Supernatural: Wishful Thinking

“A dream is a wish your heart makes.”  But it’s always best to be cautious of those things.  They can turn on you like a bad sandwich.  And wishes are what Sam and Dean are investigating this week; probably coming pretty close to the top of the Winchester Weirdest Shit Ever List.  How do you top a seven-foot-tall, suicidally depressed teddy bear, I wonder?

We open with a pretty young woman in the shower(isn’t it about time for some equal opportunity with the shower scenes?  Why is it never a good-looking guy?) of the local fitness center, unaware of the ghostly male figure watching her.  When she turns, he disappears.  When she steps out of the shower, a spooky handprint appears to wipe away the condensation.  Wet footprints follow her across the floor.  After towelling off her hair, she tosses the towel aside, only to see it hover in mid-air, as if it’s over someone’s head.  A nervous voice squeaks out from under the towel to say “Um, hello, Mrs. Armstrong.”  Screaming ensues.

After the title card, we find Sam and Dean apparently just finished with their dinner at a TGIFriday’s knockoff.  Sam has done exactly what the angel told him to do last week, and is pushing Dean about what he remembers of Hell.  Dean, between downing shot after shot of whiskey and glaring at their ultra-perky over-attentive waiter, is just as insistent that he doesn’t remember anything.  He wants a job to work.  Realizing he’s hit a wall on this topic, Sam pulls out his laptop to show Dean the only thing he’s found that might be even close to a case.  In Concrete, Washington, there are reports of a ghost haunting the women’s showers of the fitness center, and that right there is what will make Dean choke on his beer.  “Women, showers…we gotta save these people.”  Ah, Dean, ever the altruist.

While Dean is off to investigate the showers, Sam sits down at Lucky Chin’s Restaurant to interview Candace Armstrong, the woman with the ghost story.  Today he’s posing as a writer, collecting tales for his upcoming book, the working title of which is, naturally, Supernatural.  Candace explains that she’s not surprised the ghost approached her, as she’s “sensitive” to the spiritual world, and you can tell immediately that Sam thinks she’s flaky.  Probably why he gets distracted by the couple across the room making out.  But as Candace continues that the ghost helped her up after she fell down the stairs, and kept repeating “Please, don’t tell my mom,” he has to admit that’s pretty weird.  Dean has come up with no EMF results or anything remotely ghostly at the fitness center, leading Sam to conclude that crazy pushed Mrs. Armstrong down the stairs.  Dean is disappointed.  He was really looking forward to saving naked women.

As they pass the end of a footbridge, a small boy dashes by, a group of larger boys on his heels.  Dean prompts him to “Run, Forrest, run!” The pause gives them the opportunity to overhear a local man loudly proclaim to the Concrete police force that Bigfoot is in the woods.  Whipping out their FBI creds, they start asking questions.  The old duffer is more than happy to show them the trail, while the cop is baffled the FBI would be interested in a Bigfoot sighting reported just two minutes ago.  Once on the trail, the guys are coming to the conclusion this is a weird town, and that’s only reaffirmed by the giant footprints they find in the dirt.  The prints lead across another bridge to a liquor store with its door ripped off the hinges.  There are smashed bottles of booze and all the porn magazines are gone.  The only other clue is a hunk of fur on the magazine rack.  The weird has gone off the charts.  The guys are at a total loss as they sit outside the store, wracking their brains for some explanation.  Sam’s best guess is a guy in a gorilla suit playing a joke.  Dean’s theory is Bigfoot is an alcoholo-porno addict.  Neither really holds much water.

Just then a little girl rides by on her bicycle, and a copy of Busty Asian Beauties blows out of her basket.  Since it’s yet another weird happening, they follow her.  She places a box on the back step of the store, filled with the missing booze and porn mags and a note that says “Sorry.”  At her house, Sam and Dean knock on the door and learn the girl is home alone.  Well, not completely alone.  There’s her teddy bear.  When she expresses her concern that teddy is sick, Dean invents new aliases:  teddy bear doctors.  Man, is this one self-assured kid.  Not only is she unconcerned that her parents have disappeared, she’s more than willing to let two complete strangers in the house.  Either that or she’s really stupid.  Upstairs, she opens the door to her room to reveal her teddy bear:  a life-sized stuffed animal with a red bow around it’s neck and a serious attitude.  “Close the friggin’ door!” it cries.  The Winchesters expressions of utter shock and WTF are priceless.  Turns out the little girl, Audrey, wished her teddy bear was alive and it came true.  But now it’s sad and says weird things and smells like the bus.  Dean takes another crack at talking to teddy, but the bear is too caught up lamenting the state of the world on the news.  “Why am I here?” he moans.  “For tea parties!”  Audrey explains, as if he should know that.  “Is that all there is?”  Having yet to find any words for the situation, Dean backs out of the room, more than a little freaked. 

They step aside, and presumably Audrey thinks they’re discussing their diagnosis.  Sam stutters a couple times, trying to wrap his head around the concept of a giant talking depressed bear, and whispers, “Are we gonna kill this teddy bear?”  Complete with I-can’t-believe-I-just-said-that tone.  They don’t know what to do.  More questioning reveals Audrey made her wish at the wishing well in Lucky Chin’s.  Furthermore, Audrey’s mother wished they were in Bali, so she assumes her parents are in Bali.  They encourage her to go stay with a neighbor for a few days, while they treat her bear for Lollipop Disease.  Boy, Dean has bullshitting down to an art.

As they enter Lucky Chin’s, they pass the little boy who was being chased earlier.  He’s just tossed a coin in the fountain for his wish.  More on that later.  To test the well, Dean tosses in a coin, and seconds later a delivery guy walks in asking if someone ordered a foot-long sub with jalapeños.  That would be Dean.  As he eats, they notice other possible wishes:  a newspaper report on a local man winning the lottery, and the same smoochy couple Sam noticed earlier, a geeky guy in hornrims with a beautiful girl.  Come on, guys, give womankind some credit.  A lot of us know geeks can be very cool.  Anyway, Sam points out that wishes granted like this usually have a hefty price tag, sometimes a deadly one.  And this is when the owner of the place storms up to kick Dean out for eating food from somewhere else in his restaurant, only to be faced with being shut down.  The teddy bear doctors have morphed into health inspectors claiming a rat infestation.  They seem to be getting a bit sloppy with their fake IDs, though, because Dean has to dig in every pocket before he finds the right one to flash.  Although it did kill me that the ones they flashed at Audrey had badges.  Teddy bear doctors have badges!

Even with the fountain drained, they can’t find anything immediately unusual about it.  After Sam shoos the owner away, Dean ponders what Sam would wish for.  However, it’s not the lawyer-car-picket-fence life Dean assumes.  Sam’s not that guy anymore, and this Sam would wish for Lilith’s head on a platter.  Bloody.  This revelation obviously disturbs Dean, but he tries not to let on, instead going back to the case.  He’s noticed an odd coin on the bottom of the fountain, and it won’t budge. 

They retrieve a hammer and a crowbar from the car, which freaks out Mr. Chin.  Sam shoos him away, again, with the threat of an imaginary ”44-slash-F” fine.  But when neither tool works to loosen the coin, they deduce there’s magic involved.  Sam has an “aha” moment and makes a rubbing of the coin’s surface, hands it to Dean to research, and heads back to the fitness center.  He’s figured out the “ghost” is actually another wishmaker.  And he shocks the hell out of the naked teenager by confronting him about his sneaky pervy ways.  The kid fumbles around awkwardly until Sam tells him to put some pants on and stay visible.  On his walk back to the motel, Dean spots the little boy he called Forrest earlier, only this time he’s the one doing the chasing.  He doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, though, because his sandwich is turning on him.

Thus, Sam returns to their room to find Dean puking his guts out.  “Wishes turn bad, Sam.  Wishes turn very bad.”  He has managed to learn that the coin is Babylonian, and the serpent on it is Tiamat, the Babylonian god of primordial chaos.  It makes wishing wells work, and only the person who tossed it in can retrieve it, and reverse all the wishes.  Teddy, meanwhile, is having an existential crisis.  He’s scribbled “Life is meaningless, signed T. Bear” on Audrey’s chalkboard and is about to blow his brains out.  The camera pans to the corner behind him, but instead of a horrific blood splatter when the gun fires, we get an explosion of stuffing.  Which is sick and twisted and terribly funny.  Teddy is dismayed he’s still alive.

Recovering from his bout with e. coli, Dean has fallen asleep, but he’s haunted by nightmares until Sam wakes him.  Sam tries again to get Dean to talk about Hell, because it’s obvious he does remember.  But Dean doesn’t want the brotherly concern right now, he wants to work.  What they need to figure out is who threw the cursed coin in the fountain.  Lo and behold, there’s an engagement announcement for Beauty and the Geek right there in the local paper.  Time to pay a visit to Wesley Mondale, the geek in question.

Wes, a lonely geeky schmuck played by the always awesome Ted Raimi, is beginning to wonder if his wish is all it’s cracked up to be, since his fianceé, Hope, is so completely in love with him she doesn’t care about anything that made her happy before.  He’s trying to convince her to be happy for herself when Sam and Dean show up, posing as florists.  Wes recognizes them as the guys from the health department at the restaurant.  “Yeah.  And florists on the side,” Sam snarks.  “Plus FBI.  And on Thursdays we’re teddy bear doctors,” Dean adds.  What’s important, they point out, is that they know what he did.  Wes is indeed the owner of the cursed coin, part of a collection he inherited from his grandfather.  He’d been warned never to use the coin, but after his grandfather died he decided to give the wishing coin a shot, and it worked.  But he’s not about to be intimidated into reversing his wish for Hope to love him more than anything.  Although a glimpse of Dean’s gun under his jacket does sway him to go to the restaurant with them.

In the car, they try explaining to Wes that the wishes go bad.  They’re interrupted when it feels like they’ve hit something.  Personally, I thought it was teddy attempting suicide again by throwing himself under the car, but it turns out to be the invisible kid.  Wes points out that good-looking guys like Sam and Dean have it easy.  They get noticed by women and don’t have to wish for them.  Despite their protestations that they have to fight for everything they have(which isn’t much, really, outside of each other and the car), Wes in unconvinced and demands proof the town is going insane.  Just then they come across the little kid tormenting his tormentors by locking them in an SUV, tipping it over, and crying “Kneel before Todd!” 

Dean leaps out to deal with Todd, and Sam drives off with Wes to reverse the wishes.  Dean, always good with kids, has to admit he doesn’t know what it’s like to be bullied, and tries the old Spidey quote “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Todd is having none of it however, and tosses Dean into a collection of garbage cans.  When Dean crawls out of the pile, he tries punching Todd, but all that gets him is a sore fist and a teeny hand choking the life out of him.

Wes is still reluctant to take back his wish, asking Sam why people can’t get what they want.  Sam explains it’s because that’s how life works, and then is struck by lightning out of the blue.  And that’s how death works.  Knocks him clean out of his Pumas and leaves him dead on the sidewalk.  Inside, Wes discovers that Hope wished Sam dead so Wes wouldn’t wish away their love, but Wes’ eyes have been opened.  Even though he doesn’t feel like one, he takes the hero’s path and picks up the coin.  Todd releases Dean from his death grip, Sam starts back to life, and Hope no longer even recognizes Wes.  Sadly, Wes hands the coin to Sam and walks off.

The other wishes are reversed as well:  the lottery ticket is proved fake, Audrey’s parents are back, and her teddy bear is normal size again, although with a bandage over the hole in the back of his head.  And Dean feels like talking to Sam about things.  He admits he has been lying; he does remember everything that happened in Hell.  But he’s not going to talk about it.  There’s nothing Sam could do, and no way he could ever understand.  The memories will be with him forever, and this is the first time we see the torture on Dean’s face when he’s awake.  It’s heart-wrenching, if somewhat out of place for this episode.  Usually heartfelt revelations come as the result of an equally heart-wrenching case that one of the guys indentifies with, but that’s not really the case here.  For me, it lost some of its impact because of that. 

As well, I’m curious how long Dean has remembered everything.  Because if he remembered it all and was lying to Sam back when Sam made his “you can’t possibly understand” speech in “Metamorphosis,” Dean’s insistence that Sam explain his demon-blood-freak-issues at the time now sounds hypocritical.  And considering his time in the pit equalled forty years, Dean must have amazing powers of denial to be functioning at all since he returned.