Confession time. For this week’s entry in the Bestiary, I just wanted to sit back and rewatch Supernatural episodes. It’s the time of year when we all melt into puddles of goo. What better company for a goo puddle than Sam and Dean and their large cast of frenemies?
The Jersey Devil episode showed up halfway through Season 7. While my brain keeps insisting that there are 30 seasons of the show, there are actually only 15. Which means we’re just about exactly halfway through the many-faceted adventures of the brothers Winchester.
By this time the show is deeply invested in its mythos, which is fairly straightforward Christian dualism. God and Lucifer. Angels and devils. Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.
You’d think the Jersey Devil would have a role to play in the mythos. We get a tease of it in the classic horror-movie opening: Middle-aged man and wife glamping in, we’re informed, the Wharton State Forest, Pine Barrens, New Jersey. They’re tucked up in their posh tent and their pricey burrito-style sleeping bags, with working electricity and a TV with remote.
Something is stalking them. We know this because we get POV: blurryvision, also wobblyvision. And then the scene jumps, and middle-aged man is hanging upside down in his sleeping bag, and Something is rustling in the trees. Wife and tent and all the mod-cons are gone. Screaming ensues. Bloody polyfill litters the forest floor.
Cut to Sam and Dean and Bobby Singer and extended-plot business, and a monster report for them to address: “Human Burrito” chewed to pieces in the Pine Barrens. Sam opines that this is the habitat of the Jersey Devil, with some familiar history and the standard description (hooves, horns, tail, horse’s head—“More like Chewbacca head,” Dean observes). And so we embark on the hunt titled “How to Win Friends and Influence Monsters.”
Bobby checks out the autopsy and points out three things that for sure did not kill the glamper. Bite radius too small for a Leviathan (the monster of the season, a shapeshifter with horribly huge, lethally sharp teeth), there’s still some of the heart left so it’s not a werewolf according the mythos of the show, and there are still scraps left, so nope, not a wendigo.
Sam and Dean have begun their investigation in a Chili’s-level dining franchise, Biggerson’s, which prominently advertises a sandwich called the Turducken Slammer. The openly hostile waiter serves one to Dean, while Sam and Bobby choose other options. Dean chows down hungrily.
By this time it’s becoming evident that the Jersey Devil has nothing to do with what’s going on in the Pine Barrens. The monster in the woods is a zombie-like human with cannibalistic urges. The vehicle of the urges is none other than the Turducken Slammer.
Dean barely escapes becoming zombified. The body count rises, and includes the Assistant Chief Forest Ranger and his superior, aka Ranger Rick. The focus shifts to an evil doctor in his evil lab, working on an evil experiment. He’s developed a mystery meat that causes people to become hungrier for it the more of it they eat (and, speaking of goo, it melts into a puddle of same after an hour). The goal is turn them into obese, complaisant, apathetic couch potatoes. In short, modern Americans.
Unfortunately for the doctor, a very small percentage of consumers have a negative reaction to the formula. They became aggressive and violent. They crave human flesh.
The Jersey Devil remains a myth, but there are devils in plenty in the Pine Barrens. The forces behind the Slammer are Leviathans, led by one that took on the identity of Dick Roman, vulture capitalist. Dick is authentically and gleefully evil. He has no moral objection to cannibalism, but that’s not what the experiment is supposed to be about. The doctor’s project gets terminated. As for what happens to the doctor…
Well. Evil is evil. Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes, not nearly so much.
It’s entertaining. Sam and Dean are just as eye-candy-lovely as ever, and Bobby is his cranky, seen-it-all, awesome self. My one regret is that they passed on the chance to make the Jersey Devil part of the mythos.
I suppose they didn’t want to run up the effects budget. And they had an arc to develop, with Dick and the Leviathans. But they could have done so much with a centuries-old half-human, half-demon who seems to be bound to that particular region.
It might even have ended up helping the Winchesters take down the Leviathans that have invaded its territory. Because in some of the lore, the Devil is guardian rather than monster; not a killer but a protector. It watches over the Pine Barrens.
They missed an opportunity there. Good thing there’s fanfic, and head canon. Because I am having Thoughts.
