Supernatural: Croatoan
June 12, 2021 12:03 PM - Season 2, Episode 9 - Subscribe
Sam has a vision of Dean shooting a defenseless man, and they go to the town of River Grove, where they find the townspeople have been possessed by a virus that makes them violent.
Sarge gets done dirty, but somebody was really proud of that Mr. Rogers joke.
I don't think I can look at Dean's choice to stay and die with Sam apart from the fact that he's in a really bad place, and has been for a while. (I think we don't hear what John said to him yet, but once you know that's what's been going through his head for months, and in the clinic room in particular, aw man.) Even so...I'm not sure at what point in his life we'd see him make a different choice in those circumstances, whether or not Sam needs it, much less wants it. He is who is is.
As recently discussed, there are a lot of things Jensen Ackles is better at as an actor than Jared Padalecki, but I dunno, Single Man Tear doesn't get to me like Sam messily bawling his eyes out. ('Single Man Tear', the song, is wonderful and makes me laugh and laugh.)
The Roanoake colony was one of my favorite spooky real life stories when I was a kid, and I was so mad when I grew up and found out that the word "Croatoan" found carved into a tree was not a cryptic reference to some unknown doom as had been presented to me, but the perfectly well known name of a local tribe who probably rescued the English, and it wasn't that uncommon for failed colonies to dissolve in this way, but the English and later the Americans really didn't like to talk about that, which is partly why it's not widely known even now and we have this weird non-mystery when nothing that mysterious actually happened, just regular racism.
This also makes it...in Very questionable taste that the Croatoan virus turns civilized people into bloodthirsty savages, and the rest who vanished were presumably mostly possessed by demons. I don't know if Supernatural did that coincidentally out of ignorance, or some point to make from some halfbaked association between the Roanoke Colony/Croatoan and social dissolution, or (jesus) as a metaphor, or even looked into it enough to know about the Native American connection, I don't know and I'm not really looking to make their excuses, but Hoo Boy.
I haven't really tried keeping track, but Crossroad Blues and Croatoan coming back to back reminded me how many season 2 MOTW introduce plot elements that play out for years. Not every episode is great (though I like both of these quite a lot), but they're in a nice spot in between figuring out what the show is and being really deep into the mytharc.
posted by jameaterblues at 3:29 PM on June 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
I don't think I can look at Dean's choice to stay and die with Sam apart from the fact that he's in a really bad place, and has been for a while. (I think we don't hear what John said to him yet, but once you know that's what's been going through his head for months, and in the clinic room in particular, aw man.) Even so...I'm not sure at what point in his life we'd see him make a different choice in those circumstances, whether or not Sam needs it, much less wants it. He is who is is.
As recently discussed, there are a lot of things Jensen Ackles is better at as an actor than Jared Padalecki, but I dunno, Single Man Tear doesn't get to me like Sam messily bawling his eyes out. ('Single Man Tear', the song, is wonderful and makes me laugh and laugh.)
The Roanoake colony was one of my favorite spooky real life stories when I was a kid, and I was so mad when I grew up and found out that the word "Croatoan" found carved into a tree was not a cryptic reference to some unknown doom as had been presented to me, but the perfectly well known name of a local tribe who probably rescued the English, and it wasn't that uncommon for failed colonies to dissolve in this way, but the English and later the Americans really didn't like to talk about that, which is partly why it's not widely known even now and we have this weird non-mystery when nothing that mysterious actually happened, just regular racism.
This also makes it...in Very questionable taste that the Croatoan virus turns civilized people into bloodthirsty savages, and the rest who vanished were presumably mostly possessed by demons. I don't know if Supernatural did that coincidentally out of ignorance, or some point to make from some halfbaked association between the Roanoke Colony/Croatoan and social dissolution, or (jesus) as a metaphor, or even looked into it enough to know about the Native American connection, I don't know and I'm not really looking to make their excuses, but Hoo Boy.
I haven't really tried keeping track, but Crossroad Blues and Croatoan coming back to back reminded me how many season 2 MOTW introduce plot elements that play out for years. Not every episode is great (though I like both of these quite a lot), but they're in a nice spot in between figuring out what the show is and being really deep into the mytharc.
posted by jameaterblues at 3:29 PM on June 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
That's a lot of artistic license for the blood smear under the microscope. Those peach coloured concave disks kind of look like non-red red blood cells than lymphocytes which would be (much) larger colourless spheroids. There are exactly 0 lymphocytes in that field. The 'residue' doesn't even look like platelets - and 'residue' visible at this magnification would be lethal in someone's bloodstream, and there's no way to identify it as sulphur.
It's not a thing to look at lymphocytes at this magnification (if there were any) and be able to say if the increase is due to a viral vs bacterial/ fungal infection vs immune dysregulation. Doing an adherence assay might be able to indicate whether there are elevated monocytes to start guessing that it's bacterial vs. viral.
posted by porpoise at 6:12 PM on June 12, 2021
It's not a thing to look at lymphocytes at this magnification (if there were any) and be able to say if the increase is due to a viral vs bacterial/ fungal infection vs immune dysregulation. Doing an adherence assay might be able to indicate whether there are elevated monocytes to start guessing that it's bacterial vs. viral.
posted by porpoise at 6:12 PM on June 12, 2021
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Dean: Yeah, the shot heard round the world, how a bill becomes a law...
Sam: That's not school. That's Schoolhouse Rock!
Dean: Whatever.
Sarge: [pointing gun at Dean] My neighbor, Mr. Rogers...
Dean: [pointing gun at Sarge] Wait, you have a neighbor named Mr. Rogers?
Sarge: Not anymore.
Duane Tanner: Has anyone seen my Mom and Dad?
Dean: [who killed both of Duane's parents because they became infected with the virus, quietly to Sam] ... Awkward...
Guy with gun: Do you mind stepping out of the car for a minute?
Dean: Well, you are a handsome devil but I don't swing that way, sorry.
Trivia from the episode's IMDB page:
The "Lost Colony" that Sam mentions is actually a real colony. The Roanoke Colony, also known as the Lost Colony, established on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, United States, was a late 16th-century attempt by Queen Elizabeth I to establish a permanent English settlement. The final group of colonists disappeared during the Anglo-Spanish War, three years after the last shipment of supplies from England. Their disappearance gave rise to the nickname "The Lost Colony". To this day there has been no conclusive evidence as to what happened to the colonists, although the prevailing theory is that they assimilated into the local native population.
Jared Padalecki has said many times in interviews and at conventions that filming the scene where Sam tells Dean to leave him was especially hard. For some reason Padalecki got very emotional and had to make an effort to dial it back because the emotion didn't serve the scene.
This one reminded me a lot of The Night of the Living Dead.
posted by orange swan at 12:10 PM on June 12, 2021 [1 favorite]