One of the best features of Supernatural is the fact that they don’t always take themselves so seriously. I mean, sure we’ve got the super scary episodes & the ones that are tied extremely tightly to the overall mythology and underlying story – but every now and then they throw in a bit of comedy relief and this one is absolutely up there in terms of humor!
In this episode we find the brothers investigating a wishing well … of course being Supernatural, it couldn’t be all positive could it, with people getting exactly what they wished for with no evil consequences … no, in Supernatural you have to assume that there is always a dark side and in this case it is somewhat of a doozy … namely any wishes that are made, automatically have an unexpected twist, which can impact the wishers in a significant and in some cases deadly way!
While at first glance the wishes all seem somewhat harmless – a “ghost” peeping on someone in a shower, a little girl wishing for a new best friend, a bullied boy looking for super strength and a closet geek getting the girl of his dreams, the consequences in each case are different, weird and varied. The ghost of course is a teenage boy who’s made a wish to be invisible … with regular teenage hormones thrumming through his body, he immediately navigates himself to a woman showering so that he can watch her unobserved. Of course one of the consequences of being invisible is that when you’re crossing a street – you need to make sure that you look both ways! Unfortunately our peeping tom discovers this fact to his detriment when he gets run over by the Impala on its arrival into town.
One of the saddest and funniest wishes is that of the little girl wishing for a best friend. She ends up bringing her Teddy Bear to life and while the movie TED might have given us an indication of what our stuffed friends could act like … this is another, more negative version of the same.
Teddy Bear: Look at this. You believe this crap?
Dean: Not really.
Teddy Bear: It is a terrible world. Why am I here?
Audrey: For tea parties!
Teddy Bear: Tea parties? Is that all there is? (starts crying)
Sam: Are we… should we… are we going to kill this teddy bear?
Dean: How? Do we shoot it, burn it?
Sam: I don’t know. Both?
Dean: How do we even know that’s gonna work? I mean I don’t want some giant, flaming, pissed-off teddy on our hands.
Sam: Yeah. Besides, I get the feeling that the bear isn’t really the, you know, core problem here.
After much investigation, they determine that the only way to cancel the wishes is to remove a magic coin (that pulls power from a pagan goddess Tiamat) from the town wishing well. It turns out that the geek that caused a beauty queen to fall in love with him was the originator of this coin and while he is initially reluctant to remove it from the fountain, when one of the wishes results in Sam’s death, he takes it out and all of the wishes are cancelled out.
Dean does finally admit to Sam that he remembers everything that happened in Hell, but refuses to tell him anything else, as Sam wouldn’t be able to understand.