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| "...it wasn't me, I tell you! It was the one-armed man!" |
Is there anything more frightening than the loss of one's identity? Even more completely than the crime of Identity Theft, to have all sense of person and individuality completely taken from you. Erased as though it had never been...or having to suffer for the crimes of those who take your face for their own purposes. Science fiction and fantasy stories have used it often, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes, you get a really good one...and sometimes you get Superior Spider-Man. So where does Skin, the first episode of Supernatural to introduce Skinwalkers, rate? Let's have a look.
After the opening montage of the few plot-related bits in previous episodes, we begin in St. Louis, Missouri. Members of a police SWAT team enter a house as a woman, who has been tied to a chair and severely tortured, is being menaced by a man with a knife whose face we do not clearly see. However, when it is clear the police are closing in, he attempts to flee from the home and is caught by the cops. Told to drop his knife, he turns to the camera...and reveals that he's Dean Winchester!
Actually, as we'll learn, this isn't actually Dean. But it is one hell of a way to open the episode, giving us the fear that Dean has gone off the deep end. However, we cut to one week earlier, Sam and Dean are pulling into a gas station and Sam is checking his e-mail, still conversing with some of his friends from Stanford, telling them he's on a roadtrip with Dean...which is technically true, though Dean gives him some lip for effectively lying to them, saying he really can't afford to get close to people. We'll look at this a bit later, but needless to say, Sam just accuses Dean of being anti-social.
Sam does, however, get the plot of the day from an e-mail via his friend Rebecca Warren, a friend of his from Stanford. It seems her brother, Zack, has been arrested for a murder that he could not have possibly committed. Though Dean is reluctant to go back four hundred miles to St. Louis (not thinking that it's their kind of problem), Sam apparently convinces him and they head off, arriving a Rebecca's front door...and we see that she's the woman from the cold opening.
Oh, boy...
Once inside, she relates the facts of the case to them. Zack says that he came home to find his girlfriend, Emily, tied to a chair and severely beaten up, so he called the police...who then arrested him. Apparently, video footage from outside his apartment shows that he entered his apartment at 10:30, which Rebecca says is impossible, since Zack was with her until at least after midnight. Sam practices his Bluff skill to convince Rebecca that Dean's a cop so they can take a look at the crime scene.
They head over there and find the place wrecked, as you'd expect. However, Sam and Dean don't really find anything of note as Rebecca tells them a story about how their house was broken into a few weeks ago and some clothing was stolen - specifically Zack's clothes - which the police didn't put too much stock into. Nothing of note to this particular case comes up, however, until Dean notices the next door neighbor's dog barking like mad at the house - something with Rebecca says never really happened, considering how gentle the dog used to be. Dogs being affected by the supernatural is something, as Sam points out to Dean in a sidebar, not uncommon.
Dean still denies that this is their kind of thing, but he figures they ought to check out the security footage...just in case.
Lucky for them, Rebecca swiped it from the lawyers at the first opportunity!
...how convenient!
As she takes them to see it, we get a transition via a photograph of Sam, Rebecca, and Zack, fading up on Zack's face as he sits on a bench watching some apartment buildings. He observes a borderline amorous couple with the husband leaving for work, Zack taking special note of the woman and a dark smirk coming to his lips before his irises become an eerie, glassy white surrounding jet black pupils...
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| Well, we all know what face that is... |
Elsewhere, the amorous man returns home to find his wife in a position identical to that of Rebecca in the cold open. When her gag is removed, she begs him not to hurt her anymore. He hears something break in the next room and heads out to have some quality time with himself...namely an exact duplicate of himself meeting him and striking him over the head with a baseball bat.
The next morning, Sam and Dean head down to Zack's apartment (at 5:30 in the morning, to Dean's laments), where Sam has a hunch that he wants to test out - since the killer didn't go out the front door, they had to go out another way. They find some smeared blood on a power pole, but the trail ends right about there. There's no time to worry about that, however, as an ambulance gliding by leads Sam and Dean to the scene of the most recent murder.
And yes, as you'd imagine, it's the same story. The guy was supposedly driving home on his business trip, and thus could not have been there. They come to the conclusion its a shapeshifter. However, there's still the problem of where it went since - like at Zack's house - the trail just stops. Dean, though, brings up that (much like the Fourth Doctor does in the Doctor Who episode "Robot") there's only one more direction left to go - down.
Okay, so the Doctor said up, but sue me.
Thus, they go into the sewer and find shed skin - theorizing that the shifter tears off its flesh in order to shift. With this proven, they head back to the Impala to break out the silver bullets...only to be called by Rebecca, who has seen through their ruse (or, rather, her lawyers have) and knows that Dean is not a cop, telling them to drop it now in spite of Sam's efforts to try and talk her down. We also get Dean telling Sam he really just needs to disconnect from his "normal" friends. Again, more on that later.
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| "Who throws out half a pizza?" |
They head down into the sewers to track the shifter, They find some bile and some discarded clothing before it jumps them, the pair giving chase after it attacks Dean. Back on street level, they split up to cover more ground. Eventually, Sam and Dean reunite after neither finding anything. However, when a car forces them to cross the street separately (Sam going first) we see Dean's eyes react to the headlight of passing car by turning that eerie white.
Sam and Shifter!Dean head back to the Impala, where Sam quickly quizzes it on something their Dad hunted to check and make certain that it's him. The Shifter gets it right, but makes a fatal mistake when it catches the keys to the Impala with the wrong hand. Despite its best efforts to convince Sam otherwise, it's forced to attack him and render him unconscious.
In the sewer, Sam is tied up and the Shifter taunts him about some of Dean's true feelings about Sam - namely that he's jealous of Sam for having run off to college, while Dean had to stick around with John. Deep down, the Shifter says, Dean's jealous because while Sam can have friends and be normal, Dean is a freak and knows that everyone's going to leave him eventually.
Mary. Sam. John. They're all gone.
Like I said, more on that to come. However, Sam isn't buying any of it (or, at least, is keeping focused on the mission) and tries to discern where the real Dean is. The Shifter, however, communicates his desire to do some crossbreeding with Rebecca before leaving to go meet her. She is, as you'd expect, less than happy to see him but does allow him in.
Back in the sewer, Sam finds that Dean is in the same place as Sam is (how convenient!) they snark for a bit before they start getting loose to break out.
Back at Rebecca's, the Shifter is telling her the whole story...of himself. As well as revealing that Sam and Dean are hunters and go after things like shapeshifters. It seems to be going well until the Shifter gets called a freak by Rebecca - something that clearly pains it.
Back in the sewer, as they get out of their restraints, Sam brings up the idea that the Shifter needs them (or, more specifically Dean) alive so it can "download" their memories, hence why it knew so much about Dean and Sam specifically. They bust out, planning to call the police...in spite of the fact they'll effectively be sicking the cops on "Dean".
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| "No, Sammy...I am your brother..." |
The coup de grace occurs back at Rebecca's, where the Shifter talks about himself (via Dean), feeling alone and just wanting to be loved, which Rebecca unfortunately interprets as "Dean" coming on to her...and she is less than pleased. Outraged, he tires her up, leading into the cold open but now with us able to see "Dean's" face. And it plays out as we saw up to the Shifter being cornered by the cops...but this time with it fighting off some of the cops before escaping, though clearly not without some negative repercussions.
In the sewers, the Shift stumbles into its lair and begins to shed its skin in a truly impressive and really, really gross scene where its bones cackle, its teeth fall out, its fingernails fall off, and even its very flesh starts tearing itself apart as it heals from its wounds.
The repercussions for Sam and Dean, however, come via the Television of Exposition (apparently on loan after its days on Sliders), where they learn there's a want out for Dean. Dean is pissed, but Sam points out that they have no weapons and no plan...until they theorize that the Shifter drove the Impala over there, and thus all their stuff is still there. The cops, though, arrive and they're forced to flee...Sam taking the fall because they don't actually have anything on him.
Sam warns him, before he flees, to not go into the sewers. However, this is Dean Winchester and we know he's not going to take this sitting down as he demonstrates by getting the Impala afterwards and heading into the sewers and finding...Rebecca, all tied up and with no place to go.
Sam, meanwhile, has gone to Rebecca's place and unfortunately tells "her" the details before she knocks him out with a wine bottle. Back in the sewers, Rebecca relates that she was attacked and woke up here just in time to see "Dean" turn into her. Dean gets her out and they head back to her place, hoping to get to Sam in time. Back there, "Dean" has shifted back into his preferred skin for the episode and secured Sam, planning to off him and pin the whole thing on Dean.
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| "I'm gonna make this knife disappear!" |
While Rebecca checks on Sam, Dean retrieves his amulet from the Shifter's corpse.
And we get our wrap up. Sam promising to keep in touch with Rebecca, though it may not be for a long while. Zack, however, has been released...apparently, the police think this "Dean Winchester" guy is responsible for the murders, and he's dead now since his corpse was found in Rebecca's home. As they drive off, Dean expresses disappointment that Sam just can't be normal, but Sam tells him that he knew deep down he was never normal even when he was at Stanford. Dean also expresses some disappointment that he'll have to skip out on his own funeral...
Skin is actually a pretty good episode. It touches on the themes of isolation, loneliness, and disconnection - largely for Sam and Dean but also using the Shifter as a living example of those traits. Consider, in the beginning of the episode, Dean mentions that Sam should really cut himself off from the people who don't know about their world. It's not out of any malice or irritation at the thought of having people like that in their lives, it's simply because that's how their lives are and that "normal" people aren't often able to handle what they do.
Although with Dean, as see with the Shifter going through his memories, it goes even deeper. Already, he's largely disconnected with the world. He does his best not to get close to people in his work, and he's only known a very select few people in his life that he's had any regular contact with and he is losing those few people. Like I said before: Mary. Sam. John. Everyone he knows, everyone he cares about, has left him at some point in his life, and Dean fears - deep down - that one day he is going to be alone.
The Shifter's words to Rebecca while its trying to seduce her can indeed be seen as the Shifter having some level of sympathy for Dean's situation, seeing as the two come from similar backgrounds. Feeling themselves to be freaks compared to the rest of society and, in the end, just wanting a hug and someone to love them. It's really a rather sad thing and shows, much like the bits in Dead in the Water, that there is more to his character than the rather simplistic gun-toting, lady-pleasing, snark-quipping man that his persona would have you think he is.
The Shifter him/her/itself is a character with can empathize with. The background it gives about being born "human, but different" and something that was shunned by society is tragic and gives plenty of motivation for it to want human contact...though, unlike many fans of Freddy Krueger, I find it incredibly difficult to sympathize with someone who goes into psychopathic rage at the first sign of rejection and kills people. Sorry, tortures and kills people.
However, there are a few problems with the episode - namely Zack, who we never actually get to see besides in the photograph on Rebecca's fridge. Sure, we do get that one scene of the Shifter watching the amorous couple, but that's it. His actor doesn't even have any lines. While it would have, of course, been impractical for Sam and Dean to visit him in jail (particularly after Dean gets on the St. Louis PD's Most Wanted List), it would have been nice for his character to have contributed something to the story instead of just having everything he "said" being told them by another character.
Also, like with episodes before, Shifters here are a little different than they are in later episodes, but that can be chalked up to the early days of the show still being in effect as well as the Shifter not really knowing anything about its own origins, especially considering what we see of the race and various others in later seasons.
So it has a few flaws that can be looked past but, over all, the episode is very enjoyable and a very nice character piece on the inner workings of Dean's mind. Next week, Sam and Dean have to not turn on the lights and pick up the vanishing hitchhiker and acknowledge that humans can lick too because the calls are coming from inside the house!!!
...oh, y'know...the Hook Man. The Hook Man works, too...
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