15X2: Raising Hell (and a few hackles)
Sorry for the late review! My local CW network has decided to air high school football instead of SPN, and the livestream I was using kept cutting out, then I went out of town (to Toledo, Ohio, actually; home of Eric Kripke), so here we are finally.
In typical BuckLeming fashion, the episode was rife with loosey-goosey canon, infodumps, telling-not-showing and a cast of a bazillion. On those grounds alone, I found it frustrating. I get that BL are frequently charged with plot-heavy episodes, but wow, the ways they attack this challenge are stunningly dumb. They do everything you're not supposed to do when writing fiction, and prove exactly why you don't do those things.
So while there were a few pebbles of satisfaction in 'Raising Hell', overall it earned its sad ratings. (I know, I know, there are lots of reasons for SPN's dipping ratings-old show, pre-empted in some markets, overall decline in quality-but truly, this was a sloppy episode.
Some things made 'Raising Hell' at least watchable, such as the actors' performances … of which there were a lot. Rowena. Ketch. Chuck. Amara. Kevin. In addition to Sam, Dean, Cas and not-Jack. (Good news, maybe? Because Dabb has promised us a plethora of returning guest characters and if we lump them all into one episode, the show might spend time really drilling down on our leads' stories, this being the LAST SEASON AND ALL.
I know, Dean. I know.
The character threads were myriad and generally not about the characters at all; BuckLeming uses characters to service the plot (a practice Dabb is guilty of as well), so if you stop expecting the episode to be toothy or stick to canon or emotionally moving in the least, you'll probably enjoy it for the shallow, action-heavy romp that it is.
The ghosts still look cheesy in broad daylight, including poor Kevin. Which … why was he in Hell anyways? Because God said so. Okie doke.
Ketch shows up with some sort of iron-confetti gun, a la Bond with Q's gadgets (big silly), and then he and Rowena take precious time in the middle of the ghost Armageddon to make googly eyes at each other. WHO DOES THAT?? It's like Austin Powers meets Bewitched meets a spoofy romcom.
The lead ghost, who has decided to unionize his ectoplasmic forces, is supposed to be Jack the Ripper. He is massively unscary as such, and doesn't much sound British. The black goo leaking from townfolks' eyes (always in such a timely fashion) is a lazy, blatant way of indicating possession. The fx are still poo.
Sigh. This is what's happened to my show. Annnywho, let's try to find a little gold dust in this pan of silt.
Dean coining Rowena's magical ghost-sucking rock The Soul Catcher ... classic Dean!
If you happen to be a Destiel shipper, Dean and Cas actually sharing a scene and speaking together might've made your day. Those bits have been few and far between in the past three, four seasons. Doesn't mean everything is hunky dory between them, though, and we know The Empty's promise to snatch Cas when he's finally happy is still a gun sitting on the mantle somewhere. So it seems like Dabb is going to keep that low-grade feud going until maybe the mid-season finale?
For me, the best nugget was the revelation that Chuck has an unhealing bullet wound, just like Sam, and when Chuck poked at his damage? Sam felt it too. (Tying into last week when Cas attempted to heal Sam's wound, it triggered some sort of premonition, wherein we see Sam-as-Lucifer possibly killing an alt-world dystopian Dean.) Amara reveals that God is losing power. Is Sam … gaining it? Or is the wound just a conduit and they're both ebbing away?
And so we leave our intrepid gaggle facing the eventuality that the spell dome corralling (all?) the Hell ghosts is fritzing out. Dean is still ticked off at Cas, worried that Michael has been sprung from the Cage, and in the throes of an existential crisis over the likelihood that he's never, in truth, had “free will” at all. Cas is trying desperately to convince Dean otherwise, sullen over Chuck taking Jack away from him. And Sam is, once again, putting on a brave face and hiding something supernatural that is damaging him and potentially compromising his human-ness.
I'm giving this episode a wan C-. I hope next week they try to pay a modicum of respect to canon and creepiness, and dig deeper into the characters instead of painting such a wide, shallow swath.
In typical BuckLeming fashion, the episode was rife with loosey-goosey canon, infodumps, telling-not-showing and a cast of a bazillion. On those grounds alone, I found it frustrating. I get that BL are frequently charged with plot-heavy episodes, but wow, the ways they attack this challenge are stunningly dumb. They do everything you're not supposed to do when writing fiction, and prove exactly why you don't do those things.
So while there were a few pebbles of satisfaction in 'Raising Hell', overall it earned its sad ratings. (I know, I know, there are lots of reasons for SPN's dipping ratings-old show, pre-empted in some markets, overall decline in quality-but truly, this was a sloppy episode.
Some things made 'Raising Hell' at least watchable, such as the actors' performances … of which there were a lot. Rowena. Ketch. Chuck. Amara. Kevin. In addition to Sam, Dean, Cas and not-Jack. (Good news, maybe? Because Dabb has promised us a plethora of returning guest characters and if we lump them all into one episode, the show might spend time really drilling down on our leads' stories, this being the LAST SEASON AND ALL.
I know, Dean. I know.
The character threads were myriad and generally not about the characters at all; BuckLeming uses characters to service the plot (a practice Dabb is guilty of as well), so if you stop expecting the episode to be toothy or stick to canon or emotionally moving in the least, you'll probably enjoy it for the shallow, action-heavy romp that it is.
The ghosts still look cheesy in broad daylight, including poor Kevin. Which … why was he in Hell anyways? Because God said so. Okie doke.
Ketch shows up with some sort of iron-confetti gun, a la Bond with Q's gadgets (big silly), and then he and Rowena take precious time in the middle of the ghost Armageddon to make googly eyes at each other. WHO DOES THAT?? It's like Austin Powers meets Bewitched meets a spoofy romcom.
The lead ghost, who has decided to unionize his ectoplasmic forces, is supposed to be Jack the Ripper. He is massively unscary as such, and doesn't much sound British. The black goo leaking from townfolks' eyes (always in such a timely fashion) is a lazy, blatant way of indicating possession. The fx are still poo.
Sigh. This is what's happened to my show. Annnywho, let's try to find a little gold dust in this pan of silt.
Dean coining Rowena's magical ghost-sucking rock The Soul Catcher ... classic Dean!
If you happen to be a Destiel shipper, Dean and Cas actually sharing a scene and speaking together might've made your day. Those bits have been few and far between in the past three, four seasons. Doesn't mean everything is hunky dory between them, though, and we know The Empty's promise to snatch Cas when he's finally happy is still a gun sitting on the mantle somewhere. So it seems like Dabb is going to keep that low-grade feud going until maybe the mid-season finale?
For me, the best nugget was the revelation that Chuck has an unhealing bullet wound, just like Sam, and when Chuck poked at his damage? Sam felt it too. (Tying into last week when Cas attempted to heal Sam's wound, it triggered some sort of premonition, wherein we see Sam-as-Lucifer possibly killing an alt-world dystopian Dean.) Amara reveals that God is losing power. Is Sam … gaining it? Or is the wound just a conduit and they're both ebbing away?
And so we leave our intrepid gaggle facing the eventuality that the spell dome corralling (all?) the Hell ghosts is fritzing out. Dean is still ticked off at Cas, worried that Michael has been sprung from the Cage, and in the throes of an existential crisis over the likelihood that he's never, in truth, had “free will” at all. Cas is trying desperately to convince Dean otherwise, sullen over Chuck taking Jack away from him. And Sam is, once again, putting on a brave face and hiding something supernatural that is damaging him and potentially compromising his human-ness.
I'm giving this episode a wan C-. I hope next week they try to pay a modicum of respect to canon and creepiness, and dig deeper into the characters instead of painting such a wide, shallow swath.