User:Ophois/RedSky

Begins devling into Bela's backstory and "traumatic family history", killed family member. (Irvine wrote it, Cohan didn't say it) (issue 2, page 51, To Catch a Thief, Alex Irvine)

Plot

While jogging along a harbor, Sheila Case notices a ghostly ship passing by. A figure confronts her while she is showering that night, drowning her. Brothers Sam (Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Ackles) later drive to Massachusetts to investigate the death. Along the way, Dean chastises Sam for risking his life in confronting and killing the Crossroads Demon. With less than a year left to live due to his demonic pact, Dean now has no leads on whoever holds his contract. The brothers question Sheila's elderly aunt, Gertrude "Gert" Case (Geer), about her mysterious death. She is obviously attracted to Sam, and continuously flirts with him. To their surprise, Gert then suggests the possibility of a ghost ship, and asks if they are collaborating with "Alex". Playing along, Sam notes that there have been ghost-ship sightings every 37 years, following by a series of on-land drownings.

Outside, a horrified Dean finds the Impala missing, but Bela Talbot (Cohan)—a thief whom the Winchesters have previously dealt with—quickly appears and admits to having towed it. Revealing herself to be "Alex", Bela tells them that she likes to scam old women, and had convinced Gert that she had solved the murder. Since the brothers' arrival, however, Gert has withheld the payment. After another drowning occurs that night, Sam and Dean speak to the victim's brother and learn that they both saw the ghost ship. Despite their attempts, the Winchesters are unable to save him from the spirit.

Bela later informs the brothers that the ghost ship is the Espírito Santo. It has become a death omen, and signals the arrival of a vengeful spirit. Hanged for treason, the sailor had his hand removed after death to make a Hand of Glory, and Bela suspects that it must be destroyed to stop the ghost. Gert provides the three of them with invitations to a function at the Maritime Museum where the Hand of Glory is kept. As Sam distracts Gert and withstands her advances, Dean and Bela steal the Hand of Glory. However, Bela sneaks away with the object and sells it to a wealthy client.

To her horror, Bela later sees the ghost ship. With the hand now gone, she turns to the Winchesters for help. Though Sam and Dean have figured out that all of the victims have been involved in the death of a family member, Bela refuses to elaborate. The trio heads to the sailor's grave and summons the spirit of the ship's captain, who ordered the execution. Revealed to be his brother, the captain confronts the sailor, and both disappear in an explosion of water. A thankful Bela gives the Winchesters $10,000. After they depart, Dean apologizes to Sam for the suffering the demonic pact has caused him. Sam, however, responds that he would rather have Dean worry about himself.

Production

Writing

Consulting Producer Laurence Andries initially found inspiration in the Kennedy Curse—members of a rich family meeting their demise. This concept was later dropped—he deemed it "too aristocratic and too removed from the audience"—but the brainstorming involved made him consider the eastern seaboard, which lead him to the idea of ghost ships. The writers explored "everything from the Flying Dutchman to the S.S. Violet and the Griffon", all vanishing ships which serve as death omens to those who see them.

The original idea for the teaser involved a "big elaborate set-piece". An homage to The Shining, a woman would notice water dripping from the ceiling and then find the floor of the upstairs bathroom covered in water. When this was deemed too expensive, the writers settled on a woman drowning after her shower fills with water. A later scene would have depicted a similar death in a car. However, production could not afford these set pieces either, so the writers reduced the ghost's ability to merely drowning his victims through touch. Andries commented, "We write our dreams and shoot our realities".

Party

Andries chose to include the party setting to place Sam and Dean in an unfamiliar situation, though it was envisioned as a "much bigger affair". The scenes were filmed at the same location used for the hotel in the second season's "Playthings". Costume designer Diane Widas added a bit of subtlety to the wardrobe, noting that the suits fit them better than the "bargain basement" outfits they usually wear because Bela "went and paid for the suits and got the boys all decked out".

Filming

Production designed the Winchester safe house as "decrepit and dingy" with rubbish everywhere, including mousetraps. Padalecki jokingly threw mousetraps at the cast and crew members, though one eventually caught on his own finger. One scene involved Cohan standing up and then leaving after reading her line. The production crew would remove the chair off-screen after she stood up so that she would not run into it when walking away. During one take, Cohan felt she did not say her line perfectly; caught up in the moment, she immediately went to sit back down for another take and fell to the ground. Cohan claims that she could not resume the scene for ten minutes because she was laughing so hard.

Effects

Visuals of the ghost ship were initially just normal shots of a large boat, but the reaction of disbelief given by the jogger in the teaser inspired the visual effects department to depict the ship only in flashes of lightning. This "drew it out a little bit and gave a creepy feel to it". The spirit's attack on Bela in the episode's climax made use of a contraption built by special effects makeup artist Tony Lindala; a tube connected to a denture on the off-camera side of Cohan pumped out large amounts of water, creating the illusion that she is vomiting it out.

Though the script described the confrontation between the ghostly brothers as "they collide into a swirling vortex that disappears", Kripke and Singer ultimately left creative control up to visual effects supervisor Ivan Hayden. Production filmed each element of the sequence separately, with the cemetery itself taking place at Heritage Park. A separate plate used exploding water balloons shot at 1,000 frames per second; this high frame rate allowed for the use of slow motion. The layers were then composited into a single sequence, with the elements transitioning into 3D models of the characters and water after the initial collision.

Reception

On its initial broadcast, the episode was watched by 3.01 million viewers. It received mixed reviews from critics. Brett Love of TV Squad felt the "job of the week actually worked out really well", with "a good bit of the creepy, some really funny moments, and a nice little twist at the end". He especially praised the heist scenes, and compared Dean to James Bond. Ellen Geer's performance as Gert "cracked [him] up", and he enjoyed the interactions between her and Sam. Also noted were the "very cool" water effects of the colliding spirits and the "good chemistry" between Dean and Bela. Although he deemed Bela's sighting of the ghost ship "a little too reminiscent" of the episode "Bad Day at Black Rock"—Bela gives in to the brothers after she finds herself in peril—he was curious as to the additional "level of mystery" for Bela that is hinted at. The bookended scenes between Sam and Dean in the Impala were "once again well done", with Love positing that "their relationship continues to grow and turn in new directions". Similarly, Sean Elliott of IFMagazine gave the episode a grade of an A, and called it "a perfect example of why [he loves] this show". He compared the episode to John Carpenter's The Fog, but pointed out that Supernatural delved into the ghost-ship concept.

Tina Charles of TV Guide "wasn't completely wowed by [the episode]"—she found the ghost-ship villain "just OK"—but did like the brotherly conversations and the humor. Like Love, she also praised Geer's performance. Airlock Alpha, however, believed that the "comedy in the show is dead on". The reviewer liked seeing Sam stand up to Dean "like never before", and believed Sam has become a "bit edgier, letting us peek into a darkness that had never bubbled so close to the surface". Sam and Dean's conversation at the end was the highlight of the episode, with the reviewer happy to see Dean opening up more with breaking character. However, the reviewer was "still not impressed with Bela", and deeming her "forced into the show". Complaints for the season that are applicable to the episode include brighter lighting and the "almost completely MIA" classic rock. Karla Peterson of The San Diego Union-Tribune gave the "perfectly decent episode" a grade of a B. She agreed with Airlock Alpha, noting that "the absence of our beloved mullet rock [feels] like the absence of an actual character".

Kripke, however, deemed the episode "by far the least successful episode this year". The writers had been trying to introduce Bela to the series "slow" and "sporadically", but he felt it "really kind of became the Bela show" because they "tried to do a little too much, too fast".

References

General

1. Knight, Nicholas (2009). Supernatural: The Official Companion Season 3. Titan Books. ISBN 1848561032.

Specific

External links

• Official website