Sadderici Sammificus
Things I Loved:
Cas + complete lack of social skills + attempting to interact with humans = FUNNY
MOTW played by Mike Fucking Farrell...RESPECT
SFX were pretty damned fine...have you seen "Once Upon A Time"? Sucky, and that's ABC!
The HUMOR! Felt good to laugh, right?
The angst, courtesy of Dean and *smh* Castiel."Talk to me." The FEELS. Try it with Sam, why
doncha, Dean, you hurt, angry baby awwwww. (See how I am?)
Cas will never, ever ride shotgun. And he thinks a third wheel "provides stability."
The interrogation of the cat. And its response.
The POLYAMOROUS married couple!!!! Supernatural/The CW FTW! Yay alternative lifestyles!
Amanda. Effing. Tapping.
And yep---the Destiel shippers are in heaven.
But there's always a dark side. The foreshadowing has built for eight seven episodes (can't count "Bitten", can you?) for these shadows that I've felt crawling over these absurdly sunny images Sam's been remembering since ep number one, culminating in Amelia's husband rising from the dead. Except that's not really what happened. He was a soldier who'd shipped out to combat in Afghanistan, and we heard her tell Sam of his death weeks ago. I'm gonna shine a tiny RL light here and admit to inside knowledge of the personal kind (I was married to an active-duty soldier who fought in Iraq and it was exceeeeeeedingly unpleasant), and I can assure you that it happened all. the. time. The misidentified dead. Or misclassified dead. I'm assuming that was the Army or whomever on the phone, telling her he'd been found/rescued/retrieved. Although it would've been a MUCH longer conversation than, what, two minutes? So. Sam and Amelia get a house together, in Kermit, Texas (!!!), have a dog named Riot, are going to be "messes together"...and Sam's even getting her hateful dick of a DAD to engage a little bit...and then that fucking phone rings.
Did you SEE the look on Sam's face? I replayed it several times. Just blank shock.
This situation would certainly explain who the shadow figure was in the opening shots of the season premiere, standing in the dark outside Sam and Amelia's house, staring in the window---DUH---IF that happened just prior to Dean letting Sam know he was back from Purgatory and to meet him at the cabin. We never saw that, Show! We have no idea how Sam and Dean reestablished contact.
So yes, in fact, Sam may have been dumped by Amelia for, you know, her husband, before Dean made it back.
Or the entire Amelia episode was a product of Sam's broken psyche after he thought he'd lost Dean forever. The reason he's seemed autistic/creepy in his flashbacks is because THEY NEVER HAPPENED. Plus everything looks so fucking bizarre when he remembers, and that could be the DP wanting to make it look dreamy, but it also succeeds in making all those memories look artificial. "I lost my brother, and my whole world imploded, and I ran." Then there were those flashbacks last night triggered by the old folks "slipping into dreamland" in their minds, not to mention the impassioned speech Sam delivered to the Fred Jones character about waking up to reality and not giving in to dream worlds, because the minute you do, you'll lose EVERYTHING. Maybe Sam was found curled in a fetal position in the breakdown lane of the freeway, and he was picked up in a catatonic state, and confined to the state/county mental facility...where he slowly, over a year, with therapy, returned to reality.
Production Note: J2 said on HuffPo (new post, yesterday) (IKR?!?) that this season, Carver's theme is "reality vs. perception"---and Jared said that we would find out that while Dean was in Purgatory for a year, Sam, although he *seemed* to have had a much more normal time, in *reality* lived through his own "Purgatory." Jensen was particularly pleased with Jared's description of this and complimented him on his mad ad-lib verbal skills. Adorable. Of course, he could've just been referring to the fact that maybe Sam just gets his heart ripped to shreds.
Likewise, something is brewing with Castiel's reality, and the boys' (and our) perception of it. Methinks the two will be very different.
But hey---isn't it great to wonder? And to care? And NO LEVIATHANS.
Next week: MIDSEASON FINALE! "Citizen Fang"! BENNY! Brotherly hostility! And something will be revealed, right?