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I did enjoy that the kids were not pushovers!
Welllll….sigh. I am trying. I really am. This one started out more promising for me with a monster that looked scary at first…then it totally went off the rails.
I liked the start. The latchkey kids with mom as a trucker…not only white people; yay! The kids were charming and believable.
But there was so much I didn’t like.
The monster that started out promising and scary, ended up in the end, thanks to long looks at it in full light, like a guy in a mask.
The monster’s lair was HORRIBLE! It was a storage unit draped in fabric! I guess maybe it was SUPPOSED to look like a child’s fort full of lost stuff??? But it looked silly and cheap and not scary in the least. The storage unit doors were the nail in the coffin for me there. Why would a monster of Indian original live in a different-dimension-storage-unit? Because of all the lost stuff? I can reason why it was that maybe, but in the end it just looked horrible and cheap.
Mary. She is acting like she in a stage play or reading off a page. I KNOW she is supposed to be stand-off-ish, but I’m not feeling her natural acting ability here at all yet. Or very rarely.
John IS a natural. Drake is a natural. BUT, his sudden “I need her” desperation over Mary is WAY too soon! And we just found out he proposed to someone else before Vietnam? I really didn’t feel THAT at all either!
Lata has all the answers all the time and immediately. Okay, we learned she’s lying to everyone about her parents who seem to be alive. At least her mom is. But she knows EVERYTHING and they find out about the monsters way too fast and I just don’t feel any danger or urgency even when they want us to feel it.
Carlos was very much sidelined here. PigNaPoke pointed out to me that with such a large cast, trying to include everyone in every episode means some get the short end of the stick and it would be better if they were left out of an episode. That was Carlos here. Loved looking at him, but he had very little to do except make some sarcastic comments.
Ada WAS interesting. Her tendency to go a bit dark side is interesting. NOT a fan of trapping a demon in a TREE!!!! Come on!
The big stressful moment of Mary having an identity crisis via CB radio just fell flat for me. Meg didn’t sell it to me. I am not feeling the emotion from her.
And…more giant crab-dogs. And the big bad is disguised as the DJ and we are already finding that out? I am having a real problem with the “they’ll destroy our world”. I never would have EVER thought I’d accuse Robbie Thompson of lazy writing, but…that just sounds like a line from a comic book villain and is just so…overused that I don’t feel the threat from it.
I know it’s only the 3rd one. But I hate to say I’m having serious problems with it. Problems with the monsters. Problems with the big threat. Problems with the characters not pulling at me emotionally. Sam and Dean grabbed me from the very start. This feels like an after school special at times.
I want to like it. I want to LOVE it. So I hope this one was just a weak episode. But it’s not building for me the way I hoped it already would be.
Stedan: I talked to our wiki tech guru Alice…it seems that for some odd reason, any time you type an apostrophe (‘), it switches to HTML code and does that weird box thing. She is trying to figure out why. But until then, just keep participating and I’ll go back in as an admin and I can edit those apostrophes to fix it. No problem. YOU are not doing anything wrong; it’s something on our end with posts from Europe and I’ll keep dropping in to fix the boxes until Alice can figure it out.
Stedan – All really good comments and I feel similarly about how I was drawn in to SPN IMMEDIATELY and that has not been the case here as far as feeling immediately caring about the characters. But I do have hope and will keep watching. I am not sure what is going on with the comments you are leaving and the boxes. I will get with my wiki technical advisor and ask her; but I am understanding your comments in spite of the boxes! Can I ask what you are commenting on ? Cell phone? Laptop?
And yes, WHERE IS DEANNA in all this? With her daughter out hunting and Samuel missing?
Maybe it is harder to feel worry, etc. for the characters when we know what the future holds for them? We did not know for Sam and Dean. Good point.
PigNaPoke…you aren’t the only one thinking Dean’s narration doesn’t really sound like Dean. It’s totally unnecessary.
I was unable to get on to comment right after the episode last night…but here I am the next morning! I hope we didn’t lose everyone else by episode two!!!! But YAY PigNaPoke!
This one lost me.
I was not feeling the plant monster. Just…not. It may have been based in folklore, but it felt silly and OVERLY COMPLICATED for Lata to explain for episode two! I am also having a bit of a hard time with John just DECIDING that he’s meant to join these strangers and hunt monsters right back from Vietnam. Like he has some kind of epiphany that this is what he was made for when he ONLY JUST found out about it.
I’ve been thinking about what it is that’s bothering me. I think for me, the kind of TV I love most is when you start with a very small duo and we learn about THEM first…Sam and Dean…Mulder and Scully…we come to care about them and then, over time, they add more people we come to love like Bobby and Jody and Ellen…but I like having time to learn and care about and get invested in that core duo first. Here, it’s a large cast right off the bat and that feels more “Scooby Doo” to me (the van doesn’t help…I LIKE the van, but can’t stop thinking “Scooby Doo”!).
Things I liked in this one included the more human moments between John and Mary while driving. Mary is less robotic (and the cast LOOKS different – older – in just the time that passed since the pilot filming and start of season filming) and more human and I liked her better as an actress in this one as she was given a BIT more to deal with. I also really am charmed by Carlos, but I still want more depth and a bit of darkness and not just funny comments all the time. The Age of Aquarius montage went on a bit long for me. But it also made Mary look a bit more human as she was laughing at Carlos’ dramatic rendition of the song.
But I am having a big problem with the monsters. If you tell me in the first episode “we are fighting a thing that wants to destroy our world” – that just means nothing to me emotionally. A “thing” that we know nothing about except that Mary and John’s fathers may have known something about it and been out to stop it…I don’t know how to explain this because I loved on Supernatural when we got to follow Sam and Dean AS THEY LEARNED about how to combat monsters. That was great. And it seems like they are trying to do that here but it’s falling flat for me; maybe because I don’t have an emotional attachment to the characters with only two episodes? I don’t know. But it was A LOT of explanation from Lata about this plant monster and I just started to tune it out at some point!
The plant monster was not scary to me. Not at all. I was hoping to see the origins of these hunters…how terrifying were vampires (for example) before they knew as much as Sam and Dean knew? I wanted to be truly scared FOR the characters and I’m just not. Mary seems to know so much and the others follow her so I’m getting less of a sense of urgency or having them ever be in true danger. Even the kind of psychological component of this plant monster – using family members and insecurities to get to the characters – did not make me feel much (unlike the times in Supernatural when monsters forced Sam and Dean to tell each other the truth and it was so painful).
The “big bad” in a Gothic monk hood being followed around by a pack of spiders at the end…just NOT doing it for me!!!! I know they want to find a monster we’ve never seen before…but this feels like superhero universe stuff.
This one fell totally flat for me. I was really disappointed.
I did like the insights that Carlos had for Mary; how she was acting and how she hated that within her own family. I started to get the feel that they have a fair amount of history for him to know all that and I really liked that.
Lata is unique…not at all afraid of gore (playing with the jaw on the zombie at that start…by the way…zombies??? COME ON! Way too overdone and never really done on SPN.)
Mary is a little too enthusiastic about all this hunting for someone who wants to get out of it!
PigNaPoke; that’s a GREAT observation…that low end motels back then would look like the 30’s or 50’s!!!!!
Of course, not giving up on it two episodes in, but this one was a miss for me.
Hello Stedan! Welcome!
I agree with much of what you said and how you feel. I’m not in love with it – did not grab me like the SPN pilot way back in 2005! But I am interested.
Robbie Thompson has said several times in interviews that “episode 13” will explain everything. Where Dean is (which he says will also tell us where Sam is), etc. That’s a little far into it – I would have liked to know sooner, but Robbie wants to let this story play out in a certain way where we get to discover things along the way, so I will trust him.
I too was never a huge Mary fan. LOVE the woman who plays her (such a sweetheart that Sam Smith), but I liked it when she was just an idea on SPN. Her death was the reason that John and Dean and Sam started down this path and I liked the early years of the show where we were kind of seeing her through Dean’s memories as more of an ideal and caring mom. So to hit the SPN flashback episode and find out that she was a hunter was a bit of a shock. I DO like the idea that reality doesn’t always match someone idealized memories, and I was okay with monsters using Sam and Dean’s love for her against them (making Eve take the shape of Mary to get to them), but I did not like the decision to bring her back for real as a “gift” to Dean…and then she ends up unraveling much of what he thought the knew about her. No, I didn’t want “returned Mary” to hand around the bunker and clean and cook! But I wanted to keep her more of a mystery where we only saw her in flashbacks, dreams, or time travel.
So now I get A LOT more Mary! Maybe I’ll like the “brought back from the dead” version more when I get to see her backstory.
Out of all of the new cast; just judging from the pilot, I love John the most. Drake grabbed me right away and made me care about him.
I too look forward to getting a bit more “serious” or “tragic” Carlos. He obviously has a sad family backstory. I am all for humorous moments; it’s one of the things that made SPN great, and I love a gender-bending character, but they have to be human and someone you care about and can sympathize with too. I think we don’t know enough about Carlos yet. But I don’t want them to always run to him for comedic relief. I love Supernatural for the complex characters and the way that one episode can make me laugh and cry in the same 45 minutes. I hope for that here too.
Your English is stellar. I only speak/write English so as a bilingual person, you are miles ahead of me.
I hope you’ll keep coming back every week!
Kate38, you made me laugh with the “Demon? Oh, okay…what’s next”?
I liked the creepy electronic demon voice, though that is not standard SPN. Maybe we are to believe that, over the years, the demons learned how to blend in more, look more human, and disguise their voice?
Dean has to be narrating from heaven with the KAZ plates, right?
After reading some comments on Twitter, I agree with the point that John is very “Sam” here and Mary is very “early Dean” with all the bluster. John and Sam were always said to have fought so hard because they were so similar and I love seeing that here! John telling Lata that they can be scared together…John jumping into run after the monster to protect everyone else with only a tiny piece of silver shrapnel…(I guess he WANTED that shrapnel from his late friend’s cross in his arm if it was that easy to remove and could have been removed at an earlier time!) – so many of John’s actions here were so “Sam”. I liked that. It felt like Sam was a part of this one in that way.
PigNaPoke; Meg is definitely the actor with the most credit (Disney and all!). Drake is newer. So I guess that’s why she’s first? Drake stole the show though. Part of that is the way the characters are written. John is immediately more likable.
I don’t love the monster trap either. Didn’t like it on SPN that much with “soul traps”, etc. No, I like learning how to kill the monsters, not trap them, but also realize they didn’t know as much “back then” – no way to kill a demon, etc.
Kate38: LOVE YOUR COMMENTS! I hope you’ll keep watching so you can keep commenting. It’s not home here without you!
Wow! Okay…some I really liked and some not so much. Overall; I want to see more. Overall, I liked this.
I’ll get the complaints out of the way first. It’s the trend now in so many shows, but I detest music under EVERYTHING (instrumental music). I had this problem near the end of Supernatural too.
On the other hand, I LOVED the use of the music from that era. That was awesome.
John sure signed on to all of this very quickly and without much fear or wonder at the fact that monsters are real. I can kind of let that go because he saw so much action and violence and horrible stuff in Vietnam…but monsters are different and I would think it would kind of shake your world view. I really loved that he saw the ghost of his dead friend in the backseat…I want a bit more creepiness like that. That felt very real and personal; must more scary than the rather alien “guard dog” in the crypt.
I was not in love with how “Indiana Jones” the first few minutes and “box retrieval” scenes were…but we know Jensen loves Indiana Jones.
I do love the look of the show! It’s somehow like “warm dark” – very distinctive in color and tone and I really love that. The sets like the MOL bunker (this version) and the bookstore are so rich in detail; really nice. Love the use of the New Orleans cemeteries. The Manners postcard on the bookstore bulletin board…awwww.
Characters. John/Drake is instantly likable and charming. Loved how he and Mary were sneaking peeks at each other. I like Mary more than I thought I would. Their talk in the car on the way to Texas was good (and so SPN) – made her more human. I liked Lata’s sweet counterpoint to Mary’s tough wariness. And Carlos. I need to get more depth in Carlos but I am SURE we will. LOVE having a rather nonbinary character like that. Once I get some more serious episodes for Carlos, I’ll like his comic relief better. I did like the serious scene of Carlos and John in the van – that was good and I hope for more of that. Gave me a hint of how good Carlos could be.
Did Mary just leave her car in TX and jump into Carlos’ van????
I like Millie quite a bit. I want more subtle scenes for her though (everything was very emotional for her here, but that makes sense with John coming home from war).
Not sure how I feel about the big threat/monster. But we’ll see where that goes; the thing the box was going to be used to trap (besides demons).
Dean. We did not learn WHERE Dean is narrating from yet. Heaven? I kind of hoped for that as he waits for Sam. But maybe it’s from the years post-Chuck but before he died. I guess maybe we’ll find out eventually. I was surprised that hearing and then seeing Dean so suddenly; as he was not part of this story, was very jarring to me. He didn’t have time to be very “Dean” at all. No real Dean expressions…and then I thought about it and realized that he’s not nearly as “Dean” without Sam to play off of. It really is both of them together that make it Supernatural. I always liked the rare SPN episode where Sam and Dean were apart – the actors and characters got to stretch in different ways and we got to see different sides of them. But here, I guess I didn’t learn anything about Dean; where he is, how he’s feeling, what they hell is going on with him…and I wanted to know all of that. So I didn’t get the surge of love I thought I would. Seeing him with the car felt like kind of a cruel tease in a way. I want more Dean so badly. I’ll give it time.
I give this first one a solid “B”. Most importantly, I want to watch next week.
Now, SERIOUSLY DAMN CAS! He knew how to temporarily stop Zachariah. He knew heaven’s plan was not to have Dean kill Lilith but just to take him out of the game to let Sam break the final seal. And THEN he sides with Dean too late. Cas is a serious fuck-up.
I loved the talking-to Bobby gave Dean. About first insulting John and then complimenting Dean by saying Dean is a better man than John ever could be. Jensen plays that to perfection in his expressions in response to Bobby without many words. Anger at Bobby insulting John, then disbelief that Bobby thinks Dean is a better man than his father.
I loved Dean’s swearing an oath to God like “blah blah blah whatever”. Doing it only so Sam didn’t have to (he thought).
So I guess it was Ruby that changed Dean’s voicemail to Sam? The last straw that pushed Sam to do it? I thought it was the angels insuring the plan went forward, but the smirk Ruby gave made me think it was her.
HER final speech after we think maybe we can somewhat trust her after all this time is jarring; like she’s so proud of herself for figuring out how to set Lucifer free and she kind of wants Sam to acknowledge how great she did!
All the “beautiful room” (i.e. “super-gaudy room”!!!) were really good. The disappearing door. The self-healing walls. Dean referring to it as the (Star Trek) holodeck; loved all that. Dean slowly figuring it out and Dean’s speech to Cas about what’s really important; the gritty day-to-day of humanity, family, the emotions of love and pain; it’s a GREAT speech! How he just completely (in a very calculated way) dismissed Cas at the end of it and thinks maybe he lost him since Cas disappears – only to reappear and help Dean.
Loved how Dean kept wanting to just talk to Sam; the only thing he wanted when he was offered anything…except that. Thinking he’d patch things up before he (Dean) died at Lilith’s hands probably, at first. Until he realized what was really going on.
That short scene with Chuck WAS great; especially him putting his hand on Cas’ shoulder after Cas said he’d fight off all the archangels…only to take it away when Cas didn’t welcome that hand!
Making LILITH the last seal (she wasn’t breaking the last seal) was good; I remember that from the first time I saw this episode and thought it was clever.
I also remember being a bit shocked on first watch when Sam’s eyes went black…but it makes sense that perhaps he had to become part-demon to do that; though, according to Ruby, it wasn’t the blood at all; it was what was IN him…so Sam has something evil and dark in him that he choose to tap into. But do we believe ANYTHING Ruby says? Do we believe he could fly all along, Dumbo, (very old Disney reference!) and didn’t need the feather?
At least Sam knows now that Dean did not give up on him (even if he believed the harsh voicemail was from Dean). At least Dean got to kill Ruby while Sam held her for him AND Dean got to twist the knife AND Ruby never got to see her big dream for Lucifer realized. Now, I do NOT love what they do with the opener of season 5 – how Sam and Dean are magically spirited away from danger (and if I remember right, we don’t learn how that happened for awhile?). Anyway, good “oh shit” ending to this arc. Poor Sam; did it all in the name of saving the world when both he AND Dean are just pawns to the angels’ plan – Dean unknowingly broke the first seal and Sam broke the last…while thinking he was preventing breaking the last.
Damn Cas…after I watched this I realized the chain of events is really all CAS’ FAULT! He let Sam out to fulfill his role in the path to heaven’s hoped-for Lucifer/Michael death match. AND in the next episode he gets Dean there to stop Sam a day late and dollar short! Cas’ struggles with loyalty basically screwed everyone! Okay, okay, Dean in hell torturing souls was supposed to be the first domino to fall. But Cas KNEW the plan and knowingly let it happen and HELPED it happen by letting Sam out and we’ll discuss the rest in the next episode.
Sam’s hallucinations were interesting. The worst was his greatest fear of Dean abandoning him and him seeing Dean basically throwing him away as a “monster”. It was horrible. Kudos to Jensen for playing that up extra-cruel in the panic room! And interesting that Sam believed that Mary was on his side. Or were all of the hallucinations put there by Ruby just to make sure Sam would seal the deal and do HER bidding to free Lucifer? Obviously she had to drive Sam and Dean apart for it to have any chance of happening.
The pain in Dean’s face listening to Sam detox is horrible.
PigNaPoke; very interesting point about Allastair! That Sam is taking on Dean’s pain as he had no firsthand experience with Allastair torture. Also true that Sam didn’t HAVE to have Ruby with him…he seemed to actually somewhat trust her, which was, of course misplaced as Dean is almost always right about everything.
That final scene. UGH! That’s why it took me weeks to finally watch this one. Dean just looks destroyed; on the edge of tears trying to reason with Sam, then finally crying, then resorting to violence. Sam pleading with Dean; that super-hopeful look he has when he asks Dean to come “with him” and Dean says fine as long as Ruby is gone and Sam just will not agree to that. It kills them both! Sam that Dean won’t come with Ruby and Dean that Sam won’t do it without her. The whole scene is so gut-wrenching and so perfectly acted. Those barely-held-in-check emotions on BOTH sides; HOW do they DO that?!?!
Also love Bobby here. Unsure as to whether or not what they are doing is right.
I remembered how sad this one seemed on first watch. It is still very sad. Adam is never alive. Just a monster using his shape and memories that he got after feeding on his corpse. I wonder when Adam was killed? We see his mom die at the start of this episode (with the linger shot of John’s photo on her nightstand – she must have always carried a torch for him; there were a lot of photos of him around the house!), but I don’t know if Adam died before her or after? He was in a casket; so enough time to have a funeral before Sam and Dean showed up.
Anyway, Jake Abel is such a great actor and he was truly one of the highlights of S15 when he came back.
On rewatch, I found it interesting how they kind of flipped the brothers in a way. At the start, Dean is just burning up with anger that some random guy got to have HIS dad as more of a kindhearted, fun dad when he did not. He couldn’t be more of a dick to Adam at the start, but that blatant anger fits and I really felt for him. At first, Sam is very much “don’t shut him out, it’s not his fault” – seeming to be the brother who will welcome him in…and he does, but Dean ends up being the one that wants to fight for Adam’s independence and the chance to NOT get involved in hunting. Of course, yes, as Sam says, Adam’s already in it now with the way his mom was killed. But SAM turns into the one who’s a bit of a jerk in how forceful he is with Adam…wanting to teach him thing but seemingly not caring how that affects his psyche.
Bizarrely, NONE of it matters because Adam isn’t really Adam! What matters is what it reveals about Sam and Dean…how dedicated to killing Lilith Sam still is at all costs and how Dean’s still trying to save people from the worst consequences.
Even in such a dark episode, Jensen still managed some comedy when he’s stuck in the crypt alone – talking to himself.
I can’t remember how, when Adam is later “brought back” as option #2 for Zachariah’s plan, does he know anything about this whole ghoul thing? He was dead then. He shouldn’t know unless the angels implant that in his head when they bring him back. Anyway, I’ll find out soon enough as we’re heading in to Season 5. I can’t quite remember how they explain that.
But a weird and sad and pretty great episode.
Anyone else feel like there was a lot of real Jensen in this one? I did.
This does seem to be the logical follow-up to the last great siren episode though; where all these seeds of doubt are sown when the true feelings come out – now we’re back to not being honest and everyone around Sam and Dean is telling them things are not going to go well. And they’re not telling each other much.