Review - Supernatural 7x02: Hello Cruel World

Grade: B

Cas is gone, but Dr. Sexy M.D. is still on the air. Somehow, the Winchester’s world just got a little bit darker.

I want to take a moment to lament what is, ostensibly, the last we’ll see of Cas for a while, hopefully. When Bobby asks Dean how he’s holding up in the face of Sam’s hallucinations, the rise of the Leviathans, and the “death” of Cas, he mentions that Dean just lost one of the best friends he’d ever had. Hindsight being 20/20, Bobby’s right. For the past couple of seasons, Cas and Dean were, at times, closer than Sam and Dean, despite Cas’ weak grasp of human emotion. So, when Dean fishes Cas’ trenchcoat out of a river after Cas explodes into an ink stain and releases the Leviathans into the local water supply, it’s a tough moment. Cas was a welcome counterpoint to the brother’s constant angst. His lack of any discernable emotion besides confusion was necessary in a series that saw its leads become more hopeless with every episode. Cas wasn’t the brightest sign of hope, but he was never trapped in his own despair like the Winchesters do.

Now, it seems like the fellas won’t be getting that break Dean was looking for last episode because the Leviathans are loose and they’ve already started wreaking havoc. The Leviathans are essentially a cross between Supernatural’s demons and vampires. They possess any unlucky souls who, in this case, ingested the polluted water then they maneuver themselves into positions and places where they can unlock their bottom jaw and become Pez-like people eaters. Like Supernatural’s demons, these new beasties have a pecking order. Apparently, there’s a Big Bad leviathan behind everything, but he/she/it is relaying its orders through a leviathan inhabiting the man who was once The Shield’s Capt. Aceveda (Benito Martinez). A few more leviathans have possessed a pair of teens from a local swim team and another inhabits an innocent young girl. In an effort to circumvent the pattern of Supernatural’s baddies being young women, the little lady leviathan quickly switches to the body of a cheeky surgeon.

The leviathans’ need to satiate themselves leaves a trail of bodies that hits the news, landing them right on the Winchesters’ radar. Normally, this is the point where Sam and Dean mount up for one of their DIY-style hunts, but our boys have learned from their past mistakes. Sam fesses up to his hallucinations, letting Dean and Bobby know exactly how bad it’s been. Dean is only shocked for a second before he benches Sam, and Sam agrees. All the while, Lucifer—Mark Pellegrino delivering finely-tuned villainy that tiptoes between unnerving and hammy—is poking at Sam—who is spending most of his time field stripping and cleaning his guns—urging the poor kid to kill himself and rejoin him in the cage. It occurs to me that Sam has been constantly besieged by mental torment since the first episode, and now, seven seasons deep, is no different. As much as Dean needed that break from hunting last season to live a normal life, I can’t help but think Sam needs it a lot more. While any Supernatural vet knows the boys will always face torment, with Sam more often than not getting the lion’s share, this feels like a retread of many of the Sam arcs from years past, but this time, at least, the brothers have learned enough to avoid avoidance and try to head the problem off.
With Sam benched, Dean on the hunt and Leviathans on the loose, everything seems totally disjointed until Bobby gets a call from Sheriff Jody Mills, last seen in Season Five’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. See, Sheriff Mills was in the Sioux Falls, SD hospital for a routine appendectomy when she spotted LeviaDoc kidnapping his dinner. Bobby wisely leaves Sam by his lonesome and thus at the mercy of Lucifer, who lures Sam to an abandoned warehouse tailor made for suicides. Dean arrives just in time to pull Sam back, thanks to dropping a GPS on him earlier in the episode. This all sets up the standard Winchester heart-to-heart albeit with a lot more honesty than the average post-game wrap between these two. Of course the post-game wrap came about ten minutes early so there was more left to this fairly stuffed episode.

When the boys get back to Bobby’s, they run into Captain Leviathian who gives Sammy a pipe to the head before Dean manages to drop a car on him. Worse for the wear after their first run-in with the Leviathan, Dean and Sam end up in a ambulance on its way to Sioux Falls Hospital while, back at Bobby’s, Captain Leviathan proves that dropping a car on them isn’t enough to slow a leviathan.

This episode was mostly a place setting ep. Hello Cruel World merely put all the players in place and set the stage for the conflict between the Winchesters and the Leviathans that will form the spine of the season. Compared to last year, this is a much more serialized approach, which isn’t a bad route for a series as seasoned as Supernatural. I know and most longtime viewers know that eventually Supernatural will get around to the one-off episodes that are its bread and butter, but, for now, this is a solid way to build the season. Hopefully, the Leviathan arc won’t get buried, forgotten like some of the major arcs introduced early last season. As long as the writers keep with this momentum, we’re looking at the beginning of one of Supernatural’s most promising seasons.

Review - Supernatural 7x01: Meet the New Boss

Grade: A

Dean’s right. The Winchesters never catch a break, do they?

Supernatural returned last night and started right where it left off with Castiel having become ‘God’ after absorbing all the souls in purgatory.

One of the most priceless moments of the premiere was Bobby’s reaction to GodCas. Upon realizing that he and the Winchesters are completely outmatched, he kneels. Dean and Sam promptly follow suit. It qualifies as maybe one the smarter things the guys have done and one that is slyly funny because, heck, that’s what most people would do.

After subduing Sam by poking at the walls Death erected to protect Sam’s mind from his memories of Hell, GodCas goes a mission from God to make things right in the world, a totally Cas thing to do. His first stop is at church where a fiery anti-gay preacher is whipping his flock into a frenzy against those ‘degenerates’. Cas arrives, announces he’s God and proceeds to smite the preacher in the way that only the God of the Old Testament would savor. Later, he forces the KKK to disband and restores sight to a blind man. You’ve got to love Cas for at least making an effort to do some good with the Power Cosmic.

Meanwhile, the Winchesters are, in a change of pace, resigned to their fate. Dean, clearly stumped at how to beat God despite their track record with taking on deities, is convinced they’re out of options, while Sam is haunted by visions of his time in the cage with Lucifer and Michael. Sam’s visions are quite reminiscent of those that plagued Dean after his stint in the eternal boiler room—all hooks, chains, and flame. At this point, it’s abundantly clear that Sera Gamble and the good people in the Supernatural writer’s room will never, ever let Sam go even half a season without excruciating torment. That said, it’s hard to blame Dean for feeling like giving up is the best option. No matter where the Winchesters go or what good they do, some higher power, real and/or fictional, has it out for them. But, there’d be no show if the Winchesters didn’t suffer, so here we are. As much as I love Supernatural and kind of wish it would never disappear, I’d like to see the guys catch a break and sometimes it seems like cancellation would be the only way they would get a reprieve.

As the Winchesters lick their wounds, Cas visits the we-always-think-he’s-dead-but he-never-is Crowley. He strikes a deal to restore Crowley as King of Hell with the condition that Cas gets to choose which souls go where. Sounds familiar. I love how the writers at Supernatural actually maneuvered Cas into striking the exact biblical deal the real ‘God’ enforced with Lucifer. Clever those writers are.

Cas obviously has a plan, but he has never been known to be particularly strategic or subtle. When word of Cas’ exploits spreads, the Winchesters finally stop their moping and devise a plan of their own, with some urging by Crowley, to ‘enlist’ the aid of the one force that can stop God, Death. Now, the Winchesters typically come up with some dumb plans—in the sense that their plans are often fly by the seat of their pants bold—but their plan to bind Death, with some old-fashioned spellcasting, and use him to kill Cas might not have been their wisest. Once Cas finds the boys and the recently bound Death, he is visibly disappointed that he’s going to have to kill his old ‘pets’. Cas promptly un-binds Death, but Death notices that Cas is physically falling apart. Apparently, Cas can’t control all the things in heaven, earth and purgatory that man never dreamt of. The worse of those beasties being the ominously named, vaguely–defined Leviathans, who apparently predate humanity. Dinosaurs on Supernatural? They’ve had dragons, so why not? Despite this demoralizing new knowledge, Cas promptly un-binds Death and disappears to enact more divine justice.

While I’m 50-50 on if the Leviathans are actually a reference to dinosaurs, it’s obvious from Death’s response that they’re not to be taken lightly. Cas’ struggle to control the souls inside culminates with him massacring an entire office of political staffers for a congressional candidate he deemed as evil. Cas has always been a moral absolutist—in fact, his struggle to see the gray in the world has been a source of some the series’ best examples of character development—but mass murder is beyond the pail. Thankfully, Death dropped a bit of knowledge that could help the Winchesters and Cas before he goes even further. All Cas has to do is release the souls back to Purgatory. No problem.

The Winchesters draw Cas back to the abandoned hospital where he absorbed the souls of Purgatory and open a portal—more spellcasting here than on The Secret Circle—for Cas to toss the souls into. Everything seems on track until Sam goes missing. The walls in his mind have completely collapsed and Lucifer appears to tell Sam that he’s still locked in the cage. Dun-dun-dun. On the other side of the hospital, Cas successfully releases the souls, dies and returns as everbody’s favorite simple-minded Cas. But, Cas didn’t get rid of all the souls. One of the Leviathans held on and now Cas is possessed, and he’s already starting to ham it up with classic madman villainy. Knowing Supernatural’s propensity to drag out the conflict between the boys and the big bad—and the fact that Misha Collins isn’t a regular this season—it’s likely the brothers won’t be going head-to-head with LeviathanCas anytime soon, which is sad because it would be nice to see a different side to Cas, even if he is at the Winchester’s throats.

And with that, the season is off to an impressive start, especially compared to the more deliberate opening of last season. Gamble and Co. really set the bar with this opening and managed to do a lot in 43 minutes. Not only have they established a viable opponent with a personal connection to the Winchesters, they accelerated the issue of Sam’s growing madness and set Crowley up as a potential thorn in everyone’s side. Sure, some of these beats are just continuations of arcs that could have, and probably should have, been wrapped last season, but the momentum these arcs have right now is pretty fascinating. Hopefully, Supernatural will avoid some of the feet-dragging and tonal swings that defined last season and embrace the madness. And, if they keep up the momentum from this episode, not only will our boys never get a break, but we might be staring down the barrel of season 8. But, that’s just wishful thinking...