First, let me just say that every time I watch an episode of SPN, I am eternally jealous of all of the cool motel rooms that the brothers and their cohorts seem to just stumble into without any planning whatsoever. I mean, look at the wall next to the bathroom in the gif above (if you can drag your eyes away from Dean in the shower). There are ROCKS and CARTOON PELICANS on it! As a big fan of cheesy, shitty motels (blame it on my dad and the fact that every childhood road trip involved at least two motels boasting a dirty, half-empty pool and free HBO, because we were way too badass [read: cheap] for fancy things like Holiday Inns or HoJos), I study the motel rooms on this show like it’s my job. And they are almost always awesome, and I have never in my life stayed in a motel as cool as any of them. And when Sam and Dean actually complain about a weird theme room or the presence of a heart-shaped hot tub? The nerve! Some of us have stayed in countless motels, only to ever come in contact with tacky wall art and thirty year old comforters that we would never in a million years want to scan with a black light. So, appreciate your weird awesome-motel radar, boys. Most of us will never be so lucky.

Does it seem like I’m stalling discussion of the actual episode? Yeah…I kind of am. Because I fear that my opinion of it is very different from the collective opinion, and I don’t want to be the bummer patrol and bring everyone down, but I can’t help it. I wasn’t crazy about this episode even though there were some kick-ass characters and great jokes. Overall, I didn’t love the story, and I’m afraid for what it might mean for the future (at least when it comes to Bobby). I have no idea where the show is going with any of the balls it currently has in the air, but I’m starting to suspect something that I don’t like at all. However, even if things don’t go the way I’m starting fear they will (and I’ll get to that), I just wasn’t crazy about the setup of the haunted house storyline. So, that being said, please take this recap with a grain of “one person’s opinion” salt, okay?

Let’s start with something I most definitely LOVED and that is the fact that Bobby, Dean and Sam are Eskimo Brothers! If you aren’t familiar with the term, first of all, you really should be watching The League on F/X, and second of all, here is a brief tutorial:

It turns out that there is a new old hunter friend, Annie, whom we’ve never met before (right?) and she and Bobby used to have a ‘thing’. A ‘love the one you’re with’ kind of thing. And it also turns out that Dean and Annie had occasionally bumped uglies in the past too. But hey, it’s not like their entire little family had slept with her, right? Cut to Sam’s face:

Oops. Yep, him too. But to be fair, as he put it, ‘she was stressed, I didn’t have a soul…’. So Sam’s foray into Annieland was relatively recent to boot. That’s gotta be awkward for him, especially if he gives much thought to that old saying, ‘when you sleep with someone, you’re having sex with everyone they’ve ever slept with’. That’s one degree from some major fan fiction action, is what that is.

So this Annie chick (played by Jamie Luner, probably best known to most of you from Melrose Place, but to me she will always be the cool redheaded sister from Just The Ten of Us. What up, fellow olds?), who managed to land both Winchester brothers and their curmudgeonly surrogate father must be pretty damn cool, right? Yep, she is! She’s snarky and hot and has good rapport with everyone. FINALLY! A new female character who all the fans will like (ha! like that could ever happen in crazy-fandom-land), and who can maybe possibly start to fill the very large Jo and Ellen-shaped hole in this show. This is going to be soooo aweso-oops, she’s dead.

Yep, in what has to be a record for this show, a cool new female character was introduced and killed all in the first act. I get that we needed someone for Bobby to interact with on the other side, but couldn’t it have been someone else? They couldn’t have saved Annie for an episode where she might have lived? It would have been cool if she could have popped in every once in a while to inject the occasional dose of estrogen into the mix, but alas. And to add insult to injury, not only was she killed immediately, but they made it look as though she died right in the midst of applying the makeup for her side job as a meth-addicted street mime:

Yes, it appears that the worst part of being a ghost is not the inability to communicate with humans or move objects, but rather that you are forced to exist in terrible, terrible makeup and extremely unflattering lighting. It was pretty much the opposite of The Oprah Winfrey Show‘s vaseline-filtered golden glow. Poor Annie.

But then we come to my main problem with the episode – I felt like I was watching The Real World: Haunted House – a reality show/soap opera about dead souls co-existing a creepy old mansion. (Find out what happens when people stop being alive…and start getting real.) It almost had that ‘this is going to be a spin-off’ feel, with Bobby as the transition character between both shows. And to tell the truth, I didn’t much care about anything that happened at the house, other than the Bobby/Annie stuff. And don’t even get me started on that easily-offended ‘Fancy Lady’. God. For someone who made her living by letting men put things in her, she was surprisingly quick to clutch her pearls.

Essentially what it boils down to is that the house was full of trapped souls who had evaded their reapers after death, in order to showcase what a horrible existence that is (especially if you live with a Head Ghost who likes to feed on other ghosts, or something? I don’t really know – it was bad and you wouldn’t want it to happen to you, just put it that way). So the Big Lesson here is that Bobby most definitely does not want to stay in his current state, or he shouldn’t want to. Dean gets it, and he’s kind of pissed at Bobby for hanging around, even though the intentions were good.

At least Bobby is starting to get the hang of living in Ghost World; he’s finally figuring out how to move objects after weeks of practicing and only managing to get to third base with a lantern:

By episode’s end, he was even able to finally make himself visible to the brothers. Now, here’s where fear started creeping up on me. At first, I really thought that in killing Head Ghost Dude and saving Bobby’s ‘life’, that the brothers had somehow managed to bring him back from the dead, which I’m sorry, would have been lame. I love Bobby as much as the next girl, but that would have felt soooo eye-rolly after going through all of the emotion involved in killing him off only to miraculously revive him. We’ve gotten that enough with Sam and Dean (because let’s face it – if they stay dead, the show is over) – let’s leave the false deaths alone for now, kay?

My other fear is that this possibility is still on the horizon. They will either have to kill him off for good (burn the flask) or bring him back to life, and I’m starting to worry they might go with the latter. The show has killed literally everyone in the Winchester’s support system – unless Cas comes back to the land of the sane, that is – will they revive Bobby just so that the brothers have one live person to talk to? Please show, don’t do that. We’ve accepted the loss of Bobby and even though it’s fun to see him again, I don’t want to pretend that the whole thing never happened.  If everyone who dies keeps coming back, death will cease to mean much of anything, you know? Like I said, I have no basis for these fears other than everything we’ve seen in the episodes so I could be completely wrong. For all I know, they are planning a respectful and tearful last goodbye to Bobby in the finale, which is what I think should happen. So hopefully it will.

For now though, it looks like Bobby will be the vengeful third wheel joining the brothers on their quest to end Dick Roman and the Leviathan infestation. Which frankly, I can’t fucking wait to get back to after the past few episodes. For me, the Leviathan conflict is the most compelling and enjoyable part of this season and I’m glad that the remaining episodes will almost surely have to focus on it at this late stage in the season. Even the promo for next week looks super cool! And Felicia Day is in it! From Dr. Horrible!

Bobby’s best lines from the ep:

• Hi, I’m Bobby and I’m a ghost.
• Give ‘em a moment. They’ve gotten a little slower since I left.
• You can’t see her. No, you’re not standing on her.

So, was that a huge downer? I’m sorry. I really am. I don’t like not liking episodes of this show either! But I’m very optimistic for next week, so I have a feeling that next week’s post will be much more fun. To make it up to you, I include both a still shot and a gif of wet, post-shower Dean. Gaze at them all you like, then check out the promo for next week’s episode, and then HIT THE COMMENTS! Tell me what you thought of this episode, where you see things going for Bobby, and most importantly, how you HOPE things go down. I’m really, really curious.

(Gifs courtesy onemoremistake.tumblr.com)