1x06 - SKIN

Original Airdate: October 18, 2005
Writer: John Shiban
Director: Robert Duncan MacNeill

Guest Stars
Amy Grabow (Rebecca), Aleks Holtz (Zach), Shiraine Haas (Bystander), Marrett Green (Anchorman), Anita Brown (Lindsay), Peter Shinkoda (Alex)

Summary
Sam gets a message from a college friend that her brother has been arrested for murder, so the brothers travel to St. Louis to look into it.  They discover that the accused murderer had a solid alibi for the time of the murder and could not have possibly been in two places at once.  Sam and Dean suspect a shapeshifter to be the real culprit, but when the shapeshifter starts taking on the appearance of one of the brothers, all of them get caught up in a dangerous situation.

Featured Music
"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly
"Poison Whiskey" by Lynyrd Skynyrd
"Hey Man, Nice Shot" by Filter
"All Right Now" by Free

Trivia
As established later in the episode "The Benders," this episode takes place on or about March 7, 2006.

The closed captioning for the episode reveals that 'Poison Whiskey' by Lynard Skynard was supposed to play during Sam's fight with the Dean/Shapeshifter, the lyrics even run in full in the captions though a regular dramatic piece of score music is heard instead.

Sam's e-mail contacts and the subject matter of each one that can be seen are: Rebecca (about Zach), Jerry (surname unknown) - Where are you?, John Marcy - Re: Still (rest unknown), Mary Ann - WTFRU (rest unknown) and Stanislava (unknown)- Re: Get together this wk?

Channel 6 KJFT is made up for the show. There is no such station in St. Louis.

The e-mail from Becky is dated the 5th of December, but this episode takes place in March.

Webmasters' Thoughts

Hoppy says, "For me, this is when the series really starts to kick some ass.  I love this episode and when new people start to watch the show if they're unsure before this one, I tell them to hang on until "Skin" and see why so many people love this show.  Jensen Ackles gives an amazingly subtle performance showing the differences between the Shapeshifter-Dean and regular Dean but without being too obvious about it.  I also love the Filter song that was used for the transformation and how truly disgusting the shapeshifter shedding his skin was.  The dramatic scenes between the Shapeshifter-Dean and Sam are fantastic, but I'm always a sucker for the fun stuff as well, such as Dean commenting that the shapeshifter was smart for imitating the handsome one and how irritated he gets when he thinks of the shapeshifter driving his car."

Jen says, "Nothing yet!"