutty womaniser with no taste and Sam as an uptight ponce who treats Dean like an irritating embarrassment. Both are exaggerations fuelled by irritation, but it’s still an interesting insight into how they see each other.
Not that anybody paying attention needs to be told how they see each other, but the idiots in the cheap seats at the back might not have heard everything. It probably says a lot about how similar Dean’s and my perspectives are that he and I view Sam in pretty much exactly the same way.
Moving swiftly onwards, discussing women who enjoy sex brings the discussion around to the professor in the cold open who the viewer is led to believe engaged in lots of coitus with students. The situation of professor and student inherently implies a power imbalance, though it is never specified whether or not the students he made the beast with two backs with were his students or not. We can assume that a large number likely were since Gabriel saw fit to punish him, but the woman in the cold open appeared to be in her mid twenties and actively pursued the sexual encounter with the professor. Is that how they all happened? I have heard stories of professors being harassed and pursued by students like that, so I wonder, but for the sake of this analysis let us assume that what the show tells and implies is indeed how things happened: the professor abused his position of power in order to procure sex with students in his charge.
The professor is presumably pushed out of his window and slams into the concrete. Note that the professor did not scream as he fell, implying he was already dead before his defenestration. This happened just as janitor!Gabriel was leaving the building for the night, but for some reason Dean and Sam do not think to be suspicious of him when they question him early in the episode. He was the only one there and he found the professor, so he would have likely been one of the police’s suspects at least.
The next two incidents are a professor involved in animal testing getting eaten by a sewer alligator, and a pledge master getting ‘hazed’. Dean is the one to work out that all the men involved were linked by being ‘dicks’ and that what happened to them was ‘poetic justice’. Skipping past the implication that rape is an appropriate punishment which one can ‘deserve’ (Shiban, Kripke, and Gamble: sit on broken glass), it is not long later that Bobby gives them the final push they need to conclude the janitor is a Trickster and the one responsible for everything.
Calling Loki a trickster is not all that accurate however, as Loki is more a liar and agent of Chaos than he is a trickster. He crosses boundaries of sex, sexuality, and gender, is both of the Æsir and of their enemies the Jötunns (anti-gods), and is the sworn enemy of Heimdallr who is an agent of order and guards the borders. I praised Joanne M. Harris’ Loki earlier, but the one thing which grated on me was that her version of Loki just accepted that male-bodied gods were not supposed to engage in intimate relations with other male-bodied beings. Melvin Burgess’s Loki did not have any such inhibitions, but rather enjoyed physical and emotional intimacy with men as much as with women. ...And animals, because how is a human or god any different to a horse for the embodiment of chaos?
Moving on, the episode culminates in Gabriel attempting to win Dean’s favour in a lecture hall (note that Gabriel is All About Dean in this episode) by offering him sex with the two women he conjoured in return for Dean letting Gabriel get away. Contrary to popular belief, Dean does not think with his penis and refuses Gabriel’s offer. Dean cannot let Gabriel go, and as Dean says this Sam and Bobby appear. A fight ensues in which Dean in particular suffers some serious whumpage (inflicted mostly by the scantily-clad Bond women, implying I am supposed to laugh).
Dean manages to eventually stake Gabriel and kill him, whereupon he and the others book it before somebody finds Gabriel’s body. Sam almost apologises to Dean before getting into the car (inappropriate timing, Sam, but points for trying), and then Bobby annoys me a bit with more of his unearnt crochitiness. Right at the end it is revealed that Gabriel is still alive and that the one Dean thought he killed was only an illusion.
I have never been a big fan of Gabriel in this show. His next episode is another fan favourite which is supposedly hilarious, but he kept Sam in an endless Groundhog Day where he had to watch Dean dying over and over again. I understand that a show like Supernatural has to replace blood and guts with exaggerated ridiculousness, wherefore Dean’s endless deaths, but for some reason I am not able to laugh. This might be one of those normal people things which I am too neurodivergent to understand. Is this one of those déjá thingies?
Anyway, Gabriel locks Sam into watching his brother die to teach him a lesson, and depending on how we understand the mechanics of Gabriel’s ’magic’, kills Dean over and over again. The first death does not amuse me and not just because I do not like seeing Dean die: I actually watched an 11 year old boy get run over after school one day in 2004. Something went right under the wheels and luckily I cannot remember whether it was him or just his schoolbag. Either way, I do clearly remember noticing the seat of his trousers had ripped and my 13 year old brain latched onto that because it was easier to deal with than the fact an 11 year old boy was dying at my feet. His funeral was thrown open to the whole school, and some people went just to have a day off school. This song was played at his funeral and I remember it every time I hear this song:
So no, not a single one of Dean’s deaths in that episode amuse me, and no I do not give a fig about killing your buzz. I also do not like Gabriel much, but I like him as an antagonist and loose cannon. Far more enjoyable than bloody Lucifer.
That almost does it for part one. Generally speaking a good episode, though it would not rank anywhere near my list of favourites. One issue I have is that The Show does not allow Sam to be made fun of in anything like the way Dean is. As Paula R. Stiles noted, Dean is ridiculed and exaggerated a lot in this episode, but other than two incidents he is just regular Sam. I have heard tell of Jared’s complaints and insistence that his character not be made fun of, and I believe it might well have been around this time in the show that he – if I have heard correctly – got angry about where Sam’s story was taking him, and tried to start a fight with Jensen on set. Whether or not this is true, I cannot say for sure (though both Jensen and Jared have referred to an incident when Jared stormed off set to sit alone in his trailer and Jensen shortly joined him and talked to him), but whatever the case may be, a noticeable disparity is evident.
Whilst on the subject of disparities, the ‘dicks’ are almost all men in this show, infrequently women. Paula R. Stiles raised the point in her discussion of Jo in 2x06 No Exit that women do not like being portrayed as the dumbass, cocky tomboy any more than men like being portrayed as useless, lazy, stupid slobs. The former is bad representation and so is the latter, but the difference is that the former is met with resistance in modern popular culture whereas the latter is actively encouraged and criticism of it is met with distinctly anti-male scorn. In a show where almost all on-screen, violent, bloody deaths are men who die as horror-fodder while women are usually killed off-screen or saved at the last minute, here is an episode where all the ‘dicks’ are men and sexual assault against men is played for laughs. Usually when I point this out it falls on deaf ears, but if I can point out some of the writers’ homophobia, the incredibly high death rate of black men, the missed opportunities for Native American inclusion and representation, and the bad writing of female characters like Jo, why do people seem so unwilling to listen when I point this out? Why do they insist I am wrong, and why do they so quickly change the subject to women talking in board rooms? I have a very good idea why this is the case, as I will discuss in the section about male victims of sexual violence.
One final point before closing part one: some have taken issue with the presence of Busty Asian Beauties. The thinking is that Asian women (here in the US meaning of East and Southeastern Asian, excluding the Indian subcontinent and Western Asia) are almost not represented at all in the show, with Mrs Tran and Dagon being the only two notable examples. It does not look good for them to be mostly represented in the form of a porn site and magazine.
Having grown up on the other side of the Atlantic from the American context, I never understood Busty Asian Beauties as anything more than a joke about how randomly specific it was, similar to Jack’s one-legged Parisian prostitute in Titanic.
Perhaps the experience is different for North Americans, but any ‘racist’ connotations were completely lost on me. Some have even gone a little further and said that Dean himself is racist for ‘fetishising’ Asian women and being interested in Asian women specifically. To be quite honest that sounds like a load of American bullcrap. Other than it being an exaggeration of Dean’s interest for online rage fuel, I wonder whether my enjoyment of Ripped Nordic Blonds or Girthy Celtic Hotties would also be considered a racist fetishisation. The issue as I see it is the poor representation, not Dean’s interest.
Note once again that it Dean who is both given a bit more depth with stuff like this, and the one who is the butt of the joke. Never Sam.
Thus concludeth part one. Part two will follow later this week.
