For most of this episode, I was a bit disappointed. This series was being all mysterious, but it was obvious that the monster of this episode was a kappa. It was just another average story about a town getting attacked by what looked like a demon. Even the twist that the creature was good natured was predictable. At first sight, at least.
However, at that time I still expected this episode to end with some sort of action-packed climax as usual. And instead, this episode ended without conflict. Everyone just accepted the kappa story and moved on. That’s pretty neat. On top of that, stories about Kappas in regular anime are always told with the Japanese audience in mind: an audience who grew up with stories about Kappas. They’re always portrayed as these silly goofballs, and I never really got their appeal. Here though, Supernatural is aimed at both worlds, and because of this, this episode was actually able to give quite a detailed description on the nature of kappas. I like that.
Nevertheless, I still don’t agree with this series’ concept of luck. This episode had this again: without the Kappa’s inference, the town in which the main characters landed would have been a notorious ghost town, with so many accidents happening at the same time. It looks more like the Kappa causes disasters, only to save people from it. This also appeared in the unlucky coin episode. Interestingly, the few clips I’ve seen from the live-action TV-series (most notably this one, suffered from the same problem.
Rating: * (Good)
I’m afraid you have it all wrong, the live action episode is nothing like this one. Once the rabbit’s foot was disposed of, Sam went back to his normal, neither lucky nor unlucky life. And that episode went much more into people’s beliefs than the anime one.