SPN 4.12 - Episode Review
Howdy all ~ If anyone's interested, I'm still catching up and I've one more episode review to share. Only one more to go! *huff-puff-wheeze*
SUPERNATURAL
Episode 4.12
Criss Angel is a Douche Bag
Written by: Julie Siege
Directed by: Adam Krane
Guest Starring: Barry Bostwick, Luke Camilleri, Richard Libertini, Michael Rubenstein, Genevieve Cortese
Plot Summary: An aging magician's death-defying tricks seem to defy all natural law, and the Winchesters arrive to investigate the case, which takes a darker turn.
Review
Aging magicians who've passed their prime, their glory days slipping from their grasp, and their fraternal relationship is the only thing holding them together ... This episode spends a good deal of time focused on the three main guest characters, and it's not hard to draw parallels between them and the sort of bleak future Sam and Dean might face, should they survive the War.
The Incredible Jay and his two buddies are old school magicians, forced to watch as younger magicians take the limelight. The three bemoan the fact that skill no longer matters in the face of the new generation's glitz and special affects, to which the Incredible Jay announces his intent to do the Table of Death, a stunt that nearly killed him, when he last attempted it 30 years ago. His friends, Vernon and Charlie, protest in horror, but he is adamant and the show goes on.
The only hitch is, Jay survives the stunt unscathed - but a younger magician who had mocked him earlier falls mysteriously dead. Ten stab wounds and not a mark on his shirt. Cue Sam and Dean, who arrive at this magicians' convention to sort out what went down. Dean resents such frivolity about magic when "the real thing will kill you bloody," but we also learn that Sam at thirteen had a magic wand and deck of cards - awwww! They soon discover the dead magician had been a real douche bag in life, stealing tricks from contemporaries and generally being a jerk. But the only potential clue is a Tarot card found on his body: the Sword. Odd, given that the dead magician loathed card tricks.
Meanwhile, Jay has miraculously recovered all his old skill, displaying a dexterity at cards he hasn't known in years. He is so rejuvenated he tells Charlie and Vernon he'll try another stunt tonight, even more dangerous than the last. Again, they protest: again, he brushes off their concerns. He's eager to give it a try.
Then Sam and Dean arrive, once again in their guise as FBI, following up on a lead that Jay used Tarot cards in his act. Jay says it's been years, however, showing an unsteady hand, and sends them off instead to talk to a man named Chief. I have to say I still don't know whether to laugh or wince at this part, but it's ... definitely a new one for SPN! "Chief" it turns out is a gigantic gay guy dressed as a quasi-cop, who carries a whip! I found the situation cringe-worthy, but it was kinda worth it just to see Dean make that, "I'm gonna throw up in my mouth" face. *g*
Sam's night isn't going much better, when Ruby makes a surprise visit, as she is not happy. She reads Sam the riot act for wasting time on ordinary cases, when thirty-four of the sixty-six seals have been broken. (Make a note, if you're keeping count, guys.) Sam is the only one who can stop Lilith, she insists, so he needs to step up and kill the little bitch.
The odd part of this exchange is when Sam says it's not "the psychic thing" he has a problem with, and she fires back that she knows what he's got a problem with, but tough. It's the only way. Oceans of people are going to die, she warns, so he should let her know when he's ready. And off she snits into the dark.
What I want to know is what is "it"? If his mental exorcisms are his "psychic thing," then what additional thing does Ruby want him to do? That he protests against but she swears he enjoys? Is there something we haven't seen, something more, something scarier about Sam's powers or what Ruby's got him doing? The possibilities are more than a little chilling.
The next day, Dean and Sam are promptly busted by Charlie and Vernon, who see right through their FBI disguise. The boys make an awkward attempt to pass themselves off as actually aspiring magicians, but they are upstaged by Jay's preparations for another deadly stunt. A straight jacket trapping his arms, a noose around his neck, and a trapdoor on a timer - it's a feat not even Houdini would attempt. They watch as the clock ticks down and Jay's silhouette behind the curtain struggles. At the last second, the silhouette drops, jerks at rope's end - and Charlie yanks the curtain open to reveal Jay standing calmly, the untied straightjacket in hand.
It's not only amazing, it's impossible - and another young douche bag magician dangles from his hotel ceiling fan, hung by one of his own prop ropes. (Props to the FX guys, who undoubtedly had a blast with one of horror's oldest tropes: the noose that moves by itself.) The whole thing is shades of "Faith," death transferred from its rightful victim to another person, but how is Jay doing it? Sam and Dean's discussion of the clues brings other revelations as well.
My heart just aches for the boys, when Dean reflects how brutal it is to grow old and forgotten, and remarks how he hopes he dies before he gets there. Sam hesitantly asks if he thinks that's what will happen to them, or if they'll still be chasing demons when they're sixty. It's notable that he's speaking deliberately in the plural, him and Dean together. But Dean is flatly pessimistic in his replies, seeming to hold neither hope in, nor desire for a long life in this world. It ends sad or bloody, he tells Sam with a gently rueful smile.
This can't set well with Sam, and my heart aches for him as he hesitantly asks, what if they could win, put an end to it all? Dean just looks at him, as if winning simply doesn't compute. Sam persists: what if they could go after the source? Cut the head off the snake? Deliberately or not, he's echoing Ruby, which kinda makes my hair curl. But the snake has a thousand heads, Dean says in resignation. Evil sons of bitches just keep piling out of the Volkswagen.
Which makes me wonder, is *this* why Dean has been leading such a nonstop pace of hunting? Does he really feel that the War is too big to face head-on, so he's just slogging straight ahead and killing whatever random evil he finds, until Death takes him back down? It hurts to think.
The next day the boys learn of the hanged magician, and Dean has pocketed another Tarot card off the man's body. Like the first victim, the dead man had been nasty to Jay, and now was dead by the same means that Jay used in his hangman's stunt. It has to be a death transference spell.
However, the boys' interrogation of Jay doesn't quite go as planned. They learn that, A) Jay really seems clueless about what's going on, and, B) tying a magician to a chair and turning one's back is pretty much a recipe for failure. Jay vanishes completely - only to reappear from the bathroom as soon as they've gone in pursuit, and call the cops on Sam and Dean.
Back at the hotel, Jay tells Charlie about the boys' crazy accusations, to which Charlie reacts with disbelief. It's oddly sad to see Charlie's enthusiasm for and praise of Jay's skills, a lifetime of fraternal support that refuses to see Jay as anything but the best. That brotherhood is shattered at the evening show: Jay again performs the Table of Death, miraculously survives unscathed - and Charlie is found backstage, dead of stab wounds without a single hole in his shirt.
A heartbroken Jay summons Sam and Dean the next day, certain now that his show is killing people. The culprit, the boys reason, has to be someone who likes Jay, someone close to him. With Charlie gone ... Vernon looks pretty suspicious. But Jay doesn't want to believe that one of his own "family" could be responsible for these deaths, and Vernon is all he's got left.
Later, Vernon finds Jay and tells him that the headliner slot is now his. However, with Charlie dead, Jay no longer wants it, and he accuses Vernon of using his act to kill Charlie and the others. Just as the boys, snooping through Vernon's room, find a century old poster that looks astonishingly like a younger Charlie, that man appears to Vernon and Charlie. It *is* Charlie, back from the dead and looking as young as when they first started out together.
As Charlie explains, long ago he came upon a book of real magic, and in it a spell for immortality. The great tragedy is that Charlie, for all his uncounted years, found genuine friendship with Jay and Vernon. He only did these awful things, killed those people, to protect Jay. Now he wants to confer that gift of immortality to his only true friends, because he doesn't want to start all over again alone.
Committing awful deeds to save someone they love, putting that person's lives above all others, fearing to be alone in a world so short of love and friendship ... I think I hear anvils falling. ;-)
The boys interrupt Charlie's sales pitch at gunpoint, and right about there is where things fall apart. Charlie magicks a noose to swing Dean high off his feet, Sam shoots him at near-point-blank range (no more inhibitions against killing humans, if it'll save Dean) but Charlie literally catches the bullet and shows it in his hand. Helpless to end the threat, Sam tries orders and threats, but to no use: Charlie dances visible/invisible just out of reach. Then he shoves Sam onto the Table of Death and the clamps lock of their own accord. Sam struggles in horror while Dean hangs, choking, and Sam can do nothing to save him or himself. The rope is almost burnt through, when Charlie gasps and his stomach pours blood. Jay stands by, a knife plunged into his own stomach, but when he draws it free, the wound vanishes - and Charlie bleeds.
Charlie can't believe that Jay would chose strangers over him, and pulls a Tarot card from his own pocket: a card Jay himself put there to seal the spell. Then Charlie falls, and the Winchester boys are free. No one else will die due to Charlie's magic use, but at what cost?
Later, the boys come to awkwardly thank Jay and assure him he did the right thing, but he merely says disconsolately, "I killed my best friend yesterday, and you wanna thank me?" Vernon has left, abandoned him, Jay's card skills are gone, and he's faced with the fact that Charlie offered him a gift, and he threw it back in his face. Now he'll spend his life old and alone, and what's so right about that?
Jay then leaves, and leaves his cards, and Dean sighs and says he wants a drink. The weary look he gives Sam is weary invitation, but Sam can barely meet Dean's eyes. "I'm gonna take a walk," he says, and departs.
It's interesting to realize the boys took very different things away from this whole, tragic tangle. Dean saw the abuse of magic, how it becomes a compulsion its user won't deny, and how even well meaning magic can so easily turn to evil and tragedy. Sam, however, saw an old man, bitter and alone, who's lost everything he ever had, and all he's ever done has gone for naught. This night Sam nearly watched Dean die while he was powerless to save him - again. I can only imagine Sam glimpsed in Jay a horrible mirror of himself, years and decades on.
Whatever the truth, we next see Sam outside, getting in Ruby's car. Okay, I'm in, he says. What changed your mind? Ruby asks.
"I don't wanna be doing this when I'm an old man," he replies.
What scares me is that this can be read several ways. But at the very least, I think when Sam got in that car and threw his resolutions to the wind, he was doing one very specific thing.
Sam Winchester just made up his mind that he is Done, and he wants Out. He is through being a passenger in his own life, through waiting for Fate to come to them. He's had control of absolutely nothing in a terrible long time, and has only grief and loss to show. This night, Sam is taking charge of his own life, turning from reactive to proactive.
The thing is, this is nothing new. This is Sam going full circle to who he was clear back in Season One: the angry young man who's only reluctantly in this life until the mission is complete. Just because Sam has become a frighteningly *good* hunter, just because he's learned ruthlessness and honed guile doesn't mean he likes the place he's in.
What worries me is what Sam imagines for himself when it's all over. Does he envision a world of peace, without demons, without Lilith, without fear? Does he hope for that gentle old age that he so tentatively asked Dean about?
Or does he just look for a quick and brutal end that puts all his troubles to rest, and beyond that horizon, he can't see anything at all? It's tragic that Dean doesn't grasp the true darkness of Sam's path, any more than Sam can see the true fears that shadow Dean's.
SUPERNATURAL
Episode 4.12
Criss Angel is a Douche Bag
Written by: Julie Siege
Directed by: Adam Krane
Guest Starring: Barry Bostwick, Luke Camilleri, Richard Libertini, Michael Rubenstein, Genevieve Cortese
Plot Summary: An aging magician's death-defying tricks seem to defy all natural law, and the Winchesters arrive to investigate the case, which takes a darker turn.
Review
Aging magicians who've passed their prime, their glory days slipping from their grasp, and their fraternal relationship is the only thing holding them together ... This episode spends a good deal of time focused on the three main guest characters, and it's not hard to draw parallels between them and the sort of bleak future Sam and Dean might face, should they survive the War.
The Incredible Jay and his two buddies are old school magicians, forced to watch as younger magicians take the limelight. The three bemoan the fact that skill no longer matters in the face of the new generation's glitz and special affects, to which the Incredible Jay announces his intent to do the Table of Death, a stunt that nearly killed him, when he last attempted it 30 years ago. His friends, Vernon and Charlie, protest in horror, but he is adamant and the show goes on.
The only hitch is, Jay survives the stunt unscathed - but a younger magician who had mocked him earlier falls mysteriously dead. Ten stab wounds and not a mark on his shirt. Cue Sam and Dean, who arrive at this magicians' convention to sort out what went down. Dean resents such frivolity about magic when "the real thing will kill you bloody," but we also learn that Sam at thirteen had a magic wand and deck of cards - awwww! They soon discover the dead magician had been a real douche bag in life, stealing tricks from contemporaries and generally being a jerk. But the only potential clue is a Tarot card found on his body: the Sword. Odd, given that the dead magician loathed card tricks.
Meanwhile, Jay has miraculously recovered all his old skill, displaying a dexterity at cards he hasn't known in years. He is so rejuvenated he tells Charlie and Vernon he'll try another stunt tonight, even more dangerous than the last. Again, they protest: again, he brushes off their concerns. He's eager to give it a try.
Then Sam and Dean arrive, once again in their guise as FBI, following up on a lead that Jay used Tarot cards in his act. Jay says it's been years, however, showing an unsteady hand, and sends them off instead to talk to a man named Chief. I have to say I still don't know whether to laugh or wince at this part, but it's ... definitely a new one for SPN! "Chief" it turns out is a gigantic gay guy dressed as a quasi-cop, who carries a whip! I found the situation cringe-worthy, but it was kinda worth it just to see Dean make that, "I'm gonna throw up in my mouth" face. *g*
Sam's night isn't going much better, when Ruby makes a surprise visit, as she is not happy. She reads Sam the riot act for wasting time on ordinary cases, when thirty-four of the sixty-six seals have been broken. (Make a note, if you're keeping count, guys.) Sam is the only one who can stop Lilith, she insists, so he needs to step up and kill the little bitch.
The odd part of this exchange is when Sam says it's not "the psychic thing" he has a problem with, and she fires back that she knows what he's got a problem with, but tough. It's the only way. Oceans of people are going to die, she warns, so he should let her know when he's ready. And off she snits into the dark.
What I want to know is what is "it"? If his mental exorcisms are his "psychic thing," then what additional thing does Ruby want him to do? That he protests against but she swears he enjoys? Is there something we haven't seen, something more, something scarier about Sam's powers or what Ruby's got him doing? The possibilities are more than a little chilling.
The next day, Dean and Sam are promptly busted by Charlie and Vernon, who see right through their FBI disguise. The boys make an awkward attempt to pass themselves off as actually aspiring magicians, but they are upstaged by Jay's preparations for another deadly stunt. A straight jacket trapping his arms, a noose around his neck, and a trapdoor on a timer - it's a feat not even Houdini would attempt. They watch as the clock ticks down and Jay's silhouette behind the curtain struggles. At the last second, the silhouette drops, jerks at rope's end - and Charlie yanks the curtain open to reveal Jay standing calmly, the untied straightjacket in hand.
It's not only amazing, it's impossible - and another young douche bag magician dangles from his hotel ceiling fan, hung by one of his own prop ropes. (Props to the FX guys, who undoubtedly had a blast with one of horror's oldest tropes: the noose that moves by itself.) The whole thing is shades of "Faith," death transferred from its rightful victim to another person, but how is Jay doing it? Sam and Dean's discussion of the clues brings other revelations as well.
My heart just aches for the boys, when Dean reflects how brutal it is to grow old and forgotten, and remarks how he hopes he dies before he gets there. Sam hesitantly asks if he thinks that's what will happen to them, or if they'll still be chasing demons when they're sixty. It's notable that he's speaking deliberately in the plural, him and Dean together. But Dean is flatly pessimistic in his replies, seeming to hold neither hope in, nor desire for a long life in this world. It ends sad or bloody, he tells Sam with a gently rueful smile.
This can't set well with Sam, and my heart aches for him as he hesitantly asks, what if they could win, put an end to it all? Dean just looks at him, as if winning simply doesn't compute. Sam persists: what if they could go after the source? Cut the head off the snake? Deliberately or not, he's echoing Ruby, which kinda makes my hair curl. But the snake has a thousand heads, Dean says in resignation. Evil sons of bitches just keep piling out of the Volkswagen.
Which makes me wonder, is *this* why Dean has been leading such a nonstop pace of hunting? Does he really feel that the War is too big to face head-on, so he's just slogging straight ahead and killing whatever random evil he finds, until Death takes him back down? It hurts to think.
The next day the boys learn of the hanged magician, and Dean has pocketed another Tarot card off the man's body. Like the first victim, the dead man had been nasty to Jay, and now was dead by the same means that Jay used in his hangman's stunt. It has to be a death transference spell.
However, the boys' interrogation of Jay doesn't quite go as planned. They learn that, A) Jay really seems clueless about what's going on, and, B) tying a magician to a chair and turning one's back is pretty much a recipe for failure. Jay vanishes completely - only to reappear from the bathroom as soon as they've gone in pursuit, and call the cops on Sam and Dean.
Back at the hotel, Jay tells Charlie about the boys' crazy accusations, to which Charlie reacts with disbelief. It's oddly sad to see Charlie's enthusiasm for and praise of Jay's skills, a lifetime of fraternal support that refuses to see Jay as anything but the best. That brotherhood is shattered at the evening show: Jay again performs the Table of Death, miraculously survives unscathed - and Charlie is found backstage, dead of stab wounds without a single hole in his shirt.
A heartbroken Jay summons Sam and Dean the next day, certain now that his show is killing people. The culprit, the boys reason, has to be someone who likes Jay, someone close to him. With Charlie gone ... Vernon looks pretty suspicious. But Jay doesn't want to believe that one of his own "family" could be responsible for these deaths, and Vernon is all he's got left.
Later, Vernon finds Jay and tells him that the headliner slot is now his. However, with Charlie dead, Jay no longer wants it, and he accuses Vernon of using his act to kill Charlie and the others. Just as the boys, snooping through Vernon's room, find a century old poster that looks astonishingly like a younger Charlie, that man appears to Vernon and Charlie. It *is* Charlie, back from the dead and looking as young as when they first started out together.
As Charlie explains, long ago he came upon a book of real magic, and in it a spell for immortality. The great tragedy is that Charlie, for all his uncounted years, found genuine friendship with Jay and Vernon. He only did these awful things, killed those people, to protect Jay. Now he wants to confer that gift of immortality to his only true friends, because he doesn't want to start all over again alone.
Committing awful deeds to save someone they love, putting that person's lives above all others, fearing to be alone in a world so short of love and friendship ... I think I hear anvils falling. ;-)
The boys interrupt Charlie's sales pitch at gunpoint, and right about there is where things fall apart. Charlie magicks a noose to swing Dean high off his feet, Sam shoots him at near-point-blank range (no more inhibitions against killing humans, if it'll save Dean) but Charlie literally catches the bullet and shows it in his hand. Helpless to end the threat, Sam tries orders and threats, but to no use: Charlie dances visible/invisible just out of reach. Then he shoves Sam onto the Table of Death and the clamps lock of their own accord. Sam struggles in horror while Dean hangs, choking, and Sam can do nothing to save him or himself. The rope is almost burnt through, when Charlie gasps and his stomach pours blood. Jay stands by, a knife plunged into his own stomach, but when he draws it free, the wound vanishes - and Charlie bleeds.
Charlie can't believe that Jay would chose strangers over him, and pulls a Tarot card from his own pocket: a card Jay himself put there to seal the spell. Then Charlie falls, and the Winchester boys are free. No one else will die due to Charlie's magic use, but at what cost?
Later, the boys come to awkwardly thank Jay and assure him he did the right thing, but he merely says disconsolately, "I killed my best friend yesterday, and you wanna thank me?" Vernon has left, abandoned him, Jay's card skills are gone, and he's faced with the fact that Charlie offered him a gift, and he threw it back in his face. Now he'll spend his life old and alone, and what's so right about that?
Jay then leaves, and leaves his cards, and Dean sighs and says he wants a drink. The weary look he gives Sam is weary invitation, but Sam can barely meet Dean's eyes. "I'm gonna take a walk," he says, and departs.
It's interesting to realize the boys took very different things away from this whole, tragic tangle. Dean saw the abuse of magic, how it becomes a compulsion its user won't deny, and how even well meaning magic can so easily turn to evil and tragedy. Sam, however, saw an old man, bitter and alone, who's lost everything he ever had, and all he's ever done has gone for naught. This night Sam nearly watched Dean die while he was powerless to save him - again. I can only imagine Sam glimpsed in Jay a horrible mirror of himself, years and decades on.
Whatever the truth, we next see Sam outside, getting in Ruby's car. Okay, I'm in, he says. What changed your mind? Ruby asks.
"I don't wanna be doing this when I'm an old man," he replies.
What scares me is that this can be read several ways. But at the very least, I think when Sam got in that car and threw his resolutions to the wind, he was doing one very specific thing.
Sam Winchester just made up his mind that he is Done, and he wants Out. He is through being a passenger in his own life, through waiting for Fate to come to them. He's had control of absolutely nothing in a terrible long time, and has only grief and loss to show. This night, Sam is taking charge of his own life, turning from reactive to proactive.
The thing is, this is nothing new. This is Sam going full circle to who he was clear back in Season One: the angry young man who's only reluctantly in this life until the mission is complete. Just because Sam has become a frighteningly *good* hunter, just because he's learned ruthlessness and honed guile doesn't mean he likes the place he's in.
What worries me is what Sam imagines for himself when it's all over. Does he envision a world of peace, without demons, without Lilith, without fear? Does he hope for that gentle old age that he so tentatively asked Dean about?
Or does he just look for a quick and brutal end that puts all his troubles to rest, and beyond that horizon, he can't see anything at all? It's tragic that Dean doesn't grasp the true darkness of Sam's path, any more than Sam can see the true fears that shadow Dean's.