CW
(Season 4, Episode 5)
After kicking the season off with four pretty heavy episodes, it was time for a little break. And that’s a good thing. While they don’t do it often, the Supernatural team does comedy very well. This time, the classic movie monsters provided the backdrop for the laughs. It called to mind season two’s “Hollywood Babylon,” another from the short list of oddball episodes. It was largely tongue in cheek, with lots of cues from the classic horror movies, but there was still time to uncover a rather familiar foe.
Before we get to that big ol’ mystery though, we should probably talk about the production. I really like the choice to do the whole thing in black and white. Sure, it would have worked just fine in color, but the different look added to the atmosphere. As soon as the classic credits popped up on the screen, I was in. They carried it right on through in the way they shot everything as well, most notably with the brightly lit eyes on Dracula.
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Getting to the story, where do we start? The script was chock full of great references and one-liners. At the same time on occasion, as we saw with Dean’s revelation about his health post-Hell. “Brother, I have been rehymenated, and the Dude will not abide.” A hymen joke, and The Big Lebowski, all mashed together for you. I also really liked Jamie’s line, trying to put it all in perspective: “You guys are like Mulder and Scully or something? And the X-Files are real?” There was the Goethe theater, “I’m a maverick Ma’am,” Anne Rice, and they even wrapped the mystery with a classic. From King Kong: “It was beauty that killed the beast.” I could go on, but you watched it too, right?
Getting, slightly, more serious, were you guessing shape shifter right away? I was actually going with a trickster. Shape shifter worked well though, and it is impressive that they can reuse the creature and not have it feel tired. It certainly didn’t hurt that they cast Todd Stashwick. He’s been on a roll lately, having followed up his run on The Riches with great guest spots on The Middleman, Psych, and Life. This was a great part, but you have to imagine he had an odd reaction upon learning that he is a Vespa riding vampire.
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As much as I loved all the gags, my favorite scene in the episode took on a much more serious tone. That would be Dean’s little chat with Jamie (Melinda Sward) where he came clean about his “near death experience.” It really did condense a lot of what we saw in season three. Her description, “That must suck. You’re giving up your life for this terrible responsibility.” and his reaction, “Last few years, I started thinking that way.” tell the story very well. That was then followed by Dean telling her things were different. “I save them. And I gotta say, it’s awesome. Kind of like a mission from God.” Dean really has changed. Of course, the fact that Dean shared this moment with Jamie, and not Sam, is also very telling of where we are with other parts of the ongoing story.
All things considered, “Monster Movie” made for a nice little season four intermission. Judging by the preview, things will be getting very complicated and scary again with the next episode. I’ll look forward to that. And until then, I’ll just leave you with a couple things to ponder. Porky’s 2. Lederhosen. Ha.
Clacked by Brett Love 
on Oct 17, 2008 @ 08:47 EST5EDT
awesome episode. i was entertained from begininng to end…this show has become my new must watch of the week!!!
Totally laughed my way through it – and that’s pretty telling, for a so-called “horror” series. I’ve gotta add one more word to your things to ponder though – “Rehymnenated.” Brilliant. Why aren’t more people watching SPN?!
Great episode!!!, love the look, and at first i too thought of the trickster, but shape shifter as you said, work just fine too.
I’m in total agreement with everyone about this being a great and fun episode. I was also heartened to see the episode conclude with the words “The End?”. Maybe the question mark means they’ll try something like this again in the future. That would be great.
why aren’t more people watching? Thursdays at 8pm Central. We have a two channel DVR and have three programs that we want to watch at that time (and we aren’t CSI watchers). My wife likes Greys, several of us like The Office and we all like Supernatural. We DVR Grey’s and Supernatural, after deciding last year that The Office wasn’t as interesting (we made that decision right as it started to get good, too – but how were we to know?). We used to be able to time-shift Supernatural when the WB and then CW re-ran it early on Sundays, but then they stopped doing that.
we made the decision to support Supernatural — it’s one of the few shows that my entire family (40’s husband and wife, 15 and 12 year old boys) watch together. We are totally into the mythology, and my boys remember almost all of the details of past episodes. But I can see many other people deciding that in tihs crowded timeslot that Supernatural is their second or third favorite and having it slide down the priority queue.
Unfortunately, CW has almost nowhere else to put it — it really needs a different network. When the WB was the network of Buffy and Angel, it worked. now, it’s definitely the odd show out unless they can somehow mix the schedule up to pair it with Reaper, but even then the very different tones of the shows could work against each other.