Just when I thought Supernatural season 7 couldn’t get any more confusing, Cas comes back. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to see Misha Collins again, but the end of this week’s episode makes no sense and I’m growing frustrated with the way the show is treating the Leviathan storyline.
Last week the show dropped a huge bombshell about the Leviathans being here to help humanity by curing cancer. Then the boys arrived at Frank’s trailer and found him missing and the trailer torn apart.
This week, none of that is even mentioned. Instead, it’s all about the broken wall in Sam’s head and his increasingly harmful visions of Lucifer. The big fix is something that a smarter person than I will need to explain, because from where I stand, it’s an unsatisfying conclusion that feels like an easy way to get out of a complicated story.
Sam in the Hospital
“The Born-Again Identity” opens with Sam running on fumes as he’s been awake for five straight days. The visions of Lucifer are increasing annoying as he sings, explodes firecrackers and plays Cat’s Cradle. Sam gets locked in a mental institution where he helps a fellow patient get rid of her ghost brother while looking AMAZING in a tight white t-shirt.
Dean and Emmanuel
Dean searches for help with Sam and hears of a faith healer named Emmanuel. He finds the guy, only there are two big problems. The first is that demons are after him and the second is that he’s Cas, he just doesn’t know it.
You see, a few months ago Cas crawled out of a lake, completely naked and with no memory of who he is. So the woman who found him (with an assist from the Internet) named him Emmanuel.
Things get more complicated when Meg returns for Cas, because she wants to use him in her on-going war against Crowley. The three of them go to see Sam, but the hospital is crawling with demons.
Meg tells Emmanuel that he’s really an angel named Cas, so he heads down to fight the demons. As soon as he uses his angel mojo to zap them away, he remembers everything about who he is, including the bad stuff.
Castiel Saves Sam
Cas views the fact that he survived as a second chance to fix the mistakes he made, most notably breaking the wall in Sam’s head. He tries to fix it, but the wall is totally destroyed and there’s nothing to fix.
Instead, Cas lays his hands on Sam and does some type of weird Vulcan mind-meld where Cas takes the evil visions of Lucifer out of Sam’s head and puts them in his own, so now Cas is the one who’s crazy. They leave him in the mental institution so no one can find him, which sounds an awful lot like the Anna Milton storyline. Only this time Meg gets a job as a nurse to keep an eye on Cas and possibly use him for an evil plot to destroy Crowley and/or to make out with him again.
This is where the show loses me. I thought the entire premise was that Sam’s soul was tarnished by his time in the Cage. Did Cas remove Sam’s soul? Or did he trade souls? Or was he able to only remove the part of the soul that was infected?
Supernatural doesn’t seem too interested in these details. Instead, the conclusion feels like a cheap way out of the whole “Sam going crazy” storyline. Sam gets 100 percent cured, back to his good, old self, and Cas is now crazy, a way of redeeming himself for causing the problem in the beginning.
After one and a half seasons of dealing with Sam’s tortured soul, all it takes is one brief moment to solve all of that drama. It’s not satisfying at all, but at least that’s done and, hopefully, the rest of the season can focus on the Leviathans.
Next week on Supernatural: Sam and Dean team up with Garth (D.J. Qualls) to fight a demon you can only see when you’re drunk.
(Image courtesy of the CW)
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Senior Writer, BuddyTV
John watches nearly every show on TV, but he specializes in sci-fi/fantasy like The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood. However, he can also be found writing about everything from Survivor and Glee to One Tree Hill and Smallville.
