SPN Georg

No I will never be over the fact this is the only episode we actually hear dragons exist, and they're basically... dudes. I mean, par for the course, but still disappointing just a little bit.

Dean gets to experience having wealth, Sam gets told the truth about his soulless year, Cas is the dingdong who breaks the news (and gosh is he looking ragged too...), and we're into the murky middle of season six. This run of episodes is... not my favorite lol. But here we go.

LINKS!

The Superwiki page

My tag

Filming Locations map

My rewatch notes from July 2019

Interview with Adam Glass

CW Promo video

This is in my top three favorite episodes of the entire series! Enough said!

Okay, fine, I'll say more.

This one asks us several Big Questions and is as vague as Death about the answers. What is a soul even? Who is Sam without his and was existing without his soul *really* living? Or really *Sam*? And what's the larger point of season 6 as a whole? Because yes it really is all about the souls -- souls as a source of power but at what cost? Oh the humanity, etc. And getting a peek at the Larger Cosmic Order and what it means to keep it in balance, as well as what happens when that starts to break down and chaos and destruction ensue... all important concepts in later seasons (Cosmic Consequences!).

LINKS!

The Superwiki Page

My tag

My Rewatch Notes from July 2019

Map of filming locations

Interview with Robert Englund from the time of filming

CW Promo

SpaceTV Promo

SpaceTV Sneak Peek

There's just a lot going on in this one. So much. We get the return of Meg, in an enemy-of-my-enemy situation, we get Samuel and learn the depths to which he's willing to sink to get what he wants, the horror of his current situation, and we learn that Crowley was never able to get Sam's soul out of the cage making all their work for him bringing in monsters to torture (and yeesh to that...) pointless. But at least it looks like Cas is still on their side? >.>

I mean... it FEELS like we're getting to the heart of the truth, it FEELS like at least some of their problems have been resolved, right? *GAME SHOW LOSER BUZZER NOISES*

Welcome to season six... where the second you think you know the truth you fall through a trap door into a deeper layer of falsehoods!

(it's all still incredibly important to the overall narrative, and again, you can only tell that when you already know where this is all leading...)

LINKS!

The Superwiki page

My tag

Filming Locations Map

Promo videos: cw promo, space promo, space sneak peek 1, space sneak peek 2

Some of my thoughts on Cas and Sexuality

Lizbob’s Dean and Cas are in Love series to punch you in the feels

Brett Matthews' original vision for the tentacle monster

I love this one. Even if it ruined Space Oddity for me forever. :'D

It's like nine different crimes against Dean Winchester in a glittery glue bomb. Plus it's also the absolute best Soulless!Sam episode. I do thoroughly enjoy every minute of this episode, though, so I'll just let everyone else go about enjoying it, too and stop yammering in the notes about it. :'D

LINKS!

The Superwiki page

My tag (this episode is so very gif worthy)

this very short post

Filming locations map

An interview with Ben Edlund

CW Promo (leans into the fairy)

SpaceTV Promo (leans into the x-files references)

SpaceTV promo 2 (both ufo’s and fairies!)

And because I can, please have my suggestion for how they could’ve made an awesome fairie case relevant in later canon… Hurry Up And Wait (rated M, bonus destiel, special surprise guests, 22k words, written during early s12)

(except these dogs, because they're actually monsters, but purgatory probably needs doggos too so...)

I am not gonna sugar coat this one. It's... not good lol. Like it's one of the episodes I'd repeatedly forget existed at all until it came back up on the rewatch. Unfortunately I've rewatched the series so many times now that I'm incapable of forgetting it exists now.

Like all the worst episodes, though, there's like three minutes at the end of the episode that's actually too important to overlook as character/meta/overarching narrative plot points, and I did my best to not talk about it out of order. I mean, I had to suffer through this one (several times, thanks to having to edit it lol), so it's only fair that everyone has to hear about the weird dogs.

I do appreciate this one for demonstrating just how not-great Soulless!Sam as a hunter... Since everyone from Bobby to Samuel has been saying all season that Sam has been an incredible hunter over the last year, it's really satisfying to have some direct evidence that hooboy... being uncaring and ruthless is a terrible, terrible hunting strategy. So that's something, I guess.

Anyway, have some LINKS!

The Superwiki Page

My tag

Filming locations map

An interview with Jared and Jensen pre-s6 by KSite TV

CW Promo

SpaceTV Promo

SpaceTV teaser clip

The Campbells are up to some shady shit. The Alpha Vampire gets to break some delightfully terrible news. And oh yeah, Sam popped outta hell wrong!

I think I covered pretty much everything I wanted to in this one, so I’m gonna lay out some puzzling conundrums in this space for everyone to ponder instead:

The Alpha Vampire could tell Sam had no soul at ten paces, but apparently none of the other supernatural beings Sam had encountered in the previous year-plus could tell (or at least none of them bothered to tell ~him~ or any of his cohorts). (obviously leaving out Veritas last week who was shocked he could lie to her, assumed he wasn’t human, but didn’t pick up on the why...) I feel like this was written for a “make for a shocking and badass moment for this episode” while not really considering the wider implications of this statement meant for the cosmology and supernatural beings in their universe on a larger scale.

(maybe because they’re predators vampires have different senses for detecting prey, and more finely honed skills at differentiating what they’re sensing? as opposed to angels and demons who don’t specifically prey on humanity in this way? eh... there’s just so many holes in the logic to poke at! and this is in an episode I generally enjoy!)

It’s never really explained later in canon how the Alpha Vampire survived being taken directly to Crowley for torture, unless Crowley just didn’t have a weapon capable of killing him. Or just like... came to an accord with the Vampire and released him, or the Alpha escaped yet again. He just turns up again next season like nbd. And I have questions :’D

But all that’s not exactly relevant to the episode. What is relevant to this one and upcoming canon for the rest of s6 is that I truly believe this is the first time that Cas actually learns how tragically wrong he’d been in his assumption that he’d rescued Sam from the Cage. (and makes me question the logistics of how that cage rescue actually happened... Crowley-- we’ll learn in later seasons-- had been studying the magic of the cage for his own purposes, he would’ve had access and either granted access to Cas or else yoinked Sam himself and handed him over to Cas to raise from Hell. I just cannot reconcile Cas having done the deed all on his own, all by himself, and *not* realized he’d missed a significant bit. Because he is *genuinely* shaken and disturbed in this episode when he learns the truth about Sam... and it’s one of the main reasons he continues to avoid Dean... guilt, shame, horror...

Anyway, on that cheerful note, please have some LINKS!

The Superwiki Page

My tag

Filming Locations map

CW Promo

SpaceTV Promo

SpaceTV sneak peek

aka truth coming out of her well to punch humanity in the nuts...

Welcome to the brutal, painful truth. Let’s start this week with a trigger warning for suicide and implied offscreen rape of a minor, because even if this show will gloss over stuff like that, I try to give a heads up about it. Because yikes…

Poor Dean has been desperate for the truth all season long, but everyone and everything has stood in his way. And now? he’s about to be kicked, repeatedly and forcefully, with the harshest possible version of the truth on all fronts.

He suffers the consequences of his poor choices in the previous episode regarding Lisa (and again, if Dean was actually Ben’s father, you’d think that would be something she would’ve been compelled to reveal in a Most Painful Possible Way in this episode, but she doesn’t, which is the final nail in my personal coffin for the fandom theory that Ben was really Dean’s kid... but that’s entirely beside the point of this episode, really...)

And we learn the truth that Sam has known all along that something was really wrong with him, and he’s been hiding it. And also unfortunately, Cas only shows up BEFORE Dean gets hit with the truth spell, so we’re still in the dark about what’s actually going on with him, though it is becoming clear that he feels pretty dang bad about it all anyway.

LINKS!

The Superwiki page

My tag

Filming Locations map

CW Promo video

SpaceTV promo video

Space TV sneak peek

I really do hope folks have been looking through my tag every week, but if you’ve fallen behind on reading Lizbob’s Dean and Cas are In Love series, this seems like a good place to start linking those again :’)

Also, since I recorded this episode two weeks ago, and Discord has FINALLY invited me to update my user name, I’m now just plain old mittensmorgul there as well. Come say hi! :)

Dean gets to be a vampire for just long enough to have some awkward homoerotic tension and blow up his relationship with Lisa. We all get clobbered with just how Not Right Sam is behaving, and if seeing it from Dean’s pov isn’t enough, Samuel explains it in complete sentences for us. There’s just nothing subtle about this one, folks... But gosh is it fun to talk about :D

LINKS!

The Superwiki page

My tag

Filming locations map

SpaceTV promo

SpaceTV Sneak Peek clip

Welcome to our favorite director, Jensen Ackles! There’s just so much that happens in this episode, and he did a great job with it. Like a lot of season six, it looks like a fairly straightforward MotW case (or series of cases), but rewatching s6 is so much more interesting when you know where everything is headed.

The monsters are all acting “weird;” something is really really wrong with Sam, and Dean is really worried about it; Bobby finds a way to finagle his soul back from Crowley-- so right there we have lots of hints about the whole season. It’s the souls. And that will still sound like a cryptic statement seven episodes down the line when Death gives Dean that exact warning, but it really does sum up... pretty much all of s6 when you know everything that’s actually happening.

So we get to have some fun this week, learning a little more about Bobby’s life when he’s just at home doing his own thing, we get to enjoy Rufus and Jody again, and we get to meet Bobby’s new neighbor, who I assume immediately moved and never looked back. :’)

LINKS!

The Superwiki page for this episode

My tag

Filming locations map

Sneak Peek promo video

CAS! IS BACK! FINALLY. And also unfortunately just in time to set him up to take the big fall for basically all of s6.... >.>

So much of season six makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE on a rewatch, which is one of the reasons I was so excited to get to this point in the podcast. For folks who’ve never rewatched the series, or maybe only rewatched favorite episodes, hopefully we’re all learning a new appreciation for some of the less-loved parts of canon. But I think we can all agree that Balthazar is very lovable in all his nihilistic hedonism.

Plus we get new lore about angels, souls, and what’s been going on in Heaven for the last year... sort of...

Something is very wrong with Sam, and Dean’s reaching a breaking point about it that will still take multiple episodes to really come to a head, so I do some griping about that s well.

And we learn that Dean and Cas do share a more profound bond (he wasn’t gonna mention it!) in the very episode where (oops!) the handprint mysteriously disappears from Dean’s arm AND we learn about angels being able to lay claims on human souls... so all that’s very interesting, yes?

LINKS!

The Superwiki page for this episode

My tag (about six pages of posts)

Filming locations map

CW Promo