Ben Edlund is like one of those guys in baseball. The guy you bring in at the last minute, when you desperately need to win the game, and all the bases are loaded and someone needs to hit the next one out of the park. Or maybe he’s like that guy in football who runs the pass to the touchdown line in the last five seconds of the game and the team wins State or something.
Okay, this is a really terrible metaphor. I know nothing about sports.
The point is that Ben Edlund saved Supernatural tonight. Not that it needed much saving, mind you, because it’s been steadily improving each week since the sixth season premiered (although I wasn’t crazy about last week’s episode). But tonight’s episode was just the thing to make me think that nothing had changed. That this was the Supernatural of days gone by. Ten minutes into tonight’s episode and I was already thinking ‘this is just like ‘˜Tall Tales”. And it was. Because it was funny. And there were ‘aliens’. Also, the humor just never stopped. But let’s start from the beginning.
The Truth Is…Somewhere. Maybe Over There.
The opening was a cross between The X-Files and every teen show out there (Smallville stuck in my head, considering the letterman’s jacket). A couple are making out in a corn field (like the back of a car isn’t good enough for kids these days or something). They hear a noise and the boy, Patrick, goes off to investigate. For five minutes, the girl is the smart one. Unlike the idiot boyfriend, who goes off traipsing in the cornfield and gets abducted by aliens. Cue the creepy X-Files credits (with plenty of scenes from ‘Tall Tales’in fact).
The boys arrive in town, investigating the disappearances of Patrick and others. They interview several people around town. Two people (one of them a man named Whitaker, the other a woman) thinks it’s aliens. The cop doesn’t. An older blonde woman (Marion) thinks it’s fairies.
The boys eventually go to see Patrick’s father (Mr. Brennan), who clears them out of his watch shop fairly quickly, which the boys take to mean he’s hiding something. So Sam stays behind to watch him while Dean goes out to investigate the crop circles.
I can’t really do justice to the humor of what happens next, or to the episode in general. Sam’s watching Brennan in a bar and is on the phone with Dean when he gets ‘abducted’. Sam’s response to Dean’s screaming is to order another beer and suggest his brother run away from the potential aliens who might probe him. It sounds uncaring, and it is, but it’s also just so funny. The entire episode basically consists of Dean trying to get Sam to act more soulful (or ‘human’) and Sam botching it up.
Apparently Having No Soul Turns Sam Into a Sex Machine
Sam eventually leaves the bar to investigate Dean’s disappearance and stumbles upon a makeshift trailer park of UFO enthusiasts. Whitaker isn’t much help in providing assistance to Sam in how to find and fight the aliens, despite his 30 years of research. But a very helpful redhead offers her assistance.
Dean is then returned to the field, still shooting his gun as he appears. He makes the long trek back into town to find Sam in bed with the redhead.
Dean is not amused.
Sam tries to be empathetic as Dean tells his abduction tale, but it just ends up creeping Dean out. He does, however, believe he fought the aliens and won, since they seemed surprised that one of their abductees fought back and he got returned.
At a bar the next day Dean continues to lecture Sam on the actions of a person with a soul. Apparently it involves a great deal of brooding and suffering. I think Dean went to the Angel School of Having a Soul from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Dean sees a creepy guy in window, but Sam can’t see him. While doing research alone in the motel room, Dean gets attacked by a fairy. It’s utterly ridiculous (he gets thrown around the room) until he captures it and fries it in the microwave.
Concluded on next page…
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I love souless sam, he is awesome!!!! So funny!!! Please, no more emo sammy!!!!
Ps. Jared is great at comedy!