Supernatural: Weekend at Bobby's

August 29, 2021 5:06 AM - Season 6, Episode 4

After Bobby discovers Crowley has no intentions of returning his soul, he takes matters into his own hands.

Quotes:

Bobby: [On the phone with a hunter] Doesn't sound like our kind of thing. Better drop a dime to the FBI. [Hangs up. His "FBI" phone rings. He answers]
Bobby: Willis, FBI. [pause] No, Garth, not me the FBI, the *real* FBI! How are you still alive?

Marcy: I love scary movies! Have you seen Drag Me To Hell?
Bobby: Trying to avoid it.

[Rufus has buried an okami in Bobby's junkyard]
Bobby: [on the phone] Your okami ain't dead.
Rufus: Of course it is.
Bobby: Did you use a bamboo dagger?
Rufus: Of course!
Bobby: Blessed by a Shinto priest?
Rufus: I'm not an imbecile, Bobby.
Bobby: Did you stab it seven times?
Rufus: Five times.
Bobby: It's seven!
Rufus: No, I'm pretty sure it's five.
Bobby: Clearly it's seven times; the damn hole is empty.

Rufus: [after Bobby has killed the okami] So you just happened to have a bamboo dagger blessed by a Shinto priest laying around?
Bobby: Wood chipper.
Rufus: Oh, okey dokey. Wood chipper, that -– that pretty much trumps everything.

Bobby: Monsters lately; is it me or is it weird?

Crowley: I thought when I got the corner office, it was all going to be rainbows and two-headed puppies. But if I'm being honest, it's been hell.
Bobby: I thought that was the point.

Crowley: Feels good to get it off my chest. We should make this a thing.
Bobby: Do I look like Dr. Phil to you?
Crowley: A little.

Crowley: You didn't read your contract?
Bobby: The hell you talking about, contract? [writing appears on his skin]
Crowley: Paragraph 18, subsection B, which is on your naughty bits.

Crowley: Save you the recap. In fact I'll do the shorthand for you. I want my soul back, idjit. 'Fraid not. But I'm surly and I got a beard. Gimme! Blah, blah, blah. Homespun cornpone insult, witty retort from yours truly. The bottom line is, you get bupkis. Are we done?

Bobby: What's your poison, Your Highness?
Crowley: Craig, aged 30 years at least. Been drinking it since grade school.
Bobby: Well, I got old rotgut, aged six days.
Crowley: Swill like that is gonna burn a hole in your soul. Oh, sorry. My soul.

Bobby: Crowley's name.
Crossroads Demon: Okay. Okay. MacLeod. Fergus MacLeod. Swear. We call him Lucky the Leprechaun behind his back.
Bobby: MacLeod's Scottish, Einstein.

Bobby: Crowley let slip that he likes Craig. It's, um...
Rufus: It's Scotch. Only made and sold in a tiny area on the north tip of Caithness County. It's peaty and sharp with a long finish of citrus and tobacco notes.
Bobby: ...
Rufus: What? What am I, a heathen? I know what Craig is.

Bobby: I know it all now. Fergus. You may be king of the dirt bags here but, in life, you were nothing but a two-bit tailor who sold his soul in exchange for an extra three inches below the belt.
Crowley: Just trying to hit double digits.

Bobby: I appreciate you boys lending a hand.
Dean: Hey, any time we get to punk Crowley works for us.
Sam: Yeah.
Bobby: Still... knowing how much you love flying, the friendly skies... I guess a nine-hour plane trip was no picnic. You drink your way through it?
Dean: I was fine.
Sam: No. He white-knuckled his way through four puke bags.
Dean: Well, at least I was sober. Some nutjob decided to try something, I was ready; I had a fork.

Agent Adams: Have you seen this man, Rufus Turner AKA Luther Vandross AKA Ruben Studdard.
Bobby: No. Never seen that dick.
Agent Adams: How do you know he's a dick?
Bobby: Lucky guess

Agent Adams: I just want to take a look around.
Bobby: You got a warrant, sonny?
Agent Adams: Well, do I need one, sir?
Sheriff Mills: Okay fellas, put the rulers away. Zip up.

Bobby: Why did you send him outside?
Sheriff Mills: ’Cause I didn't think you’d want him in here.
Bobby: I don't. I've got a body in the basement.
Sheriff Mills: My point.
Bobby: Yeah, but I've got another body buried in the yard.
Sheriff Mills: Damn it.

Trivia:

This episode was directed by Jensen Ackles.

Dean and Sam are hunting a Lamia, which is the same creature from Drag Me to Hell, the movie mentioned by Bobby's neighbor, Marcy.

When Dean calls Bobby, the caller ID shows the name John P. Jones. John Paul Jones was a member of Led Zeppelin, Dean's favourite band.

Alan Ackles, Jensen Ackles' father, has an uncredited part as the voice of a newscaster heard on Bobby's TV. Jensen Ackles had seen the part on the script and thought his dad could do it. The part was recorded over the phone as Alan Ackles sat in the studio in his house in Texas, in his bathrobe, sipping his coffee.

The title is a play on the 1989 dark comedy Weekend at Bernie's.

One of Bobby's phones is marked with the name Frank Castle. This is the name of Marvel's Punisher.

The character Gavin MacLeod is named after actor, Gavin MacLeod. Among his many roles in movies and television, MacLeod is best known as Murray Slaughter in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Captain Stubing in The Love Boat. The character of Gavin MacLeod was a passenger on a ship that went down and was lost at sea. This is a meta joke reference to the The Love Boat.

Rufus mentions that some items from Gavin McLeod's ship are on display at the Maritime Museum, specifically Gavin's ring. In a later episode, Sam and Dean have to visit the display for a haunted necklace, oddly enough belonging to Gavin's jilted lover.

The first time that "Garth" is mentioned. Bobby says it's a wonder he's still alive. Garth shows up for the first time in the season 7 episode, "Time for a Wedding!", played by DJ Qualls.

Bobby says to Crowley, "I'm going Dateline on your ass," before he reveals a glow-in-the-dark devil's trap. Dateline NBC was known to feature hidden camera sting operations for catching sex offenders and conmen. Crowley's reply, "I hope that's paint," may refer to the fact that human sperm glows under UV light.

When the FBI agent comes to Bobby's house, Bobby says he has a body in the basement as well as in the yard, but later, you see that the "body" in the basement would actually be only ash as the demon burned to death and he torched the demon's remains

At the end of the story, when the boys are driving and talking to Bobby on speaker phone, Dean is steering on the right side of the car. That's because they're still in Scotland after digging up Crowley's bones. The car they were driving was an Austin Metro. It's about the size of the original Mini.

Where Bobby and Rufus are burying a body in Bobby's yard, when the camera pulls back at the end of the scene, a crew member is visible, standing under a wrecked car. The crew member notices and backs into the shadows.

Bobby takes NoDoz caffeine tablets to stay awake.

posted by orange swan (9 comments total)

In this episode we get a look at what Bobby's life is like, and it turns out it sucks. He's running support for a number of hunters and trying to get his soul out of hock and he can't even take a minute to eat peach cobbler, let alone have a date with the nice neighbour lady. Also Sam and Dean can be self-absorbed, demanding pains in his ass.

I don't get how Dean didn't know how much Bobby is doing or about his efforts to get his soul back.

Of course, Bobby went to hell, albeit briefly, in the last episode of season 5, which should have voided his contract as it did Dean's, but...
posted by orange swan at 6:05 AM on August 29, 2021

Exactly this is one of those "inconvenient" family episodes that was bothering me. At no point to either of the boys say to Bobby, "what's going on, what do you need help with, is there anything we can do for you?" Instead, it's all "we need this, and we need that." It's all a one-way street. Bobby shouldn't have to beg to get Sam and Dean to help him. Sheriff Mills, who isn't family, is more understanding of Bobby and receptive to him and willing to help him than his so-called Winchester "family."

I'm not very familiar with peach cobbler, but I'd be willing to bet that sitting that long in the fridge means it's well past its prime.
posted by sardonyx at 8:01 AM on August 29, 2021

I really like this episode for the behind-the-scenes look (and, of course, another Rufus appearance); it gives the world some extra texture and reminds us that when Sam and Dean call on Bobby, he's not just waiting around for them to call; he's probably in the middle of five other things at once.

I love DJ Qualls and it's a real shame Garth doesn't show up for another season.


I'm not very familiar with peach cobbler, but I'd be willing to bet that sitting that long in the fridge means it's well past its prime.

Okay so like you know what apple pie filling is like? Imagine that except peaches, and it's in a baking dish and covered with a crust that starts out on the bottom but rises through the filling during the baking process. Absolutely delicious, but won't keep past a week or so.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:21 AM on August 29, 2021

It absolutely hurts that Bobby, who is pretty much a decent guy, doesn't get to have a personal life. He's the lifeline for so many hunters and the lynch pin of so many investigations, but he's so wrapped up in that world that he can't even see what's in front of him when it comes to normal human interactions. He deserves so much better. He also deserves somebody (or somebodies) to act as his backup, something he really doesn't have in any meaningful way.
posted by sardonyx at 10:37 AM on August 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Bobby mentions that he's drinking old rotgut "aged 6 days" - bourbon, by law, has to be made from majority corn and aged a minimum 2 years in virgin charred oak barrels.

Crowley might be talking about Glencraig (a Speyside whisky, not Elijah Craig, a bourbon) but the distillery founded in 1829 at Glenburgie isn't quite "the north tip" of anything, like Rufus mentions.

If he's talking about Craigellachie (pronounced craig ella key), while it is also in Caithness County, the distillery founded in the 1890s is about as inland as possible for Caithness.

Both currently have 30+ year aged-in-barrel offerings.

Fergus Rodric MacLeod (Crowley), according to Rufus, was born in 1661 so unless Crowley was in grade school after turning 200... Of course, Crowley is a known liar.

If "Craig" was defunct, and bottles were magicked back into existence for Crowley's pleasure, 1661 still predates any (licensed) Scottish distilleries of which the first recorded were well into the 1700s. Bushmills (Irish) was one of the first recorded licensed distilleries, having been granted one in 1608. The first surviving recorded mention of Scotch whisky was 1495, though.

But, Scotch didn't start getting aged until the 1800s after the collapse of the French winemaking industry (impacting the production of cognac) which led to sherry becoming popular in Scotland among the well-to-do, which was imported in barrels from Spain because lower ABV (up to 17% compared to 40%+ for cognac) necessitated larger volumes. This led to a surplus of empty used sherry barrels, and they were used as a cheap solution to storing whisky. Up until then, whisky was preferentially consumed fresh (as "rotgut") but it was accidentally discovered that it got tastier the longer it was stored in those particular barrels.

Elijah Craig was founded in 1789 in Kentucky, but no releases have been aged more than 23 years, and it is one of the very first to age corn mash distillate in charred oak to create/ invent bourbon.

Incidentally, virgin charred oak barrels ages distillate to similar levels of tastiness much faster than used barrels, and a factor for why Scotches typically spend a lot longer aging - and super old bourbons aren't necessarily any tastier (sometimes the reverse, they get overwhelmed and just taste like old wood).

The British Isles had a deforestation problem well before the 1800's - each naval warvessel around then took several thousand mature oak trees to make, so the idea of using new barrels to store whisky didn't occur (whisky was stored in random used barrels until the sherry barrel surplus). Kentucky, then, still had lots and lots of mature oak trees.

lol, the photo (windowed, no less) on the 14" CRT taking a couple of seconds to load from the internet.

Like I've mentioned, I've become a big fan of Mark Sheppard mainly on strength of his performance as Crowley, then kept seeing him pop up elsewhere. This episode goes a long way to give the character depth and some humanity.
posted by porpoise at 1:43 PM on August 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

The "grade school" reference was odd, but I suppose when one has existed for 400 years one must sometimes translate one's life experience into modern terms in order to be understood. And perhaps Crowley was deliberately trying not to reveal too much about his personal history. I mean, he has a British accent and name when he's Scottish. Is that ever explained?

Peach cobbler would absolutely keep in the fridge for a weekend. It would keep as long as a pie.

Bobby was a foster father to Sam and Dean, and they've been used to him taking care of them, but the thing is now that they're grown men of 31 and 27, their relationship should have become more equitable as relationships between adults should be. It bugs me that they never did more to get his legs working again than to ask Castiel to fix him -- if it had been one of them in a wheelchair, they would have been all over that. To be fair, they do always have a lot on their plates, and once Bobby told them off for being self-absorbed they took their lecture without complaint or argument and told him they were willing to do whatever they could to help him. Then they went to Scotland to find Crowley's bones which, given their financial situation and Dean's phobia of flying, was not a small thing.

As an aunt with grown nieces and nephews... I can tell you that it is not uncommon for young adults in their 20s and 30s to not realize that relationships with their elders should not be a one-way street anymore.

I've been doing a google dive on Jim Beaver. His father was a minister, he attended a Christian university for a year, and he seems to still identify as a Christian though not to talk about it much. He served in Vietnam for two years. He was originally a playwright and TV writer before focusing more on acting. He's been married three times. The first marriage took place in 1973 when he was a student and lasted four months. The second lasted 15 years, produced his only daughter, and ended when his wife died of lung cancer in 2004. He's written a memoir about the year of his wife's death called Life's That Way. He and his third wife have been together since 2016 and married in 2019. He describes himself as a liberal Democrat and is clearly pro-vax and anti-Trump. During the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017, he wrote a Facebook post about how he'd been repeatedly molested by a high ranking Naval officer during his military days, but that he didn't feel that the #MeToo movement was for him and thought it was more appropriate for him to show support for women by saying, "I believe you," than to ask for solidarity for himself by saying, "Me too." He generally demonstrates a good grasp of political concepts/issues, and is a good writer.

He comes across as sensible, down-to-earth, funny, and friendly on Twitter, shares details of day to day life such as lunch with his daughter, and chats with random Twitter users in a way actors at his level seldom do. He even makes gallant and civil attempts to talk sense to the anti-vaxxers or Trumpists who tweet at him, but wisely bows out of such no-win conversations after a few exchanges, and blocks purveyors of misinformation to keep them from using him to disseminate their garbage. He generally maintained media silence on Jared Padalecki's 2019 arrest for a drunken assault of three people at a nightclub, but I don't blame him for that. In his position, and in that specific situation, it was best that he say whatever he had to say to Jared in private. The really important thing is that he didn't make excuses for him/make light of what he did, and he hasn't. The one thing he's said that I looked at askance was to say that, regarding the allegations against Woody Allen, he "leans toward" believing Woody (eeek).

Even so, he's pretty solidly in the "a decent person so far as I can tell from googling" category.
posted by orange swan at 3:03 PM on August 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Pie in the fridge? For a week? Not in my house.

Pie is meant to be eaten fresh the day it was baked. It can maybe sit on the counter for a day or so, but even then it's not the same. Crust doesn't really hold up for that long. And in the fridge? I can just envision it turning into cold, damp mush.
posted by sardonyx at 4:58 PM on August 29, 2021

I give up on figuring out soul contracts. Intuitively, it makes more sense to me that selling your soul means selling your soul, not selling the right to send your soul to Hell one time (this is a little retconning, but if souls are so valuable that angels are stocking up, I think it makes more sense if they own those souls, not just the right to send them somewhere?) Not that it matters, since clearly it works however a given episode needs it to work.

There are a couple more episodes that are partly or mostly from Bobby's perspective, and Sam and Dean intentionally don't always come off well as supporting characters in his life versus episodes where it's the other way around. (And I don't just mean in a "why didn't they ask Castiel to heal Bobby's spine" way, Dean accusing Bobby of being selfish is the writers laying it on pretty thick.) I have some issues with Bobby's character both on the story's own terms and how he works as a character, which episodes like this don't really resolve, but they give it a shot and I'm always happy to see Rufus.

(For a bunch of reasons, I always wish we knew more about what Samuel Campbell and Bobby make of each other. As the saying goes, if you had a nickel for every surrogate father who killed his wife while one of the two was possessed by a demon and later disemboweled himself while possessed by a demon, you'd only have two nickels, but it's weird that that happened twice.)

Can you IMAGINE being a fallen angel or an arch-demon from the dawn of time, spending eons plotting your ascendancy and starting a prophesied cosmic war, and within a couple of years not only does your whole team wind up dead or imprisoned, but the guy they put in charge next is an 18th century rando who sold his soul for a bigger dong.
posted by jameaterblues at 6:23 PM on August 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Seventeenth century rando, but it is FUCKING HILARIOUS that Crowley AKA Fergus sold his soul for a bigger dick. Despite his claim that he was "trying to get into the double digits", I bet he had a micropenis to start with.

Sam did ask Castiel to heal Bobby's spine, but Castiel was out of angel juice at that time and couldn't do it. He didn't get his powers back until the last episode of season 5, by which point Crowley had already healed Bobby. I just think Sam and Dean should have looked at other options. Bobby was so depressed about being a paraplegic that he was thinking of suicide, and he tried gambling with that Irish witch. Dean bailed him out of the latter situation, but still, it didn't feel like Sam and Dean really registered Bobby's pain.
posted by orange swan at 7:26 PM on August 29, 2021 [1 favorite]