Supernatural: Exile on Main Street

August 25, 2021 11:00 PM - Season 6, Episode 1

Sam is mysteriously released from hell and seeks out Dean, who is trying to live a normal life with Lisa. Together the brothers join forces with their newfound Campbell relatives, and begin the fight anew.

Quotes:

Sid: So I been buying you beer for a year. And I think that means you owe me a couple of gory details.
Dean: Oh, no. There's not much to tell, you know? It's, uh... I lived on the road... Took, uh, crap jobs that nobody else wanted.
Sid: Like?
Dean: Like... Pest control.
Sid: Really? Pest control.
Dean: Yeah. You get to work with a partner. You get to help people. You have no idea what's in some people's walls. It could eat 'em alive.

Lisa: Did you almost kill a Yorkie?
Dean: Technically.

Bobby: [to Lisa and Ben] Well, it's nice to finally meet you two. Mi casa es su casa. Maybe you want to just go upstairs. TV's broken, but there's plenty of Reader's Digest. Just don't touch the décor, okay? Assume it's all loaded.

Sam: Golf? Really?
Dean: It's a sport!

Trivia:

The title of this episode is from The Rolling Stones' 1972 double album of the same name.

When Dean is explaining to Sid why he has a gun, he mentions that opossums carry rabies. In fact, rabies is extremely rare in opossums.

Sam's car that's "set up the way he likes it" is an '06 SRT8 Dodge Charger. Dean's truck is an 88 or 89 Ford F-250, and was the very same one Henry Spencer drove in the 2006 movie Psych

posted by orange swan (3 comments total)

I can't help but feel glad Dean got at least one year of normal, settled life, to live decently, to experience a lasting romantic relationship with a woman, to be a dad, to have friends. It's more than he's ever had -- or ever will have again, sigh. Of course he carried a heavy weight of grief the entire time and he didn't look exactly happy or at peace, but he had a good life on the whole and he knew it and valued it. It was nice to see indications that he was pulling his weight domestically -- cooking breakfast, checking on Ben, locking up the house at night. I bet Lisa had to teach him quite a few domestic skills, such as how to clean -- he's never had to before. And notice how suburban Dean tucks his shirt in?

It makes me smile that Dean's regular life vehicle is a pick up. My Dean-like brother always drove a pickup.

That shot of Ben's feet in the exact same kind of boots Dean is wearing, heh. I'm imagining them going boot shopping together.

I don't get why Samuel would be brought back -- it's so, so weird and he's just another hunter -- but okay.

Sam loves to get on Dean's case about anything Dean does that's out of character for him, such as playing golf or falling in love or wearing shorts. It's not that Sam would think there was anything objectively weird or wrong about those things -- he's just ribbing Dean because he knows he'll be sensitive about his new departure. It's peak younger sibling obnoxiousness and it's very realistic.

The golf thing was also a meta joke -- Jensen Ackles is an avid golfer.

This is the second djinn episode, but this one didn't engender trippy fantasies in its victims. Instead, Dean saw his worst fears come true.

I thought I recognized the actor who played Sid, and looked him up. Turns out Russell Porter appeared on The X-Files episode "Syzygy", as a most unfortunate guy named Scott, who first loses his girlfriend to a horrible death, then dodges one psychically launched garage door spring only to get impaled by the second. He didn't have any better luck in this episode. He appears once more in Supernatural in 2015, but as another character, and he doesn't have any acting credits post-2015. I gather he's focusing on teaching acting these days as owner and program director of an acting studio he founded, or so says the IMDb bio for him that he wrote himself.
posted by orange swan at 11:31 PM on August 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is an episode I enjoy more on rewatch when I know where it's going.

But yeah, Dean acts different after a year as a semi-domesticated creature, and has NO idea what to make of this Sam. He offhandedly tells Lisa he’s OCD about demonic omens but that fear is absolutely the background radiation of his life and will be forever, and the best he’s hoping for is for Lisa and Ben not to see it too often. (We’ll overlook the unlocked handgun under the bed in a house with a middle schooler. Dean's been around guns his whole life and has decided what he can and cannot be worried about.)
posted by jameaterblues at 7:41 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

It is this episode where I really start having issues with Dean. I said in an earlier post, family is only family when it's convenient for him. This episode doesn't show that, but it starts to create that crack whereby his behaviour towards this new family is problematic and problematic in a way that ends up with him manipulating them and lying to them repeatedly. Yes, he does it for what he thinks are very good reasons, but in the end, they're not.

Here, it starts with Dean and Lisa in the garage and Dean outright lying to her face. That's so not cool and not the way to treat a partner. If anybody can understand Dean being worried about something out there and feeling the need to hunt it, it should be Lisa, given what she and Ben went through and how Dean saved them. But no, Dean has to protect the little woman from the big, bad scary world and lie to her when. Sure, she is likely to be worried if he goes off hunting without backup, but isn't it better that she knows what her partner is doing, rather than him just not showing up one day or showing up ripped/cut/shot/bitten/etc. to shreds?

A way back there was a discussion about being Ginger or Maryann people and how that translates to Dean and Sam people. Up until this point, I probably would have come down on the Dean side, in large part because I liked the way he interacted with Lisa before this episode. He was straight with her, he seemed to respect her, and even though he really didn't have a good role model for how relationships worked in his own life, he seemed to get it. That all starts to go down hill from here.
posted by sardonyx at 2:48 PM on August 26, 2021 [2 favorites]