SPN Georg

The penultimate episode of any season ramps up the drama, but hooboy, this one is made of angst! We’re closing in on the end of Chuck’s One Perfect Season, where everything worked perfectly for his story from start to finish. At least he’s never really gonna meet with this much success ever again (because 15.20 doesn’t count lol). Sam’s in demon detox, Cas is doing Heaven’s errands, and Dean is br...

Poor Jimmy Novak. And poor Sam. And poor Dean. And poor Amelia and Claire. And honestly, poor Cas. Poor dude just got heaven-tortured into a mental reboot. All those "doorways to doubt" have been slammed shut, and his compassion for humanity has been erased. (don't worry, he'll get that back eventually) As for Sam, his whole bleak secret gets exposed in the worst way possible (driven into withdraw...

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 Wi...

Welcome to Chuck’s story. Was Chuck written deliberately to eventually grow into the Overarching Big Bad of the entire series? I really doubt it. Does it work perfectly anyway? Yes, yes it does. And because of that, rewatching this episode with the clarity of hindsight becomes a transformative experience. Oh Chuck, I see what you did there... you cruel, capricious god (who really should’ve been pr...

Gosh I love this episode. It throws the viewer off balance wondering what the heck is actually going on, right up to the end when Zachariah boops Dean and all the rest of us back to “reality” and washes the bright colors away again. The real hunt/case of this episode isn’t the ghost Sam and Dean learn to deal with, it’s whatever the heck Zachariah’s actually up to with the entire charade. And...

This... is a big one. This is the episode where I first sat up and realized why Cas stuck around, why he became such an important and beloved character (s7 was airing at the time of my first watch, if you needed context for that). His entire character arc for the rest of the series pretty much takes off right here. But the seeds of his entire relationship with Dean are also planted here. This was...

RIP Pamela. RIP Dean beginning to feel even remotely good about himself. RIP Sam’s secrets (well... soon... we the audience have seen a glimpse, but Dean is still getting stonewalled...) This is a hard episode, and even more so because it follows several MotW episodes and wrenches us back into the big mytharc plots. But also because we can watch Sam completely abandon the concept of being “ca...

Did someone say queer Dean content? Because we have some of that here... Truly there’s been so much written about this episode, strictly about Dean and his sexuality, that I’m gonna take one little paragraph here to say that the surface-level parallels (including the vast majority of the THEN segment of this episode) are all sending up flaming red flags about Sam and what he’s secretly up to with...

Poor Sam thought he completely understood the situation when he was a freshman in high school, but fifteen years later from an adult perspective things look very, very different. And doesn’t this just define a big part of Sam? This burden of guilt he carries for so many things that aren’t really his fault, yet he still feels responsible for? Owwww. Granted, this theme pretty much sums up the mytha...

Disclaimer: I have no idea what kind of person the actual Criss Angel is, but the dollar store version of him in this episode is most definitely a douchebag. They don’t let us forget! It’s like this episode was written to test the network censor’s last nerve over how many times they could say “douchebag” in a single episode. :’D Sometimes when I’m editing an episode, I have to stop and debate...

I know this is an episode that a lot of people forget exists (or really try to forget it exists). But for how truly terrible the rest of this episode is, that final scene with Sam and Dean under the bridge is *critical* to Dean’s character, and understanding the breaking point of s4, as well as Dean’s arc going forward. For like... the rest of the series. So yeah, I’m mad it’s at the tail end of a...

If their ability to find an escape hatch out of this one irritated Chuck, I can’t help but imagine that’s at least part of what pushes him in 4.18 to “write himself into the story,” you know? When does Chuck ever show up in the story, when the Winchesters could really use a helping hand from a loving God? Nah. Well, maybe a little bit... but mostly it’s when they’re finding loopholes in the s...

aka that one where Chuck submitted fic to a bang because he wanted art for it I joke, but... it’s kinda like he was trying to fill in those missing months while Dean was in Hell a little bit, and then Anna was forced to beta it, and illustrated a few scenes. Yes, this is a two-parter that ends on a big cliffhanger, and it’s not even a midseason finale, let alone a season finale. We go right into t...

I am so personally partial to episodes wherein Sam and Dean experience maximum wtf, which so often defines Edlund episodes. Especially as the series continues and they have leveled up so much since the early days of “this is so far out of our paygrade” for every little monster they run across. Sometimes knocking them completely off balance is the best way to shake loose important character de...

What I consider to be the beginning of Castiel’s arc toward truly understanding Free Will and eventually accepting it for himself, this episode is packed with things that will become central tenets of the show for the rest of the series. Considering this is Julie Siege’s first episode, and she only wrote a total of six episodes over two seasons, her impact on the core of the narrative of the entir...

Where everything is scary. Poor Dean is infected with Ghost Sickness, forced to experience the fear of a murdered man. He’s infected not because he’s a dick, not because he uses fear as a weapon or scares people because of his job, because Sam does all of that too. He’s infected because he’s buried a terrible secret about himself-- one that he feels ashamed of. Times like this I’m glad I do an&nbs...

Aah, I love Ben Edlund. This one feels, in retrospect, like a microcosm view of the Grand Narrative of Supernatural as Chuck’s story. I could probably do a thesis paper on this episode, but instead I kept the podcast version under an hour... I mean, the queercoding in this one ALONE, the direct commentary on the Hays Code shoved into every level of the storytelling from the surface “black and...

Major important developments, ahoy! Dean discovers what Sam has been up to with Ruby since he was dragged to Hell, and he is not impressed. If it was all so great-- as Sam has desperately tried to convince himself-- then why hide it from Dean? From everyone? Why completely cut even Bobby out of his life completely and lie about Ruby? Sam attempts to justify his choices and actions, but savvy viewe...

Or at least, In the Beginning as it stands in canon until we find out about the earliest events in creation... but this is early enough to be getting on with for the current storyline. :’D Sam is barely even in this one, off doing shady shit with Ruby. Dean is told to “stop it,” but not what “it” is. He assumes it’s something to do with his parents, something that happened in the past, a...

Aah, and episode where Dean doesn’t get any pie, but instead is handed an existential crisis! After wrestling with issues about his belief in angels and then God, he comes to the conclusion that if God is real, then he has to be a jerk, because why would he let all this awful stuff happen to people? And that is a very valid question. Cas talks him through it in a way that provides zero comfort, an...

HERE WE GO! We all know what this one is. This is the one where the destiel starts! and some other stuff happens, but come on folks... WE GET CAS NOW! Watching him grow into the person we will know at the end of the series is an absolutely glorious journey I’m thrilled to talk about with everyone now. :D As promised in the podcast, I have a lot more reference posts for folks to read this week, and...

Aah, the end of season three. Maybe it’s not exactly where the writers intended to end up (with six planned episodes slashed from the season), but hooboy does this one pretty effectively set up Sam’s entire arc in s4... and honestly? When we understand what Sam was originally intended to sacrifice of himself to save Dean from going to Hell, I really REALLY appreciate s4 for what we got instead. So...

And once again, I realized I left something out of the podcast that could probably be a whole episode on its own... the tagline on my title card this week. In this episode, we learn that John had hunted Doc Benton years ago, probably in the 80′s when he first became a hunter. He cut out Benton’s heart and thought the job was done. Clearly it was not. Over the years, we learn of so many of these ol...

Here at the tail end of strike-shortened season 3, where multiple plotlines of the early season have been put on the back burner to await development in s4 (notably Sam and his demon powers, and the temptation to go to the dark side) in capitulation to the fact they wouldn’t have enough time to develop them fully to save Dean from Hell... instead we dive headlong into the unavoidable and turn the...

A little meta statement on the Writer’s Strike and a genre shift from the Reality TV format back into the standard scripted drama of the overarching Supernatural narrative. Sam and Dean actually curse! The Ghostfacers think what they’re experiencing is “reality,” but from our perspective already entrenched in the Supernatural world of Sam and Dean, we can see how little they really understand...