After the last few weeks of treading metaphorical water, it was great to see the plot finally moving forward in “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
While current events were largely centered on Anna, a human who can hear angels and seems to possess some sort of telekinetic power, Ruby was the big story this week.
I like the way they handled the possession angle. I had wondered how the writers could justify Ruby possessing a human host. If she really is trying to do good, forcibly possessing someone is not really a sound first step. In retrospect, the solution (taking possession of a coma patient at the moment of her death) is a fairly obvious one, but a good one nonetheless.
I also like that none of the evidence that Ruby is genuinely interested in helping Sam was too conclusive. Sure, Ruby killed a handful of demons that were aligned with Lilith, but it’s not like Lilith wouldn’t willingly sacrifice some of her followers in order to manipulate Sam.
See, shows like Supernatural are big on their twists. I have been expect a twist revealing either Ruby or Castiel to be evil all season. At this point, the more you build either of them up as obviously not evil, the more liable I am to expect them to actually be evil.
For some reason, very early in the season, I decided that one of Castiel or Ruby HAD to be evil. I’m not sure why, but I just felt that had to be the case. But as I was watching “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” another option occurred to me. We’ve seen lots of evidence that Ruby wants to help humans; we’ve also seen evidence that Castiel isn’t entirely pleased with the sometimes ruthless orders his bosses give him. So what if Ruby and Castiel both team up with the Winchesters? Think about it: a rogue angel and a rogue demon working together with a couple humans to protect humanity in the battle between heaven and hell. Sounds like a pretty solid storyline to me.
You know, whether Ruby is being honest about her intentions, or if she is secretly in league with Lilith, she deserves some sort of award for putting up with Sam’s post-Dean whining, angst, and his generally being an asshole. If I were Ruby, after the first couple hours I’d have either given up on him, or just killed the whiny bastard outright. Yet she managed to put up with at least a month of Sam being pretty damned intolerable.
There were a couple of other important bits this week. For one, we met a new demon, Alastair. Said demon apparently spent time torturing Dean in hell (I’m sure we’ll hear more about that down the road. Maybe as soon as next week). The other notable thing about Alastair is that he is strong enough to withstand both the demon-killing knife and Sam’s psychic exorcism powers. Presumably, Lilith is stronger than Alastair since he works for her. Which means the Winchesters need a third option to take down Lilith (and that Ruby was right to try and stop them in the season three finale. Even if they had managed to stab Lilith, it wouldn’t have killed her).
We also learned, from Anna, that there are apparently over six hundred seals and that Lilith only needs to destroy sixty-six of them to open the door enough for Lucifer to get out. This both makes it much more difficult to stop Lilith and nicely covers potential plot holes. If there were only sixty-six seals, and the Winchesters stopped just one that was time sensitive, then Lilith would be thwarted (Breaking a seal by raising Samhain, for instance. Samhain only had a one day window every six hundred years. If they had stopped the attempt to raise him, and there were only sixty-six seals, Lilith would have to wait a very long time to free Lucifer).
There was little, if anything, to nitpick about this week. Even when it looked like there might be something to comment on, the show quickly covered itself. For instance, when Sam was telling Dean about how he and Ruby had hooked up, I thought to myself that he was being way more detailed about that then he should be. I figured the show had just forgotten the context of the flashback, that Sam was telling all this to Dean. I was quite amused when less than five seconds later, Dean cut him to protest that Sam was sharing too much information.
I am loving the fact that I genuinely am unsure what way they are going to go with the rest of the season. Obviously Lilith is evil, and Uriel is unconcerned with who gets hurt as long as it helps the angels win. Castiel and Ruby’s ultimate allegiances though are much murkier. Before this week, I’d have said one of them has to be evil, but now I’m not so sure.
“I Know What You Did Last Summer” was probably the best episode of the season to date. I look forward to finding out if next week’s conclusion, “Hell’s Angels,” can live up to its excellence.
Trevor MacKay is the sci-fi/horror/fantasy/cheesy/random geeky stuff guy. If something is geeky and/or unbelievably cheesy, he’s there.
