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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x19 Folsom Prison Blues

The second series of Supernatural races towards its conclusion with only three episodes remaining after this one until the end, but in spite of that none of the episodes for a long time have had any bearing at all on the plot. I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere, but having been a fan of Buffy and Angel since before Supernatural existed, I miss the build up and progression of story over the twenty two episode run of a series. In some ways, Supernatural is a ghost of television past and often reminds me much more of The X-Files than is perhaps good for it. The X-Files has 217 episodes but most of those are stand-alone monster-of-the-week episodes. Supernatural does eventually focus more on its overall plot, but this archaic attitude to serial television never goes away: even some of the very last episodes of the show in 2020 were stand-alone episodes.

That does not mean that the stand-alone episodes are bad, though, just that they can drag a bit after a while, and most of series one and two has been stand-alones. It will come as a shock to you, Dear Reader, but I am a fan of any episode which focuses on Dean, and 2x19 Folsom Prison Blues is just such a one. It takes place in Green River County, which I assume is in the vicinity of Little Rock, Arkansas based on the ‘Little Rock City Police’ on Henriksen’s door in one scene. I established in my analysis of 1x16 Shadow that Dean is a fan of Evanescence, and now he gets to be in prison in their hometown. Fun for him.

The plot of 2x19 Folsom Prison Blues centres on Dean and Sam getting themselves arrested in Arkansas in order to infiltrate a prison. An acquaintance of John’s who apparently saved him at one point works as a guard at the gaol in question and has reason to believe a recent string of deaths is related to the paranormal. Dean and Sam investigate the case which leads them to the ghost of a nurse who experimented on inmates in life and continues killing them in her afterlife.

The villain of this episode has similarities to Dr Ellicott in 1x10 Asylum who abused his position of power over the mental patients under his care to test electroshock therapy on them. In that instance, Dean related to Ellicott’s victims and aligned himself with the misunderstood, maltreated mentally ill in general, and thereby set himself in opposition to those who marginalised, mistreated, and abused them.

5x11 Sam, Interrupted will see Dean pose as a patient in a mental hospital without even trying, and the ease he blends in with is cause for concern, but pertinent to 2x19 Folsom Prison Blues is Dean’s chameleonic camouflage among the prisoners. Sam scoffs at the idea of the prisoners being ‘innocent victims’ but Dean instantly goes at that issue and says that the prisoners are still human. The meaning of this is of course similar to the situation with the mentally ill people in 1x10 Asylum: they have been dehumanised so that any (mis-)treatment of them is justifiable or even commendable by ‘normal’ people. As somebody who has been outcast from decent society (and made into a criminal by Sam’s actions in 1x06 Skin), Dean can easily relate.

In my analysis of the previous episode, I commented on autistic masking and Dean posing as a PA. This might have some applicability here as Dean adopts yet another role, but what struck me was how similar the situation Dean found himself in is to the kind of situation he grew up in with John and the environment John groomed Dean for: homosocial, combative, hierarchical, physical, straightforward, and aggressive. The rules here are easy for Dean, and contrary to masking, he might actually feel less need to pretend and fake it in such an environment. Quite apart from neurodivergence, it would also be the easiest thign for Dean to become like the rest of the men there. He always has an undertone of dangerous and potential violence, but restrains himself because of his desire to do and be good. He does not see much difference between himself and the men around him.

Sam for his part does not doing anywhere near as well in a gaol environment. Whereas Dean generally appears positively chipper, Sam is tense and utterly out of his element. In contrast to Dean, Sam aspires to a middle class, respectable life, the kind of existence his friend in 1x06 Skin enjoyed (the one with the huge windows which would afford no protection during the zombie apocalypse). As such, being among the underclass is far outside Sam’s comfort zone, but more than that: he feels no sense of kinship or commonality with the men in gaol whatsoever. His scoffing at the idea of them as ’innocent’ betrays his mainstream, blinkered view of society at large, e.g. criminals are bad people and deserve to be imprisoned. He imagines a separation between himself and them (and by extension himself and Dean) whereby they are a different kind of person than he is and he would never be in their position. He regards himself as better than them.

The fact that Dean and Sam are wanted for murder, bankrobbery, fraud etc suggests that many if not all of the other inmates are in for similar reasons. The episode is also named after Johnny Cash’s song Folsom Prison Blues which is a song about the worst things a person could do to end up in gaol, such as shooting a man just to watch him die. However, we do not know the truth of their situations, and if the FBI are so wrong about Dean and Sam, who else are they wrong about?

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This attitude put me in mind of Sam’s smirking at Curtis being ‘probed’ in 2x15 Tall Tales: Sam cares about using the correct language about things such as ‘conjoined twins’ rather than ‘Siamese twins’ or ‘First Nations’ rather than ‘Indians’, but this is all a facade. It makes him sound educated, intelligent, liberal, and modern, but laughing at the man who was repeatedly raped and eschewing the idea of the prisoners being ‘innocent’ belies Sam’s true thoughts. He is incredibly sheltered and divorced from the reality of other people’s lives, and it takes a lot for a man to have grown up in the poverty Sam did but to still know so little about what life is like for the poor. In short, Sam is a poor guy who has become a champagne socialist and I find him insufferable.

To be fair to him (because even Sam is a human, believe it or not) it is understandable that he would want to escape and separate himself from his upbringing and pretend he has nothing in common with the men in prison. Running away from things is a means of self-preservation, and one which Sam repeatedly resorts to over the course of the show. The result of such behaviour is that he abandons other people who need him, namely Dean, and one of the consequences of Sam’s distance from his past life and upbringing is that he has further distanced himself from Dean.

That said, Sam never appeared to be close to Dean or to understand him at all. As far as Sam was concerned, Dean was John’s right hand who did whatever John told him to. Sam found John suffocating, and by association so too was Dean like a hand around Sam’s throat. What Sam never saw was that Dean’s obedience to John was down to grooming, conditioning, and abusive parenting. John gave the orders and Dean followed them, but Sam never realised that Dean did not like following them, or that Dean did not agree with what John did or said.

This is one of the reasons for the toxicity which is the hallmark of Dean and Sam’s brotherhood: in Sam’s eyes, Dean represents everything Sam hated about John as well as embodying what Sam wishes he could get away from. Dean is a concept to Sam, or to use modern academic language, a trope, i.e. an empty idea. The sheer negativity Sam throws at Dean over and over again in this episode is emblematic of this. It was bad enough in 2x18 Hollywood Babylon when Sam constantly spoilt Dean’s fun, but throughout this episode he bore a look on his face as though Dean were the stupidest person in remedial English. Everything Dean does exasperates and vexes Sam to the point where he bitches about him to random strangers, such as Meg in 1x11 Scarecrow and Randall in this episode:

‘Why you inside, kid?’

‘Cuz I got an idiot for a brother.’

Frak you, cunny-hole. This is not to mention his attitude regarding Dean and the solicitor’s letter. Dean had managed to get the solicitor to find out where nurse Glockner was buried and Deacon gave Dean the letter with the details. Sam, of course, had to take away any sense of achievement Dean might have felt by saying ‘Do you want to open it up when you’re done patting yourself on the back’, to which my unfiltered response was ‘Oh, fuck off Sam, you knobber’.

He complains a lot but rarely provides solutions. He is also combative and argumentative, like an angry, yappy little chihuahua. Rather than Dean getting beaten up again, Sam should have been the one to take a truncheon to the stomach in this episode. What an absolute tosspot.

Speaking of absolute tosspots, Henriksen… Nah, I jest. I understand why Henriksen is the way he is and what he is supposed to do in the story, but I honestly cannot for the life of me care for him or his presence in any episode any more than I cared about the police in 2x12 Nightshifter or 2x07 The Usual Suspects. He pursues Dean and Sam doggedly, believing he is on a righteous mission to bring a monster and his brother to justice for their heinous crimes. This he does with a cocky, swaggering confidence borne out of zeal and a passionate desire to have Dean locked away for good. He manages to throw Dean off his game a little with how much he seems to know about the Winchesters. How much Henriksen actually knows is never revealed, but he reveals enough to Dean to cause him discomfort. He is also perhaps quite insightful, as his suggestion that John touched Dean in a bad place (3x12 Jus in Bello) is perhaps not too far off the mark.

That said, I remain incapable of summoning the energy to care. This is Supernatural, not The X-Files, and a show about Dean and his brother fighting supernatural powers only to end up locked away in gaol for the rest of their lives would be the worst possible ending for the… No, wait, the worst possible ending would involve about half a foot of rebar and vampmimes. Alhamdulillah nobody would ever be that stupid though, am I right?

Anyway, Dean and Henriksen’s interactions in this episode are interesting because the power dynamics are all over the place. In the interrogation scene, Henriksen has the overt power since Dean is about to be imprisoned and Henriksen is about to put him away, yet I am put in mind of Dean and Gordon’s conversation in 2x10 Hunted where Gordon thought he was in control of the situation. Both men made the mistake of underestimating Dean. In fairness, Dean’s cocky act has all the hallmarks of a facade to hide his fear, but the difference here is that Dean knows something Henriksen does not. Henriksen has not caught Dean and Sam at all: they played him like a fiddle and Dean has every right to be blasé and smirk at Henriksen’s faux confidence. Hubris, even.

The fact a motion sensor got Dean should have been a clue for Henriksen that something was amiss in the whole situation, but I suppose one cannot blame him for not catching that when he had finally caught what he believed to be an extremely-dangerous criminal and threat to the public.

I cannot blame him, but I can continue not particularly caring about him just like I never especially cared about Katie in Angel.It is a shame his story is so short, as he could have been a great ally for Dean and Sam in a similar way to Jody and Donna much later on. Alas, stories which will never be…

Once more it seems like I have surprisingly little to say on this episode at just shy of 2,000 words I am already coming to the end with only a few minor comments left. One thing I expected upon rewatch was a prison rape joke or some such, but I was glad that no such thing was in evidence. There was one comment near the beginning as the new inmates were walked out of the bus into the prison and one of the men said “You’re mine, Baby”, as well as Dean’s “Don’t worry, I won’t swap you for smokes” to Sam seconds later.

Both these comments are ambiguous and not necessarily related to sexual violence, but one cannot help shaking the feeling the audience was supposed to chuckle at this. Sam’s cellmate in particular seems very aggressive, and Sam admits later that he keeps staring in a way that makes him very uncomfortable. The shot of Dean and Sam looking at each other while the cell doors are closed and their cellmates are both standing almost intimidatingly behind them. I am sure I have seen a similar scene in some ‘comedy’ or other where the expectation was that rape was imminent. After some of the stories I have read and things I have watched, I honestly do not have it in me to even consider laughing at the idea of men being raped in prison. ...Or men being raped at all, actually. I will leave this discussion here because I recently wrote a lengthy discussion on the subject in 2x15 Tall Tales Part 2. I was relieved at the dearth of prison rape jokes in the episodes – not even a comment about soap and showers – so well done, John Shiban. It is just a shame you could not restrain yourself in the writing of 2x15 Tall Tales.

Leaving that behind, Tiny’s self-esteem issues and abusive dad reminded me a lot of Dean. Tiny (played by Clif, the man who became Jensen and Jared’s bodyguard) claims that his brother shot and killed their dad, but this begs the question: why is Tiny in gaol? Is he lying about who shot their dad? Or, as Paula suggested, did he take the fall for his brother?

This story is an interesting one to have at this point in the show, and it was a choice to have such a story be told to Dean rather than Sam. John probably beat Dean as I have discussed elsewhere, and Dean still holds himself responsible for John’s death. There is not a lot there, but it ain’t nothing. Whilst on the subject of John, though, Deacon’s claim that John raised Dean and Sam right had me telling my television to engage in sexual intercourse with itself. John was only burnt eighteen episodes ago and The Show is already trying to ret-con his stewardship of Dean and Sam. On your bike and do one, Show.

Finally, the cold open was successful in setting up many aspects of the episode: it introduced Randall who was a key figure in solving the case, shows the horrid windowless cell in the abandoned cell block, and shows something escaping. The guard dying after ignoring a warning was a bit of a tired trope, though, but the shot of the ghost following him was creepy.

And with that, I am done for this episode. It enjoys a solid rating of 8.6 on IMDb and I enjoy it when I watch it, but it is not one I especially care about. 2x20 What is and What Should Never Be, however, is to Supernatural what Buffy 1x12 Prophecy Girl is to Buffy. Gird your loins and prepare for a lot of Dean discussions over the next three episodes because things are about to go to Hell for him.

PS: Dean was definitely flirting with the man taking his mug shot.

You can read more of my analyses here:

Series 1

Series 2

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