This is the mid season finale until January 20th, and Castiel tries to rekindle a family bond between him and his daughter, Claire. Actually Claire is James Novak’s daughter, the man Castiel possessed to walk on the earth, but he gets a rude awakening and an icy cold shoulder from her. Sam struggles with Dean’s unsettling behavior, but wants to trust his brother for keeping his condition under control. Crowley also gets a family reunion in hell as well.
The Good
- This is nice way to end the mid season, by reconnecting Castiel with James’ daughter, Claire, and venting out a lot of anger that she has for him taking her father away and leaving her to defend herself after her mother left.
- Kathryn Love Newton, who plays Claire Novak, reprises her role as the daughter of Castiel’s vessel, James Novak. Her performance as troubled girl, whose family was torn apart by Castiel, is good. The pain and hurt that Castiel has caused is shown on her face. By being abandoned by her mom, and the death of the guardian, her grandmother, she was sent to a group home, where she escapes and is living with a man named Randy that convinces her to steal things for him. She stays with him because he is the only person at that time that showed any kind of love toward her.
- Dean’s been having nightmares of him going on a bloody rampage. The Mark of Cain is getting stronger.
- Castiel asks Dean and Sam to help him with Claire, they agree, but try to a tell him that maybe Claire is not his responsibility anymore, Cas disagrees, and just wants to make sure that she is okay and safe.
- Believe it or not, Castiel is the closest thing she has to a father right now.
- Crowley finally gets to see his mother, Rowena, after she abandoned him hundreds of years ago. Rowena tries to convince him that what she did to him was for the better, he disagrees.
- Crowley’s birth name is Fergus…..really?
- Rowena who is a prisoner in Crowley’s hell tells her son that his number one demon, Gerald has been smuggling demons up from hell without his consent. Gerald tries to silence her but Crowley, I mean Fergus, puts a knife through his head. Crowley then releases her and now mother and son are reunited. This should be fun.
- Dean asks Castiel if things go bad with him having the Mark, he wants him to put him down. Cas doesn’t know what to say to this.
- Castiel and the Winchesters find out that Randy has asked Claire to rob a store and get the money to pay off his loan sharks. Cas stops her just in time, but she doesn’t want anything to do with him and walks away. Claire finds a few loan sharks at Randy’s house to collect his debt. To settle his debt he bargains Claire in exchange for a clean slate. The bookie takes her upstairs, but gets interrupted when Castiel blows the front door off its hinges and rescues her.
- Dean gets provoked by one of the loan sharks, and the Mark simply takes over. We don’t see the massacre but Sam can hear it all the way from the car outside. Sam walks into the house and sees nothing but bloody corpses. He reaches down toward Dean, and tries to get him to say that he had no choice, but Dean is inconsolable. Castiel is reminded of Dean’s request earlier that day, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
The Bad
- The real good stuff didn’t happen until the end of the episode when Dean went crazy at Randy’s house.
- Some of the scenes I felt were scattered brained and thrown in there just to fill air time. Dean watching the Three Stooges, Castiel trying to buy girlie magazines and stuff and trying to explain it to the cashier, and Crowley whining about having mommy issues when he was a kid, are a few examples.
- Rowena is a little annoying in this episode. But I still love her Irish accent.
This episode didn’t have the firepower or the intelligence like its other previous episode, but it is still a good way to end the midseason. In the very end, it finally got interesting, but only for a few minutes. The anticipation of the Mark of Cain affecting Dean fizzled out throughout the episode, but I hope that when it returns in January, it will get better.
