Supernatural: Rock and a Hard Place (9x08)

Oh god this is so late, sorry. I'm gonna be depressingly brief, especially given that this is an episode of Supernatural, and usually I like to ramble on about these. The plot is a basic one, straight out of an earlier season of this show.

Jody Mills calls up the Winchester boys to investigate a bunch of missing persons cases. Sam and Dean find out that these people all have something in common - they go to the same church. Not only that, but the girls have all taken a chastity vow. Sam and Dean think that maybe dragons are the culprit, given that it's taking virgins. They need to get closer to the situation, so the two boys take a purity pledge and go to one of the meetings. There, Dean meets a girl named Suzy. While Sam and Jody continue research, Dean goes home with Suzy and discovers that she's one of his favorite porn stars. The two of them have sex. Only now there's a problem - Sam and Jody have just figured out that they're hunting Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth. She's taking virgins who have broken their oaths, which now means Dean and Suzy are in danger.

Dean and Suzy are taken by Vesta, and they are dumped underground with all of the other missing people. Sam and Jody find out where they are based on a phone call from Dean that kept cutting out, but luckily Sam managed to hear the sound of a whistle. While there, Vesta attacks Jody and Sam. She stabs Jody, and then goes for Sam. Jody manages to kill Vesta with a special stake, but not before Vesta reveals to Sam that he is seriously internally damaged. Jody is okay, despite the stabbing, and she says goodbye to the boys. Sam talks to Dean about what Vesta said, wondering if he's always going to be messed up. Dean doesn't want him to deal with that, so he starts to tell Sam about Ezekiel, but Zeke himself steps in and stops Dean from doing so.

Alright, let's just do the Good, the So-So, and the Bad. Like I said, it's gonna be quick.

The Good:

Jody Mills is a freakin' bad ass. Here we have a motherly-type figure for the Winchesters who is still allowed to be active, competent, and even sexual. She recognized that the Winchesters would know more about this stuff than she did, so she let them take the lead, but she still offered good suggestions, helped Sam to figure out the truth, and even ended up killing the bad guy of the episode. Even better? They didn't shine a big "I'm a bad ass Female" light on her, either. She was just a useful ally, with a good relationship to the boys, and a good strong head on her shoulders. I think the writers must have finally started getting notes on the lack of good female characters, because they're finally paying attention and doing a good job.

That conversation at the end between Sam and Dean broke my heart, for obvious reasons. Poor Sam, thinking he's just broken. Poor Dean, being unable to say anything. And Zeke... I'm beginning to worry about this... is he gonna hurt Sam?

The So-So:

I'm nitpicking, but the stuff about Vesta really bothered me. Not only was the history involved wildly inaccurate, but when they actually went to fight her, she was talking about eating livers and weird stuff like that, and I just kept thinking that there are plenty of pagan goddesses that would have been much more appropriate than Vesta for this story. Relative to most gods in the Roman and Greek pantheons, Vesta/Hestia was very peaceful and kind.

The Bad:

Ugh, okay, so before I watched the episode, I noticed that there were some social justice complaints about Dean's sex scene. I didn't think too much about it, because to be honest I've found that sometimes this show gets nitpicked to a large degree, and I wanted to draw my own conclusions. But... yeah. Dean was a sleazy asshole in this episode. I'm not going to say that this was all on him. I mean, he didn't force Suzy to do anything. But let's look a bit closer at this: Dean knew this girl was a born again virgin. He knew she was ashamed of her past and was looking to get past it. And instead of respecting that, or listening to her side, he just seduced her, and told her that she was more valuable to the world when she was a porn star than she is now.

Let's be fair here - Suzy was a very weak character. She had nothing to her. She was just... ugh. She just turned on her morals so very easily, which was rather silly, considering she seemed very serious and dedicated. And then after the two of them had sex, we only spent one more second with her where she expressed some half-assed regret about the whole thing. Once Vesta had been defeated, we don't even seen her again. What a terribly written character.

So yeah, that's my rather short review of this episode of Supernatural. I didn't want to get caught up in Dean being an ass, but it was actually really difficult not to. I don't want to say this was a terrible episode or anything, because it wasn't. I think Jody saved it from that fate, in a big way. I suppose that given how awesome she was, it just made the lameness of the other major female character all that more obvious. Couldn't they have tried a bit harder? Suzy could have been more complex. They could have delved a bit more into her past as a porn star... or shown Dean feeling guilty for what he had done. But alas, they basically just wanted Dean to have sex, I guess. Whatever.

7/10