#the great pre-convention spn rewatch

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3.12: Jus In Bello - My Rewatch Review

This episode is probably still in my list of top 10 not just favorite but best episodes of Supernatural ever. It has everything I love about the early seasons of the show in it: the boys facing peril not just from a supernatural danger but from humans, a smart plan cleverly executed, a moral dilemma that really makes you think, a ton of great side characters, and a lot of really great scenes and brother moments that tell you so much about Sam and Dean without either of them having to say a word. Their every interaction together in that prison cell, the ones between the two of them and the ones between them and other characters, could (and have) been spun out into multi-page character metas on their own. I also love seeing Henriksen finally being brought around to their side (even though I still maintain that, given how easily it happened once he had hard proof, that he really should have been more open to the possibility ages ago), and I always mourn the loss of his character and all the might-have-beens that surrounded the possibility of the boys having a real FBI agent on their side.

What this rewatch is bringing into stark relief for me, though, is just how clearly Ruby is telegraphing her real intentions for Sam, and just how frustrating (though understandable) it is that neither Sam nor Dean see it because they are too wrapped up in their own personal emotional rollercoasters with regards to the clock ticking down on Dean’s deal to see what she is actually pushing Sam towards. Because her every word and action in this episode is the cherry on top of the bullshit sundae that she has been trying to feed Sam about the mindset that he needs to be in in order to win this war. What Sam and Dean did was absolutely the right course of action; they are the good guys, after all, and if you want to be the one to hold any sort of moral high ground at the end of a conflict, you absolutely do not want to start out being the ones that sacrifice the innocent in order to accomplish your goals. It is tragic that, despite their efforts, Nancy still died, and so did everyone else who helped them fight off the demons, but just because the other side retaliated against the people they saved doesn’t mean they were in the wrong. It’s possible that Lilith would have found out what happened anyway, even without the one demon escaping, or maybe she would have wiped the town off the map instead of just the police station, or maybe she would have murdered a bunch of other people instead. Just because she retaliated doesn’t mean that Sam and Dean should have compromised their principles in order to take out those demons. And yet, Ruby has them both so twisted up and around her fingers that she very nearly has them convinced that they were in the wrong, and eventually, she will succeed in convincing Sam, at least, that almost any act is justified when you are fighting a war.

It’s truly masterful storytelling, in my opinion, because it is only now, when I have watched the show enough to be able to detach myself a bit from the Winchesters’ emotional drama, that I am able to see that everything Ruby is doing is a manipulation designed to lead Sam right into the arms of Lucifer. She even knows how to manipulate Dean’s mistrust to serve her own ends, and she also manages to convince the audience, who really isn’t looking for her to be more than who she says she is. Which, now that I think about it, may make her the scariest villain the show has ever written, because she is definitely evil from the very beginning, but unless you know exactly what to look for, you don’t know just how evil until her very last moments onscreen.

I do have one nitpick about this episode, which I mostly find funny rather than annoying, because it’s another one of those setting snafus that only really stands out if you know the location where the episode is supposed to be taking place. This one is a bit of a two-parter: for one thing, Monument, CO is much closer to Denver or Colorado Springs than Boulder, either of which would probably also have SWAT facilities, so the line about them going to Boulder is a little jarring if you know anything about Colorado’s geography. The other thing that’s funny, though, is that Monument is also only an hour’s drive or so from the biggest Supermax prison in the country, so the siege could have probably been avoided if Henriksen had just taken them straight there instead of commandeering a local sheriff’s office as a staging area for a transport to a different prison in Nevada. If he had done that, we would have gotten a very different episode, but not necessarily a better one, and this one is so good that I don’t think I would trade its narrative for one that understands where Monument, CO is, though, no matter how much the writer’s lack of understanding on that issue leaves a few holes in the narrative unfilled.

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6.05: Live Free or Twihard - My Rewatch Review

Let me just start by saying that the Twilight parody that this episode opens with is brilliant and hilarious. I have never read or seen Twilight, and only have the barest minimum of understanding of it as the passing fad it was, and yet it was obvious just from the little I do know of it to recognize exactly what they were doing at the beginning of this episode, and it always makes me laugh. It’s especially funny when you think about the fact that there are probably other shows on Supernatural’s own network, the CW, where scenes not unlike that one play out with complete seriousness every week—maybe not with vampires, but definitely with all the hallmarks of overwrought teen melodrama—which serves to highlight one of the many ways in which, for all that it has its own level of camp, Supernatural is kind of unique among genre shows aimed at a certain demographic.

And I will also say that getting to see the effect that vampirism has on the human body from a first-hand perspective was fascinating and really well-done as well. The use of the sound and visual effects as Dean was going through his transition made you feel like you were experiencing it with him, and they also did an excellent job of portraying the physical toll that resisting the urge to feed took on him over the course of the episode too. I have never had any cause to doubt Dean’s strength of character, even at some of his lowest points in the series so far, but the willpower it took for him to resist feeding is something he should be applauded for, though it’s probably a lucky thing that he knew about the cure and the admonishment that it would only work if he didn’t ingest even a drop of human blood before he was confronted with the blood bags, otherwise he might have been in trouble, because feeding from people is very different than drinking blood that is not coming directly from a person’s body and harms no one. I do think that Samuel has new respect for Dean after seeing him go through what he did; it’s still ridiculous to me that it would take something like this for Dean to gain his grandfather’s respect, though, or that he would even need to, but I’m not going to rehash my dislike of the Campbells too much here and now.

Sm, however, is a different story, and I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that this is the worst thing that he has ever done to his brother. It is only even remotely forgivable because he is not really Sam—I actually do think that Sam and Soulless!Sam might as well be two different people, because how can you hold Sam accountable for things that he never would have done if he had been entirely himself? And yet, there is no denying that letting Dean get turned was a truly horrible thing to do, and an even worse thing was letting him think that his life was over because of it. I can only chalk it up to Soulless!Sam’s mind really not working the way a normal human being’s works, because there were so many better ways for him to have handled Dean’s expectations after he was turned than what Sam actually did. The best way to handle it would have been to reassure Dean, to tell him that there was a cure as long as he just sat tight and waited for Samuel to show up, and that what had happened to him was terrible, but that if it gave them a chance to wipe out the nest and figure out what the vampires were doing, some good could come out of it. That is the sort of thing that I could see anyone with a shred of understanding of how Dean thinks actually saying, and if we didn’t already have all the proof we needed from watching him stand there and let Dean get turned—with that terrifying smirk on his face, no less—the fact that Sam doesn’t, especially after we know that he knew about the cure all along, is the last bit of proof we need that there is something really wrong with him, and it’s the last bit of proof Dean needed too.

But the thing that always gets me about this episode is thinking about the ways it could have ended if Dean had had just a little less self-control, or if Sam hadn’t had Samuel and his cure on hand. There was a heartbreaking fanfic I read once that had Sam regaining his soul only to find out that Soulless!Sam had let Dean turn into and remain a vampire, and trying to atone for that choice and its consequences led both of them down a very dark road. We are lucky that it didn’t turn out that way in canon, but the possibility of it, no matter how remote, speaks to just how dangerous it is for Dean to be hunting with Sam right now when he doesn’t understand who Sam is, or how he will act, because he doesn’t fully realize yet that the person riding beside him is not really his brother. He may look like him, but in all the ways that matter, Sam is still gone.

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5.22: Swan Song - My Rewatch Review

And now we arrive at what I will always think of fondly as the ‘first’ of Supernatural’s two endings. This episode has been and will forever be not just one of my favorite episodes of Supernatural, but one of my favorite episodes of any television show I’ve ever watched. And I mostly stand by my opinion that, if the show had not been picked up for a sixth season, this would have been a very good ending. I know that it is possible that they would have changed some things about it had it been the actual series finale, but I also think it would have stood perfectly on its own, minus seeing Sam under the streetlight in the final scene. It wraps up the myth arc that the series has built on since Season 1, and it finds a realistic yet ultimately unsatisfying end to the Winchesters’ story, which is very in keeping with the show’s style generally. And if we had only been given five seasons with these boys, it is an ending that I could have lived with.

Which is why I found the parallels and the contrasts to the actual season finale that we got ten seasons later to be very telling when rewatching this episode for the first time since the true series finale aired. Because ‘Carry On’ was a reversal of this finale in pretty much every way possible, and I think that is a good thing, because after having ten more years with these boys, and growing and suffering along with them through so much more than they’ve experienced here, each of the elements in this finale that were reversed in ‘Carry On’ make the actual series finale a truly satisfying one in a way that, if you were to simply transplant the resolution of this episode onto the end of the series, this one would not have been.

For starters, there is the contrast in the nature of Sam’s death here and Dean’s death in ‘Carry On’. When all is said and done here, we know that Sam is in the worst place imaginable, being tortured by Lucifer for all eternity, and the thought of Dean being forced to just leave him there is unconscionable. As much as the show wants you to think that he will just go and live a normal life, there is no way that I can actually see that lasting for long. Either he goes stir-crazy and starts hunting again at some point, or he finds some way to jimmy the Cage open and get Sam back, because Dean is not the kind of person who can just live with the thought of his brother suffering like that. In contrast, Dean dying on an ordinary hunt after all the forces of destiny have been defeated means that he is at peace, so the idea of Sam giving up on hunting (especially when it obviously happened naturally in its own time, rather than him giving it up immediately because of a promise made to his brother) and leaving Dean at rest is both understandable, and also no longer out-of-character for him.

There is also Cass’s response to Dean when he asks about his ‘grand prize’, and how that line hits differently when applied to this episode as opposed to the series finale. ‘What would you rather have? Peace, or freedom?’ We know that Sam and Dean were fighting for freedom here, because the peace that they would have gotten post-Apocalypse would not have really been peace, but what Dean and Sam both deserved as the heroes of this story is both peace and freedom, and that is what ‘Carry On’ was able to give them that ‘Swan Song’ was not. They were free for the forces of Heaven, Hell, God, and destiny, and got to live their lives as such, and in the end, we got to see them find the peace that they both truly deserved, in a Heaven that they deserved as well, rather than the Heaven that they would have been given had they chosen peace instead of freedom here.

I was both surprised and glad that Chuck’s final line of this episode could have very easily been carried over to ‘Carry On’ as well, though, because the message that he was trying to convey here is the one message that holds true up to the very end of the show. “Up against good, evil, angels, devils, destiny, and God himself, they made their own choice. They chose family. And, well, isn’t that kinda the whole point?” That, right there, is the message of both this finale and the show’s actual finale, and there is nothing that proves that this show knew exactly what story it was telling right up to the very end that those words still hold as true in season 15 as they did in season 5. 

So, as good an episode as this is, I am glad that it was not how Sam and Dean’s story actually ended, because I think the ending that they got was the ending they truly deserved, and this ending would have been a good stopping point, but an unsatisfying one at best. But that’s okay, because the real reason why it is one of my favorite episodes is not because of the nature of the ending, or even because it wraps up the Apocalypse storyline in a satisfactory way. It is my favorite because of the interstitial scenes of the Impala, which I feel truly bring the car into its own as a character in the story, and also open up Sam and Dean’s lives even further. The line “...but they were never, in fact, homeless” still gives me chills to this day, the soundtrack is one of my favorite pieces of instrumental music ever written, and it is absolutely one of the elements of this show that keeps me coming back to watch it over and over again.

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5.08: Changing Channels - My Rewatch Review

There are few surprise reveals that any show has done better than Supernatural and the reveal that the trickster that has been hounding Sam and Dean since season 2 is actually the archangel Gabriel. And it’s a ret-con of sorts that actually works really well within the confines of the story that has already been told, because it doesn’t negate anything that came before, and it adds a fair amount of nuance and depth to the trickster’s character and past motivations in the process, especially where his actions in ‘Mystery Spot’ are concerned. I can buy that the first time the boys came upon him in ‘Tall Tales’, it was by accident, and he chose to mess with them and ultimately let them go rather than killing them outright because he knew who they were from the very start and figured he’d have a bit of fun. And then, when they fell into his orbit again in ‘Mystery Spot’, he could see that the events that would lead to them starting the Apocalypse had already been set in motion, and his decision to screw with them there was more of an attempt to derail the train before it got too far down the track. Because if he had managed to get Sam to accept his brother’s death and learn to live without him, Sam may very well not have fallen into Ruby’s trap, and things may have played out very differently. But after seeing Sam’s reaction to losing Dean, even without the demons showing up to influence him in his grief, Gabriel realizes that these boys were chosen not just because of what they’ll do, but because of who they are. And so we come to this episode, where he has chosen to accept the inevitability of Armageddon, and has decided to get Sam and Dean to do the same.

And I honestly can’t blame him. I really do not like the way that he has messed with Sam and Dean in the past—‘Mystery Spot’, for all the humor it attempts, is a dark and painful episode to watch—but once you know who he really is and why he’s really been doing all of this, it’s hard not to empathize with his attempts. You can see the shape of his reasoning for trying to get Sam to accept Dean’s death back before Dean went to Hell, and you can also see the desperation in what he is trying to do here. He loves his brothers, loves his family of angels, but he hates to see them fighting, hates to see them tearing each other apart, and hates the fact that they were so desperate to try and bring their father back that they chose to bring on the Apocalypse. In his position, I’d probably want to get the worst of it over also. That’s the rest of the angels’ reasoning for ‘getting the Apocalypse over with’, after all; they figure, if it doesn’t bring God back, at least there’s a good chance that it will usher in Paradise, which will at least lift the burden of looking after humanity off of their shoulders.

The only problem with that, of course, is humanity, and that is why I also love that Sam and Dean do eventually get through to Gabriel. Not in this episode, obviously, but their perseverance, and their reasons outside of simple stubbornness for not saying ‘Yes’ to Michael and Lucifer and getting the battle out of the way do eventually make an impression on him. And the power of having an archangel in their corner is not to be denied—not for his physical prowess, but for what he represents to the rest of the angels. Because despite spending most of his time in the persona of the trickster tormenting and killing humans for fun, he still has more experience with humanity and their worthiness than any of the other angels do. I find it fascinating that Lucifer’s original sin was not wanting to put humanity on the pedestal that God expected him to, but that even though all of the other angels fell in line with God, they don’t actually care about humanity either (except for Cass, and look at what it took for him to see humans as worth protecting over the interests of his fellow angels). God told them to love humanity, and they didn’t say ‘no’, like Lucifer did, but their actions now show that they never really said ‘yes’ either, or, if they did, they have long forgotten their directive from God and are now acting as selfishly as Lucifer did before he fell.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a theological essay, but there is no real debate about whether this episode is amazing or not, and it doesn’t really reveal anything new about Sam and Dean in this moment, but bringing another archangel out of the woodwork does make the angelic side of the apocalypse equation much more interesting. And Gabriel is a wonderfully complex character now that he is more than just a trickster, and I look forward to discussing his evolution as a character more fully in future episode reviews as well.

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4.16: On the Head of a Pin - My Rewatch Review

This episode always leaves me weirdly conflicted, because I love almost everything about it, and yet it is one of the most difficult episodes for me to rewatch, because it drags both Sam and Dean down to new lows both in their personal trials and in their relationship, and then just leaves them there. And while this may be the lowest we see Dean get during this particular story arc, it is a really dark place that the story chooses to drag him to and leave him, and even though we don’t get as much of Sam and what he’s going through, the revelation that he has been getting his new-found demon-defeating powers by drinking Ruby’s blood is also a really dark revelation, and it is made worse by the knowledge that Sam has a whole lot deeper to sink before he will reach bottom and start to rise again.

But this episode is Dean’s story, for the most part, and the revelations about his part in the oncoming Apocalypse are as soul-crushing for anyone who loves his character as they are for Dean himself. It breaks my heart every time to watch his reactions to Alastair’s revelations, first about comparing him to John, and how John never broke while Dean did, and then to discover that through that breaking, the first Seal was broken, starting the Apocalypse. Dean’s reaction to this knowledge is 100% in-character, and 100% devastating. The boy who wanted nothing more than to be like his father, and to make his father proud, the boy who wanted to be a hero and who just wanted to save people from monsters and protect his little brother, the boy who was only in Hell because he sold his soul to save Sam’s life... It was bad enough when he just had to live with the guilt of all those souls he tortured, and the fact that he enjoyed doing it, but now he has to also live with the weight of the knowledge that everything that has happened as a result of the oncoming Apocalypse, every person that has died in the breaking of or defense of a Seal (including Pamela) is also tied into his decision to step off the rack and become the torturer. Add to that the fact that the angels only saved him because he still has a part to play, and that all of this is his destiny now, and has likely always been... It’s no wonder that it breaks him, and it makes me want to take him away from the writers and wrap him in blankets and never let anything bad happen to him ever again.

But it also makes me want to sit him down and scream “Talk to your brother, you colossal idiot!”, because everything that he is going through right now is the same thing that Sam has been living with since the end of season 2, and if the two of them would just be honest with one another for once in their lives, they could avoid a lot of the shit that is about to come between them. Dean’s issues with the idea of his destiny come from the fact that he sees himself, and wants to be, nothing more than an ordinary monster-hunter. He calls himself a hero, but he doesn’t want to be a super-hero. He doesn’t want the fate of the world or the lives of billions in his hands. And the thing is, though we never get as explicit a statement from Sam, it is obvious that he doesn’t want that either. The difference we see here, though, is that Sam has come to terms with the fact that the forces of good and evil have been screwing with him his entire life, and he has chosen to find a way to do something about it. He doesn’t realize yet exactly how he’s playing right into the hands of the forces he thinks he’s fighting against, but he has fallen firmly into the acceptance stage of the grieving process for the idea that he will ever have a normal life, while Dean is caught seesawing between denial, bargaining, and anger. And I feel like all it would take is one honest conversation between the two of them to bring everything out in the open, get them on the same page with regards to how they feel about being jerked around by angels and demons, and get them working together to forge their own destiny. But that’s not the story that’s being told, and it wouldn’t be as good a story anyway, and I know that, so I will put my sorrow at watching these characters that I love suffer on the back burner for the sake of the show that I love telling a really good story.

I also love watching Cass start to come into his own in this episode, though I thought that the climax of his fight with Uriel and Anna coming it at the last minute seemed weirdly contrived and poorly-written. Not sure exactly why, but it was the one moment of this episode that fell flat for me. Seeing what angels look like when they die is always freaking awesome, though—as with the way they handle the wings of living angels, the way that they do the wings of dead angels is truly inspired, and something that I have seen no show do as well as Supernatural. It is sad to think that I will get truly sick of the angels by the end of the series, because, for an aspect of mythology that the show had originally vowed never to touch, they did a great job with them at first when they did decide to bring them in.

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3.13: Ghostfacers - My Rewatch Review

This episode is a truly worthy continuation of the story of Ed and Harry, the ‘professional’ ghost hunters that we met back in Season 1, and I love that it also serves as a bit of meta-commentary for the show itself on the writer’s strike that unfortunately cut this season of the show short. I also always find it strangely affecting, as well. The show does not exactly handle Corbett’s crush on Ed or Ed’s reaction to it with a whole lot of finesse, but it is not as cringe-inducing a story element as it could have been, and the earnestness of Corbett’s character makes him extremely likable, and therefore makes the fact that he is the one who dies very tragic. Not to mention, he ends up saving everyone else from the malevolent spirit that inhabits the house, quite possibly destroying himself in the process, and though the tribute that Ed and Harry try to give him at the end of their show is awkward and affected to the point of insincerity (which is very in keeping with their characters, though), the clip of Corbett himself always makes me tear up a bit no matter how many times I watch it. Supernatural’s ‘funny’ episodes always work best when they find just the right blend of humor, horror, and pathos, and that makes this episode in particular one of their best in that category.

I also love that the reality TV perspective gives us a slightly more realistic look at Sam and Dean than we usually get, even if it is only in the form of having them use curse words that the show then has to beep out. It is a fandom-wide headcanon that both Sam and Dean would actually swear like sailors, and probably smoke and have a lot more tattoos than they actually do (shout-out to last episode, where I missed mentioning that we finally got to see their anti-possession tattoos for the first time), and that if this show had aired on a network like HBO rather than the CW, we would have gotten far grittier and yet far more true-to-their-actual-lives characterizations of the Winchesters, the lives they lead, and the work they do. As fun as those ideas are for headcanons and fan fiction, though, and as neat as it would have been to have Sam and Dean pepper their vocabulary with a few more realistic and colorful curse words every once in a while, I am glad that this show was always grounded squarely in the PG-13 realm. Because, for all the limitations of network TV, they were actually able to get away with quite a bit when it came to the gore and the violence and the horror aspects, and I think having the boys be just as gritty and dark as their surroundings would have taken a lot of what I actually love about the show away.

An episode like this is a perfect example of that, in my opinion. Because the show doesn’t have to be 100% dark, gritty, and true-to-life all the time, you can have an episode like this that is simultaneously funny, heartbreakingly tragic, and also truly terrifying all at the same time. A show that allows itself that one-step removal from reality can play with genre and tropes in a way that the gritty, hyper-realistic, ‘stick to the story with no diversions’ narratives of a lot of prestige TV produced in this day and age cannot. So, while it can be nice to theorize about the recognition a show like Supernatural would have gotten if it were made in today’s TV landscape, on one of the networks that would allow Sam and Dean to be darker, grittier versions of themselves, in the end, I’m glad we got the show we got, because without the ability to play around within the story and the genre, and without the breathing room within the season to tell every type of one-off monster-of-the-week tale that they could come up with, we would have never gotten the show that we actually love so much, or episodes like this one, and that would be the true tragedy.

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2.01: In My Time of Dying - My Rewatch Review

This episode always hurts to watch. Early on in the series, it was painful, but bearable, and it always came at a point in the series when I was bingeing episodes pretty heavily, so I never really dwelt on it as an episode on its own, and usually just let it color the episodes that came after it, or focused more on the part of the story that dealt with Dean and the reaper, or with Dean and Sam trying to communicate across the veil. But then, I lost my own father.

It’s been almost five years since he died, and almost exactly that long since the last time I was able to bring myself to watch this episode, and his loss still colors everything that I see in it now. In every look that John gives his sons, in every silent moment where the camera lingers on his face, in every word and action and facial expression, I can see his life flashing before his eyes. I can see him thinking about his past, about his children, about the life he has given them and the legacy he’s leaving them with. I can see his regrets, and his fears, and his resolve, and the love he has for both of his sons, and I admire him for it. John may not have been the best father, but there is no doubt in my mind that he loves Sam and Dean, and that, despite his failings, he honestly tried to do his best by them. Revenge may have been one of his driving factors, but it was not his only one; he also tried to keep his children safe in a world that was so much more dangerous than he could have imagined. And given that, when the chips were down, he sacrificed his chance at revenge for his wife’s death in order to protect his sons and save Dean’s life, it is obvious which of those motivations meant the most to him in the end.

And seeing the episode more from John’s perspective than Sam’s or Dean’s this time got me wondering about one scene in particular that I suddenly saw in a completely different light this time around. When John and Sam are fighting in the hospital room and ghost-Dean is yelling at them to shut them up and breaks that glass, I think that the look on John’s face says that he believes that Sam broke the glass with his powers, and it scares him, especially since Sam doesn’t look entirely certain that he didn’t, either. I believe that is the moment when John truly decides to sacrifice himself for Dean. He tells Yellow-Eyes that he knows about the other children, which means that he knows they can go bad, and that is the last thing that he wants to happen to Sam. And who is the best person to keep Sam from going dark-side? Not him, that’s for sure. Whatever he said to Dean, there’s no doubt that he could have explained himself better, or at least worded his request in less black-and-white terms than telling Dean he either had to save Sam or kill him, but I think that his heart was in the right place when he told Dean that he had to save Sam, and he definitely made the right choice when it came to deciding that Dean was the best person to keep Sam from the dark path that Yellow-Eyes was planning on leading him down.

Everything else about this episode is also very well-done, especially the scenes of Dean existing but being unable to interact or communicate with the people around him, and the conversations between him and Tessa the reaper. But the scene where Dean first sees the reaper in the hallway, follows her, and comes upon that nurse choking and dying on the floor still confuses me. I realize they had to give him some motivation to be alert and aware of the reaper’s existence while still being unaware of its true nature, but how is it that someone can just collapse on the floor of a hospital and choke to death without anyone noticing? And why was there no mention of it having happened afterward? Was it even real, or was it something else that Tessa chose to show only to Dean, in order to force their eventual confrontation? I could be way over-thinking it, but the scene stands out as a confusing hitch in an otherwise-perfect episode, and I don’t think it would have taken much to explain what was going on there a little better.

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1.05: Bloody Mary - My Rewatch Review

This episode is probably the best example yet of the amazing skill with which the cast and crew of this show manage to put together episodes that feel like full-on horror movies every week. The lighting in every scene, the aesthetics of Mary in the mirror and the evil reflections that go from subtle to full-on-terrifying from one minute to the next, and especially that final scene in which Mary comes out of the mirror and is then confronted by her own reflection... give her a couple more victims, a bit more exposition, and have Charlie trying to solve this puzzle on her own rather than experienced hunters like the Winchesters rolling into town to save her, and you have a horror movie ready-made for the big screen instead. And somehow, the writers and directors and crew of this show manage to pull off something like that on a weekly basis. It truly is impressive, and the show definitely didn’t get enough credit for just how good they were at what they did. But the fans know, and maybe that’s enough, because it was the fans, and not the industry acclaim, that kept them on the air for fifteen years.

The other thing this episode really highlights for me is the way in which the stories they were telling and the aesthetics they were using to tell those stories worked so well together. As their (fortunately, brief) cameos in Season 15 showed us, ghosts like Bloody Mary and the Woman in White really worked best in the early seasons, when they were dealing with grainy, lower-resolution film, and when the show’s aesthetics leaned more towards gritty, low-budget horror. I have nothing against the fact that they transitioned away from that style over time, especially as the story transitioned away from urban legends and ghost stories and more into battles against the cosmic forces of Good and Evil, but I am glad that they managed to fit most of the iconic urban legends into these early seasons, when the show’s aesthetics could do them the low-budget justice they deserved.

This is also the first time that we get hints that there may be more going on with Sam than just a desire for revenge. I always love the reveal about his dreams being prophetic, as well as the fact that he knows, thanks to his knowledge of the supernatural, that he can’t just brush it off as a coincidence, or as a misremembering of when the dreams actually started. He knows it isn’t normal, and this is the first time that I’m wondering if there isn’t a element of the fear he has about being touched by the supernatural that makes him more antagonistic towards the idea of reuniting with his dad. Because, for all his desperate desire to find him, every time John Winchester gets brought up, he talks more about how his dad is angry with him, and how difficult their relationship is, and how he doesn’t know if his dad will even want to see him than he does about them hunting for the thing that killed Mary and Jess together. It makes for an interesting war within Sam’s psyche, and it has always been a completely understandable one once you know about their history, but the one thing I had never really considered until now was to wonder whether Sam was afraid to reunite with his dad because he thinks he is a supernatural freak, and his dad kills supernatural freaks for a living. This fear is never spoken aloud by Sam, and isn’t directly hinted at that I remember, but, especially given what we eventually find out about John’s search for the demon, and what he discovers, and what he tells Dean just before his death, it seems to be a valid fear. I know John loves his sons, and they both know it too, but there can be room for fear there too, and if that is part of the war inside of Sam as to whether he really wants to find his dad or not, it’s definitely a valid concern.

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2.21: All Hell Breaks Loose, Part 1 - My Rewatch Review

The way that this episode advances both Sam’s storyline and his character has always made it one of my favorites. It reveals so many hidden truths, both little—the truth about Ava’s whereabouts—and big—the truth about what the demon was really doing in Sam’s room when he was a baby, as well as the truth about his mother’s death—and it showcases Sam at his best as a character. The way that he takes charge, the way that he keeps his head despite his fear, the way that he holds faith in the goodness of others right up until the bitter end… it may end up having horrific consequences (I want to scream “Did you forget that this dude has super-strength?” at him every time he and Jake give up their weapons right before the final fight) but without that faith, he wouldn’t be Sam. Without that faith, he would have been just as easily turned as the others. Without that faith, he wouldn’t be the hero of this story, and it makes the path that he ends up walking in the future that much more bittersweet knowing that, despite everything the world has tried to throw at him in the name of ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ he is still a good man.

This episode is also much more painful post-series finale because the parallels between Sam’s first death here and Dean’s last death are heart wrenching. From the nature of the fatal injury and the imagery of the uninjured brother’s hand covered in blood upon finding it, to some of the words spoken by Dean here being very similar to those that both he and Sam exchange during his death scene in the finale... every time one of the brothers dies in the other one’s arms, it breaks my heart, even though I know that the death won’t stick, because it is still so obviously real to them every time. We as the audience know, to some extent, or can at least assume that neither brother will be killed off permanently, but no matter how many times it happens, Sam and Dean don’t know that. For them, that death is real, and permanent, until it isn’t, and the fact that the show honors the pain and the emotion that both brothers experience upon one another’s death, from this episode right up until the very last episode, shows that they never let the fact that they allow the brothers to cheat death on the regular to rob either the audience or the characters of the emotions that they should be experiencing every time it happens.

This episode always makes me wish I could have been a fan of the show since the beginning, though, because I would have loved to have been able to experience Sam’s death here with no prior insight into how it might be resolved. Because I discovered this show when it was halfway through season 8, and even though I watched it from episode 1 with no knowledge of any of the story beforehand, it is hard to be too surprised at a character’s death when you can infer from promotional photos advertising the show on Netflix that he manages to survive, or be brought back, or something. If I had been watching the show as it aired, though, there would have been a little less certainty to that fact, because there’s nothing from stopping a show from killing off a character or replacing them if the story demands it—and while that type of storytelling trope was less common a decade or so ago, it would not have been unheard of. There are plenty of clues in this episode that indicate that wouldn’t have happened, mainly due to the fact that they wouldn’t have revealed so much more of Sam’s history only to kill him and have none of it matter, but that doesn’t mean the uncertainty and the shock wouldn’t have been there.

I would be remiss in my review of this episode if I didn’t also mention how great Ava’s villain reveal was. It was subtle at first, and almost can be overlooked as a bit of over-acting on the actress’s part, but when it becomes obvious that she’s not actually crying over the death of her fiancé, that’s when it becomes easy to suspect that there’s more to her story than she has been telling. And it’s a great evolution of her character too, to see how someone with no prior tendencies or inclination towards violence can be pushed into doing so much evil when given the right incentives. And that’s also what makes Sam stand out as such an anomaly, because despite what the demon thinks he sees in Sam, he is unable to exert the same influence towards murder in Sam in the time he is given, and though that ultimately leads to Sam’s death, it also will lead to the demon’s downfall, because he is the first, but not the last enemy of the Winchesters to underestimate the fact that they are both good men who are willing to do the right thing in the face of evil.

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6.08: All Dogs Go to Heaven - My Rewatch Review

I’ve never cared much for this episode. I find the premise of it to be extremely disturbing—as someone who has always been afraid of dogs, adding a layer of ‘dog could be a monster in disguise’ is probably one of the horror tropes that hits closest to home in terms of real fears for me, along with the additional creep factor that the show lays on in the form of the skinwalker who actually cares about the family he is supposed to destroy. At least the show doesn’t shy away from just how disturbing an idea it is to have someone in your home who is not what you think they are, and allows the woman that the skinwalker took advantage of to be appropriately angry and freaked out by him, and doesn’t let him off the hook when he tries to explain himself. And the other side of the storyline, of all the ‘sleeper cells’ of skinwalkers waiting to turn hundreds of families into monsters en masse was also sufficiently terrifying, but since I know it doesn’t actually go anywhere, it significantly lowers the stakes of anything that actually happens in the episode and ultimately makes it fade into the background of the season pretty fast. 

The only thing that makes it even a little interesting is watching the shift in Sam and Dean’s dynamic now that the fact that Sam is soulless is out in the open, and trying to get into everything that’s going on inside their heads because of that change. It makes me wonder, sometimes, why Sam tried so hard in some respects to hide that anything was wrong with him from Dean in the first place, while not really trying in other ways. Not necessarily because it doesn’t make sense for him to have done so, but more because I am always a bit confused about what he chose to try and hide and what he didn’t. Like the fact that he never sleeps. He obviously must have pretended to, because the two of them share hotel rooms and it would have been impossible for Dean not to have noticed him being awake all the time, and now that Dean knows he doesn’t sleep, he has stopped pretending, but it doesn’t do a great job of making his case that he didn’t realize there was anything wrong with him until recently if he hasn’t slept in an entire year and went through a fair bit of effort to make sure Dean didn’t notice once they got back together. Especially considering all the other ways in which he didn’t really try to act like Sam.

I think it speaks to the interesting dividing line that the show is drawing between the idea of the body and the soul, though; the idea that what makes a person who they are is not just their memories, but their emotional center. Sam’s memories are intact—he says so directly in this episode—which could be what led him to do things like pretend to sleep around his brother; not because he has to, but because he knows that it’s part of being ‘normal’ and he assumes that he should be acting ‘normal’ even though he knows there is something different about him. But he can’t act ‘normal’ in other ways, like responding the way we know Sam would when he was reunited with his brother, or showing any concern or empathy towards others despite that being a core element of Sam’s character, because no matter how many memories he has of conversations with people, or emotional reunions with Dean, he can’t tap into the part of himself that makes real emotions possible, which means he can’t fake concern, or empathy, or understanding.

And that, at least, is where the parallels in this episode between Sam and the skinwalker elevate the episode’s place in the narrative just a little bit. Because Sam before the reveal that his soul is missing was a lot like Lucky as the dog; he was playing the part he was expected to play, and Dean accepted him for who he appeared to be, and initially didn’t even look all that deeply into the things that didn’t add up because of his own feelings towards his brother. Sam revealing that he knows he’s not the same person that Dean remembers, that he knows there’s something wrong and has been trying to hide it from his brother, is also a lot like Lucky revealing what he was to ‘his’ family. He knows it was wrong to hide his true nature, but he understands his own reasons for doing it, and he hopes that maybe they will too, but he has few expectations. Sam, at least, seems pretty sure that Dean will continue to tolerate him in his current state, more because of the promise that the ‘real’ Sam will eventually be returned to him, but there is definitely still a part of him that is obviously just saying what he thinks Dean want to hear in order to keep Dean from kicking him to the curb. Because I think the memory of what family means to Sam runs deeper than emotions (hence how he got himself mixed up with the Campbells), and that’s the only thing that keeps him relatively sane for a soulless person. And if he were to lose that connection, if Dean were to truly give up on him, who knows what kind of monster he might become.

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6.07: Family Matters - My Rewatch Review

This is another one of those episodes that I find fascinating because it is pretty much all exposition, but it is crafted in such a way that you hardly notice until it is over that not much actually happened, and yet a lot was learned that moves the season’s major story arcs forward. Over the course of the episode, we learn that Sam has been acting the way he has because he was returned from Hell with no soul, that Samuel and the Campbells have been using their hunts to capture Alphas instead of kill them, that the reason for capturing the Alphas is because they are trying to find out where Purgatory, the afterlife of monsters, is, and that they are doing all of this on the orders of Crowley, who (supposedly) was the one that brought both Sam and Samuel back, and who is (also supposedly) now holding Sam’s soul hostage in order to ensure the Winchesters’ continued obedience to him. And we learned all that pretty much by just going from one set piece to another, watching the boys sneak around and only get confrontational when necessary, and yet, when it is all over, it takes a minute for you to realize that not much happened besides all that exposition.

Episodes like this are kind of funny because Supernatural has a knack for making them riveting to watch as they are happening, but ultimately forgettable as standalone episodes once they are over. Whenever I am looking down the list of episode titles after not having watched the show for a while, this is one of those ones where I have to pause and go “What was that one about again?” Because I know that it is the episode in which we find out what’s wrong with Sam, since it comes directly after ‘You Can’t Handle the Truth’, and I always vaguely remember that it also gives us more information about what Samuel and the Campbells have been doing with the monsters they have been capturing instead of killing, but outside of that, it’s usually a blank to me, which makes sense after I watch it because that really is all that happens—we find stuff out. There are no big action scenes, no epic battles, and very few memorable moments that one can point to and say, “oh yeah, I remember the episode that came from!”

That’s not to say this episode doesn’t have some great moments, though. The whole first scene is always a good one, watching Cass and Dean try and figure out what’s wrong with Sam. I am and probably will forever be on the fence about whether Cass brought Sam back soulless on purpose or not. I do still want to think the best of him in most situations—he wants to do the right things, he just always seems to go about it in all the wrong ways—and he always seems genuinely surprised, both upon finding out here that Sam doesn’t have a soul and later on in a different episode where we see a flashback of him watching Soulless!Sam walk away from Dean instead of going to him after Cass brings him back, which leads me to believe that he likely didn’t do it on purpose. But he also manages to be an extremely convincing liar throughout this season, so I have never ruled out the possibility that he knew all along and just kept that information very close to the chest because he knew what Dean would do if he ever found out the truth. Cass does drop one more big hint that there is more going on with him besides the things that we only know after we know what he’s really up to, though: Crowley tells Samuel at the end of the episode that his nephew Christian was possessed by a demon ages ago, and yet, when Christian comes into the room where Sam, Dean, Samuel, and Cass are talking, Cass says nothing about it. And there’s no way he didn’t know; as an angel, he can see demons’ true faces, and as a demon, Christian would have known who he was too. Cass’s long game this season is impressive, but every little betrayal that is revealed along the way does not endear me to him as a character, despite his reasons for all of it.

The other great scene in this is the confrontation between the Winchesters and the Alpha vamp. I love the character of the Alpha vamp. He chews the scenery with the best of them, and he does a very convincing portrayal of a being that is thousands of years old, and who has used humanity as a food source all that time. It makes sense that the hunters underestimate him, and it also makes sense that he underestimates them, to some extent, because they are both so alien to one another, even though they think that they understand one another pretty well. 

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6.06: You Can’t Handle the Truth - My Rewatch Review

I think the thing I found most fascinating about this episode during this rewatch is just how much I agreed with everything Veritas said to Sam and Dean before making Dean spill his guts about his feelings about Sam. Because one of the things that I have noticed, and made note of, the most when writing these reviews is just how many times the fact that Sam and Dean can’t be honest with one another gets in the way of everything else—their safety, their happiness, their ability to work together. And it’s one thing for them to ‘lie professionally’ as Dean put it so succinctly to Ben over the phone a few episodes ago, but they both also lie in their personal lives all the time, and not just to one another. And the previous episode is a perfect example of the ways in which lying does a whole lot more damage to them than the truth ever could. I even noted in my entry on the episode that if Sam had just been honest with his brother, a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided, because there are ways to phrase the truth to make it work for you based on who you are dealing with at the time. Even partial honesty in that case—for instance, Sam not telling Dean that he let him get turned, but at least being honest about there being a cure, and about needing Dean to infiltrate the nest—would have been a hell of a lot safer for both of them, and it would have probably kept Dean and Lisa’s relationship from falling apart quite as fast too.

And that is another situation just within the last few episodes where a little honesty could have gone a long way. If Dean had just told Lisa, “I got turned into a vampire and I thought I was about to die; I came to the house that night just to see you one last time to say goodbye before I went and asked another hunter to kill me. It was a stupid, dangerous thing to do, and I never should have done it, but at the time, it seemed worth the risk just to give you that closure,” sure, maybe she would have gotten just as angry and shown him the door, but at least they would both be making that choice from a place of honesty and openness. And one of the few things that made Lisa a good partner for Dean is that she knows about the supernatural, so telling her the truth about what happened to him wouldn’t be exposing her to anything she isn’t already aware of. I don’t think their relationship was necessarily long for this world anyway, given that what she said to Dean about Sam in this episode was absolutely true also, but at least it could have ended in a slightly more conciliatory place if Dean had been able to be as honest with her as he unintentionally forced her to be with him.

Outside of the fact that there is a lesson to be learned here that I’m pretty sure goes straight over Sam and Dean’s heads, at least for a few more years at any rate, I’ve always found this episode a bit on the uncomfortable side. I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of the ‘truths’ that people tend to spill out when under the influence of Veritas’s curse. I realize that they are designed to drive the people who hear them to commit suicide or do something else that causes their death, but that really makes me question whether they are actually being confronted with the truth or not. Especially the first scene of the young waitress—I have a very hard time believing that so many of the people around her despised her so much that the ‘truth’ they were hiding from her was that they thought she was ugly and pathetic and should kill herself. Those things, while perfectly designed to push an already-depressed person into killing themselves, are just not how people would likely express their honest opinions about someone when forced to speak the truth. Though it makes for an interesting conundrum when it comes to Dean being touched by the curse—he doesn’t know anyone in town who could get that personal with their attacks, his own brother isn’t affected, and he already has such a low opinion of himself that I doubt anyone could really tell him anything that would have worked to make him suicidal (that’s simultaneously a depressing and comforting thought). And then, the scene at the end, where Dean starts beating the crap out of Sam after Sam is finally honest with him and says that he thinks he needs help—it was shades of his reaction to Sam post-possession in ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’ but ten times worse, because he just keeps pounding on Sam’s face until he’s unconscious. I absolutely understand Dean’s anger, but it is a very uncomfortable scene to watch, and a really awful thing to fade to black on without any resolution.

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2.15: Tall Tales - My Rewatch Review

If there is one best part about this amazing episode, it has to be the point-of-view scenes between Sam and Dean when they are telling Bobby about their investigation. While I don’t think that this is how Sam and Dean see one another all the time, having them exaggerate one another’s personality traits into the point of obnoxiousness is a great and hilarious way to illustrate the ways in which even the people that we love can occasionally get on our nerves. This is not an uncommon trope in TV storytelling—most notably, for me, is an episode of the X-Files which I remember nothing else about except for the fact that it used this particular storytelling device—but to use it here, not just as a unique way to tell the story but also to illustrate something that would end up being vital to the larger case they were investigating, is particularly well-done. Not to mention, Bobby’s exasperation with them the entire time—up to and including his response to their (kind-of adorable) attempt to apologize to one another in the middle of fleeing the scene of a crime—makes every moment even better. Bobby is definitely one of my top three favorite side-characters in the show, and I can’t wait for him to start showing up more often from this point on.

My biggest complaint with this episode is the lack of characterization around the Trickster’s third victim—the research scientist that was torn apart by the ‘alligator in the sewer’. For the first two victims—the ethics professor that cheated on his wife with his students, and the frat boy that enjoyed humiliating younger members of his fraternity—there were solid character flaws that the trickster was exploiting and punishing them for. But the only thing we know about the third victim is that he was a research scientist that did animal testing. Dean says that that’s enough to condemn him, and the show obviously expects the audience to agree, and this is where I have to vehemently disagree with them both, because there is not anything inherently wrong with using animals for scientific research. I hate to break this news to some people, but there is a lot of legitimate, important scientific research, most of it in the medical field, that requires animal testing. Without animal testing, we wouldn’t have most of the life-saving medicines and medical procedures that people rely on today, including the vaccines that we are all currently counting on in order to help life get back to normal right now. Without animal testing, a lot of the products that we rely on in our everyday lives wouldn’t exist. I am willing to concede that not all of the testing that is done on animals in certain industries is necessary, but if we are talking about a professor at a college or university, the chances that he was working on something frivolous are extremely low, and the fact that the show expects us to condemn him simply for doing his job, without giving us any other reason, is definitely a stereotype about the scientific profession that I can do without. I hope that it is something that becomes less common in media in the future, given the attention being paid to the importance of science and medicine these days, but demonizing research that can save people’s lives simply because of the way that research has to be done in order to be both safe and effective is a very narrow-minded viewpoint, and I am disappointed that an otherwise amazing episode of this show stoops to using this trope when there was really no need to.

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2.14: Born Under a Bad Sign - My Rewatch Review

I love Evil!Sam in this episode, and the range that Jared manages to bring to the character. I am always as convinced as Dean in the beginning that it is actually Sam that he is dealing with, his entire scene with Jo is exceptionally spine-chilling, especially when he flips back to being ‘Sam’ as soon as Dean bursts in the door, and once the demon stops hiding its true nature, it’s not too hard to guess that it’s Meg before Dean does, if you remember her mannerisms and patterns of speech. The most amazing acting in this episode, though, comes from the first few scenes, when Dean and ‘Sam’ are trying to figure out what happened to him. Because so little is shared between them—‘Sam’ is despondent and terrified (in hindsight, likely trying not to express too much emotion lest he give the game away too soon), and Dean is doing his best to reign in every emotion in order to keep either himself or Sam from freaking out any further. But it’s in their eyes, every time they look at one another when the other isn’t looking back. Every fear Dean has that his dad’s words might be true are there, that this might be his moment of truth, is written all over his face, and the desperate confusion that Sam exudes from every pore still has me wondering if Meg was really that good an actor, or if demons are able to tap into their host’s emotions and channel them in some way, because she is almost terrifyingly convincing as Sam right up until she doesn’t have to be any more. Kudos to Jared in this episode, and I am so glad that this is only the first time that we will get to see him play not!Sam, because he does it almost as well as he plays Sam.

I am always a bit confused as to why Dean punches Sam at the end of the episode, right after he stops being possessed, and I can kind of see now why it makes certain parts of the fandom very angry. Sam’s line—“Did I miss anything?”—can be read as a bit snarky, but I always read it as genuine confusion, and Dean should know that not only did Sam have no control over his actions, there’s a good chance that he really doesn’t remember anything that happened while he was possessed, which makes the punch feel retaliatory and unprovoked. However, given that it is common fandom knowledge that the punch was unscripted—one of many unscripted elements in the show that they will happily admit to— and that both Jared and Jensen seem to think that it was perfectly in character, I am willing to give Dean the benefit of the doubt. He obviously didn’t mean it maliciously, and Sam didn’t seem to take it as anything more than a knee-jerk release of the tension that had been abruptly broken by the demon’s exit. Just like with the extremely weird joke about Sam having ‘a girl inside of him for a week’ that the episode ends with, I can chalk it up to the boys having uncommon ways of dealing with trauma and tragedy, which is to be expected, given the lives they lead and all the crazy shit they deal with on a daily basis, and I will try not to judge them for it, even though I understand why it might make others uncomfortable.

It is also a personal headcanon of mine (one that is probably shared by most of the fandom at this point) that it is after this episode that Sam and Dean decide to get their anti-possession tattoos, spearheaded by Sam, of course. Because despite the fact that it doesn’t show up until near the end of next season, this is the most logical point in the narrative for them to consider them as a possibility, and given what Sam has just gone through, it makes sense for him to want to get them as soon as possible, just to make sure that nothing like this can ever happen to him again (though we all know how well that turns out... poor Sam).

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2.12: Nightshifter - My Rewatch Review

This is one of the episodes that I feel is practically perfect from beginning to end: from breaking into the recap with a news story, to Ronald and his ‘mandroid’ theory, to the ups and downs of the shifter hunt, to the FBI getting involved, all the way to the end of the episode, which uses one of the best music cues of the series. My favorite scene of the entire episode, though, is the conversation between Dean and Henricksen. It’s so brief, and it comes so late in the episode that it hardly has any bearing on the story at hand, but in just a few lines, it manages to twist and darken and clarify a lot of the history that the show is built upon. On first watch, this episode completely changed my perspective on the entire show, and I think that I can tie a lot of my passion for it directly to this scene. Because until this point, I hadn’t really thought too much about how Sam and Dean’s life, or their childhood, would look like to outsiders. I hadn’t given myself the chance to think about what it would mean for them to grow up like they did, or how someone like their father would be viewed by people who didn’t know about the supernatural threats that he and his family were facing. It’s a side of the story that the show rarely explores in any detail, but it is the root of some of fandom’s darkest head-canons and bitterest debates. And this scene, at least for me, is where it all started. Where the wider world of the story opened up and became about more than just what I saw on-screen. 

It also gives us a great introduction to Henricksen, who I have always personally loved as a character and an intermittent antagonist to the boys. Because it is not hard to see things from his perspective, or to understand his motivations behind hunting down Sam and Dean. And unlike the monsters and demons that are after them, or even other hunters like Gordon who are after Sam because they think he is evil, Henricksen’s motives are pure. He really is just a guy who is trying to do his job, and his role as an antagonist comes from a disconnect between who he thinks the Winchesters are and who they actually are. It’s why he turns so easily from an enemy to an ally in Season 3 when he finally gets proof of the supernatural, and it is also why I will always mourn his loss as an ally when that time comes, even though his job as an antagonist always causes me a fair bit of anxiety when I watch this season, despite knowing how it all turns out. Because there is just something about Sam and Dean being pursued by law enforcement, and the threat that it poses to their lives in a real and tangible way outside of hunting, that always sets me on edge. Just like the Henricksen’s comments about John spin out all sorts of headcanons about the boys’ childhoods, so does the possibility of them being arrested by the FBI spin out all sorts of alternate scenarios for them to overcome, or fail to overcome, were they to be brought down by human authorities instead of supernatural threats. And since those fears can be translated into real-world terms that my brain can understand outside of fiction, they hit a whole lot harder when presented as a threat to Sam and Dean (the midpoint of season 12, when a similar scenario plays out down a much darker path, is another great example of this).

I have always wondered, though, how the police and the FBI explained what they found inside that bank after Sam and Dean were gone. We see a little of it, with the one officer recognizing that the shapeshifter looks exactly like the woman that he just escorted out of the bank, but there is so much more that won’t add up. How do they explain the piles of goo in the office and the stairwell, or the fact that the bodies that they found were both missing their clothes? How can they justify thinking that Sam and Dean killed the people in the bank when they left the SWAT members whose uniforms they stole alive? And what happens when they talk to Sherry about her ‘identical twin’ and hear her story about everything that went down? Or anybody’s story of what unfolded, for that matter? It is one thing that sort of surprises me about scenarios like these within the story, where some people can remain ignorant of the supernatural threats surrounding them even in the face of overwhelming evidence that something not natural had to have happened in order to explain all the evidence, but given that similar things happen in our world all the time, it is at least a constant of human nature that the show puts to very good use, especially in scenarios like this one, and it is one of the things that continues to make this episode enjoyable and compelling, no matter how many times I watch it.

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6.03: The Third Man - My Rewatch Review

I find Balthazar to be a fascinating addition to the ranks of angels as we have seen them so far, and I am always a bit surprised that we don’t meet more like him, especially because I feel like his perspective on the “God isn’t coming back and the Apocalypse isn’t happening any more” issue is one that more of the angels would be able to get behind to some extent. Because it feels like Balthazar is just carrying on as if the Apocalypse had ended in the angels’ favor. I had asked this question in my review of ‘99 Problems’: What were the angels expecting to get out of the end of the Universe if the Apocalypse went their way? Because if Paradise was going to be anything like Heaven, it would have been pretty hands-off for all of them, and without humanity to watch over or Hell to thwart, or whatever else it was that angels did as part of their heavenly duties, what would come next? And I am willing to bet that most of them hadn’t really thought that far ahead—likely they were just hoping that the Apocalypse would be enough to bring God back, or that any change would be better than things remaining the same—but I think that Balthazar, at least, knew exactly what he wanted out of all of it, and when it didn’t happen, he decided to fuck off and live his own life anyway.

And it’s an understandable attitude for him to take, if not an ideal one; hence, why I’m surprised that more angels didn’t follow in his footsteps (or maybe they did, and they just knew to keep a lower profile than he did). And it’s why I find myself fascinated by the parallels in this story to the film that it takes its title from. Because the driving force behind the story in the film The Third Man is that of a man who is trying to find out what happened to his friend, a man who is presumed dead, but who actually faked his own death because he was being hunted down for the crime of selling diluted penicillin on the black market, causing numerous illnesses and deaths. And when the man finds his friend alive and confronts him, the friend expresses no remorse for the hurt that his illegal activities have caused others and actually offers the man a job working for him. Ultimately, though, the man decides against it, and ends up killing his friend during a police pursuit. Within this episode, you can see the bones of that story clearly. Balthazar is the friend, presumed dead but actually alive and well and working a black-market scheme that has the potential to hurt or kill a lot of people, and Castiel is the man who is searching for answers about that friend once he finds out that he did not die as was suspected. They even have a similar confrontation in which Balthazar explains his plans (to some extent) and invites Cass to join him in his new life of uncaring decadence. And there is a ‘police pursuit’ in the form of Raphael and the forces of angelic law and order showing up to stop Balthazar, but which end up putting Castiel in the ultimate position of stopping his friend.

And here is where the difference between the ending of the movie and the ending of this episode drop a huge hint at what is actually going on with Castiel this season, a hint that we don’t even know to be looking for this early on. Because Castiel does not join Balthazar, but he does not stop him either, or even try to censure him for what he has done. He makes sure that Balthazar follows through with Dean’s demand that he release the boy whose soul he bought in exchange for the Staff of Moses, but then he lets his old friend go without a word. And while this could be explained away as Cass just not caring as much about what happens to humanity any more in favor of his own concerns in Heaven, which he was pretty clear about earlier in the episode much to Dean’s dismay, when you look back on the season as a whole, and you know that there is more to the whole ‘angels buying up human souls’ thing than Balthazar is letting on, Castiel’s motives for letting Balthazar go become much clearer. Because unlike the poor fellow in The Third Man who feels nothing but disgust over the immorality of his friend’s uncaring actions and the hurt that they have caused innocent people, Cass knows that Balthazar is not the only one in that room with an interest in the power that souls hold. So even though he can’t give up on his mission to stop Raphael in order to “blow coke and jump on the bed” with his old friend, he sees that Balthazar’s cache of weapons and his market in souls will be useful for him down the road. And his decision to let Balthazar go should have been examined more closely by Dean, but Dean is too distracted by the fact that Sam is definitely not acting like himself to pay too much attention to the affairs of angels. Which (though it’s a discussion for another time) might have been part of Castiel’s plans all along.