This disc contained four episodes–Sin City, Bedtime Stories, Red Sky at Morning, and Fresh Blood.  And we’re definitely getting into the meat of the season here, so no screwing around, let’s do it.

In Sin City, there were two big takeaways for me.  The first one is that we got some real insights into Hell.  It turns out that Lucifer is real … kind of.  The demons all believe in him and he’s like the God of Hell, but none of them have ever seen him.  This is really important in the Supernatural universe, so if you haven’t seen the rest of the series, note that.  In his absence, YED, whose name was actually Azazel, was the king of Hell and Sam was supposed to take over.  Obviously, that plan went to … well, you know.

Also, at some point during this conversation, Dean said that he’d like to believe in God.  Not that he did, but that he’d like to.  Mental note.

The idea was also presented that maybe when Sam came back, he came back different.  This is an idea that comes up periodically in the series (of things that are dead should stay dead), as we’ve already seen and will continue to see.

At one point, Ruby and Sam are having a discussion, and I can’t remember if it was about saving Dean or the impending supernatural war, but she told Sam that there will be collateral damage.  Sam is like, “Yeah, but I don’t have to like it,” and Ruby paused for just a second and said, “Of course.  You wouldn’t be Sam if you did.”  (Again, can’t be said enough, Katie Cassidy was AWESOME.  Someone please cast her in something amazing.)  I found that extremely interesting.

Read the rest of this entry »

And the rewatch is back on!  Honestly, the break has been kind of nice but once I started up again with the new season, I realized how much more I was appreciating things and little callbacks and continuity thanks to the rewatch, and I wasn’t even halfway through.  So I decided to pick back up, and as promised, I’m taking a more condensed approach to discussion on S3.  So far, I’m enjoying watching it this way, and I’m hoping some of you guys will find it a little easier as well to go in chunks rather than an episode a day.

Disc One has three episodes–The Magnificent Seven, The Kids are Alright, and Bad Day at Black Rock.  The Magnificent Seven is about the seven deadly sins escaping hell out of the gate, and is our first introduction to the idea that, at least in Supernatural world, some of these biblical concepts may actually be demons.  Pretty cool.  Also pretty cool in that episode?  It took place in Oak Park, Illinois, which is the last place I lived and which I LOVED.  As described, it’s just west of Chicago (shares a border, even), and as in the show, you can see the city skyline just looking down the road.  Ahhhhh, I want to go back.  Anyway, I think it’s funny how we’ve seen Meg in Chicago, the seven deadly sins were hanging around Chicago, and as you know, a pretty major figure is met in Chicago in S5.  Love how all the demons also love Chicago, which does definitely explain a lot of the driving.

The Magnificent Seven was also notable because it was our introduction to Ruby.  And let me just say, for the record, I know a lot of fans bitched about Ruby and Bela but I LOVED Katie Cassidy.  She was so awesomely perfect and well-cast for that part and she really added a lot to the show.  (Spoilers in italics!)  When they killed her, I was destroyed, and I was SO PISSED about them replacing her with Genevieve Cortese, who I thought was terrible and couldn’t enunciate.  I guess JPad did get a wife out of it, so yay for him, but she majorly sucked and going back and seeing Katie Cassidy in all of her Ruby glory only served to drive that point home for me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey guys, sorry for the massive delays in the SPN rewatch.  It’s been a lot to juggle with fall TV starting up and trying to get into the swing of that, but I’m committed to keeping us going!  Since we are officially at the end of S3, though, I do want to try something different for S3.  I don’t know if you guys are with me on this one or not, or if there’s anyone following along and not commenting out there who’s watching for the first time, you may not have an opinion, but I am in with the general consensus that S3 was probably the weakest of the bunch.  I didn’t hate it, nor did I hate the girls, but it just didn’t DO IT FOR ME the way S2 and S4 did.  Nor did it really do it for me the way S1 and S5 did.  So … here’s what I’m thinking.  I want to continue to watch along at the rate of about a disc per week, and then do a post per disc rather than per episode.  I’ll highlight the points that come up later in the show, interesting things to discuss, maybe the occasional in-depth thought, and we’ll try to plow through that season a bit quicker than the end of S2 has gone.  Does anyone have any major issue with that?  And then when we do S4, we’ll revisit our approach.

The other thing is … and I hope this doesn’t destroy anyone, but I have got to abandon the Supernatural Cuss Count.  I can’t do it.  I’m bad at it, I miss things all the time because cussing comes as naturally to me as breathing, and I know I’m so far off at this point that it sort of seems moot.  At this point, I’ll be a more mellow watcher without having to try to catch the cussing, and that’ll make it more enjoyable for me.  And while I do of course want you all to enjoy this along with me, that’s kind of the point.

But okay, let’s finish off S2 with a bang!

Sadly, no one gets banged in either of these episodes.  However, we do finally get some resolution on YED, which of course is what the series has been building up to all this time.  Sam wakes up out of nowhere in a deserted town with Ava, Andy, and two other Special Kids With Special Powers–one lipstick lesbian and one army dude.  It turns out that YED really only needs ONE soldier, and so they’re all there to duke it out for last man standing.  Hmmmm, wonder who the fight will come down to?

Read the rest of this entry »

Aaaaand … we’re back!  Apologies for last week–I had some personal business kind of dominate my life.  It’ll never happen again.

Alright.  This was kind of a big episode but I’m going to condense it a bit since we have a finale (parts one and two!) to get to.  Dean went in after a djinn, met it, and woke up in a fantasy world with his greatest wish granted–that Mary was still alive.  At this point, we pretty much know what Dean wants.  Sam too.  So in that way, this episode wasn’t especially illuminating.  But I did think that there were a few interesting points that we should discuss.

First of all.  Even though Dean got his wish of Mary still being alive, it’s not like life was perfect.  John had died, except it was of natural causes.  Sam got his school and Jessica life, but he and Sam weren’t close.  And Dean … well, he’s kind of an asshole.  And he’s BEEN an asshole to Sam, pretty much their entire lives.  And clearly, he likes to drink.  And that’s another interesting thing … hunting clearly made Dean into a better person than he would’ve been anyway.

And then, there’s the fact that Sam and Dean end up hunting anyway, and they end up doing it together.  It’s another one of those destiny/free will things that this show likes to explore sometimes.  And in keeping with the imperfect world, all the people that Sam and Dean had saved as hunters were all dead now.  Everything in life is a trade off–there’s no magical happy ending, and I love the show for not being afraid to show that.

Read the rest of this entry »

WRITER’S BLOCK!  No seriously, I haz it.  But I’ve still been watching, and I just need to give myself a push, so let’s barrel through, right?

This episode was the return of Henricksen, who showed up once Sam and Dean got intentionally thrown in jail to work a case for their dad’s old friend Deacon.  Sam insisted that this was the dumbest and craziest thing they’ve ever done in a long, storied career of dumb and crazy, but Dean said that Sam and Dean aren’t saints, but they’re loyal and they pay their debts.  True.

Okay, two things I really loved in this episode.  First of all, Deacon turning out to be the asshole guard was really a nice twist.  And secondly, I loved the “REALLY pretty sure” exchanges.  But beyond that, I totally adored how much Dean fit into prison.  He doesn’t smoke but he’s amassing cigarettes because they’re currency, he gets respect for fighting, and he’s friendly with people and can therefore come by info.

Oh, and before I forget, not that it was major, but I loved Sam’s buddy, the old jailbird, who said, “Cons all love to talk but we’re all liars.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, after a long holiday weekend (at least here in America–do you Canucks get Labor Day?), this was kind of the perfect episode to come back to.  And absolutely nothing of mythological importance takes place in this episode, but it’s totally one of my favorites.  I mean, to this day, whenever someone says anything about PA, in any context, I think to myself, “That’s one hell of a PA.”  And at my current job, that’s a common abbreviation that I hear at least, oh, daily.  It’s just a funny episode, light hearted and also fun in that Dean geeks out on horror in a way that a lot of fans of this show can probably identify with pretty closely.  I mean, I know what got me into the show was that each episode was (initially) like a little mini horror flick.

And you know what else?  I think this might’ve been the first episode where the show played around a little bit with having a meta episode.  I mean, there were little jokes, like the LA weather being practically Canadian (since they filmed in Vancouver) and the nod to the Gilmore Girls set (which JPad was on), and that was kind of like the Linda Blair joke.  But beyond that … the show, via the actors in the movie, asks questions like, “Why would a GHOST be afraid of SALT?” and “How do ghosts in hell hear the chanting?”  And they come back with things like, “A shotgun?  That’s even stupider than salt,” and incorporating, “Maybe the ghosts have super hearing!” into the script, which demonstrates to the audience how stupid it is and how sometimes you’ve just gotta roll with it.  I enjoyed seeing them playing with meta early on, since we see it again later.  Plus, I think you get an idea for certain opinions of the writers, such as replacing a good story with tits and fart jokes is hack-y.  I just enjoyed that because I think every profession has its own set of inside jokes and pet peeves, and it was fun to be let in on that.

Read the rest of this entry »

You guys!  It’s Sex Luthor’s wife from Smallville!  You know, I was kind of surprised–I remembered a lot of this episode too.  S2 was apparently pretty memorable, which I hadn’t really thought about before.  But anyway, this was another light mythology episode so again, I’m gonna keep it short (well, short for me anyway), and save the big guns for the heavy-duty episodes coming up.

The thrust of this episode is that it was a running parallel between the story of the week (Sam having to kill a werewolf that he … well, maybe didn’t LOVE, but definitely liked a lot), and the standing plot of Dean maybe having to kill Sam if he can’t save him.  And of course, we continue with Dean’s evolution toward “monsters”.

And in fact, let’s deal with that first, because it’s the easier of the two themes.  In this case, it’s true that the werewolves (which Dean was REALLY excited about, hilariously) didn’t know what they were or what they were doing, and it certainly wasn’t their choice.  He still felt that there was no other option than to kill them, but he did more willingly make an effort to save the girl, and you could tell that he is feeling more morally convicted at this point.  I sincerely love the character evolution on this show, and I do love watching it on DVD because I think that seeing everything close together makes the subtleties stand out more, which is kind of fun.

Read the rest of this entry »

I love this episode but it is light on mythology, so I’m going to keep this one short and sweet.  And first things first … TRICIA HELFER!  Man, I love her, and sweet southern Jesus, is she good at crying.  I felt like the guy was REALLY familiar also, so I went and IMDBed him, and OMG, you guys.  You will not believe this.  I had to go back all the way to 1993–he was the hometown boyfriend in Son-In-Law!  Yeah, that’s right–Son-In-Law was SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO.  God in heaven.

Now, this was an episode that I actually remembered and I was able to watch this one this time around with the knowledge that Six (Tricia Helfer’s BSG name and the only name I ever want to know her by) was actually dead.  Again, I love the willingness of the show to experiment with their format.  We didn’t actually find out that she was dead until well over halfway in, even though the boys knew.  Very cool.

One of the major things here is that this experience is another step in Dean’s evolution from seeing the world in strictly black and white to accepting a few more grays.  He’s such an asshole to Six throughout the episode, while Sam is just generally more sensitive and sympathetic to her–even more so than usual.

A big focal point of the episode was what happens to people when they die.  Sam says that angry spirits are like wounded animals that lash out, and that they weren’t evil people, just sometimes bad things happen to them and they get stuck in loops.  And he mentions the idea of unfinished business, which of course was what was keeping Molly/Six there even after she was cremated–not only was she unaware that she was dead, but she was also desperate to see her husband again, although in the end, she loved him enough not to.

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, before we even get going on this at all, let me give a renewed shout out to Patty, for her tireless BSG count and even more tireless commenting.  Actually, you guys have all been amazing on the commenting, so shout out to that too.

And second huge shout out to hockeybychoice, who is a goddess among mere mortals for going back and finding an actual accurate Supernatural Cuss Count.  Apparently there are so many they go in one ear and out the other for me, so the double checking was AMAZING and netted quite a few more cusses than I had initially caught.  The official count, before this episode, is:

• Ass: 58
• Bitch: 20
• Son of a bitch: 37
• Bastard: 16
• Dick: 1
• Crap: 54

Love it!  I may go back in and do a search for “damn”, but in the meantime … WHOA.  I know that must’ve taken an assload of time and I appreciate it, and so do future generations of SPN lovers who will no doubt be like, “Dude, they say ‘son of a bitch’ an awful lot.  I wonder how many times?”  Yay!

Read the rest of this entry »

I really liked this episode for the somewhat different format, with Sam and Dean trying to figure out their own mystery.  It was very Memento-ish.  At least I think it was.  I’ve never actually seen that movie but I still like to reference it like I have, much like I like to say, “I drink your milkshake!  I drink it up!”

Anyway, just to cut right to the chase, Sam is all covered in blood and killed a hunter, but it wasn’t actually him, it was a demon.  And it wasn’t just ANY demon, it was MEG.  And she locked herself in Sam’s body by burning a binding symbol on his arm.  It looked pretty painful, but it did lead to Bobby giving the boys anti-possession charms and … doesn’t it seem like he could’ve given those to them sooner?  If he just had them laying around the house, you know?  So not on the ball there, Bobby.

Anyway, Meg keeps basically trying as Sam, to get Dean to kill Sam.  For a long time, I was like, why doesn’t Sam just kill his own damn self?  But finding out that Meg was testing Dean made more sense.  Dean says he’s tried his whole life to keep Sam safe and he just can’t do it.  He’d rather die.  And then Sam tells Dean he’d live to regret this and knocks him out and bails.

And where does he go?  To Duluth, to a bar, where who is the bartender but … JO!  Yay!  Any chance to see Jo is one that I’m excited about.  Sam (correctly) accuses Jo of carrying a torch for Dean, and then promptly crushes her by saying that Dean likes her in a little sister sort of way.  And that is some cold shit, even for a demon.  Somehow demon Sam thinks this is a good pickup line, and puts the moves on Jo.  The end up fighting, he knocks her out, and at least she has the good sense to know that he’s not really Sam.

Read the rest of this entry »