Supernatural Episode 821
“The Great Escapist”
Written By: Ben Edlund
Directed By: Robert Duncan McNeill
Original Airdate: 1 May 2013
In This Episode...
Crowley has enlisted in a couple of young men to pose as Fake Sam and Fake Dean, to earn Kevin’s trust and find out what is going on with the tablets. It’s not clear how these guys do the glamour (I guess Crowley did it...?) and why they can’t be harmed by holy water yet can be trapped in a demon trap, but whatever. Kevin figures this out fairly early on in the episode, but doesn’t let on until he lures the fake Winchesters into a trap towards the episode’s end.
The real Winchesters get an email from Kevin. Essentially it is a video with a dead man’s switch. If Kevin doesn’t log in once a week it sends off this video, in which Kevin explains why the boys are getting this message: it means he is dead and Crowley got him. The reality of the video is never explained. Was Kevin really dead? Was this a trick, maybe from Crowley? Did Kevin just forget to log in? Again, whatever. This video also triggered all of Kevin’s notes about the tablet to be uploaded to the Winchesters, and they push their grief aside to try to figure out the third trial. Sam is in bad shape and won’t accept the TLC that Dean is forcing on him. Perhaps it is his fevered brain, but he recognizes a symbol that Kevin has made over and over in the margins of his notes. It is a glyph that belongs to a Native American tribe. Loosely translated it means “messenger of god.” Sam believes Metatron is in the mountains with this tribe.
So Sam and Dean head out to Colorado and check into a hotel on the tribe’s land. The manager is suspicious, silent, and borderline hostile - the boys later learn that they are the only guests to have checked in since 2006. Sam is so ill he is acting drunk, so Dean leaves him to rest while he checks out the local museum. There he learns that this is the home on earth to a sacred messenger who likes to hear stories. Dean recognizes the hotel manager in a photo - dated nearly 100 years ago. Another “whatever” moment, this is never revisited.
While Dean is taking in the local history, Sam follows a high-pitched hum that only he can hear and discovers that one room has dozens of boxes of books stacked up in front of the door. Dean returns and tells Sam about the messenger who likes to hear stories, and Sam puts it together. He leads his brother to the room. All the packages are gone, and the door is ajar. They slip in and are greeted by a modest middle-aged man with a shotgun. This is Metatron, and he is no Transformer. He can see that Sam is more than halfway through the trials, and fills in the details. He is not an archangel; he was just an average “typing pool” angel until god asked him to take down “the word.” God disappeared and the archangels took over. They started to scheme, and if they couldn’t have their father back, they would take over the universe. Of course, they couldn’t do that without the word of god, and Metatron feared for his own safety. So he went into hiding and has no notion of the outside world. He is the only angel who doesn’t know who Sam and Dean are, but he reads everything. Dude needs a Kindle. Dean and Sam blame Kevin’s death on Metatron, that he had to fill in as prophet because Metatron wouldn’t step up.
Kevin, meanwhile, is with Crowley, who is sick of Kevin being a “brat” and has begun strangling him. Blinding white light emanates from Kevin’s eyes - then suddenly he is with Sam, Dean, and Metatron. Metatron has healed/saved/resurrected Kevin. Kevin is still unconscious, and Metatron agrees to share the third trial with them, but it is unnecessary. That loud hum that Sam has been hearing has been “resonation.” He is now on the same plane or can share thoughts with Metatron. The third trial is to cure a demon - whatever that means.
Meanwhile, Castiel has been hiding in plain sight from Naomi and her goons inside of Biggersons, a Denny’s-like coffee shop that is identical across the country, so it has been throwing off the tracking angels’s sensors. They lock him down by killing everyone in one location. He is distracted long enough for Naomi and her goons to find him. They still want that angel tablet; Castiel won’t budge. Crowley pops in and kills one of the goons; the other is an angel who flipped and works for him now. He essentially scares Naomi away and figures out that if touching the tablet was what broke Naomi’s hold over Castiel, why would he stop that? He reaches into Castiel’s gut, roots around, and pulls out the blood angel tablet.
Dig It or Bury It?
This was one hell of a dense episode. I think maybe too dense. There was lots of important information here... it just made my head hurt. Info overload, and there were a lot of little nitpicky things. At the end of the evening, I was too focused on the little questions to absorb the big picture. The more I think about it, this episode was a fail for me.
Prophecies?
Familiar faces return when Sam and Dean find a strange unlabeled film in the Men of Letters’ belongings.