Baby’s Rear View Recap: 12.09 “First Blood”

This post is about Supernatural season 12 episode 9 “First Blood,” written by Andrew Dabb and directed by Robert Singer.

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

“I-I need you to meet me at the bunker.”

Mary is nursing a coffee in a diner in Lawrence when she gets a panicked call from Castiel. She agrees to meet him at the bunker, even though he won’t tell her why.

“You're gonna talk to me, son. You just are. Now that's not a threat. I don't believe in torture. Doesn't work. Oh, I've seen folks waterboarded, cut on. And they talk. Ooh, they do. But they never tell you what you need. You know what does work, though? Every time? Nothing.”

Meanwhile, the Federal agents are deciding what to do with these brothers they picked up six hours ago. Turns out what they’re going to do is leave them in solitary confinement for two months.

“Let me paint you a picture of a world without monsters or demons or any of those little buggers that go bump in the night. Of a world where no one has to die because of the supernatural. Of a new world, a better world.”

It turns out Mick from the British Men of Letters has been meeting with hunters. He meets with a hunter named Wally over burgers, but to no avail. Wally politely tells him to shove his offer of ‘help’ up his ass.

“Sam and Dean? They're like herpes. Just when you think they're gone: Hello! The boys are back, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.”

Cas meets Crowley in yet another bar to convince him to help find the Winchesters. But Crowley is unwilling, since the Winchesters are nothing but trouble for him and his kind.

“Look, I -- me and my brother, we're working this case in Louisiana. We thought it was some southern fried werewolf thing, but it's not one thing. It's a pack. There's, like, a billion of them down here, and we need help.”

Mary is reading John’s journal in the kitchen of the bunker when she hears a phone ringing. She follows the sound to Dean’s room, where she finds a cellphone in a desk. Alicia asks for help with a werewolf pack while Mary looks at a picture of herself with the boys before she died.

“I saw it on the news and I thought, that's the sort of thing Sam and Dean would investigate. They would roll into town, save the day, kill the monsters. But with them gone I tried to work the case. I tried. But I don't know what I did wrong. I asked questions, but maybe they were the wrong people or the wrong questions, and I just -- I never found it. Never found the monster. Never even got close. And three more women died before I left town. Before I ran away.”
“So we go back. You and me.”
“No. No, I'd only get in your way.”

Mary asks Cas to meet her in a bar. She apologizes and Cas laments being unable to live up to Sam and Dean’s legacy of saving people without them. They’ve been gone six months, two days, and ten hours.

“I wanted them punished. I wanted to look Dean Winchester in the eye and I wanted him to feel it.”
“Well, that that is totally mentally normal.”

Sam and Dean are found dead in their cells. Their bodies are transported to the morgue, where they are left alone. They wake up but run into the morgue attendant before they have a chance to escape. They incapacitate him, steal his cell phone, and then stuff him in one of those dead-body-cabinets.  Then they hightail it out of there.

“You didn’t tell him?”

“No.”

Sam finds a map while Dean calls Cas. They realize they’re in Rocky Mountain National Park, and Dean tells Cas to meet them on route 34 a soon as possible.

“Castiel, it's me. I'm just calling to… You don't have to worry about that thing in Missouri. I'm handling it.”

Mary took care of the vampire in Missouri and called to let Cas know. Cas, in turn, calls her to come with him to pick up the boys.

“Alright, so we got what? An hour till dark? Which puts us at six hours till midnight?

“That sounds about right.”
“Dean, we gotta talk about this.”
“Okay, we will. All right? Later.”

Dean and Sam struggle through the woods, pursued by the feds and a squadron of soldiers.

“Mrs. Winchester—Mary: I came to this country to do one thing—make friends. But you American hunters, you're—you're a different breed than our sort. You're surly, suspicious. You don't play well with others.”
“Well, that is accurate.”
“You don't trust people you don't know, even when they come bearing gifts. Now I can't help that, but I can help you.”

Meanwhile, Cas and Mary have stopped to meet with the British Men of Letters. They explain that they lost Sam and Dean after defeating Lucifer, and that they need help. The BMOL offer a satellite—in return for some good word-of-mouth.

“Well, what we have here is a failure to communicate. 'Cause we're not trapped out here with you. You're trapped out here with us.”

The feds are gaining on Sam and Dean. They manage to take out the guy closest to them and hightail it to a cabin in the woods, which they promptly home-alone the crap out of.

“Who are you?”

“We're the guys that save the world.”

Sam and Dean manage to incapacitate every soldier without killing a single one. Admittedly, they only showed seven soldiers going down and there were definitely more than that but… still impressive.

“Uh, you left survivors?”

“They were soldiers, just doing what they were told.”
“Still, a bit unprofessional.”

Cas and Mary find Dean and Sam in the woods. They exchange hugs, and then Cas and Mary lead the boys back to their car—where the BMOL are waiting for them. They express their thanks and explain that they should leave in a hurry so that the people they left won’t catch up.

“And we made a deal. We'd get to die and come back one more time, but in exchange—”
“–Come midnight, a Winchester goes bye-bye. Like, permanently.”

The Winchester clan is riding in the car when suddenly, midnight hits and something is about to go down. It turns out it’s Billie, here to collect on the deal she made with Sam and Dean to get them out of prison. And oh yeah—breaking this deal? Has cosmic consequences.

“You said come midnight, a Winchester dies? I'm a Winchester.”

Before Dean and Sam can debate over who gets to go, Mary volunteers herself. Dean and Sam try to protest, but Billie doesn’t want to hear it.

“You know this world, this sad, doomed little world, it needs you. It needs every last Winchester it can get, and I will not let you die. I won't let any of you die. And I won't let you sacrifice yourselves. You mean too much to me, to everything.”

Mary raises her gun to her head and says one last “I love you.” But before she can pull the trigger, Cas puts a blade in Billie’s back—consequences be damned.

“Every person who knew about Sam and Dean's little adventure in assassination has been dealt with. As far as the world's concerned, it never even happened.”

Unbeknownst to Dean and Sam, Mr. Ketch is killing everyone they were so careful to leave alive.

“I'm listening.”

And Mick is meeting with Mary Winchester.

Questions:

Lol what kind of phone stays charged for 6 weeks? Speaking of, though, what is the timeline? How long was it before this happened? Was this just days after their disappearance? Because the next time we see Mary, it has been 6 weeks since. It’s not really clear how long she stayed at the bunker before starting to hunt again.

Is this werewolves in Lousiana thing a reference to The Originals. Oh please say it is.

Ok but why they letting them shave? Is that a thing that high-security prisons do?

WTH season is it? WHAT IS THE TIMELINE? Because it is definitely not winter in the Rocky Mountains with no snow on the ground, ya feel?

Shouldn’t the feds have known exactly where Norton was? And therefore exactly where Sam and Dean were? And therefore been able to catch them before they even got to the cabin? I’m just saying, they were right on top of them in the shot immediately preceding that scene. 

Ok but Dean didn’t ask Cas to bring Mary? They had no idea she was gonna be there? I love when we see Cas taking initiative in making decisions, and this is obviously just the lead up to his big decision later—i.e. to kill Billie.

Is Billie really dead? WTF is reaper lore? I think I miss when reapers weren’t angels.

Also, why did they kill Billie? I mean, I guess she was a villain technically, but was she just the easiest to sacrifice or does this have some deeper meaning? Beyond the symbolism of killing an agent of death, did they feel her arc was over? I always assumed her purpose was just to be a threat hanging over their heads to up the drama (and legitimately add conflict sometimes). Has her purpose come to an end? Do they have something in mind to replace that? DO they REALIZE that this was their ONLY recurring WOC on the ENTIRE SHOW? Did they think we wouldn’t notice that? Do they even care? Apparently Alicia is replacing her… and everyone knows there can only be one. Smh. 

And what will the consequences be? Because there were sort of no consequences to killing Death in season 10… I’m just saying they better follow through with this consequences threat. Billie’s death deserves to haunt us from the void.

Speaking of death, how long will we have to wait until Mr. Ketch dies?

Aren’t the feds gonna assume that Sam and Dean killed all those soldiers? Talk about bad PR. How will they live with the government on their backs? Because, although it was a secret site, the President knew they were there, as did the agents who made the arrest (and it’s not clear if they were the same ones hunting them in this episode, but I’d lean towards no since these were portrayed as “soldiers” not “agents”). And Mick says at the end that “every person who knew about Sam and Dean's little adventure in assassination has been dealt with.” So if they weren’t the same, are the agents who made the arrest still dead? Also. DOES THAT MEAN THEY KILLED THE PRESIDENT? Because I doubt that we will see much more from the federal government this season. And they clearly implied that Mr. Ketch killed everybody. I’m just saying.

When will we see Alicia and Max again? (Lbr, they the real MVPs).

Conclusions:

I quite liked this episode. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it should be classified as a mytharc episode or a MotW. Sure, the first half cleared up the previous mytharc conflict and the end set up the next one, but the “monster” (AKA the feds) seems to be a self-contained one-off villain of the type we see in MotW eps. I lean towards mytharc, but I think it does have lots of MotW qualities. And those MotW qualities it has is what makes it one of the stronger mytharc episodes we’ve seen lately. It took its time and gave us some room to breathe, the opposite of which is a recurring problem in mytharc episodes.

It had a lot of emotion, and that’s always something I can get behind. Cas just killed me this episode. I don’t think we saw him smile once that entire time, and I loved it. We also got some really great lines from Cas that let us into his state of mind and the growth of his character.

There was one Cas scene I wasn’t a fan of, though I actually don’t think it was Cas’s fault. It was the scene where Mary shows up at the bunker in the very beginning and starts to blame Cas for losing her sons. I understand why this scene existed. It shows that Mary is a Winchester, i.e. angry and maladapted to human interaction. It also shows that she cares about her sons, and maybe even that she’s projecting the blame onto Castiel because she feels guilty herself. That’s a very ‘Dean’ thing to do. It also showed that Cas’s despair is so deep and his self-esteem so low that he agrees with her that he’s awful. I liked all those things. What I did not like was the way it was written and used. First, the pacing was off. I get it if they wanted us to feel that waiting feeling, or if they were going slow to ease us into the episode. But it just felt off. And that kept us from empathizing with Mary. I saw people online demonizing her left and right for blaming Cas. And it’s not because we’re blinded by our love for him. It’s because the scene didn’t read. We need to see her point of view. And it just felt half-hearted and half-assed to me. It also wasn’t used effectively as conflict. We don’t feel the tension and heartbreak of Cas’s only ally turning against him. It was sad, but it didn’t bleed into the other scenes and up the tension like it could have. And then she just apologizes in her next scene like it’s nothing—there was no emotional beat set aside for it. If this tension had been developed more, if this relationship had been developed more… think of how much more potent it would have been to see Cas save her.  

I think the wonky timeline in the beginning contributed to this. We see Mary and Cas in the beginning, and then suddenly it’s 6 weeks later… It bugged me a little. It’s like they wanted the best of both worlds, and I almost would have preferred to start with a ‘six weeks later’ title card at the beginning. It would have been cleaner. I liked the moments we got, but I digress.

I liked the quietness of the episode. I actually wish we could have had more. Most of the conversation seems perfunctory and expository, and I wish we could have done without it. In a show like this though, it’s to be expected. I wish we would have had less from the feds. I wish we only saw what Sam and Dean saw. I felt like the two main agents were more annoying than anything. The weird antagonism between them felt sort of forced to me. I get that the more we see them, the stronger effect their deaths have at the end… But I much preferred seeing their individual interactions with the Winchesters to their interactions with each other. To me, the premise of this episode gave it the potential to be like Red Meat—but it fell short of that standard. Maybe because of the differences required of a mytharc episode, I don’t know.

Wow. All of that above makes it look like I didn’t like this episode. Sorry for misleading you—I did like it. I liked the bookends with Mick and his voiceovers. I thought it was clever and that it worked well to frame this episode clearly within the overarching story of this season.

I also loved the montages of the boys, and actually pretty much everything about them. I could watch Cas’s sad face all day and I wouldn’t be bothered. And I’m glad that Mary is getting some time in the narrative.

And I loved that morgue attendant. He didn’t deserve to die, he was so awkward and deserved only good things.

Overall it was a solid episode. I liked it. I will never forgive them for killing Billie, but at least it wasn't a horrible episode besides that.