6.01 Review
Starting a new thing this season of Supernatural, to go along with the fresh look and start of season 6 of the show. After each episode, I’ll post a couple of reactions, afterthoughts and predictions for the future of the season.
So, starting at the beginning, EPISODE ONE: EXILE ON MAIN STREET
This episode left me with a feeling of fresh mint in the mouth. Seriously, I kid you not!
It’s Supernatural as we love and remembered it and, at the same time, it’s a whole new different show that, had I started watching now, I’d still tune in next week.
Needless to say, from this point on, spoilers for last night’s episode, abound.
DEAN AND LISA
Lemme start this by saying that, immediately before seeing this episode, I’d been watching the premiere of House, which included a soft-porn version of a relationship between two characters in that show, something left me with an urgent need to bleach my brain and stab my eyes bloody. After something like that, watching the mature friendship between Dean and Lisa really, really touched me. It felt real.
There were no illusions on either part that they were madly in love. They’re not.
They’re comfortable with each other and they respect each other. It’s a communion of help and love, if not passion.
The Dean that managed to survive the end of the world and form a family unity with Lisa and her son is a dulled and numb Dean. A washed down version of the fearsome man that he used to be, but a necessary version to preserve whatever sanity he has left.
Lisa understands that and Dean seems to get glimpses of that understanding of himself whenever he allows himself to, particularly when he looks longingly at his car or at his jacket, both hidden away from his day-to-day life. He knows he’s not what he used to be, but what he used to be was nothing but painful memories and a hard life for him. So he settles for this and I believe, on good days, is even happy with it.
Lisa has no illusions, something that she makes very clear when she realizes that Dean is subtly saying goodbye to her; but she cares for him and understands him better than anyone (I think) at this point. She knows him better than Dean knows himself. Which, I believe, might prove to be a very dangerous position for her.
One moment that I found was very sweet and revealing about their relationship is when Lisa catches Dean packing weapons and acting all around weird in their garage. The fact that his first reaction was to try and cover it up worried me a little bit, thinking that the only way that Dean had found to make his relation with Lisa work was trough lies and not being himself. My fear was immediately squished out of existence by the fact that he not only came clean a second later but also by the fact that Lisa took it in stride and trusted him to know what was best in terms of monster’s prowling. That implies so many things that I found myself with a goofy smile on my face. It implies long talks after his nightmares; it implies many freaks outs before this one, as he adapted from a paranoid way of leaving into a more relaxed and suburbia one, each handled with care and love on Lisa’s part. At this point in time, she seems to already know the difference between what Dean calls his OCD about monster and respect for his ‘spidey-sense’.
DEAN AND BEN
It’s a like a match made in Heaven: the boy who wanted a father meets the boy who thought he’d never be a father. And the result is just explosively sweet.
Ben had already been smitten by Dean’s presence way back in the day, when they first met. And I think that had more to do with the fact that Dean taught Ben how to stand for himself than the fact that Dean rescued him from the evowl changeling mother.
Their moments together in this episode lets us know that that relationship hasn’t changed. Ben tries to copy everything that Dean does, tries to be him, as we see from the clothing style and the auto-shop lesson, a clear sign that the kid idolatrizes this stranger that came to live with him and his mom.
And Dean… well, the hallucination where YED forces Ben to drink his blood clearly tells us what Dean thinks of Ben. Ben is his son, and even thought Ben is not his biologic son (as far as we know), and that, as so, the YED would have never come for Ben with the intent of turning him into one of his hell army kids, Dean sees Ben in danger of exactly that. In Dean’s subconscious, Ben is his son in every possible manner, way or definition
SAM
Sam is… strange. Something is very, very off with him, like part of his soul was left back in Hell, like a sort of commission fee to get out. And the scary part is that he seems not only to be perfectly aware of that fact but also doesn’t seem to care about it all that much.
Sam’s matter of fact admission to Dean that their little group of hunters needs a little heart, a soul, someone who cares about others, is very, very telling.
If, in one hand, we had already had a glimpse of what Sam hunting without Dean looked like, the circumstances then were very, very different. The cold hearted, hard hunter that we saw in Mystery Spot was a hunter who had lost his brother and who was searching for revenge on the Trickster who’d done it. This, however, is a Sam that is, apparently from his own words, celebrating life for all that its worth. And still he acts and sounds heartless.
Is this a way for the show to tells us that Sam with out Dean loses his heart; and that, at the same time, Dean with out Sam loses his sparkle of life? If that’s so, I absolutely love the concept!
The reunion of the brothers was awkward, to say the least. Their positions of power were extremely unbalanced and that fact made Sam look unsympathetic. Sam is the one with all the knowledge, the one who brings Dean back into to the loop of tings, while saving his life in the process. He’s the one who knows what’s hunting them, he’s the one who knows that, standing right next door to the room where Dean wakes up after being given the antidote, are more elements of their family than they’d ever dream to have.
Sam was also the one who decided that the best thing for Dean was to believe that his brother was rotting in Hell for a whole year longer than what he actually was.
Dean merely learns what’s going on at the speed that Sam feeds him. That’s not nice. It makes Dean seem like a small child in the middle of all the grownups, diminishes his standpoint in front of the rest of the group of hunters, in such manner that Cousin Number One just assumes that Dean’s a rookie where it comes to hunting. That part, that’s Sam’s fault.
Not that I don’t understand Sam’s reasoning. To some point.
Dean was out. Dean was living the life that, looking from the outside in, looked perfect. The truth is, no one really bother to check if that was just a carefully maintained illusion or the actual reality. The reality, as Dean points out, is a broken man who suffered from grief-induced depression and PTSD, with no hope of redeeming the very facts that caused those conditions. To a degree, Dean wasn’t living; he was surviving.
Based on his actions in this episode, the Sam of season 6 is going to be, I suspect, highly manipulative. The control of information, the way he dismisses Dean’s concern about memories of Hell with a very fake sounding appreciation of life, little birds and cute puppies… even the way in which Sam seems to agree with Dean’s decision of staying out of hunting life. They all seem off somehow.
Sam doesn’t put pressure on his brother to leave everything and join their merry little group; but he doesn’t tell Dean everything that he knows either. And I’m sure Sam knows something that makes him feel sure that Dean didn’t joined them this time, but that he will soon enough.
THE CAMPBELLS
Dear old previous-doornail-granddad is stringing Sam along. No, this is not a fact that the episode told us, only a very strong hunch.
Not all is well in the Campbell little hunting group. Samuel seems to have an agenda of his own, one that he has apparently shared with the cousins ITS, but not with Sam, which can only makes us lead to believe that it’s either something that even heartless-Sam wouldn’t agree to do, or something that will eventually harm someone that Sam still truly cares about, namely, Dean.
Samuel’s talk about Dean reminding him if his daughter gave me the chills, for some reason. It didn’t sound as a loving grandfather looking nostalgically at his grandson; it was more of like a calculating man looking at an interesting artifact.
If this season is about revenge of the things that go bumping into the night, I wonder… wouldn’t Samuel want revenge as well, on the man that showed up at his doorsteps right before his whole family went to hell? How easy would it be for Samuel Campbell to put two and two together and come to the conclusion that, if Mary had never invited Dean in, the Campbell’s would have never been involved with the YED, Samuel would have never been possessed or killed his own wife and Mary would have never, ever done the deal that eventually led to her death. Samuel is a smart man… and if we know anything about both Campbells and Winchesters is that they are passionate and have very strong feelings about family.
Bobby
I saved him for last because, sadly, he wasn’t in that much in the episode. But the short scenes he had, Bobby rocked my world!
Dear, dear Bobby, would have given out both kidneys to keep Dean safe and out of hunting life. And while that is the exact same reason why Sam didn’t made his presence known to his brother, with Bobby we get a clearer view of the love behind that decision.
Sam made a logical decision.
Bobby made one of love.
They just happened to be the same decision.