Supernatural 1.4: "Phantom Traveler"

Written by Richard Hatem
Directed by Bob Singer

In which Dean and Sam track down a possessing demon with a pattern of causing plane crashes, but things get complicated between Dean’s fear of flying and a possessed pilot…


After three strong episodes to start the series, this episode seems to slip a bit, at least from my point of view. I find that my enjoyment of the series is now firmly rooted in the exploration of Dean, especially since Sam is showing very little in terms of a distinct personality. It might actually be a flaw of the series that the writers will be correcting over time, but I’m not entirely sure that staging Sam as the “straight man” to Dean is the best move.

Dean (Jensen…see, I can remember his name!) is the more dynamic brother, and his scenes have been one of the highlights of the series. As I mentioned before, the elements that are supposed to be scary don’t really bother me, so I’m in it for the disturbing psychological places that these situations take the characters. In this case, it brings out Dean’s fear of flying. That was probably the best part of the episode, but in too many other cases, I didn’t feel like the story was all that interesting.

In general, I did think it was interesting that Dean and Sam were essentially forced to act like terrorists in order to save the passengers on the plane. If less time had been spent on trying to generate sympathy for a guest character that we didn’t know or have reason to care about, more time might have been available to explore that angle. As it was, the timing in the plot required the flight attendant to go along with what they were doing on a relatively poor argument.

There were the token connections to their father and Jess, but overall, the story didn’t move forward very much. I was under the impression that this was supposed to delve into Sam’s psychology a bit more, and if that was indeed the case, there’s reason for concern, because I didn’t get much out of it. I get that Sam is shutting down a lot of emotions in response to the changes in his life, but the resulting flat affect is not at all conducive to his performance.

As I mentioned in earlier comments, one of the drawbacks of the “monster of the week” format, where the focus is rather narrow, is that the audience interest will come and go with the overall interest in that narrow topic. I personally didn’t get much out of the whole “plane crash” scenario, so for me, I needed to find something else in the episode to make up for it. Maybe that exposed some of the weaknesses of the character dynamics at this early stage. Quite possibly, it’s just that I didn’t favor this episode.

One interesting aspect was, as usual, the connection between folklore and reality and the idea that these brothers are running around with a book filled with exorcism rituals, among other things. I keep thinking of what would happen if the wrong person got a hand on that book! This is probably the episode closest to taking a “real world” situation and applying the “Supernatural” concept to it. Perhaps that was part of the problem. I liked the previous episodes where they were operating more on the fringe of society, which in this case, they couldn’t do.

Writing: 2/2
Acting: 2/2
Direction: 2/2
Style: 1/4

Final Rating: 7/10