Supernatural – Episode 10.04 – The Gripe Review

“I wonder what Kate is doing,” said no one in the fandom.

Welcome to the Gripe Review for episode 4. Someone should pay me for this one because I would have never wasted my time watching this episode had it not been for this review. It's because of your comments and discussions here, they are too precious for me to forego.

It’s filler week which - following the trend set by Sera Gamble and perfected by Carver - is tantamount to throwaway episode week. Also, the episode is written by Adam Glass, which means we're sure to get one thing: exposition.

In my post season 9 plots review, in the gripe titled “The return of who-gives-a-f*cks,” I discussed the recent fad of SPN writers bringing back forgettable, shoestring characters and pretending the audience begged for it. Some of those characters, like Charlie, received this treatment so many times they became circus performers who keep leaving the stage and coming back for encore. Some like Kate are so obscure people have to be reminded who they are.

I wished I could tell the writers to stop doing this, that many of us don’t care about their brain children as much as they do. In seasons past it used to be memorable people like Meg, Crowley, Gabriel, Becky, and Anna who made comebacks, mostly for plot related reasons. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if the next filler episode was advertised to feature the motel clerk from episode 43, accompanied by exclamations of, “Oh, gee willy! Isn’t that exciting? Bet you guys were waiting for him all along.”

Let’s examine something. Picture this scene:

Now this dialogue:

Dean: Remember Kate, the werewolf girl we let live? Any ideas what happened to her?

Sam: I heard she stayed kosher for a while, until her sister Tasha got sick. They say Kate turned her to save her life. Tasha then went bad and started killing so in the end Kate had to stab her.

Dean: That’s sad, man. Poor kid! Hey, what's this? The mark on my arm is glowing… *proceed with episode about why the MoC is glowing on Dean’s arm*

There, I summarized this entire episode in one short dialogue, and added an opening for a much better filler, one that features our heroes and involves the current mythology.

I understand the necessity for fillers. What I don’t understand is the insistence to make them so far removed from the main storyline that, after replacing a few lines of dialogue here and there, they could work in any season. Did we really need to know about Bitten to understand Paper Moon? I guarantee you no since I bleached my brain from that godawful episode – the worst episode in the history of the show IMO – and didn’t have any problems following Adam’s paint-by-numbers script.

I’m going on gripe mode for this one because it deserves it, and because there weren’t any worthwhile characters for a decent character review. Cas was absent; Crowley was absent, and Sam and Dean played background music to Kate’s Exposition Bonanza. I’ll get to their bits shortly but first, lets talk about the gripes.

Gripe #1: Stop talking!

There’s a part early on when Sam and Dean interview a witness of the werewolf attack at the bar. I fast forwarded through this, then rewound it, fearing I might miss something. My fear proved baseless because, in the end, the only thing that came out of that long, bang-your-head-against-the-table interview was that the culprit was in a barn. This could have been written in a passing scene, with a far more interesting character, like a hick with an accent or a bartender with an attitude, throwing the information around while the boys snatched it and ran with it.

In a TV show, visuals and quality of dialogue are as important as the story, yet I get a feeling these keep falling through the cracks in SPN’s writers room in favor the shortest, most obvious rout to the tale’s finish line. It’s a shame because this show used to be so good at using visuals to create parallels and imply meaning. Remember the Impala story in Swan Song? That’s quality we once had and lost in the second half of a decade.

Gripe #2: Stop talking while showing!

In the long sequence at the diner where brains go to die, we were forced to sit through Kate’s story with no way out and no possibility of skipping since it was pretty much the entire episode. Sam and Dean were as trapped as we were except this was their show which they spent listening to other people talk.

What riled me most about Kate’s story though, was that it was both shown and told. If this is a TV show, not a radio play or printed text, the creators have the advantage of putting the script on film. Why saddle it with a narration that tells us exactly what we see on screen? Why not just show the images, or take it one step further and use the narration as a clever device? Why not have Kate lie, or omit parts of the truth while we see the real story on our screens? Have Kate claim she didn’t turn her sister, or have her vilify herself by saying she did it for kicks, then show us how shattered she was when looking at her injured sister and how desperately she wanted to save her. All these scenarios would have been better than "Here is what happened, and here is the story of what happened, in words." Kate also would have earned an extra layer of personality, and a chance at our sympathy, if they had added that twist instead of boring us to death with her dull monologue.

Gripe #3: Bending character and logic for plot

The way the final encounter played out was a mind boggling exercise of characters and the laws of universe obeying plot. Sam and Dean got easily overpowered by two baby werewolves in the first half. They spent that entire time being shoved around so the sisters could have their heart to heart. Once the talk and stabitty stab was over – behind a closed door so neither of them could see – they came out of their funk and casually finished off the bad guys. How did those dudes get the best of them in the bedroom if it was so easy to kill them in the living room? Why were they just standing around, or lying on the ground, listening to Kate and Tasha? Why did they wait exactly the right amount of time for Kate and Tasha to finish their conversation before wrapping things up?

Gripe #4: Put it in the waste basket, not the recycle bin

Not only was the plot spoon fed to us, with things a child could deduce being pounded into our heads, (Sam in the diner, about what Kate did: “It was all just an act, to protect Tasha.” Thank you Dr. obvious! I didn’t get that from her tall tale,) it’s also a recycled plot. Think back to Benny, how he went straight only to have to face down a loved one (his ex-girlfriend) gone rogue, and forced to kill her. Didn’t something similar also happen between Kate and her boyfriend/best friend in Bitten? How about Bobby and his wife? Some might say these are parallels, a theme for the show. It’s about family members and lovers having to make sacrifices for the greater good, much like Sam and Dean have done so many times. But parallels have a time and a place, and when they happen to characters we care about they have the desired impact. Characters whom we don’t give two shakes of a flamingo’s tail about, in stories we see the ending from miles away, no longer carry that effect. Theirs becomes a cheap paperback that needs to be thrown in the waste basket and not in the recycle bin.

Gripe #5: Sam and Dean having moments of yawn

Since we’re back to the good old SPN formula, the episode had many good old Sam and Dean moments. In fact, it was loaded with them, which gave it a jarring quality when it also plowed through the werewolf story. There were scenes where, in the middle of a conversation about demonic transformations and guilty consciences, Kate would call to tell them they'd never see her again, and we’d wonder where to look and what to focus on.

My main problem with the Sam and Dean scenes however was that I couldn’t understand where they were going with them. Was the subject of the brotherly angst Dean’s demon transformation or Sam’s once again dangerous tilt toward the dark side? They oscillated between these two like a ping pong game. Was it a challenge for the two of them, a sort of who-is-guiltier-than-whom world cup championship? Not that it’s implausible for them to toss accusations around after what they went through, but it was unsatisfying to say the least since it prevented them from going any deeper than the surface into either subject to have a true heart to heart conversation and really take apart what happened.

I confess, I wanted them to solely focus on Dean’s demonic experience, since I felt it didn’t get its just deserts this season. I was fishing for anything, even an analysis of the trauma, to feed that void, but the show threw everything and the kitchen sink in there with it, including a lampshade of Jared’s arm in the sling and what Sam did with Lester. I know that one is important and will likely come up in the future when the show inevitably, unsurprisingly, turns its focus to Sam. But maybe it could have waited for one more episode, when we were well and truly over Demon Dean.

Speaking of DD…

Gripe #6: We lost Demon Dean for this?

I already talked at length about how disappointed I was with the way they ended Dean being a demon. What adds insult to injury is that they followed it with subpar material like this. It reminds me of season 7 when, after an explosive season opener and second episode, they divested themselves of the brimming-with-potential Godstiel, and the bone chilling Leviathan Cas, and dumped us in a damp laundry basket called “Girl Next Door.” I’m tempted to yell at the showrunners: Fine, it’s your show. Destroy all the anticipation we built over the summer, and all the juicy scenarios we churned in our heads. Take them all away after two-three episodes, we won’t complain. But does it have to be followed by this garbage? Do we have to feel bored on top of miserable and disappointed?

My overall impression of the episode: Unnecessary, boring, full of exposition and bland characters, wouldn’t have watched it if it wasn't for the review and my lecherous craving for the following comments/conversation.

Kudos: The only thing I have is this:

For once it was Dean, and not Sam, held at gun point, to encourage Sam to give up. I guess we should also count the fact that no one tied Sam to a chair.

Don’t forget to comment, or forget if you don’t care about this episode or this review. You may think I’m crazy spending this much time on an episode I didn’t like, for a show I’ve almost given up on. But my silly, most likely delusional, hope is that someone from the writers room might read this and decide not to bring back motel desk clerk #2 from episode 43.


Tessa

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