7x12 Time After Time After Time

            In “Time After Time After Time,” season seven episode twelve, Sam and Dean are investigating a hunt that Sheriff Jody Mills found. While investigating what monster is mummifying people before disappearing in a flash of red light, Dean gets pulled with the monster back to 1944, where he meets Eliot Ness. They team up and try to find the monster – which turns out to be the god Chronos – and find a way to get Dean back to his time. Back in the present, Sam and Jody are attempting to do the same thing. They figure out how to summon Chronos, but they need to know the exact time Dean has his hands on Chronos in order to get Dean back. Dean manages to tell Sam what is happening on his end with a note hidden in the baseboards, and Sam and Jody use other clues in the letter to get Dean back.

            “Time After Time After Time,” as the title suggests, is all about time. The brothers are in different time periods, they need to kill the god of time, and Sam needs to summon Chronos at the right time or Dean is stuck in 1944 forever.

            Having one of your main characters in a completely different time period is a difficult situation. All obvious forms of communication are cut off. Technology does not work, as none of it has even been invented yet. Besides, you can’t just pick up a phone and call someone from sixty eight years ago, no matter how cool that would be. You also can’t just send them a letter. Instead, Dean – and the writers of Supernatural – had to be more creative.

            Their communication method was foreshadowed when Sam and Jody are looking through the boxes from Bobby’s house. The bottle of Johnny Walker Blue had a note from Rufus tied to it, probably written years earlier and forgotten about by Bobby. Back in 1944, Dean looks at a letter and uses the knowledge he’s gained from movies to get a note to Sam. Once Sam finds the note, all he and Jody have to do is talk to Lila Taylor and find the exact time to summon Chronos from. It is a fairly obvious form of communication; people often hold on to letters for years, and the written word has always withstood the tests of time. However, it is not something that most authors would think about. Recently, forms of communication have changed from writing letters to writing texts, emails, or other electronic forms that are easily lost.

            While Dean does eventually find a way to talk to Sam, he starts off with the mission to kill Chronos, not fully grasping the fact that he would be stuck in 1944 until it is pointed out to him. Killing a god a certainly not an easy feat, and convincing a god to take you back to your own time is probably not an option either. Dean could not walk up to Chronos and politely ask him to take back to his own time so he can kill him there. Instead Dean either has a lot of faith in Sam, or is accepting the possibility of him being stuck in 1944 forever, as he attempts to kill Chronos anyway.

            However I can’t help wondering what would have happened had something gone wrong. After all, sixty eight years is a long time, and some small detail could have easily kept Sam from knowing how to bring Dean back. Even just replacing the seventy year old baseboards would be a problem, as then Sam wouldn’t know who to talk to to get the exact time. And what if that one person they needed to talk to was not still alive? If Lila Taylor was twenty years old in 1944, she would be eighty eight in 2012, which is pretty old now. If any small detail had failed, Dean would have been stuck and Sam would be on his own.