Well, Supernatural started to roar to a close and then sort of tiptoed up to it and went “boo!” In the process, Castiel went completely off the deep end into “Kneel before Zod” territory, and Sam had to reassemble himself via dreamscape. And that was just the last hour. The first hour of what really wasn’t so much a two-parter as a programming glitch, wrote out Lisa and Ben, or rather, wrote out Dean from their memory. And Bobby’s professor ex-GF, Eleanor, actually had quite the skeleton in her closet and its reveal gets her killed. Nobody really finished up in a good place.
Episode 21 was called “Let It Bleed,” and it rejiggered the backstory by introducing that H.P. Lovecraft had previously jiggled the lock on purgatory and let something through, but the exodus stopped at one. While the boys and Bobby are finding this out, Lisa and Ben are kidnapped, and her new boyfriend is killed by Crowley’s crew. Dean starts working his way through torture porn again to find out where they are. He also asks Balthazar to help. Eventually the boys catch up, Lisa gets possessed and says unspeakable things to and about Ben so Dean shoots her to get the demon out. Ben also finally gets to handle a gun and they all get out alive.
Separately, Bobby finds out that the boogey man released at H.P. Lovecraft’s 1937 soiree disposed of all the partiers one by one over the next year and the only survivor was the housekeeper’s son. He goes to visit the (now elderly) son, who tells him his tale. When Bobby offers condolences on the loss of the man’s mother, he thanks him, and sadly tells Bobby he’s the only person ever to do that. Then he hands Bobby a picture of his mother, and Bobby’s floored to see that it’s Eleanor. He goes to see her and she spills that yes, she’s a purgatory demon, over 900 years old, who inhabited the housekeeper and was quite happy to be out of purgatory and have a normal life but she realizes the jig’s now up.
On the post-rescue Familia Dean front at the hospital, we have a comatose Lisa and a grieving Dean. Castiel arrives and Dean asks him for a favor, which we don’t hear onscreen. In the next scene, Lisa is awake and Ben is at her bedside, telling her they were in a car accident. Dean pokes his head in the door and when they look up at him, there’s no recognition. They ask who he is and he offers that he was the guy in the other car, checking to see that they were OK. He goes outside and gets in the car with Sam and Sam tries to initiate a discussion about it and Dean shuts him down.
Episode 22, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, picks up on a completely unrelated note with a sweaty, panicky Sam racing through the streets at night via dizzy cam, fleeing the police, before he breaks into a bar inhabited by a lone barkeep (Eureka’s Erica Cerra, which is clue #1). She tells him to move along, they open at noon; he asks to stay, and when he can’t tell her his name, she acquiesces and lets him hide there. Then he has a flash vision of a dive motel. They search online and find it’s two towns over and she offers to drive him.
Once there, they find evidence of casework, alternate IDs, and Bobby’s address, and she starts to (wisely) get nervous. Outside, they find the Impala and then suddenly, someone’s shooting at them and it’s another Sam, less sweaty and more assured. They get in the car and start driving to Bobby’s and another flash later (wherein we see Dean attending to a comatose Sam in Bobby’s panic room and shining a light in his eyes), it’s daytime, but the girl tells him it’s always been daytime.
They stop the car and bicker and he tells her to get back in the car because he senses AlternaSam and then he finds the weapon stash in the trunk and heads to the woods after him. He soon finds himself face to face with AS, who explains that the hell wall in his mind has been dropped (courtesy of Castiel), dividing him into separate pieces that are skittering around in a dream state for a fight to the death, and the best piece wins. AS is actually soulless Sammy and he’s all too happy to hurl a range of insults at Soulful Sammy (who I’ll call Sam Prime), who finally snaps to, starts running, and finally ventilates AS, who warns him that “the other one” is worse. Once he’s vanquished, SP receives AS’s “piece” (via white smoke) and hikes back to the car where barkeep (we never get her name) is stoic. (Now Two-Parts) Sam remembers she was a bartender he had killed when he was soulless, and as soon as he does, she begins bleeding and warns him of what’s to come before she evaporates.
Out in the real world, Castiel holds the jar of blood batter that is the core of the ritual and is trying to break up with Crowley (presumably because of the Lisa/Ben-napping), but Crowley snits out after Castiel tells him he can flee or die. At Bobby’s, Dean and Bobby drink and mull while Sam lies unconscious. Somewhere in there in all of the flashes that reveal what preceded Sam’s collapse, we find out that Bobby, Dean, and Sam were looking for Eleanor and when they caught up with her, she’d already been bled for the purgatory ritual, the details of which she gave up to Team Castiel, so he had everything he needed to cast the spell. Eleanor died and then Castiel showed up and brought the wall down on Sam (I’m guessing to preoccupy Dean so he’d leave him alone), with a promise to fix him later.
Back in real time, Balthazar shows up at Bobby’s with the address of where Castiel and Crowley can be found, but that’s as much as he’s willing to help. Then he flits over to Castiel and plays dumb about the deception. Castiel already knows and kills him for it, stabbing him in the back. Back at Bobby’s, Dean and Bobby pack up and Dean leaves Sam a gun and the address.
Back in dreamscape, Two-Parts Sam arrives at a scene straight out of Interview With The Vampire, complete with blazing candelabras and draped furniture to find a bloody, Hell-Soaked Sam. This one just sadly tries to talk him into getting a life and out of reassembling the team because of the burden he’s going to take on, but TPS says he must and he unholsters his gun. HSS tells him has no intention of fighting him and hands him a blade instead. TPS apologizes and then runs HSS through and takes on all the hell memories. Back in Bobby’s basement, a reassembled Sam wakes up.
Dean and Bobby arrive at Castiel’s hideaway and have about a moment to gauge the outside security before Crowley’s demon squad crash lands via a smoke twister (that flips the Impala) and starts taking out the angels. Then Raphael and Crowley show up inside to neener neener neener to Castiel that they have made their own deal, telling Castiel to flee or die. Castiel tosses the blood batter jar to Crowley and blinks out.
Dean and Bobby revive inside the upside down Impala and head inside as Crowley Latinates. Dean hurls the blade at Raphael and she catches it and then flings them both down the stairs for grins. Crowley completes the spell and they all wait for the big purgatory reveal and then nothing happens. Outside, Sam has stalked up; inside, Castiel appears with his own neener neener neener that he duped Crowley and Raphael into doing the spell with dog’s blood. His own now-empty blood batter jar tells Crowley that Castiel has done the spell himself, and done it right, so he takes his leave and blinks out and when Raphael starts to (sort of) beg forgiveness, Castiel summarily snaps his fingers and Raphael explodes.
Next, Castiel goes completely off the rails and I roll my eyes so hard I may have pulled something. In a voice not unlike that you would use to disarm a crazy person, or speak to a small child or an animal, Dean tries to make the case to Castiel that harnessing that much power is no bueno. He’s about one inflection away from bending at the waist, patting his leg, and saying “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good angel? Who’s going to give back all those big bad souls right this minute?” – but Castiel is a deep-denial megalomaniac at this point, talking about the awesomeness of all the souls inside him.
Just as this is scaring the daylights out of Bobby and Dean, the angel blade is slammed into Castiel’s back and the camera reveals that Sam is holding it. Unfortunately, Castiel barely blinks as he removes it. Then he very calmly announces he’s the new God and it’s a new day and they should just kneel down now because otherwise he’s going to kill them. And, hiatus!
Seriously, y’all? When I began the season, I talked about how little I enjoyed the catechism sidebar of the last couple of years, and now it looks like rather than dial it back, we’re ending a season-long extended diatribe on a post-averted apocalypse good vs. evil angelic civil war with an intro to a scary new God with a not-at-all altruistic agenda housed inside someone the Winchesters trusted (and loved). So, season seven will be the boys vs. the great and powerful Oz with a secondary arc about how well Sam deals with his reassembled persona and memories? I’m guessing Castiel could give a rat’s ass now about keeping his word to make Sam right. Before the series ends, we may find Dean on a whiskey IV, but I’m pretty sure this is where I bug out.
As for these two episodes on their own, it was interesting to me that each one essentially kept the boys separated, which never goes well. I feel like they squandered the Winchesters vs. the World angle, same as they did in the last season finale when they weren’t together. I love that the cast and crew get to keep making the show. I’m just not terribly interested in the show they’re making anymore. Good luck, kids!
Photo Courtesy of The CW