“You Can’t Handle the Truth” put the angst of the boys front and center in an emotionally and physically brutal hour that raised more questions than it answered, and although CW promos gave away the “what” about Sam, I’m not going to write about that here because I’m going on the facts as presented in the actual episode that aired.
Written by Eric Charmelo and Nicole Snyder, a newbie Supernatural scribe team whose previous credits include one of my guilty pleasure TV movies, Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber, the episode starts and stays dark. We begin with a suicide as everyone around a mousy waitress unloads on her about how grating they find her to be until she shoots herself.
The boys investigate it as one in a series of odd/off suicides and subsequent body snatches, and the next one we witness is off the charts gore as everyone’s worst nightmare about a dentist comes true. It seems Veritas has been summoned to town by a cuckolded gal, is moonlighting as a wannabe old-school Geraldo Rivera, and anytime anyone in earshot of her TV broadcast says they want the truth, they get it in spades.
Since the focus so far this season has been Dean vs. monsters, he of course makes the declaration while downing a liquid lunch and is treated to the bartender questioning her fertility and confessing to snorting Oxy and a comely fellow patron fairly demanding he look at her chest. When Dean calls Bobby, the TMI goes into overdrive – Bobby’s a closet Tori and Dean watcher and pedicure-getter who likes Dean the bestest but thinks Sam is the better hunter. When he starts to confess a little too much more than that even, Dean hangs up on him. Next, Dean talks to Lisa and she tells him all the things he doesn’t want to hear about himself, and that they’re fairly done now.
The driving bead of the hour is that Dean is increasingly uncomfortable around, and fearful of, Sam. He’s Googling doppelgangers and emptying bottles of scotch and begging off as much one-on-one time with Sam as he can. When they pursue Veritas home they find her horror room of victim body parts, on which she snacks while tapping Dean’s brain for the truth, where she finds what we know – he knows something’s wrong with Sam. When she can’t read Sam the same way, she panics and demands to know what he is. Sam can’t answer. They kill her, and then have their own chat about what might be off. Sam confesses he know he’s different, just not how or why. He confesses that he did watch Dean get turned last week (after lying earlier in the episode that he just froze), and instead of grieving with Sam about this final realization, he beats him unconscious.
So, that happened. And then the doofy trailer said outright what the episode didn’t, which may be a big-ass fakeout, but still – lame PR. The boys did solid work as usual. Castiel does a drive by pretty much to confirm that the McGuffin isn’t the truth horn and then say he can’t help them. Looks like he’s back next week to finally work some mojo on Sam. Didn’t love it. I’m hoping we’ll get clear of the G vs. E-isms, but I’m guessing that with the newly-released artwork, which features pretty blatant imagery, it won’t be anytime soon. That seems counter to what I thought we’d been told the season was going to be about, but maybe we’ll be past it before the Hellatus. If not, it just feels like a very sad and unnecessary retread.
Photo Courtesy of The CW