Overall impression of the episode?
I’m still in that dumbstruck post-episode blankness phase after something life-changing WTF-inducing has just happened.
So. There’s plenty of good. Namely,
Sam being lovely.
Sam knowing and reciting the recipe for the Colt bullets.
Sam saving the day.
Sam being grudgingly acknowledged by the Alpha Vampire.
Sam Winchester.
But there was also just metric fricktons of NOPE?
BEWARE SPOILERS AND ALSO RAGE
Literally no one considering that the vampires attacked because their entire species was being massacred.
The Alpha Vamp being brought back only to be killed. I liked him :(
Sam not getting any chance to actually talk through why he was playing mediator, and his final decision to “pick a side” being played as nothing more than an end to his supposed “indecision.”
The show being unwilling or uninterested in wrestling with the horrors of what the BMoL are doing and making neither Sam (who has historically spoken out in favor of good “monsters”) or Dean call them out.
Seriously, why hasn’t Sam, of all people, spoken out against their methods? Toni’s description was pretty explicit, and the embarrassingly-named, awkwardly gold-colored vampire killing thing was also a clear example of the atrocity of their methods. (Not to say those methods aren’t effective…just that they’re horrifying.) Sam knows what they do, even if he acknowledges and understands that Toni didn’t torture him on their orders.
The gross manipulation that was the “no one in this room has ever killed anything” scene.The members of the BMoL in that room may have never gotten their hands dirty, but they were indirectly responsible for actual genocides. Somehow the fact that they haven’t actually wielded the knife of pulled the trigger is used to make them seem like the victims. It also shifted the attention away from their methods.
WHEN WILL SAM LEARN ABOUT MAGDA?
Honestly, all this and more may eventually be addressed, and maybe I’m being unfairly salty about some of this instead of waiting for the fat lady to sing, but. Um. This is, truly, my “overall impression” of the episode.
