Spoilers aren't vegetarian
I agree with 
giandujakiss that there was just something very ugly about this episode. The show set up all these parallels between Sam and a devil-dealing, thrillseeking jerk, then recoiled from that, but not in the good way: by having Sam declare him a loser virgin.
I've agreed for a while, even as a Dean-girl, that Sam's been pushed back way too far. That showed up here as worse than absence: when the writers bring Sam to the foreground, they have no idea who Sam is (thus explaining the failure of whatever they were trying to do with the parallelism). The one really non-awful, emotionally powerful moment was not (as it could maybe have been) Dean eating with the kid, but Sam eating breakfast and snagging the toast off his mom's plate as if that's just how you eat. That moment showed the collapse of Sam's escape attempt, his resignation to his life, ten times more clearly than the exposition at the beginning and the end--he really doesn't know what he's missing. That's terrible, unless Sam gets something out of it other than turning into a caricature of Dean. But the show won't commit to that answer, or any answer, for Sam and so it veers around helplessly instead of dealing with Sam as a person.
Plotwise: Wow, I sure hope that demon doesn't report back to Lucifer about this unexpected new loophole in the rules that allows Lucifer to possess Sam by a simple card-shuffle maneuver.
comments on DW
giandujakiss that there was just something very ugly about this episode. The show set up all these parallels between Sam and a devil-dealing, thrillseeking jerk, then recoiled from that, but not in the good way: by having Sam declare him a loser virgin.
I've agreed for a while, even as a Dean-girl, that Sam's been pushed back way too far. That showed up here as worse than absence: when the writers bring Sam to the foreground, they have no idea who Sam is (thus explaining the failure of whatever they were trying to do with the parallelism). The one really non-awful, emotionally powerful moment was not (as it could maybe have been) Dean eating with the kid, but Sam eating breakfast and snagging the toast off his mom's plate as if that's just how you eat. That moment showed the collapse of Sam's escape attempt, his resignation to his life, ten times more clearly than the exposition at the beginning and the end--he really doesn't know what he's missing. That's terrible, unless Sam gets something out of it other than turning into a caricature of Dean. But the show won't commit to that answer, or any answer, for Sam and so it veers around helplessly instead of dealing with Sam as a person.
Plotwise: Wow, I sure hope that demon doesn't report back to Lucifer about this unexpected new loophole in the rules that allows Lucifer to possess Sam by a simple card-shuffle maneuver.
comments on DW