SPN - 8.10

[feliciakw]

It's good to have the show back. I've missed Dean. I've missed Jensen and Jared. I've missed the storytelling.

But.

This ep leaves me dissatisfied and melancholy.

I haven't really liked where they've taken the angel characters since early/mid-S4. (Cas was awesome when he showed up, but things started going downhill somewhere after "Great Pumpkin.") The trend is continuing. Angels, with the exception of Cas, and Alfie, who's now a goner, are apparently never going to be anything more than one more adversary for the guys. Meh.

I'm disappointed with where they left Benny and his storyline. I get why Dean cut off contact with Benny. Still. He's left a friend who is an addict--and a deadly one--to twist in the wind. I know that was their original plan, but still. I hope we see Benny again, and I hope he's not a bad guy.

Glad the Amelia storyline is over, though. I never really felt one way or the other about her until tonight. And tonight, I decided I don't really like her. Why? Because she seduced Sam. She has a husband, and she seduced Sam. I am not down with that.

What I did like about tonight was Dean cutting Sam loose and giving him every opportunity to have "normal," to go back to Amelia. So Sam chose, of his own free will, to stick with the job. No more blaming Dean for it, kthanx.

I liked that in the course of letting Sam go, Dean admitted that he's just tired of the fighting. We all are, dude. We all are.

I liked the apparent truce that has been called. Now if they could just learn to read one another again, maybe we'd get somewhere.

It felt like a very "distant" episode, which makes sense, since they were each dealing with their own problems. But as much as the guys were sitting together drinking beer and watching TV, it still felt distant at the end.

Admittedly, it did get a laugh or two out of me and Geo. When Cas appeared and woke Dean up, Geo loled. I did the same when he appeared next to Sam. Sam, you've never really had that experience, have you, of Cas just suddenly showing up in your personal space. Now you know.

I'm not sure how many people still read these blurbs I write, as it seems that most of my f-list that watched the show don't watch it anymore. So I'm mostly writing this out of habit. And maybe a little nostalgia, seeing as how I've been writing these since S4, and have done pretty much the whole series at one point or another.

And on a final note, Jensen looked really, really, good. Like, really.

Comments

[lady-m-319.livejournal.com]

1st-Glad you do the reviews and I'm sure I'm not the only one who reads them but doesn't regularly comment.

2nd- Oh yeah! Jensen looked really, really good.

3rd- I was a little slow on the uptake tonight and didn't put 2 and 2 together about Dean ditching Benny because he had to choose between Benny and Sam. Phew! I'm glad I'm clear on that now. The 'why' was causing angst and weighing heavily on my little brain.(I'll still rewatch to pull all the pieces together.)

4th- I liked the epi. But then again, I usually do.

Thanks for the review!

[feliciakw.livejournal.com]

1. Thanks. :-) When readers lurk, it's hard to know they're out there.

2. Goes without saying. I'm convinced he's been having a torrid career-long affair with Canon, Nikon, Ampex, or whatever cameras they use in the industry. He should be ashamed of himself, really, looking that good all the time.

3. I think it was more than just choosing between Sam and Benny. I think if Sam had chosen to go back to Amelia, Dean would have been in the Impala heading to the Catskills (or wherever Benny was) to talk him off the ledge. I got more of a sense of "If Sam is gonna give up Amelia, I've got to do my part." He won't be going behind Sam's back, which is good, but I can't help but be upset that the AA sponsor cut his sponsoree loose. You know. (I talk about it a little bit in my reply to gluisa upthread.)

4. There was a lot about this ep that really bothered me, most of which had to do with the torture and the angels. But I also got the very strong sense that this should have been the ep that sent us into hiatus, rather than the ep that brought us back from the weeks-long break. It just . . . didn't really satisfy me as a return episode.

I'll re-watch, as usual, to see what I missed and see if anything else clicked. And it was really good to see the guys back on my screen, and to see Dean lay it out for Sam, and for Sam to actually make a decision.

We'll see where we go from here.

Thanks for reading and for posting. :-)