Supernatural: Mystery Spot
By fred | February 15, 2008
(S03E11) Yes, Thursday’s night is the night for Lost, but long before it belonged to ABC hit-drama, this was he night for Supernatural. And make no mistake, if may be on The CW but this little really cool, it is a great show. Which is probably why I always start with it. Just as with Lost, I known I’m in for a great hour and I’m never disappointed.
Yes, Supernatural is about demons and all other sorts of demoniac creatures, but I have to be honest : it’s not really a scary show. Oh sure sometimes it’s a but creepy, but it definitely is always great, but you don’t really get scared so much. Not that it’s a complaint, because the show and the two brothers make for such a compelling team that we don’t need anything else than what we got, which usually includes lots of humor, too.
That said, it’s still a show about hunters fighting demons and sending back to Hell, to go over it quickly. But this episode was quite different than most of the others, there was something special to it. Well, frankly there was more than one thing special about it but let’s not rush there.
The first thing that was different about it was that they didn’t get him. Usually Sam & Dean start by looking for some missing persons or strange things happening somewhere, and they always end up finding the son of a bitch and putting it to rest. But not this time, this time they did not found the missing person, (okay they might know what happened to him…), the mystery spot has nothing special or supernatural to it, and if they did meet the bad guy, they did not kill him. In fact, they didn’t even try to go after him. They just left the town, and that bad day, behind them, without looking bad, too happy to finally move on to other places, and time.
As I said they found the bad guy, our old friend the Trickster – which I was really happy to see again BTW. But once again, the guy is obviously stronger than they are. It’s kinda funny, I think, that they an hunt and kill some pretty evil demons, some very bad ones, some really mean sons of bitches to use the appropriate expression, yet this little guy who doesn’t really appear that threatening looking at him at first, he can completely mess with them and find a way out every time.
So much, in fact, that even the dark cold Sam we saw during the second part of the episode, even him I’m not sure he could have killed him. He obviously was quite powerless, face to the Trickster.
But let’s rewind a little, shall we ? This episode was basically made out of two parts. The first part was quite light and pretty damn hilarious, while the second one got much darker. First off, was the good old time loop.
Now I don’t know about you, but I called that one. I’m not sure why exactly, but right when the episode started, the first seconds of it, as I was watching I said to myself : this is a time loop. Maybe it’s because I had been thinking about such things a few days ago regarding Lost, I don’t know, but the concept of time loop is pretty old, it’s a good old sci-fi cliché, and one of the trademark for such a thing is exactly what we got here : it starts with an alarm clock, a song coming up, or an alarm going off, some kind of noise, and one character waking up.
The only one who knows that there’s a time loop going on, who can remember every iteration of that same day going over & over again. The famous Groundhog Day, many times referenced here, or even the recent and too-quickly canceled series Daybreak, all use this device, of course. And the first seconds of this episode were exactly that : the alarm clock, the song, and Sam waking up. And watching that, for some reason, the first thing that popped into my mind was the idea of a time loop. Adding to that the way the took care to show us a few little details that were too many not to mean anything (the sauce, the dog, the girl, etc) and it wasn’t hard to see it coming.
Posted in Reviews
Shows: Supernatural
