Supernatural Season 3 Episode 9: Malleus Meleficarum

Supernatural Season 3 Episode 9

a.k.a The Real House Witches of Massachusetts 

Synopsis:

Season 3 Episode 9: Malleus Maleficarum follows a group a women who are using a book club to perform witchcraft.  Sam and Dean start to investigate when one of the witches murders  the wife of the man she had an affair with.  When she tries to kill the man, Sam and Dean saves him but when they go to the witches house, another witch had already killed her. While Sam and Dean were investigating Ruby pops in to give them a warning.  She wants them to leave town because the demon the witches are worshiping is too powerful for Sam and Dean.  Dean then gets effected by a witches spell and starts coughing up blood. Sam couldn't find the hex bag so in desperation he rushes to where the coven was meeting and threatened them with the colt, trying to get them to stop.  Ruby comes in and saves Dean while Sam realizes that one of the witches in the coven is actually a demon in disguise tempting the other women with witchcraft to get their souls.  When Dean and Ruby rush to the coven's house we learn that Ruby used to be witch when she was human.  Dean was able to kill the demon using Ruby's knife.  We then learn that most if not all demons were once human and that that's what hell does to you.  That's what will happen to Dean.

Review:

This review will focus on two things: the basic structure of this episode and how similar it is to all other episodes in Supernatural and the lack of unique plot and abundance of sexism found in this episode.

First the basic structure of this episode and how almost every episode so far has followed this like a template.  Most Supernatural episodes follow a typical "murder mystery" template.  First you see a glimpse or a taste of the monster-of-the-week.  Then Sam and Dean start investigating and they think they figure it out.  Come to find out that they were wrong and someone else dies.  Then they learn new info and after a close call where the monster almost kills them they defeat it and save someone.  I would say about 90% of the episodes so far follow this template.  Now don't get me wrong despite this fact Supernatural is really good about still making the episode interesting and despite the common pattern it doesn't get repetitive.  However this is not the case for this episode.  Malleus Maleficarum follow this template to the letter, but the plot is so bland and two dimensional that it doesn't counteract the repetitiveness in these episodes.  It just makes this episode predictable, like a bad mystery novel.  There's no mystery in this episode and every "plot twist" like it wasn't really the coven but the demon manipulating the coven that was killing everyone didn't have a nice impact that most "plot twists" in other Supernatural episodes have.

With that being said, I will now go on to talk about the lack of unique plot and the abundance of sexism found in this episode.  Like I mentioned earlier this episodes sub-plot, or their monster-of-the-week is so weak that it can't stand alone by itself.  This episode has that feeling that the subplot was just created to move the main plot (saving Dean from going to hell) along.  Now I'm not saying that a subplot can't be used to move the main plot along, but rather it should still be strong enough to stand on its own with out the extra fluff from the main plot.  Aside from the lack of unique plot the amount of sexism in this episode is astounding.  The episodes title, Malleus Maleficarum, is a reference to a book by that name written in 1486 by a German Catholic Clergyman on how to identify and get rid of witches.  Now like most things related to witches back in the day the book is extremely sexist, saying while both men and women can be witches, it is more common for women because of their weak nature and how easily they give into temptation.  In this episode the coven were shown to be tempted by the demon so easily.  The demon even goes to say that all she did was bring the book to book club and they lined up to perform dark magic because of what it can give them (money, promotions, free trips to Hawaii).  Even when one of the witches die, they don't want to stop because they don't want to give up on what witchcraft can continue to give them.  The book even goes into saying that women were targeted by demons because of their loose tongues.  It's an extremely common stereotype that all women love to gossip.  In this episode we get a brief bit of dialogue where one of the husbands make a quip that they don't actually read during book club but just gossip.  The final theme that this book presents in this episode is that woman usually fall into the dark arts for vain or selfish reasons like revenge and that men usually do it for power.  In this episode we get very shallow reasons as to why this group of women are using the dark arts.  One to get revenge on a man who broke things off with her so he could get back to his wife and the others so they can live a more comfortable life with money and fame.  It brings up that idea that a man's ambitions are more dimensional and that what a woman desires is shallow and superficial.  I feel this effected the episodes plot and if the writers had given the women a more substantial reason for turning to the dark arts it would have greatly helped the episode.  Also the idea of cookie cutter house wives secretly being bad ass and wielding dark magic to bend the world to their will was something I desperately wanted out of this episode.

Questions/Concerns:

My main concern with this episode was how closely it followed some of the themes found in Malleus Maleficarum (the book).  I feel this episode had such a simple story line because of the writers strike and that not as much effort was put in it as other seasons have had.