sweetondean: Leylin Vixen's Quick Draw Recap - Supernatural 12x04 American Nightmare

Wednesday 9 November 2016

Leylin Vixen's Quick Draw Recap - Supernatural 12x04 American Nightmare

American Nightmare

Opening words

Episode three left us emotionally compromised and Mary in the wind so I was eagerly waiting for episode four. Needless to say I was not disappointed. This was the first script from a new writer Davy Perez. He was live tweeting the episode and he seemed genuinely excited for his first outing. Also he has black humour that also made me laugh during the episode. We will have exciting times ahead if everything the fans are speculating will come to pass. So we shall see.

Details

Title American Nightmare

Episode 12.04

First aired November 3, 2016

Directed by John F. Showalter

Written by Davy Perez

Monster Gail Peterson

Timeline

Location(s) Mason City, Iowa

Pleasant Valley, Missouri

Story

This week we had creepy MotW case on our hands and still the episode remembered the myth arcs of the season. We got an update from Castiel to Dean about his and Crowley’s hunt for Lucifer and Dean and Sam were both showing signs of the emotional fallout of the last episode.

The case starts when a woman suffering from stigmata comes to a church and dies from her injuries and the Winchesters pick the case up.

Dean is mostly grumpy to everyone and especially the child services person because of what happened with Mary, especially when she mentions splitting up families to them. Sam and Dean head to see a religious family whose daughter has died and Sam feels that something fishy is going on. Dean suspects that the killer is the Wiccan working in the child services, and Sam thinks it is the ghost of the daughter. They split up and Sam finds out that the daughter hasn’t died and she is being held captive and religiously and mentally tortured in the basement.

Sam is captured and he is able to talk to Magda. He learns that not only the daughter is a psychic but she killed those people by accident when she was trying to get them to notice and help her. The mother tries to kill her whole family at the family dinner but Magda prevents it. Dean slowly comes to terms with Mary’s leaving.

We also see that Mr. Ketch is following the brothers. The ending of the episode casts a grim note to the whole story when he kills Magda because the Winchesters let her live. We still do not see his full face.

Characters

Episode four had a great cast like many times before. Gail Peterson as the mother was chilling but Magda in my opinion stole the whole show. Abraham and Elijah Peterson were being ruled and were brainwashed by the mother. They were innocents that were killed by a very human monster. Beth Roberts and Olivia Sanchez gave a very human face to child services. Mr. Ketch still intrigues me but I hope he is more than a mere thug. The cross tattoo on his hand is interesting. Does it have a back story? I also think I want to snatch his bike for myself!

Set design

We start with a church set. I think this is the real church they have used a few time but I am not sure. I liked the glass windows the most. It reminded me of the season seven premiere 7.01 Meet the New Boss where Castiel changed his image in the window to himself as their new god. That imagery gives the immediate feeling of a church even though nothing else would be seen.

The episode also had a normal morgue set and a child services office set. With these sets we only got to see a small amount. Most of the episode we lingered in the Peterson household. They had almost fully cut themselves off from the society and the whole farm was close to old western times. Indeed very “Children of the Corn” like! It had very earthly colours and and zero bright colours. The basement on the other hand was something from the dark ages or The Exorcist. The brutality that was happening down there was mirrored by the set, the “pagan” iron cross just added to the effect. It was a nice parallel that Mr. Ketch had a tattoo cross on his hand.

Costume design

Normally the costumes are pretty same episode to episode but even the Winchesters got something fairly new and blast from the past this time around. Sam and Dean were trauma counsellors in 11.08 Just My Imagination which was a pretty similar look to Child Protective Services case workers. Priests they have been both in 1.14 Nightmare and in 4.03 In the Beginning, when Samuel and Dean were in disguise. Of course they also appeared as FBI too, so three aliases in one episode. I think that is the first one ever.

Costumes for the family were also different than normal. Like I wrote in set design all the bright colours were missing and some of it was even fit for the dark ages or crazy horror movies! The costumes were close to earthy and pretty plain.

Music

The songs for this episode were Golden Dunes by The Budos Band, Down in My Heart by Paloma Kwiatkowski and Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho by Paloma Kwiatkowski. I chose a part from the lyrics from Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho as we have two familiar names on it. You’ll never know if the song was chosen just because of that. There were also slightly different lyrics from various singers to this song so not all had the said names.

"Good morning sister Mary

Good morning brother John

Well I want to stop and talk with you

want to tell you how I come along

I know you've heard about Joshua
He was the son of Nun
He never stopped his work until
Until the work was done”

– Elvis Presley