S13.E11: Breakdown

[gonzosgirrl]

28 minutes ago, auntvi said:

Jared was in his early 20s when SPN started, so it's very possible he grew another inch.

Agreed.

[catrox14]

34 minutes ago, gonzosgirrl said:

Agreed.

But his head got bigger too. I don't mean ego. Look at Jared's head between s4 and s5. Didn't he say in interviews he was using some growth enhancers to bulk up for Conan? I'm not being asshole to Jared here. That's been a thing he's discussed before.

[gonzosgirrl]

6 minutes ago, catrox14 said:

But his head got bigger too. I don't mean ego. Look at Jared's head between s4 and s5. Didn't he say in interviews he was using some growth enhancers to bulk up for Conan? I'm not being asshole to Jared here. That's been a thing he's discussed before.

Oh he's definitely gotten bigger all over, and then smaller (after his shoulder injury) and back to bigger again. I was just saying that he's gotten taller, which isn't something you can physically enhance like bulking up/slimming down. The boy is TALL!!

[catrox14]

1 minute ago, gonzosgirrl said:

Oh he's definitely gotten bigger all over, and then smaller (after his shoulder injury) and back to bigger again. I was just saying that he's gotten taller, which isn't something you can physically enhance like bulking up/slimming down. The boy is TALL!!

You can get taller via human growth hormone. I know of teenagers who have taken it who were much smaller than their peers but maybe it only has that effect in puberty.

on topic: If they had just given some of those monsters some growth hormones they could have had a bigger parts to sell! Monster Growth Hormones! 

[bettername2come]

In the first season of Gilmore Girls his character referred to himself as 6'2" and throughout the series people would reference him getting taller, so I think it's possible that last inch happened in or around season 2 of SPN.

[DittyDotDot]

15 hours ago, catrox14 said:

But his head got bigger too. I don't mean ego. Look at Jared's head between s4 and s5. Didn't he say in interviews he was using some growth enhancers to bulk up for Conan? I'm not being asshole to Jared here. That's been a thing he's discussed before.

Yes, he was bulking up, but I believe it was for the show, more than anything. It may have benefited his auditioning for other things, but if I remember right, they asked Jared to bulk up a bit in S4 due to the demon blood. I've joked he was taking steroids, but I think most of it was a heavy regiment of weight lifting.

14 hours ago, bettername2come said:

In the first season of Gilmore Girls his character referred to himself as 6'2" and throughout the series people would reference him getting taller, so I think it's possible that last inch happened in or around season 2 of SPN.

Yeah, Jared mentioned he was a late "grower". That he didn't start to shoot up until he was 17 or 18 and then didn't stop growing until he was in his 20s. So, yeah, I can believe he's grown an inch since the show started. 

[takalotti]

THEN:

 

Just because I’m keeping a running tally of this annoyance, this is the fourth THEN sequence where there’s been no mention of Cas being held captive or Asmodeus pretending to be him over the phone. Oh but that's okay because the boys don’t check in with Cas this episode and it TOTally makes sense that Dean and Sam wouldn't update Cas with "Hey! We found Jack, but then we lost him again. No idea why we didn’t call you when we found him except that if we did then your captor who we don’t know about would have shown up and that would have overloaded the episode of the tv show we're not on. But anyhoo, we accidentally got zapped to another universe for a couple days, and we’re pretty sure Jack got zapped to Apocolypse World with our mom. So now your captor who we don’t know about knows that there are other universes and that we’re trying to actively open rifts to one. Good talk."

 

NOW:

 

Is it odd that Donna's niece, who Donna thinks looks up to her enough to want to take a gap year like she did, has a "No guns" bumper sticker? Not necessarily, I guess. I just would have figured that she’d think "My aunt is a badass with a gun" and so not be anti-gun. I guess between that and the Think Globally, Act Locally bumper sticker, we were supposed to come away with "Oh look, she’s a hippy. Easy prey"?

 

Think the card reader is broken on purpose so cashier boy can vet victims more easily? He was definitely realistically sleazy and creepy. Everyone inside was creepy, just the way they all turned to stare for so long.

 

Wow. Donna spoke volumes with just the word "Oh." I think it says a lot about how well her character has been established that the actress' delivery of just "Oh" can tell you something is heartbreakingly wrong.

 

WAS there really a family reunion in Sioux Falls a couple weeks ago? Or was that one of many cover stories that Donna tells Doug when she’s on a hunting trip and Dean was just generically covering for her and maintaining his lie? Or was it specifically referring to the previous episode which sure was a wild time for them all? I wouldn’t think it was the latter since they aired a week apart and there wasn’t anything else in the episode that indicated a time jump, plus Dean's expressions read more as 'Hope he can’t tell I’m lying through my teeth right now' than 'Man, you have no idea how wild it actually was.'

 

I already posted some of this before, but in short, I didn’t have a problem with Sam being reluctant to help the Fed. He didn’t have any objection to showing up and helping Donna even though she already said it wasn’t their kind of case, until it was a question of working side by side with a Fed. I really think he’d have been fine working the case if it were just cops and not FBI, or somehow working around the Fed and feeding tips through Doug and Donna.

I GUESS some of Sam's expressions at the end of the phone call in the bunker could be interpreted as "'Not our normal thing.' That’s our out, right? Whoa, 'On our way'? Ookay, not what I thought you’d say. Wait, I don’t think this is a good idea." But I think it could just as easily be read as "'Not our normal thing'? What can we really do when it’s not monsters? Oh, okay, I guess we'll give it a shot. Wait, we don’t know anything about tracking just bad people." I think what tips me to interpretation #2 is that he brought Dean into the call. If he really was against helping, wouldn’t he have gently told her there wasn’t anything they could do and not bounced it off Dean? He came into the kitchen and said "Hey, Donna, I’m here with Dean. I’m gonna put you on speaker. Uh, why don’t you tell him what you told me?" not "Uh, so what did you want to tell us?"

 

So, I don’t know if I’m off base for thinking this way, or if the show even intended it, but it really seemed like Dean was trying too hard to be a trucker. It didn’t bother me at all; I just found it amusing. Like the way he talked on the CB radio seemed too heavy with the lingo and I was cringing in secondhand embarrassment. I get that he can’t get on there and say "Pardon me, I’m looking for some information on my missing cousin. Do any of you nice folks have any leads on the following description?" But I’d think that going too heavy on the lingo would raise a flag with real truckers, too. And then his outfit when he showed up at the meet up. No, nothing was WRONG with it, but he would have been fine in his usual flannel and jeans, yet he still felt the need to add the vest. I shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve already seen how much Dean likes to play dress up and overdo the role playing (most recently, Tombstone). Still makes me giggle, though. 

 

Is it weird that we could see Sam and the Fed from the interrogation room? When they brought the preacher in, he basically ignored the three people behind the window waving the bloody t-shirt around, implying it was a 1 way mirror, and they usually are 1-way. 

Plus, when inside the interrogation room facing the window, Donna is on the left, preacher is on the right, and in the window Fed is on the left with Sam on the right. But right after she says "Your call" the shot jumps to inside the observation room and everything is reversed. Preacher and the door he came through are on the right (when he was first brought in, the door was on the left and he was seated on the left up to this point), and Sam and the Fed have swapped sides from where they were a second ago. Did someone flip the shot (can that even be done accidentally in the digital era?), or am I looking at this wrong? 

 

Loved Dean's 'good job' nod to Doug (after Doug smacked Marlon and Donna finished her disapproving look to Dean).

 

Doug's "I don’t think I’m okay" was so perfect.

 

When Marlon came back to gloat and let Dean know that the Fed got Sam, like some of you I thought it was supposed to be a classic villain game (like in Spider-Man, when the Green Goblin wanted Spider-Man to choose between saving MJ or a tram full of people). That’s the only reason it could make sense for Marlon to bother coming back where he’s needed as an ingredient and to give Dean a heads up. If he had just stayed away, Dean wouldn’t know to chase after Sam, and they'd have a harder time fixing Doug. I don’t like dumb villains. Makes our heroes' win just limp.

 

Every time the bad guys talked about only taking "people other people won’t miss" I was mentally shouting "Other people are missing Wendy right now, dumbass! Luis had a family! Your argument is invalid!" But yes, I know: Psychopath.

 

Also, right after Fed goes on about how most monsters blend in and how his service keeps them from going batshit on the general public for food, the show then cuts to 3 monsters and at least 2 of them definitely do not blend in. 

 

Good thing getting shot didn’t make the Fed squeeze the trigger ? I do get that Dean didn’t have much choice, but why is this never a concern?

 

Man, that break up with Doug felt forced, which made it completely obvious why the show made them break up. I totally get him not being all gung ho "I’ll be a hunter, too!" But once you know, you can’t go back to not knowing. So he doesn't want to go out and hunt them, fine. But breaking up with Donna doesn’t put him in any less danger from monster attacks. And he probably doesn’t want to wait at home for her, worrying while she’s out on a hunt. But breaking up with someone you love doesn’t change how much you'd worry about them going out on hunts. All it changes is how often it’s in your face, so really all breaking up does is allow you to go "lalalala" with your fingers in your ears. Sorry show, but I’m not going to simultaneously believe that Doug loves Donna AND that it’s cool that Donna is 'out of sight, out of mind' for him.

 

So, like many already said, I was way more creeped out by the episode when I thought it was people (even though it wouldn’t really tie into anything supernatural). Once I knew it was monsters, creep factor disappeared for me. However, what wasn’t clear to me was if the Fed and leatherface were monsters who blended in like he described, or just psychos and the only monsters were the ones ordering the food. The latter would put me at half creep factor.

Edited March 14, 2018 by takalotti

[The Companion]

On 1/26/2018 at 2:46 PM, SueB said:

Now what actually surprised me is that DEAN wasn't foaming at the mouth to go find his Mom.  I'm going to fanwank that since Kaia think Jack went to AU, Dean feels like Jack would be capable of protecting Mary.  

This. Apparently he is willing to hold a minor at gunpoint, but now he is chill. Also, there are still no repercussions for that.

 

On 1/26/2018 at 3:25 PM, ahrtee said:

I think Sam has a right to a breakdown.  What I don't think works is why now, why all of a sudden, especially with no advance warning (we could see Dean going downhill over *years,* not just one episode, and we saw him fighting it (and losing.)  Sam was outwardly fine up until this ep (though, thinking back, maybe his refusing to eat the lizard was the beginning...) :)  I just don't think it works *in the context it's written.* 

So blame the writers for being too abrupt.  Blame them for not showing more of Sam's mindset earlier.  Blame Jared for not giving body language clues before this (though I think it's because the writers just pulled it out of their ass for a new arc--like we need one, in between all the plates in the air plotwise). 

So, yeah, I can understand the idea behind it, but I don't think the execution worked *at all.*  Besides, since they've been going on for 13 years about how Sam and Dean are different (especially in their emotional reactions) there's no reason to think that Sam would react *exactly* like Dean has been.  Have some kind of emotional reaction?  Sure.  That's what most fans (at least the ones with sympathy towards Sam) believe about his season 8 fiasco.  Going into the "this is going to end bloody.  There's no point to it.  We've lost everyone"?  That's Dean.  Give Sam his own kind of breakdown.  Or at least let him explain it in his own way.  

This. It was sudden and it felt too much like Dean. Also, I was disappointed that Eileen didn't even get a cursory mention. It felt like someone was like: "What if the roles were reversed and Sam lost his optimism for an episode?" and that was the end of the thought process. 

 

On 1/28/2018 at 11:49 AM, Bobcatkitten said:

I appreciate all theories trying to explain Sam's sudden depression. But the fact is if we have to try to come up with explanations then the writing failed. 

This.

 

Even though I found the episode spotty on the character moments, I loved having Donna and thought the MOTW was interesting. The motivation was suspect, given the prices of those body parts (as opposed to meal delivery like Blaine in iZombie), but I think the poor justification was actually a reasonable thing to throw into the episode and probably intentional. We weren't supposed to buy that it was actually saving lives.

I was disappointed that poor Donna got dumped, but she deserved better.