Supernatural S.8 Ep.8 recap!!

*Spoilers Ahead*

Remember the days of sitting in front of the television watching your favorite cartoons, laughing and enjoying the animated antics of those zany characters and their shenanigans? Remember when one of them would be hit with a frying pan and their face outline would be stuck it or watch them turn to ash after a stick of dynamite explodes in their face? Well, that was the theme of last night’s Supernatural. It starts with a man who sees a cute girl then suddenly his heart leaps from his chest. While at a gas station, Castiel is reading an article about the incident. Dean asks him about returning to Heaven but Castiel says he doesn’t want to have anything to do with Heaven. Instead, he makes the decision to become a hunter with Sam and Dean. “Their” first case takes them to the morgue to the man the article referred to. There, Castiel begins sniffing the body and begins giving details of the victim’s ailments. Of course, Sam and Dean, having done this for far longer, have all the necessary details outlined in short session. As the episode progressed, the focus has shifted from Dean and what happened in Purgatory to Sam and Castiel and their personal issues.

Castiel is still haunted by his actions in Heaven, stating that he “vaporized” thousands of his fellow angels while he was possessed by the Leviathan. Dean lends his ear to his angel friend. However, what Cas doesn’t know is that Heaven has apparently restored order during his absence, with the enigmatic (and strangely creepy) Naomi replacing the deposed Zachariah as Heaven’s head paper-pusher. After listening to Sam’s speech to Fred Jones, Cas realizes he can’t keep running away from what he did in Heaven and wants back in to face his demons, but Naomi forbids him to return yet she wants to keep tabs on him. What are her true motives? Is she loyal to Castiel because of his actions before the Leviathan incident or does she want to avoid a revolt because of his actions during the Leviathan incident?

Sam now has plenty of extra baggage in the way of nearly leaving his life of hunting to pursue a life of normalcy and failing to protect Kevin Tran from Crowley and failing to find a way to get his brother, who has saved his tail on plenty of occasions (he even went to Hell for him), out of Purgatory and basically stop saving lives (as Sam has preached many times over) altogether. Sam has bumped heads with Dean over his giving up hunting ever since Dean’s escape from Purgatory as the start of this season. Guess it makes sense considering Dean has already tried to lead a normal life way back in Season 5. Needless to say, it didn’t work out. The same can be true for Sam as well. After his speech to Fred, even he has to realize that he can’t keep running from his loss of Dean a year ago and what happened with the Trans. The whole white picket fence and two-car garage thing isn’t for him. Being with his brother and dealing with the creatures that go bump in the night is Sam’s true calling. It would suck for him if there was another incident with Amelia that involved Crowley just like the one with Jessica and the Yellow-eyed demon back at the start of the series.

As I mentioned before, this episode took a humorous turn with a man named Fred Jones whose psycho-kinetic abilities allow him to actually bend reality. Fred spends his days in a retirement home watching classic cartoons which tend to activate this ability. The caretaker of the home has harnessed Fred’s reality-distorting ability to commit robberies at local banks. Those caught within range were affected in the way of a security guard who attempts to stop the robbery at a bank before being crushed by a falling anvil and a suicidal man, who walks off the roof of a building, hangs in the air for a few seconds and falls only when he looks down.

But the true comedic highlights go to Castiel as he tries to adjust to humanity. He was livelier in this episode than in the past with him sniffing a dead body to his questioning a talking cat (who I hope will make a surprise return) and his off-the-wall interrogation of a woman which he might have picked up from watching one too many episodes of CSI. It was nice to see him break his Jack Webb mold for Christopher Walken in “7 Psychopaths”. I hope the writers continue to come up with ideas to keep Castiel incorporated in the storyline enough to keep him fresh and not have him an instant problem solver for the Winchesters. Comedic props also go to Dean who was given the chance to express himself whether it is hitting himself with a book and hearing birds chirping or getting smacked in the face with a frying pan and have his facial outline cast into it. However, this isn’t the first time Dean was given a funny moment. Remember when he lip-synched to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”?

I like an episode like this that take a break from all the scary stuff and gives us something a bit milder. I hope Castiel will continue to play out as Sam and Dean’s “third wheel” hunter.

Dean funny moment.