Lost Limey Watches Supernatural #39 – “Heart”

A quick note by way of introduction may be required here. For quite some time now, certain members of the Richmond WriMos have been trying to persuade me to watch the CW show Supernatural. I  have relented and am now embarking on watching Supernatural via the wonders of Netflix. This series of posts will simply be my first impressions, almost stream of consciousness style, presented in the form of the time elapsed in the episode and my thoughts expressed as bullet points. It’s effectively live tweeting the episodes except I don’t have to stick to 140 characters or fewer. So without further ado here’s my take on:

Season 2 Episode 17 – “Heart”

• 00:19 – Once again, we skip the previouslies and launch right into the teaser, which appears to be a rather professional seeming office party. There’s a focus on a man and a woman. He’s making awkward small talk, and she’s wearing white, which means she’s probably a monster. I’m marking him as the Inevitable Teaser Death.
• 00:56 – Women in white is crazy prepared to deal with the guy’s clumsy advances.
• 01:11 – Now she says a kind of ratty looking dude at the end of the bar. He must be important because we get a BWAAAAHM on the soundtrack like it was an ersatz Hans Zimmer.
• 02:22 – The visual language of this episode seems “off” so far. We’re now getting a bright daylight shot of the San Francisco skyline. Between that and the office partyish intro, I feel like I’m watching David E. Kelley’s Supernatural.
• 02:50 – Random blood on the wall and carpet of this woman’s expensive looking apartment. I guess the show remembered what genre it belonged to after all.
• 03:12 – Looks like the guy was the Inevitable Teaser Death after all, and in what most of been a fairly heinous way judging by how torn up the body is. Also, dropping that coffee pot is a party foul, young lady.
• 03:38 – Sam’s playing detective at the morgue. Trying to figure out what it was that bit the Inevitable Teaser Death guy. He’s also kind of incompetently hitting on the medical examiner.
• 03:51 – So, it seems like a wolf bite, which seems unlikely in a big city. I’m guessing we’re hitting on another classic horror monster here. I’ll let Warren Zevon elaborate on my feeling.
• 04:05 – A missing heart seems just slightly too specific to be a lucky guess, Sam. just sayin’
• 04:41 – Serial killer who seems to be acting in the week of the full moon. Definitely in lycanthropic territory. The missing hearts are an odd detail. I blame Ann & Nancy Wilson.
• 04:55 – Dean is geeking out big time over the nature of their target. Sam throws some much needed shade in his direction: “Okay Sparky, after we kill it we can go to Disneyland.”
• 05:18 – The boys are using the aliases “Landis” and “Dante.” I assume Landis is a reference to the director of An American Werewolf In London. I assume Dante is a reference to Joe Dante, but the lycanthropic connection eludes me. To the Googles! Ah. he directed The Howling.
• 06:09 – Sam shoots Dean a very meaningful glance after Madison, the woman from the teaser, describes the Inevitable Teaser Death guy as someone who hits on anyone once he has a couple Scotches in him.
• 06:42 – Sounds like the ratty looking dude from 01:11 was Kurt, Madison’s ex-cum-stalker.
• 09:27 – The brothers Winchester’s investigation of Kurt’s place seemed to come up empty aside from the vicious looking claw markings on the balcony.
• 09:48 – Cut to policeman being growled at by something. We get the shot from the something’s point of view, but it’s all filtered and distorted. It’s distracting.
• 09:50 – But the cops gunshot gets the boys attention.
• 10:41 – Dean seems to have taken an immediate dislike to Madison’s neighbor, Glen. I think it’s due to his horrendous taste in t-shirts.
• 11:12 – Kurt apparently owns a body shop. I assume it has to be some kind of money laundering front for him to be able to afford the nice apartment he lives in, especially as it’s in downtown San Francisco, an area not exactly renowned for its abundant cheap housing.
• 11:35 – The boys raise their fists to settle things “the old-fashioned way” with a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. Sam wins because Dean apparently always picks scissors. This seems like a suboptimal strategy on Dean’s part. Also, Jared Padalecki has distractingly large hands.
• 12:15 – Sam seems oblivious to the fact that Madison is trying, albeit ineptly, to flirt with him.
• 12:21 – In possibly the least subtle move ever, she just dumped out a laundry basket of all her “sexy” underwear on the table in front of Sam.
• 13:12 – Seriously, those are enormous hands. It looks like he could palm a watermelon.
• 13:59 – Something about the way Sam says “What a bitch!” talking to Madison about the soap opera they just watched made me laugh until I started coughing.
• 15:25 – Apparently, a recent mugging meant that it was time for Madison to take control of her life. I sort of get whee that’s coming from but it seems an awfully odd inciting event.
• 15:58 – Sam’s idea of a compliment to women: “You’re unusual.” He’s clearly smoother than a fresh jar of Skippy.
• 16:31 – Dean’s tracked Kurt down to a strip club. One that’s playing bad Winger music. Naturally, Dean’s having a tough time obeying Sam’s imprecation not to take his eyes off of Kurt.
• 18:16 – Well, Kurt’s not the werewolf. Madison is. Also, The Stooges on the soundtrack almost redeems the Winger from earlier. Almost.
• 18:32 – My odd sense of humor strikes. The closed captioning reads: “[ROCK MUSIC ENDS]” and I laugh uproariously.
• 18:51 – Dean does have a point. Sam was supposed to be keeping an eye on Madison, and he completely failed to notice her sneaking out. I get that the 1957 version of  3:10 to Yuma is a great film, but you were supposed to be guarding Madison from werewolves. Oh the irony in that.
• 19:15 – Apparently Madison has no memory of leaving her bedroom and becoming a vicious heart-ripping creature of the night. She’s also now naked, having lost her pajamas at some point during said heart-ripping spree.
• 19:35 – Sam of the huge hands locks the naked woman, who is also the victim of a stalker, in her apartment with a “I’m not going anywhere. And neither are you.” I can see no possible way this could be misinterpreted as a non-heroic act.
• 19:58 – Madison: “I’m not a werewolf! There’s no such thing!” You can kind of see her point.
• 20:54 – Looks like the brothers have some philosophical differences (I know, shocking) about approaches to dealing with Madison. Sam believes that she has no idea that she’s a werewolf and blacks out upon transmogrifying, “Like a really hot incredible hulk,” as Dean puts it. Dean, as usual, is more on the kill happy side of the argument.
• 21:29 – Sam alluding to the demon-touched part of himself when he talks about Madison having an unknown monster inside of her is a nice little touch.
• 21:54 – Apparently Daddy Winchester had a theory that you can cure a werewolf by killing whoever spawned them. It’s completely untested though.
• 22:26 – Madison’s life-repairing mugging included being bitten, so the boys have a scrap of info to go on to discover her werewolf sire.
• 24:58 – That “I’ll just be a bad memory” speech from Sam was oddly noble and rather poignant.
• 25:32 – The nails growing transformation effect was pretty cool. The smash cuts to avoid showing more of Madison wolfing out rather less so. I imagine that’s due to budgetary constraints. If only they had had the foresight to cast an actual werewolf for the part.
• 26:15 – The werewolf’s attack on the prostitute (as Sterling Archer has taught us, they’re only hookers when they’re dead) was really well done, great tension in the camera angles and the soundtrack. Plus Dean looks badass pumping the silver bullets into the werewolf. Judging by the t-shirt, I think it was Madison’s neighbor, Glen but I need to see more.
• 26:22 – Yeah, it’s Glen.
• 28:49 – Madison mentions something that had been bugging me a little bit for the past thirty-eight or so episodes. “You know, for a stake out, your car’s a bit conspicuous.” I feel like that Impala is fantastic enough that I can ignore it, though.
• 31:05 – Looks like the killing Glen cure worked. Though there’s still a good nine minutes left, so it cant be over that easy.
• 31:28 – Dean’s casual making himself scarce behavior is the most obviously forced thing ever.
• 31:41 – Sam: “He means well.” Madison: “You mean, he thinks you’re gonna get laid.”
• 32:31- This is the first time Sam’s gotten some since the whole Dead Jessica thing, right?
• 33:50 – The cure was nothing of the kind. Madison’s just wolfed out.
• 34:39 – Looks like all the “not killing Madison” options have been exhausted. I like the mention of calling Bobby and the boys other Hunter contacts to seek options out.
• 34:50 – Sam calling Dean on his hypocrisy about being willing to kill Madison because a part of her is “evil,” but being unwilling to kill Sam even though he has the same connection to “evil” via his Ol’ Yellow Eyes granted psychic abilities.
• 36:45 – Madison seems to accept that there’s no cure and be willing to sacrifice herself so that no one else gets killed. Sam is not taking that well.
• 37:18 – She’s handing Sam the gun and telling him that she wants him to kill her. That’s rough.
• 38:20 – “Silent Lucidity” is a great musical cue here.
• 39:08 – Sam’s not going to let Dean take the shot because Madison asked Sam to do it.
• 39:48 – Off-screen gunshot and cut to the credits. That’s just a brutal ending.

This was a mostly by-the-numbers filler episode up until Sam slept with Madison and she wolfed out again. Then it became something pretty special, and surprisingly emotional with a heck of a gut punch ending. The last parts of the episode from Madson deciding that she needed to die until we see Sam with tears just streaming down his face walk back into her apartment with the gun were just hard to watch. The writing was pretty deft, and it got me invested in Madison as a character pretty early on. I think some of that was that the boys didn’t have a whole lot of screen time together. It was either Dean of on his own or Sam & Madison together. Either way it worked really well.