From MadCap's Couch - Supernatural: "Bedtime Stories"

Surely nothing will go wrong here!

Horror Month 2022 is over, but the spooky continues as we push further into Supernatural's third season! After some time with demons, who's up for some Bedtime Stories to start off November?

... no?

...

Well, you're gettin' 'em.

Bedtime Stories gives us a recap of events, focused on the Colt and Dean's deal as well as Azazel once more tormenting Dean about the possibility that Sam is no longer 100% Sam post-deal. Your standard Season Three stuff. After we escape the recap, we begin at a housing development in New York. Given that this is Supernatural we're talking about, we know that there is nothing but good things about to happen. Three overweight contractors get stalked and then attacked by something... that is rather like a wolf, which we don't ever clearly see in full. Only one of them survives to tell the tale. We'll be getting back to him.

Elsewhere, the Impala drives down an abandoned road marked only by the humming of a bullfrog... and Sam and Dean arguing. After getting the Colt back last episode, Sam has apparently proposed the idea of summoning the Crossroads Demon and putting her at gunpoint to let Dean out of the deal. Dean angrily shouts that he wants Sam to drop this, Sam making a particularly mean dig that Dean isn't their Dad... but Dean still doesn't relent. Instead, he gets Sam to tell him about the job they're going on, which they determine could be a werewolf given that the lunar cycle is right. Recalling their last experience with werewolves, they have only two days to determine if the killer is in fact a werewolf.

Soooo... am I not getting my Jell-O, or...?

At the hospital, the two pose as detectives of the local Sheriff's Department and speak to the remaining contractor. Despite coaxing by Sam and Dean, he insists that the attacker was a normal man, only being distraught that said man killed his brothers. He asks Sam if he knows what that's like, Sam telling him that he can't imagine a worse pain. Dean bites back words, clearly feeling conflicted himself. When asked about further details, the contractor mentions that the man had a tattoo on his arm of Wile E. Coyote. Dr. Garrison, the man's doctor, pops in and Dean pulls him aside to ask him a few questions.

In a comedy bit, Sam - having been unintentionally put in the role of a police sketch artist - has to showcase a very, very bad stickfigure drawing. Dean chastises him warmly, but then has gotten information from Dr. Garrison that rules out a werewolf. After ruling out a werewolf and a demon, the boys have bupkis. 

Far and away, a young couple named Julie and Ken are lost in the woods and happen upon a kindly old woman in a house living all alone with a pie cooling on the windowsill. They accept her invitation to stay and rest and she feeds them... and the food has been poisoned, because of course. They begin to double over and she pulls out a kitchen knife rather menacingly... and slits Ken's throat. Outside the window, a little girl in a white dress watches with a deadpan expression.

At the hospital, Sam and Dean narrowly avoid two State Troopers and speak to Julie. They find her tended to by Dr. Garrison beforehand, just a reminder that he's here. Julie tells them about the situation, explaining that she pushed the old woman over and her head was cracked on the stove. When pressed for further information, Julie mentions the little girl... and from the scene, I don't think Julie could have seen said girl, but whatever. The boys note it as an oddity. The boys check the house, finding EMF in the house near the window but otherwise the place seems normal. Sam proposes fairy tales, which Dean mocks him a bit, but it makes sense.

The three contractor brothers in the beginning? The Three Little Pigs.

A guy and a girl hiking through the woods and getting eaten by an old lady in the woods? Hansel & Gretel.

What the little girl has to do with it, though, they don't know. Nor do they have any idea of what is really going on. A cut later and Dean has done some looking into the town's records and found nothing about a pale-skinned, black-haired girl having gone missing or dying horrifically. Sam theorizes that the kid might be some kind of puppet master, causing people to murder people through spirit hypnosis, referencing a British medium who is said to have done so. Seeing a house with a pumpkin on the step and some mice running around (Cinderella), the boys break in and investigate. They find a woman inside handcuffed to the oven by her own stepmother, who apparently went ballistic on her. Checking the perimeter, Dean encounters the pale girl in the white dress, who flickers out of reality like a ghost does but leaves behind a fresh red apple.

"You're all going to die down here..."

Dean mentions the porn version of Snow White and Sam thinks this may have something to do with their ghost girl, noting that the poisoned apple did not kill Snow White, but put her into a deep sleep. At the hospital, they find the only one who fits the description of a comatose patient they're looking for is Callie, Dr. Garrison's daughter, who has been in a coma for years. The boys find him reading from Grimm's Fairy Tales and, as he does so, the man with the Wile E. Coyote tattoo beats down and kidnaps a kindly old lady after helping her load her groceries into her van.

Garrison explains that Callie was poisoned by bleach, and was brought in to the ER by her stepmother, and they had no idea how she could have gotten the bleach. Callie's stepmother also passed away a year ago, and no one knows the truth. However, with her being read the Grimm Tales in her sleep, her spirit is becoming angrier and more powerful and manifests in this way. The old woman is brought in, having been bitten multiple times by what seems to have been a wolf. Hearing that the woman has a granddaughter, Dean takes the address and goes to locate her, charging Sam with finding a way to stop Callie.

Elsewhere, said granddaughter gets captured by the wolf man.

Sam speaks to Garrison, trying to break it to him that his wife poisoned Callie. Naturally, Garrison takes this well and helps Sam in putting an end to the troubles - actually, no, because we've got another ten minutes in the episode. Never one to let his door to door salesman techniques be for naught, Sam forces his way into the room. Garrison eventually breaks down and admits that he's seen Callie's spirit around, having known that something is going on for a while now.

Dean breaks in to try and save Little Red Riding Hood, getting into a fight with the Wolf as the spirit of Callie watches.

Sam implores Garrison to listen to his daughter. The two reconcile and Callie passes on, ending the hypnotic influence just before Dean would have cut the wolf man open with a pair of scissors. We get our wrap up, Garrison telling the boys that he should have let Callie go a long time ago, something that Dean says to Sam is good advice. When Sam calls him out on it, Dean walks away without answering.

That night, as Dean sleeps, Sam sneaks out to the Crossroads with the Colt in hand. He summons the Demon, who is remarkably coy for a woman who is about to be shot. It is also here that we get the confirmation that the Crossroad Demon from both Crossroad Blues and All Hell Breaks Loose, Part 2 are indeed the same demon as well as being this one. Sam, of course, puts her at gunpoint with the Colt and demands that she release Dean from his deal. She doesn't believe he'll pull the trigger, of course. The Demon makes an appeal to Sam, stroking his ego and insisting that Dean being gone means that he won't be cleaning his brother's messes... which Sam reacts very poorly to.

The Demon was not impressed with Sam's nonetheless creative use of Viagra. 

She reveals that, even if Sam kills her, Dean's not out of his deal. The Crossroad Demons have a boss like everybody else, and he isn't going to let Dean go. When Sam presses her for the name, she refuses to tell him. Told that there's no way out, Sam shoots her in the forehead without another word, the Colt's magic killing her instantly. As her body falls to the rocky road, Sam stares at her blankly, as if killing the Demon and the woman she was possessing meant nothing to him at all...

Thus, Bedtime Stories comes to a close. Like with many episodes I've viewed in doing this review series, a more critical look reveals more beneath the surface. Much like Dr. Garrison has to let Callie go, this episode mirrors Sam's own struggle to let Dean go... something that, unlike Garrison, is adamantly clear by the final scene that he refuses to do. Apart from that, it's a great little one-off episode with more focus on Sam than Dean that we've been coasting on for the last few episodes. It's Sam's knowledge of the Brothers Grimm that allows the boys to navigate what's going on and eventually come up with the answer. It is Sam's struggle with Dean that pushes him to reject the lesson of the episode. And, finally, it is Sam's determination that leads to him standing alone at the crossroads with the body of a woman he murdered in cold blood.

Surely, this will end well for him.

The episode's little vignettes are interesting to showcase fairy tales with a more modern twist to them, keeping to the spirit of the originals without doing a full on rehash of them. They are, after all, manifestations caused by a very angry spirit, so it makes sense that they're through the modern lens for more reasons than just budgetary ones. So much is done with so little, following the Wendigo school of thought that is so prominent through the early years of the show.

Next time, we'll be leaving behind the Brothers Grimm for a life at sea in one of the more maligned episodes of the series (so much so that jokes are made about it later on). Bela will come back, there will be a cursed object, and while a red sky at night is a sailor's delight, the Winchesters Brothers will learn that a sailor's warning is a Red Sky at Morning.

"How certain are you that what you brought back is 100% pure Sam?"

See you then!