Supernatural: Love Hurts (11x13)

This was a middling sort of episode, but it had a number of praise-worthy things about it, and I came out of it ultimately satisfied with the results. Let's start with a few of the things I didn't enjoy, however.

Cons:

The actual ups and downs of the case, the twists and the monsters and the fights, were all super standard and predictable. There was not one surprising thing about the monster, or the motivations of the villain, or anything. I liked some of the character work, and I'll talk about that in a minute, but for the most part I was yawning through the scenes where Sam and Dean were working out what they were hunting and how to defeat it. It's nothing different than what we've seen a thousand times before.

There was one really jarring individual moment that I feel I must mention... when Sam has been incapacitated by the "white witch," who summons the monster to kill unfaithful husbands and the pathetic wives who want them back, he spits at her that she's "practically a feminist." I really don't know what to think about that. Was the purpose of that joke that Sam thinks this woman isn't a feminist, and should be ashamed of her actions? Maybe... but it didn't come across that way. To me it made it sound like being a feminist is being a man-eater, in the sense that Sam was accusing this woman's behavior of being that of a feminist, and therefore vicious. I don't really know what to think. It would be unlike Supernatural to have Sam, of all people, make such a strangely sexist remark, but the whole joke just felt off to me. Maybe I'm missing something?

Pros:

The one good thing about the case itself was the death imagery. I mean I know this sounds gruesome of me to say, but it was pretty cool to watch the monster rip people's hearts out with one single strike. Pretty intense, actually, especially when the cheating husband got his heart ripped out and the monster's hand went right through a cubicle partition in his office. Yikes!

It was cliché and uninteresting to have the monster take on the form of a person's deepest darkest desire, but despite the silliness of the setup, the payoff was actually way better than I would have expected. Dean gets cursed by the white witch, and the baddie comes after him, taking the shape of his desire - Amara. Sam is upstairs in a separate room, confronting the witch herself while this is happening, so he never sees the creature take on the shape of Amara. Sam stabs the creature's heart, which the white witch kept in a box, and "Amara" disintegrates, leaving Dean ruffled but unharmed.

But here's the cool part - despite the fact that Dean could have brushed the whole thing off, he decides to come clean to Sam. He tells him about his weird connection with Amara. And Sam... well, he's not exactly surprised. He tells Dean that it's not his fault, that he doesn't blame him. Amara didn't give Dean a choice about the way he feels. He's being forced. Dean sadly admits that he doesn't think he'll be able to kill Amara, when it comes down to it, and Sam tells Dean that it's okay - he'll do it.

This moment was absolutely fantastic. I'm beyond thrilled that this season seems to be the season of honesty between the Winchesters. Dean has been feeling a lot of shame and guilt over his connection with Amara, so of course he hasn't been totally honest about it from the beginning. But when it comes down to it, he's straight with Sam, explaining to him what's going on. And Sam doesn't blame him or judge him for any of it. Sam knows that something nonconsensual is going on, and he understands that his brother is a victim in all this, not a complicit participant.

And then let's talk about that a bit more - I'm so happy that we've gotten an explicit confirmation that Dean is being forced in to something against his conscious and rational will. The overtones of assault are now made concrete, and we can move forward knowing that this Amara/Dean thing is meant to make us uncomfortable, and that we want to root actively against Dean succumbing to these feelings.

The lack of Casifer this week made me sad on a surface level, but his absence is actually pretty ominous. What is Lucifer waiting for? What is his game plan? Does he actually have plans to defeat the Darkness, or was that entirely an excuse to get out of the Cage? I can't wait to see him come back into the story next week!

That's all, folks. Like I said, this was a middling episode with a fairly uninteresting monster-of-the-week element. But the character work with Dean in particular paid off in a real way.

7.5/10