Supernatural 3:2 review

Season three of Supernatural continues with a fine second episode. Spoilers lie ahead...

When kids love their moms too much: or what happens when our boys getin touch with their inner emotional selves

Dean’s still trying to sleep with every woman he can shove in before he dies, while Sam’s Googling around the clock to make sure that’s the next sixty or seventy years.   This brings them to Indiana for a yoga instructor Dean slept with eight years ago and an incidental job with creepy creepy kids.  I do wonder how Dean manages to keep track of all the women he has slept with – he always seems to know how to find them, years later.  Scent-marking maybe?  Fit in another couple visits from our mysterious blonde, a really nice homemade flamethrower, and Dean’s son, and you’ve got a nice tidy episode.

The monster of the week is changelings, those creepy evil Fay creatures that steal children to suck the life out of their suburban moms.  It’s a nice job showcasing the disbelief and then despair that the mothers go through as they realize something is wrong with their children.  Although the mystery is nicely put together with a realestate theme, it’s the interpersonal that makes this episode really pop.

Dean’s son?  Yeah, that part got me too.  But the signs are unmistakable.  Ben wears all black, loves cars and AC/DC, and hits on hot chicks.  Oh, and he’s eight years old.  He’s not actually Dean’s kid (though the writers keep us hanging for quite a while), but it’s a portal to the future, a future that Dean won’t ever have, that he gave up for hunting and Sam.  It works really well, the poignancycontrasted with his catting-around ways.  This is the first time we’ve ever seen Dean want anything besides Sam, his car, and fucking shit up in a way his father would approve.  He looks the life he’s always disdained in the face and finds out it’s not actually that bad.  We can only hope it adds an extra depth to his death watch that’s sadly been missing.  Plus who can hate the mini-Dean?

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Meanwhile the blonde with the nifty knife points out some skeletons in Sam’s closet; all of his mother’s friends turn out to be dead.  She’s a demon who wants to help Sam out for her own mysterious reasons and is willing to pay for the access- by helping him to save his brother’s life.  It worked really well to have both brothers making deep emotional discoveries separate from each other.  In some ways, the ever closer bonding that has marked their relationship for the lasttwo seasons – as fraught as it was – is reversing.  Sam’s guilt is keeping him from Dean while Dean’s avoidance of his impending death automatically separates him.

We can only hope that this navel-gazing continues in the much more lighthearted next episode (actual lucky rabbit’s foot?  That’s something I would have never thought of, but promises to be hilarious if nothing else….)