Supernatural: How to Win Friends and Influence Monsters
September 25, 2021 6:29 AM - Season 7, Episode 9 - Subscribe

Something is turning the people of a small town in New Jersey into inhuman creatures of a kind that neither the Winchesters nor Bobby have ever seen before, and that prey on other people.

Quotes

Bobby: I never could get you little grubs to pull a trigger on a single deer.
Dean: Talking about Bambi, man.
Bobby: You don't shoot Bambi, jackass. You shoot Bambi's mother.

Bobby: [to Dean] If you die before me, I'll kill ya.

Brandon: [sets a plate of food in front of Sam] Sidewinder Soup and Salad Combo goes to Big Bird, [sets a plate of food in front of Dean] T.D.K. Slammer to Ken doll, and a little Heart Smart [sets a plate of food in front of Bobby] for Creepy Uncle.

Dean: I think you pissed off my sandwich.

Dick Roman: [Regarding humans] I really think you guys have spunk. You're like a planet of just the cutest little engines that could. But... like the late, great actual Dick Roman used to say to the whores he'd kick out of the presidential suite..."Cute doesn't quite hack it, sugar."

Sam: You think the world wants to end?
Dean: I think that if we didn't take its belt and all its pens away each year that, yeah, the whole enchilada woulda offed itself already.

Bobby: What the hell did you get?
Dean: New Pepperjack Turducken Slammer -- limited time only.
Bobby: [eyes the sandwich] Bunch of birds shoved up inside each other. Shouldn't play God like that.
Dean: Hey, don't look at me sideways from that -- that Chinese chicken geezer salad there, okay? This is awesome. Like the perfect storm of your top-three edible birds.

Dean: Remember when Crowley kept going on about hating Dick? I thought he was just being general.

Dean: Hey! Uh, Brandon, can we grab a booth?
Brandon: Hey, douchewad, a hostess will seat you. Do I look like a freaking hostess?
Dean: ... Do you want to look like a hostess?
Brandon: [storms off]
Sam: That didn't really make sense, what you said.

Dean: Our quality of life is crap. We got purgatory's least wanted everywhere, and we're on our third "the world's screwed" issue in, what, three years?

Bobby: There's something wrong with you, Dean.
Dean: Are you kidding? I'm fine! I actually feel great. The best I've felt in a couple months. Cass? Black goo? I don't even care anymore. And you know what's even better? I don't care that I don't care.

Sam: Did he seem a little, uh, stoned to you?
Dean: Ranger Rick? Yeah. Definitely growing his own on the back 40 and smoking all the profits.

Dean: Well, that's funny, right? I could give two shakes of a rat's ass. [thinks] Is that right? Do rats shake their ass, or is it something else?

Bobby: What the hell's a Glamper?
Dean: Sam?
Sam: High-end camper. TV, A.C., Wi-Fi. Back to nature, zero inconvenience.
Bobby: That's idiotic.

Sam: [about the Jersey Devil] Some accounts gave it bat wings, others horns, a tail. And, uh, oh, yeah, a horse's head.
Dean: The sketch looks more like a Chewbacca head.
Bobby: Sounds kind of mixed-up.
Dean: Yeah, kind of like it should be fighting a Japanese robot.

Dick Roman: [after being sprayed with Borax] Sam... That is not how we communicate from a place of yes.

Sam: Okay, so whatever turned Gerry Browder into a pumpkin head, and is currently turning Dean into an idiot...
Dean: I'm right here. Right here.
Bobby: ...is in the turducken slammer at Biggerson's.
Dean: [looks at the goop coming out of his sandwich] If I wasn't so chilled out right now, I would puke.

Bobby: Damn thing is eating Rick.
Dean: Man, I liked Rick.

Dean: Bobby, don't go all Sigmund Freud on me right now, okay? I just got drugged by a sandwich.

Dick Roman: I imagine you appreciate guns.
Bobby: I'd appreciate one right about now.

Bobby: So you got Dick Roman.
Dick Roman: We can have whoever we want. We could have you, for example. If you were worth the effort.
Bobby: Oh, you're hurting my feelings.

Dick Roman: It's an us-eat-dog world.

Bobby: I want to talk about your new party line.
Dean: Party? What are you talking about? I don't even vote.

Bobby: I've seen a lot of hunters live and die. You're starting to talk like one of the dead ones, Dean.
Dean: No, I'm talking the way a person talks when they've had it, when they can't figure out why they used to think all this mattered.
Bobby: Oh, you poor, sorry... You're not a person.
Dean: Thanks.
Bobby: Come on, now. You tried to hang it up and be a person with Lisa and Ben. And now here you are with a mean old coot and a van full of guns. That ain't person behavior, son. You're a hunter, meaning you're whatever the job you're doing today.

Sam: It only took one bullet to bring it down.
Dean: And not even a silver bullet, just a bullet-bullet.
[Boogey jumps back up, they shoot it several times, it dies]
Bobby: First one must have just stunned it.

Dick Roman: If you want to win, then you got to be the shark. And a shark's got to eat.

Trivia

Bobby asks Sam, "Aren't you just full up playing Snuffleupagus with the devil all the live long?" In the early years of Sesame Street, Big Bird was the only one who could see Snuffleupagus.

When Dean questions why he should care anymore, Bobby says, "You get a case of the Anne Sextons, somethings gonna come up behind you and rip your fool head off." He is referring to the Pulitzer Prize winning poet who wrote about her depression and suicidal tendencies.

The van that carries detergents has the company name of "Acme" on it. Acme is the fictional corporation featured mainly on Looney Tunes cartoons (mainly on Road Runner cartoons), where the products are made by Acme. Both Looney Tunes and Supernatural are owned by the Warner Bros. company.

When the waiter in the diner is being rude, Bobby says "What's got his flair in a bunch?" This is a reference to the 1999 Mike Judge film Office Space.

When Dick refers to "a place of yes" he is quoting Bethany Frankel's book A Place of Yes: 10 Rules for Getting Everything You Want Out of Life.

The title is a reference to the 1936 self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Ranger Rick is a children's nature magazine.

In the clip where Dick Roman appears on the news for a press conference applauding his aggressive and successful corporate takeovers, the tag line reads "The Rise of Dick", which is an obvious double entendre.

Bobby has a spy-type listening device that "will pick up vocal vibrations from window glass at half a mile". The prop used in this episode is a simple parabolic microphone which has an operating range of less than 300 feet of open air and crappy sensitivity to low frequency sounds. There are laser microphones that can "hear through windows" at thousands of feet but they look more like skinny cameras than anything else.

The New Jersey Pine Barrens forests are very unique, due to the very sandy soil (being very near the shoreline of a coastal state) and frequent forest fires, the pine trees are very young. They are densely populated, tall, slim, and very little else grows there. Thus the name "Pine Barrens". It was too bad they couldn't film the outdoor scenes in the real New Jersey Pine Barrens, because the ambiance of it can be very, very spooky. The (probably) Canadian forest chosen for filming this episode didn't appear to have a single pine tree in it, and the ground was covered in lush grass.
posted by orange swan (3 comments total)
 
I've never had a turducken anything and now I don't know if I can ever have one.

I find it hard to believe that a leviathan could be made to meekly consume itself. Surely they'd put up a fight.

It seems the real Dick Roman was just about as vile as the Leviathan Dick Roman: he was NRA, Republican, mean to prostitutes.

Bobby knows his Robert Browning and his Anne Sexton. This show does not do a lot of literary references. Dean, who is not a reader, is all about pop culture references, and even Sam, who must have read at least the standard school curriculum literature (we never see him read a book for pleasure), never makes any. I love the implication that Bobby's reveling in poetry in his spare time.

The scene where Sam finds a bullet hole in Bobby's cap and both he and Dean are looking into the back of the van in alarm and horror was well-played.
posted by orange swan at 6:45 AM on September 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


"Buncha birds shoved up inside each other... shouldn't play god like that." Bobby…

At least the real Dick Roman got eaten.

I know it's supposed to be a side effect of the Turducken Madness but honestly, Dean lamenting corpse goo will ruin decent leather and getting snacky in the middle of an autopsy seems like extremely textbook Dean.

For all the times Sam and Dean treat Bobby like Wikipedia with crash space, they know he's smarter than they are and are pretty happy following him around. Some small percent of that might be that it feels enough like (a less miserable version of) the dynamic they grew up in to be comfortable, but mostly, they just honestly think he's cool as hell.

The scene where Sam finds a bullet hole in Bobby's cap and both he and Dean are looking into the back of the van in alarm and horror was well-played.

Yeah, that’s a pretty awful moment.
posted by jameaterblues at 9:12 AM on September 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


That's an interesting bit of background writing for Bobby. Alongside dropping that Bobby likes Browning, leviathanBobby drops that he's a highschool dropout, then something about Bobby's (alcoholic) dad suggesting that his dropping out might not be secondary to lack of scholastic ability.

It's immaterial, but is the FanFare episode title correct?

I've made turduckens before (and even got a comment about it sidebarred on the Blue in 2005). There's no real culinary reason to do it, it's more of a showoff piece. A lot of people do it wrong; the turkey body at a minimum should be glove boned. Stuffing chicken thigh inside a glove boned duck thigh (it's got to be a big duck, but you want a medium turkey and a small chicken anyway), then stuffing that in a glove boned turkey thigh gives you something like a baseball steak with three different layers.

I don't bother with turducken anymore, but I haven't done a whole bird for holiday dinners since - it's turkey rolls now. Book-opened skin-on turkey breast, butterflied thigh, seasoned, rolled up, skin stretched out, and pinned. Two side by side in the oven still cooks faster than a whole bird and you get evenly moist slices of white and dark meat and some crispy skin. For people who like it better done, there are the ends. The rest of the bird (less drumsticks, which go in a slow cooker to make pulled turkey or confit) goes into stock, stock for stovetop stuffing/ dressing, and a lake of gravy. Deglaze the pan with reserved stock or cognac and that goes into jazzing up the gravy.

Sly half jab at tipping - Sam tips 18%.

Dean: "... I'm hungry."

Eating while autopsying jokes are as old as forensic autopsy.

I wonder if they tried giving the boys super soakers, then decided that it would look too silly?
posted by porpoise at 5:47 PM on September 25, 2021


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