This week on Supernatural, Briana Buckmaster as Sheriff Donna Hanscum was featured for the second consecutive episode, straight off of “Wayward Sisters,” in a story that put her family ties front and center. Could niece Wendy add another layer to the Wayward world?
“Breakdown” was an unusual Supernatural episode in a variety of ways — for one, the guys show up to support Donna as friends with a knack for solving mysteries, not as actual hunters, on what initially appears to be a non-paranormal kidnapping. Despite still coming in with an FBI cover, they take a back seat as civilians so the real feds can do their work and act alongside Donna as “relatives” of the victim, basically taking on the role of the people they usually roll into town to help.
Then, there’s the fact that the big bad wasn’t a monster, although monsters were involved as the buyers of what this human killer was selling, and both Dean and Donna are forced to take human lives. The notion that the hunts Sam and Dean undertake on a weekly basis are just the tip of an impossible iceberg is thrown into stark relief, as our villain taunts the boys — and the audience — with a reminder that there are hundreds of thousands more monsters out there than they could ever know about, that they only ever tackle the ones that don’t know how to cover their tracks.
Whether this tidbit was merely an incidental reality check or a further hint at the bigger work that Billie tasked Dean with in “Advanced Thanatology” is yet to be seen, but it’s certainly a repeat of season 12’s British Men of Letters party line — that despite how heroic they may seem to us, Sam and Dean, when they’re not averting apocalypses, are still very much saving people via the starfish methodology — you know, “it made a difference to that one” — rather than thinking big picture.
There’s Sam, who’s fulfilling my prophecy about his terrifying breaking point all too well — his repression is deeper and darker than Dean’s, and while Dean may lie to those around him about how he feels, Sam has perfected the art of lying to himself, and the fact that he’s now prising the lid off his inner truth is sure to lead to some strong and scary stuff, ranging anywhere from facing up to his own mental health to a full loss of self control and a resurgence of his raw psychic power, which has been alluded to more frequently in the last couple of seasons than it has in many, many, many years.
“It’s our lives. And I tried to pretend it didn’t have to be.” With Sam’s utterance, we’re also now looking at a role reversal, where Dean will have to be determined to show him that they can have something good and keep it — new territory for him to consciously take the lead on, but innately the most natural and correct course for him, and honestly, this close to the show’s surely nearby end, the more often a Winchester swears that their end is going to come bad and bloody, the more I rejoice, because it’s all the more reason to believe those comments are a narrative set-up to prove them wrong in an arc for final closure.
But maybe most importantly, as it comes straight off the back of the Wayward Sisters backdoor pilot, is Donna, who finally gets her “origin story” even though she’s known about the supernatural for several years. Unlike Jody and the girls, Donna had not, until now, personally suffered losses in the line of hunting, but when her niece is kidnapped and her boyfriend is temporarily turned into a vampire, she’s a changed woman. Although both niece Wendy and boyfriend New Doug survive the episode, Doug is unable to cope with the truth about Donna’s world and breaks off their relationship, choosing normalcy and simplicity in a way you can barely even hold against him.
Donna’s sense of isolation is exacerbated by Sam, who delivers some brutal honesty about getting close to people, colored by his own emotional struggles. Dean said much the same thing to Patience earlier in the season, but since his own change of heart, he clearly no longer feels the same way, as he calls Sam out on his handling of Donna, but as this is still the boys’ point of view, we won’t know how Donna has processed all of this trauma until we return to her perspective in Wayward Sisters.
The one character we didn’t hear enough from was Wendy herself. Supernatural has really improved its empowerment and survival rate for female victims in recent years, but we don’t see any aftermath with this one, as the story is more about Donna than anything else. Wendy, in the scenes leading up to her kidnapping, clearly has spunk and a sense of adventure, and other shades of her personality — a gun control sticker on her car and a lesbian pride t-shirt — can be observed and extrapolated, but after she’s put in danger, she becomes the damsel and we don’t get too much more.
However, her mere existence also shows us more about Donna’s life, giving her ties to be followed up on in Wayward Sisters, as that show is intended to be a lot less transient than Supernatural and will focus on the home lives of the lead characters and the people who populate their world, and if Donna is to have her own emotional perspective, then her relationship with Wendy, particularly juxtaposed against her relationship with Jody’s found family of young women, is one of the biggest aspects to explore.
It’s for these reasons and more that I’d love to see actress Sarah Dugdale reappear as Wendy Hanscum on Wayward Sisters, but she’s not the only survivor who might make for an interesting guest star as the Supernatural universe continues to expand. Over the years, Sam and Dean have touched the lives of hundreds, shaking up their lives and leaving them with a new perspective on the world around them, and in particular, the show’s controversial female survival rate has increased exponentially, especially in recent years. There are any number of untold stories about what happened next for all those survivors, and here are just a few who, if followed up on, might make interesting fodder for future episodes of the Supernatural universe.
Detective Diana Ballard
The Exorcist’s Linda Blair spews her horror cred like pea soup all over Supernatural’s season 2 episode “The Usual Suspects,” in which she plays a police detective who arrests Dean for murder and, during the case, discovers both the existence of ghosts and the fact that the real culprit is her detective partner and boyfriend Pete Sheridan. After saving the boys and taking down Pete herself, she lets Sam and Dean escape police custody.
As the Winchesters moved on, Diana is left alone to deal with the weight of killing her own lover and her knowledge of the supernatural, but she seems like someone who would have made a very resourceful ally. Did she attempt to get back to a normal life, or did her new awareness lead her into more paranormal investigations since that day? One thing’s for sure — more policewomen in the know can only be a good thing in order for our wayward sisters to do their work, so I’d like to see this detective roll into town and team up with a couple of sheriffs.
Ranch Manager Ellie
If Danay García wants some time out from killing zombies, she should come teach our girls a thing or two about demon deals. Unfortunately surnameless, Ellie met Sam and Dean when they showed up at the property she managed in Idaho to seek out a hellhound for the demon trials. The entire family she worked for, the Cassitys, all seemed to be candidates for an existing demon deal — and indeed several of them were, as the boys discover as they sign on as ranch hands under Ellie’s supervision and she tells them the family gossip.
However, it turns out that Ellie herself also made a demon deal with Crowley, in order to save her mother from Parkinson’s disease, but she wasn’t made fully aware of the ten year term. It’s her hellhound that Sam kills to complete the necessary trial, and the guys give her a hex bag to hide her from Crowley, but as Sam points out, her soul is still destined for hell when she eventually dies — and given that the boys didn’t seal up hell, plus Crowley’s death, what does that mean for her — and other existing deal-holders — today?
Krissy Chambers and Josephine Barnes
This is either the world’s greatest no-brainer or too close a circumstance to work, but I’m going to go with the former. We first met Krissy Chambers in season 7, when she was about 14, and to date, she’s the only teenager we’ve met who was raised by a hunter, much like Sam and Dean were. Despite her father’s promise to leave hunting and give her a normal life, he’s been killed by the time we meet up with her again in season 8, and Krissy, along with other teens Josephine and Aiden, have been taken in by a man who’s teaching them to hunt as a unit.
When foster daddy Victor turns out to be exploiting the hell out of the teens in his charge — he orchestrated the killings of the families to drive them into revenge-killing under his control — the kids decide to stay together in Victor’s house with Josephine, who’ll soon be 18, as their guardian. Krissy would now be around Claire’s age, and they both come full of attitude and ferocity with similar, yet very different, life experience — not to mention unique, peer-like friendships with Dean Winchester. I’d love to see these two butt heads as their respective squads clash on a case — and I’d love to see Jody’s reaction to the fact that they’ve been raising themselves.
Tracy Bell
Tracy Bell was a character that immediately felt like she was going to show up again but never did. In an episode written by now-showrunner Andrew Dabb, we meet her as a young hunter using herself as a honeytrap to kill a vampire she’s been after, who then falls into Abaddon’s clutches as bait for Sam and Dean. She has an interesting emotional arc, in that she holds a vendetta against Sam — her family was killed years ago by demons celebrating the release of Lucifer, when Sam allowed himself to be possessed, and this forces Sam to remember the past damage he’s inflicted on the universe.
Tracy survives the shoot-out, and by the end of the episode, has had a change of heart about Sam. She’s also one of the only characters, besides Sam and Dean, to ever drive the Imapala on screen, and after she brings the car back to Dean, she’s seen getting in the back seat to go celebrate with the boys — and then we never hear from her again. Actress Olivia Ryan Stern still has strong ties to the CW, appearing as a recurring character on Riverdale, so it’d surely be no trouble to pop next door for an episode of Wayward Sisters or Supernatural. Bonus feature: get Abaddon actress and aspiring director Alaina Huffman to direct it.
Linda Tran
There are no words to truly describe how incredible Lauren Tom’s performance as Kevin Tran’s mom Linda was to me during season 8. If you asked me to rank my favorite characters in the entire history of Supernatural, it would look something like this: Sam, Dean, Cas, Jody, Jack, Linda Tran, and then the rest. Yes, she’s that good — her humor, her intelligence, her shock value, her attitude toward Sam and Dean, her ability to eviscerate someone with a look — she’s someone you want on your side, and she’s someone I’d hope the boys feel a bit of responsibility toward, so I’d love to see what’s become of her.
Sadly, we haven’t seen Linda since she was freed from Crowley’s clutches and took Kevin’s ghost home during season 9. Since Kevin himself was finally freed from the Veil and sent to heaven by Chuck in season 11, not only do we have this fantastic, unique character out there all alone, she also has the off-screen experience of casually co-habiting with a non-vengeful ghost for over two years — there have got to be some stories there. It’d be especially timely to see her again sometime soon, as we just met a new version of Kevin from the apocalypse universe. That story doesn’t seem quite done, so I’d be very keen to see either an alternate Linda, or the real one, interact with this version of Kevin. I’d also shoehorn her into Wayward in literally any way possible — just make something up and get her there.
Marie the Fangirl
Okay, listen up. Marie of “Fan Fiction” fame encounters the supernatural once more, and having lost contact with Sam and Dean — if they even exchanged numbers, the boys have probably changed phones a dozen times by now — she attempts to track them down via all the information she knows about their lives, thanks to her study of the Supernatural book series. Jody finds her digging through the remains of the Singer Salvage Yard, arrests her for trespassing, and the rest is history.
Or, get this. In a episode dedicated to the fandom that founded it, we get a Supernatural convention episode, redux: an updated version in which the Wayward girls discover just how many people out there know the truth about their world but believe it to be fiction. At this con, they encounter Marie, who’s trying to healthily balance what the Supernatural books have given her as a fan with the fact that she knows the real truth, and it’s all a wonderful commentary about getting personally close to the source of your fandom — as many Wayward fans have.
Alicia (and Max) Banes
There’s so much going on with these two that I don’t know where to start! Obviously, Alicia and Max met Jody in “Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox” — the eponymous Asa was Jody’s ex-lover and also secretly the twins’ father, whom they’d never met. There’s a bond there, on top of the demonic attack they all survived together, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they’re regular drop-ins at Jody’s place already, if they happen to be passing through the area. There’s a Jody-centric story worth addressing about how she feels about her own romantic history, and they could certainly be a part of it.
Plus, you’ve got the magical aspect — Max Banes is a natural witch who uses magic in his hunting, and some guidance in spellcraft could be a skill that some of the girls might find useful, whether they possess the innate power or not, and who else is gonna take Claire to gay bars? Plus, oh yeah, just casually, there’s the fact that Alicia is now a freakin’ twig puppet person and doesn’t even know it. We left Alicia and Max at the end of season 12 in a very unusual circumstance, the start of a whole other chapter, and more than any other characters we’ve met in the Andrew Dabb era of Supernatural, these ones demand a follow-up, be it on Wayward or the O.G.
Patience’s BFF Ronson
Patience Turner is probably the wayward sister with the most unfinished business in terms of her personal life — unlike Claire, Alex and Kaia, she wasn’t a homeless orphan. Unlike Donna and Jody, she’s not an adult in full control of her life. She’s the baby of the group, a high school student with a normal life — friends and family — back in Georgia. She walked out on her dad in order to listen to her visions and come help Jody, but even during the Wayward Sisters pilot, she very much expected to go back home. She’s certainly been adopted, but it doesn’t change the fact that the life she left behind will have to be addressed in order for her to fully transition to a life of hunting in Sioux Falls.
It’s very likely that we’ll see more from her father James, and probably from her dead grandmother Missouri, via their spiritual link, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we also get to see her best friend Ronson once more. This tiny role was scene-stealing in our introduction to Patience — in mere moments, a funnier, more natural and realistic depiction of a dorky teenage girl than I’ve seen on TV in years — and I would watch her own spinoff, but at the very least, I’d love to see Patience either explaining or hiding the truth from her.
Mia Vallens
Season 13’s really been knocking it out of the park with well-rounded female characters and their survival rate. Another unique new addition was Mia Vallens, the grief counselor who also turns out to be a shapeshifter — albeit a benevolent one — who Sam, Dean, and Jack work a case with in “The Big Empty.” For starters, she’s a great example of the whole choice about personhood for non-evil supernatural creatures that the girls will surely need to address at some point, as well as one of the many hidden millions, mentioned in this episode, who “pass,” but there’s more to it than that.
Wayward Sisters is sure to be a very socially conscious and progressive show, and it’s also aiming to show the stability of a healthy home environment. I rather like the idea of mental health and therapy being addressed at some point — say, one of the girls not coping with what they’ve been through, and attending counseling, but no progress being made as they can’t explain the actual facts of their circumstances to a civilian therapist. Cue Jody calling Sam for advice, he’s reminded of Mia, and presto — a legitimate counseler who can hear the whole truth. You can have that one for free, Berens.
Alice, AKA Smash
Another super-cute newbie, Alice — who we first meet under the code name Smash in “The Scorpion and the Frog” — is an expert safecracker, a Baby-Driver-esque indentured servant to a crossroads demon. While thrown together on a heist, Dean discovers that, some undetermined time ago, Alice sold her soul, but as long as she keeps working jobs, the demon never collected on the deal. When this episode aired, there were a lot of people comparing Alice, in all her kookiness and ’90s revival fashion, to Charlie, which, no. For starters, Alice’s dialogue and mannerisms sat more truthfully to me as a representation of alternative culture than Charlie’s clunky caricature ever did, but regardless of personal preference, it’s apples and oranges — there are dynamic differences between them and I can only assume that these people lump all offbeat women into one “weird TV girl” archetype.
One thing that Alice and Charlie do have in common, though, is an instant connection to Dean — his rapport with young women and the way he relates to them not even quite as a big brother, but as peers, is something really unique to watch. He obviously also has this kind of relationship with Claire, he has it with Krissy, and Marie brought it out as well, and there have been others. I’d really like to see an episode — it’d probably work better on Supernatural Prime — that’s centered around Dean’s relationships with young women, and take a look under the hood at exactly why these friendships click so well for him.
Mary Winchester
The mother of badasses — in more ways than one — Mary is a must-have for Wayward Sisters. Mary’s transition over the years from the stuff of Dean’s daydreams into a very real, flawed, multi-faceted human being is one of Supernatural’s greatest successes. As the production has grown and changed over the past 13 seasons, it’s shifted from a show that started out playing by the rules of a very different era of television to one that holds its own in 2018 with one of the most subversively and naturalistically liberal worldviews around despite its straight male starring roles.
The choice to unfridge Mary Winchester — the helpless female figure who died to kick off a man’s story — and grant her a journey of autonomy and power represents Supernatural learning from its mistakes. It shows a drive to do better, and the same drive lies at the heart and soul of Wayward Sisters. Aside from being a plain awesome female hunter character, a link to Sam and Dean, and an already established friend of Jody’s, Mary stands for something more — she’s the ultimate example of surviving Supernatural, literally and metaphorically rising from the ashes of a burnt-down world that didn’t make space for her, and building a better one in its place.