Tactics and Strategies in the Supernatural World

I have another great one to share today (but hey, isn’t everything here great?  No, this one is really good, honest.  Faellie sent this to me a week and a half ago and I finally have the right occasion to share it.  Enjoy her indepth and well written analysis on the roles of tactics and strategies in Supernatural.  This can also be found at http://shopstewardess.livejournal.com/.  Please, if sharing, link to this or Faellie’s livejournal site. 

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Tactics and Strategies in the Supernatural World 

This article explores the different roles that tactics and strategies play in the Supernatural world, and suggests that while the Winchesters are expert tacticians, it’s their problems with strategy that have been causing their troubles, both personally and with the apocalypse.

OK, once again starting at the beginning with the definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, tactics is “the art of deploying military, air, or naval forces in order of battle, and of planning and executing military manoeuvres in actual contact with an enemy”.   Strategy is “the planning and direction of the larger military movements and overall operations of a campaign and “the art or skill or careful planning towards an advantage or a desired end.”  So tactics is about fighting the battle that’s immediately in front of you, strategy is about putting together a series of steps with an overall goal in mind.   In Winchester terms, it’s the monster of the week (tactics) and the season’s story arc (strategy).

Tactics: saving people, hunting things

At the start of Supernatural, the world of the hunters is one where they deal with what’s in front of them at the time.   Hunters are mostly solitary: the only, very limited, co-operation we see is ad hoc partnerships and, as it later emerges, the information exchange through Harvelle’s roadhouse and Bobby’s contacts.   There is no evidence of long-term thinking, no overall plan. 

This approach has been fine for dealing with the supernatural entities that hunters have come across up to the start of Season 1. At this point none of the supernatural nasties have much in the way of long-term goals, or of strategies to meet those goals.  Many of the things hunters fight, principally spirits and ghosts, act to a predictable and unchanging pattern in a limited geographical area.  The actions of even those which are capable of independent motivation have a limited range of purposes: survival (the Wendigo, the Shtriga in Something Wicked, the Djinn in What Is and What Should Never Be, the changlings in The Kids Are Alright), revenge (murdered priest in Houses of the Holy, ghouls in Jump The Shark), greed (shapeshifter in Nightshifter, witches in Malleus Maleficarum) or just being evil sons of bitches for the pleasure of it (shapeshifter in Skin, serial killer ghost in No Exit, siren in Sex and Violence).  Even the pagan gods usually limit their activities to survival (Scarecrow, A Very Supernatural Christmas), or in the case of the Trickster (as he was thought to be in Tall Tales and Mystery Spot) and the Leshi (Fallen Idols), to the next interesting thing to come along.  

John Winchester comes into the world of the hunters with the death of Mary.  He is revenge-driven, as are many of the hunters (Gordon Walker in Blood Lust and Fresh Blood, Isaac and Tamara in The Magnificent Seven).  John’s plan for the Yellow-Eyed Demon, which turns out to be rather longer-term than anyone could have expected but is still essentially simple, is “find it and kill it”.   And while finding it, find and kill other supernatural nasties which prey on humans.  These essentially simple aims can be dealt with through good tactics: locate the battle and then fight it using the appropriate means.  At this tactical level, John is obviously expert at dealing with the supernatural, as is shown by Sam’s surprise in Something Wicked that John should have left the Shtriga alive rather than dealing with it once and for all.  John has passed his knowledge and skills onto his sons, and they not only have the technical abilities necessary to defeat in battle whatever comes in front of them, but are also skilled and experienced in working as a team.

Sam and Dean’s good tactical team work is strikingly obvious from the start.  In the Pilot, Sam and Dean haven’t seen each other for two years or more, and yet when hunting the Woman in White they smoothly put into practice well-honed methods of getting out of trouble and solving the case: Dean makes the phone call that keeps Sam from being arrested, Sam continues the research while Dean is under arrest and then makes a fake emergency call that enables Dean to escape, Dean fires at the ghost through the car’s side window (the Impala’s side window no less) to save Sam.  To put these sorts of tactics so smoothly into place after two years apart and with no prior discussion shows a high level of expertise with the methods they are using, and solidly good training for Sam and Dean to be able to move back into using them so easily. 

The Winchester brother’s expert tactical team work continues in an almost unbroken line from then on.  In Wendigo, without needing to say anything Dean sets himself up as a distraction so Sam can get the victims out of the Wendigo’s larder.  In Roadkill, there is a smooth (and again undiscussed) change of tactics near the start of the episode, in order for Sam and Dean to deal with the unexpected realisation that they are dealing with a ghost who doesn’t realise she is dead.  In Season 2’s The Usual Suspects, Dean’s well executed manoeuvre over a false confession gets Sam out of custody, and well-established practices then allow contact to be made with Sam while Dean is still in custody.  In Season 4’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, Dean and Sam support each other in the fight against Alistair in the church, and then in the middle of the fight are able to decide without words both on the time to retreat and the way to do it – with a spectacular crash through a stained-glass window.  Perhaps most notably in Season 4, in It’s a Terrible Life, Zachariah uses a “monster of the week” to get Dean back into fighting mode.  By taking away Dean’s disabling memories of hell and of the events of On the Head of a Pin, and giving Sam and Dean familiar roles in finding, and then fighting, the kind of tactical battle in which they excel, Zachariah has chosen the perfect approach to bringing back Dean’s mojo.

Winchester Team tactics are particularly noticeable when Sam and Dean trade off their people skills, as there are numerous examples of one brother’s failed approach being followed up by the successful methods of the other.  Sam fails to establish a relationship with Ron in Nightshifter where Dean later succeeds.  There is a striking example in Asylum of this being worked out in advance, rather than on the fly as appears more usual: in Asylum Dean is the intrusive reporter questioning the cop and kicked out by Sam, who then gets the necessary information from a friendly chat.  That Sam and Dean can easily swap the roles they take in establishing these relationships is shown by contrasting Death Takes A Holiday with I Believe the Children are Our Future.  In both it was necessary for Sam and Dean to persuade a young boy round to their way of thinking, but in Death Takes a Holiday Dean failed by telling the truth, Sam succeeded with the comforting lie, while in I Believe the Children Are Our Future Dean failed by telling the comforting lie, Sam to some extent succeeded with the hard truth.

Winchester team tactics also make excellent use of the different approaches and qualities Sam and Dean have in a physical fight.  Dean, once he makes up his mind to action, follows through quickly and decisively without stopping to re-think.  An example of this is that when the time comes for fighting, Dean almost always starts off on the front foot, going forward. It’s this forward momentum into the fight which so often results in him being thrown around so spectacularly, as the bad guys use that forward momentum to deflect him away. Sam, by contrast, is still thinking and processing even in the middle of the battle. On the one hand, this often results in him being on the back foot at the start of a fight (so providing the bad guys with lots of opportunities to strangle him). On the other hand, Sam’s ability to keep thinking means that he often comes up with new ideas as to how to deal with the situation which then create the means to a successful outcome.  Examples of this are It’s The Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester, where Sam improvises Halloween masks with blood to fool Samhain and Jump The Shark, in which even under torture Sam deduces that the bad guys are ghouls, and passes the information on to Dean, allowing Dean to use the appropriate method to kill them. 

Goals and strategies: a new challenge for the hunters

The hunter’s concentration on good tactical skills works well until the supernatural baddies start to disclose some long-term planning, first the Yellow-Eyed Demon, then Lilith, then Lucifer.  This is where hunters in general are left not understanding or recognising the problem: the bigger picture completely eludes them.   And the Winchesters, who do begin slowly to understand this bigger picture, are left without the self-knowledge, training and experience to put together the long-term campaign necessary to deal with it.

The first hunter to realise that a more strategic approach is required in John Winchester.  John finds out, just before the start of the Pilot, that it was the Yellow-Eyed Demon that killed Mary, that the Yellow-Eyed Demon dripped blood into Sam’s mouth, and that all the Winchesters are in danger.  But beyond those realisations, John is left struggling to find an appropriate strategy to deal with the situation.  His immediate reaction to the danger presented by the Yellow-Eyed Demon is to disappear from view, and to communicate with Sam and Dean only by text messaging co-ordinates to the monsters of the week that John himself is no longer in a position to fight.  However hard this was on Sam and Dean, it seems to have been the right thing to do, as it’s unlikely to be co-incidence that almost immediately after John first speaks by phone to Sam and Dean (at the start of Scarecrow), the Yellow-Eyed Demon’s daughter, Meg, is able to make contact with Sam.  Later in Season 1 John is beginning to put together a plan for dealing with the Yellow-Eyed Demon (Shadow, Dead Man’s Blood, Salvation, Devil’s Trap), but he is always on the back foot.  By Season 2’s In My Time of Dying John has run out of time, and all he can then do is make a deal to save Dean, and tell Dean either to save Sam or kill him.

Like John, Sam and Dean, although highly expert in tactical situations, have had no experience in dealing with longer-term, strategic issues, and have never learnt to work together at that level.  The brothers’ lack of training and experience is compounded by the fact that their different personalities mean that they naturally implement strategic thinking in different ways.  Unfortunately, they don’t understand this, and so haven’t learnt, as they have with their battle tactics, to use each other’s strengths and cover each other’s weaknesses.  After John’s death, their long-term goals sometimes diverge, but even when they have the same goal they have difficulty identifying and implementing a joint strategy that will allow them to work cohesively towards that goal.

Sam’s approach to a long-term goal is that of a steady worker, putting in a measured and constant effort.  Along with his undoubted intelligence, this is one of the reasons for Sam’s academic success: his ability to put aside short-term distractions (such as the Halloween party in the Pilot, which Sam attends only at Jessica’s urging) in favour of a steady workload.  Not one of life’s last-minute crammers, Sam, and this approach works well for him in academia.  Arguably it works less well in the more fluid world of Supernatural, where much of what happens is out of the control of human agency, and methodical research and a steady workload will not always make the necessary information available or produce an appropriate course of action.  The result is that, in the world of the hunters, Sam is sometimes inclined to keep working on his main goal past the time when this is productive.  At the start of Wendigo, Sam and Dean have spent a week unproductively in Stanford trying to find out about Jess’s death, until Dean pulls them away to find the Wendigo at the co-ordinates left by John.  In Scarecrow, Sam wants to chase after John to California on the basis of a telephone call from a Sacramento pay phone, rather than follow up the (time-critical) clues to the Scarecrow killings.  It’s the different styles of dealing with their long-term goals that separates the brothers here.  It’s only the strength of the personal relationship between Sam and Dean that leads Sam back to Dean just in time to save him from the Scarecrow.

By contrast with Sam, Dean’s natural approach is to carry on with the various monster of the week hunts while waiting for developments on his long-term goals.  So in Season 1, even when Sam and Dean have the same overall goal, “find Dad”, their strategy for doing this is entirely different.  This difference in approach is the cause of disagreement between the brothers to the point where, at the start of Scarecrow, they temporarily part.  In Season 2, Sam and Dean again have the same overall goal, that of killing the Yellow-Eyed Demon.  But in Everyone Loves a Clown, Sam complains that they’ve been at Bobby’s for a week and all Dean can do is work on the Impala, rather than follow the main goal.  Dean’s response to Sam’s complaint is heartfelt: 

“Sounds good.  You got any leads on where the demon is?  Making heads or tails of any of Dad’s research?  Because I sure ain’t.  But you know, if we do finally find it – oh.  No, wait, like you said.  The Colt’s gone.  But I’m sure you’ve figured out another way to kill it.  We’ve got nothing, Sam.  Nothing, OK?  So you know the only thing I can do?  Is I can work on the car.”

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