6.14
Opening sequence: Goddamnit. There is a war in Heaven. Something big and nasty was just dragged out of Purgatory. Please tell me that mention of Dean and Lisa was just an irrelevant fluke.
- Ooooh, flamey-eyes. Sammy's got the flamey-eyyyyes!
and now I miss Lucifer, dammit.
- Possessed mannequins? That's one of those tropes that either turns out awesome or fails spectacularly.
- Oh, Dean. I fucking love you, with your protective mother-henning and the Monty Python references and the snark.
"what are they?"
"effective."
- "You shove it down, and you let it come out in spurts of violence and alcoholism"
"that sounds healthy"
"well, it works for me"
*looks at opening sequence* *looks at this dialogue*
LAWLZ, DO I SMELL FORESHADOWING? SO SUBTLE.
- Oh, the puns, the horrible puns!
... and the little bit of flirting with Sam. Almost like old times.
- Oh, a phone call from Lisa. How unexpected.
- God, I've missed these two watching surveillance tapes while bad-80s porn music plays in the background.
- "... he rubbed her feet during Glee"
"I just threw up in my mouth"
- When Sam was soulless, I was too busy being distracted by all the douchery to really notice his sideburns. Now that he's making facial expressions and being all emotive again, they suddenly seem a lot more prominent.
- That scene with the white mannequins and the security guard/janitor type with the crazy cheekbones was actually a little creepy.
- ... and the phone, it rings again. And it's Ben. And my wishes for an irrelevant fluke are dashed to pieces, just like my wishes for Gabriel's return and more Cas. This is not going to end well.
- This episode just took a one way ticket to what-the-fuck town.
Great, Dean. Listen to your could-go-flashback-to-Hell-catatonic-again-at-any-minute brother and leave him behind. I get that you really give a shit about Ben and Lisa, but still. That's a little much.
- Ben's such a little douchebag.
and here we go, with the Dean and the Lisa and the not being able to handle being with a hunter and the sad. Don't get me wrong, all this stuff with Dean and Lisa is sad, and really throws the inherently lonely nature of the life Dean and Sam lead into sharp relief, but now seems like a really shitty time to go about exploring it.
- I haven't found myself rooting for a ghost in a long time.
Sam leaving him there, that's not so much with the good. He should know by now that something always happens - intentional, perhaps?
Never mind.
- Dean is such a good man, it's heart-wrenching.
Fuck, Ben. Really? Really? Give Dean a hideous fucking guilt trip, because that's exactly what he needs, and that's totally rational. Or have you already forgotten the fact that he hit you?
- Too easy. the resolution of that hunt was too easy. There has to be more.
- and there's a montage. Another montage. How many of these have we had this season?
Call that number n. The total so far is n - 1 too many.
- HOLYSHIT, creepy-doll-loving dude. I did not see that one coming.
- a haunted kidney? That's new. That's new, and I'm not gonna lie, that's a pretty freakin' sweet idea.
I'm a little confused, though. How was the ghost in her kidney able to kill someone at night, when she wasn't anywhere near the chemistry lab?
- Possessing the Impala? Shit, son, no more sympathy for that ghost.
- Is it just me, or did that hunt resolution smack of bad writing and too much coincidence?
- Awwww, Sammy - and there we have the one even remotely relevant thing to come out of this episode. Sweet as it was, Sam stepping up to the plate with a little well-deserved gratitude isn't nearly enough to make up for 42 minutes of wasted space.
So here's the thing.
Dean needs to deal with his shit. I don't think Ben and Lisa qualify, though - aside from the fact that Dean needed to say goodbye to Ben. We've already seen how heartbroken Lisa is over Dean, and how much he misses her, so it isn't like he's been avoiding it or them. Lisa set up boundaries after Dean's little stint as a vampire, and honestly, if that were my kid, I would have done the same thing. When the danger went from theoretical to real, Dean knew what to do, and so did she, no matter how much it hurt. He faces that and lives with it every day, and so does she.
Seeing them again didn't accomplish much of anything, other than some serious knife-twisting, reinforcement of Dean's guilt complexes, and re-opening of old wounds for both of them.
Overall reaction: Negative. I get it that a little dealing with the past is necessary in Dean's life because he's such a ridiculous bottler, but I don't think it was appropriate in this scenario, given the things I stated in my end-comments.
The resolution of this episode's hunt was, quite frankly, bullshit.
It was really nice to see Sam and Dean have some positive, bantery interaction again, but when that's the best thing you can say about an episode, it's not a good sign.