Supernatural: Twigs & Twine & Tasha Banes (12x20)

Oh my goodness, my emotions. But also some things were annoying.

Cons:

Let's start with Mary and Mr. Ketch. They continue to hunt together, but Mary finally gets the hint that Mr. Ketch is a bad guy after he tortures a shifter and seems to enjoy it. She then discovers Mick's body, and finds the room where Sam, Dean, and several of their friends (Garth, Claire, and Eileen) are being kept under surveillance. They have a brutal showdown, but Ketch hits Mary with a taser and she wakes up tied to a chair so that Toni Bevell can question her.

Things that annoy me: Toni. Obviously. She made no sense at the beginning of this season and I doubt she'll make much more sense now. Also, the fact that Mary took this long to figure out that Ketch was no good? I mean, come on. There's this whole tension going on in this episode about family and how Mary disappears into a hunt and isn't there for her boys. I get why they're going for that tension, but the justification for it seems nonexistent. Can't Mary just try a little harder to answer her phone or call her sons back in a timely fashion? It seems like such an easy problem to rectify.

I mean, okay, I'm not, like, thrilled that three female characters were murdered in this episode. One was the bad evil witch lady, so, okay I guess I can let that one go. But the other two were Alicia Banes and her mother Tasha. Alicia got brought back - sort of - but Tasha didn't. And while Supernatural has been better lately about its female characters, there are still far too few of them and they still appear far too infrequently. To bring Alicia and Max, the twins, back into the story only to murder their mom and then kill off Alicia? Two black women, mind you? Just maybe not the best idea at this juncture.

Pros:

One thing I will say about the Mary and Mr. Ketch plot thread is that their showdown was awesome. It was a really well-choreographed fight sequence, in the sense that it felt brutal and down-to-earth and not too fancy, and you could tell that these two were really physically damaging each other. It was almost hard to watch, but in a way that really kept me in the moment. Also, I'm glad somebody finally knows that Mick is dead. That was getting a little ridiculous.

Oh, and another thing? The British MOL have a creepy surveillance room, and we see that Claire and Eileen are both on their radar. This makes a certain amount of sense, as both have worked with the boys quite recently, and been involved in cases related to the MOL. It's interesting that they don't have Cas on the board at all, and fascinating that they haven't discovered Jody or Alex. But they do have Garth. Does that mean Garth is coming back? Does that mean they're going to find out that Garth is a werewolf, and kill him? I will riot.

We have our obligatory "catch up with the A-plot" scene at the beginning, where Sam and Dean bemoan the fact that they have no answers. But the cool part is that the whole thing is just framed by Dean being really, really worried about Cas. He says he can't understand why Cas would do what he did, and he didn't recognize the guy he was looking at there at the end, just before Cas knocked them both out. Again, we're seeing Sam and Dean's reactions to Cas' behavior framed very differently, and it's delicious to watch.

In the main plot, the twins Alicia and Max are brought back in, as their mother Tasha has been on a hunting trip and hasn't been back in a few days. Alicia is worried, while Max thinks she's overreacting. Sam and Dean meet up with the twins, and they all find Tasha staying at an inn, apparently perfectly fine. But turns out, not so much. There's an evil witch living there who killed Tasha and used branches and stuff to make a new puppet version of her. This version of Tasha has all of Tasha's memories and whatnot, but it's not the real woman. While Sam fights off another one of these creepy puppets, Dean has to convince Max not to take the evil witch's powers. If he does so, he can be with his "mom," or at least one version of her, but he will be forfeiting his soul so that the old witch won't have to go to Hell when she dies. Dean manages to kill the old woman before Max can make the fatal choice. All of the evil witch's puppets vanish, but not before puppet Tasha stabs and murders Alicia. Sam and Dean leave Max to burn his sister's body, but he uses the branch-puppet magic to bring a version of his sister back.

Lots to unpack here. First of all, I like the fact that this was a case-of-the-week episode where Sam and Dean came in, and everything pretty much went as horrible as it could go. I feel like usually they come in, and even if disaster strikes, they leave feeling like things were better than when they got there. And sure, in this one, Dean did kill the bad guy. But... honestly, at what cost? I liked the bleak way things panned out. Sam and Dean were doing what was right, in saving Max's soul and not allowing him to make a crazy deal to save his family. But, of course, as Dean points out, he and Sam have been doing terrible things to protect each other for their entire adult lives.

The parallels between siblings Max and Alicia and siblings Sam and Dean were played up but in a wonderfully subtle way. Sam and Dean were... let's just say... more devastated than usual about the deaths they witnessed. When they saw dead Tasha, and witnessed Max's reaction to this death, both of them looked on the verge of tears. You could just feel them thinking: we know this pain. And when Max keened and cried out over the dead body of his sister, Sam and Dean both must have thought - I've been here. I've felt this. So when Sam and Dean try and talk with him and rationalize how Max must be feeling, they both know they're full of crap. Dean's saying, pragmatically, that once the shock wears off it's going to hurt. Like, no shit, Dean. And let's be real: if Sam had been the one to die up in that room, Dean wouldn't take kindly to somebody giving him platitudes. We've seen the way Dean behaves when Sam is gone, and it's not pretty.

I want to give a shout-out to the actor playing Max, Kendrick Sampson. He had to do a lot of heavy lifting in this one, reacting to the deaths of two immediate family members within the hour. His reaction to his mother's body was confusion, disbelief, and a slowly bubbling grief. His reaction to Alicia's death really got to me. Ouch. He just wails over her dead body, and it gave me goosebumps. Of course he manages to find a way to bring her back, and I'm wondering what the consequences are going to be for that. I like the fact that these characters seem primed for another appearance.

As the episode ends, we see that Dean gets two voice mails from his mother. One is her telling him that she misses her boys and wants to be better about being there for them. The second one just says "we have a problem." Dean looks over at Sam who is asleep in the passenger seat of the impala and calls out to him to wake up. But he doesn't. It's odd, because the moment doesn't go on quite long enough for me to grasp whether Sam is supposed to be unconscious or not. Is something going on? Is he alright? This was an awesomely suspenseful way to end the episode, and I'm getting a bit excited to see how the final few episodes of the season play out.

So, there you have it. For a C-plot episode with a healthy B-plot going on alongside it, I was surprised by how much I liked this one. Max and puppet!Alicia can come back any time they want.

8.5/10