There are a few flaws to Supernatural. The first is that recap that they always do at the start of each episode: it’s just pointless and fails to really create an atmosphere (by the way, for an example of this done well: Gankutsuou). The second is that the drama keeps nudging towards cheese at times. It’s never really cheesy, but it gets dangerously close at times.
This episode was a good example of that: it had moments that were really genuinely good: the woman who sold her soul to the devil made an excellent story with an especially tragic conclusion at the end. The creators made good use of her faith in Christianity. It all gave a nice twist to the “repenting to your sins”, though the acting tried a little too hard at times to be tragic, which wasn’t really helped by an angsty Sam (“Jessica! Jessica!”).
Also, you could see that this episode was rushed in the way that that woman conveniently lost her Rosary when she paid a visit to Bobby.
Overall though, I still give props up to this series; the good parts really outweighed the flaws here. For a show that has had to cut its episode length in half, it’s doing a pretty darn good job of still making each episode count by making each episode short and to the point. The way in which each episode turns out to be much deeper than you’d initially expect really works. Nevertheless, the stiff acting still remains a problem and the creators needs need to take advantage of their strong points and use those in the big picture.
Rating: * (Good)
Sam’s always been angsty… even in the original version.
I dunno why Meg got so much younger though. Sometimes it’s weird when you know the source material.
While most of the time I hate angsty characters I was ok with it in Supernatural, I mean Sam lost his mom when he was just a baby, his life after that was quite bad, he runs away from the family business yet years later when he is almost over the death of his mother and lives a almost happy life his girlfriend is killed just like his mother and now he has to do something he tried to escape from his entire life and there are so many other issues with same that I won’t mention because I have no idea if they were mentioned in the anime. Bottom line, I think some angst is ok. Plus he is nowhere near as useless as most angsty characters we encounter in anime.
I want to drop this show so hard now.
Its good that we got more backstory on her but…THATS NOT HOW YOU INTRODUCE MEG :/
Instead of kickass wham episode, we got a random emo “baw dieing girl” story for her introduction? Oh hell…
And they already are throwing hints at YED’s identity, way to go with subtlety, Japan…
The problem with this adaptation is that as long as it follows source material Its AWESOME, even surpassing the source material sometimes…but just as it starts doing something on its own, it falls flat on this face.
with this episode, the show fell flat on its face…from 10th floor window -_-