Supernatural: The Things They Carried (10x15)

Yeah... I don't really care about Cole. This episode wasn't terrible, but Cole is boring. And the parallels with the Winchesters are starting to get mind-numbing. This was basically just your standard filler episode. Let's look at the plot.

Dean finds a case - a grizzly murder-suicide in North Carolina. He wants to check it out. Sam is worried about taking a case, but Dean insists that he can handle it. He says that they need to give in to the inevitable - there's no way to fix this Mark of Cain thing. Dean would like to get on with his life for as long as he's still able.

Sam and Dean find out that the guy who killed himself has a friend named Kit who's showing the same symptoms. Then, Cole shows up. Kit is a friend of his from the army. The pieces slowly come together - on a rescue mission in Iraq, Kit and Rick got infected with something that makes them ravenously thirsty. Turns out to be a Khan Worm, the same kind of creature from Season Six's "And Then There Were None."

Sam goes to protect Kit's wife and try to restrain Kit, while Dean stays with Cole, who has been infected. Dean tries electricity to defeat the worm inside of Cole. When that doesn't work they decide to try dehydration. Eventually, at the last moment, the worm escapes from Cole, who is now an inhospitable environment, and Dean kills it. Sam is unable to save Kit, though. As Kit tries to kill his wife, Sam is forced to take him out.

Sam and Dean part ways with Cole, who thanks them for their help and sincerely hopes to never see them again. Sam feels guilty for not saving Kit, but Dean reminds Sam that sometimes, even if you do everything right, the guy still dies.

This episode was just... boring. Nothing too surprising happened in it, and nothing pushed the A-plot forward. Cas and Crowley weren't even mentioned. The Mark of Cain didn't seem to affect Dean in particular. Sam angsted about his brother a little bit, but that's pretty much par for the course, isn't it?

The resolution felt anti-climactic. We still don't really know what the Khan Worms are. I like the idea of a parasitic monster, something without a higher form of consciousness, but they didn't do anything too interesting with it.

Also, there were a few weak moments in the script. I don't know exactly how to describe it, because it's not like the writing is normally stellar for this show or anything, but in this episode I noticed several moments of rather hokey writing or unbelievable reactions by the guest characters.

That's not to say it was all bad, though. While heavy-handed, I did still appreciate the parallels with Dean and Cole, both trying to fight the monster within, and Sam was clearly thinking of his brother when he was unable to save Kip. He can't face the thought of losing Dean, of not being able to fix this. Obviously, even after all of these years, these Winchester boys have a lot of crap to unpack.

I liked the conversation in the impala towards the beginning of the episode. Dean is being practical - he doesn't think there's a way out for him, so he wants to spend his final moments, as it were, doing what he's always done - saving people, hunting things, with his little bro in the passenger seat. Of course, you have to imagine that Dean wouldn't be so relaxed about everything if Sam were the one in danger. And that's exactly the situation that Sam is in - he's not worried about himself, he's worried about the person he loves more than anything in the world.

Despite Cole being kind of boring, I still sort of admire him for accepting the reality of his situation and not judging Sam and Dean for the past. He knows all about giving second chances, and he's also willing to accept that Sam had no choice in killing Kit, the same way Dean had no choice in killing Cole's father.

That's where I'll leave things. I'm a little annoyed with the filler episode, but it wasn't abysmal or anything.

6.5/10