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Supernatural | 13.14 Review

Supernatural - Good Intentions

written by Meredith Glynn, directed by P. J. Pesce

The 14th episode in this season is my least favorite episode written by Meredith Glynn so far. It is one of the main plot-episodes that is supposed to develop thIs season’s overall story, but even though there is quite some development in this episode it feels hollow and - in a way - meaningless.

A universe with empty names

There were a few things that I liked about the story in the Alternate Universe. I liked Jack from the beginning of season 13, so it was nice to see what he’d been up to during these last four episodes. At The core of his story he is quite like Sam – a really sympathetic character who dreams of a safe life with the people he grew to like and who are what he considers family, who wants to protect Mary and the people in the camp, and who’s ready to fight someone like Zachariah and Michael. At the same time he’s not all human and has powers he’s not completely in control. No wonder his story is compelling – it’s a good story. For that reason I liked his naïve assurance that he would never let the AU-angels get to the normal world, and his shadow figures where one of my favorite scenes in this episode.

Bobby telling Mary about her AU version was interesting, too. Not only was it a confirmation that Sam and Dean really saved the normal world, it also gave us the first real comparison between a character and their AU counterpart. And for me that is actually surprising, because it’s not what I would expect from an alternate universe. Of course, it mainly shows us a world that is almost completely destroyed – but what is the story behind it? Who are the people living in this world? We don’t know! They drop a lot of names on us and expect us to care because we used to care for these characters. The only thing is that the AU characters are not the characters we used to know, and just naming them after their counterparts doesn’t make them more interesting. Zachariah in this episode is probably the best example because he was plain boring. Even Kevin and Bobby in the AU don’t really have a character. They are not exactly the Kevin and Bobby that we know, but we don’t see any surprising character traits or differences either. They are – more or less – how you’d expect them to be in that universe, and that is an unsurprisingly boring story idea. In the end, it is an excuse to bring back fan-favorite characters without knowing what to do with them at all.

And one last thing: The special effects for Jack’s powers are really ugly. I’m sure even a small CW show should be able to do better than that.

Search quests

The story in the normal universe brings us two quests – one fake and one real – that involve collecting various things. The first one is made up by Donatello who’s slowly losing his mind, and the result is one of the most ridiculous scenes I’ve ever seen.

I won’t deny that writing random antagonists in an interesting way surely is a challenge, especially when a show like Supernatural has had so many of them already. But Gog and Magog look ridiculous, act ridiculous and had a horribly forced dialogue. And even the fight is not one I’ll come back to re-watch, even though I usually enjoy watching a good fight. That fight just wasn’t good, and the only not-bad-thing about this whole scene was Dean’s amusement and the fact that he won the fight.

The second collection quest that is introduced at the end of the episode is the real deal and it joins a list of quests to find rings, ingredients for killing Leviathans, completing tasks to close the gates of hell, searching for ingredients to get rid of the Mark of Cain… sometimes the story structure does feel a bit like a video game, but as long as the accompanying storyline works, I am okay with that. In this episode however that was not the case.

A mad and soulless body

I feel sorry for Donatello because he used to be a good guy – even without a soul. But losing your soul, getting under a spell of Asmodeus and being corrupted by the demon tablet is enough to bring anyone down. I guess this episode was the last we saw of Donatello. I was surprised to see how well Keith Szarabajka can portray a cray Donatello.

So from what we have seen in this episode, Donatello really is beyond saving. Castiel wanting to kill him to get a new prophet sounds logical, because a corrupted Donatello without a soul is not exactly what you would call human. So the Winchesters being so very upset about Castiel’s actions in this episode really felt more like the writer trying to create some drama, and not because it makes any sense for the characters.

War is coming, apparently

But the Winchesters are not the only ones with strange motivations. While I am glad to see Castiel acting a bit more like a soldier, his reasons for suddenly doing so are not convincing. Castiel hasn’t met the Michael from the Alternate Universe yet, he hasn’t really seen anything that Michael did and all that Castiel knows about him he knows from Lucifer – who he knows he can’t trust. In fact, he was killed by Lucifer not too long ago, so if he was actually more scared by Lucifer than by Michael, that would be understandable. Lucifer being afraid of Michael might seem scary to Castiel, but is that enough for him to predict war and to ignore Sam’s and Dean’s wishes? It all feels a bit too vague to cause any character development.

The multi cast, featuring Sam & Dean

The most disappointing part of this episode was that even when Sam and Dean were on screen they didn’t get anything really meaningful to do. As in previous episodes they are there to connect different plotlines and other character arcs so that it makes a show, but not having them in this episode wouldn’t have made much of a difference. They have their little it-is-the-middle-of-the-season-so-we-wait-until-a-solution-comes-around talk, and their emotional state is more or less whatever the writers need them to be.

Remember when Dean threatened a girl at gun point because he was so worried about Mary? Remember how depressed Sam was because he couldn’t believe that they could save Mary? Why are they suddenly so relaxed about the situation? There is a brief moment where we Sam seems to be more depressed again, but aside from that there is no real emotional involvement from the Winchesters in this episode. Sure, there is a repetitive who-are-you-doing-question for Castiel, an amused-by-loincloths from Dean, that tiny bit of depression for Sam and that weird worrying about a soulless and corrupted body. But it’s all very superficial and doesn’t go anywhere.

Of course, side characters need some character development, too. But I think it would work a lot better if that were to happen alongside the main characters’ development and stories, and not instead of them.

Going back to my opening statement that this episode felt hollow - here is why it felt like that to me: there is no good exploration of why people feel and act like they do, and the two main characters that you usually connect the most to barly have anything to do at all. Sure, they go on their assigned quests and are upset about whatever the show rolled the dices on, but that is not enough to make me care about what happened here.

#SPN #Supernatural #SPN review #SPN13 #spn 13x14 #spn spoilers #review

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