Supernatural – At least Dick got thrown a bone

If I had any thoughts of missing Sera Gamble next season when Jeremy Carver takes over for her as showrunner, Supernatural‘s season seven finale put those feelings to rest. Buh-bye, Sera … don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

In all seriousness, I have to give props to Gamble for what she did with season six, taking over Kripke’s spectacular empire and vision was filling some awfully big shoes. Some thought season six was uneven, but I really liked it … it was season seven that was the downer for me. I was really hoping for a little redemption with the finale, but, alas: the shoes proved way too big in the end.

All that teasing about Dean being the righteous bone owner? Nah, just get some random nun and do the deed. There was no mystery, no continuity, no suspense. Hey, Bobby’s vengeance is getting out of control. Let’s not build that up at all, or use him to help fight Dick. Let’s just burn the flask and get on with it. After building up how hard it is to kill the Leviathans, there was no fight — all you do is stake their leader through the neck with a bone. Was there a metaphor in there somewhere — did the writers attempt to throw a bone at the viewers? Now, if you wanted to read into the title, “Survival of the Fittest,” you could probably make a case for everything happening as it should to go along with that theme. Sam, Dean and Cas are all still surviving, and Crowley is definitely a fitter nemesis than Dick.

I see the potential for season eight, and I’ll be faithfully watching. Crowley’s going to be a big player, which delights me to no end. I can hope that Meg is gone, or at least in another body (read: another actress, please). Sam’s solitude isn’t going to go well, so that will be fun to watch. I’m hoping we’ll see more of Kevin the Prophet — I like his mix of nerdiness and bravery. It’s not reading into things too much to say that I am nearly positive that Cas is back to being Cas — did you hear the change in his voice when he was in purgatory with Dean? I just got the feeling that the crazy was gone and he was back to fight the good fight. I’ll predict that his disappearance was totally misleading and that he was hatching a plan to get Dean out of there. And now we’re back to the survival of the fittest, to be sure, because Cas has been able to survive quite a lot.

But more importantly, so have Sam and Dean, and seeing that they are still around surviving, something they’ve done against all odds for seven seasons, gives hope that season eight will survive too, to be another stellar installment in one of my all-time favorite series. Remember season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Sure, there were some near-perfect episodes during that season, much like Supernatural‘s “Defending Your Life,” “The Mentalists,” “Time After Time,” and “Season Seven, Time for a Wedding!” from this season. But in the end, Adam and The Initiative were not poster children for Darwinism, much like Dick Roman and his flesh-eating Leviathans. It’s bound to happen in a long-running series and I can let it go if you can.

This and that:

• Yay! The Impala’s back! The only travesty is that Meg was driving it.
• The intro, with the black goo exploding on us all season — was that foreshadowing?
• What was the purpose of Dean and Cas faking out Dick with the wrong bone at first? Really didn’t get that, and it certainly didn’t help build suspense. It all just fell flat for me.
• I know there’s a joke in there somewhere about Cas being a dick detector. …
• A little funny that Dick designed an additive to kill only the short, skinny and smart haemophiliacs, ’cause who’d want to eat them?
• How could they do such an injustice to Bobby, not once, but twice this season? Let the guy have a moment in the sun, for crying out loud.

Clacked by Debbie McDuffee
on May 18, 2012 @ 22:47 EST5EDT