Supernatural Review: Mother Knows Best

There were some major surprises in this week’s Supernatural and things are finally starting to make more sense as to all the cryptic hints we’ve been getting about Castiel (Misha Collins) and the battle in heaven. But before we get to that let’s get to some of the other things we’ve learned.

Firstly, Eve is trying to make the perfect creature, something smart, quiet, hard to kill, and will spread like wildfire. She comes to a small town and begins to reek havoc as she transforms the entire population as an experiment.

Dean, Sam, Bobby and Cas reach a dead end for where to locate Eve, but are able to do so through Lenore (Amber Benson) whom we last saw in season two. Cas brings the vegetarian vampire to Bobby’s where she explains how Eve is urging all the monsters to kill. She has been hiding out in the basement to stop herself while everyone else in her group left because they couldn’t resist Eve’s call for blood. She eventually tells them Eve’s location though not before explaining that she is being used as telephone, where the mother can hear everything they’re saying through her and now she knows their coming.

Lenore begs Sam to kill her because she doesn’t want to keep feeding on humans, but Sam in typical Sam fashion is refusing to because he believes she can fight the urges. Cas steps in and kills her via supernova angel light inside her body. Everyone is a little stunned by his actions but don’t have much time to process it as Cas transports them to Oregon.

When they get there, things look normal with people going about their business. The hunters and Cas find themselves inside a local diner where the angel is unable to disappear in and out of. Eve is cutting of his signal and as Dean notes, “Well, that’s great. Because without your power, you’re basically just a baby in a trench coat.”

Soon they discover more dead bodies and whole tavern of vampire/wraith hybrids that Dean coins as the “Jefferson Starships” because they are horrible and hard to kill. Then the local police burst into the tavern and arrest Bobby, Sam, and Cas while Dean is able to hide behind a pool table. At the station all seems to be normal when Sam starts to yell Jefferson Starships and it turns out the police officers are creatures as well. Dean comes in at the knick of time to help the odds as they are able to kill all the monsters except for the sheriff whom they interrogate to get Eve’s location.

Meanwhile Sam and Dean discover two boys who were locked up in a cell and decide to take them out of town to their uncle because the rest of their family were dead. Cas disagrees and tells them that it’s a waste of time when more lives were at stake. The situation plays strongly on Dean as he sees himself and Sam in the two boys. One older brother protecting the younger one as they now find themselves orphans.

While the brothers were gone, Cas pulls some major interrogation technique as the sheriff squeals and reveals Eve’s location. She was at the diner the whole time.  Dean and Sam go first armed with their shotguns of phoenix ash as they finally come face to face with the mother of all.

Here’s where things get really interesting as some major plot points were revealed. Eve was happy with their arrangement, with some of her kids killing the humans and then the hunters killing some of her kids. She was fine with their place in the order of things but then Crowley (Mark Sheppard) started torturing and killing her creatures, even her first born that began to infuriate her. She asks them what does Crowley want to achieve from all of this? Sam and Dean answer with purgatory, just as we audiences believe, but it turns out this was about the souls. Even bigger shocker, Crowley’s not dead.

We’ve already been told that the human soul is like a nuclear reactor full of untapped energy. Eve is pissed off that her children are being kidnapped, tortured, and killed so to combat Crowley she’s just going to turn every single human into one of them. So this is the big reason why she’s been amassing her army. Eve, who’s transformed herself to look like Mary Winchester, makes the boys a deal: deliver Crowley to her and she won’t kill them or Cas and Bobby.

Dean refuses after saying that they’ve spent the past how many months working for a demon and there was no way they were going to work for her now. He keeps taunting Eve who finally decides to force him to do her bidding by biting him. Except of course Dean had an ace up his sleeve in form of ingested phoenix ash. After downing the ashes with a shot of whiskey, the particles I’m assuming were floating in his bloodstream that Eve just took a big chunk off.

The biggest shocker of the episode comes at the very end as Cas returns to the diner after telling the hunters that he’s going to investigate if Crowley is still alive. He very much is though as he appears in the diner after the angel, berating him for having to clean up the mess again. Looks like Crowley’s been working with Cas this whole time since the demon’s supposed death.

This of course gives sheds some light to why Rachel was so shocked with what she learned about Cas’s dirty secret. He was working with a demon to harvest human souls. It also makes us question whether Cas is actually a good guy or a bad guy now. If he’s so desperate to win against Raphael to work with a demon, is that actually worth it? Right now it looks like it’s beginning to turn Cas into something that looks like soulless Sam, where you can kill a being just to move things along. Even more so now though the show emphasizes how angels and demons really aren’t so different. Dean and Sam learned this the hard way in season five, but it’s something else to see their only angelic friend and ally to do things just as bad as a demon.

Since Cas has been secretly harboring Crowley, is this why he’s been so attentive to the Winchesters? Was he personally always coming to their aid to make sure that they were in the dark when it came to his own plans?

With Eve dead in this episode, one obstacle has been cleared and we can finally get to the real conflict of season six: Castiel vs. Raphael vs. The World.

Season 6, Episode 19: Mommy Dearest (originally aired April 29, 2011)

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Fridays at 9/8C on The CW

Images courtesy of The CW and Jack Rowand