The Heroes' Journey
Written by: Andrew Dabb
Directed by: John Showalter
Air date: January 23, 2020
Sam and Dean visit their old friend Garth who asks them for a favor, but they end up discovering that they themselves may be in serious trouble.
Tropes
- Brought Down to Normal: Sam and Dean have to face real problems like cavities, tripping and falling sick. All of their plans fail and Garth has to bail them out in the end.
- The Bus Came Back: Garth's wife Bess appears onscreen for the first time since her debut episode in Season 9.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Thanks to their being depowered, Maul wipes the floor with Sam and Dean, and only ends up being killed when Garth stabs him from behind.
- Dead Guy Junior: Non-dead example. Garth named two of his children after Sam and Castiel.
- The Dentist Episode: Dean develops cavities, while Garth happens to be a practicing dentist. Do the math.
- Failure Hero: Sam and Dean, thanks to being Brought Down to Normal, have to face normal problems all at once due to which they fail at all the hunter activities they would normally do without breaking a sweat. Garth is the one who saves them multiple times and eventually guides them to their next goal.
- Genre Savvy: When Sam and Dean explain how God is a writer who used them as the main characters in his story, Garth wondered whether that makes him a supporting character or special guest star. He further explains that he's happy being the guest star, pointing out that while the hero might win eventually at the end of the story, most of the time their lives just suck with constant danger and tragedy. He is aware however of Plot Armor and how that provides some advantages.
- Groin Attack: Maul inflicts this on Dean.
- Muggle Sports, Super Athletes: MMA fighting...with monsters.
- Mushroom Samba: While Garth puts him under to fix his teeth, Dean hallucinates performing an entire 1920s tapdance routine in black-and-white set to "Let's Misbehave".
- Naughty by Night: Implied Trope when the seemingly wholesome Garth and his wife Bess mention that they're fans of Fifty Shades of Gray.
- Obliviously Superpowered: Sam and Dean discover that they have unknowingly benefited from Plot Armor and Required Secondary Powers their entire lives and all previous 15 seasons of the show, courtesy of God himself. When this ability is removed, their Arbitrarily Large Bank Account (through stolen credit cards) is suddenly taken away, they can get hurt or sick even from tiny scrapes or a poor diet like Dean's, their Cool Car breaks down regularly because it's 50 years old, and even casually picking a lock becomes next to impossible. It's even implied that they never trip over things normally, as both Dean and Sam are genuinely shocked when the latter almost trips while rushing up some steps. Dean initially assumes that they've been cursed on account of none of these things being normal to him until Garth explains what he thinks happened.
- Plot Armor: In-universe. Garth speculates that because the Winchesters were the protagonists of God's story, they did not have to deal with normal human problems like getting sick and developing cavities. It's even implied that their aversion to mortality was a result of this. But now that they are God's enemy, they are "depowered" and have to deal with the problems all at once.
- Really Gets Around: Bess's werewolf cousin, Brad, has been participating in the fight club because he has three baby mamas to support.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Due to having fallen out of favor with Chuck, he removes Sam and Dean's Plot Armor, leading to the two suffering "normal" problems that would not hinder them in a regular episode of the show:
- Sam doesn't use a potholder while lifting a pot of boiling pasta, which leads to him burning his hands when he grabs it by the handles. He also burns food in the oven after going in another room; it's boring for a story to have a scene where the hero constantly checks on his food and is careful with hot food, but in normal life, it prevents oven fires and injuries.
- Dean's crappy eating habits give him multiple cavities, and after eating seven grilled cheese sandwiches he gets sick and throws up during a hunt. He also was given a sudden lactose intolerance, so that plays into his sickness as well.
- A hacked credit card that Charlie gave the boys doesn't work anymore because you can't have a card with unlimited money in Real Life.
- Sam gets a cold out of the blue and takes a remedy from Garth's wife to cure it. But homemade remedies don't always work, making Sam feel worse and not curing his cold.
- Dean gets a ticket after parking near a fire hydrant.
- The Impala keeps stalling because it's a car that's over 50 years old.
- Sam tries to sway Bess's cousin Brad with his Puppy-Dog Eyes, who just finds it ridiculous.
- Dean tries to pick a padlock with a rusty nail, only to end up breaking his fingernail; real-life lockpicking is slower and requires putting tension on the lock plug and slowly disengaging the pins, not just jamming a thin piece of metal in the keyhole and jiggling it.
- Aside from Sam and Dean's issues, Garth notes that a werewolf's raw meat diet can lead to dental problems if they don't get regular checkups.
- Van Helsing Hate Crimes: Dean and Sam decide to destroy the monster fight club (where the only victims are monsters, who fight each other voluntarily) for no reason other than assuming that with any gathering of monsters that large, they must be killing people in the area, even though no evidence of this is shown and they don't do any research to see if there have been suspicious deaths.
- Written-In Absence: Castiel is in Heaven to ask his siblings about God's whereabouts.
