SPN 5.07 - Not again
I'm afraid my first thought when the episode ended (after my squee for next week's preview) was "fandom would have done this so much better." In fact, part of the problem with this episode that even a better screenplay wouldn't help is that there is too much running under the surface here that isn't touched on. I am also going to give Sera Gamble the benefit of a doubt and assume the reason that she wrote the teleplay and co-wrote the story was because Jenny Klein was the visiting writer this season who botched the draft and it had to be redone in a hurry. I say this not because I consider Gamble to be incapable of writing a dull, logically inconsistent episode, but because I find it quite surprising that in an episode with such a potentially intriguing and seriously emotional premise that she would have written something so paint-by-numbers. What she often can be counted on is to make emotional moments resonate.
But the episode ends up feeling like a cheat because there isn't enough time in it to hit on half the things that should come about as a result of both the Bobby storyline and the idea of only one half of SamandDean facing old age. This episode lacked an emotional center, it was all over the place, and in many ways I felt like we were expected to feel more about Patrick and Lia than Bobby, or even Dean's predicament.
It didn't help that the episode had both shaky foundations and also was jumping the logic track every few minutes. But I'll start by hitting on the one plus this episode had -- casting Chad Everett as an older Dean. I'd be really interested in reading an interview where he talks about how he prepped for this because it seemed to me he had paid attention to little things JA does in his portrayal of Dean. Having a completely different actor in one of the two central roles in this show is a hard sell. But partway through his appearance I really started believing him as Dean.
The opener was also fine and appropriately brief given everything the show had to delve into (nice reoccurrence of the Weekly World News, too). We also get off to a good start in the moment where it looks like someone's not going to buy their CDC IDs (even if Sam's not using the bikini inspector one anymore) and Dean blames it on changes in Washington.
We also have (perhaps unsurprisingly in a Gamble episode) some further character development in another clear sign that Sam is moving on from Sam circa S4. Despite Patrick pushing all of his usual buttons, Sam plays him pretty well. My guess is that these repeated events are setting us up for something. After all, 5.04 led us to the idea that Sam is going to say yes to Lucifer at some point, and the more Sam has changed, the less likely that would seem to be. Unless of course, the point is that he is going to say yes for some yet unseen reason, or that, conversely, we're being baited and switched by Dean doing so. Or as in SPN's usual method of telegraphing the obvious, neither is the case and we're just getting hit over and over again with the "Sam Has Changed" hammer so that we get the message.
But that's as far as it goes for pluses. Instead we have three wobbly pillars in the episode.
1) Oh, so now we're supposed to care about Bobby?
I have to say that even from the preview they ran last week I had already guessed that Bobby was behind the search for a miracle cure to his paralysis, one that went really wrong. So I'm not sure if I was supposed to be surprised at his actions or not. But I was hoping this episode would make up for the fact that Bobby’s dealing/not dealing with his new condition has been ignored up until the moment when Dean suddenly thinks to ask him how he's doing so that we can be told that Something Is Wrong and that This Will Be an Important Plot Point. It’s not like neither Sam nor Dean have spoken to Bobby since 5.02, but if not for the shots of Bobby in a wheelchair their conversations wouldn’t have been any different from the many times they spoke to him in S2-S4. And as far as we know, their complete absence of caretaking or even voicing of any concern since then makes what Dean says at the end of the episode pretty hollow. I’m even willing to go with the idea that maybe after Sam and Dean split up that Dean did go to see Bobby, spent some time with him, maybe helped fix up his new van, etc. But it seems unlikely since, when Sam speaks to Bobby, he talks as if it’s the first time he’s spoken to Bobby since that event, and yet it has apparently been months since he and Dean went their separate ways.
So we have Bobby’s speech in the parking lot, which covers the cliched bases. I can’t believe either Sam or Dean should be terribly surprised that Bobby's not adjusting well but I’m going to assume that they both are and that this is why neither argues with him just then. Although maybe Dean plans to and that’s why, when it seemed they were leaving, he and Bobby march back to their room. It also makes for a convenient time for Sam to leave and thus leave us in doubt that he knows about the reversal spell plan.
Instead we get "the talk" at the end. I thought Dean’s line to Bobby about still being a soldier despite being wounded was a good one. But the problem is that I didn’t feel the episode let Bobby acknowledge anything real. In fact, his line to Dean just before about how Dean would never stop complaining if he were in Bobby’s place seemed to say it all – that the problem is that Bobby is not allowed to complain about the everyday difficulties, indignities, and discrimination that are the lot of someone with a permanent disability. That he’s not allowed to complain about the reality of his situation instead of the larger picture of the war, and that if the apocalypse ended and nothing supernatural ever needed to be hunted again, he would still be in the chair, and his life would still be different than it was before. Also, old people don’t tend to feel useless because they’re old. Young people tend to treat them as if they’re useless because they’re old. Old people are simply irritable at not being able to do things the way they used to and because their life, as a whole, is more difficult for them to carry out than before. But having difficulties does not equal uselessness.
But that's what we see Bobby focus on which seems particularly out of place because 90% of the time we’ve seen him, Bobby didn’t help by running onto the scene and punching someone out. He did it by calling on his network of contacts, or doing research, or even doing his job as a mechanic and junkyard owner. There’s nothing about his disability that prevents him from continuing those things; he was never a mobile full-time hunter anyway. So why focus this discussion on Bobby still being important in a fight? What's more, I felt rather resentful towards Dean suggesting that Bobby doesn’t get to have a single moment where he’s focused on his own needs and reactions instead of theirs. “I don’t want to hear that again”? Not a great line about caring, sharing and keeping the lines of communication open. I believe Dean has strong feelings for Bobby, but I wasn’t thrilled with his approach. Saying "don't talk about it" is pretty close to saying "don't tell me anything I find inconvenient to hear, however much you're troubled."
Of course these missteps overlap with problem #2…
2) Does no one on staff know anyone over 60?
When Sam and Dean are about to discover Cliff, Sam says that they’ll never reach his age. This seems a marked contrast from Criss Angel where Sam was hoping to find some way they might. And I would think that part of the purpose of having this episode in the series is to suggest that it’s a good thing that neither Sam nor Dean will make it to such an end and that neither should want that for themselves. If so, it didn’t get leaned on much, nor explored in a way that really resonated.
Ok, so Dean plays and loses, but not enough to kill him. However, he's now plenty older than Bobby and while Chad Everett makes for a relatively spry 80 year old (I think he’s actually 74) Dean in the story is an AMAZINGLY spry 80 year old. He can clearly eat all the cheeseburgers he wants if he retains that sort of stamina.
For example, are we supposed to believe that Patrick's apartment is on the 37th floor? Dean is in DAMN good shape to be only 10 seconds behind Sam on a climb like that.
I also can’t believe a team of writers couldn’t figure out for themselves that Dean would have had more trouble hearing the lock tumblers than seeing the numbers (that whole sequence made no sense, what kind of lock picking is that?) Would someone also like to explain the connection between eyesight and memory to me? It’s been so long since we’ve seen Sam and Dean do a salt and burn in a graveyard and yet this is where we get the grave digging? Dean once stole a cement mixer, they couldn’t steal a grave digger? They should have had Dean just play for 25 years if they wanted him to be essentially the same as a 30 year old, but then I suppose it wouldn’t have given JA the time off that JP got in 5.04.
I'm also going to assume that the reason Sam is so unaccommodating about Dean's new state is because neither he nor Dean want to see it as anything but temporary.
But the crux of this episode's problem was …
3) Who is this villain? Why is he here?
Dean deciding at once to play for Bobby’s life is no surprise. They have no other options and he has no time to waste. But here we come upon a major problem: why does Patrick play anyone for years?
Clearly Patrick is a thief and a swindler, as we’re shown with the instance of the watch and the car. But how does he profit from the years? No one seems to be paying him anything to enter a game with him, and he doesn’t seem to be profiting from their deaths by, say, stealing their possessions. So what is his motivation? The only thing I could figure is that the years other players lose add to his life extension – that he steals other peoples' years to live longer. But that's certainly not clear, and since when is that a witch's power?
For starters, the “he-witch” thing is just stupid. Male witches are called warlocks, why emphasize the “witch” part? And secondly, we were told in Malleus that witches all gain their power from contracts with demons. Yet Patrick is supposedly 900 years old and Lia, who also has powers, is at least a few hundred as well. That is one patient demon. It doesn’t make any sense. Why not just call them both demons and be done with it? After all, the Crossroads Demons as well as the one who possessed Tammi have shown that demons have a remarkable range of power to do things. Here we see Lia doing the telekinetic thing and Patrick apparently teleporting the way demons do. If they can resurrect people then extending or reducing their lives wouldn’t seem a stretch. So I repeat, why is it so important to portray both as witches?
The only thing I could figure was that the writers didn’t want to portray demons as at all sympathetic even though we’ve already had a sympathetic demon couple in Sin City. Although my second question was then why the writers felt any need to make Patrick and Lia sympathetic to start with? In fact, Lia’s appearance in this episode is really unnecessary. The only importance she has to it is to provide Dean and Bobby with a way to reverse Patrick’s spell. And since Bobby and Sam are both research experts, I wouldn’t have found it a stretch to believe that somehow both figured out a reversal spell on their own. So the only reason she was around was to flesh out Patrick’s story. But why bother? We have Bobby, a longtime character in the show in desperate need of development, and on the face of it this episode should be all about him. He’s what drives all the action in it, but his own experiences seem to be put in simply in a perfunctory manner. And then we have Sam and Dean potentially working out issues about their own expectations of the future here in Dean’s sudden aging, and yet what little there is about his experience is played for laughs.
Here’s my suspicion. The original story by Jenny Klein didn’t focus that much on Sam and Dean or Bobby. It focused on her original characters Patrick and Lia (something Jane Espenson pointed out is a common failure with spec scripts) so it needed to be rewritten. But too much of the original story either had to be kept or was kept due to time issues and so we end up with a mishmash of stuff that doesn’t really flesh out anyone. Coincidentally, the last episode to deal with aging, Kriss Angel, was also overly focused on the characters of the week although it still worked out Sam and Dean’s emotional storyline in a much better way.
Returning to Patrick and his motivation, I have to wonder what Xavier was playing for in the opening segment? The guy was only 25 years old to start with, what was he trying to do, become a 13 year old again? Why bother playing such a game? It makes perfect sense for older individuals like Bobby, Cliff and Hesh. But why Xavier? I can only assume he was an addicted gambler, because to play a game with no real stakes for him, and then to keep playing until he lost so badly that he aged and died in a couple of hours? Nothing else makes sense. But then this presumes something important: the reason Patrick can steal people's future years, is because all our lifetimes are set in stone, that years are banked like grain in a silo. That's pretty deterministic for the ":free will" argument SPN always wrestles with. It's also a pretty peculiar one for Dean, who has already almost died twice, and then did die only to be resurrected. On what lifetime timeline is he playing at this point?
Patrick claims not to be a murderer and yet he is, so I assume that when he lets Hesh off easy, it’s because Sam is watching him and he wants Sam to lower his defenses, be uncertain of where he stands. But then when Patrick says at the end that he doesn’t want to win so that Lia dies, what does it matter? Given what he did with Hesh clearly he doesn’t have to win or lose in order to confer the years to the other player. Why go through the routine?
My reference earlier to Patrick teleporting, by the way, had to do with his sudden appearance to confront Sam and Dean in his apartment. Exactly how did he get back and past Bobby and the non-working elevator to appear in the room like that? Also, how does he know about Dean’s heart, or for that matter that Dean is dying later when he’s playing against Sam? Does he know what happens to all his victims? And if he isn’t a mind reader, how does he know Sam is Dean’s brother? I wouldn’t have expected either Dean or Bobby to have mentioned Sam during the poker game, which was the only other time Patrick has seen them.
The only reason I can see that we had the final scene with Patrick and Lia is because we’re supposed to be seeing something of Sam and Dean’s future there. That scene was all about letting go, which is something neither of them have done until now. So it makes me wonder if by season’s end that’s something we’re going to see – one of them having to let the other go in some permanent way. And maybe that's going to lead into next week's episode, too.
Besides those three problems, there are various other issues.
1) I was wondering from early on where this episode was supposed to be set. Not only does Bobby make it into town in record time but it’s the first time I can recall that we’ve seen such an assortment of Asian women in the series. Of course, they get to be prostitutes and housekeepers so yay for that, huh? Speaking of which, they rarely run into housekeeping staff despite all their motel stays, but I noticed that the last time we saw an Asian woman (in S3’s Dream) she was also a housekeeper.
2) Back to Cliff, is there some reason Dean needed to check for a birthmark – the tattoo and ID wasn’t enough? I’m going to assume it was so he could plant the suggestion that Cliff’s wife had hired them to find him. Because otherwise Cliff should have really been asking who the hell they were and what they were doing looking for him.
3) Uh, where does Dean get off telling Cliff to stay classy?
4) I’m next going to assume that Dean wasn’t kidding about there being a lot of bars in town. Given the look of Patrick’s apartment this is not a small city, so I’m going to have to figure that it took Sam and Dean days, maybe even a week to come across Patrick. They’re at the Cicero Motel, which makes me think maybe this is taking place near Chicago. Because Bobby is clearly at home when he’s talking to Dean and we next see him beating Dean by a few hours to Patrick. “Brains before legs” is a poor excuse to start with, and it leaves us with Bobby being able to teleport his van otherwise.
5) I’m rather wondering where Sam and Dean came up with all that bartender bribing cash from. Clearly not from playing poker.
6) Given the nature of their case, fine, Sam would be willing to quickly believe Dean was Dean. But what was with “I thought you said you were good at poker?” Said? Sam doesn’t know if his own brother is good at poker? What? So how does Dean later know that he’s a better player than Sam and that Bobby’s better than them both unless they’ve played before?
7) Nice to know they never bother to lock their doors. Not like most motels don’t have automatically locking ones at that.
8) Dean owns a bathrobe? Really? I get that the writers didn’t want to have Chad Everett do a scene topless, but why did he have to be undressed at all?
9) I missed the Impala in this episode, though I get that it made more sense to be using Bobby’s van (and yes, I know she appeared in the parking lot scene).
10) So the three of them follow Patrick to his apartment (he must have been in town for a while to bother with one) and they see him leave. How do they know what apartment he’s in?
11) Um, they decide to set a fire inside the van instead of immediately outside of it?
12) Is there some reason Sam decided to show his hand? Since Patrick folded he doesn’t get to see his cards. Was this Sam's pride showing or was this his effort to throw Patrick off in reading him? I guess Sam also began with only just enough chips to restore Dean to his previous age. You’d have thought Sam would have loved to make Dean younger than him so that Dean could never quite pull off the “older” brother routine again!
13) Only in a Sera Gamble episode would Dean call Sam’s name with his dying breath. And I loved JA's little jig when he reappears.
14) The thing about Ironside made us both laugh because early in the episode Mike said “So Bobby can be Ironside now.” And then later on, sure enough Dean pulls that reference out. Maybe it’s a generational thing.
Please, SPN, do something good with the next episode.