After a very very
very long recap - honestly after fourteen seasons it’s amazing every episode
isn’t just endless recap - we open with Dean running a bar with Pamela Barnes.
She was a recurring character on the show, a psychic and one of Bobby’s
contacts who became blind when looking at Castiel’s true form and later died
because she’s female and on Supernatural and that’s just dangerous.
He’s having a happy
time drinking booze, having no customers, not!flirting with Pamela and killing
the odd vampire who shows up. And not selling his bar. This quickly replays on
a loop and this is obviously Dean stuck in his headspace
And am I the only one
who thinks that there’s absolutely no way Dean’s headspace bar would have
country music while classic rock still exists? C’mon Supernatural you
know your own soundtrack!
So to everyone else -
the terrible plan of terribleness has failed and now Dean is newly possessed by
the archangel Michael and there’s an army of monsters about to turn an entire
city into monsters. Not an important city or big one, but Supernatural
has always had a kind of rural-mid-west thing about it that it’s not going to
break that now.
So then the gang
throws holy oil at Dean!Michael and manage to get the holy handcuffs on him. Which…
well they had a plan B I guess? They could have maybe included this in the
planning? Maybe thrown the holy oil at Michael and then gone in with the spear?
Or maybe it needed unnecessary gloating to work?
Michael declares that
their puny handcuffs totally can’t hold him. Except they can. Or at least for
the time being. But they can’t stop him summoning his growing army of monsters
who begin banging on the hastily secured doors.
With no idea what to
do, Sam decides to call on the Reapers. Billie, the new Death, always has a
reaper following the Winchesters around because they’re both a) annoying and b)
there’s grudging respect. But mainly A.
So Jessica is their
currently assigned Reaper - because they’re so annoying that she’s had to
assign shifts of Reapers to watch them. Jessica then explains to Sam that she’s
a reaper and it’s so very much not in her job description to save people. Quite
the opposite. He tries to invoke some debt the Reapers owe them but she points
out the Winchesters can’t fuck things up, then fix said fuck up, then act like
everyone owes them for that
I like the Reapers,
they’re so very good at calling out Winchester shit
Michael pipes up to
say in his world they’ve destroyed death and enslaved all the Reapers. Since
people are regularly dying on his world I can assume this is either a)
nonsense, b) the writers threw it in to sound ominous without thinking what it
meant for their world building) or c) Archangel shenanigans
Thankfully some other
mystical force gets in touch and whisks Sam, Castiel, Jack and Dean!Michael to
the Winchester cave which is rather surprising but hey good use of Deus Ex.
It’s also surprising to Maggie leading the extras to fight the monsters in the
city - but thankfully Michael now summons those monsters to the Winchester cave
so they stop destroying and recruiting
That leaves Sam &
co thinking what to do next and they decide, following a previous experience
with Crowley and possession. So they want to go into Dean’s head using
shenanigans to snap him out of possession
While this is
happening, Michael is trying to play mind games with everyone telling them all
how much Dean doesn’t really love them and just sees them all as burdens blah
blah honestly after 14 seasons of really unhealthy co-dependence it’s pretty
ridiculous that Castiel and Sam may even feel this for one tiny second. And
they don’t seem too so I really don’t know what the point is. Jack has a brief
wobble but, really, can we not do the whole “bad guy says obvious shit to make
us turn on each other and we’re going to fall for this blatant ploy” because
it’s tiresome to say the least.
They do manage to get
Michael to expand on his motives. Back in his world when he and Lucifer squared
off he assumed the absent God would appear and reveal his plan or get involved
or something. He didn’t: the world was destroyed and god didn’t appear. And
then he took over Dean’s body and saw his memories of Chuck. A writer. And
writers make multiple drafts and discard them - to which he realised Chuck was
pretty much creating worlds, finding fault with them, discarding them and
moving on
Which… is not exactly an entirely inaccurate interpretation?
So Michael has now
dedicated himself to hopping from world to world, destroying them all until he
finds Chuck himself - then killing god. Which is a super melodramatic motive
but given the whole being an archangel abandoned by god thing, kind of has a point.
I mean, that would kind of put me in a “fuck all the things” mood
While everyone jumps
into Dean’s head that leaves Maggie, Jack and some of the extras to defend them
against the horde of monsters. It starts to go very very very wrong until Jack
manages to tap into some nephilim power, nuking everyone.
Inside Dean’s head
Sam and Castiel quickly find the happy memory after Sam realises you can’t trap
Dean in a traumatic memory because he has waaay too many and he’s just too
immune to endless angst for it to work against him any more. I almost laugh at
this that they go into Dean’s head and realises it’s just layers of trauma one
on top of the other and the reaction is “shrug, yeah he’s a mess”. And just
move on from there
They find the happy
fake memory and recognise it’s out of place and gatecrash on Dean’s happy bar
fantasy. And it’s a pretty cliched scene but on fastforward because it takes
like 2 minutes for them to tell Dean “hey, Pam’s blind. Also dead.” And Dean
realises that he has never known a woman to live for more than 2 years so this
must all be fake!
So then Michael!Dean
arrives into the headspace to say RAWR EVIL and also MIND GAMES. Which doesn’t
work, so they punch each other as well. But in between all this they all info
dump that this is technically Dean’s head so Dean is in control. Even with
Archangels around
Because Archangels
can literally kill death but can’t overcome humans when in their own fantasy
mind bars even though they banished them there. These are the rules. Apparently.
Yes.
So because Dean is the master of his own head he sticks Michael in his mental store room and locks the door and insists his head, his rules so he decides this WILL hold Michael. And it’s his head so he does
I do wonder what the
plan was if Michael hadn’t decide to join them in the dream pub? But he did and
then The Rules Applied apparently so that’s all good. The day is saved
Sam praises Maggie
for leading the extras. The monsters happily all went their merry ways to
become various monsters-of-the-week for a few episodes
Castiel tells Jack
off for using his soul powers, warning him that there are consequences which
could fundamentally change him. Honestly what’s with the vague warnings here?
We know what losing your soul does - please be explicit in your warnings!
No-one cares about vague warnings
And Billie visits.
Turns out she was the one who breezed in to save Sam and all but now she has a
warning. Once upon a time her library had a thousand fun ways for Dean to die…
which I’m sure she had fun reading. Now they all say the same thing - Michael
escapes, possesses Dean and takes over the world. Which is bad. Except there’s
one book with another option. This is not revealed to us to give the writers
plenty of room to bring shenanigans later.
Dean is already
struggling with Michael hammering away in his head
Ok…. I’m going to say
it: Jensen Ackles embodies the character of Dean and his acting as Dean is
always A+++ on point. But as Michael? Just this calm, slow monotone all the
time with occasional smirking? Not really selling it to me.
Also, hey they can go
into people’s heads and just mess with possession. Since the gang can’t even be
arsed to attempt a exorcism in the last 10 seasons, it seems even more glaring
to
As for the plot… it’s
another ok ellipsis moment. Because am I the only one who isn’t a huge fan of
having a big mid-season finale moment and then resolve the whole big
cliffhanger in one episode. Sure we have some hooks for the future, but for now
the Michael storyline has been sort of put on hold… but it felt easy. I mean,
not bad - but… it relied on some
not-exactly-impossible-but-still-a-little-dubious twists and rules in Dean’s
head to make it work. It was… I don’t want to say convoluted per se but it can
definitely seem convoluted on a clear day. There’s a whole lot of plot
convenience there.
Also calling it now -
Jack consumes his soul and goes evil and becomes a big bad at some point
