['Supernatural' - 'You Can't Handle the Truth']

Hey, people who don't watch 'Supernatural'! This is obviously a review of Friday's episode of that show, but I want you to be aware of one thing -- something that may lead you to watch the show someday. But even if you don't, know that 'Supernatural' has two of the finest lead actors on television.

OK, if you don't want to read about 'You Can't Handle the Truth,' see you later. But I just wanted the non-'Supernatural' fans who read this site to have that information.

As for my fellow 'Supernatural' fans, I'm betting you'll agree with me about two things: That Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki gave exceptional performances, and that the ending of the episode was shocking. It was meant to shock, there can be no doubt about that.

My responses to the ending, and to the episode as a whole, are pretty complicated, so I'll say in advance that I appreciate your patience if you'll bear with me as I go through my post-'Truth' thoughts.

As a whole, 'Truth' had some plotting problems, which I'll get to later. Generally speaking, it took a long time to get to the truth we were all waiting for: What is Sam? And we didn't find out, though, by process of elimination, we know he's not human and he's not Lucifer.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What to make of Dean beating up his brother at the end of 'Truth'?

Just as our responses to that moment are probably complicated, I think Dean was experiencing several emotions and impulses at once. In those Veritas scenes, Jensen was unbelievably good at making you feel Dean's unbearable sadness -- not only did he decide that he was a lost cause, he found out his brother wasn't human and had been lying to him the whole time.

The life Dean had tried to lead with Lisa was over, and his initial joy at seeing Sam alive had been replaced by hurt and incomprehension over believing -- and then being told -- that Sam wasn't Sam. To Dean, it might have been better if Sam stayed in the cage rather than come back and put him through this emotional wringer. And then to have Sam admit that he knew he was off the entire time? It must have been the most painful betrayal possible.

Dean didn't want to kill Sam -- he didn't have the heart to. So he put down the blade, but he still wanted Sam out of commission so he could drag his brother to Bobby's house. His first instinct, as always, was to go to Bobby's and try to find some comfort there, even if Bobby might not have any answers.

My guess is he told himself he was punching Sam to just knock him out for transport purposes, but the rage and hurt Dean was feeling just took over. He went much further than he had intended, because he wasn't in control of his emotions. After all, he'd just told Veritas that he knew he was a killer, nothing more. Why not just give in to the violence that he'd been immersed in since he was a kid? Why bother fighting his darkest instincts? Especially when he may have been thinking: "How could I let my kid brother turn into me?"

Call that Response 1, which was the majority of my reaction to that final set of scenes. Overall, I thought they were good scenes, thanks in large part to Jensen and Jared's terrific performances, and those dark moments may have set the stage for some interesting developments.

Response 2 -- let's call it about 30 percent of my overall reaction -- contains some questions and perhaps a few fears about where the show is taking Dean (both brothers, in fact). The show seems to be making some parallels to Season 1 or overall 'Supernatural' paradigms, in which Dean is (or was) allegedly the more remorseless, unemotional hunter. As Dean said in 'Truth,' now Sam is the guy that Dean allegedly was back in the day -- cold, ruthless, unconcerned about the human cost of what they do.

Yet I don't think that Dean ever truly was that guy. I hope both the show and Dean remember that.

Part of the reason the show's been interesting to me is because of the complexity they gave this supposedly cool, rational, unaffected hunter. Dean was forced into that role by his family duties, but over the past six seasons, they've shown that fulfilling that role has cost him a lot, and being the gruff, responsible leader was not necessarily something he ever wanted.

Of course he had feelings -- why else would he have cared so much about his relationship with Sam? Would the Dean of Season 1 have ever smirked the way Sam did while questioning a dead girl's sister or while watching his own brother being turned? No. Dean could be thoughtless and brusque, among other things, but there was always a guy in there who was trying his best under very difficult circumstances.

Maybe one of the goals for the season is for Dean to realize that he never was that unemotional, remorseless guy. I hope so. Because I'd really be concerned if the past six season of character development and exploration were left by the side of the road like a moldy burger.

OK, maybe I'm overstating the case there, but the trajectory of the brothers from youth to manhood has been one of the most interesting things about 'Supernatural.' The brothers have so much individual and dual history. I'll grant that the show hasn't always been consistent about how it showed or developed their growth or relationship, but they've learned how to treat each other as adults. They've learned how to let each other make their own choices. Dean even attempted to lead a life outside of hunting and establish emotional bonds outside that narrow, single-minded world.

Of course, all of that made it that much more painful when Dean said, "I ain't a father. I'm a killer and there's no changing that. I know that now."

The tragedy of the scene is that he doesn't even know how far he's come. For Dean to give up on himself that completely -- so completely that he'd try to obliterate his brother's face -- that was hard. And I don't know if I entirely buy that Dean sped to that place of low self-esteeem that quickly. Sure, it was hard to learn that Sam came back inhuman. Does that mean Dean just gives up on himself?

Again, maybe the idea for the season is for the brothers to preserve or re-discover the maturity they'd gained over the past several years, and even build on that. I really hope so, and I hope that 'Supernatural' is not in the process of hitting the reset button. It's too early to say whether that's the case, and my inclination is to give the writers the benefit of the doubt. They know a lot of us have stuck with the show to see these issues of maturity and interdependence treated in thoughtful and intelligent ways, and given how emotionally ambitious the season is, we have reason to believe that they're going to give us some compelling food for thought in the next six months. Still, these are just some ideas I thought worth bringing up.

As for Sam, I wonder about the implications of the whole "I don't know what happened to me or what I am" thread. As I've said before, if he has no agency and is just a puppet on someone else's string, then how can we get invested in what he's going through as an individual or in his relationship with Dean? Is Different!Sam still the Sam we used to care about? I hope so. We need to find out what he is soon so that we know whether to care about him or not, not to put it too plainly. But if we end up with only vague clues about who or what Sam is, it'll be that much more difficult to care about where the character goes from here.

All in all, as I said, I was more intrigued than concerned by what transpired at the end of 'Truth.' I do like the idea of the brothers being together, yet emotionally apart -- they never did separate for long in season 5 but to see them psychologically diverge and yet work through their complicated issues while sharing the Impala has a lot of potential, if it's handled right.

I just fully recognize that this is a dark season, and though I think it has potential, I get why some fans might be a little wigged by the melancholy tone. I like me some dark and twisty, and I quite like bittersweet noir themes, but let's face it, the ending of 'Truth' was about as dark as things get for this show.

Still, despite its title, we didn't get a ton of truth about what's going on, and we can't fully judge how all these things are going to work until we're more clear on what's going on with each brother (especially Sam). But I'm certainly willing to see where all this goes. We're still in the set-up phase of the season, and while season 6 doesn't have the apocalyptic ambition of season 5, as I said, it appears to be emotionally ambitious. Thus the powers that be are really going to have to bring their A game to the character development to pull this off.

Having said all that, I'm not pleased that this was the third episode of the season to have distracting structural issues (the others were 'The Third Man' and 'Live Free or Twihard'). I'm seeing some new names pop up on the writing credits this year, and I'm not sure if that's the issue -- new writers not having a great feel for what makes a 'Supernatural' episode work, plot-wise. But I hope they get this problem in hand soon. The best 'Supernatural' episodes have well-crafted or at least sturdy plots that allow us to explore the characters, their development and their relationships. 'Truth' wasn't a bad episode per se, but the plot ended up detracting from the overall momentum of the hour.

'Truth' trundled along in a relatively decent way until it unleashed a huge groaner of an implausibility. Every so often, 'Supernatural' does this -- it spends too much time establishing who the villain of the week is and then too little time on that character and the truths that are elicited when he or she shows up. So there was a truth-inducing trinket out there, the show wrung some comic and dramatic beats from that, and then -- wait, it's not Gabriel's trumpet. The goddess Veritas has been summoned. OK then.

And the boys figure out she's the local news anchor how? Oh, they just decide that anyone who wants to bring truth to the masses must be a journalist, and, oh, by the way, she must be a female news anchor. Whaaa? How'd they make that leap? That was just not credible to me. From the moment the duo decided it was the news anchor to the moment they actually encountered her in her swanky lair, I timed it -- that was about five wasted minutes. Five minutes in which we could have had more Truth Time with Sam and Dean. Argh! The final few scenes were so interesting that I wanted much more of that. Am I alone on that?

Let's just move on, because the not-awesome plot gives me a migraine. I want to ask your thoughts on the Lisa development. If it's true that the show has just dropped the Ben and Lisa story line for good, that'll be disappointing. I now feel that Dean's drop-in on Ben and Lisa last week -- a scene that was inartfully shoved into the middle of 'Twihard' -- was mainly there to set up their breakup this week.

Why did Dean answer the phone when Lisa called? He could have just ignored the call, given that he knew that he'd probably get some uncomfortable truths. Was it Dean's old "I don't deserve happiness" instinct kicking in? He had to know where that conversation was likely to go. Why not tell Lisa exactly why he had been acting so odd? She might have had all the more reason to break up with him, but he had nothing to lose at that point. She deserved the truth as well. It was disappointing that, because the show wanted Dean broken up with Lisa, he didn't just tell her why he had acted so oddly.

And overall, I'm just a little sad and surprised that the show kicked Lisa to the curb so early in the season. In the few flashes we saw of her, she was on her way to becoming more than a mere plot device. She was independent and thoughtful and strong, and now the show has lost another female character (argh!). I don't quite know if I buy that Dean fell into a self-pity spiral and thought he didn't deserve her and Ben, though I do buy that he was in a lot emotional turmoil at that moment. Maybe we're not done with Lisa, and in the hopes that that's the case, I'll reserve judgment on where they've left that. For now.

I was pretty hard on 'Twihard' last week, maybe harsher than I intended to be (hey, that's going around, huh?). And it's not that I hated 'Truth.' Like 'Twihard,' it wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible, it was somewhere in the middle.

The big thing 'Truth' did right was giving Jared and Jensen some opportunities for terrific acting. Mechanically speaking, the episode could have been better than it was, but at least it provided some memorable emotional moments.

As we've all noted, Jared has shown extreme skill in the way that he's played Different!Sam this season. He certainly seems like our Sam much of the time, but in tiny ways, he's able to communicate that he's not really Sam. Witness the moment in 'Truth' in which he walks away from Dean with the spell box containing the cat head. He wasn't smirking, exactly, but there was a hardness about him; he knew he'd just played his brother, and he didn't care. The way Jared has played Dean's ruthlessness -- and his surprise at how ruthless he can be -- has been nothing short of perfect.

As I've wondered before, what if season 6 Sam doesn't have a soul? Could he be caught up in the soul-stealing process that the angels appear to be so concerned about? It's a theory. I don't think Sam is an angel, or Castiel would have figured that out by now, although clearly he has other things on his plate at the moment.

What's clear is that the reliable 'Supernatural' theme of fathers and sons is getting a workout this season. Sam has been around Grandpa Samuel, who is much less emotional than anyone in the Winchester clan. Dean has tried to be a father to Ben, which has made him vulnerable in ways he wasn't before.

And by the end of 'Truth,' both sons may be thinking that they've just become John Winchester clones. Of course, John wasn't an unfeeling man -- he tried to protect his sons and give them the tools that would help them survive. Dean's grief may arise from the fact that he wasn't able to protect his family the way John was -- Sam has been turned into something inhuman on Dean's watch. Given how hard he tried to protect Sam, that must be the worst possible turn of events, perhaps even worse than Sam dying or being thrown in the cage. Because Sam's inhumanness means that Dean failed as a brother and as a son.

Jensen was extraordinary at showing us the range of Dean's emotions -- disgust at having to pretend nothing was wrong, rage at what his brother had become, pain at realizing that he'd lost everything and was only good at one thing -- killing. Of course his rage face was terrifying, but the overwhelming emotion Dean gave off in those final scenes was sadness. Sam's plight was confusing and worthy of compassion, but Dean's face was just heartbreaking.

A few more notes:

• This week's restaurant, Big Gerson's (which has been spotted before on the show) was located in Calumet City, Illinois. I spent much of my youth working at restaurants and fast-food places in Cal City, which was the next town over from mine. Though I did want to shoot myself once or twice while serving burgers there, I never did, thank goodness.

• Way too many extreme close-ups this week. This show sure has a pretty cast, but I'm not a fan of that many ECUs.

• The Bobby pedicure humor was a much-needed light moment in the episode. Even over the phone, Jensen and Jim Beaver have great timing.

• I must confess I was expecting Castiel to have more than one scene. It was a bit odd that he didn't come back -- that was all the more frustrating, given that there was a fair amount of wasted screen time in 'Truth.' Some quality Cas time soon would be nice. I'd like to get more of an idea of the war that's going on in Heaven.

• As for Veritas, I didn't quite get this: If she knew that Sam wasn't human, why was she surprised that he could lie? She acted offhand about Sam's non-humanness ("You didn't know that?"), yet wigged out that he was able to lie to her. Not a big deal but the best episodes have antagonists that are a little better thought-out and integrated than Veritas was.

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'Supernatural' airs 9PM ET Fridays on the CW.


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