Man, I am struggling with this show. On the one hand, I think the cast is starting to come together nicely — especially Jojo Fleites and Nida Khurshid, who are fun to watch even when their characters are given weak material, and standout Drake Rodger — and at least stylistically, The Winchesters is doing a good job of distinguishing itself from Supernatural, which makes it feel more like a whole series and not mediocre fanfic. On the other hand, so much of the heavy emotional stuff requires you to have a deep understanding of the relationship dynamics of its predecessor, which is fine but also makes everything feel kind of forced, and that’s not what you want from big character moments and reveals! And this episode sure was full of those, in addition to a few too many plot points. So let’s dig in.
The cold open takes place at Hannibal Park Hospital in Missouri, where a man wandering through the hospital hallway is having what seems like a PTSD flashback. Except it’s not all in his head: A hokey-looking Power Ranger knockoff with a hot spear shows up, fights the wandering man, and splatters his blood all over the hospital wall. It’s not looking good for our patient.
On the other side of the credits, Dean gives a raspy voice-over about the importance of facing the monster inside of yourself as Mary spars with a shirtless (!) John in her backyard. She gets a little flirty here — “Monsters aren’t gonna play nice, and neither should you,†she tells him winkingly — and it’s probably the first spark of mutual attraction I’ve seen that the script hasn’t forced on a scene. Carlos, also sensing chemistry at last, shows up to sass their “hetero mating ritual†before pulling them into the house for an exposition dump with Lata.
They’ve got a new case: Thomas “Patches†Pasternak, a veteran and the victim from the cold open. He was found dead in a locked room in the hospital’s psych unit, and the staff’s been claiming he died by suicide. Carlos and Lata don’t agree, though, since there were scorch marks all over the room that Lata thinks came from a supernatural being. There’s some debate about what it could be — Mary brings up dragons because I’ll never be free of them — but the key piece of info here is that Carlos is a vet who served in the Navy, which makes a new connection between him and Marine vet John. (Fleites is nonbinary, and Jensen and Danneel Ackles have confirmed Carlos is as well even though the term likely wouldn’t have been used in the 1970s and Carlos uses he/him pronouns.)
The Monster Club decides to sneak into the hospital to look at Patches’ body, and John has a PTSD moment interspersed with some war-flashback sequences that are filmed and cut like Dean’s scenes in Purgatory in Supernatural season eight. It’s a nice callback. And he’s going to have more of these — the Monster Club sends him and Carlos to the in-patient therapy group so they can figure out the connection to Patches’ death.
The therapy-group sessions give us some insight into Carlos, whom we don’t know much about at this point in the series. Before the Navy, Carlos lived life mostly as a drifter; after getting arrested, he ended up enlisting and getting sent to Vietnam. John digs into his own trauma, telling the group about the friend from the pilot who was killed in front of him. Post-group, they have some more fun in the psych ward: Carlos manages to get Patches’ file, which reveals that Patches complained of being haunted by the spear-holding Power Ranger, and John stumbles upon the mangled, presumably dead body of a fellow vet named Jimmy.
After some lore work, Lata learns that the Power Ranger is an ancient god who uses the power of war to trap and kill his victims. Although the war god is technically immortal, he carries his immortality around in an amphora that, once broken, will leave him vulnerable on Earth. (Lata calling out how ridiculous this weakness is makes up for the fact that this weakness is, in fact, ridiculous.)
Mary, Lata, and Millie all head to Missouri to smash the vase in time to save Carlos and John, who at this point have been sucked into a Vietnam-esque jungle, courtesy of the war god. The war god shows up, tells John he wants to channel his rage to help defeat the Akrida, and takes off his Power Ranger mask — surprise, it’s Jimmy! John and Jimmy the war god fight, the B-plotters smash the vase, John kills the war god, and everyone goes home, though the hunt has stirred up some bad emotions for Carlos and John.
The A plot has so many layers — between the PTSD, the Carlos character reveal, and the fact that all of this is tied to the metaplot — that it outstrips the B plot, a less busy story line about Lata and Mary working through Mary’s grief over losing her cousin Maggie. There’s some sweet stuff here about Mary reconnecting with her love of hunting that I’d like to have seen featured more prominently this week, though hopefully we get to it later in the season.
But the real emotional core is carried by Rodgers, who channels his best Ackles / Jared Padalecki to show John struggling to deal with his anger and grief. The end scene, with Millie holding John as he shakes uncontrollably in the shower, is the highlight of the episode (well, that and Carlos showing up to Millie’s garage in full Navy uniform, but that’s a whole other thing), and a more focused central plot might have made it even stronger.
The episode spends a lot of time highlighting the parallels between John and Sam/Dean, who spent 15 seasons repeatedly fighting their inner demons, rage, daddy and mommy issues, codependencies, etc. But Sam and Dean also had time to earn all their baggage, and four episodes in, I’m not sure The Winchesters’ version of John Winchester has shown us he’s angry and abandoned so much as the scripts have repeatedly told us that’s the case. Then again, it’s tough to flesh out four characters in only four episodes, and this first season is packing in a lot quickly. We’ll see what happens next week.
Family Business
• I didn’t even get to investigative journalist Kyle Reed, who is the guy Mary met at the movies at the end of the previous episode. He’s been investigating mysterious disappearances at psych wards all over the country. I thought he’d be something slightly more demonic than a journalist, but alas.
• “There’s no logical world in which paper beats a rock.†Carlos is the new Dean.
• Sam and Dean also went undercover in a psych ward in Supernatural’s season five, and Sam had to confront his own anger issues. Huh!
• “John’s been a fighter since he was 4 years old.†Direct parallel to Dean, who started hunting at age 4 after Azazel killed Mary.
• No Ada or Roxy the DJ this week and very little on the metaplot aside from the war god wanting to turn John into a weapon to fight the Akrida. I assume this will come back around later.
• I’m sorry, but the war god’s costume is so bad. I know the budget for this show is tight, but this has intense Joey Tribbiani working at Caesar’s Palace vibes.
• We have blessedly gone two episodes without hearing “Americana.†Maybe Robbie Thompson’s reading my recaps.