Things I Love About SPN Season 1: Hook Man

Supernatural, Season 1
Episode 7, “Hook Man”
Written by John Shiban
Directed by David Jackson

Warnings:
some brief discussion of female objectification, mild dubious consent issues, homoeroticism and homophobia

I have to confess, if there’s an episode in season one that I don’t love, and tend to skip sometimes on my many rewatches, it isn’t the much maligned “Bugs” or the infamous racist truck episode, it’s “Hook Man”. Which is probably why I’ve been struggling these past few weeks to get my thoughts on the matter down on paper - to the point I was almost ready to abandon the project - but that would be a pity since, despite my ambivalence, there are some aspects of the episode that are quite interesting. So, I’ve decided to take a different approach this time and start with a quick summary of the plot upfront so I can just focus on those scenes and themes I find intriguing.

Here’s the synopsis: we open with 18-year-old reverend’s daughter, Lori Sorensen, being tarted up for a date by her racy college roommate. Cut to Lori out with her frat boy date as he parks his car on a spooky road, under one of SPN’s favourite spooky bridges, where he proceeds to get fresh with Lori and makes her uncomfortable. Cue dark figure with a hook hand that attacks the car, and the boyfriend’s dead body winds up hanging suspended upside down over the car. Unconvincing fake scream from Lori. Title card. Sam and Dean turn up and, similarly to the Bloody Mary case, they decide they’ve found the source of a famous urban legend: this time, the Hook Man, whom they eventually identify as the vengeful spirit of a crazed serial-killing preacher named Jacob Karns. Meanwhile Lori’s roommate meets a bloody death and Lori discovers her father is having an affair with a married woman. She has a row with him, which is witnessed by Sam. Finding Sam watching her house, she gets fresh with him and makes him uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Dean tries to burn the bones of JK but it doesn’t take and the hook man attacks Lori’s father. The brothers conclude the vengeful spirit is feeding off Lori’s repressed feelings and punishing people she thinks are immoral. They realize the silver hook is the source of its power, but it was melted down and reforged, so they decide to destroy all the silver they can find in the Sorensens’ house and adjacent church. But then Lori turns up in the church crying because she’s come to the same conclusion as the brothers and has decided she’s the one who deserves to be punished, prompting the hook man to chase both of them until Sam notices Lori’s wearing a silver hook-shaped cross, which he snatches and tosses to Dean who tosses it into the furnace. The hook man goes up in smoke and the day is saved. Epilogue: sad parting scene between Sam and Lori. Quick BM scene in the car. Brothers drive away. Roll credits.

Reading between the lines, you may already have guessed one of the main reasons I’m not keen on the episode: I’m afraid I just don’t find the heroine of the week attractive or sympathetic. To me, she just comes across as whiny and annoying. But there are also aspects of the plot that bother me too, which is surprising considering “Hook Man” was penned by the same author who wrote the previous brilliant episode, but in this one it feels like Shiban has shoe-horned together a combination of urban legends in a way that doesn’t particularly track logically, and he also employs plot devices that seem to have no dramatic explanation other than to provide a too convenient way for Sam and Dean to solve the case.

Mind you, I’ve criticized a script before now only to discover later that the problems arose from edits made by the director (or ad-libs from the actors!), so I’ll give Shiban the benefit of the doubt. As it happens, it turns out the original director of this episode was deemed unsatisfactory by the regular crew, and Kim Manners had to be called in as “co-director” to “get the ‘scare’ across” http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.07_Hook_Man#Minutiae, so it's conceivable the original director made poor choices about the script that weren’t fixed when Kim took over.

The discovery of this piece of trivia explained other puzzling things about the episode. For example, after the final scenes of “Skin” I had expected to see a marked improvement in the brothers’ relationship in the next episode but, although it does seem less tense on the whole, Dean doesn’t seem to have made that much progress since killing his dark other self; he’s still feminizing Sam, and throughout this episode – which is predominantly set in a university environment - Dean is continually riding Sam about his college experience. But it seems “Hook Man” was originally set to air earlier in the season but was pushed back, (presumably because the necessity to reshoot certain scenes delayed production), and “Phantom Traveler” aired in its place. (Ibid.)

Realizing “Hook Man” was originally written to follow “Dead in the Water” makes much more sense developmentally because we had already witnessed Dean making snide little comments about Sam’s college education in those early episodes but, while Sam had reacted defensively in “Wendigo”, we saw him learning more about Dean in “Dead in the Water” and making a conscious decision to treat the barbs as a joke rather than allowing himself to be fazed by them. The brothers’ relationship in “Hook Man” fits right into that stage of their dynamic and it also makes sense that the show would want to follow up at that point with an episode that expands on the theme of the brothers’ relative intelligence, which had been brewing in those episodes, by allowing us to see Dean in a college environment and, turns out, he fits in better than we might have expected. It’s also interesting to view “Hook Man” as a precursor to “Skin” since, in the former, we can see Shiban consciously setting up themes in a deceptively light-hearted and comic manner that he intended to revisit and develop in a much darker context in the latter.   

For example, in the original script, the brothers’ first scene introduced an example of Dean feminizing Sam. By the time it appeared in the aired episode, the scene was heavily cut but the original is available in the DVD special features (and also on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sad7pXmUKks) It begins with Sam standing at a payphone while Dean can be seen getting out of the car, crossing behind him and taking a seat at an outdoor café table. “I don’t understand.” Sam says into the phone. “Why do you need my badge number again?” After a moment he sighs, clearly annoyed and frustrated, and he reads the badge number from the card. “Yes, Sergeant Frances Marquis, that’s me,” he explains, and adds insistently, “Yes, Frances is a boy’s name. All right, thank you for your time.” It transpires that Dean has given him the badge number of a female officer. “Your half-caff double vanilla latte’s getting cold over here, Frances,” Dean taunts him as he hangs up the phone and moves toward the table, and he responds, testily, “next time give me a gender appropriate badge.”  So, we can see now that when Shiban wrote Dean feminizing Sam in “Skin” (“Sam wears women’s underwear”) it wasn’t actually for the first time. He intended it to be a developing theme that referred back to this scene. However, by the time “Hook Man” actually screened, the only part that survived into the aired episode was Sam thanking the police call centre operative and Dean’s quip, “Your half-caff double vanilla latte’s getting cold over here, Frances.” To which Sam simply replies, “bite me”. Perhaps the scene was edited once the episode moved to the later slot because it seemed less appropriate for a post-“Skin” brother dynamic. And it’s possible there were other scenes similarly toned down in the filming process or re-shoots so that Dean’s barbs played more as light-hearted teasing rather than the resentful needling evident in the pre-“Skin” episodes.

(Incidentally, there’s another interesting tidbit in the opening exchange, which includes one of those standard conversations that remind us the brothers are supposed to be searching for their father. “I had ‘em check the FBI’s Missing Persons Data Bank.” Sam exposits. “No John Does fitting Dad’s description. I even ran his plates for traffic violations.” I mention it because, later in the episode, we see Dean casually pulling a parking ticket from under his windscreen wiper – a subtle nod back to this conversation that makes me wonder if John Winchester uses similar methods to keep tabs on his sons.)

Moving on to Iowa, Sam and Dean pre-text as students to get intel from the murdered boyfriend’s frat brothers. (This is another thing I liked about season one: the brothers don a variety of guises to get information rather than jumping into a fed suit every episode. It was dramatized in the pilot and “Phantom Traveler” that impersonating federal officers draws attention and involves risk. Plus, hiring Fed suits costs money, so they only do it when they have no other recourse. It’s these little attentions to detail that heighten interest and realism in the first season.) The victim’s room-mate is painting up for a football game when the boys enter and he asks for help with his back, a request Dean clearly deems inappropriate, but he has no problem pushing Sam into the socially awkward situation. “He’s the artist,” he explains, much to Sam’s obvious annoyance:

Homo-erotic subtext!

(Mind you, remembering that we later see Sam drawing, and drawing well, in “Home”, there may actually be some truth in Dean’s claim. Also, in “Shadow”, Dean implies that Sam’s penchant for wearing “costumes” for their pretexts is a legacy of his “high school drama dork” days and reveals that Sam was in a school production of “Our Town”. As I suggested in my review of The Pilot, it’s possible that the show was originally setting up the idea that Sam has a repressed creative side [and that, in reality, the show may just be depicting the plot of an unwritten novel]. Unfortunately, the theme is sadly neglected thereafter, at least until S4 “After School Special” where we learn he had a teacher who admired his writing talent.)


After some not so subtle questioning from Dean, the frat boy reveals that the victim was with someone on the night of the murder.

MURPH: Not just somebody. Lori Sorensen.
DEAN: Who’s Lori Sorensen? (to SAM) You missed a spot. Just down there on the back. (SAM looks annoyed. DEAN grins.)

“Lori’s a freshman.” Murph continues. “She’s a local. Super hot. And get this: she’s a reverend’s daughter.” http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.07_Hook_Man_(transcript)


The scene is played comically but let’s not ignore the fact that it relies for its humour on the assumption that the situation is home-erotically awkward for Sam. Also, Murph’s objectification of Lori, and especially his fetishization of her as a reverend’s daughter, is a little bit creepy, isn’t it? So, here we have homo-eroticism coupled with female objectification, both of which were major themes in “Skin”.

There follows a scene where the brothers meet and question Lori, then the action cuts to the college library where they discuss the possibility that they’ve found the source of the Hook Man legend and speculate that they may be dealing with an angry spirit.

(CUT TO: DEAN and SAM at a table in the library. The librarian places a few big boxes in front of them.)
LIBRARIAN: Here you go. Arrest records going back to 1851. (DEAN blows some dust off a box and coughs.) DEAN: Thanks.
LIBRARIAN: Ok. (She walks away.)
DEAN: So, this is how you spent four good years of your life, huh?
SAM: Welcome to higher education. (They begin reading.)
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.07_Hook_Man_(transcript)

Note that Dean takes the opportunity to be dismissive of Sam’s college years, but Sam chooses to take the comment lightly.

(CUT TO: Hours later. They are still looking.)

Now, this is where it gets interesting. At first it goes as you’d expect, with Dean looking bored and Sam finding something pertinent. But then it’s Dean who spots the page that leads them to the murder weapon.

SAM: Hey, check this out. 1862. A preacher named Jacob Karns was arrested for murder. Looks like he was so angry over the red light district in town that one night he killed 13 prostitutes. Uh, right here, “some of the deceased were found in their bed, sheets soaked with blood. Others suspended upside down from the limbs of trees as a warning against sins of the flesh.”
DEAN: (looking at another page) Get this, the murder weapon? Looks like the preacher lost his hand in an accident. Had it replaced with a silver hook. (Ibid)

SAM: (points to another page.) Look where all this happened. (DEAN reads.)
DEAN: 9 Mile Road.
SAM: Same place where the frat boy was killed.
DEAN: (impressed) Nice job, Dr. Venkmen. Let’s check it out. (Ibid)

This is the first of two visits to the library, and the second is even more interesting from a character point of view but, for now, the brothers head to the scene of the boyfriend’s murder and we’re introduced to the ubiquitous rock salt gun for the first time:

CUT TO: 9 Mile Road. DEAN and SAM drive up and get out of the car. DEAN opens the trunk and hands SAM a rifle.)
DEAN: Here you go.
SAM: If it is a spirit, buckshot won’t do much good.
DEAN: Yeah, rock salt. (He hands it to SAM.)
SAM: Huh. Salt being a spirit deterrent. (DEAN takes out a coil of rope and shuts the trunk.)
DEAN: Yeah. It won’t kill ‘em. But it’ll slow ‘em down. (They start walking towards the trees.)
SAM: That’s pretty good. You and Dad think of this?
DEAN: I told you. You don’t have to be a college graduate to be a genius. (Ibid.)

This is an important exchange. Dean’s continued pokes at Sam’s college education unconsciously reveal that he’s actually intimidated by it, but the scene also points up that Dean has his own kind of smarts, and I think it’s significant that Sam actually acknowledges that to some degree. It’s also kind of demonstrated when the brothers and their shotguns are accosted by a local sheriff and Dean has to do some fast talking to get them out of the arrest . . .  which includes another college poke at Sam:

(CUT TO: EXT.- CALUMET CO. SHERIFF’S DEPT. DEAN and SAM are leaving.)
DEAN: Saved your ass! Talked the sheriff down to a fine. Dude, I am Matlock.
SAM: But how?
DEAN: I told him you were a dumbass pledge and that we were hazing you.
SAM: What about the shotgun?
DEAN: I said that you were hunting ghosts and the spirits were repelled by rock salt.
You know, typical Hell Week prank.
SAM: And he believed you?
DEAN: Well, you look like a dumbass pledge. (Ibid.)

At this point, policemen start streaming out of the station and jumping into squad cars, so the brothers follow them to the sorority house where Lori has just discovered Taylor’s body. Here Dean indulges in some trademark inappropriate humour. “Dude! Sorority girls!” he enthuses.

And the theme of female objectification raises its ugly head again. Well. I say “ugly” but it’s actually a very cute and handsome head, and therein lies the problem. Dean gets away with this kind of crap because he’s young and charming and good-looking but, after watching “Skin”, does a 26-year-old man letching over teenage girls really seem quite so harmless? Although Shiban plays it comically in this episode, I don’t doubt he wrote with “Skin”, and its exploration of the dangerous potential of this side of Dean’s character, consciously in mind.

Still, that doesn’t stop me enjoying the humorous little exchange that follows when Sam and Dean break into the sorority house:

gif credit: the jabberwock via https://casey28.livejournal.com/1786606.html

And I also enjoy the brothers’ remarks when they enter Lori’s room and notice the smell of ozone, confirming they’re definitely dealing with a spirit. As always, I appreciate the first season’s focus on the lore and practical mechanics of hunting.

Shortly afterward the brothers find themselves at a college party. How they came to be there isn’t entirely explained, but it’s an aspect of campus life Dean can approve of. “Man, you’ve been holding out on me. This college thing is awesome!” he exclaims, whilst smiling and winking at a nearby sorority girl. Sam admits “this wasn’t really my experience,” and Dean chides him. “Let me guess: libraries, studying, straight As? What a geek!” But it comes over as light-hearted ribbing, which Sam accepts with a philosophical shrug of acknowledgement:

Sam has found some evidence that may connect Karns to the Sorensens and we’re treated to a little more ghost lore:

DEAN: Reverend Sorensen. You think he’s summoning the spirit?
SAM: Maybe. Or, you know how a poltergeist can haunt a person instead of a place?
DEAN: Yeah, the spirit latches onto the reverend’s repressed emotions, feeds off them, yeah, okay.
SAM: Without the reverend ever even knowing it
DEAN: Either way, you should keep an eye on Lori tonight. (SAM nods.)
SAM: What about you? (DEAN looks at an attractive blonde smiling at him by the pool table.)
DEAN: (reluctantly) I’m gonna go see if I can find that unmarked grave. (He looks at the blonde again, shakes his head in disappointment, and walks away.)
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.07_Hook_Man_(transcript)

Dean finds the “unmarked” grave rather more easily than one might have expected since it turns out to be marked with a symbol the brothers have already seen on the wall of Lori and Taylor’s bedroom, and on a drawing of Karns’ hook:

But what is this symbol? Why does JK scrawl it on the wall? Why is it on the hook?
Is it the manufacturer’s signature? Then why is it on the grave? If a criminal with a prosthetic arm was executed today, would he have precisionprosthetics.com stamped on his gravestone? o.O

The salt ‘n burn is a creepier affair than the more mundane, work-a-day scenes we see later in the series. The graveyard is dark and spooky and Dean, less blasé than he later becomes, is wary at the sound of snapping twigs and other eerie night noises. The filming angles as he takes a position over the grave are intriguing: his stance, the placement of the accelerant bottle, and the way the liquid streams and spurts into the coffin, all combine to give the impression he’s pissing over the bones, perhaps to point up the irreverence of this act of desecration that viewers are witnessing for the first time in the series.

Then he lights a match, and we get this beautiful shot of him staring into the flame before he tosses it into the grave. Is he thinking of his mother at this moment? There’s a beautiful and tragic symmetry in the reflection that he’s now holding in his hand the fiery element that consumed her and using it as a weapon against evil.

Meanwhile something much creepier is going on at the Sorensens’ place. After an argument with her father, Lori catches Sam watching the house:

LORI: I saw you from upstairs. What are you doing here?
SAM: I’m keeping an eye on the place. (LORI looks at him.) I was worried.
LORI: About me?
SAM: Yeah. Sorry.
LORI: No, it’s cool. I already called the cops. (She smiles. SAM laughs.) No, seriously. I think you’re sweet. Which is probably why you should run away from me as fast as you can.
SAM: Why would you say that?
LORI: It’s like I’m cursed or something. People around me keep dying.
SAM: I think I know how you feel.
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.07_Hook_Man_(transcript)

It’s clear that Sam identifies with her, but then she goes on to vent about her father’s affair “he taught me, raised me, to believe that if you do something wrong you will get punished” she says. “I just don’t know what to think anymore.”

This is a clusterfuck of ideas she’s putting into Sam’s head. Maybe some were already floating around his mind to a degree, but this conversation crystallizes the notion that he is somehow responsible for his mother’s death, and Jessica’s, that he is cursed – and links it to the idea he’s being punished, deserves to be punished, for something he’s done wrong, or something that’s wrong with him – ideas that will continue to haunt Sam until they ultimately lead him into the Cage. So, thanks for that, Lori.

And then she decides she’s going to hug him.

He’s uncomfortable with this but after several awkward moments he eventually sort of puts his arms round her,

which is a mistake because she takes it as encouragement and promptly forces her tongue down his throat kisses him, and it’s just all manner of awkward and cringeworthy,

Nope.

Sam appears to be conflicted, nevertheless he gently but firmly pushes her away:

It’s an ironic reversal of the first scene where the frat boy went too far and made Lori uncomfortable; now she’s done the same thing to Sam.

When the salt ‘n burn fails to gank Karns, the brothers conclude that the hook rather than his bones must be the source of the spirit’s power, so it’s back to the library for Sam and Dean but, this time, there’s a marked difference in their relative research modes.

Dean now looks completely at home in the college study environment, fully engrossed in his books, while Sam is the one looking bored. And it’s Dean who discovers the vital clue that leads to the whereabouts of the hook:

DEAN: Here’s something, I think. Log book, Iowa State Penitentiary. (reading) Karns, Jacob. Personal affects: disposition thereof.
SAM: Does it mention the hook?
DEAN: Yeah, maybe. (reading) Upon execution, all earthly items shall be remanded to the prisoner’s house of worship, St. Barnabas Church.
SAM: Isn’t that where Lori’s father preaches?
DEAN: Yeah.
SAM: Where Lori lives?
DEAN: Maybe that’s why the Hook Man has been haunting reverends and reverends’ daughters for the past 200 years.
SAM: Yeah, but if the hook were at the church or Lori’s house, don’t you think someone might’ve seen it? I mean, a bloodstained, silver-handled hook?
DEAN: Check the church records.
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/1.07_Hook_Man_(transcript)

And Sam subsequently finds that the hook was reforged, so the brothers truly work the case as a team. But, significantly, this scene demonstrates that Dean is just as capable at research as Sam and might well have thrived at college if not for his sense of obligation to his father’s crusade. All of which speaks to the resentment and jealousy the shapeshifter would expose in “Skin”:

S1E06

The brothers return to the Sorensen residence, collect all the silver in the house and church and throw it into the furnace. When Lori arrives and the Hook Man starts pursuing her, the brothers realize they’ve missed something:

Props to props for finding a hook shaped cross!

Sam snatches the cross and throws it at Dean as the invisible spirit approaches, eerily dragging the invisible hook along the wall.

Dean slowly turns and watches the oncoming crack with alarm, and it’s all very scary, but . . . what is he waiting for?

Don’t just stand there! Melt something!

Tossing the salt gun to Sam, he dashes back to furnace while the Hook Man continues to pursue Sam and Lori, and there’s a good deal of running and screaming and shooting while the hook slowly melts in the fires of Mount Doom.

But eventually the cross is destroyed, and the Hook Man goes out in a blaze of gory.

All credit due: the FX are pretty impressive.

Then it’s all over bar the fond farewells and the closing BM.

 

Dean watches the sad parting in his wing mirror, feeling bad for Sam. It seems he’s gradually moving on from his former resentment and starting to wish for a normal life for his brother. “We could stay,” he suggests when Sam returns to the car, but Sam just shakes his head, and the episode ends with a beautifully framed shot of the car as the Incredible Hulk walks sadly away from another town the brothers drive away accompanied by the ironic strains of Boston’s “Peace of Mind”.

Now if you're feelin' kinda low 'bout the dues you've been paying
Future's coming much too slow
And you wanna run, but somehow you just keep on stayin'
Can't decide on which way to go
Yeah, yeah, yeah
I understand about indecision
But I don't care if I get behind
People livin' in competition
All I want is to have my peace of mind.

(lyrics courtesy of Google)

Ultimately, although I consider “Hook Man” to be one of the weakest MOTW plots of the season, Shiban maintains his usual strengths in terms of theme, character, and relationship development. There’s also a lot to enjoy from a visual standpoint, and we can probably thank Kim manners for the great camera work and beautifully framed shots since they are his forte.

What do others think? Am I too critical of the episode? Am I doing the plot and/or Lori an injustice? Are there more positive aspects of the episode that I’m missing? I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.