I've received so many wonderful art gifts for the "The Song Remains the Same" I've decided to collect all the art for the serial under one post. (I'm also including the banners I created myself). Here they are in order. Please click on images to see them full size:

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"Dead Man's Blood" (cont.)


The next scene begins in a motel room where the camera pans over the brothers in their beds. The show was always happy to exploit the sex appeal of its leads, and in the early seasons this often took the form of voyeuristic panning shots of them while they were sleeping. I’ve remarked before that the show seemed to be consciously subverting the traditional “male gaze” trope by objectifying male characters in a way that was unusual at the time. Down the track the scripts started to emphasize the creep factor of watching somebody while they’re sleeping so perhaps these early scenes were a deliberate choice to compromise the viewer in the act of invasive voyeurism even before it became an obvious recurring theme.


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“Dead Man’s Blood” is the first of three episodes that feature Jeffrey Dean Morgan as guest star as we lead up to the season finale. It’s also the first episode in the series that features vampires as the monster of the week. Eric Kripke has revealed that he originally didn’t want vampires in the show because he felt they’d been amply covered by Buffy the Vampire Slayer* (which is valid but, also, ironic since vampirism became such an important metaphor as the seasons progressed). Once he was persuaded, however, both he and writer John Shiban were determined to find new and fresh ways to depict vampires compared to other shows and movies. Nicholas Knight, author of the Supernatural companion books, notes that there was a wealth of material from which they could draw inspiration: “[Vampires] usually have inhuman strength and speed, and heightened senses, like night vision. Beyond that, vampire lore is so vast, with so many variations, that it’d be impossible to say definitively what a vampire is.”*

Typically, Kripke wanted to draw principally from genuine folklore rather than popular media: “John and I both felt that if we were going to do vampires, we’d have to do our own version, based more on real folklore than what people know to be vampires, which is mostly based on the original film Dracula [1931]. But there’s every permutation of vampire throughout every culture since the beginning of time and we got to pick and choose elements that aren’t as well known.”*

One of those elements was the way the teeth were visualized. Shiban recalls how the idea of retractable fangs was developed: “Certain vampires lived among people, and we figured they could only have done that if they had retractable fangs. We based the fangs on the idea of shark teeth in rows.”*

Part of the freshness was achieved by “de-bunking” some popular conceptions. For example, Supernatural’s vampires are unaffected by crosses, and less vulnerable to sunlight than the usual portrayals.

Co-writer, Cathryn Humphris credits Kripke with the idea of dead man’s blood being poison to vampires*, but I don’t think this one was entirely original. I’ve always assumed the inspiration came from the scene in the movie Interview with the Vampire (1994) where Claudia tricks Lestat into feeding from a pair of dead boys he thinks are just sleeping, and their blood all but kills him.
*Supernatural: The Official Companion Season 1

Not all the innovations survived beyond the first season, however. “Dead Man’s Blood” is the only episode where we see the vampires’ eyes flash (in a similar fashion to those of the shapeshifter in “Skin”). Their abilities and senses also seem to vary through the seasons: in this episode they are shown to have inhuman speed and heightened senses (mostly), but these traits seem to come and go in later seasons to serve the purposes of different plots. This first depiction remains my favourite, though.


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"I can get my own dates." "A fine example of American Primitive." "I'm sure you're many things, Sam." 

"Dean, would you get your mind out of the gutter please!"   "I've got to go do . . . something . . . somewhere."

"What do you care if I hook up?" "The pain I went through . . . I can't go through it again."

"Low sodium freaks!" "That's my boy."

"Provenance" cont.

The epilogue begins with some explanatory exposition:



Sarah wonders why the little girl did it.



The conversation reminds me of one that Sam will later have with Molly in season 2, “Roadkill”. On both occasions, Sam speculates on the motivations of angry spirits while Dean is dismissive. It’s something he doesn’t like to think about because that would humanize the spirits and muddy the saving people/hunting things ethic. He prefers a worldview where the things he kills are just monsters. On this occasion, things still seem fairly black and white since they assume the little girl was born evil and, hence, was always a monster. But Sam’s use of the word “tortured” introduces a hint of grey areas that both brothers will be forced to confront in the second season; Farmer Greeley from “Roadkill” is a far more nuanced character, and when Sam talks about him the parallels between the Winchesters and the things they hunt become more readily apparent. And while Dean is initially reluctant to acknowledge the lingering humanity in Molly’s spirit, in the end he grudgingly concedes that “she wasn’t so bad . . . for a ghost”.

At this stage, however, the brothers still retain their image as unalloyed heroes so, when it’s time to leave, Dean hangs back like a gooseberry, still hoping for a pat on the back from the pretty girl.


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