former vampire

Not sure how I feel overall about this season finale. I think I'll have to rewatch to decide. What I liked: ⦁ Dean is finally free of the Mark! He wasn't 100% Dean with the MoC, and I hated the way the mark has played out towards the end of this season, so I'm really glad to see it gone. ⦁ Jared & Jensen did very well with some emotional scenes. ⦁ The interaction between Cas & Crowley was enjoyable to watch. "You weren't in my contacts list." ⦁ "A hamster told me." ⦁ We got to see Death again. And Dean cooked for him. ⦁ We got to learn a little more about Rowena & she finally has some real power. (Scheming, nit-picking mother to the King of Hell was not fun to watch.) ⦁ Sam, Dean, Cas, & Crowley are still alive at the end of the episode. (Although, the prospect of any of them living much longer doesn't look very good.) What I didn't like: ⦁ The MoC made Dean slut-shame a dead teen girl in front of a cop? I get that this isn't normal, unfiltered Dean behavior. What I really have a problem with is the way its effect on Dean has been shown. Ideally, the audience should have seen the MoC slowly ramp up Dean's actions & emotions over the last several episodes. If one of the effects of the MoC was making Dean cruel & judgmental, we should have gotten a little more of that each time. Instead, last episode Dean slaughtered the entire Louisiana part of the Styne family & beat up Cas. This episode he's yelling at & name-calling anyone even remotely involved in the vampire case he's working on, and getting another hunter killed because he can't slow his roll for even 30 seconds to think up a plan. Because there hasn't been a good effort at showing what the Mark is doing, it looks more like the MoC is giving Dean multiple personalities. Last week we got almost unstoppable killer; this week it was judgmental, name-calling Mean Girl. ⦁ Why didn't Sam call off the spell? I like that the spell worked, but like many others here, I don't understand the reason he never contacted Cas to stop it. Was Sam unaware that the MoC was locking away the Darkness, and that removing the MoC would release it? Did Sam know that all the ingredients had been found? What if the spell were cast after Sam was killed & Dean had been sent away by Death? Did Sam think that finding someone that Rowena loved was an impossible task & that the spell would never be cast? Was Sam counting on Dean not killing him? Did Sam care whether or not the Darkness was released? There are so many questions I don't feel were answered here. ⦁ Death is dead. Why did Dean kill Death? Like other commenters, I don't understand if that was the real Dean or the MoC that wanted Death gone. Was killing Death part of Dean's plan all along, or was that an in-the-moment action? What effect does this have on humans dying (if any) & the other Reapers? ⦁ Why did we only learn about the Darkness & the MoC being a lock last minute? I get that this was so that neither Sam nor Dean really had a chance to do stop it. I feel like the writers could have planned this better, though. I would have preferred if (a few episodes back) they somehow contacted Lucifer to remove the Mark, but he wouldn't cooperate. Instead, he would have made some cryptic remark about the MoC being a lock, but wouldn't give them any details. Then at least, Sam & Dean would have had a vague idea what removing the Mark might do & their choices would have had more meaning. ⦁ I also agree with whoever said the Darkness looks too much like the demons being released from the Devil's Gate. New special effects, please! ⦁ Would have liked to hear a bit more about Oscar/Seth & Rowena's relationship to him. He was 8 yrs old in Rowena's memory, but how old was she at the time? Did Rowena love him like the brother she never had, the type of son she wished she had, or was Oscar her first real crush? If she had romantic feelings for Oscar, why couldn't she be with him as they grew up? Or maybe they were lovers back then (during his normal lifetime, not at age 8, you sickos!) & Oscar was Crowley's real father? It seems clear that the demon lover hamster!Oliviette talked about was actually immortal Oscar, so Oliviette may have been wrong about the lover part as well. (It wasn't clear to me if Oscar was surprised that Crowley brought him to see Rowena, or if Oscar was surprised that Rowena was alive after all those years.) Anyway, I thought that just a few sentences explaining Rowena's relationship with him & why she chose to kill him would have given her character so much more depth. Maybe we will hear Oscar's story in season 11? So, at least we can start next season WITHOUT Sam or Dean in Hell/Purgatory/the Cage and WITHOUT any severe physical injury/mental or emotional injury/curse/soullessness/demon blood addiction. It's just the rest of the world that's in shambles. Hooray?

How many episodes are left this season? I know this will probably end on a cliffhanger like Monroe & Rosalee's wedding did last season. Still, I'm trying to figure out how all the loose ends fit here. We've got: Juliette as a hexenbiest working with the Royals & forcing Nick to aim a gun at Monroe's head Mama Grimm coming to town because of the email Juliette sent her Trubel coming to town because Rosalee called her the Royals bringing an arsenal to the house of the renting neighbors in an attempt to kill Kelly/kidnap Diana Renard/Jack the Ripper killing & mutilating Wesen women Adalind, pregnant & without hexenbiest powers, staying at Bud's house Did I miss any? I'm purposely leaving out the special keys that were forgotten or ignored this season. Somehow I see most of this occurring as a showdown in & around Nick & Juliette's house. With all the stories & players converging, they might as well have the entire cast there. The main gang is there for sure. Kelly brings Diana. Trubel can bring Josh even though he has no powers or special training. Bud & Adalind will show up there because they've never made particularly wise decisions up until now. Renard will make an appearance as Jack. We can even bring in the bodies of Adalind's mom & Henrietta to make the cast complete. No, wait...more Royals can arrive in Portland to see how the kidnapping is going! Oh, and maybe we can have the Wesen Council send in another assassin to the house just then, since we don't have enough storylines going on at once! I enjoy many of the characters, & like the WotW cases, but this has gotten way too much like a soap opera for my tastes. If they don't end several storylines, I might not watch this show much longer.

Metatron saved Cas before Cas got part of his own grace back in the library. The stolen grace (from Crowley killing that other angel) was slowly fading from episode to episode so Cas was weaker than the other angel (a Cherub, I think?). I don't understand why semi-recharged Cas had such a problem fighting the Gregori, though. If Watcher angels are supposed to be much more powerful than your typical angel, then it should have been demonstrated in-show. YMMV, but Cas was entertaining when he didn't understand references. I also liked him exploring what it meant to be human, although I didn't care for the powerlessness or the mopey attitude that sometimes went along with it. I thought the writers could have done much more with his new-found knowledge. Metatron put an entire internet full of books, TV shows, movies, & pop culture references in his brain. Yet Castiel has only used that twice that I recall -- once to say he understood a Star Wars reference & once to race Metatron for his grace hidden in that library. Lately, the show has Cas in angst over Dean, Claire, and his own life choices. I'd like for Cas to get a little more dialogue to help solve a case & make some witty references while doing so. I don't trust the writers to do that, though. We'd just get more "woe is me" and "is Dean/Claire going to be alright?" type of stuff. I wasn't paying attention to the name the Gregori was using. Do we know that he wasn't just using the name & property already owned by his vessel? I assume Jimmy & Amelia share a place in Heaven because they both went to Heaven & they're soulmates. But we don't know exactly how Heaven 2.0 is set up. Maybe they get special treatment because Jimmy was an angel's vessel? Wasn't Bobby's wife possessed? You'd think that she would have made it to Heaven. They weren't soulmates? Bobby's detour in Hell had something to do with this? Most likely either the writers didn't want us to be more pissed at Sam & Cas for getting Bobby sent to Heaven's jail, or they just forgot he was married. I thought Castiel gave her money the last time we saw her. I don't know much money or how long ago that was supposed to have been. I'd like to know what happens to angels when they die too. If they do go back to heaven then it has to be without all of their original angel powers. Maybe they get their own rooms like humans? And what happens to the monsters that get killed in Purgatory -- do they go directly to Hell? The Jimmy & Amelia scene was kind of sweet, but I couldn't be overly happy for them. Jimmy made it sound like he'd been waiting forever for her. All I could think was that he could have waited longer! They have an 18 year old daughter together that could have used a little more love & guidance. Sure, Claire will probably do fine on her own. And sure, Jimmy had no control over when Amelia would die. Still, the fact that Jimmy gets Amelia (& appears to pout about the waiting) after Claire had just found & then lost her mother bugged me a bit. I was waiting for Dean to open the book & show her something inside it as soon as Claire dismissed it as homework.

I wondered why Monroe freaked out over the condition of the ogre gun, since its outer case appeared to be completely intact (as far as I could tell with the movement & flashlights, anyway). The plastic super-soaker wouldn't have survived the fire, but I'm sure the rest of the team kept theirs. Besides, it was the potion that defeated the phoenix Wesen, and Rosalee knows how to make more! I hope she writes down the recipes for future Grimms and times that she's out of town. Speaking of writing stuff down, the entire gang needs to journal all of their previous Wesen cases to start building back their library, when they get a chance to sit down & take a breath. At least a few of their books partially survived the fire.

I also wondered if Renard was Jack the Ripper when Henrietta was killed shortly after Renard ran from her house. My memory was telling me that Jack was dressed more casually, but I guess that the accent or the weird movements Jack made were playing a trick on my mind. My DVR shows that Henrietta's killer was wearing navy blue dress pants & brown leather shoes. That could be Renard. The legs seemed skinnier than I expected of Renard, but I could be wrong about that, and everything else seems to point to him. Assuming that Jack the Ripper was brought about by Mama Renard's 2-headed snake, the question becomes whether Mama Renard wanted this to happen, was okay with this happening as long as her son survived, or whether she was totally unaware of the possibility? Also, is there any connection to water in the real Jack the Ripper case? Not sure whether I want Juliette to die or become evil. I'm not sure she can pull off evil. There was this exchange after Kenneth notices soot on Juliette's hand: Kenneth: Been burning some bridges? Juliette: A little payback. Kenneth: Oh? We're going to have a lot of that. Afterwards, the corners of Juliette's mouth raised approximately 2 millimeters. That was not an evil grin or even a smirk. It was like something registered with her, but you almost needed a microscope to tell.

I'll comment on the trailer now, since I'm assuming we'll find out if anything survived the fire in the next episode. When reading through the previous episode threads, I was a little surprised at the commenters asking whether Wu had a key or permission to be in the trailer. He didn't need to be given his own key. There was one in the magnetic Hide-A-Key underneath the trailer, a second underneath the doormat, and a third key hidden in the fake plastic rock. ;) Seriously though, the location of the trailer was way more important than any key to it. Wesen powers or human tools (lockpicks, crowbars, explosives, etc.) could easily be used to gain access to the trailer once it was found. I was concerned about that happening much earlier this season when the FBI lady & her associates were following Trubel. In real life, scanning pages in the trailer would be difficult and photos don't render text very well. I guess those rules don't have to apply here with all the other magical stuff going on. Still, I think our best hope for info surviving is if Wu took a few books or pages home to read in his spare time. Most of the translations were written on separate sheets. Translations in languages that were not English, Spanish, or German wouldn't be missed right away, or not missed at all. Maybe Wu decided to type some into Google Translate. Or maybe he went old school and is using foreign language dictionaries to translate info about Wesen. He seemed motivated enough to do his own research, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's his new hobby. Guess I'll watch the next episode now & see if I'm right.