Golly, I spend this whole podcast talking about the pointlessness of revenge, but that’s rather conditional. And specifically in this case, in s4 overall, and every other revenge arc that comes to failure in this entire series, that condition is ACTUALLY KNOWING THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SITUATION!

Blind revenge is always doomed to fail. These ghouls enacted this massive plot for revenge against John Winchester, not even knowing he’d died more than two years before. This was entirely a situation of their own making. They could’ve gone on the rest of their lives just doing their ghoul thing and never come to the attention of hunters, let alone Sam and Dean. But nope, they set out on this mission without having all the facts, and paid the price for it.

Just like Sam and Dean in all of s4. Sam’s on this revenge mission against Lilith, is absolutely convinced he’s doing the right thing, and only with our benefit of hindsight know just how incomplete their data set is going into it. They’re literally spending the entire season working on the wrong problem, by design! And they end up manipulated into exactly the situation they’d spent the season trying to avoid. If only they’d had all the facts up front...

So yeah, revenge, ghouls, the Winchester Brother who was never intended to join the narrative in any larger way, to have died before his first appearance on screen. And round and round we go with the emotional manipulation! Right into the apocalypse.

Bonus materials for this episode:

The Superwiki page for this episode

My tag for this episode

A brief interview with Dabb about this episode from the official s4 companion book

An interview with Jake Abel from the official Supernatural magazine

Rewatch notes from June 2019

The CW 20 second Promo video for this episode

If you need to see it, here’s Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli jumping the shark. They REALLY dragged this out :’D