'Supernatural' Season 7, Episode 3 Recap

['Supernatural' - 'The Girl Next Door']

'The Girl Next Door' left me gobsmacked, but for all the wrong reasons.

I'm going to spend most of this review writing about one scene that came late in the episode. It neatly encapsulated a lot of what was wrong with not just this episode, but many other things as well.

If you're looking for a lot of commentary on Jensen Ackles' competent directing or details like the Biggerson's sign and things like that, you're not going to get it this time around.

I take a good chunk of each Saturday to write these reviews, and I'm going to put myself on the clock for this one. Honestly, I don't want to devote half of a beautiful fall day to something that aggravated me so much.

The scene I'm going to talk about and expand upon is the one in which Dean kills Amy. Not only does the Dean in this scene seem nothing like the Dean I've come to know over six-plus seasons, I actively disliked this Dean. The other parts of the episode felt sloppy and not especially well-paced, but that scene was just on another level of wrongness altogether.

Now, please don't start with any "You're sounding like a Deangirl!" nonsense in comments. I've never, ever been a Samgirl or a Deangirl or a Casgirl (I'm occasionally a Bobbygirl, but that's neither here nor there). Seriously, I'm not going to whine here about how the writers love one character and clearly hate another, yada yada. But I will say, what Dean did in this episode just makes no sense to me, and the implications of his actions do not bode well for the show.

The last six seasons of 'Supernatural' have been about the Winchester brothers learning all about shades of grey. They've literally made deals with the devil, with Death, with Crowley, with their own morally conflicted angel friend. That's what it is to become an adult -- it's a matter of figuring out which compromises you can live with, learning from where you've gone wrong and realizing that you don't know everything. We learn compassion for ourselves and others from making mistakes and being forgiven for them.

But all the sudden, in this episode, Dean just reverts to black-and-white Dean, the Dean of five or six seasons ago -- the Dean of "If it it's a supernatural critter, we put it down"? Why? What possible purpose does that serve? Amy is someone that Sam knows well, she's not your average unconflicted killing machine and Sam's willing to vouch for that. So Dean not only lies to Sam about trusting him, he goes ahead and kills one of his brother's few friends.

Again, why? Isn't this show about family? Isn't this show about how you do anything for family, come what may? Amy killed her own mother to save Sam's life! If that's not enough of a "merit badge," try this on for size: She killed (and she may have only killed bad people, a point could have been made much more forcefully) because her son's life was in danger. This has no resonance for Dean? Come on, this was an unusual circumstance, one that the Winchesters both should have understood and identified with, not just Sam. And if the show casts the extremely sympathetic Jewel Staite as a well-intentioned mother and friend, it had better give a really great reason to kill off her character. This episode did not do that. At all.

Dean walked up to her and ganked her in cold blood and that was that. And you know what? I don't care that he apparently had some regret in that moment. The fact that the show has decided that Dean sees things this simplistically removes one of the main draws of 'Supernatural' -- its moral complexity. Remove that, remove six years of character development and you basically have a pre-'Faith' season 1 episode, with added helpings of unrelenting glumness.

The show seems determined to make every outcome negative, and that removes a lot of 'Supernatural's' more interesting textures. Dean could have trusted Sam, but the show is determined to demonstrate that gambits like that never work out, so the answer there is no. Dean could have told Amy to watch herself and that both she and her son would be ganked by him if she stepped out of line -- but trusting people never works out, so the answer there is no. Dean could just hope that his brother heals and be there for him and see where that situation goes, but no. Trusting people and being open-minded never works out; lying and killing (followed by drinking) are always better. So that's a no.

The constant belief that things will never work out and never go well is not only predictable, as I wrote last week, it's also the easy way out, frankly. Constant pessimism is tiresome, lazy and immature. It's hard work to encounter each situation as it comes and evaluate it on its own merits. It's much easier to just assume the worst and proceed on those assumptions. It makes Dean, and the show, much less interesting if both take it for granted that things will always, only, get worse.

Not only was killing Amy out of character and indicative of shallow thinking, it was done for a dumb overall reason. The episode kept hammering home the parallels between Amy and Sam, the freaks who were trying to manage their problems. Well, by killing Amy, Dean revealed that he thinks his brother can't manage his own issues. Well, why can't he? What's so enormously terrible and life-threatening about Sam having some mental issues that he is trying his best to cope with? What about that makes him completely untrustworthy?

But the season apparently must have a contrived, manufactured conflict between the brothers. By killing Amy and giving a "we are what we are" speech, Mr. Nihilism confirmed that he has no belief in his brother. Dean lied to Sam's face about letting Amy go. I don't see what Sam has done to make Dean treat him this way -- with condescending contempt masquerading as caring. Sam left a note, he wanted to deal with the Amy problem on his own, and did so, in his own fashion. He's being truthful about his condition, which is understandable. What exactly has Sam done wrong here?

But again, the season must have an inter-brother conflict, apparently. Why? I don't know. If the show has to have an ongoing issue between the Winchesters, this isn't a creative foundation for that. It's just dredging up some old issues, not creating interesting new ones. Suddenly Dean goes back to non-trusting older-brother mode, after years of the show trying to give these brothers some kind of common ground. None of that felt earned, none of it felt thoroughly and thoughtfully set up.

If the first couple of episodes were the show laying the groundwork for the new season and the new villains, 'The Girl Next Door' felt as though it was giving us the meat of the internal conflicts for the season. My two cents: I think the brotherly conflicts are bogus. This isn't an interesting, rich, understandable set of problems. This is the show putting characters in the wayback machine and expecting us not to notice.

So here's where we stand: The show has apparently decided that, in the world through which the Winchesters move, nothing ever works out. Dean will never trust Sam. There are no grey areas. There is no better or at least not-as-bad future to hope for. Castiel, who hasn't been mourned really at all (and jeebus, what's that about?), is a distant memory. And the brothers will go through a conflict that feels fake and unearned.

I really don't want to be this down on the show. It brings me no joy. But I wish I could say that the problems above are my only issues with 'Girl Next Door.' They are not. Just a few more:

* How did Bobby escape death in the previous episode? We don't know.

* Why was Bobby so seemingly chipper after his entire house was burned down? We don't know.

* How do the Leviathan know all the boys' aliases? Did they get that information from Bobby's house? We don't know.

* Wasn't it convenient that Sam just happened to find the park where Amy turned up? Normally I'm willing to let those kinds of coincidences go, but not in an episode where just about everything else went wrong (and let me emphasize, it's the writing I have a problem with, not the acting or directing).

I realize that other reactions to this episode are out there. My husband, who also didn't think much of 'Girl,' had a very different take -- he thought Sam should have killed Amy. He thought Sam would know enough by now that that's what he'd have to do. But in general, he thought the episode was messy and all over the place. I can't disagree there.

Before I sign off, I want to quote from Carrie Raisler's excellent AV Club review of the episode. After Dean killed Amy, "the episode went from simply dull for me to downright maddening. One of the most refreshing things of the first two episodes of the season was how quick Sam was to confide in Dean, and how willing Dean was to use their brotherly bond to help Sam come back from the brink. Now, with Dean's subterfuge and Sam's initial reluctance to bring Dean in on the plan, we're back to square one with the brothers lying and playing games with each other. It's been done and no matter how interesting it might have been in earlier seasons, it's just not any more.... Yes, story options get thinner as the years go on and new character beats are difficult to create at such a late stage. That's still no excuse for reverting to things we've already seen so many times in the past." Yep.

If you're not that negative about this episode, that's fine. But before you accuse me of being overly hard on the show, know that I only react this intensely to shows that have typically done good or at least frequently interesting jobs of exploring the complexities that they introduce and expanding and illuminating their characters.

Nothing about 'The Girl Next Door' made me hopeful on either of those fronts. I just don't see Dean as a person who would kill a child's mother, then calmly tell the kid that he will kill him if he steps out of line. Oh, and the kid should go find some people to live with now that Mommy's dead.

What kind of callous, heartless person does that? But the show has bee so relentless about taking things and people and support away from the boys that perhaps the reversion to the Dean with a hard heart should have been expected.

The big-picture problem for me is that, this is not a nuanced exploration of dark themes. I love dark themes; most of my favorite dramas delve into just these kinds of complicated territories. But the show's approach to difficult topics seems less challenging, less nuanced and less interesting these days. I liked the season premiere generally, I was mixed on 'Hello, Cruel World,' but what I saw in 'Girl' angered me, frankly, and it touches on tonal issues I wrote about at the end of season 6. From where I sit, the show is not setting up the kind of challenging emotional and moral dilemmas it has offered us in the past. This strikes me as pessimism and negativity as a substitute for engaging character development and storytelling.

By the way, I'm going to be out of town next week, so the review of the Oct. 14 episode will be delayed until Monday, Oct. 17. I was going to be all dramatic and say maybe I'll just stop reviewing the show altogether, but I'll wait til the mid-season break to see how I feel about that.


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

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