Supernatural S10E10: The Hunter Games Review
Supernatural returns for 2015 not with a bang, but a whimper.
As Castiel puts it, the theme of ‘The Hunter Games’ appears to be the possibility that “there is a little monster in all of us” – namely, in Dean who continues to battle with his massacre urges, and in Claire, who seems pretty content to set Dean up for death (spoiler alert: he lives, and the whole showdown turns out to be quite disappointing, but more complaining about that later).
After last years bloody confrontation with Claire’s faux-father-figure and his band of merry men, Castiel and Sam are desperate to try anything to fix Dean, including springing Metatron from the pearly gates. I get the theory behind questioning the scribe of God – being the only one with the actual answers -, and he did give away a nifty hint or two, but did Sam and Cas really believe that Metatron – who killed Dean, mind – would jump up and down at the chance to help?
Unsurprisingly, the questioning ends up with Dean practicing his torture methods on Metatron while Sam tries to kick down the door (and while Cas stands around and watches Sam’s fruitless efforts before he apparently remembers that he is a Angel and as such, can blow that door to smithereens). That closes the door on Metatron’s co-operation pretty tight, but by this point, the First Blade is already back in play and we can only assume everything is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Meanwhile, Castiel is still trying to play daddy-dearest to Claire who continues to hurtle out of control. Claire’s subplot involving spilling her secrets to two randoms in a bar that just happen to kill people – for pleasure, it seems, not money – plays out as a little far-fetched. No doubt Claire would be the type to wax poetic about her broken life to strangers, but their eagerness to off Dean on her behalf had me convinced that they were demons – shifty eyebrows and eager smirks abound for these two would-be assassins. Apparently, though, they are just regular Joe Blows, who come at Dean with bat and axe, get owned, and then scamper off as quick as anything. All in all, though the subplot did allow us to glimpse at Dean’s remaining humanity when he stayed the axe at Claire’s scream, it ate up too much screen time for too little reward.
The last thread of this wee
k’s episode also fails to ring with the truth of what we know of our beloved King of Hell. Rowena continues to attempt to play Crowley/Fergus, laying on the mummy-dearest routine hard while twisting his closest subordinates in order to wrest control of Hell – and the First Blade – away from him. If this doesn’t end with the revelation that Crowley knew the entire time and was playing her back (and with Rowena getting shipped off the face of Earth by her precious diddums Fergus), then I am just going to pretend this entire subplot never happened. Ignorance can be bliss, sometimes.
After ten seasons of a series, you don’t expect every episode to knock your socks off, but you tend to have certain high expectations about a few specific episodes – including the mid-season premiere. Unfortunately, Supernatural seemed to drop the ball with this instalment – advancing the plot in the attempt to remove the Mark of Cain from Dean (finally!), but not hurtling us to the edge of our seats in anticipation.
Review by Hannah Fitzpatrick
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