SUPERNATURAL: The Darkness has a Brother

S11E6 “Our Little World”

And you would never guess who it was. Well, I wouldn’t, anyway. I was totally surprised. I shouldn’t have been, given the recurring themes of family and siblings in the show, but I was.

 

Two girls are talking about their parents. One girl, named Goldie, is complaining a lot about her mother. She meets Amara, who says that she wants to be like her, and sucks out her soul. Crowley is waiting for her when she gets home. Amara sneaks in carrying her shoes so she won’t make any noise. They then have a very typical father/teenage daughter argument, except for the eating souls part.  Crowly knows what she’s been up to. It’s obvious since she went from about twelve to about sixteen. It’s a good thing her dress grew with her.  Her hair shortened and acquired a curly style. She looks like a young Gillian Anderson. Crowley grounds her and throws her around psychokinetically, just for emphasis. She admits he is stronger than her “for now”.

The boys are still in Fall River, Massachusetts. They are looking for more of Amara’s victims. We first see them leaving a home, disappointed because they thought that they had a hot lead. “Only a soulless psycho would kill the family cat.” Sam says. “Unless the family cat takes a nap in the dryer.” Which was funny, but dryers are very dangerous for cats. Always check your dryer before starting it.

 

Sam pushes Dean into calling Cas. My prediction was wrong about the next series he would watch, he’s watching Jenny Jones. Dean tells Cas he needs him back in the game. They then find out that poor unfortunate Len from the last episode is dead. Cas tries to leave the bunker but he is overwhelmed with memories of his own rage.

We find out immediately that Crowley had Len killed as a security measure, which may be why they haven’t found any more of the soulless. Sam and Dean go to the police station to meet up with the nice detective from the last episode and to examine the scene of the crime. They conclude from the smell of sulfur that Len was killed by a demon. While they are there, Goldie is brought in, struggling, and they are told that she was a nice kid who went berserk and tried to kill her mother with a frying pan.

Meanwhile, Cas is back to watching television and he spots the quarry that they have not been able to find — Metatron, in a car mirror. He is at the scene of a violent confrontation that is being shown on the news. (by the way, the news announcer is creepy).

A red haired demon enters Goldie’s cell and comes after her with a knife. He stops dead in his tracks because there is a demon trap on the ceiling over his head. Sam tells Goldie she’s done a good job and they take the demon back to their sinfully ugly hotel room for a little torture session. They don’t get much out of the demon, discuss exorcising him, and discover that he has a dead meat suit as opposed to possessing a live meat suit so they kill him. They triangulate from the GPS on the demon’s phone and find an abandoned asylum, so they head off to kill Amara, ready or not.

Crowley tries to make amends with Amara and brings her a nice young mailman to eat. She refuses out of spite. He then implores her not to grow up so fast and to give him a chance. He says he will protect her if she is patient with him, and she agrees.

Cas finds Metatron filming a mugging victim. He heals the victim and then talks with Metatron.  Metatron insists that he has pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Cas reveals that he got the demon tablet, which was  very important in earlier episodes, and asks Metatron about the Darkness. Metatron sees that Cas is not in good shape and accuses him of being paralyzed by fear. Wrong.

Sam and Dean take down the guard at the door of the asylum. Outside the building is derelict but twentieth-century-inside it is sumptuous but medieval. Sam handcuffs the guard and hands the demon killing knife to Dean and says he will take the others. Dean goes to kill Amara, but Crowley protects her and then gives a rather long speech about how he couldn’t kill Dean before but could kill him now. Fatherhood changes a man. But just as he says that, Amara hits him over the head with a book (Dante’s Inferno, perhaps?)

Meanwhile Sam is dealing with the demons in the hallway.  He puts the angel killing knife away and chooses to fist fight. It’s a knockdown drag out fight and he finally has to kill one who gets the better of him. Hey, the demon was mocking his pacifism. This is probably pointless as Crowley has been only allowing dead meat suits around Amara. But Sam has no way of knowing that. He let two out of three live. Two out of three ain’t bad, Sam. While he is trying to break the door down to get to Dean, he has another vision. It is of stone and chains.

Castiel beats the crap out of Metatron. Metatron begs to be killed because life is so hard and demeaning. Finally he does tell him about the Darkness. She is God’s sister. God had to put her away and betray her to create. I guess that makes sense, like in Genesis where first there was darkness and God said “let there be light”. Also, she eats a lot, which could be a problem if you are trying to create rather than destroy.

Amara roughs up Crowley for a while with only the power of her mind and declares herself an emancipated minor. Dean finds that he can’t kill her. There’s definitely a romantic vibe between them. It’s creepy not only because she is a soul eating monster, but because she still looks too young for Dean and is only a few weeks old. If that. She says she thinks it is because he was the first thing she saw when she was released, the first of his creations. She then says she is going to go off to see the world until she is strong enough for what she really came for, which is payback. One can assume that she will take her revenge out on God’s creations.

Sam busts through the door and gets tossed by Amara. Dean charges at her but ends up thrown against a wall. It’s good to know that he may be able to take aggressive action when Sam is at risk or possibly because she is distracted.

It is becoming a tradition for the three of them, Crowley, Dean and Cas to go over what has happened in the latest adventure at the end of the show. Dean insists that Amara overpowered him. He just flat out lies. Sam has a memory or further vision. As I suspected, it’s of the cage, the cage where Lucifer and the Archangel Michael are imprisoned. The Archangel Michael was using their half brother Adam Milligan as a vessel when he was dragged into the cage, so he has been there since that happened, never rescued and rarely mentioned. In the vision, fingers are reaching through the bars. Sam hasn’t told anyone about these visions yet.

This episode was all about restraint. Cas decides not to kill Metatron, whom he has hated for a long time, because Metatron is human, can’t stand against him and he’s pathetic. Castiel’s fight was awful to watch. He’s basically beating up a man whose only defense is a sharp tongue. It would look even worse if we didn’t know what Metatron was like. Sam puts himself in more danger than he should to spare the demon’s lives. The fight in the corridor, Sam against two demons, was really well done. He got to show his stuff. Dean doesn’t have a chance to show restraint. He can’t kill Amara. Crowley says he has lost his inhibition against killing Dean, but still doesn’t get it done. And Amara, probably for the first time, shows restraint because she does not kill Crowley.

There are a couple of mentions of Hell not getting its quota of souls. I don’t know why that would happen. I don’t think Amara had the chance to eat that many! But whether the reason is important or not, it will lessen Crowley’s power. His power is dependent on how many souls are in Hell. That might be significant as to whether anything gets out of the cage.

I may be wrong as to whether or not they actually show or tell us much about God on the show. Now that we know Amara is family it seems like the only way to resolve the conflict might be to solve the issues between the siblings. I am a little worried about who or what God will turn out to be. He seems like he will be someone with great power but little wisdom. He may be a force of nature, strong but essentially without morality, like Amara. Or he could just be a slob like one of us.

After Wednesday night’s episode Jensen Ackles and Jared Padelecki livestreamed on Facebook. By candlelight. They were off of work because it was Veteran’s Day here and Remembrance Day in Canada. They talked a bit about the episode, and said some nice things about Veteran’s Day. It was a cool thing to do for the fans.

Next week they are hunting wabbits. It’s a return to their roots because the first few episodes, before the show’s mythology was well established, were based on urban legends. There is an urban legend about a bunnyman who is an escaped mental patient who haunts a bridge in Clifton, Virginia. We will see if that is the story that the episode is based on.