Black Gate

If you’re an avid fan of my posts on this blog (and I assume that most of you are) you’ll notice that I didn’t post last week. I’m hoping that the intervening week has removed some of the trauma and heartache from the experience, not to mention given you the opportunity to seek some much needed counsel from your spiritual guru or therapist.

It was my DVR’s fault. A week ago, I re-arranged the living room so that we’d have room for the television. I moved the television, along with the accompanying bundles of wires and electronic gizmos. Everything was working fine, hours before Friday night prime time television. But, sadly, the DVR still decided (and make no mistake, it was a conscious choice, of this I’m sure) not to record Supernatural.

So I went to the CW website, in hopes of watching the episode in time to review it … but to no avail, because it takes a week for them to post the episode. And my internet television of choice, Hulu, does not offer Supernatural. Thus why you, dear readers, are getting this recap more than a week after the show aired.

On the plus side, though: Dean gets abducted by aliens … or maybe fairies!

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We start in Buffalo, New York, with a businessman’s car being attacked (along with the businessman) by a very angry dog. Lot of options: both werewolves and hellhounds come to mind.

At a roadside diner, Dean chats on the phone with Bobby in an effort to work out what to do about Crowley (the “King of Hell” who’s taken Lucifer’s place and busted Sam out of Hell), but Crowley shows up in the middle of the phone call. He’s got a job for Sam and Dean. Sam puts up a nominal protest, but he doesn’t have a soul, so how much can he really object to anything anyway. As Crowley puts it, “You’d sell your brother for a dollar right now if you really needed a soda.”

Dean, however, still has a soul and refuses to work for Crowley … until he points out that he can cause Sam pain whenever he wants, since he currently is in possession of Sam’s soul.

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For weeks, viewers (including yours truly) have wondered what’s up with Sam, who has not quite been acting right since he got back from the hellish prison he dove into at the end of last season … and mysteriously returned from at the beginning of this season. Last week, he even watched as Dean was turned into a vampire, apparently in an attempt to catch the Alpha Vampire.

Tonight’s episode starts with a waitress who gets a little too much truth. A customer, an old woman, offers that she once ran over a homeless man and didn’t even check to see if he’s okay. Her co-workers confide way too much information about what they think of her (of the not-positive variety). This all begins when she says, on the telephone, “I just need the truth. That’s all.” It ends with her blowing her own brains out.

Cut to Dean, who is on the phone with Bobby about how to find out the truth about Sam. I think you can see where this is heading.

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The episode opens with a young man (Robert), dressed all in black and wearing too much product in his hair, romances a girl (Kristen) in a bar. He is enigmatic and tentative, recoiling at the sight of blood from a papercut. “We can’t be together,” he says. “You think you know me, but you don’t. I’ve done bad things. You should run. Now.”

“I can make my own decisions,” Krsten replies. “I’m 17.”

No, they haven’t called in Stephanie Meyer to guest write this week’s episode of Supernatural. Instead, they’re taking a turn at dark parody, pulling the cliches from the Twilight saga into their more nitty-gritty vampire mythos. In Supernatural, vampires are flat-out monsters, not dark romantic leads.

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The most recent episode of Supernatural brings back a major hanging plotline focusing on one of the major secondary characters in the series. Bobby Singer is a sort of mentor and father figure to the boys, the closest thing they have left to family (except, of course, for the sudden arrival of their previously-deceased grandfather and an entire family of hunters they never knew about).

Last season, Bobby made a deal with the demon named Crowley in order to stop Lucifer. (He also got healed from paralysis, allowing him to walk again.) He had to offer his soul up to Crowley, but it was sort of a short-term deal … Crowley promised to “rip up the lease” when they beat Lucifer.

In the first few moments of this episode, we see that Crowley didn’t hold up his end of the deal. In a flashback to a year previously, just after Lucifer’s fall, it’s revealed that Bobby summoned Crowley about getting his soul back. Crowley says he can’t do it, citing a loophole in the contract that says he’d make his “best efforts” to give back his soul, which means “I’d like to — but I can’t.” Crowley gives him 10 years to live before collecting. Bobby’s attempt to capture Crowley in a Devil’s Snare is thwarted because Crowley summons hellhounds, forcing Bobby to let him out.

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Since having children, I’ve found that anything hinting at children in danger is a lot more emotional than it was before. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button would have probably had no real impact on me a few years back, but watching it now those last few minutes, where Button is aging younger and younger, undergoing dementia as his toddler body gets smaller and smaller, forgetting even how to walk … it still haunts my dreams. (I probably should have put a spoiler space there, but if you haven’t seen it by now, you probably aren’t going to.)

So the promos for this week’s episode tell me that it’s going to be a rough one, emotionally. There’s a baby and, from what I can tell, he is either a monster or eaten by one … or possibly both.

The first moments of the episode, as is often the case, are action packed. Camera zooms in on a family photo which is then smacked by a blood soaked hand and falls to the ground. A woman runs through the house, clutching her baby in bloody arms. She hides in the bedroom. The phone gives a busy signal. Someone’s forcing the door open, so she hides under the bed with a baby. There is absolutely no way that this plan will work, and to her credit you get the idea that she knows it, but this is a horror series after all and it’s not like she had a lot of options.

Holy crap, Dad’s bloody corpse is under the bed with them!

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Season 6 starts a year after the events in the finale of Season 5, which I detailed a few days ago. This blog post is being written somewhat stream-of-consciousnessly as I watch the episode.

It will contain spoilers (like the picture at the right).

You have been warned.

At the start of the episode, Dean’s been living a year with Lisa and her son, Ben, in suburbia, after his Lucifer-possessed brother, Sam, dove into a trans-dimensional prison to save the world. It’s clear that Dean hasn’t completely gotten over his past, though, as a montage relating his mundane daily tasks to his former life makes clear.

Still, he’s making friends. One in particular, a neighbor named Sid, seems to have bonded with him over regular beers, but Dean isn’t sharing anything about his past with him. He tells him that he used to be in pest control. (I, for one, am pegging Sid as a demon or something. He’s just a little too interested in Dean’s past.)

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Yesterday, I described the second and third seasons of Supernatural which all built up toward Dean Winchester’s death, as part of a demonic deal to save his brother.

Dean was sucked into Hell, leaving his brother Sam on Earth with the demon Ruby, who has taken on something of a friend and mentorship role with him.

More spoilers to follow …

Season Four

Season four of Supernatural began, a year after his death, with Dean crawling his way out of the grave with no real idea how he got back. But he doesn’t appear to be a demon or any other kind of beastie … so what’s going on?

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