Supernatural |
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Things open up on a cold winter night with Alice and Russell, a young couple who are on a first date. Things progress from chaste, jewelry-commercial kissing to heavy petting and even heavier biting back at her apartment, taking the phrase “I want all of you inside me” to a very cannibalistic level.
Fast forward to the morning after with Sam talking to Alice’s roommate and getting the inside scoop. As it turns out, Alice and Russell eat each other to death. Making things even more interesting, Alice would have been very unlikely to take a guy back to her apartment since Alice was a virgin with a Jonas Brothers promise ring and all that jazz.
Sam reports back to Dean who is more laid back than usual. When Dean claims that his formerly-favorite holiday, Valentine’s Day (which he re-dubbed “Unattached Drifter Christmas”) has lost its luster for him, Sam becomes concerned.
It’s dream time for Dean and the elder Winchester brother rocking out to Warrant’s seminal cheeseball hit of the ’90s, “Cherry Pie” as a devil and angel-attired team of stripers gyrate wildly in front of him in his slumbering visions. His dream is met with an insta-flurge when Anna (the red-haired former angel/human-turned-angel-again) interrupts with a special message asking Dean to meet her at 225 Industrial. She’s now a renegade angel once again who has been let out of Heaven’s prison.
Cassiel meets Anna instead of the Winchesters. She complains that the boys don’t trust her, but Cassiel tells them that he’s the one who doesn’t trust her. His mistrust is confirmed when he points out that she’s carrying a large knife, one that doesn’t work on angels — unlike the one that Cassiel is carrying. Now that’s a knife!
This week’s episode of Supernatural sees Sam swap bodies with Gary, a teenage burger-flipping student by day and an aspiring warlock by night. Although Sam appears to be Gary to the outside world and to the mirror, instead, the viewer sees Sam in Jared Padalecki’s body on the screen even though everyone else thinks it’s Gary the Gawky Teenage Witch (played by Colton James of 7th Heaven).
The Winchester boys find themselves in Housatonic, Massachussetts, attempting to help out their former baby sitter, now with a family of her own. In between discussing how she was the best baby sitter ever, her husband tells them about the crazy ghost-flavored shenanigans in the house, particularly their daughter having the words “Murdered Child” scratched in blood Exorcist-style across her stomach. Sam and Dean tell them spend the next night or so in the hotel and they will take care of this ghost problem for them.
After what seemed like forever, Supernatural resumes Season 5 after one of the bleakest episodes of the series. Jo and Ellen are dead, Lucifer went on a little field trip, and the Winchester boys came out on the losing end. This week, Sam and Dean check themselves into a loony bin to help their father’s friend, a hunter named Martin who is shacking up in a cookie jar where the inmates are being picked off by an unseen monster that makes the murders appear to be suicides.
The episode kicks off with Susan the Schitzo, a 40-ish woman who sees her dead, young son standing behind the doctor in her one-on-one patient time with him. She’s been refusing to sleep or take her meds since her roommate Annie was killed by a monster. The doctor Dr. insists that Susan’s roommate Annie killed herself, although Susan attributes Annie’s gruesome death to monsters. At lights out time, Susan begins screaming for help back in her room. No one comes to her rescue as the monster drops in and kills her, making it look like she slashed her wrists in a suicide attempt.
After several weeks of episodes that were heavy on the humor, Supernatural turns dark. Very dark. In one of the bleakest episodes of the series, the hunters reunite to track down the Colt, face down Lucifer and attempt to stop him from resurrecting He Who Rides a Pale Horse, losing two members of the team in the process.
The episode starts off with Dean and Sam tracking the Colt, now in the possession of a demon named Crowley. (A nice little play on Aleister Crowley, since Aleister was the oh-so-charmingly polite British demon who tortured Dean in Hell for three centuries, and this guy was the supposed chum of Bella, the irritating British chick.) Unable to get close to Crowley, the Winchesters concoct a plan to infiltrate his mansion. They recruit Jo, Ellen’s daughter, to stand around in a short skirt and pretend her car broke down. After Crowley’s demon goons try to make a move on her, Jo ices all of them and gains Sam and Dean access to Crowley’s mansion. Interrupting Crowley’s “me time” (which consists of (watching footage of Nazis goose stepping to Motown music), the Winchester boys have a surprisingly easy time getting the Colt.
At the behest of Carver “Chuck” Edlund, who they believe called them, Sammy and Dean speed off in the impala to their destination. As it turns out, Carver didn’t call them to the first ever Supernatural Convention based on his wildly popular series of (supposed) fiction novels. It was actually Becky who engages in some fangirl squeeing after seeing Dean – and particularly – Sam drive up.
Carver explains he wasn’t the one who called them there and has to explain such concepts as “live action role playing” (LARP-ing) to the Winchester boys who take in the sights of hundreds of fans wandering around dressed as them, or as some of their past Monsters of the Week, including the Scarecrow and The Hook. Posters and t-shirts emblazoned with “Got salt?” abound and Carver Edlund is a keynote speaker at the event, announcing a symposium on the homoerotic subtext of Supernatural and, much to the delight of fans, that there will be more Supernatural books, in spite of the fact that the character of Dean had been banished to Hell.
In one fell swoop, Supernatural managed to combine a humorous episode with one that advances the season-long Mega-Apocalypse storyline. Trapped in a Trickster’s paradise which conveniently resembles (thinly veiled parodies of) television shows, the Winchester boys discover the identity of this candy-loving Trickster and just how large a role he plays in the war between angels, demons, and humanity.
Things open up “before a live studio audience” and Sammy and Dean mugging the camera on a sitcom-esque set. And for the first time ever, Supernatural has a theme song with awesomely cheesy lyrics and opening credits that feel like a cross between Perfect Strangers and Family Matters.
In another detour from the Megapocalypse storyline, Supernatural falls back into Monster of the Week format. The twist this time is that the monster in question actually has a heart.
A rash of young men turning up old brings the Winchester boys into contact with a Nathan Detroit-like He-Witch. Taking his game on the road from town to town, the 900 year old witch wins years from people who sit down to his card table and lose. As a result, he’s dewy and fresh, as is his female companion. At 900 years old, we see how good you look, yes? Mmm….
This week’s Supernatural combines the Monster of the Week formula along with the running Apocalypse story arc with the Winchester boys making contact with a surprisingly sweet demon spawn.
Posing this week as FBI Agents Page and Plant, Sammy and Dean learn about a rash of deaths resulting from joke store pranks gone seriously wrong: A babysitter, quite literally, scratches her brains out after her charge puts itching powder on her hairbrush and a nursing home resident accidentally cooks his roomie with a joy buzzer.
After testing the joy buzzer and discovering a really quick way to cook a delicious ham and reference Babe in one fell swoop, Dean grabs Sam to pay a visit to the babysitter’s charge. The kid gives them the info where the unusual murder objects were procured. Turns out, both the joy buzzer and itching powder came from the same store: The Conjurarium. Its militant, middle-aged owner — wearing a snazzy, homemade Siegfried and Roy — nearly soils his matching Monticore underroos when Dean melts a rubber chicken with the cursed buzzer. Realizing that nearly dropping a deuce on the store’s floor is hardly the reaction of someone who had known the objects were cursed, the brothers Winchester hop in the Impala and head to the local hospital to follow their latest tip.
Taking a break from the mega-huge apocalypse storyline (as most apocalypses tend to be mega-huge), this week, Supernatural slides back to the Monster of the Week format with the Winchester boys taking on wax museum mannequins, cursed objects, and Paris Hilton.
Posing as detectives, Sam and Dean stumble upon an accident involving the most recent owner of the fabled “Little Bastard,” the classic Porsche in which actor James Dean met his untimely demise. The most recent owner had his head sliced open on the front windshield in a matter of seconds after his friend stepped out of the garage. Hmm… Curiouser and curiouser.
After finagling a way to check out the car, motorhead Dean has a pant-piddling go at authenticating the number on the engine block to see if it really is the Little Bastard. As it turns out, the car is a knock-off with the Winchester lads tracing back the original owner of the car, who wasn’t James Dean. Nevertheless, surveillance footage from the victim’s friend’s video camera showed an oddly James Dean-looking figure creeping up on the guy, giving the faux Little Bastard a new paint job with its owner’s brains.
