Supernatural: S08E05 - Blood Brother.

Let the midweek TV clusterfuck begin! Or rather end of the week, whatever...


Blood Brother, although not quite as fillery as the last two weeks, still ironically does even less to further the plot. It mainly involves either flashbacks or side character Benny. Aren't there more important things to be getting on with? The last two weeks have been great, guys, but you're gonna have to get on with the actual plot at some point. Then again, I suppose Benny is a pirate vampire...or a vampirate, so I guess there isn't much more important than that.

Benny's plot, ultimately, isn't that far away from every other vampire story...ever. I mean other than the whole vampirate thing and getting brutally murdered at the end. Benny was a loyal vampire, he fell in love with a human woman and their love made him change his vampire ways and they ran away together, but eventually the past caught up and blahblah. We've heard this a thousand times before. Bloody women!

Also, anyone else think it's funny that vampires trigger Dean's epic battle flashback and Sam gets a...air conditioning fan flashback, just awesome Sam, just awesome. I'm sure that fan fixing will be so useful to absolutely nothing in the rest of the story. I mean I know having a human life has been important to both the story and very specifically to Sam but it honestly just feels like the writers are just writing Sam out of his own show.

Sam continues to drill Dean about almost killing Kevin's mother, seemingly still ignorant of his own hypocrisy. I mean we get the whole 'well not to him' line, so I guess that could imply that Sam agrees with Dean and is just sticking up for Kevin but the smug way he's going on about it makes him a real asshole. And Dean continues to drill Sam about his year off, also seemingly a lot more self aware of his hypocrisy but is seemingly using Sam's year off as a gut punch, I mean the year off was really shitty on Sam's part, I'm not gonna argue that for a second but Dean could be going about this a little better.

Blood Brother is not a good episode, not a bad one exactly either, but whatever. What I was going to say is despite everything, I loved the dialogue in this episode. The dialogue was really witty and tightly written this episode, really reminded me of the Supernatural glory days. I really love the way Benny and Dean bounce off from one another, I found myself chuckling quite regularly. There were other moments of classic Supernatural quirkiness too, like when Sam and Dean decided to argue on the phone while Dean was trapped in the vamp nest. And some classic brotherly love, I don't talk about acting often in my TV reviews but I really felt Padalecki but on a great performance this week. It's the little touches that used to make Supernatural so great and it works just as well here.

In the end Blood Brother was very reminiscent of one of the main problems with the last four or so seasons. No matter how good your story is, if your execution stinks then the story can't be enjoyed. No matter what anyone tells you, a story in a TV show or movie is actually the least important thing. TV and Film, first and foremost, is a visual medium. So first and foremost, it's the visuals that matter above all else. If I wanted to see actors stand around and talk at each other, I'd go watch a stage play. If I wanted a good story, I'd read a book. There is no excuse that so much of this episode either happened off screen or in places we couldn't actually see it, honestly minus the character development in this episode, this episode was basically forty minutes of nothing and honestly Sam's flashbacks are so incredibly pointless to the rest of the story, I don't even know if his flashbacks even count as anything. It had an interesting enough story and enough character development to not make me completely hate the thing but this was executed so incredibly poorly and the worst thing is, is with the way it's directed, I think director Guy Bee really thought he was being stylish. What an obnoxious prick. Then again he did direct Lone Gunmen last week and look how that turned out. In the end it ultimately pissed away the potential it had to be as great an episode as the story promised. Not a bad episode so much, but definitely a step in the wrong direction for the series. Benny is a great character though, I hope he sticks around with the brothers.

Pros

• Benny is awesome.
• Dean's purgatory flashbacks are awesome, if only the leviathan were that cool when they were the actual villains.
• Great classic Supernatural dialogue. 
• I really think Jared Padalecki is a better actor than Sam deserves.

Cons

• When does the plot actually start?
• EPIC FAN FLASHBACK - Writers, can you write Sam back into the story, please?
• Benny is a great character, why give him such a generic back story? 
• Sam and Dean are still assholes.
• Terrible execution wasted the potential this episode had.

Think About It!

-Locke