Recap of Supernatural
Season 5, Episode 11
Sam, Interrupted
Dean: They give you something?
Sam: Oh... Oh, yeah. They gave me... *everything*! It's... It's... spectacu... lacular...
Written by Andrew Dabb and Daniel Loflin.
Directed by James L. Conway.
Air Date: January 21, 2010.
The brothers check into a mental hospital to investigate a mysterious monster.
Body count
For this episode = 2 humans and 1 wraith.For the series so far = At least 354 humans (of which 6 were witches), 55 demons, 32 ghosts, 11 vampires, 9 hellhounds, 6 changelings, 4 angels, 4 gods, 3 shapeshifters, 3 zombies, 2 ghouls, 2 werewolves, 2 dogs, 1 crocotta, 1 djinn, 1 rakshasa, 1 rawhead, 1 reaper, 1 rugaru, 1 shtriga, 1 siren, 1 wendigo, and 1 wraith.
Tropes
- All Therapists Are Muggles: How the boys get into the mental hospital.
- Battleaxe Nurse: Averted; Dean lampshades the trope when he first meets Karla, but she's quite friendly.
- Blade Below the Shoulder: The wraith has a long spike which can extend from her wrist, which she uses to pierce the skull all the way to the brain to suck it dry.
- Brain Food: Cerebral slushies.
- Cassandra Gambit: Sam and Dean need to get admitted to the mental hospital, so they tell the doctor in charge the truth about their Demon Slaying, knowing full well that it will sound crazier than any lie they could make up. Subverted when it only tips off the wraith that two hunters are on her trail.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: How Dean defeats the wraith: she extends her feeding spike from her wrist to try and run it through his brain. He grabs it and snaps it off and it looks and sounds painful. For the record, this wraith was posing as the very same nurse who performed cavity searches on the boys.
- Hollywood Psych: The Winchesters check themselves into a Bedlam House and get subjected to All Psychology Is Freudian.
- The Mirror Shows Your True Self: The problem is, what if what you saw in the mirror is a hallucination?
- Naked Nutter: Exploited when a nurse finds Sam and Dean spying in the morgue; Dean drops his trousers and yells, "Pudding!" to divert suspicion.
- Obfuscating Insanity: Dean pretends to be crazy to keep staff from questioning why he and Sam are in staff-restricted areas of the hospital.[Sam and Dean are in the morgue of the hospital. Nurse enters.]Nurse:What are you boys doing in here?Dean: [Drops pants and shakes hips] Pudding!Nurse:[smiles politely] Alright, let's get you boys back to your rooms.Dean: [Pulls up pants, whispers to Sam] Crazy works.
- Properly Paranoid: Martin and multiple other patients are convinced that there's a monster roaming the sanitarium killing people. The doctors don't believe them, since they're you know, patients in a sanitarium. But this is Supernatural, so they're completely right.
- Red Herring: First the doctor, then the woman who kisses Sam and Dean are suspects.
- Retired Badass: Martin Creaser.
- Shout-Out: To Fletch. The boys use "Babar" as the name of the doctor who referred them to the institution, and the following exchange is directly out of Fletch:Doctor: Wasn't there a children's book about an elephant named "Babar"?Dean: I don't know, I don't have any elephant books.
- Dean asks Karla if she's like Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
- Silver Has Mystic Powers: The wraith is extremely vulnerable to silver, so Sam steals silver-plated letter openers from the nurses' stations.
- Spotting the Thread: Dean realises that both he and Sam going crazy at the same time is too much a coincidence, and the wraith has infected them.
- There Are No Therapists: Dean meets a female therapist who appears to be zeroing in on his issues. Only she turns out to be a hallucination, so Dean decides at the end of the episode that the only way to cope is to bury those issues. This will not end well.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: Dean and then Sam.
- Vampire Doctor: A wraith poses as a nurse at a mental hospital, taking full advantage of the fact that the patients there are supposedly 'insane' so that she can feed on them without having to at all worry about anyone believing her targets' attempts at warning others about her actions.
- You Have to Believe Me!: The patient in the teaser trying to convince her doctor that a monster is after her.
