Baby’s Rear View Recap: 11.19 “The Chitters”

This post is about Supernatural season 11 episode 19, “The Chitters,” written by Nancy Won and directed by Eduardo Sánchez.

*****Spoilers below*****

“Look, Jess. As soon as I turn 18, I promise, we're gonna get out of here, okay?”

Episode opens on two teenage brothers in Colorado: Jesse and Matty. 12-year-old Jesse tells 16-year-old Matty about the boy he kissed and Matty tells Jesse to be careful about people who won’t understand. The two talk about their plans to sell Matty’s coin collection and move to California. Jesse goes off to pee; while he’s gone, he hears Matty screaming. He tries to follow his screams but Matty is nowhere to be found.

“Sleeping is the new smoking.”
“What? No, it's not. It's sitting. Sitting is the new smoking.”
“That can't be right.”

After the title card we see Dean and Sam in the bunker. It looks like Dean’s been up all night, and they’ve still found nothing to help Cas. Sam thinks they need to get out and work a case. He’s found something in the newspaper about a missing persons case where the witness claimed the victim was carried off by a mutant with green eyes.

“What, you're saying it was junkless?”

The boys head to Colorado and question the sheriff on the case. She says the witness may not be reliable because she was high on pot at the time. She also tells them that similar disappearances seem to be happening every 27 years on the dot. While Sam checks the old case files, Dean questions the witness. The witness explains that something took her friend Libby. It was green-eyed, pale, hairless, and looked like a human except it didn’t have any sexual identifiers. She says that when she found Libby, she wasn’t herself anymore: she was green-eyed and emitting the same buzzing sound that had come from the creature.

“Weed alone doesn't conjure up that kind of scenario. Isn't that right, Sam?”

“Dude, I was 18.”
“Sinner.”
“It was college. It was probably oregano anyways.”
“Rebel.”
“You're an idiot.”

The boys reconvene to share their intel. Dean is sure the story is legit, not just a product of Ganja Girl’s drug use. He takes a moment to tease Sam about his experience smoking weed in college before Sam changes the subject. Sam shares that it looks like the sheriff 27 years ago was closing in on some of the missing before he suddenly stopped—and then resigned and disappeared several months later. There also seems to be one lone witness from ’89 still in town—Etta Fraser.

“So why did she call it the chitters?”

“Oh, that was the word Gran used to describe the sound coming from the woods when the orgies were happening. Yeah, kind of a buzzing, rattling.”

Etta reveals that her husband was seen having sex with two other women 27 years ago. The three all disappeared. Her grandma told her that he must have caught “the chitters,” something that happens once a generation around the spring equinox and causes one to “get so revved up with lust that your eyes would shine like emeralds.” She burns sage to protect herself.

“So we have confirmed orgy-ish behavior.”

Meanwhile two more teenagers stumble on a pack of the monsters mating. The girl makes it out alive, but the boy is attacked and left to die. The Winchesters question the girl, and she confirms what they know so far. Then Dean gets a call from Ganja Girl, who says she saw a friend in the woods but is too scared to follow. Dean heads to the location while Sam checks out the new crime scene.

“Who the hell are you guys?”

“You wouldn't believe us.”

Once in the woods, Dean finds Libby. He tries to talk to her but is soon brought to the ground by a second monster—this one male. Dean is struggling against the weight of the monster when suddenly someone slices the monster’s head off. Dean looks up to see two men.

“What's it like . . . settling down with a hunter?”

“Smelly, dirty. Twice the worrying about getting ganked.”

Dean and the couple go out for beers to talk. Sam soon joins them. The couple, Jesse and Cesar, are hunter husbands who work mostly in Mexico. The monsters, Bisaan, are a type of cicada spirit that reproduce by taking over human bodies in a cycle every 27 years. It turns out that this Jesse is the same Jesse whose brother disappeared 27 years ago. Sam asks Jesse to take him to the old sheriff while Dean and Cesar go back into the woods to search for the burrow. They’ve got to find the burrow tonight, before the Bisaan go back underground.

“And they are never fixed, are they?”

“No, I guess not. But you gotta help him get that revenge anyway.”

Cesar shares with Dean how important this revenge is to Jesse. Dean listens and commiserates with both Jesse and Cesar’s pain. Meanwhile, Jesse shares with Sam what happened once Matty disappeared. Sam is clearly affected by Jesse’s experience with his brother.

“I think I found the burrow.”

Cesar is attacked and Dean chases off the attacker. He follows it and finds the burrow. Dean can’t get ahold of Sam, so they decide to go for it.

“I never got over what I lost that day, the one person in the whole world I loved the most.”

After Sam and Jesse plead and disclose that they know the truth about the monsters, the ex-sheriff reveals his story. He says he tracked one to its lair and found his daughter. He saw the missing there, dead. When his daughter attacked him, he killed her. Jesse breaks down in anger and Sam holds him back as he accuses the sheriff of letting him down. He tells them the location—the old Donnelly mine.

“They're in the mine. Don't worry. They won't be coming back out.”

Dean and Cesar find the mine, and the dead within it. The mothers are dead but the eggs are still incubating in their wombs. The two split up again for whatever reason and are both attacked. (They don’t really make a very good team…) Luckily they are both boss and get out of their respective scrapes on their own. Once they reunite, they go back to the car to get gasoline to light the place up.

“You know whenever you and dad used to leave me to go hunting and I -- and I wouldn't hear from y'all for a while, I, um, I was always sure that some vamp or rugaru or take your pick I always figured one of them finally got ya. I tried to think of what to do, you know, the next step to take. I was just lost.”

“We came back, though, every time.”

There they meet Sam and Jesse, who accompany them back to the mine. Jesse finds his brother’s body, and his special coin as well. They give Matty a proper burial and burn the place down.

“Two hunters who make it to the finish line?”

“Yeah, you leave that alone.”

Sam and Dean plan to ask the hunter husbands for help with Amara and Cas. But when they find out that the couple plans to get out of the business and raise horses, they decide to let them go.

Questions:

How does this possession thing work? So presumably junkless is the adult version of the things incubating in the dead bodies of the mothers. But if they have a corporeal form, how do they possess another’s body?

Why do they always have older women hitting on Sam and making him uncomfortable? I’m uncomfortable, with this trend. Just… don’t do that, Supernatural.

Why do they always have “funny” awkward reaction shots from Dean when someone mentions being gay? Come ON. And why does Dean ask what it’s like settling down with a hunter? He knows—he just got done comparing their relationship to his and Sam’s, so he knows what it’s like. Anyone else feel like this was queerbait? Like, just there so that bi!Dean fans could think, “I bet he really wanted to ask what it’s like settling down with a man.”

The boys know from Etta that sage will protect them, so why don’t they use it? It would have been a way to keep the monsters away so they could search for the nest in peace and safety.

Conclusions:

I liked this episode overall, but only because the things I really liked made up for most of the rest of it. I wasn’t a huge fan of the story, but I loved the hunter husbands (representation!) and was totally invested in them as characters. I was SO worried that one of them would die. I was convinced of it, actually. So I was really pleased with the resolution of the plot.

I also liked the comparisons between them and the Winchesters. The comparisons were very direct and obvious right from the opening shot, but I think it’s an easy way for us to feel closer to the Winchesters, so I like it. And honestly, besides those four characters and their stories and interactions, maybe plus the old retired sheriff, there was very little I liked about this episode. But like I said, it sort of evened out.