Supernatural season 11, episode 5, “Thin Lizzie,” aired tonight. Read our recap and discuss the episode with fellow fans.
This week’s episode of Supernatural marked the debut of writer Nancy Won with the show, and it was a good one with an old-school feeling, callbacks to earlier stories, and a smart tie-in to the current storyline.
An old-school ghost hunt
The episode opened with the premise that the ghost of Lizzie Borden was killing people in her old home, which had become a bed and breakfast as well as museum. We got some classic callbacks like Sam using an EMF meter and one of the victims mentioning the Ghostfacers. The tale of Lizzie Borden allegedly killing her father and stepmother with an ax has become folklore over 100 years after the crime, so it’s no surprise Supernatural would go there.
The story takes an interesting twist when the brothers discover the B&B has been faking the haunting with all the classic signs. And after one of the owners of the B&B and a man in the next town over are murdered with an ax, it’s clear the brothers aren’t dealing with the ghost of Lizzie Borden. (Sam is a little bummed considering his interest in serial killers.)
The Darkness
It turns out, Amara is the one behind everything. She’s been hanging around the B&B, sucking souls. She sucked the soul of Len, a poor Lizzie Borden fanboy who was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Unlike Jenna from earlier this season, though, Len’s soullessness manifests in his complete disinterest in everything that once made him happy. He no longer eats, sleeps, or cares. His soullessness matches Sam’s experience in season 6 much better than Jenna’s did. (We even get a couple of mentions of the fact that Sam was soulless, yay continuity.)
After the murder of a man in his own driveway — the babysitter, Sydney, claims she found him — and the wife’s cold reaction, the brothers go in search of the suspicious wife the next day. When she’s not at home, Sam calls Sydney, and Sydney leads the brothers to another house — where Dean finds the wife’s body before being knocked out. Sam finds the son tied up, but before he can free the kid, Sydney holds him at gunpoint.
Amara sucked her soul as well, and Sydney feels peace and freedom in her soullessness. She killed the husband because he was a meth-head. The wife was sleeping around, and they weren’t treating their son, her babysitting charge, the way he deserved. She killed the owner of the B&B because she stiffed Sydney on pay from her summer job. Oh, and she killed the couple at the B&B because the guy dumped her, and the girl was his next hookup.
Sam eventually frees himself and tries to fight back, but before Sydney can shoot him with her shotgun, Len hits her in the back with her ax. But he only did it because he wanted to see if he could. He realizes he can’t keep going the way he is, so he confesses to all the murders so he doesn’t hurt anyone else.
The question of soullessness
What this episode explores — the different ways people react to soullessness — is fascinating. When Sam came back from Hell soulless in season 6, he was an efficient hunter without concern for the safety of others. He started hunting with members of the Campbell family, but he never connected with them. He was willing to let Dean turn into a vampire because there was a cure. So while he wasn’t murdering people like Jenna, he was cold. This was the opposite of the Sam who is warm, kind and who seeks connections with others.
Len also became the opposite of his souled self. He lost interest in everything that once gave him pleasure; his enthusiasm — his defining trait, perhaps — was lost. But he kept a measure of self-awareness; he recognized there was something wrong with himself, and he selflessly turned himself in to keep others safe from himself, which was a wrinkle.
Sydney, we could probably argue, also became the opposite of her souled self. She grew up in an abusive home, but her scars no longer bothered her without her soul. She was free of the prison that growing up in that environment created for her. She could do what she wanted, which was not something she could ever do in the toxic environment of her childhood.
So, maybe Jenna becoming murderous wasn’t completely out of line with a person losing their soul after all. Jenna was kind and caring with her soul, and murdering her grandmother is pretty much the opposite of that.
The question of soullessness, perhaps, is which aspects of our personality we lose without our soul. Which trait is most defining? It is likely that trait that is lost without a soul.
Watch a promo for the next episode
