SPN Ep Rxn 6.1: But I already got a Chaaaarger!!
Never done one of these before, but here is an episode reaction review. Fun times!
The Story:
So fandom was right: Sam does keep himself secret from Dean out of some twisted self-loathing protective impulse! Man, hunters are a screwy bunch.
And half of fandom is wrong: a very nice montage shows us that Dean was slowly crawling toward some semblance of emotional functionality, with a girlfriend who gets him, a kid he adores, and friends he likes well enough to willingly hang out with. He's respected and respectable. If Sam actually were dead, I'd say Dean would have eventually healed as well as anyone ever does from that level of damage.
Shortly, however, Dean begins to see signs of a hunt: something with claws that likes to mark its territory, that kills quickly but not silently, and leaves no evidence unless it wants to. Dean is rattled and out of practice, but he's plenty prepared, with a gun in his truck and an armory in the Car/Shrine in Lisa's garage.
Kudos to Show for making Lisa awesome, because if Dean is suffocating in Suburbia, it's under the weight of his own twisted self-sacrificing protective impulse to keep 'civilians' from ever figuring out how dangerous the world really is. Lisa appreciates Dean's expertise and mainly cares that Ben stays alive and uninjured. It's not Lisa's fault Dean lies about a possible monster in the neighborhood. That one's all Dean. And Lisa apparently understands and works around this impulse. "If, hypothetically, there were, for example, a twisted spirit from the bowels of Hell prowling the neighborhood in search of my son, what, hypothetically, might you advise we do? Not that you'd worry me or anything. So a movie and a cheesecake: that translates to three, four hours? Call me with your all-clear."
But then Azazel appears, and it's awesome in the sense of "yes, I do want that third slice of apple pie, it was so good the first two times" and "yes, the Joker really did survive that building collapse." Even if turns out he's really just a Boggart in Azazel form.
Sam appears. He has his hair combed back from his giant forehead. In Season Four, this meant he was turning evil. In a polar role reversal, he rescues Dean from certain strangulation, whisks him to his secret base like Batman rescuing Reporter Girl from poisoning by weaponized hallucinogen, and proves that he is human. He seems tight-strung, manic, waiting for the other shoe to drop - "shoe" meaning "tears" or "punch to the face." Dean doesn't really oblige.
They do hug. The hug was missing something. I suppose the first time you hug your newly resurrected brother is always going to be special; later on, it gets to be "Oh, right. This again."
Then Sam takes Dean to the War Room to meet the Team. (Can we take a moment to imagine the bizarre concept of Sam working with a team?) Someone is passing out resurrections like party favors, at a party for people named Samuel, so Grandpa Samuel Campbell is back with another bewildering hug for Dean. Bald Samuel's mission is to mobilize an elite team of Campbell hunters to combat the rising supernatural menace. He's also a skilled biochemist or alchemist. Think Mr. Fantastic meets Nick Fury. I whole-heartedly approve.
The Team, having rescued the enemy's known target from certain death, was content to sit around talking shop, trying to recruit Dean. Dean, who has shown himself to be more paranoid and better able to get into a monster's head than Sam, insists that they haul out of their safehouse and rescue the probable collateral victims. Dean is a good hunter; he expects monsters to use traps and leverage against him. And he has no confidence in the Team's ability to run a simple stake-out.
Dean's right. The first red-shirt of the season is sleepin' with his eyes dryin' out in a car across the street.
Lisa and Ben are fine. Lisa, who is pragmatic and, I repeat, awesome, takes Dean's advice immediately, and within the hour, gets herself and Ben in the car to cross three state lines into the middle of nowhere to stay with a hermit she's never met, all on Dean's say-so. She's a keeper.
They arrive at Bobby's Bunker, Ben and Lisa troop upstairs with a warning not to touch the cursed objects occupying every horizontal surface. Sam pokes his head in the door and Dean gets this slight smug secretive little smile as he looks between him and Bobby, waiting to pounce on Bobby before he tries to stab Sam, and then it turns out that Bobby already knows. Everyone was in on it. It's like the episode of Scrubs where the whole hospital found out Carla was pregnant before she did.
Poor Dean. Everyone treats him like some lab rat who keeps choosing the pleasure button over the food button and has to be tube fed. Must be humiliating.
Lisa doesn't, though. When Dean apologizes for bringing his life down on the Braedens' heads, Lisa shut him up and explains that she wants him around because she believes he's good for Ben. Lisa, unlike a Winchester, tells Dean that he is loved and appreciated, something Sam would do well to imitate.
The hunters leave the civilians in the bunker and head back to HQ and the giant map for a strategy/recruitment meeting. They want Dean in the gang. Samuel pulls the family card: apparently, if you have Campbell ancestry, you're a hunter - sort of a parallel to "Family don't end in blood." Samuel is brash, ambitious, and authoritative, and his team is just patronizing enough to prod Dean into showing them what he's got. What Dean's got is a plan for a pair, not a pack, and I suspect Dean would really prefer taking out the djinn alone.
The hunters invade Dean's adopted home and make fun of the Better Homes and Gardens decor. (How does Lisa have that much money? How is that house so clean when it's got a 12-13 year old boy living in it?) Sam discovers that Dean has taken up one of Dean Smith's hobbies, and expresses sincere and legitimate concern for Dean's mental health. (In what universe is golf a sport?)
Because this is a plan for a pair, not a pack, the Team eventually disperses, leaving Dean and Sam alone. They don't talk much. Whatever Sam's got bottled up, he's not letting out. Dean kindly continues to refrain from punching him in the face for treating him like a rat with brain damage.
That nothing they got between the two of them? That's what I never want with me and my brother. Even a knock-down fight is better than this. This sucks.
Fortunately, the djinn attack.
Sam and Dean split up (stupid) so that Dean can rescue the civilians and Sam can kill the djinn. (Why don't they go together to rescue the civilians? They know there are at least three enemies. They're already outnumbered!) Dean loses the emulsion of anti-djinn juice by being more focused on the victims than on his surroundings, and he gets strangled and poisoned. Sam also loses his primary weapon (whatever happened to lamb's blood on a knife?) and, ignoring the much cheaper and heavier irons in Dean's golf bag, proceeds to beat a djinn into submission with a driver, before the other djinn enter the house and surround him. Things look bad for Sam, especially since the djinn poison through skin contact, and Sam's not wearing gloves.
On the neighbor's living room, Dean succumbs to the venom (and the episode loses its previously stellar sense of dramatic pacing). In Dean's hallucinatory coma, the cycle of the Winchesters repeats. Lisa burns and Ben gets consecrated to the forces of evil, and it is All. Dean's. Fault. Azazel has magician's fingers. Fire blots out the stars. Of all the things Dean could be afraid of now - ghouls, hellhounds, loved ones getting possessed, himself going black-eyed, Alastair, Lilith, Sam turning evil again - his fear is destroying Lisa and Ben's future. We've seen Dean hopped up on fear juice before. This is new.
Since only one group of fighters gets to be smart in this episode and it's not Sam and Dean, Samuel and one of the Team come to Sam's rescue with some old-fashioned edged weaponry, slick teamwork, a canvas sack, and, wait for it, gloves. Sam runs offscreen to rescue Dean from the weaponized hallucinogens again, and Samuel bags the Team a live djinn.
May I repeat: live djinn, which Sam does not know about. Samuel must have a holding facility full of supernatural creatures and creature parts, where dissections, analyses, stress tests, and possibly vivisections are conducted. Samuel is a secretive bastard. I whole-heartedly approve.
Dean gets cured, and the next morning Sam asks, no, wheedles, no, presents a situation in which it might be a good idea for Dean to come back on the road with him. It's like Sam's got phantom hand syndrome, where half his brain keeps trying to undo what the dominant half has worked so hard to accomplish. Sam plays the "you're endangering them" card. Dean plays the "I'm their last line of defense" card. They're probably both right. What's important is where Dean places his loyalty: with his new family. Even though Sam can take care of himself and has other people looking out for him, he still admits that he needs Dean to be his conscience. Dean has to admit that's an important job, but watching out for Lisa and Ben full-time is now more important.
And he's probably still pissed that Sam thought he had to let Dean think he was dead to keep Dean from dropping everything in a hopeless codependent freak-out. Look who's codependent now, Sammy! Dean left him for Lisa!
Dean tries to give Sam the consolation prize, the Car, who is probably feeling very lonely and impatient sitting in the garage under her flannel drop cloth with two hundred pounds of weaponry in her trunk, but Sam doesn't want the Car, Sam wants the Car with Dean in it. Dean can keep his stupid Car. Sam's already got a Charger. So there.
The Facts:
Djinn. Djinn can control the type of hallucinatory coma they leave their victims in, either psychically or by producing two different venoms, but the content of the coma is determined by the victim's subconscious perceptions, fears, and desires. A light paranoid state can be induced by a casual touch. Djinn also have cool psychically controlled tribal tattoos which serve as tracking markers for heavy power use. The Happy Verse type of coma we saw when we first encountered djinn must be the monsters' idea of euthanasia.
The djinn cure. In Natural Magic, anything that cures a bite or envenomation is likely to kill or terrify the animal that bit the patient, and vice-versa. The djinn cure, unlike any medicine approved by science, doubles as a weapon against djinn, so apparently it was designed on at least some magical principles. We don't know if it's a sedative like cadaver blood in vampires, or simply a lethal weapon that leaves less incriminating marks on the corpse, but as a weapon, it seems to be dosed at 30-50 mL intramuscularly.
Sam and Samuel. I'm guessing they don't have any hand-prints burned into them, or they'd have used them for scrying already. Sam fell body-and-soul into Hell, but Samuel probably got a hunter funeral or at least cremation. Whatever got them out has full access to the Cage and to Heaven, and can construct human bodies from thin air.
Sam has his own car. It's new. It's pretty. It's probably got cut-foam weapon slots in its armory.
The Team has some dirty creepy secrets. They've got a van with a grate separating the back from the cab compartment, perfect for prisoner transport. Samuel is acquiring live humanoid specimens behind Sam's back.
Dean tastefully demon-proofed Lisa's house. He keeps a gun in the bedroom, without even a lock box or a concealing pile of dirty clothes, holy water next to the gun, and a Devil's trap under the doormat.
Closing thoughts:
The concept of family. This season, Dean is torn between three families, one of blood, one of love, and one of both. The past five seasons have been about "family don't end in blood," "family is most important," "family loves each-other anyway," and "family lets each-other grow up," but this season looks to be about "what isn't family?" I think the Campbells are going to be trouble. Like the Mafia. Maybe family don't end in blood, and conversely, blood don't make a person family.
The work of a wall is to stand there, doing nothing. A lot of very significant nothing happened in this episode. Dean didn't go back on the road. Sam didn't come find Dean until it was almost too late. Sam didn't want to braid hair and cry. Dean didn't pry any secrets out of him. The crime that defines Dean and Sam's relationship right now, Sam letting Dean think he was dead, is a crime of omission. Drastic changes have occurred to the show's emotional landscape, but we see them in what Sam and Dean don't do.
Sam's car. Sam has my very favorite car in the whole wide world after a dark green Firebird with a giant screaming eagle on the hood. I have to wonder if Sam asked one of his new friends for advice on his acquisition, and how that conversation went:
"I need a car. Something with a lot of leg room, plenty of storage space. Something inconspicuous."
"You could get a mid-size SUV, like a Tacoma, maybe a Blazer. People remember an SUV, but they all kinda look the same, especially the early Nineties models."
"What about handling? I need something that'll take a turn, you know. SUVs have a high center of gravity, they roll over."
"Could get a Subaru, push the seat all the way back. They've got great handling, and don't let the soccer-mom look fool you, those babies can jump."
"Eh."
"Or a Crown Vic, white, if you wanna buy American. Whole lotta power. Trunk you could put a body in on the way to torch it. Plus you'd get all kindsa cred with the victims on interviews. You might not even need to whip out the badge."
*points* "I want that one."
*pause* "Kinda heavy on that late sixties muscle car vibe, doncha think? People're gonna remember those lines - "
"I want it in black."
The Story:
So fandom was right: Sam does keep himself secret from Dean out of some twisted self-loathing protective impulse! Man, hunters are a screwy bunch.
And half of fandom is wrong: a very nice montage shows us that Dean was slowly crawling toward some semblance of emotional functionality, with a girlfriend who gets him, a kid he adores, and friends he likes well enough to willingly hang out with. He's respected and respectable. If Sam actually were dead, I'd say Dean would have eventually healed as well as anyone ever does from that level of damage.
Shortly, however, Dean begins to see signs of a hunt: something with claws that likes to mark its territory, that kills quickly but not silently, and leaves no evidence unless it wants to. Dean is rattled and out of practice, but he's plenty prepared, with a gun in his truck and an armory in the Car/Shrine in Lisa's garage.
Kudos to Show for making Lisa awesome, because if Dean is suffocating in Suburbia, it's under the weight of his own twisted self-sacrificing protective impulse to keep 'civilians' from ever figuring out how dangerous the world really is. Lisa appreciates Dean's expertise and mainly cares that Ben stays alive and uninjured. It's not Lisa's fault Dean lies about a possible monster in the neighborhood. That one's all Dean. And Lisa apparently understands and works around this impulse. "If, hypothetically, there were, for example, a twisted spirit from the bowels of Hell prowling the neighborhood in search of my son, what, hypothetically, might you advise we do? Not that you'd worry me or anything. So a movie and a cheesecake: that translates to three, four hours? Call me with your all-clear."
But then Azazel appears, and it's awesome in the sense of "yes, I do want that third slice of apple pie, it was so good the first two times" and "yes, the Joker really did survive that building collapse." Even if turns out he's really just a Boggart in Azazel form.
Sam appears. He has his hair combed back from his giant forehead. In Season Four, this meant he was turning evil. In a polar role reversal, he rescues Dean from certain strangulation, whisks him to his secret base like Batman rescuing Reporter Girl from poisoning by weaponized hallucinogen, and proves that he is human. He seems tight-strung, manic, waiting for the other shoe to drop - "shoe" meaning "tears" or "punch to the face." Dean doesn't really oblige.
They do hug. The hug was missing something. I suppose the first time you hug your newly resurrected brother is always going to be special; later on, it gets to be "Oh, right. This again."
Then Sam takes Dean to the War Room to meet the Team. (Can we take a moment to imagine the bizarre concept of Sam working with a team?) Someone is passing out resurrections like party favors, at a party for people named Samuel, so Grandpa Samuel Campbell is back with another bewildering hug for Dean. Bald Samuel's mission is to mobilize an elite team of Campbell hunters to combat the rising supernatural menace. He's also a skilled biochemist or alchemist. Think Mr. Fantastic meets Nick Fury. I whole-heartedly approve.
The Team, having rescued the enemy's known target from certain death, was content to sit around talking shop, trying to recruit Dean. Dean, who has shown himself to be more paranoid and better able to get into a monster's head than Sam, insists that they haul out of their safehouse and rescue the probable collateral victims. Dean is a good hunter; he expects monsters to use traps and leverage against him. And he has no confidence in the Team's ability to run a simple stake-out.
Dean's right. The first red-shirt of the season is sleepin' with his eyes dryin' out in a car across the street.
Lisa and Ben are fine. Lisa, who is pragmatic and, I repeat, awesome, takes Dean's advice immediately, and within the hour, gets herself and Ben in the car to cross three state lines into the middle of nowhere to stay with a hermit she's never met, all on Dean's say-so. She's a keeper.
They arrive at Bobby's Bunker, Ben and Lisa troop upstairs with a warning not to touch the cursed objects occupying every horizontal surface. Sam pokes his head in the door and Dean gets this slight smug secretive little smile as he looks between him and Bobby, waiting to pounce on Bobby before he tries to stab Sam, and then it turns out that Bobby already knows. Everyone was in on it. It's like the episode of Scrubs where the whole hospital found out Carla was pregnant before she did.
Poor Dean. Everyone treats him like some lab rat who keeps choosing the pleasure button over the food button and has to be tube fed. Must be humiliating.
Lisa doesn't, though. When Dean apologizes for bringing his life down on the Braedens' heads, Lisa shut him up and explains that she wants him around because she believes he's good for Ben. Lisa, unlike a Winchester, tells Dean that he is loved and appreciated, something Sam would do well to imitate.
The hunters leave the civilians in the bunker and head back to HQ and the giant map for a strategy/recruitment meeting. They want Dean in the gang. Samuel pulls the family card: apparently, if you have Campbell ancestry, you're a hunter - sort of a parallel to "Family don't end in blood." Samuel is brash, ambitious, and authoritative, and his team is just patronizing enough to prod Dean into showing them what he's got. What Dean's got is a plan for a pair, not a pack, and I suspect Dean would really prefer taking out the djinn alone.
The hunters invade Dean's adopted home and make fun of the Better Homes and Gardens decor. (How does Lisa have that much money? How is that house so clean when it's got a 12-13 year old boy living in it?) Sam discovers that Dean has taken up one of Dean Smith's hobbies, and expresses sincere and legitimate concern for Dean's mental health. (In what universe is golf a sport?)
Because this is a plan for a pair, not a pack, the Team eventually disperses, leaving Dean and Sam alone. They don't talk much. Whatever Sam's got bottled up, he's not letting out. Dean kindly continues to refrain from punching him in the face for treating him like a rat with brain damage.
That nothing they got between the two of them? That's what I never want with me and my brother. Even a knock-down fight is better than this. This sucks.
Fortunately, the djinn attack.
Sam and Dean split up (stupid) so that Dean can rescue the civilians and Sam can kill the djinn. (Why don't they go together to rescue the civilians? They know there are at least three enemies. They're already outnumbered!) Dean loses the emulsion of anti-djinn juice by being more focused on the victims than on his surroundings, and he gets strangled and poisoned. Sam also loses his primary weapon (whatever happened to lamb's blood on a knife?) and, ignoring the much cheaper and heavier irons in Dean's golf bag, proceeds to beat a djinn into submission with a driver, before the other djinn enter the house and surround him. Things look bad for Sam, especially since the djinn poison through skin contact, and Sam's not wearing gloves.
On the neighbor's living room, Dean succumbs to the venom (and the episode loses its previously stellar sense of dramatic pacing). In Dean's hallucinatory coma, the cycle of the Winchesters repeats. Lisa burns and Ben gets consecrated to the forces of evil, and it is All. Dean's. Fault. Azazel has magician's fingers. Fire blots out the stars. Of all the things Dean could be afraid of now - ghouls, hellhounds, loved ones getting possessed, himself going black-eyed, Alastair, Lilith, Sam turning evil again - his fear is destroying Lisa and Ben's future. We've seen Dean hopped up on fear juice before. This is new.
Since only one group of fighters gets to be smart in this episode and it's not Sam and Dean, Samuel and one of the Team come to Sam's rescue with some old-fashioned edged weaponry, slick teamwork, a canvas sack, and, wait for it, gloves. Sam runs offscreen to rescue Dean from the weaponized hallucinogens again, and Samuel bags the Team a live djinn.
May I repeat: live djinn, which Sam does not know about. Samuel must have a holding facility full of supernatural creatures and creature parts, where dissections, analyses, stress tests, and possibly vivisections are conducted. Samuel is a secretive bastard. I whole-heartedly approve.
Dean gets cured, and the next morning Sam asks, no, wheedles, no, presents a situation in which it might be a good idea for Dean to come back on the road with him. It's like Sam's got phantom hand syndrome, where half his brain keeps trying to undo what the dominant half has worked so hard to accomplish. Sam plays the "you're endangering them" card. Dean plays the "I'm their last line of defense" card. They're probably both right. What's important is where Dean places his loyalty: with his new family. Even though Sam can take care of himself and has other people looking out for him, he still admits that he needs Dean to be his conscience. Dean has to admit that's an important job, but watching out for Lisa and Ben full-time is now more important.
And he's probably still pissed that Sam thought he had to let Dean think he was dead to keep Dean from dropping everything in a hopeless codependent freak-out. Look who's codependent now, Sammy! Dean left him for Lisa!
Dean tries to give Sam the consolation prize, the Car, who is probably feeling very lonely and impatient sitting in the garage under her flannel drop cloth with two hundred pounds of weaponry in her trunk, but Sam doesn't want the Car, Sam wants the Car with Dean in it. Dean can keep his stupid Car. Sam's already got a Charger. So there.
The Facts:
Djinn. Djinn can control the type of hallucinatory coma they leave their victims in, either psychically or by producing two different venoms, but the content of the coma is determined by the victim's subconscious perceptions, fears, and desires. A light paranoid state can be induced by a casual touch. Djinn also have cool psychically controlled tribal tattoos which serve as tracking markers for heavy power use. The Happy Verse type of coma we saw when we first encountered djinn must be the monsters' idea of euthanasia.
The djinn cure. In Natural Magic, anything that cures a bite or envenomation is likely to kill or terrify the animal that bit the patient, and vice-versa. The djinn cure, unlike any medicine approved by science, doubles as a weapon against djinn, so apparently it was designed on at least some magical principles. We don't know if it's a sedative like cadaver blood in vampires, or simply a lethal weapon that leaves less incriminating marks on the corpse, but as a weapon, it seems to be dosed at 30-50 mL intramuscularly.
Sam and Samuel. I'm guessing they don't have any hand-prints burned into them, or they'd have used them for scrying already. Sam fell body-and-soul into Hell, but Samuel probably got a hunter funeral or at least cremation. Whatever got them out has full access to the Cage and to Heaven, and can construct human bodies from thin air.
Sam has his own car. It's new. It's pretty. It's probably got cut-foam weapon slots in its armory.
The Team has some dirty creepy secrets. They've got a van with a grate separating the back from the cab compartment, perfect for prisoner transport. Samuel is acquiring live humanoid specimens behind Sam's back.
Dean tastefully demon-proofed Lisa's house. He keeps a gun in the bedroom, without even a lock box or a concealing pile of dirty clothes, holy water next to the gun, and a Devil's trap under the doormat.
Closing thoughts:
The concept of family. This season, Dean is torn between three families, one of blood, one of love, and one of both. The past five seasons have been about "family don't end in blood," "family is most important," "family loves each-other anyway," and "family lets each-other grow up," but this season looks to be about "what isn't family?" I think the Campbells are going to be trouble. Like the Mafia. Maybe family don't end in blood, and conversely, blood don't make a person family.
The work of a wall is to stand there, doing nothing. A lot of very significant nothing happened in this episode. Dean didn't go back on the road. Sam didn't come find Dean until it was almost too late. Sam didn't want to braid hair and cry. Dean didn't pry any secrets out of him. The crime that defines Dean and Sam's relationship right now, Sam letting Dean think he was dead, is a crime of omission. Drastic changes have occurred to the show's emotional landscape, but we see them in what Sam and Dean don't do.
Sam's car. Sam has my very favorite car in the whole wide world after a dark green Firebird with a giant screaming eagle on the hood. I have to wonder if Sam asked one of his new friends for advice on his acquisition, and how that conversation went:
"I need a car. Something with a lot of leg room, plenty of storage space. Something inconspicuous."
"You could get a mid-size SUV, like a Tacoma, maybe a Blazer. People remember an SUV, but they all kinda look the same, especially the early Nineties models."
"What about handling? I need something that'll take a turn, you know. SUVs have a high center of gravity, they roll over."
"Could get a Subaru, push the seat all the way back. They've got great handling, and don't let the soccer-mom look fool you, those babies can jump."
"Eh."
"Or a Crown Vic, white, if you wanna buy American. Whole lotta power. Trunk you could put a body in on the way to torch it. Plus you'd get all kindsa cred with the victims on interviews. You might not even need to whip out the badge."
*points* "I want that one."
*pause* "Kinda heavy on that late sixties muscle car vibe, doncha think? People're gonna remember those lines - "
"I want it in black."