Baby’s Rear View Recap: 12.05 “The One You’ve Been Waiting For”

This post is about Supernatural season 12 episode 5 “The One You’ve Been Waiting For,” written by Meredith Glynn and directed by Nina Lopez-Corrado.

*****Spoilers below*****

"No, ma'am, they don't make them like this anymore."

The episode opens on an antique shop, where two people are meeting in the middle of the night. The two are arguing over the price of a Nazi watch from the 1930s when the dealer’s jacket starts smoking. He spontaneously combusts, and the buyer (after trying to take the watch and run) bursts into fire shortly after.

“The old lady? Loaded. I'm talking Scrooge McDuck swimming in pools of money. So what's a lady like that doing at some crap store at 3:00 a.m.?”

Dean finds a case—a freak fire in Ohio. Sam comes home with pie, which Dean uncharacteristically declines. Concerned, Sam tries to engage him in a talk about his feelings, but Dean would rather focus on the case. It’s called sublimation. Apparently.

“Nazis. I hate these guys.”

Dean and Sam investigate the crime scene. Dean finds a hidden room of Nazi paraphernalia while Sam hacks into the antiques dealer’s hard drive and finds out he has a ledger filled with Nazi items. It turns out the watch belonged to someone in Hitler’s inner circle. With the Nazi connection and the immolation M.O., all signs point to the Thule.

“Come on, Eleanor. He is hot. So you just—you put on those big girl pants and you take off his.”

Meanwhile, an unfamiliar girl is struggling on her first Tinder date after a bad break-up. But it’s about to get much worse. While Ellie is calming down in the bathroom, some guys in suits break into her livingroom and torch her date. As she escapes out the window and runs down the street (cutting her leg open in the process), a man with a heavy German accent tells what seems to be his son that they need her alive but can use the blood she left behind to track her.

“Yeah, well, dropping out of college to wipe out Nazi corpse-bags wasn't exactly my mother's dream, but what are you gonna do?”

Dean and Sam get ahold of their old bud Aaron, who is hunting Nazi deutch-nozzles in the Motherland. He tells them the Thule are working on something big—a mission called “Das Blud,” or, “The Blood.” Sounds ominous.

“We gotta follow that car. Oh, I've always wanted to say that.”

The boys cut the call short when they get the notification that another body has dropped. They head over to the crime scene in their Fed suits, where they find the body is definitely connected. But just as they go to talk to the survivor, Ellie, she gets snatched. They jump in the impala in hot pursuit.

“Family drama’s a bitch, ain’t it?”

They follow it to a parking garage, where the kidnapper (the young man from earlier) has stopped to switch cars. As he’s looking for the key, Dean sneaks up and pulls his gun.

“The watch, it's like a -- it's like a horcrux.”
“It's a Harry Potter thing.”
“Oh, you would know that.”

The boys tie him up in a chair and threaten him ‘til he talks. And talk he does. He tells them his father (Nauhaus) is in the Thule high command, and put Hitler’s soul in a pocket watch at his death so that they could later resurrect him. But the watch got lost for years. Since then, the Thule have been keeping track of Hitler’s relatives—whose blood is necessary to house the soul. And Ellie just happened to be the relative nearest to the watch.

“I know it's hard to believe this right now, but it will get easier. Trust me, I've been there.”
“Oh, right. Did someone wanna use you to resurrect Adolph Hitler?”
“Uh, w-- No, not exactly.”
“There you go.”
“But they did want me to bring back Lucifer. I was his vessel.”

Ellie is having trouble dealing with her life, which has been turned inside out very suddenly. Sam talks to her in the other room. In trying to comfort her, he confides that he had a similar experience with Lucifer.

“Now does that sound scary? Yeah, you bet. But there are times when you run and there are times when you stand and fight. Now is one of those times when you fight.”

As Dean is trying to hurry them along, the Thule finally catch up. Dean and Sam hold them off while Ellie escapes, once again through the window. But she doesn’t make it far before Nauhaus finds her and grabs her off the street. Now Dean and Sam have no bait and no hostage.

“Your generation -- you millennials -- are too weak to steward the future. It needs a stronger hand. The world is divided und inflamed. This falling of empires, the flailing of economies, is precisely why there has never been a better time for the Fuhrer's return. And you my dear, you have his eyes.”

When Nauhaus finds out his son told the Winchesters of their plans, he is very disappointed. Christoph tries to stand up to his dad, but Nauhaus won’t be changed.

“Fritz, my son has had a very trying day. He should rest.”

In fact, Nazi-dad puts out a kill order on his son. Luckily for little Christoph, Fritz is distracted by a radio message giving the Winchester’s location. Christoph dodges the bullet. Fritz is not so lucky.

“Do you know what it was like to have a Nazi necromancer for a father? It sucked. Christmas was a joke. Career Day at school was a nightmare. All I do is try to make him proud, I'll never be good enough. He asked a guy named Fritz to kill me.”

Dean and Sam go back to the diner, where they prepare to hack all the traffic cams in the city until they find Ellie. Just as they are beginning to despair, Christoph walks in and sits down. He explains what happened between him and his dad and offers Ellie’s location in return for protection.

“Let’s go kill some Nazis.”

The three head over to the airplane hangar where Ellie is being held. But not before Dean takes care of the “Kraut” tailing them. Dean and Sam leave Christoph cuffed to the car while they prepare to infiltrate the hangar through stealth. Unfortunately, stealth precludes their using the grenade launcher. Good thing they’re trained killers and can just sneak up behind the guards and snap their necks.

“The Fuher's soul must occupy a body that contains the blood of his blood. Did you really think I'd resurrect the greatest man who ever lived in the body of a weak, unworthy, American female? Mein Gott. I never needed you, only your blood.”

It turns out that Nauhaus is taking Ellie’s blood and putting it into his own body. It works, and Hitler is resurrected. But he is not alright. He is… all kinds of messed up.

“Take the rest of her blood, then give her to the dogs.”
“But, Fuhrer, we have no dogs.”
“Then get some!”

Hitler tells his lackeys to get rid of his great-great grandniece and they get ready to leave. They’re just waiting for the plane to be ready.

“Heil this.”

Dean and Sam are captured and brought to the room where Ellie is being kept. There they meet the Fuhrer, and are told they will be fed to the dogs as well. But with all eyes on those frightening Winchesters, Ellie is free to sneakily pick up a gun. When she shoots one of the unnamed Nazis in the head, all hell breaks loose. Dean and Sam take care of the other lackeys and then Sam goes to check on Ellie while Dean corners Hitler. After punching Hitler in the face, Dean shoots him in the head.

“The Thule that are left are gonna hunt you as a traitor forever. Our advice? Run.”
“Why don't you head back to Buffalo? Nobody goes to Buffalo.”

When the Winchesters and Ellie get back to the car, they let Christoph go. They had a deal after all.

“So how you holding up?”
“Uh, well, we just burned a pile of dead Nazi zombie bodies. One of which I killed, so maybe, like, third worst day ever.”

Sam debriefs Ellie and they say goodbye. It seems Ellie plans to stop running and maybe even go back to med school.

“I killed Hitler. I think I deserve some pie.”

And finally, Dean and Sam drive off into the sunset (or more accurately, to a bakery boasting the best pie in a thousand miles).

Questions:

Does Christoph even speak German? His dad always speaks English around him and he has no accent… interesting.

Man, Aaron must really like them* to be using up his international minutes. *by “them” I mean Dean. (#gaything #deanxaaron4ever #budlife)! I guess that wasn’t a question so.. Amiright or amiright?

Yeah, so is Dean okay? Like, are we supposed to be ok that his sublimation (his healthier unhealthy thing) is to kill? I mean, I guess the theme lately has been needing space. I get that Dean also needs space. But not just from Sam or from the situation. He’s distancing himself from all emotion. All work and all play makes Dean a hella scary dude. But at least he’s not drinking?

And they killed ten people on screen in this episode? It felt like a lot, and I don’t know what the average is, but my gut is telling me it’s far fewer. I mean, we sometimes see villains kill that many, but it’s usually done in a much more supernatural way, with magic, or magic fog, or magic soul-sucking powers… It’s kind of disconcerting to see so many people getting their necks snapped, or shot, or burned alive. Maybe this is part of the season theme, where we see how monstrous humans can be.

Conclusions:

This is the first episode of Supernatural EVER to be both written and directed by women. (Right?) It only took us 12 seasons! No really, though, this is phenomenal and it makes me really happy and hopeful. I want to support them.

That said, I’m not going to pretend this was my favorite episode. There were some good parts. It was a little funny sometimes, the characterization was fine, all I really wanted was for someone to punch Hitler and that happened, so yay.

I wasn’t really looking forward to a Nazi episode though, and to be honest, I think it would have had to have been pretty incredible for me to love it. I was, however, really looking forward to seeing Aaron. So that was a bit of a disappointment to see he only had a few minutes of screen-time. (However I freaking loved what little he was in. That glow necklace! Deutch-nozzles. Bud. Never forget).

But I honestly felt like the directing was a little odd. And I loved Nina Lopez-Corrado’s directing in “Red Meat,” I loved it to death and back. But that type of directing, which is perfect for a dark, emotional episode like that, didn’t work as well in an episode that was supposed to be comedic. Some of the banter read a lot slower than it normally would in a comedy. The action scenes were hard to keep track of. And that beginning scene was just painfully boring.

That said, there were some gorgeous and even poignant shots throughout. Hitler lying dead with his phone in his hands, Dean and Sam killing Nazis in tandem like it’s a gotdamn video game. I mean, that added a whole other level to the comedy, which made it deeper and darker and great. But something about the landing didn’t stick. Honestly, it may be just because of the current atmosphere—we’re not viewing this in a vacuum. I saw more than a few people on Tumblr lamenting the fact that it was hard to watch seeing the parallels between Hitler and our next president.

It was also a bit weird to see so many people die on-screen. I mean really, it had a distinct video-game feel to it, at least to me. Which was both interesting and uncomfortable. But it wasn’t particularly funny, which left me feeling mostly confused.