"Season 7, Time for a Wedding!"

I love when the writers get all cheeky and poke fun at industry conventions! I wonder what else they'll decide is supposed to be included in season 7.

We start with "Then" and with so much focus on Becky, I'm guessing she's the one who will marry Sam. Yeah, despite my attempts to remain unspoiled, I knew Sam was the one getting married. :(

We're in Las Vegas, with Dean talking up a hot waitress. He's actually pretty relaxed and into the flirtation, which is nice to see. But this opening talk confuses the heck out of me. Since when do they have a sacred annual pilgrimage to Vegas? It took me a long time to get into the flow of the story after that.

Dean's main problem, coaxed out of him by the waitress (stripper?), is actually pretty great. His brother is batshit nuts, but the shit's not hitting the fan. He's all reasonable and stuff, though he's worried about Sam being out camping by himself. She says "we all need to face ourselves sometime," not referring to Sam, and when we get to the end of the episode, that idea is revisited. Nice circle there. But I'll come back to that.

So Sam texts Dean to come down the street, and wear his Fed suit. Hey, I recognize this church! It was the one where Sam defeated Samhain in "It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester." Pretty sure it was also the entry to the tombs in "Houses of the Holy," too. You know you're obsessed when you recognize repurposed locations. :)

So Dean comes in packing, but Sam assures him he doesn't need the pistol. Dean asks what their pretext is (I love when they use the lingo, though I'm not sure we've heard this one since "Tall Tales"). What are they hunting, a siren?

No. Sam's in love, and he's getting married.

Enter the creepy bride, with the thickest veil this side of the Boar's Head (<---Harry Potter reference). Dean's reaction, to both Sam's announcement and to his bride, is priceless. I LOVE when Jensen gets to do comedy! Beautiful black-and-white wedding cake that explodes into the title shot. That was AWESOME. Dean's still trying to figure this out. Sam's explanation? "We met, we ate..." Ah-HA. She had to do something to him, right? A spell or potion, maybe? But despite Sam being a bit mild and oddly unquestioning, he seems fine. Very natural with Becky, who of course is thrilled beyond belief. She doesn't care about the average life span of his hookups—eyes wide open—and is even paying for the wedding. "Really?! SuperFan99?!"

Sam and Becky leave for her home in Delaware. Dean calls Bobby but has to leave a message, as Bobby's got his hands full with a nest in Oregon. I love that Bobby's presence is so strong, even when he's not on screen.

Sam and Becky pull into a restaurant parking lot. Sam says they just ate, and for a moment I think Becky must be a monster of some sort who needs lots of calories, but no, it all becomes clear when she walks in to the site of her high school reunion, with the requisite mean girl handling the planning. Becky shows off Sam, then introduces him to her friend Guy, who has an interesting reaction to Sam. I assumed on first watch that he was part of Becky's plan, and he is, but his surprise is not just that it worked, as we later find out.

"Guy's a really good friend. We met in the erotic horror section at the Novel Hovel..."

Guy's an event planner, and reunion season is very busy for him, but Becky runs after him to get some silver-clad glass bottle and makes reference to him being Wiccan. Dean drives up as they drive away. He doesn't follow, but goes inside and pulls out Dad's journal, presumably to do research (though I'd think he has that thing memorized by now) or take notes (maybe it's his own journal now). He's immediately distracted by a newspaper story about some guy's good fortune and immediate tragedy.

Sam's sitting at a lovely dinner (rotisserie chicken from the grocery store) and Becky comes out in sexy lingerie. Anyone else reminded of "Wishful Thinking" at this point? Or, like, for the full 11 minutes up to this point? But Sam gets vision-like headaches and comes painfully to reality, with no clue how he got there, and I can't help wondering why I thought he seemed so normal. Now he's really Sam, for a few crucial seconds. Becky gives him the potion, and he's back to being in "love" with her. Poor Sam.

Cut to a guy hitting balls on a baseball field, and another guy using mojo of some sort (his hand movements remind me of Castiel, but I'm thinking more like demon or witch). Baseball to the face, requisite blood splatter, ewwwww.

Dean, being supportive, brings Sam a waffle iron. Sam's a little standoffish but displays no animosity. He's just...I don't know, kind of empty? Dean brings up the job in town. Baseball guy just got called up to the majors. Becky says their first thought was crossroads demon, but there's the 10-year time frame. Dean's totally flummoxed that Sam and Becky are working the case together. He's pissed at Becky, but even when Sam says "that's my wife you're talking about," there's no heat. He's talking the talk, but there's no real emotion behind it.

Dean says people who get their dreams come true bite it pretty quick. Sam says maybe what's bothering Dean is that Sam doesn't need him anymore. Ouch. Dean leaves, and tells Bobby he doesn't want another hunter, but since Bobby's all the way across the country (sorry, Dean, he's not close to his magic South Dakota wormhole), he's going to hook Dean up with someone local.

Sam catches Becky writing in her journal (swirly "Sam loves Becky" crap) and sniffing the presumably scented ink. When he licks his thumb and rubs the ink off her nose, there is nothing romantic about it. Except to her. He's found another dream-achiever...and Becky's journal. But despite her hilarious panic, he thinks it's beautiful and hugs the book. He's so adorable!

Dean goes back to the restaurant to meet the hunter, but the burly guy he approaches first isn't who he's looking for. It's the scrawny guy in the corner (DJ Qualls!), who says, "I thought you'd be taller." Bobby told him Dean would be all surly and premenstrual working with him, but he's cool with it. So do you think he'll go the way of Tamara, a hunter never seen again, or Rufus, recurring until he dies?

Dean (in a sweater vest?!) and his new partner cross paths with Sam and Becky at the CEO's office. Dean plays hard-hitting journalist very well, while Garth cuts right to the chase and hits the guy with "nefarious means" questions about black magic and hoodoo. Between the two of them, they get that the guy didn't want the job. But his bitchy wife obviously did want it. Dean tries to get the story from her, but she blows them off.

"Why do people keep thinking I'm threatening them?"
"Because it sounded exactly like a threat, dude."

Sam's trying to work the case while Becky tweets about going on a romantic getaway. The elixir wears off again, but it leaked in Becky's purse, and she can't stop Sam from reverting.

Dean saves the CEO's wife, whose story makes it sound like a demon deal. But the timeline is whack. Garth shows his hunter chops and lays out the plan. They'll stow the wife with his cousin, a tri-racial paraplegic sniper, while they go after the demon.

Becky makes a desperation call to Guy, Sam is in pain and asks Becky what's going on, and when he says he's calling Dean, she knocks him out with a waffle iron.

Sam wakes up tied to a bed in a nice cabin.

Tied. To a bed.

...

...

Okay, I'm back. Sam's fully himself, and what a friggin' relief! Becky tests him for concussion symptoms, says he's pantsless because they're very constricting, but don't worry, she didn't do anything weird. Guy calls her back on her computer, and she wants the elixir. She says the stuff is wearing off faster and faster and whines that they haven't even consummated their marriage. Guy says to meet him in an hour, and Sam heard everything. He's pissed, while Becky is full of justification. Sam knows right away that Guy is the one killing everyone, and says Becky is on his list. Crazy woman. She refuses to untie him, stuffs a rag in his mouth, and calls "love you too!" as she runs off for more love potion.

I know she's pathetic and doing something awful here, but I really like Becky!

But it turns out Sam was right. Guy wants payment now, and reveals his red eyes. Reunions give him tons of clients, and he admits (kind of) that he's responsible for the deaths. He says he wasn't thrilled to see her new hubby was Sam Freakin' Winchester, but he'll give her a special deal. Twenty-five years—unprecedented—with Sam for her soul and her promise not to tell the Winchesters any of it.

The timeline gets a little murky for me from this point. She wants a drink, but Guy hands over the potion, then she goes back to the house and talks to Sam, then she's drinking at the end of the reunion. I think the editing could have been tidied up a little.

Dean and Garth go to Becky's apartment and find enough clues to send them to the lake house (Loon Lake, nice pun :) ). Becky is there lamenting that her plan to show off Sam—he's tall and nice, and they'd think she was happy—isn't going according to plan. She does a short rundown of her life and fondles the bottle of elixir. Sam tells her she's better than this, she says she's not so sure, and now we're back at the restaurant after the reunion. She tells Guy she's in.

Wow. I can't believe we still have 20 minutes to go. This episode was actually shorter than normal, but seemed to go on for a long time.

Becky gets close enough to the demon to seal the deal, but instead drops a lighter on a devil's trap made from blueberry vodka. Sam, Dean, and Garth show up, so apparently they made it to the lake house. Guy asks for Dean's autograph, Dean pulls out the demon-killing knife. Guy claims to be an innovator instead of a cheater, using an "intern" to arrange accidents and collect early on the souls. Intern flings all three hunters across the room. He's pretty powerful. Fights ensue, Garth gets knocked out, Sam and Dean are getting throttled, season 1 style. Becky saves Sam with a knife through the intern's torso (that knife isn't that long!) and Sam tosses it to Dean, who turns it on Guy.

Guy says "oh crap" and Dean thinks it's because of him, but then Crowley appears. Oh, crap. But Crowley isn't too happy with Guy's stupidity. The "intern" ratted him out. Crowley's pissed at the damage to their credibility.

"There's a reason we don't call our chits in early. Consumer confidence. This isn't Wall Street, this is Hell! We have a little something called integrity."

Crowley makes a deal to cancel all Guy's deals (15 of them) and take Guy from Dean. Sam's suspicious, and Crowley points out that demons have left Sam and Dean alone while they're dealing with the Leviathans.

"You met that dick, yeah? Smuggest tub of goo since Mussolini. I hate the bastards. Squash them all. Please. I'll stay clear."

His "done. and done." when he cancels the deals reminds me of Ash. *sniff*

Man, I love Crowley.

Sam, with absolutely no sympathy for Becky, gets an annulment and says she'll probably never see him again. But he does take pity and tells her she's not a loser, to just do her thing, whatever that is, and the right guy will find her. Then Garth gets all crushy on her, but Dean squashes that pretty quick.

We have the goodbye scene, when Dean tells Garth he doesn't suck. "Thank you, man. That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me." I like Garth. I hope we see him again.

Sam says he does need Dean watching his back, but Dean admits Sam's a grown up and doesn't need him any more.

"It's still a Denver scramble up here, I just know my way around the plate now."

Sam says it's about time Dean gets to just look out for himself, but Dean doesn't look too thrilled about that. This is where we're supposed to reflect back on the waitress (stripper?) saying he needed to face himself. Come on, Dean, you can do it. You're a helluva guy, you know.

Final verdict: This wasn't my favorite episode, but I really liked the tone and the characters, and I have a feeling this will be one of my favorites to rewatch. It's always nice to have a light episode among all the heavy, dark ones.

What did you think?

Bobby's World

Due to my son's birthday party (and the ensuing cleanup) I didn't get to watch "Weekend at Bobby's" until this morning. In order to get you the recap (so, obviously, SPOILERS) sooner, I tried to watch the episode last night and fell asleep shortly after someone was fed through a wood chipper...which, as you might guess, does not lead to sweet dreams.

But enough about me! Let's focus on Bobby...which is exactly what Supernatural did. Now, since Jensen and Jared are a major part of why I tune in every week, it would have been possible for me to be less than invested in this episode, but that wasn't the case (which is a tribute to both the writers and the actors of the show). And I know Trish was probably excited to see this episode because when we saw Mark A. Sheppard at DragonCon, she cut right to the chase asking him if Crowley (the king of the crossroads demons) still had Bobby's soul and if we'd be seeing Mark again in season 6? (He assured us that the answer was yes on both counts.)

In fact, we see Mark right at the beginning of the show, flashing back a year (right after Sam sacrificed himself to save the world) when Bobby tries to get Crowley to uphold his end of the bargain and give back the soul that Bobby didn't so much sell as "pawn" (gaining in the deal use of his paralyzed legs). But it turns out that Crowley isn't giving it back (shocking, isn't it? A demon who can't be trusted!) Crowley, with the help of a hell hound, ends the encounter with the upper hand but we know that Bobby isn't going to stop trying.

Then we get into Bobby's present day life. Although it does include Sam and Dean (who, in keeping with seasons past, call him for help), we see that Bobby actually helps lots of Hunters. You remember that phone bank we saw in a previous episode, all marked so that Bobby knows what to answer as the FBI, CDC, CIA, etc? When we saw it before, it was comical. Now, it was sort of deliberately sad--this man who once was forced to kill his wife, helping all these people and yet still largely alone. Not only was the continuity in this show great (bringing back the female sheriff and referencing Dean's fear of flying), so was the emotional resonance. Jim Beaver did an incredible job--throughout the whole episode, I just wanted to give the poor man a hug. (And of course, giving the boys less screen time probably made it much easier for Jensen Ackles to direct an episode that, ultimately, I thought did a great job of tying up loose ends from last season while still contuining to set up problems for this one.)

We normally see the boys' interactions with Bobby through their end--with Bobby often being the voice on the other end of the phone, dispensing wisdom and occasionally humorous insults. This time, we stay with Bobby and see what his life is like after he hangs up the phone. In this case, that life includes torturing a crossroads demon to get information on Crowley. When he has what he wants (Crowley's original human name), Bobby kills her, by pouring the mysterious contents of a bag into a fire. But prior to that, she offers up the information that Crowley isn't just the king of the crossroads, he's the king of hell. So is he the new big bad now that Lucifer's in the box? While I don't want a rehash of last year's angels v. demons, I would be totally okay with more guest appearances by Sheppard!

Meanwhile, we see another aspect of Bobby's life--the chipper blonde neighbor of six months who's still trying to get to know the single man who lives next door. She brings him a ginger peach cobbler. And now that I've finished typing that sentence, I realize that use of the word chipper may have been a Freudian segue. When Bobby attributes the screaming from his basement to a horror movie, blonde baker invites him over to watch "Drag Me to Hell" (Loved his response that, actually, he was trying to avoid that.) With her horror movie gambit having failed, she asks him to come over some time and look at her wood chipper, which has stopped working. It's obvious she was a crush on Bobby, not that he has time for such things because his phone his ringing again.

In addition to Sam and Dean periodically calling for help with a monster whose plot line is so peripheral that I've forgotten its name already (much less how to spell it), Bobby gets an in person request for assistance from fellow Hunter Rufus Turner, who has been in one or two episodes previous to this. Just like Sam and Dean hunting something previously not seen outside Greece, turns out Rufus has just "killed" something that's never before been seen outside Japan, prompting the funny observation, "Is it just me, or are monsters getting weird?" Bobby helps Rufus bury the body, only to have law enforcement come looking for it later (including the female sheriff played by Kim Rhodes we saw in "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid." Now that she's hip to paranormal goings-on around her, she's a lot less eager to arrest Bobby. She even tries to help, although she makes it clear that because of her job, there are limits to what she can do.)

The law goes poking around in his yard to look for the body, which--luckily--is gone. Or, not so luckily, if you're Bobby's neighbor who lives alone. When he bursts into her house with a gun late at night to save her, he asks if she's seen anything strange. "Besides you?" But she quickly sees that she's in danger and Bobby gets into combat with the Japanese demon, who ends up going through the wood-chipper. Which, ew, ew, ew, but the scene was actually pretty well done and inappropriately funny...and also a bit sad. "I thought you said it wasn't working," Bobby says of the wood chipper, clearly at a loss for how to explain everything. Pan to neighbor in her white nightgown, absolutely covered in blood. "I only said that to get you over here." Bobby, belatedly realizing that she likes him, offers to come back over some time, which she rejects, looking now appalled by him. "Story of my life," he says. Awwwwww.

When Dean calls later to confess his worries about Sam (giving this episode a clear through line to the rest of the season even though the boys are mostly off screen), Bobby tells him he can't talk right now. Dean makes the mistake of calling Bobby "selfish," as he is the only person Dean can talk to. Bobby then demands that Dean go get Sam and then gives them an earful over the phone about how selfish they are and how no one seems to be batting an eyelash that Bobby's headed for hell at the end of his contract. While the boys did have that coming, I thought Sam made a good point when he said, "If you need help, all you have to do is ask." (Earlier in the show, Bobby the cantankerous loner actually rejected Rufus' help, so there's a fair point that it's a two way street. If you want people to be there for you, you have to be willing to occasionally reach out.) Rufus comes through with a way for Bobby to summon the ghost of Crowley's son (who, as it turns out, loathed his father and gives Bobby information about where Crowley's bones were buried.)

The episode comes full circle. We once again find Bobby and Crowley in a stand-off over Bobby's soul, only this time Bobby has an ace up his sleeve (which reminds me--LOL at the playing of the Gambler earlier. It was such a change from Sam and Dean's usual AC/DC or other classic rock that it helped set a definite tone for a different type of episode.) Anyway, the boys are now in Scotland ("We've gone international."), poising in the graveyard over Crowley's bones. Turns out, that mysterious bag earlier in the ep? Held the demoness's bones, and you kill a crossroad demon by burning their mortal remains. I loved Bobby's scathing comment to Crowley that demons think they're all that, but really they're just "ghosts with ego." Crowley is clearly pissed, but also clearly has no choice. Bobby gets his soul back and gets to keep use of his legs (yay!!!) Afterward, there's a phone call between Bobby and the boys that I loved not just because of the gruff affection between the three of them but because the teasing between the boys (Sam's smirking that Dean "white-knuckled his way through four puke bags" on the plane) seemed like the most natural, brotherly interaction they've had so far this season.

Of course, this is Supernatural, so instead of just ending it when Bobby got off the phone with a sheepish, "Let's roll credits on this chick flick," they had to go just a minute further. We see Bobby try to sit down with his ginger peach cobbler (again) only to be interrupted by the phones (again!) and realize that when you're trying to save the world on a daily basis, your work is never done. And that no matter how many hunters are in his life--and who genuinely care about him--at the end of the day, Bobby Singer is still alone. Awwww!

And then previews, which I don't even want to think about. What are they doing to my Dean???? Apparently, he becomes some kind of monster with a hunger for human flesh, so I am torn. Normally, if Jensen is on the screen, I am unable to look away. However, this is seeming like something best watched in tiny spaces between my fingers. Guess we'll know more in a week!