Supernatural: Two and Half Men
August 27, 2021 4:46 AM - Season 6, Episode 2 - Subscribe
After four couples are murdered and their babies go missing, Sam finds that a security company may be involved in the case and summons Dean to help him to bring the baby of a fifth slaughtered family to Samuel, but they soon realize that a powerful shapeshifter is determined to get the baby and that the baby is not as it seems.
Quotes:
Dean: Maybe I shouldn't go.
Lisa: It's okay. You want to go, so go.
Dean: You know what, Sam can handle this.
Lisa: No offence, but if you don't leave, I will shoot you.
Samuel: Okay, so, either we got monsters grabbing babies to make baby stew, or we got a bunch of psychotic yokels grabbing babies to make baby stew. Either way, it's baby stew, which is bad.
Sam: It was fast. And it freaked when I cut it with silver.
Dean: All right. So that narrows it down to?
Sam: A ghoul, a zombie, a shifter or about a dozen other things.
Dean: I don't recall seeing babynapping in the profiles.
Sam: Yeah. Exactly.
Dean: [to the baby] Well, feel free to speak up if you know anything.
Dean: [trying to adjust a car seat] Who designed this thing, NASA?
Sam: [the baby is crying in the grocery store] Dean, make it stop.
Dean: How?
Sam: Everyone's staring at us like we're child abusers! Feed it!
Dean: We fed it!
Sam: Then what?
Dean: I don't know. You think I speak baby? Maybe he needs a diaper change.
Sam: Oh God, I hope not.
Dean: It's like trying to defuse an IED with poop.
Dean: [to the baby] Okay, if I put you down, are you gonna be a man about it?
Dean: You got something to say to me?
Mark: ...
Dean: Ok, then why don't you just stand there and think at me.
Samuel: [hands the baby to Mark] Congratulations, it's a boy. Sometimes.
Dean: You can't just Angelina Jolie a shapeshifter!
Dean: What the hell's it want with babies anyway?
Samuel: Softball team?
Sam: Not every hunter is a head case. I mean, Samuel is actually a lot like you.
Dean: I'm a freaking head case.
Trivia:
Sam calls Dean "Guttenberg", a reference to Steve Guttenberg from Three Men and a Baby.
When Dean is lulling the baby to sleep in the motel room, he is humming Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water". That same song is playing during the final scene of the episode.
The security systems installed in the houses of the victims is from Harper Caine Security. In the show Two and a Half Men, the last name of the brothers is "Harper".
This is the first time in the show that we see the characters actually facing their doppelgängers in a single shot. Usually when the actors have to play against themselves the shots are overs or close up coverage on one or the other (this is of course a money-saving technique). But in this episode for the first time first Sam and then Dean face the shapeshifter that has taken their form, and we see both of them on screen simultaneously.
This episode has the first mention of Alpha monsters.
The shapeshifter behavior in the episode (especially when he was sitting in the car next to the officer he killed) resembles the behavior of the T1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
In "Jump the Shark" (ep. 4.19), one of the ways they test Adam is with silver, but he doesn't react to it and Sam mentions later that as a ghoul he wouldn't, but in this episode Sam says that the monster's reaction means he could be a ghoul.
Quotes:
Dean: Maybe I shouldn't go.
Lisa: It's okay. You want to go, so go.
Dean: You know what, Sam can handle this.
Lisa: No offence, but if you don't leave, I will shoot you.
Samuel: Okay, so, either we got monsters grabbing babies to make baby stew, or we got a bunch of psychotic yokels grabbing babies to make baby stew. Either way, it's baby stew, which is bad.
Sam: It was fast. And it freaked when I cut it with silver.
Dean: All right. So that narrows it down to?
Sam: A ghoul, a zombie, a shifter or about a dozen other things.
Dean: I don't recall seeing babynapping in the profiles.
Sam: Yeah. Exactly.
Dean: [to the baby] Well, feel free to speak up if you know anything.
Dean: [trying to adjust a car seat] Who designed this thing, NASA?
Sam: [the baby is crying in the grocery store] Dean, make it stop.
Dean: How?
Sam: Everyone's staring at us like we're child abusers! Feed it!
Dean: We fed it!
Sam: Then what?
Dean: I don't know. You think I speak baby? Maybe he needs a diaper change.
Sam: Oh God, I hope not.
Dean: It's like trying to defuse an IED with poop.
Dean: [to the baby] Okay, if I put you down, are you gonna be a man about it?
Dean: You got something to say to me?
Mark: ...
Dean: Ok, then why don't you just stand there and think at me.
Samuel: [hands the baby to Mark] Congratulations, it's a boy. Sometimes.
Dean: You can't just Angelina Jolie a shapeshifter!
Dean: What the hell's it want with babies anyway?
Samuel: Softball team?
Sam: Not every hunter is a head case. I mean, Samuel is actually a lot like you.
Dean: I'm a freaking head case.
Trivia:
Sam calls Dean "Guttenberg", a reference to Steve Guttenberg from Three Men and a Baby.
When Dean is lulling the baby to sleep in the motel room, he is humming Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water". That same song is playing during the final scene of the episode.
The security systems installed in the houses of the victims is from Harper Caine Security. In the show Two and a Half Men, the last name of the brothers is "Harper".
This is the first time in the show that we see the characters actually facing their doppelgängers in a single shot. Usually when the actors have to play against themselves the shots are overs or close up coverage on one or the other (this is of course a money-saving technique). But in this episode for the first time first Sam and then Dean face the shapeshifter that has taken their form, and we see both of them on screen simultaneously.
This episode has the first mention of Alpha monsters.
The shapeshifter behavior in the episode (especially when he was sitting in the car next to the officer he killed) resembles the behavior of the T1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
In "Jump the Shark" (ep. 4.19), one of the ways they test Adam is with silver, but he doesn't react to it and Sam mentions later that as a ghoul he wouldn't, but in this episode Sam says that the monster's reaction means he could be a ghoul.
When asked what the baby's name is, Sam says John, Dean says Bobby. That says a lot about how their feelings have shifted regarding their dad and their surrogate dad.
At no point does Dean say “I love you,” or really address his relationship with Lisa. He only talks about wanting to be there for Ben. Lisa, also has a point: it wasn’t fair to her to deal with a grieving, broken Dean after Sam told him to go to her. Their interactions are more of the slippery slope slide into Dean being a horrible partner.
posted by sardonyx at 7:15 AM on August 27, 2021
At no point does Dean say “I love you,” or really address his relationship with Lisa. He only talks about wanting to be there for Ben. Lisa, also has a point: it wasn’t fair to her to deal with a grieving, broken Dean after Sam told him to go to her. Their interactions are more of the slippery slope slide into Dean being a horrible partner.
posted by sardonyx at 7:15 AM on August 27, 2021
I don't watch Supernatural for the dismemberment but look, that title is writing checks that the episode does not cash.
You can argue how suited Dean is to being a parent but whatever percent good he is at that, it's higher than how good he's probably capable of being as a romantic partner. I don't even say that as a character flaw as such (independent of his choices in specific relationships because thoughts and prayers for Lisa, I could never.) Huge caveat that this show ran long enough and inconsistently enough under enough writers that most character generalizations fall apart somewhere. But Dean's not a loner or antisocial, he deeply wants a family, and partly because of the way he was socialized he pictures that a particular way. But that doesn't mean he's always capable of maintaining that if he has it, or that he doesn't over time get that need fulfilled in other ways. (This is from the previous episode and you have to consider the source, but it always stands out to me that Sam tells Dean he stayed away because Dean didn't want a brother, he wanted a family. What an odd thing to say, to Dean of all people.)
posted by jameaterblues at 7:39 PM on August 27, 2021
You can argue how suited Dean is to being a parent but whatever percent good he is at that, it's higher than how good he's probably capable of being as a romantic partner. I don't even say that as a character flaw as such (independent of his choices in specific relationships because thoughts and prayers for Lisa, I could never.) Huge caveat that this show ran long enough and inconsistently enough under enough writers that most character generalizations fall apart somewhere. But Dean's not a loner or antisocial, he deeply wants a family, and partly because of the way he was socialized he pictures that a particular way. But that doesn't mean he's always capable of maintaining that if he has it, or that he doesn't over time get that need fulfilled in other ways. (This is from the previous episode and you have to consider the source, but it always stands out to me that Sam tells Dean he stayed away because Dean didn't want a brother, he wanted a family. What an odd thing to say, to Dean of all people.)
posted by jameaterblues at 7:39 PM on August 27, 2021
You can argue how suited Dean is to being a parent but whatever percent good he is at that, it's higher than how good he's probably capable of being as a romantic partner.
I'd put that down to the fact that Dean has had some parenting role models to look to as well as considerable personal experience in raising a child to draw on, while when it comes to romantic relationships he has neither. Dean raised Sam, and while John was a terrible father he did have some good qualities, and there was also Bobby and other babysitters/foster families for Dean to look to. (While we've seen that John left Dean and Sam alone in hotel rooms for days on end when Dean was as young as nine or ten, there is NO WAY he could have done that when Dean was four and Sam was a baby. In the early years they must have had people taking care of them, probably quite a number of them.) So Dean has resources to draw on when it comes to knowing how to care for children.
But what personal experience does Dean have of romantic relationships? Has he ever even seen a functioning romantic partnership in operation? As he says in the episode in which he and Sam have themselves committed to a psychiatric institution, he's never had a relationship that lasted two months, so even his relationship with Cassie was short-lived. It's all been about casual sex for him, and he could never tell any of the women he's been involved with the truth about who he was or what he did. The one time he did fall in love with a woman (Cassie) and tell her the truth about himself, she dumped him immediately. As for role models, his parents' marriage was on the rocks when he was four, and then his mother died, after which she and the marriage she had had with his father became a lost Utopian ideal.
It's no surprise that Dean would struggle with being a partner. A year in, he was handling ordinary day to day life pretty well, but when he tried to combine hunting life with his relationship with Lisa, things really went to pot. Dean really blew it with Lisa by electing to not tell her things. He wanted to protect her, but while he didn't need to tell her everything, if they were going to be together he needed to tell her enough that she would be able to understand his actions/whatever's happening to her and Ben. It's not like she wouldn't understand, because she had seen enough and knew enough already that whatever he had to say would make sense to her. I suppose he just didn't know how to handle the situation given that he was raised to keep a code of silence/lies about his work, and that he has a very strong drive to protect children and anyone he loves from the kind of horrible things he's constantly dealing with. Lisa needs to understand what is going on and he's shutting her out, and she can't live with that.
posted by orange swan at 6:05 AM on August 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
I'd put that down to the fact that Dean has had some parenting role models to look to as well as considerable personal experience in raising a child to draw on, while when it comes to romantic relationships he has neither. Dean raised Sam, and while John was a terrible father he did have some good qualities, and there was also Bobby and other babysitters/foster families for Dean to look to. (While we've seen that John left Dean and Sam alone in hotel rooms for days on end when Dean was as young as nine or ten, there is NO WAY he could have done that when Dean was four and Sam was a baby. In the early years they must have had people taking care of them, probably quite a number of them.) So Dean has resources to draw on when it comes to knowing how to care for children.
But what personal experience does Dean have of romantic relationships? Has he ever even seen a functioning romantic partnership in operation? As he says in the episode in which he and Sam have themselves committed to a psychiatric institution, he's never had a relationship that lasted two months, so even his relationship with Cassie was short-lived. It's all been about casual sex for him, and he could never tell any of the women he's been involved with the truth about who he was or what he did. The one time he did fall in love with a woman (Cassie) and tell her the truth about himself, she dumped him immediately. As for role models, his parents' marriage was on the rocks when he was four, and then his mother died, after which she and the marriage she had had with his father became a lost Utopian ideal.
It's no surprise that Dean would struggle with being a partner. A year in, he was handling ordinary day to day life pretty well, but when he tried to combine hunting life with his relationship with Lisa, things really went to pot. Dean really blew it with Lisa by electing to not tell her things. He wanted to protect her, but while he didn't need to tell her everything, if they were going to be together he needed to tell her enough that she would be able to understand his actions/whatever's happening to her and Ben. It's not like she wouldn't understand, because she had seen enough and knew enough already that whatever he had to say would make sense to her. I suppose he just didn't know how to handle the situation given that he was raised to keep a code of silence/lies about his work, and that he has a very strong drive to protect children and anyone he loves from the kind of horrible things he's constantly dealing with. Lisa needs to understand what is going on and he's shutting her out, and she can't live with that.
posted by orange swan at 6:05 AM on August 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
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I kind of loved seeing Dean with that baby. But, as with the Lisa and Ben situation, it's another scenario underlining the reality that Dean would love being a father but can never be one, because he can't combine family life with hunting, and he will not and cannot ever give up hunting -- and how powerless he is to protect those in his care from the monsters he has to deal with.
Exit a few of the Campbell cousins. It's weird that Samuel referred to them as "three of my people" when they were either his grandchildren, or grandnieces/grandnephews.
posted by orange swan at 4:51 AM on August 27, 2021