Reply To: Let’s all talk about Good God, Y’all! (S5 E2)
There are a lot of good parts in this episode but as a whole it never managed to feel like one of my favorites. I think it’s because the whole ruse WAR puts on with who is or isn’t a demon goes on a little too long or I whish there was some other part to the story. Or maybe the episode really mostly lives in the surprise of what really is going on that simply doesn’t work on third, fourth or tenth watch anymore?
Anyhow I DO enjoy watching the characters interact and love how this season right away kicks into high gear with the Big Bads and introduces the Four Horsemen here! The choice of the horsemen’s “rides” is also really fun.
Seeing Cas so intense at the beginning – wanting to look for God, revealing the truth about the amulet, telling Dean he’ll better support his (Cas’) plan because he gave up everything for him – really drives the point home how urgent and big this situation is.
And I find it touching that even though Dean really doesn’t know where he stands with Sam at the moment he doesn’t want to let go of the amulet and what it means to him!
THE BRIDGE from the finale!!! Seeing it now brings up so many feelings…..but it is a gorgeous location. I wonder how the special effect with the gap was created.
It’s great to have Ellen, Jo and Rufus back and all in one episode.
Ellen’s tough love is very refreshing. Giving both Sam and Dean a piece of her mind about cutting her out. HA. And later telling Dean to suck it up and work on the problem with what he’s got….HER…and not wish for Sam or Bobby.
I love the fact that BOTH Sam and Dean figure out what’s going on separately from each other, showing that they are perfectly equal in wits.
And how poignant nowadays how War says here that people don’t really need a reason to kill each other!! More true than EVER. SIGH.
It’s a very good follow up story for the hard trust conversation we had at the end of the last episode! We see the tension keep building here and think it’s real how Sam and Dean drift further apart just to then find out much of that was probably caused by War’s influence on the town. Then you relax and hope that they actually see that and make a new try at reconciliation just to have another twist with the brothers deciding to split up completely at the end. UGH! For Sam and Dean to NOT put each other before everything else and stick together is so hard to accept but an excellent painful story point and from that angle I love that the show allowed time for the deep hurt to scab over enough for them to go forward together again. Both Jared and Jensen are doing amazing work in that scene making us hang on every word and really feeling for both brothers. You can tell how Sam is still hoping for Dean to try and talk him out of leaving and you can see how it pains Dean not to be able to bring himself to do just that. It’s still as hard to take as ever.
The ONE thing I don’t like about this episode’s storyline is the confusion over IF or IF NOT Sam was actually cured of the addiction to the demon blood or the power that it gives him. We are made to believe that Sam isn’t jonesing for a hit but then War says its “all blood all the time” in Sam’s head. So was Sam lying to Dean at the beginning? Or was War just influencing him to believe he still wants it? Shouldn’t God’s cure be stronger than War’s manipulations? And in the end the blood wasn’t even demon blood anyway, so why would that cause Sam to slide back. That part made me believe it was War’s meddling that made Sam think he wants it, but that should have lifted when War was taken off line. Maybe he wasn’t addicted to it at all ever and it was always only about the power? But at the end Sam says that he doesn’t trust himself and that the blood was a temptation…
It just throws too many things out of whack and into suspicion that we barely understood to begin with. And then it never gets really cleared up or explained.