Supernatural - Episode 4.03 “In the Beginning”
Futile Efforts Part 1

You Son of a Bitch
What a feast of sweets in this scrumptious episode! After such large slices of delicious pie and brownies, one can only suspect that Eric Kripke is cheating. Actually, Jeremy Carver, the Writer of this episode is the cheat. Nearly everything he prepared tasted so good, went down so easy, with such generous portions, that it’s hard to be too upset about the cheating. Almost.

First, let’s enjoy the pie ala mode and brownies and vanilla milkshakes again.

Pie a la Mode with Whipped Cream
So many Questions were answered!
1 - Mary Campbell Winchester knew the Yellow Eyed Demon. She had to make a deal with the son of a bitch to get John brought back from the dead.
2 - Mary should have kept a journal to note the night to stay in bed and avoid getting killed though. She interrupted Azazel (and thus apparently had to die). This explains why only some of the PsychicKids lost their parents in nursery fires.
3 - Azazel has to make deals for the kids because he needs permission to enter his chosen ones’ homes and dose the PsychicBabies with the demon blood.
4 - Demon blood is like Ovaltine, or possibly performance enhancing drugs.

Brownies and Milkshakes
(Character Moments for Fans to Gulp Down)
1 - Dean is the person who convinces John to buy the ’67 Impala!
2 - Mary was a kick-ass Hunter! Dean sooo has a crush.
3 - GrampySam and Dean flex their hunting skills together. In priest suits.
4 - GrampySam gets possessed by the Yellow Eyed Demon and sniffs Dean and gloats about his Grand Master Plan, except for actually telling any useful details.
5 – Azazel is 4 for 5 on killing the Winchester clan. He’s taken out GrampySam, Grammy, Mary, and John. Dean is the exception. And Dean is the one to bring Sam, Azazel’s favorite, back in the game after Jake stabbed Sam.
6 - Dean uses John’s Journal to figure out most of the clues for the hunt.
7 - Dean gets to use the Colt again!
8 - Dean looks Azazel in the eyes and tells the son of a bitch that he kills him!

Sugar Shock from the added high fructose corn syrup
(Overkill with gratuitous fan pandering)
1 - Grammy and Grampy Campbell were Hunters too! They lived happily in the Hunter House in the Big Woods, down the road from the Waltons.
2 - Grammy and Grampy’s first names are the basis for Sam and Dean’s names (and not inspired by the characters Sal and Dean from On the Road, as was previously how they got their names.)
3 - Daniel Elkins readily gives Dean the Colt for no compelling reason other than Dean really really wanted it.
4 - Everybody says ’son of a bitch’ alot!

Leftovers!
(Appetizing New Questions)
1 - How and why did Deanna and Samuel Campbell become hunters?
2 - Was John Winchester “100% John” after Azazel brought him back from the dead?
3 - Why does Azazel’s plan matter? Dean killed Azazel over a year ago. The demons who came through the Devil’s Gate are fighting a factionalized civil war. Does Azazel’s Grand Master Plan ‘continue’ through Sam? Is Sam ‘encoded’ with Azazel’s plan as a sleeper agent? Has Sam unwittingly pulled the pin on Azazel’s Grand Master Plan by using his powers?
4 - Whatever Azazel was planning, isn’t Lillith following her own playbook? And where is Lillith by the way?
5 - How are Sam and Ruby keeping their night time creeping on the down low? Isn’t anyone noticing the demons are disappearing? Ruby hid them from Lillith before with mojo bags. How are their guilty secrets being hidden from the angels?
6 – How does Castiel have no idea what Sam is doing, but he knows Sam’s GPS location at anytime?
7 – After Sammy wins the Tour de Hell (albeit doped up on Demon Blood), where will Sam go after he takes the Yellow Jersey from Lillith?

Does this pie taste funny to you?
Now for the indigestion after too much high calorie pie. Time travel stories hurt my eyes and make me hurl. Maybe it’s going face-first through the silvery water of the Stargate, or the pressing g-forces when sliding through the wormhole.

To trick us into the time travel setup, the Writer makes it appear that Castiel sent Dean back in time. In 1973, Azazel can spot that Dean’s knowledge of the future was done by an angel… and with no explanation as to how Azazel knows! Azazel easily spots angel handiwork when none of hell’s other evil residents 30 years later have any clue?

If Castiel is truthful, and he just wanted Dean to “know everything they know”, the most direct path to that end is for Castiel to just tell Dean (or brainflash Dean) exactly what Azazel did to baby Sam and what Sam is doing now.

Castiel says the past cannot be changed to alter the outcome. Why bother sending Dean back in time? Why make Dean experience the failures of not killing Azazel, not saving his family, and not choosing to save innocent strangers over saving his family? To test him? So Dean can experience futile efforts once again? The boy’s got failure issues already Cas. This angel is one cruel mofo (Or Jeremy Carver is. Maybe he really does hate Dean.)

Castiel can alter human perceptions and enter their dreams. Say he can actually take people back in time. He can probably take them back in time in their dreams too, which is totally different. The story setup as “time travel” was because if Dean (and we) knew the fix was in all along, then we would realize Dean’s actions didn’t actually matter and the whole trip back to Kansas was an exercise in futility.

If the angels are worried about what Sam is doing, then why not just ask Sam? Castiel can give Sam a stern talking to about how the God Squad has one eye fixed on him (and probably the eye of Mordor is watching too). Kripke needs to do some explaining about what angels can actually do. How does Castiel not know what Sam and Ruby are doing, but he knows Sam’s exact street address at any time? That’s crap.

Castiel may be a liar. He may be as incompetent a guide as he appears to be in this episode. But the Writer gets tagged as the dick for giving Castiel vague “make it stop” instructions and the lame story setup. The Writer turned Castiel’s badass powers into a lot of useless beauty.

Supposedly nobody’s seen an angel for millennia, but Azazel recognizes that Dean’s time traveling could only have been done by an angel? There’s no TARDIS in the Supernatural universe? Clearly, if Dean had traveled back in time, he would have arrived naked in an alleyway, as was established by The Terminator films.

The revisionist history on Azazel’s character is disappointing. He’s made over as a master genius with a ‘big hidden evil plan’. Yellow Eyes was more interesting as a power hungry General building his army and working his way up the food chain in In My Time of Dying and not Doctor Evil. He’s re-written as a Grand Master Chess Player pulling strings from wherever dead demons go to be really ‘dead’ if hell isn’t their final destination. Azazel’s plan from beyond the grave is sure convenient but compromises the character.

Both actors who played Azazel were excellent though! Mitch Pileggi played him with awesome menace and humour. The interplay between possessed GrampySam and Dean was delightful fun. Azazel was so appealingly evil, let’s overlook this kluged re-introduction for now.

Corporal John Winchester is similarly problematic. An ex-Marine who served in Vietnam is more of a wuss than emo Sam at college? That’s crap. It was 1973, not 1955. John didn’t need to be turned into George McFly to be worthy of Mary’s love, nor to hope for and want a long happy life, nor to get killed by Azazel.

Jeremy Carver’s done these character contortions before – compromising characters to cover plot problems. It’s why some folks tag him as writing “dumb Dean”. He doesn’t hate Dean, well maybe he does…after all, if Dean had actually time traveled and changed the past, then all the deaths were now his fault for introducing Azazel to the Campbells in the first place. But hating Dean doesn’t nullify that Carver mangles characters when he can’t solve his plot problems.

Carver does let Dean behave like Dean here as we get classic snark and two gut wrenching Dean moments. The thanks goes primarily to Jensen Ackles, who knows the Dean character inside and out and how he’d react in any situation. The characterization of Dean was consistent. And a problem. Nothing new was revealed about Dean’s character. Was there any doubt he’d choose to save his parents by altering history? Nope. That choice was clear from Dean’s ambivalence after the Djinn dream world in What Is and What Should Never Be where he questions whether hunting to save innocents was worth the cost.

All of This Has Happened Before
While watching this episode, the line “All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again” came to mind. Yes, that’s a Battlestar Galactica reference. And more relevant to Supernatural and our lost boy Dean, it’s the first spoken line of Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie.

“All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.” In Kansas. Twice.

The ‘if only Dean could change the past’ story was already done in What Is and What Should Never Be. Sam had his crack at doing things over and over and over in Mystery Spot. Those are two of my favorite episodes. At least they stole from their best work, as this is the best rip-off of their own show probably ever.

Overall this episode was super enjoyable for a futile effort. There was plenty of pie and lovely full fat whip cream, with vanilla ice cream on the side! Supernatural never gives so much without exacting a price. After three extremely delectable episodes in season 4, Eric Kripke must be planning to break my heart just before ripping it clean out of my chest. Son of a bitch!