SUPERNATURAL: Sam, Interrupted

It’s been a long, long time since we last saw the Winchesters and at last they are back on our televisions. Let me preface this by saying that I really enjoyed the episode – it had a unique feel to it and some amazingly funny moments – but I have to say that I found it a bit jarring to go into such a standalone, light episode after the devastation of the fall finale. I know that the issues of the finale were acknowledged in this episode, but I guess I just felt like the first episode back would be a really, really heavy one after Jo and Ellen’s sacrifice and the implications of Lucifer and Sam’s discussion. Having said that, this was a solid hour of television that managed to both freak me the eff out and crack me up. Just how I like my Supernatural.

Well, we might as well get this out of the way, because I’m sure it’s what we’re all thinking: PUDDING!!! I mean, come ON. That was so out of left field and so funny that I think that the first time I saw it, my jaw just dropped. And then I laughed for about five minutes. I think it was the sound effects as Jensen was swinging to and fro that particularly got to me. It’s the small details like that that really show they care. In case anyone missed that scene:

Essentially, we had a monster of the week (a Wraith) that’s passing as human and has set up shop in a mental institution – a perfect ground zero for a monster that feeds on brain juice and needs a constant supply of crazies (because nobody questions a rash of suicides in a mental hospital). How disgusting was her extraction method?? It was like a unicorn horn gone evil. Things got even more disgusting when Sam broke the thing off and it was spurting blood and the Wraith started shrieking. Actually, things got really gross when Sam inspected the body in the morgue by inserting a probe into the neck hole (technical term) to find that the hole extended all the way to the brain – gah! For a minute I thought I was watching Bones or something.

I liked that Sam and Dean used the truth to get admitted to the joint, because really, what sounds crazier than the lives of Sam and Dean? Of course, there needed to be a hurdle to prevent them from taking the Wraith down easy-peasy (because this stuff is something they could do in their sleep by now, right?) so the Wraith infected the boys, which made them go a little crazy themselves. Of course, this being Supernatural, Sam and Dean’s version of crazy consists of their neuroses being majorly amplified to drive the point home that ‘hey guys, you feel super guilty and there’s a crushing weight of responsibility on your shoulders’. Yes, important points both, but I think that this horse died a while ago, and beating it any longer just seems redundant, am I right?

One thing we got that we don’t get nearly enough of is Sam and Dean wearing something other than jeans, flannels and leather jackets. Don’t get me wrong, I love their uniforms, but it’s nice to see them veer from the norm once and a while. I am officially a big fan of the hospital pants/white t-shirt combo, and I know a lot of you are too from perusing Twitter last night. Am I just really slow to notice these things, or is Padalecki suddenly ginormous? He’s totally got the exaggerated proportions of a prince in a modern Disney movie. Yowza.

This episode pretty perfectly encapsulated one of the things that SUPERNATURAL does best; they create a fantastic horror movie every week with great acting and writing. The scenes where Dean and Sam were having their psychotic breaks made me completely panicky in a good way, and there was plenty of gore to keep sickos like me happy/grossed out. I still maintain that I would have preferred this after an ep where they actually address some of the really very important things that are going on around them (ya know, like the end of the world or whatever), but hey…we can’t control everything. Overall I’d say that not a lot actually happened, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Now, here are some quotes and other bits that I loved:

• Dean being told he and Sam had to attend separate group sessions because of their dangerously co-dependent relationship

• Dean telling Sam he’d been “thraped” – if only the doctor had been Tobias Fünke, Analrapist! I’m so using that word from now on when someone makes me talk about something that I’m happy to pretend doesn’t exist.

• Sam on drugs = hilarious.

• Was that Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite playing Martin? He’s so familiar but Uncle Rico’s imdb page has no mention of Supernatural.

Next week, I can’t figure out what the heck is going on – it looks like another standalone episode, but with this show you never know. It’s called “Swap Meat”, and involves a body switcheroo (although not Sam and Dean swapping with each other, which I’m kind of disappointed about because that would have been gold). Anyhow, here’s the preview:

So tell me what you thought of the episode – yay or nay? Were you expecting something more mythology-based like me? Are you ready to just get on with the big stories and leave the one-offs behind? Will you ever eat pudding again without thinking of Dean? Head down to the comments, and if you’re so inclined, follow me on Twitter: @TONicole