I was slightly disappointed with this episode, solely because I don’t like its placement in the season. Overall, the episode itself is pretty good and I enjoyed it immensely. It’s an interesting way to integrate Chinese mythology into the show and show how all wishes do end up turning bad. I guess my main problem with the episode as a whole is the tone. We started the season off with 4 brilliantly dark and eerier myth-arc episodes and then had 2 snarky stand-alones. This was followed by a seasonal myth-arc and then followed by another snark-infested stand-alone? The first third of the season seems a little snark heavy, which makes me wonder if overall they’re aiming for a more light-hearted tone to provide the boys with some truly golden comedic moments (Sam’s scene where he loses his show down the gutter will forever remain in my memory), or if they’ve simply piled the snark into the beginning so we can go for a truly dark good vs evil showdown with no relief. Either road I’m not too happy with.
Anyway, jumping straight in we find the boys at each other’s throats again as Sam tries to get Dean to admit he remembers hell, while Dean’s just pissed off Castiel was too confused by his own recent actions to admit how well he fills out his jeans. Well, it could be true. Have you seen the way those 2 look at each other?
Ok ok, Dean is quite obviously hiding something, considering he’s attempting to down his own weight in alcohol there. Yeah Dean, I’m sure Sam won’t realise anything is out of the ordinary. Sam finds them the case, where a ghost was seen lurking at a women’s health club, so of course Dean immediately rushes off to save the women, obviously not realising the vast majority of women to be found at a women’s health club aren’t the pretty young slim things he enjoys ogling, but a large variety of women, all shapes and sizes.
Then again, this is TV land, therefore all the women are young and pretty. My bad!
They arrive and find nada. NO sulphur, not racks, nothing. Sam’s a little bit weirded out by a couple making out in the restaurant while he talks to the girl, and they see a little boy gets taunted by bullies, which Dean seems to find hilarious. Once a bully, always a bully it seems. Which seems odd, because Dean has always been the defender of defenceless kids. Anyway they seem to think nothing strange is going on until they hear about Big Foot. They track Big Foot down, although he’s apparently robbed a local store, taking booze and porn.
Funnily enough, it’s a young girl who returns the porn and booze with a note saying sorry. Most peculiar indeed. They track her back to her house where they find out her name is Audrey and she tells them her teddy bear is sick. Yes it was…a giant teddy bear. A man-size, walking, talking, melancholic, suicidal emo teddy bear. Who doesn’t understand why he’s on this planet to which Audrey exasperatedly yells, “For tea parties!”
Excuse me while I decide whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity. I think I’ll LMFAO. Because this teddy is just….ok, this bit is hilarious.
So, they find out her parents wished to be in Bali and errr..vanished, and she wished for her teddy bear to be alive to play with. So they traipse down to the Chinese restaurant where the wishing well is and Dean tests it out by wishing for a footlong Italian sub, which miraculously appears and Dean immediately chows down. Sam refuses to make a wish, stating they have no idea what’s going on. When the proprietor of course gets unhappy, they decide to reveal themselves as health and safety inspectors and shut down the restaurant, drain the fountain and figure out what makes it magical. What they find is a coin stuck to the bottom of the well. Which they can’t get out, but Sam gets a copy of it and they traipse off to find out what it is…well Sam traipse off to find out what it is as Dean suddenly gets food poisoning from his sub.
So we get to the heart of the episode – you can’t always get what you want. Wishes turn bad. And I thought we already covered this in season 2 with the Djinn. Although this episode does deal with a slightly different aspect of the whole situation.
So they have to find the first person who put the coin there. In the meantime we see how other people are coping with their wishes gone bad. The ghost in the women’s club? A horny teenager who asked for invisibility. He ends up being run over by Dean – although why ws he lying in the middle of the road, I still can’t udnerstand. Teddy decides to kill himself, cocking the gun in his mouth, lovingly whispering, goddbye cruel world, pulling the trigger….and then erupting into wails of agony because he’s made out of stuffing and guns do no damage! Heh. Oh dear. That is funny. What an emo bear.
The little kid getting bullied is now super-strong and goes to beat up the other bullies, and starts taking it out on everyone around him. The couple getting all cutesy who announces their engagement? Well, he made the first wish, wanting her to notice him…only now she won’t leave his side. They find the guy, and drag him away from the girlfriend to take him back to the restaurant in order to reverse all the wishes but he doesn’t want to, because everything he wanted has come true. Dean decides to go deal with the kid and amusingly get beaten up while Sam takes Wes on to the restaurant..and is then struck by lightning. Wow. Is Sam trying to catch up to his brother’s tally? He’ll have to die a hell of a lot more in roder to come anywhere close to Dean. So the besotted girlfriend wanted him to stop interfering with their love life at which point Wes realises how wrong this is. He pulls out the coin and it all stops and goes back to normal.
And then on the pier Dean admits to Sam he does remember everything from hell. He remembers every last detail and he won’t tell Sam anything. Sam wants to udnerstand what his brother went through, what he faced in order to help him but Dean can’t make him understand. According to Dean, there is no way Sam could ever understand so there is no point in trying to explain it. And I can udnerstand it. It’s hell. It’s meant to be the worst of all our fears, the last place you could possibly end up. It’s something to fear to aspire toe scape one, and while my idea of hell is not the same as yours, it’s definitely nowhere anybody actively seeks to spend time.
I love this analogy with Dean as a returning soldier. I imagine war would be a lot like hell, a certain type of hell. This whole mini-arc has been beautifully scripted and extremely well played out, with Dean as the returning soldier whose seen horrors one can’t imagine, and his younger brother who jsut wants to udnerstand but never can. Because things like hell, like war, like famine, there is no way a person can truly understand unless they’ve seen it for themselves, unless they’ve experienced that. It’s part of what makes it hell.
Unfortunately, this also apparently clsoes off Dean’s little arc of returning from hell and I believe we move into Sam’s arc of dealing with Dean’s death and going all dark side, which….no fair. I want to know what hell was like for Dean, and exactly why Castiel pulled him back out (besides his body and pretty, pretty eyes). I hope those answers will be along shortly, but most importantly, there better be a better bloody reason than to save Sam, because I’ll be pissed if Dean’s sole goal his entire freaking lfie is to save Sam.
After recapping, I forgot how much I enjoyed this episode. I can haz moar Supernatural, nowz, plz?
