Supernatural: Ask Jeeves (10x06)

Okay do you guys remember that episode in Season Eight, "Trial and Error," where Sam completes the first trial? It had a family of snooty rich people in it, and while that episode had some good things in it, the snooty family kinda sucked. They were lame and cliche and I was not a fan. Well, when I saw the promo for "Ask Jeeves," I thought I might have similar complaints. However, I am happy to report that I was wrong. Let's do a quick plot summary.

Dean finds one of Bobby's old phones, which contains a message about an heiress named Bunny, who has recently died and has apparently left Bobby something in the will. Sam and Dean decide to go check it out. When they get there, they find a morally bankrupt family of entitled jerks. The butler tells Sam and Dean that the only thing they've inherited is a key. There are jewels on it, but apparently they aren't real. Sam and Dean come back to the house to find that there has been a murder, and that since they were in the house around the time of death, they have to stick around to be questioned by the police.

Things start unraveling rather quickly after that - somebody believes that the murderer was the ghost of Bunny's dead husband. Sam and Dean think this might be a vengeful spirit thing going on, but when Sam finds the body of the butler at the same time as Dean thinks he's talking to the butler, they realize: it's a shifter. They use silverware to surreptitiously check each of the house's inhabitants, but nobody sizzles. Later, the family turns on Sam and Dean - after all, nobody started dying until these two strangers turned up! They lock Sam and Dean in a room.

Then, the truth comes out - it was the maid! She was Bunny's secret daughter! Turns out, Bunny had been keeping her daughter, Olivia, in the attic. Olivia is the product of an affair Bunny had with a Shifter. Turns out, Bobby killed Olivia's father. Bunny asked Bobby to spare Olivia, which he agreed to do, as long as Olivia was kept locked up. Bunny made Bobby promise to look after Olivia if anything happened to her. The key that was left for Bobby in the will was the key to the attic where Olivia was supposed to be. However, the butler had taken pity on Olivia and allowed her to come out of the attic to live as a maid. After Olivia started killing people, the butler turned on her and tried to lock her up again. That's why she killed him.

Sam gets cornered by Olivia, but Dean shows up, having retrieved silver bullets from the impala, and shoots her. He continues shooting long after Olivia is dead, which worries Sam. Sam tries to ask Dean about it in the car, but Dean insists that it's nothing - he was just a little anxious about his first kill back on the job, so he wanted to make sure it was done right. Sam suspects it has something to do with the Mark of Cain, but Dean brushes him off.

Okay! Complaints?

Well, even though I liked the family, they didn't pop out to me as distinct characters very well. Maybe there were just too many characters introduced for a single episode? I never had it totally clear who was related to whom, for example. It's a small thing, but one of the signs of a strong C-plot episode is when you can really remember each individual guest star. That wasn't the case here, even though they were very fun while they were onscreen.

Another small thing - there was a reference to "Rizzoli and Isles at one point, and it was a rather clumsy moment in the script. This is a bit of a nitpick, but the line just stood out to me as being really insincere.

One last thing... at the beginning of the episode, Dean complains that everything is really quiet, and he wants a hunt. It always bothers me when things like this happen, because of course I'm like... well, if you want to help with something, why don't you go help Cas?! I understand logically why Misha isn't in all the episodes, but it pisses me off a little bit when they don't mention him or keep the story lines connected at least a little bit. Even the end of a one-sided conversation on the phone would have made me happy. This isn't about my love for Cas, particularly. It's just that we know he's important to the A-plot, so he really shouldn't be dropped off the face of the earth just to be dragged in when needed.

That's all I've got in terms of complaints, though. I'm pretty happy all things told.

First of all, there were a lot of great jokes in this episode. I can't list them all, but here are a few of my favorites: one of the women says "well I never!" and Dean replies "Okay first of all, who talks like that?" Of course I loved all the stuff with Sam being profoundly uncomfortable about the attention of the women. That was priceless. Olivia was a pretty sassy villain. I loved when she acknowledged the cliche. When it's not the butler, it's the maid! All of the references to Clue, and to murder mystery cliches in general, were pretty spot-on. Oh, and I loved Dean's aversion to drinking coffee out of a tiny cup. That was silly, but it made me chuckle.

On a more serious note, there were a lot of great parallels between Dean and Olivia. Particularly, we hear Sam tell Olivia "being a monster is a choice," and Olivia says that the choice has been made for her. Cue Dean entering and shooting Olivia. A bunch of times. The theme of choice has been one of the most important ones on Supernatural since the very beginning. Lately, there's been a lot of talk about choice, and different characters believing they don't have a choice. For example, Dean's decision to let someone possess Sam. Or Sam's decision to torture people to find Dean when he was a demon. But of course they do have choices, and saying that they don't is a way to remove their own culpability. I think we'll see more of this play out as Dean falls back into the Mark of Cain behaviors we saw from him last season.

Great acting from Jared, by the way. I mean, he's always awesome, but I noticed some really great stuff here. He's amazing with the comedy, particularly in the scenes with the women fawning all over him. But he's also great at the drama. When Dean started shooting Olivia, we got to see a reaction shot of Sam, and he looked seriously freaked out. After everything he went through to get Dean back, I think the thought that it might not be fully Dean really, really scares him. Of course, Sam tries to talk to Dean about it, which makes sense - ever since Dean became a human again, they have been trying to work on their communication. So the fact that Dean shuts down and won't talk to Sam about this makes it all the more clear that we have something to worry about.

I also really loved the case itself. It always bothers me when the boys aren't looking for a case, and then they just randomly stumble across one, but this wasn't like that. Sam and Dean didn't know there was anything weird going on with Bunny's will, but it turns out the key was left to Bobby because of a Shifter all along. So, they stumbled into a case, but they were being drawn there because of a supernatural creature, even if they didn't know it. Actually, this is a pretty cool setup, and not something that we see a lot.

We've seen a ton of episodes in the later seasons of this show where Sam and Dean decide to let a monster go, because being a monster is a "choice," and some of them have learned to adapt. It was sort of nice to have a case where the monster was pretty unambiguously monstrous, in that she killed a lot of people. At the same time, it wasn't totally cut-and-dry. She had been locked in an attic her whole life, which obviously made her go a little crazy. On the one hand, she probably needed to die. On the other, we're still meant to feel uncomfortable about it. That's a hard line to walk, and this episode did so artfully.

The family was really funny, yes, but I liked how they still felt real, in a certain sense. Sure, they were over the top, but they also cared about each other, deep down. I loved the line when one of the guys mentioned to Sam that in families, nobody really likes each other. Sam says that he and his family get along... well, at least he and Dean get along. For now. At this exact moment in time. I think it really highlighted how tenuous relationships can be, even with the people you love the very most.

You know, it's funny... when I started writing this review, I thought I was going to be writing about a fun, simple little C-plot episode. But after I finished writing it, I realized that this comedic episode was actually highlighting a lot of important and serious themes that this show often deals with. So, yeah. I'm pretty impressed, actually.

8/10