S12.E14: The Raid

[The Companion]

On 3/2/2017 at 8:50 PM, Commando Cody said:

That scene with Ketch showing up at Dean's reminded me of Dean showing up at Rufus's.  They should just build a bus station outside the bunker. Everybody knows where it is and just shows up. 

 

It reminded me of the same. And seriously, least secret bunker ever. At least upgrade the locks, guys.

 

On 3/2/2017 at 9:13 PM, MysteryGuest said:

So now that Sam has signed up with the BMOL, we can expect him to start lying to Dean about where he goes and what he's doing.  He's not going to come right out and tell him, because he has to bring him around to their side slowly.  I so, so, so hate this plan.  

The lying between brothers bullshit has been played to death, and it always ended badly.  At this point in the series, it's just a cheap, lazy way to drive the plot because the writers aren't clever enough to come up with something else.  I'm so not looking forward to this. 

Agreed. I hate the secrets and lies garbage. Even though I haven't loved this season and I hated Amara, I have liked the better communication between the brothers. 

Spoiler

The only up side is that this one doesn't last too long. 

On 3/2/2017 at 9:23 PM, MysteryGuest said:

We talked about that possibility a while ago.  It's a slippery slope once you start annihilating entire species without even thinking about it.  It absolutely shouldn't sit well with Sam and Dean, but I'm not sure we can count on these writers to remember that.

 

Yeah, I feel like we shouldn't have to say xenocide is wrong. I feel like that should be a given?

 

On 3/3/2017 at 9:59 AM, RulerofallIsurvey said:

 

• Mary totally played Sam with the 'urgent' message.  And she knew she was doing it.  I can't be upset with Sam, because that is something that Sam would do - show up thinking she really needed his help, even though he's mad at her.  It makes me even less sympathetic toward her character.  

This was where I got a bit stabby. They are hunters. Urgent should only be used for major life threatening issues. To play the urgent card so she could talk to Sam? That was some serious bullshit. I was angry. I honestly couldn't blame Sam for leaving a placeholder letter and rushing to Mary assuming she was in danger (with the caveat that I assume for my own sanity that he intended to update Dean once he got the lay of the land). She should know that a fake emergency is a huge violation on top of everything else.

On 3/3/2017 at 10:42 AM, catrox14 said:

 

What about the 5 monster families in Chicago.  I mean given there was a shapeshifter and werewolf and djinn family odds are their was a vampire family too. (II cannot believe I just Invoked fucking bloodlines to discount the BMOL). Surely Ennis would have called the boys to let them know that this vampire family was killed.

 

They are all dead because I cannot stomach the idea that Bloodlines ever shows back up.

On 3/3/2017 at 7:11 PM, auntvi said:

LOL. Sounds kinda like American military advisers on the ground in Vietnam. The BMoL should watch out for that classic blunder - never get involved in a ground war in Asia America.

But have they gotten involved with a Sicilian when death is in the line?

On 3/4/2017 at 12:25 AM, SueB said:

Exactly. And as I said a couple of days ago, Mary doesn't know HOW to be a 'Mom' of adult children.  It's she who associates "Mom"=cut off the crusts of the PB&J.

I admit, I was super pissed at Mary in this episode and full team Winchester boys. This perspective does actually help me get past some of my anger because I think it is right. She died in the 1980s when that was very much the image of mother. There was a lot of panic about latchkey kids and a lot of thinking of the children (hell, I still get bullshit for being a working mother). So, I think it is fair to say that some of this may be Mary's assumptions of what mother means and her inability to reconcile those assumptions with parenting adults. I am still not impressed with the effort she has put in and still pissed about a lot of her decisions, but this does make me pause.

On 3/4/2017 at 1:47 PM, DittyDotDot said:

 

Personally, I think the whole plan of the BMoL was foolish. Even if they had succeeded, it doesn't wipe out vampires everywhere and they can make more, very easily. They keep this up and they might find themselves fighting a war on every monster front, and I don't think they have enough gadgets for that.

 

This is a good point. We have seen the monsters go into overdrive as a defense mechanism before and it isn't pretty.

On 3/4/2017 at 2:05 PM, catrox14 said:

 

Oh gods.. I just realized @DittyDotDot that monster war? Is this going to take us back to the 5 monster families in Chicago? Please no.

Stop invoking that episode. I heard if you mention it three times, a rerun of it will haunt you. Shit. Nothing to see here. 😆

On 3/5/2017 at 2:10 PM, catrox14 said:

 

Makeup takes care of that tired look.

IMO, if the show didn't want Dean to look tired...he wouldn't look tired.

I think it's all intentional.

I  could use a professional makeup artist then. The baby is sick and I am not sure there is enough concealer in all the land. Lol. On the bright side, I got a lot of the show binged 

 

If I ignore the parts that make me stabby, I actually enjoyed this one. I liked that both boys were on the same page (in the beginning). I actually enjoyed watching Dean on a pure vampire hunt and I really enjoyed the siege. It was tense and entertaining. Better than a lot of episodes in this season from that perspective.

I think JA and JP continue to hit it out of the park with some fairly tough scenes. If there is one thing Mary's reappearance has done, it is to give the guys some really good emotional stuff to work with. I would change a lot of it if I could, but I give credit to the guys for doing their best with what they've got. 

On a purely random note, they really shouldn't ask non Louisianans to pronounce Atchafalaya.  Because that was just painful. It's uh-cha-fuh-lie-yuh. 

I hate that Sam is on board and I don't buy it for all the reasons listed in this thread. Sigh. 

[Katy M]

55 minutes ago, The Companion said:

They are all dead because I cannot stomach the idea that Bloodlines ever shows back up.

It never happened.  It never happened.  It never happened.

 

57 minutes ago, The Companion said:

There was a lot of panic about latchkey kids and a lot of thinking of the children (hell, I still get bullshit for being a working mother). So, I think it is fair to say that some of this may be Mary's assumptions of what mother means and her inability to reconcile those assumptions with parenting adults. I am still not impressed with the effort she has put in and still pissed about a lot of her decisions, but this does make me pause.

I think I tend to give Mary more slack than most (if not everybody) because I can just understand how she doesn't feel an emotional connection to adults that she hasn't seen since they were 6 months and 5 years old.  They're complete strangers who happen to be her biological children.  It's not like she hates them or is trying to hurt them.  She just doesn't really feel an emotional connection.

[gonzosgirrl]

Die, Mary, die. 

Sadly, I don't find Sam siding with her and the BMOL and deciding to humor poor, dumb Dean until he can educate him, out of character at all. 

[catrox14]

1 hour ago, Katy M said:

It never happened.  It never happened.  It never happened.

 

I think I tend to give Mary more slack than most (if not everybody) because I can just understand how she doesn't feel an emotional connection to adults that she hasn't seen since they were 6 months and 5 years old.  They're complete strangers who happen to be her biological children.  It's not like she hates them or is trying to hurt them.  She just doesn't really feel an emotional connection.

I don't understand why if nothing else, she wouldn't feel an emotional connection to Dean at least who she raised and loved for 4 or 5 years especially since she died when she was in the attached to her children phase. Why wouldn't that transfer over to her adult children? IMO it's terrible writing to just put it down to...she didn't raise them up to adulthood.  It makes no sense other than to create this "Not just a Mom" shitty version of Mary.

[Aeryn13]

Their grandfather had no emotional connectiom to him and in the two days? he knew them, he invested the freaking time to read John's journal and at least find out who those people, his grandchildren were. Why they were like that.

Mary huffily tells Dean he is not a child and doesn't even react to his rebuttal. She never invested any time in finding out about their childhood after she died. Whereas her sons DID try to get to know her as she is now. One-way-street Mary can't be bothered and god forbid, anyone would associate her with being a mother. She has to define herself as "me me me superhunter". And the actress validated that attitude outside of the show and played the character as some entitled shrew who especially Dean did wrong by somehow expecting her to be Suzie homemaker.

[gonzosgirrl]

Just now, Aeryn13 said:

Their grandfather had no emotional connectiom to him and in the two days? he knew them, he invested the freaking time to read John's journal and at least find out who those people, his grandchildren were. Why they were like that.

Mary huffily tells Dean he is not a child and doesn't even react to his rebuttal. She never invested any time in finding out about their childhood after she died. Whereas her sons DID try to get to know her as she is now. One-way-street Mary can't be bothered and god forbid, anyone would associate her with being a mother. She has to define herself as "me me me superhunter". And the actress validated that attitude outside of the show and played the character as some entitled shrew who especially Dean did wrong by somehow expecting her to be Suzie homemaker.

So much this.

I get that she doesn't know these grown men as her sons, but to use this as an excuse not to feel emotionally connected just doesn't fly. Imagine you somehow lost your infant and toddler to a kidnapper and didn't see them again for thirty years. Then, unexpectedly and miraculously, they were returned to you, grown up and yet still wanting to know you, accept you (a stranger) as their mother. Would you really feel no connection at all? And she's a hunter, someone who knows things that are inexplicable and unbelievable to the general population. It should have been easier for her to accept, not harder. But even if she deserved sympathy for any of that, she threw that away by coldly informing Dean that he's 'not a child' when he dares to ask her to remember she is their mother. Not their nursemaid or caretaker, their mother. The writers missed the mark on every level with her, beyond her first episode back.

[Katy M]

21 minutes ago, catrox14 said:

I don't understand why if nothing else, she wouldn't feel an emotional connection to Dean at least who she raised and loved for 4 or 5 years especially since she died when she was in the attached to her children phase. Why wouldn't that transfer over to her adult children? IMO it's terrible writing to just put it down to...she didn't raise them up to adulthood.  It makes no sense other than to create this "Not just a Mom" shitty version of Mary.

Because he's a completely different person.  I'm not saying that it wouldn't happen.  It just seems like people expect an instantaneous connection.  I don't think it was that weird for her to take John's journal, go off for a few weeks and figure stuff out.  If you're children age 30 years, in what to you is an instant, it's going to be weird.

Joining the BMOL is a completely different issue that I do have issues with.

[ahrtee]

4 minutes ago, gonzosgirrl said:

So much this.

I get that she doesn't know these grown men as her sons, but to use this as an excuse not to feel emotionally connected just doesn't fly. Imagine you somehow lost your infant and toddler to a kidnapper and didn't see them again for thirty years. Then, unexpectedly and miraculously, they were returned to you, grown up and yet still wanting to know you, accept you (a stranger) as their mother. Would you really feel no connection at all? And she's a hunter, someone who knows things that are inexplicable and unbelievable to the general population. It should have been easier for her to accept, not harder. But even if she deserved sympathy for any of that, she threw that away by coldly informing Dean that he's 'not a child' when he dares to ask her to remember she is their mother. Not their nursemaid or caretaker, their mother. The writers missed the mark on every level with her, beyond her first episode back.

Oddly enough, this is one time I feel like defending Mary (on some parts, at least).  

This isn't the same as if she'd lost her children and spent 30 years looking for them, mourning them, and wanting them back, only to find them grown up.  This is going to bed one night with your children 4 years and 6 months old, and waking up to find them nearly 40 years old.  So, yes, I'll allow  her time to get used to that idea.

But the problem for me is that she never did.  Instead of getting to know them and looking for the parts she used to know, she came across as not really liking them.  Maybe because they had turned into hunters (which, once upon a time, she declared she didn't want for her children).  Maybe because she didn't want to get sucked into being "mom".  But it would have been much easier for all of them if she'd just said that (putting it gently, maybe) and stayed away altogether.  But by keeping up the fiction that if they'd just give her time, eventually she'd turn into someone else, it was unfair to all of them.  And using that fictional connection in order to coerce them into doing something they knew was wrong?  That's cold.  

[catrox14]

4 minutes ago, Katy M said:

Because he's a completely different person.  I'm not saying that it wouldn't happen.  It just seems like people expect an instantaneous connection.  I don't think it was that weird for her to take John's journal, go off for a few weeks and figure stuff out.  If you're children age 30 years, in what to you is an instant, it's going to be weird.

Joining the BMOL is a completely different issue that I do have issues with.

It would be one thing if Mary and the boys were separated for years before she died. But they weren't. She was tending to the both of them in loving caring ways just before her moment of death. I would think THAT emotion would be what ties her to them. And she was with them in her Heaven when she was yanked out by Amara. There is no good narrative reason, IMO,  other than the writers and the actress wanted a badass hunter!Mary who was more than a Mom. And to get that they ran over Mary's past. Hell then even runined Young!Mary who never wanted her children to be hunters. And top it off when they have her chastise Dean for wanting his Mom to be kind to him and Sam. What a disaster of a character IMO

[gonzosgirrl]

11 minutes ago, ahrtee said:

Oddly enough, this is one time I feel like defending Mary (on some parts, at least).  

This isn't the same as if she'd lost her children and spent 30 years looking for them, mourning them, and wanting them back, only to find them grown up.  This is going to bed one night with your children 4 years and 6 months old, and waking up to find them nearly 40 years old.  So, yes, I'll allow  her time to get used to that idea.

But the problem for me is that she never did.  Instead of getting to know them and looking for the parts she used to know, she came across as not really liking them.  Maybe because they had turned into hunters (which, once upon a time, she declared she didn't want for her children).  Maybe because she didn't want to get sucked into being "mom".  But it would have been much easier for all of them if she'd just said that (putting it gently, maybe) and stayed away altogether.  But by keeping up the fiction that if they'd just give her time, eventually she'd turn into someone else, it was unfair to all of them.  And using that fictional connection in order to coerce them into doing something they knew was wrong?  That's cold.  

I don't think anybody said she wasn't entitled to some time to adjust. Even time away from them to do it in. It was entirely about the way they did it, and the actress's own performance that made it unacceptable.

ETA: as to my analogy, I don't think it's all that different, but that's okay. I wonder how the sympathy factor would have played out if she wanted to be 'mom' to these guys and Dean said, hey no thanks, I'm a grown man, I don't know you. "My" mom is dead and I can't handle looking at you. I'm betting it wouldn't have gone over so well.

Edited March 2, 2020 by gonzosgirrl

[ahrtee]

2 minutes ago, gonzosgirrl said:

I don't think anybody said she wasn't entitled to some time to adjust. Even time away from them to do it in. It was entirely about the way they did it, and the actress's own performance that made it unacceptable.

If you read the rest of my post, you can see that I only gave her a pass for a short period to allow for adjustment, but hated the fact that she never did adjust.  That Mary came across as if she didn't like her sons but only stuck with them out of some guilt or need to prove herself.  That she was playing herself as "Mother Mary/Super Hunter" to the world, as if to prove that she really is Supermom who can do everything, when in reality she wasn't doing anything for anyone but herself.  It doesn't really matter whether it was the writing, the acting, or a combination thereof.  It just means that the character became thoroughly unlikeable and (to me) unwatchable.

[Katy M]

18 minutes ago, gonzosgirrl said:

I don't think it's all that different, but that's okay. I wonder how the sympathy factor would have played out if she wanted to be 'mom' to these guys and Dean said, hey no thanks, I'm a grown man, I don't know you. "My" mom is dead and I can't handle looking at you. I'm betting it wouldn't have gone over so well.

Not stated so harshly, but if Dean (or Sam) had been like, I don't really remember you.  This is kind of weird.  We (I) need some time away to think about this.  I would have been fine with that.

26 minutes ago, catrox14 said:

nd she was with them in her Heaven when she was yanked out by Amara.

She was with baby them.  Not adult them.  Totally different people.

But, yes, again, I'm not into the "bad-ass" hunter thing at all.  And I hate the ridiculous retcon that she was hunting after Dean was born.  Ridiculous!!!!  Ugh!

ETA:  I actually would have understood this 100% better and been more behind it if part of the reason that she needed to distance herself was because she wanted to get away from hunting.  That would have been in character from what we saw in In the Beginning.  And a rift between them because she was trying to talk them out of hunting, while maybe they were trying to talk her into, would have been more organic.

Edited March 2, 2020 by Katy M

[Myrelle]

1 hour ago, catrox14 said:

It would be one thing if Mary and the boys were separated for years before she died. But they weren't. She was tending to the both of them in loving caring ways just before her moment of death. I would think THAT emotion would be what ties her to them. And she was with them in her Heaven when she was yanked out by Amara. There is no good narrative reason, IMO,  other than the writers and the actress wanted a badass hunter!Mary who was more than a Mom. And to get that they ran over Mary's past. Hell then even runined Young!Mary who never wanted her children to be hunters. And top it off when they have her chastise Dean for wanting his Mom to be kind to him and Sam. What a disaster of a character IMO

ITA.

And this was the episode where the writing was on the wall for everything that follows/followed.

This one marked the beginning of the end for this fan of the show.

Mary was too important of a character to the entire show/series, even if she was barely shown to us previously because what we were given previously implied a warm and loving mother with a past that involved hunting also.

To do away almost altogether with the warm and loving aspect of the character dealt a blow to the show that it never really recovered from, IMO.

In all honesty, the rest of the way is too painful to watch for me.

Once again, lost potential through the writing rears it's ugly head in these latter seasons, but rarely more thoroughly than with what they did to the Mary character here and in the episode before this one.

 

 

Edited March 2, 2020 by Myrelle
Revision

[gonzosgirrl]

39 minutes ago, Myrelle said:

Once again, lost potential through the writing rears it's ugly head in these latter seasons, but rarely more thoroughly than with what they did to the Mary character here and in the episode before this one.

I agree with your whole post, but I'd expand this list to add Asa Fox. Learning that Mary not only hunted after Dean was born, but left for days at a time to do so, just makes it all the more unforgivable that she did nothing to protect her home and family from the supernatural/demons. Clearly this uber bad-ass hunter should have known better. It's in things like this that the ret-con and canon-busting writing-for-Twitter-mentions fails its hardest.

[AwesomO4000]

7 hours ago, gonzosgirrl said:

Sadly, I don't find Sam siding with her and the BMOL and deciding to humor poor, dumb Dean until he can educate him, out of character at all. 

I can see this point of view about Sam lying to Dean and getting him to play along - though after season 11 this doesn't make as much sense (character growth, what character growth?) - as a legitimate Sam criticism.

The siding with Mary - unless it's to help keep her safe - and especially the BMoL; not as much. As I've said somewhere above, that doesn't even make sense based on Sam's stance earlier in the same episode. And it certainly makes no sense if Sam is supposed to be in any way intelligent, because nothing that happened in the episode should have changed Sam's mind.

There was nothing about the siege that looked like good planning. I wouldn't even call it competent. If not for Sam's knowledge of how to make the Colt's bullets, they wouldn't even have won the battle as far as I can remember. So I can't see why Sam would find this a competent operation to join. The same operation that tortured him, and that he took that torture from to save others from being in his position by not naming names. And who haven't changed, since they mentioned torturing someone else - which Sam is supposedly okay with now. (Which: what?)

The Colt itself being there is problematic in that Sam knows how the Colt got to be there, and who died in the getting of it, because he was there. Again it went wrong because of poor planning. So Sam impressed with the operation itself doesn't make sense, since the two incidences Sam knows of where the BMoL had involvement both went FUBAR.

And Sam suddenly okay with "let's kill all the monsters!" is weird also. Even in the case of Benny, a very good argument can be made that that was personal, and so his "let's give the monsters a chance" type stance should've been in tact. What about Garth and his family? What about Sully and the Zanna? The werewolf girl they let go? Why would Sam suddenly be all okay with sacrificing them in the "kill all the monsters" plan?

What would have made more sense to me: Sam being impressed with the gadgetry, and planning to sneak back into the compound and steal it all. He could've talked Dean into that. That I would have believed. That Sam saw these people on their own - not the gadgetry - as in any way impressive... There wasn't enough evidence in the episode to support that conclusion, in my opinion. So that's the part that I find out of character. That and the monster genocide stuff.

It was much more "tell" than show in terms of the BMoL being in any way impressive.

Edited March 2, 2020 by AwesomO4000