Supernatural: Time Is On My Side
July 11, 2021 6:15 AM - Season 3, Episode 15 - Subscribe

Sam and Dean work a case involving a doctor who, back in 1816, became obsessed with finding the secret of eternal life by taking people's vital organs. Meanwhile, Bobby has a lead on Bela's whereabouts and Dean leaves Sam to confront her.

Quotes:

Rufus Turner: There are things that you don't know about her.
Dean: Oh and you do? Right; because you know things.
Rufus Turner: Yep.
Dean: And let me guess, you lift her fingerprint?
Rufus Turner: Yep.
Dean: And that got you jack.
Rufus Turner: Yep. She burned them off. Probably years ago.
Dean: Yeah, so you're right where we are.
Rufus Turner: Nope. You do her ear?
Dean: Sorry?
Rufus Turner: You do her ear?
Dean: Hey man I'll try anything once, but I don't know, that sounds uncomfortable.

Trivia:

Towards the beginning of the episode, after Sam and Dean, interrogate the demon to find out who holds Dean's contract. Sam recites an exorcism that goes like this "Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus. Omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, Omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica." This is Latin and it translates to "We exorcise you, every impure spirit. Every incursion of the infernal adversary, every legion, every congregation and diabolical sect."
posted by orange swan (9 comments total)
 
I hate to think where/how Dean and Sam got those blow up dolls. They couldn't use towels or something? Bet that was Dean's idea and Sam protested and then rolled his eyes and went along with it.

The immortal doctor was Billy Drago, the same actor who played Peattie in The X-Files episode "Theef". Creepy and menacing seems to be his forte.

This was Bela's last episode. I wish she had lasted longer but that was a good six-episode run. Interesting that she let Dean think she was worse than she was and had killed her parents simply to inherit their money. She doesn't care what anyone thinks of her and prefers not to discuss her trauma.

I'm not clear on why Bela would spend her last ten years on earth as a dealer in supernatural paraphernalia when she had inherited millions, but it's probably a combination of greed, dysfunction, liking the excitement of the life, and hoping that the network/connections she would build and things she would learn would position her to find some way to get out of the deal.

But for someone so smart, she should have realized that building an alliance with Dean and Sam was her best chance of survival. I suppose she underestimated them, and also thought she could kill Sam (and Dean as well, while she was at it) at the eleventh hour, and save herself that way. Instead she screwed them over at every turn: breaking into their father's storage locker, stealing their lottery tickets and the Colt, shooting Sam, having the Impala towed, setting them up to get sent to Supermax for the rest of their lives, and trying to murder them while they slept. By the time she asked Dean for help, he didn't give a damn what horrors she was facing, and I don't blame him.
posted by orange swan at 6:52 AM on July 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


Doctor: "Fine, so you're cops and morons."
Dean: "Excuse me? No, no. We're very smart."

I enjoyed the guy being pissed off that he had a kidney stolen.

Billy Drago is a treasure.

I thought Rufus looked familiar. Steven Williams played Mr. X in TXF.

The immortal doctor was deeply immoral, but, geeze louise that's a brutal resolution by the Winchester boys. Way to make a(n immortal) friend.

The blow up dolls; I'm sure it was played for laughs, but ultra cheap motels are often colocated with adult entertainment stores.

About Bela's lifestyle choice, your hypothesis is pretty solid. Bela probably doesn't see the Winchesters like the audience does, though - from her perspective, they're mostly bumblers.
posted by porpoise at 6:25 PM on July 11, 2021


I was going to say that I had no idea where the boys would have gotten the blow-up dolls, but apparently I'm not at all versed in the geographical planning of adult entertainment shops. Who knew they'd be co-located with cheap motels?

I'm surprised that the demons could change Bela's deal. From everything they've shown so far, I thought deals were immutable and that they needed the human to consent to the terms.

Of course Bela has more information on the demon that holds the contracts than the boys do. That's her specialty, after all. Plus she has had 10 years to gather the information.

If they had write Bela off, I wish they had given her a more prominent part in her final episode. She really only had two scenes.

I'm still not sure why she sold (or said she sold) the Colt. At this point, she didn't need any more money, and it might have helped her out wiggle out of her deal. I know she told Dean that having the gun didn't help, but if the deal was changeable, it should have had some value, even if it just bought her an extra year.
posted by sardonyx at 7:20 PM on July 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


Steven Williams (Rufus) is another of those actors I'm just always pleased to see; you probably would remember him as Mr. X, Mulder's man-on-the-inside after Deep Throat is killed, in The X-Files, but he's also one of the two troopers pursuing Jake and Elwood in The Blues Brothers.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:48 PM on July 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


Who knew they'd be co-located

I was being too flip, what I meant was that city zoning codes limit cheap motels and adult entertainment stores to marginalized locations.
posted by porpoise at 8:44 PM on July 11, 2021


wild, WILD to me that Sam's real actual plan was for them to run away and be immortal organ-stealers together.

Dean's objection, that Benton is a monster and thus not human, and he would rather go to Hell, doesn't totally gel for me; being tortured in Hell till you become a demon doesn't seem like a better solution for anyone. Obviously, the show won't let them go the organ zombie route and needs some reason to sink what is otherwise a not totally unworkable plan, but generously I could write it off as Dean panicking, just in a different way than Sam is. Falling back on the human/monster dynamic (for someone who is explicitly not in any way connected to the supernatural!) gives him a way to decide that feels safe with what he knows, and I think Dean's desperation and terror have something to do with how vicious their solution for Benton is.

Rufus! Hello, Rufus! Always a pleasure.

It's a super quick moment but when Bela is against the wall and for a second starts to panic and struggle and Dean says "don't flatter yourself" as like a quip I always have to pause and get my rage under control before I can continue. That you find out like thirty seconds later she was sexually abused as a child, and also she gets killed off like two scenes later moving some plot around, makes me kind of glad Lauren Cohan went off and got what I assume was a better job on Walking Dead because I like Bela but cmon, she's got to have better things to do with her time than writers who are going to give her that nonsense.

But buying the souls of children desperate to escape the sexual abuse of their parents and then sending them to an eternity in Hell is some incredibly dark shit, even for this show. But I really do like Bela and what she brought to the show, and I (weirdly) like that she would rather risk Dean killing her with the image she's chosen to let people believe than give him something he has no right to.

But yeah, the plot with Bela and the Colt ultimately goes kind of nowhere. I totally misremembered and thought she had stolen the Colt to defend herself, and the whole thing seems pretty pointless otherwise except to get the Colt out of the way as a possible solution, which would be fine enough if they didn't spend multiple episodes building up to it and then give Bela one of the few problems in the universe where holding on to the Colt might actually be really useful. It's not a terrible episode overall, but, woof.
posted by jameaterblues at 10:10 PM on July 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


Somewhere in my google drive I still have an unfinished Bela prequel fanfic that was attempted as a way to explain her whole deal - the thing that always got me is that she looks so young when she makes her deal (and the scene is staged so she looks even younger - the swingset, the uniform), and since that's only pointed out to us a few seconds before she died, there's no way for that to be explored. Did she know she was making a deal at the time? When did she actually find out about the supernatural?
posted by dinty_moore at 6:24 AM on July 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


Wasn't there also something mentioned that implied that children can't bargain their souls?
posted by porpoise at 10:14 AM on July 13, 2021


Porpoise, I don't remember that (but I might have just missed it), but either the Supernatural writing team also forgot what that means in terms of Bela, or they had a real fucked up idea of what would make someone not be considered a child.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:49 AM on July 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


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