Damsels in distress, long lost friends popping up out of nowhere, Winchesters refusing to allow each other to die, an ally seemingly lost forever. More crying, and this just might have been the most Supernatural episode of Supernatural ever created.
- Did you hear that Castiel was back in this episode? He is.
The episode opens with Sam running down an alley, obviously tired and desperate. He runs into a drug dealer, where it is revealed that Lucifer hasn’t let him sleep for five days. The dealer offers to give him something to knock him out, but it doesn’t work, and Sam ends up getting hit by a car trying to escape. He is brought to a hospital and placed under psychiatric care, because, well, Satan is talking to him inside his head and he hasn’t slept for five days. He needs MEDICAL ATTENTION.
Dean shows up and finds that Sam has accepted his imminent death. Dean is obviously less zen about the whole Sam-dying-thing, so he goes to make some calls and try to find a way out from underneath this thing. Something (Bobby? Bobby?!) knocks a business card loose and Dean makes a random desperate call for help. Meanwhile, Sam is deteriorating fast, with Lucifer now disturbing him at all hours, and even preventing him from eating.
- Is it inappropriate that I used this cap? It’s their fault, they lingered on it long enough.
Dean gets a call back from the number, and learns about a healer who is “the real deal” named Emmanuel. When Dean goes to meet him, he finds a demon (who he kills) and Castiel. It seems that Castiel has a wife, and no idea who he actually is. Dean plays along, probably because he doesn’t want to ruin any chance he has of saving Sam. As they drive together towards the hospital, Emmanuel!Cas reveals that his wife found him wandering naked in the woods, with no memory whatsoever.
Back at the hospital, Sam has been making a new friend in Maren, a troubled young girl who is thought to be suicidal. She confides in him over a candy bar, and tells him that she hears her brother’s voice in her head, telling her to kill herself to be with him, or he will do it for her.
In the car, Emmanuel!Cas and Dean talk about Sam, and how Dean’s friend Cas is the one who did this to him. Dean talks about how this is betrayal is the one thing he can’t get over.
They stop at a mini-mart, which happens to be crawling with demons that are after Emmanuel!Cas. Presumably, bringing him to Crowley would be their ticket to the big time. Dean takes them out pretty easily with the help of Meg, who has been following them for awhile. She is understandably curious about Castiel. She offers to help Dean keep the situation off of Crowley’s radar, because she needs friends, hates Crowley and would like her own little angel on a leash if possible. Dean agrees, if only for the added protection as they make their way to Sam.
Sam and Maren have been ghostbusting at the hospital. They get rid of her brother and Sam saves the girl, like he does.The three musketeers have arrived at the hospital, and it turns out that basically every doctor, nurse, and patient there is now a demon. While Meg and Dean have an obvious conversation about Emmanuel!Cas’ identity really close to him, he overhears and they explain that he is an angel.
Castiel goes down to take out the demons, and as he does, he remembers bits of what have happened since he came down to visit Dean. Remembering everything that he did and became, he tries to leave right away. Dean follows, to convince him that redemption is possible. It’s not until Dean pulls the trenchcoat out of the trunk of his car that Castiel decides to go and see what he can do.
Sam is being wheeled to receive electroshock therapy by a demon, who I’m fairly sure im.s not certified to perform that procedure. Castiel comes in and saves him from the demon but learns that he is too far gone to rebuild the wall in his mind.
After he tells Dean this, Castiel realizes that he can shift the problem from Sam to himself. He does this, and now Lucifer is in his mind the way he was in Sam’s. Sam and Dean leave him there, presumably because he’ll be safer there than on the road with them The episode ends with Meg getting a job as a nurse at the hospital, for no good reason I’m sure.
- I solemnly swear I am up to no good.
So much about this episode is highly symbolic. For starters, it’s interesting to me that they would choose to have Sam interact with a drug dealer directly at the beginning. For what seems like forever, Sam has been fighting against going dark side (while Dean is just plain fighting.) The metaphor of addiction was more directly played with the demon blood, but is just as relevant as Sam starts to slip away underneath the control of Lucifer.
The other big symbolic moment for me was Castiel killing the demons in front of the hospital. As hard as he might try, he can’t destroy or remove the things he has done (which he conveniently flashed back to after each demon he murdered.)
Anytime Castiel is portrayed as something more human and less android-angel, I love it, so that aspect totally worked for me.
I was left with some questions, though. What was the point of the Maren/ghost brother storyline? (It seemed like it was just to let me know that Lucifer and I have similar reactions to a lot of things.) Dean leaving Cas there seemed a little out of character, unless it is a reflection of how his betrayal has changed Dean’s feelings towards him. Plus, what the heck is Meg up to?
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Julia Santo knows that she would never survive the Hunger Games or fighting monsters, but that doesn't stop her from being obsessed with genre fiction. She's the Operational Programming Director for GeekGirlCon, a nonprofit that celebrates and supports geeky women through events. 
Not to give anything away to anyone who might not have seen the last episode (the one right after this), but I think the Maren/ghost storyline will come into play with our boys and their ghost. Seems that no matter how good things start out, eventually the ghost will go nutso and need to be put down. I could also be reading too much into it, as I do on occasion.
I also hate the boys working with Meg. Working with demons never pans out. Never ever ever.
Although I think you are right about the way they are going with Bobby as a ghost, the idea that all spirits that don’t move on automatically become angry, violent, vengeful ghosts really isn’t supported by canon.
Many of the ghosts have been angry violent and vengeful. But there are a fair number that aren’t. Mary is the first to come to mind and she is the closest comparison to Bobby. For 22 years Mary stayed quietly in her home, quietly minding her own business and protecting it from evil when the poltergeist appeared. She was a hunter who didn’t move on and caused no trouble that we heard of. If Bobby were to follow Mary’s pattern Sam and Dean would be in their 50′s before he even began to crack and it could take longer than that. As long as someone destroys the flask after Sam and Dean are dead, Bobby could become Bobby the Friendly Ghost.
Molly in Roadkill did cause destruction, but she was never angry or vengeful. She couldn’t find her husband and simply wanted help to find him. In Playthings, the sister ghost was probably held in check by the grandmother’s hoodoo, but she only demonstrated anger when she was faced with losing her family and her home. The last shot of Playthings shows the sister and the grandmother as ghost children playing together and causing no harm.
We also have several ghosts whose entire reason for staying is protection. The schoolmistress in The Real Ghosthunters is believed to be the only evil spirit causing harm. Instead, she is staying around to keep the spirits of the dead students in check and to keep them from hurting others. In the Mentalists, the younger sister was only warning the victims of her older sister. The older sister was driven by anger and vengeance but the younger one was only acting as a protector. In The Usual Suspects the murdered prostitute(?) again was acting as a warning trying to keep her murderer from murdering others. Even in Asylum the spirits of the patients were not angry or hurtful. They wanted their story told and were trying to warn people away from Dr. Ellicot.
I know Tessa said that spirits that stick around become angry, vengeful and will eventually need to be hunted, but Tessa’s job is to get spirits to move on. Her entire sales pitch is that it is time to move on and no I can’t tell you what comes next. With Dean she had the additional selling point that he believed that ghosts are violent and need to be hunted and destroyed. Telling him that this will happen to him if he sticks around bolsters her case for leaving.
The truth is, we and hunters only see ghosts that cause trouble. This is obviously a subset of all ghosts. It may be the largest subset, but there is no way to tell. We know all about The Women in White and Bloody Mary. They take action that means they need to be taken down. We have no idea how many ghosts are like Mary, staying in their house, maybe watering the plants when the family forgets and generally not being one bit of trouble.
Bobby has reason to be angry about the Leviathans. He has reason to be annoyed by not being able to reach Sam and Dean. Yes, I think we are headed toward Sam and Dean need to put Bobby down. But the history of ghosts on the show doesn’t necessarily support the idea that EVERY ghost is destructive, angry, and vengeful.
This is interesting–I mean, what reason to we have to trust anything a Reaper says? Like you said, they have a job to do. I agree that we might see some help from Bobby before the inevitable emotional need to get rid of him.
Well, canon on this show doesn’t seem to hold up to itself all the time either. That’s not to say that there aren’t good ghosts, because as you pointed out, there are. I just suspect that they are going to go the route of evil with Bobby, which is why they pointed it out with the girl and the ghost in this episode.
I also don’t understand why they bring this up and, almost completely drop the Leviathan storyline which is supposed to be the big bad of the season (unless they pull a Mother of all Evil again and ditch it in lieu of something unexpected).
Good review! I mostly agree…
This episode was odd. There were a bunch of things that just didn’t work…like, what happened to Emmanuel/Castiel’s wife? Would someone who met an amnesiac man, brought him to a hospital, and married him still without his memory after a few weeks REALLY let him just take off with some stranger? (I bet she’s regretting it now, hm? But we wouldn’t know, because she just vanished from the storyline.) I think it would have been better if she was his social worker, or caretaker or something. Why did they need to make her his wife? Odd.
And the whole Maren/Sam story was a little off too. I liked the storyline, but it kind of felt like it was there just to give Jared and Mark Pelligrino something to do.
Meg. I like Meg as a bad guy, but she really is evil, not evil with a heart of gold. It doesn’t seem to me that Sam and Dean would be able to get over the fact that Meg killed Ellen and Jo, possessed Sam and made him kill an innocent hunter, and caused a whole lot of suffering for a lot of other people. Every time she appears, I think that they should just go ahead and kill her. She’s just as bad as Ruby, and the boys were certain of their course with her. And I REALLY don’t buy that they’d leave her there with Castiel. Even though my belief is that both boys think he should have taken on the burden of Lucifer…since he caused the whole situation in the first place…I don’t think they’d leave him in an institution, completely helpless, with a demon (who has the hots for him) as the only thing around him who knows what’s going on.
There were a lot of good things going on in this episode too though. I enjoyed the way Dean was with Emmanuel, knowing who he was, hiding his feelings (not always successfully) and trying with single-minded intent to get him to Sam for healing.
I think Sam showed how hard he’s been trying to survive with Lucifer in his head. Lucifer showed how annoying he is to live with. And I think there are definite hints that Lucifer is not just a construct of Sam’s mind now…he’s some kind of entity with self-awareness. Is he the real Lucifer, just a part of him, or something else? I hope we find out!
Castiel showed that he understands what he did, and did what was in his power to make it right. I think he needed to do that, for Sam, for Dean and for himself. If he survives, they might find their way back to working together. Without that sacrifice, that could never have happened.
So even with the issues, I did like the episode. And I love your selections for illustrations!
Seriously, though. Between this woman, and his vessel’s family, how many wives is Castiel going leave in the dust?
I think Meg is too interesting and too useful as a possible source of information for the boys (or the writers) to get rid of her right now, but I agree that they should have killed her long ago.
And I’m glad you appreciate the pictures. I know which one I appreciate the most. ;D
I did like this episode quite a bit, primarily for how it dealt with Sam and his Lucifer issues. For once I felt like the situation was paid off pretty well, as opposed to having Sam’s storyline hijacked by other characters in episodes that were supposed to be about him. I agree about the Meran storyline though. I liked it, but wasn’t really sure why it was there. Sam seems to be able to connect to other people even when he himself isn’t doing very well, so I felt that the storyline, although strange and a little out of place, was in character for Sam. And, I like the idea that this storyline was maybe dropping hints about where they might be going with Bobby. Supernatural does this a lot; kind’ve foreshadowing an upcoming storyline with elements inside a separate episode.
About Cas’s “wife”. I had a few ideas. Maybe she’s a demon also sent by Crowley to keep an eye on him and she’s staying well under the radar. Oh, (more interestingly) she’s a Leviathan… Maybe Cas has become a kind of Leviathan Alpha due to the fact that he carried them around in his body after releasing them from purgatory. Maybe the Levi’s ‘need’ him for something or he’s important to them for some reason. They could have even been perpetuating his amnesia so that he wouldn’t understand who or what he was, thereby keeping him vulnerable to their influence. Ooooh, I like this idea. Maybe I should write for the show.
And, I also agree about the Meg thing. It somehow seemed off to me too, slightly forced almost. I am always happy to see the character, I love hating her. But from the moment she showed up on screen, I was kind’ve like, what are you doing here? You serve no purpose… you aren’t helping at all. She seemed quite powerless and ineffectual. Why didn’t she just go to Cas earlier and tell him who he was? Why was she waiting for Dean to do it? Then, Sam and Dean leave a completely vulnerable Cas with HER watching over him? It seemed weird to me… a strange plot choice. I mean, Cas knows who he is now, he is back to full angel strength, so it seems odd, even reckless to leave him in Meg’s hands. I am sure (hope) it will pay off in later episodes. Also, this decision seems highly hypocritical of Dean to me. I mean, Sam is enemy number one when HE works with a demon, but its ok for Dean to do it when it suits him? And what was all of Dean’s haranguing at Cas about working with Crowley and that there is “always another way”? Humph, I don’t like the way in which this characterizes Dean at all, and I don’t think that it is consistent of his character. After Sam’s fall in season 4, and Cas’s in season 6, he should be more convinced than ever that you don’t work with demons. No how, no way, not ever, rather than simply taking Meg at her word and working with her because its convenient. This show has shown again and again that nothing good comes from trusting a demon.
I liked this episode of Sam FINALLY losing it. I’m not too disappointed this the way Show handled it, however, what I would have wanted if I were writing the fanfic is to drop the Meren (?) storyline even though this little actress was a delight, and have Sammy fully engaged with Lucifer; conversations and interactions that from our perspective he’s all alone in the room. Sam would believe that Lucifer has created hallucinations of Dean, the doctors, and that they are trying to poison him. Sammy would plead and argue with Lucifer to bring his brother back all the while Dean is in the room trying to talk to Sam.
I realize this is poorly written; but I’ve got to run for now. Thanks for the reviews; they are alot of fun!