NaNoWriMo and then a five-day trip to Toronto got me all backed up over here. Sometimes I don’t write when I hate an episode, but I liked both “How to Win Friends” and “Death’s Door”, so let’s get to it, shall we?
Episode 7.09 was written by my favorite Supernatural writer, Ben Edlund. I love how he veers from ridiculous to horrifying so easily, and makes me believe every second of it. So we start out with the mauling of a non-camper camper type (I believe in tents and sleeping bags on the ground when you camp, that’s how we did it when I was a kid, dammit!) which brings our beloved Winchesters and Mr. Bobby Singer to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, which always makes me think of The Sopranos, in search of the Jersey Devil.
Needless to say, this is not the work of the mythical Jersey Devil. And I could go on and on, because this episode is pretty twisty and turny considering we start out in the Pine Barrens and end up in a shootout with leviathan Dick Roman at some distribution warehouse, and since we have already seen the episode that follows this one… well, I don’t need to spend a lot of time on this one. The gist of it all is that the leviathan have spiked Dean’s new favorite sandwich with some kind of grey, gooey revolting-ness that sedates people, making them easier to eat, I assume. Although DoctorLeviathan had a few failures, like the zombie-like guy who attacked the campers, and AngryBrendan waiting tables at Biggerson’s.
Awesome gruesome: The night our trio of heroes go a-huntin’ for whatever is eating people in the woods, they meet one crazy zombie! Which leads us to one of the best, old school autopsies ever! along with some silly, not so grumpy anymore Dean dialogue (I firmly believe that Edlund LOVES to write Dean). My favorite bit being the cat head in the zombie stomach (“You got to be damn hungry to eat a cats head”). EWWW.
So, after some sleuthing and the sobering up of Dean, Bobby gets snatched on the roof of the leviathan hideout and teased by Dick Roman. Our lovely Winchesters come to the rescue, of course, leaving Bobby a moment to rifle through Dicks’ plans, finding out what those plans really are, and melting a bunch of leviathan faces in the meantime.
A little more villian blah blah, and Bobby runs out to the awaiting getaway van, and Dean peals outta there with Dick running behind pulling off a few rounds in their direction. As they speed away, Dean and Sam giddy with their escape, they realize that Bobby, who hasn’t said a thing since they sped off, has been shot in the head.
And I yell “Noooooo!” at my TV as the executive producer title card pops up.
“Death’s Door” starts right up where we left off, with a zoom into Bobby’s hole in his head, and I have to say I was totally confused at first, with the scene in the Pine Barrens from the previous episode, even if I recognized that it was a little different than the original. It’s a pretty clever way of introducing us to Bobby’s brain, show, and we get an awesome episode traveling through Bobby’s rapidly dying brain.
The conceit, brought to us by Rufus (Hi Rufus!!), is that if Bobby can dig deep enough into his gin-soaked brain, he can find a door out and save himself from death, or at the very least, get the cryptic info he got from Dick’s desk to the brothers (and OMG, another one of my shows with cryptic numbers?). Unfortunately, Bobby has a reaper on his tail who informs Bobby that he is in a coma and dying and he might as well just come along, and we all know those guys don’t give up once they’ve got a bead on you.
Meanwhile, our sorrowful Winchesters stomp and cry in the hospital as they begin to realize that they are going to lose their second Daddy. Dean is not taking it well, as to be expected, harassing the poor organ donor guy and such, while Sammy resorts to his now fall back tic, shoving his nail into his palm to make sure that this isn’t all some horrible, horrible hallucination. It’s pretty sad. I hate to see those boys in pain, and now that they seem to have finally repaired their relationship, they have to deal with this. Why are the writers so mean to them?
Anyway, we get quite the tour of Mr. Singers head, ending with youngBobby shooting his abusive drunk of a dad dead, dead, dead right before he smacks his Mom into oblivion. Nice move, youngBobby, I approve. This is enough to get nowBobby to wake up on his deathbed just long enough to get the numbers to Sammy, and call the boys “idjits” in his fatherly way, and flat line right in front of those lovely boys eyes.
The screen goes black, exec. producer title card, aaaand… Bobby’s dead? For realsies?? Not sure. It would be very Supernatural of them to finally kill off Bobby. Amazing he’s lasted this long, actually. But then again, this is a show where dead people show up all the time, and people escape death countless times, so who knows. We certainly won’t until January (damn you, holiday hiatuses!).
