Two weeks after February 6th (just around my birthday, interesting enough...) the most beautiful roadkill in the world comes back to life in a most amazingly scripted and performed episode.
9.9
The other reviews make me laugh, because they are, more or less, either exactly what I myself thought/think, or just what I thought I would see reading them. As soon as the Boys showed up in the trailer, I know that there was a grin on my face because I knew that the format had been changed up. "In medias res" – I don't know if this is still the viewpoint, but I know that a lot of Modernist literature utilizes the same concept ("in medias res" being Latin for "in the middle of the situation," as compared to "ab initio" for "from the beginning. I remembered that all from high school. Impressed? ;) hehe). Think of Catch-22, or Heart of Darkness, or...I'm trying to think of other examples. Anyway. In his memoir of the field, On Writing, Stephen King talks about the difficulty of using "in medias res" because of needing to find the balance between flashback background exposition and not resembling Wayne's World with the "doodoodoo" screen blurring.
Well, now that I think about it…every story is "in medias res," since none starts at the beginning of time, and most don't go through someone's whole life (with the exception of Russian literature BOZHE MOJ they don't like to leave anything to the imagination...). Supernatural began in medias res, since the family breakup had already occurred... Anyway, my point is that while I had no idea what the twist would be, I could tell that the format, not just the shooting style, was different, and that made me quite the excitable poppet.
Honest to goodness, I didn't know what the twist was going to be (QUITE unlike the 6th Sense, which was spoiled for me by a radio DJ. The jerk.). It was certainly exhilarating, but I definitely think this episode will age well; it, like most good entertainment, doesn't lose its creative spark even when you know the ending. And unlike some opinions I read below, I loved the first forty-five minutes. In addition to the in medias res storytelling, you could tell there was something going on both from the recap and from the philosophical discourse between Sam and Molly. The modus operandi usually is, although Sam seems to have forgotten when he yelled at Dean for his bluntness, something along the lines of "There are ghosts you are in danger we will kill them break."
Speaking of the recap, I completely forgot about the whole storyline of Bloodlust when I wrote my "revelation" theorem that Supernatural = Evil, Good = Human. Here I was thinking it was rather apocryphal. It obviously has kinks in it, but in terms of the overarching worldview it works (since the whole reason I wrote it was because of the lack of Things that are Groovy) so I'll just put it aside for now. "There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio..." Hamlet is rather apropos for this episode, is it not? Thematically, at least. I can see some similarities between Molly and Ophelia.
Tricia Helfer was wonderful in her role; what I said before about how this episode will be enjoyable even knowing the twist is mainly due to her performance. It was interesting for me to note that, given how beautiful Tricia is, how often she seemed too thin, pulled apart. I'm assuming at least a bit of that had to do with makeup, and was intentional, as she's a ghost. Oops, I spoiled it. Hehe. You're rather a fool if you're reading the reviews before watching the episode and hoping not to get spoiled, though. Hehe...I just accidentally managed to hit shift+a and then delete…what magical keystrokes those are...black magic, that is. Nearly had a heart attack. Shift+z is just as beautiful, though. Anyway, I have gotten sufficiently distracted enough for one review. I was talking about the formula and Bloodlust – I'm sure that Kripke et al, The Powers that Be at Supernatural, assumed that the audience would have, like me, forgotten about the theme of "Bloodlust" and need a gentle reminder that el que no es humano isn't all bad. Also, I'm sure they wanted another chance for Dean to be all gung-ho and shoot-first-ask-questions-later, even though he's seen how bad that can be, and even though he's already proved that he is not going to be able to shoot to kill in Sam's case even if he knew it would either be kill Sam or kill himself. This episode, while awesome and a "stand-alone" in its own right, also reminds us of that whole theme and topic – I just noticed that this is episode 216. This makes me a scared panda. Or, as my syntax and semantics professor said when we studied this phrase, "the excrement will strike the cooling unit."
We've had a couple episodes dealing with highways, or about travel in general – "Pilot," "Phantom Traveler," "Route 666," "Roadkill," etc. Kripke himself has always said that he conceives of the series as one long road trip cross country. The final episode of Supernatural (I'm a big fan of TV shows going out with dignity, at a planned time, and not just going and going because networks keep greenlighting them even though they've "jumped the shark.") should be on the road, don't you think? The English Major in me just thought, "Yes! And the Boys should lose to the ghost!" …Not so much. Sit back and chill out, please, dear sir. I'd like them to be able to walk into the proverbial sunset, myself... Anyway, I think that thematically it would work out well for the last episode to be based on something on the road, and it would also make sense statistically – the sheer amount of time they spend en route between jobs means that they should have some problems on the road sooner or later.