A SUPERNATURAL Depth of Character
Episode 805 “Blood Brother”
I love Ben Edlund. Let me count the ways. Okay, not literally count the ways, but he’s directly responsible for some of my favorite episodes of Supernatural, as well as The Tick. He writes the perfect mix of character development, heart, humor and twisted darkness, and was responsible for this week’s fantastic episode.
This time, it was a good thing that the Winchesters split up for the episode. Instead of the usual bristly tension, Dean got to be Dean, and Sam got to… well… reflect on some things. Honestly, it does a bromance good to have little periods of separation, am I right?
Speaking of bromance, Benny and Dean are a pretty decent dynamic duo themselves. This story explained much of Benny’s background as told through both Dean’s flashbacks and through the events of the episode itself. He’s sympathetic and likable, and for me to like a vampire is saying a lot about the skill with which this story is told. With every episode, we’re coming to understand why Dean did the things he did, and what unfolded in Purgatory. That story is the running thread through the season that’s tying everything together.
The other running thread is that of Sam and the bitchy veterinarian. I can very much do without it, and I have no clue why Sam would fall for her. Yes, we find out that they’re sort of kindred spirits in a way, drifters without a past or future, never really being part of a town, just residing there for a while and then moving on. But unlike Benny, the vet is so unlikable that I literally have not even bothered learning what her name is. I don’t care. I don’t like her, and I don’t want Sam to like her either.
This episode is a simple monster-of-the-week without actually being a monster-of-the-week, if that makes sense. Dean and Benny are going to route out a “vamp nest,” which Dean purposefully keeps Sam out of, but it’s also Benny’s story about how he got where he is, and what was lost (and gained) along the way. Sometimes, you just can’t go home again.
At the conclusion, the Winchesters are reunited, and Sam discovers who, and what, Dean has been having secret phone conversations with. I like how they harkened back to Sam’s intuition, where a simple handshake told him more than he wanted to know about the stranger who had been killing vampires all night with his brother. The seethingly black look Sam gives Dean speaks volumes, and Benny’s parting words say it perfectly: “I can see that you have a lot to talk about.”
Which I’m not looking forward to. The previews of next week’s show have us right back with the brothers fighting, Dean saying “you abandoned me for a WOMAN?” (gasp, anything but that) and so on. Hopefully the writers will break the bone in order to reset it, and after next week, we can get to some nice clean healing so that their screen time together involves the Winchesters against the darkness, instead of against each other.
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