This week’s Supernatural is one of the lighter and funnier episodes of the season, showcasing guest stars Charisma Carpenter and James Marsters. The nicely structured story uses the focus on Carpenter’s and Marsters' characters to reveal just as much about Sam and in particular Dean, while weaving in just a touch of the Leviathan arc.
When the guest stars are this much fun, the writers can play around—and they do. For the most part, it works very well, though I am left with a few questions I hope the writers explore as the season unfolds.
I love the way the episode is bookended with scenes of Sam trying to get Dean to talk. Dean opens the story caught up in a nightmare, no doubt the one he keeps trying to drown in a whiskey bottle. The dream touches on all Dean’s current worries, grief and guilt, starting with Cas walking into the reservoir, skipping to Sam caught up in his Lucifer hallucination and ending with Dean killing Amy. He wakes up reaching for a drink, something Sam has noticed his brother doing more and more.
Dean’s drinking has been building steadily since he came back from hell, but the writers have now put it on the table as one of the issues for season seven. Sam tries to put it on the table as an issue between the brothers, but Dean is not biting. He tells Sam he may be the new improved model, but Dean is still Dean and that means no heart to hearts over what’s bothering him. Not, he insists, that anything is bothering him. “Yeah, okay,” says Sam with just the right touch of skepticism.
Over the years, Sam has been mired in guilt and blame himself, particularly in the third season when he obsessively set sights on Lilith to get revenge for all his losses, especially Jess. And the behaviour of his soulless self in the sixth season was very tough to accept once he had his soul back. But Sam has always been a talker, which allows him to move past the guilt and look to see what he can put right. Whether Dean likes it or not, Sam’s comfortable with chick flick moments, and in Supernatural’s dark world, that’s a plus. Dean, on the other hand, bottles up his feelings, literally and figuratively, until they finally explode.
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