Supernatural: Golden Time (15x06)

This episode has made my soul ascend to heaven!

Cons:

Could have used more sign language. This is totally a nitpick, totally a personal preference thing. I love ASL and I love the idea of Sam learning it for Eileen, and I wanted more, more, more. Also a personal preference thing, but I totally wanted them to kiss? Can Eileen just like... be in the rest of the show and go on hunts with the Winchesters and start dating Sam and... yeah. More Eileen please and thank you.

Pros:

See, I couldn't even properly complain about anything before jumping straight in to the Eileen of it all. We all know Supernatural has a crappy track record with its female characters. So many of them have been fridged, or even at best killed off in a less fridge-y way, but the end result is that there is a dearth of ladies in the Supernatural universe. Eileen was a particularly difficult and senseless death, as there was no reason why she had to die to prove the point that things were getting rough. And then here we have a mission - find a way to help Eileen, who is a ghost that doesn't want to go back to Hell. Sam finds a compromise solution, but it's not ideal, and then he discovers that Rowena was working on a way to make a spirit corporeal. They can bring Eileen back! Cue some witches who come in as obstacles, some reminiscing about Rowena, and then bam! Sam gets a win. Eileen is alive once again.

There are so many reasons why this story felt so important. We are setting up a dichotomy here between Sam, who is still hopeful and still wants to fight for good, and Dean, who is helpless and depressed in the face of the enormity of their problem. (Also he's going through a breakup, so that's making things rough). In this episode, Sam wants to help someone he cares about. And not only does he manage to succeed, he actually finds a much better solution to the problem, and gets to undo just one in the long list of losses he has suffered. This feels narratively sound. The show can't just be a long line of suffering over and over and over again with a band-aid slapped over it at the very end. There has to be some hope, some goodness in the world. And Eileen is that for Sam.

We also have the Rowena situation. Sam goes to her place, and the evil witches explain that her rooms were heavily warded. One witch dies just from going inside. But Sam? Sam is unhurt because Rowena left all of her things to him. And lo, my heart did grow three sizes this day. Holy moly. The Rowena/Sam of it all has left me genuinely staggered. I did not expect this to do such a number on me. I love Rowena. I miss her so much.

I love Eileen, too. I love that she's a hunter, and that she's hyper-competent, and that even though in this case she came to Sam and Dean for help, she never feels like a damsel. In fact, she's taken to being a ghost pretty well, and seems to be able to control where she is with remarkable accuracy and consistency. This is for plot reasons, of course, but I also love the idea that Eileen kicks ass at being a ghost just as much as she kicked ass at being a human.

Sam as a witch is SENDING me. Dean calls him "Rowena's protege," and Sam later says he "learned from the best" when he uses a spell to stop the witch who is trying to kill him. This is one of those things that feels so obvious in retrospect. Sam has always been a great hunter, but he's also always been great with books and memorization and lore and magic. I like the idea of stating this more explicitly. For years, I've looked at the Men of Letters as Sam's natural endgame, a way to combine his love of academia and knowledge with his vocation as a hunter. And I still believe this to be the most logical conclusion. But I also think Sam Winchester is a witch now, and I am in love with it.

And then there's Dean, who takes a backseat this week to hang around in the bunker and eat full boxes of cereal alone in his room. Big mood, Dean. The obvious, textual reason for his distress is that he feels like everything is pointless. If God is making all the rules, what the hell is the point of even trying? There's a moment right at the end where Sam is trying to convince him that what they do still matters. He tells Dean he needs his brother, and Dean seems to respond to that. But he also says that he can't tell what's God, and what's not, and that it's driving him crazy. Which, like, let's drill down into that for a second, because yes. This is so compelling.

Dean has already had that conversation with Cas a few episodes back, when he talked about how he didn't know what was real. And Cas said, "we are." And it was super very much gay, y'all. And now Dean and Cas are on the outs. Everything about the distance between them is being framed as a breakup. Dean is moping around in the bunker, while Cas sequesters himself away in a small town, and talks about a "friend he once had" with random strangers, clearly pining. I know there's more to it than just the Destiel angle, but when Dean says he can't tell what's real and what's God, I am irresistibly drawn to what this means for him and Cas specifically. Castiel was assigned to Dean. He was told to pull him out of Hell because of the Apocalypse. And yes, the Winchesters and Cas became "Team Free Will" and Cas defied his orders and the Apocalypse was averted. But now, everything has been thrown into question. That whole story was just part of Chuck's larger narrative. So is anything about Castiel, about his relationship to Dean, real?

And that phone call. That was a phone call between ex-boyfriends who are forced to communicate for logistical reasons. Cas is so grumpy. Dean is so gruff. "Sam's been trying to call you." Oh, lord, Dean. Just admit you miss him. This whole conversation was so great. It gave me so much hope for the story they're telling about their relationship.

Cas' subplot was pretty standard, but I mean that as a compliment. Basically, his "time off" is interrupted when he learns about people going missing in the area. He helps a woman find her missing son, and defeats the djin who has been praying on the town. He also goes full bad-ass Castiel, healing himself from multiple gunshot wounds and taking down the bad guy with brutal efficiency. He even heals the kid's injuries, although it seems to take a lot out of him. What I found really interesting about Castiel's defeat of the bad guy is that at first he's relying on his powers as an angel, standing and taking the gunshot wounds with barely a flinch. But then he reverts to human methods. He doesn't smite the djin. He stabs him. Over and over. It's actually quite intense. He does things the human hunter way, and it speaks to the ways in which Cas will never be fully human, but he's certainly leaned more and more into that part of his identity over the years. What with his powers being on the fritz, it might be time to hang up his wings once and for all, by the time this show wraps up.

So that's that! We got some prime Eileen content, we got some great Rowena reminiscences, Cas got his own subplot and got to be grumpy to Dean, and we even got a nice little brotherly moment there at the end, where Sam encourages Dean to get back on the horse, and tells him he needs him. This was such a fantastic episode and I can't wait for more!

9.5/10