In brief
I had a thought last night that went like this: All the taking away of allies and what-all of the Winchesters has actually demonstrated more than anything else that they aren't the characters they were when the show started and that in order to be *themselves* they need these other allies/friends around them.
In other news, fantastic and fun episode, greatly suspenseful, Sam and Dean being cool guys who can rig up a bomb in like 20 minutes, yes please!
Of course Charlie was fantastic, and yes it does seem like she was an apology for the idiocy of Becky. I hope. I also kinda liked her Shire-bound co-worker, for some reason. I spent a lot of those scenes trying to get a clear view of the walls of her cubicle, though, so I'll definitely be re-watching for that purpose.
She broke the sword on Sam! Fantastic! Sam getting randomly clobbered with household objects is sorta a fave thing of mine. (A sword is a household object, shut up.)
I really liked the fact that for once a show managed to have a geeky character who was genuinely geeky and nerdy, and the writers managed to do it without falling back on the old High School cliches of 'all geeks want to be ze beautiful ones/popular/not geeks/blah de blah whatever'. I know they couldn't have done that with F.D. anyway, but it's still so, so nice and surprising and awesome to actually see it on a show. Because frankly my opinion of writers when it comes to dealing with geeky, nerdy things is super duper low, and this helped bring it up a couple of notches.
Also this is definitely a situation where I would like nothing better than to read fic with the one-off character. *stares at f-list*
Also, it occurs to me that there may be people out there who watched this episode that are wholly unable to identify with the Charlie/ey character. I don't know who these people are and I can't imagine what it's like in their mysterious twilight world, but I'm sure there's a few of them out there.
How strange. Imagine how a character like that looks to those people. I wonder what they see.