Are You There, God? It's Me, Dean Winchester

This episodes finds the Winchester brothers battling to keep another one of those pesky keys from opening and moving the world that much closer to becoming hell-on-earth.

It's a good episode, but not as good as the first three of the season. Still, Castiel is back (yay), and we get some more references to what Dean went through during those 4-months-that-seemed-like-40-years in Hell. I'm hoping that gets developed a little more quickly, as it's a good source of tension and suspense.

In this one, the tension rests there as well as with Castiel (this time accompanied by Uriel, a snarky and maybe-a-wee-bit-prejudiced angel that Castiel calls a "specialist," which you should maybe read as "homicidal maniac") and his own doubts over the course of events. And let us not forget the tension between Dean and Sam when it comes to Sam using his "talents."

Good job with this one.

Now, word to Mr. Kripke--Ackles and Padalecki have definitely hit their stride as actors, and now's the time to really blow the audience away with some heavy-duty plot and character development.

I'm going to start with a caveat videor ("viewer beware", in my horrendous Latin. To quote Harry Dresden: "Darn correspondence course."): the story deals with the somewhat gruesome origins of Hallowe'en, at least according to the Romans' account of Samhain (which may be biased or exaggerated to make the ancient Celts seem more brute-like), and the Big Bad of the week is a powerful demon named Samhain (pronounced "Sam-hain", not "sow-WHEN" like the Pagan/Celtic festival).

Aside from that, another top-drawer episode in a season that has been taking this series to greater heights. A new angel has joined Castiel, one Uriel, who gives me a definite "bad cop" vibe to Castiel's "good cop". The atmosphere is terrific, and the conversation between Castiel and Dean gives us an insight into both characters as they continue to evolve, as well as how angels work in this universe. It's nice to see angels cast in a very different light than what we're used to. These are not Martha Williamson's kinder, gentler angels, these guys are closer to what angels are really like: powerful beings in the middle of a war with the powers of darkness.

This is the only show I go out of my way to watch. This episode was great. Dracula on a moped - hilarious!

I'm woefully behind in watching the great Universal monster flicks (something I am going to rectify pronto), but even still, I really love this episode! The black and white film stock, the Bernard Hermann/Franz Waxman-esque soundtrack, the opening credits which look like something straight out of a 1930s monster movie, the old-style iris-outs and wipe dissolves (even a shot that's a clear mimic of the camera 360-ing around Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak's kiss in "Vertigo"), the atmospheric lighting and playfully cheezy sets -- splendid! The only thing missing is an angry mob with torches, but it would be hard to fit something like that into the tightly-woven narrative. It's more than a deliberately corny episode, the writing is still top-drawer and the character development is still at its peak. We even get to hear the monster's angle on what it feels like to be the monster, and why it sought to take control of things in such a gruesome way.

Oh, and the shot of Jensen Ackles in lederhosen: too cute for words!

This season has to be one of the most tightly-wound ever in a tightly-written series with an incredible amount of attention to detail, and this episode tightens things a little more. The monster of the week has to be one of the more disturbing ones so far. Granted, we've seen a human turn into a monster before, but this one is more subtle and the transformation more gradual yet shocking in that it starts with something simple and seemingly harmless: who hasn't had a male relative or acquaintance who's cleaned out the refrigerator before... But what if it was more sinister than just the hungry-horrors...? (It also put me in mind of the hunger-demon in the debut arc of "John Constantine: Hellblazer") And at the same time, it seems to mirror the internal transformation going in in Sam, during Dean's sojourn in hell. But, after he used that "let's talk about it" ruse to coax the man-turned monster into a trap, can we really trust Sam to keep his promise to Dean? This is one season that I don't want to miss a minute of, and I'm grateful that Amazon is offering download episodes...