Recap: A SUPERNATURAL After School Special

Season 11, Episode 19 “The Chitters”
Written by Nancy Won
Directed by Eduardo Sanchez

It’s seldom that Supernatural attempts any sort of message other than universal themes of heroism and sacrifice, but this episode definitely did. It conveyed the message very well in some ways, and not so well in others.

Two boys are walking in the woods. Not our boys, but a sixteen year old and a twelve year old. Brothers. Jessy (Valin Shinyei), the younger one, talks about kissing a boy he likes. Mattie (Connor Stanhope), the older brother, cautions him to be careful. They also talk about how much they want to leave the tiny town that doesn’t understand them, and the older brother talks about how much they could get for selling his coin collection. The younger brother asks to see his buffalo head nickel and he shows it to him. Then the older brother is attacked and dragged off by a strange humanoid figure with glowing green eyes. This happens in 1989 outside of Gunnison, Colorado.

Our boys are restless and Sam (Jared Padalecki) wants to investigate strange disappearances in the woods in our time. Thanks again for letting us know it’s going to be a stand alone ep! It would be more interesting to come up with a variety of different ways to start the episode.

Sam and Dean (Jensen Ackles) visit the local sheriff (Kandyse McClure), who lets them know that rounds of disappearances occurred in 1989 and 1962. Dean interviews the friend of the person who disappeared most recently this time around. The two girls were enjoying the legal recreational use of pot in Colorado, and her account is not taken seriously. She says her friend was abducted by some strange sexless being with glowing green eyes. She found the abductee later and she was different, making a chittering sound and having glowing green eyes. They find the sole person involved in the 1989 disappearances who still lives in town. She says her husband was caught having sex with two different women before he disappeared. They also disappeared, so she figured he left with one of them. When they ask why she is burning sage and planning to leave, she says that her grandmother said that when people got ‘the chitters’, they were overcome with lust, their eyes glowed green, and then they were never seen again. Since people were disappearing again, she decided to leave town for a while. Not a bad idea.

A couple of teens see Rob the fireman on top of the school librarian in an alley. Their eyes glow green and a third person with green eyes attacks the boy, killing him. Dean and Sam hear about this at the police station.

In poking around the woods, Dean is attacked and is not getting the best of it when a stranger comes up and cuts off the attacker’s head. There are two strangers, big burly guys, who seem to know something about what’s going on. Hunters. Dean asks if cutting off the head is the right way to get rid of these things, and the guy replies that it seemed to have worked. It’s funny because Dean has said in the past that most things appear to be able to be killed by decapitation.

They all repair to the local bar and have a beer. This is where I realize that the synopsis on the DVR is wrong, because it says that the hunters don’t like Sam and Dean. They get along fine. They quickly find out that the two are a couple. Jessy (Lee Rumohr) is a native of the town. He is, in fact, the little boy who lost his brother 27 years ago. This is not unusual because most hunters have lost family members to the supernatural. However, he has had additional trauma in not being believed by the town, and still hates them. He tells Sam and Dean that they should step back and let him get his revenge against the monsters. They agree, then promptly come up with their own plan that splits the other hunters up, one with Sam and one with Dean. Huh? The guy warns them off and they take over the investigation anyway?

Jessy knows that the monsters are cicada spirits. They can’t mate using their own bodies, so they take over humans by getting into them through the mouth and then mate, lay eggs and die. The eggs mature in twenty-seven years. This is far more biology than we usually see on Supernatural. You could almost think they are not supernatural, until you realize the unlikelihood of climbing into someone’s body through the mouth when you are the same size, or producing your own genetic material with someone else’s DNA.

Sam and Jessy go off to find the man who was sheriff twenty-seven years ago. They find him surrounded by beer bottles and regret. He tries to throw them out, but eventually tells his story. He had found the monsters all those years ago, and they had possessed his own daughter, who he thought had gone safely back to school. He was forced to kill her. He never told anyone what happened to his daughter. Sam is shocked. Jessy is furious. He could have backed him up all those years ago, and stopped the cycle then. The former sheriff said he thought it was over because the people were dying. He tells them where he found the dead townspeople and his daughter.

Dean and Cesar (Hugo Ateo) find the nest first. It is guarded by people inhabited by cicadas. They kill the guards, but the other hunter is injured. Dean goes ahead of him and says he has found the nest, in an old mine. An old mine? There’s an old mine there and no one looked for missing people in it either in the past or now? They get to the mine, which is completely boarded over. Not a problem for the cicada people, since they have dug tunnels, but how did Dean know it was the right place? He couldn’t have possibly seen anything through the boards, because there’s nothing to see until they have gone into the mine for a ways. He couldn’t have seen the cicada person go through the boards because they are still nailed on.

They find missing people with larvae in their bellies. Unfortunately they are already dead. Since they are already dead they decide to torch the place. Jessy finds his brother’s body and the coin, which I’m sure will now never be sold.

The brother gets a Viking funeral, always the safest thing to do on Supernatural to avoid vengeful spirits. The hunter couple are celebrating getting revenge. Dean speculates that they could use them in the upcoming battle against Amara (Emily Swallow), but he’s dreaming. I know the next thing for them is to quit. I am right, because they turn around and say they are retiring to their ranch that they’ve been paying on all these years but only visited twice. Dean does not tell them that they might be needed. Seeing two hunters reach the finish line is a rare thing.

What was done right? Seeing the brothers struggling because they didn’t fit in was fine. The couple was nice. I would have liked to have seen more relationship stuff, but I always want to see more relationship stuff. Our guys are casually accepting, and that’s good.

The problem is with the heavy handed analogy between the way the townspeople act about the cicada possessed people and the way that people treat homosexuality in real life. The former sheriff didn’t keep his daughter’s death secret because he wouldn’t be believed. He didn’t keep it secret because he had to kill his own daughter. He kept it secret because no one knew his daughter had disappeared, and he could pretend that she never got the chitters and went off to have an orgy and disappear into the woods. He kept it secret out of shame. And because he did that, the problem reappeared twenty seven years later and more people were lost.

The cicada spirits were good monsters. Horrifying and disgusting. The way they inhabited people reminded me of the way they leave empty exoskeletons on trees. I’m not afraid of cicadas, but they are eerie. For people who live in places where cicadas have seventeen year cycles, the noise is not just a chitter. It’s enough to drive you crazy. And there are many bugs who have mating cycles that are disturbing, like having mass matings all over your car. Larval pregnancies touch on fears of reproduction. But I’m thinking that perhaps this monster should have been in a different episode, one in which we are not associating being gay with getting the chitters. Maybe an ordinary nonsexual monster that the kid was not believed about would have been sufficient.

The danger of comparisons is that people might think that the situation you present as an example to show how wrong someone acts is a comparable situation, when the wrongness is the comparison that is supposed to be made. I think that we are supposed to see the sheriff’s shame about his daughter and its bad effects as an analogy to how Jessy was treated by the town and his own mother for being gay. I am certain that we are not supposed to see being gay and having the chitters as analogous.

Another thing done right? Both halves of the couple lived through the episode!

Next week we return to the Darkness. We have fog and smoke and evil running through people’s veins.

 

Supernatural airs on Wednesdays 9pm/8c on the CW.