Supernatural: S08E15 - Man's Best Friend with Benefits.

Supernatural has had one of the strongest runs in recent memory, will this week continue the trend or will the quality finally dip?


As Bella and Edward...I mean Portia and James drove off screen, I found myself sitting there, blinking in a confused daze. Tonight's episode felt to all extensive purposes like one long, back door pilot. A homicide detective who was also a wiccan, that used his powers to better himself as a cop?! His girlfriend isn't just his girlfriend, but a familiar that can turn into a dog?! This sounds like one of the thousand hackneyed Twilight rip-offs currently gathering dust at your local book store. You know what it also is? Nothing to do with Supernatural. Honestly, if this was a back door pilot, I cannot wait to see the series, the lore and the action were all great, yes, even after all I said.

However and a big however, when Supernatural is coming to the end of its 8th season, when everything has been put in place, the last thing I want is an awkwardly shoehorned back door pilot. This episode is easily up there with episodes like Bugs and that retarded episode about the racist truck in terms of pointless time wasting.

And I totally get that the brothers are just killing time until the next trial, but they didn't need to dedicate an entire episode to them killing time, the point of a TV show is to condense time, to give us the best of moments, this episode was like watching paint dry. You can't just tell us 'oh yeah so they helped this guy in the past off-screen once' and then expect us to suddenly care if his magic use has turned him into some kind of killer. No one cares.

Probably the most angering aspect of this episode was despite all the advancements in the last month or so of episodes, it looks like they brothers have come full circle. Most of the episode is wasted on the brothers bitch fighting about their trust and abandonment issues and when they aren't wasting our time with their stupid, unnecessary fucking tantrums we have to watch the brothers continue to struggle to have any kind of moral consistency, as they try to reason with the audience how it's okay to kill James, but let all the other people go that they've let go in this season. Both Sam and Dean were great characters in season one, which I am rewatching alongside this season, it saddens me that the writers have turned them both into utter cunts this season.

And sure that final fight was very flashy, but they also wrapped up the whole fight in about two minutes, making the conclusion feel even more rushed and easy than usual and that is no easy feat considering the pathetic endings to some of the biggest, most hyped characters throughout the shows history. Serious bullshit.

I really don't have a lot to say about this episode, it was bad, really bad but I am so beyond caring by this point that I can't even really get that angry about it and rant. I will forever hold a place in my heart for this show, for the early seasons when it was the best thing on TV, but after four seasons of painful and bitter disappointment I use every rare good episode as a treat and simply take these shitty episodes, that have become the norm, in my stride. I've hurt too long, to bother with hurting over this any more.

Pros;

• If this was a back door pilot, this new series sounds interesting I guess.
• Some solid, albeit rushed, action.

Cons;

• Pure filler episodes, that feel like shoehorned back door pilots, are not cool ever but are especially shitty this late into a season.
• The brothers have come full circle...again.
• Rushed climax.

Think About It!

-Locke

What would you rate, 'Man's Best Friend with Benefits'?