"Pick[ing] on songs that are easy targets" is the central theme of this feature. Just once, I'd like to see a musician with immaculate indie cred defy expectations by ripping into, say, Sonic Youth or The Clash.

Oh dear. Now my expectations for the rest of the series took a nosedive. I don't think there are enough great writers left on the series. Carver's a great writer, but he's busy running the show. Andrew Dabb and Daniel Loflin are good, too, but that's still only three writers.

Mark Pellegrino is the only reason I even looked at The Tomorrow People. He's the only one who stands out in a sea of abs and hair product.

What saddens me about this season is the possibility that Ben Edlund will be too busy with Revolution to write much for Supernatural, and we'll end up with more excrescences from those two.

The dog-fucking detective episode from last season was also theirs, and I'd go so far as to say that was the worst one of the whole series. Route 666 was terrible but in a way that a lot of trashy horror movies are (the facile race relations angle was also bad within the normal parameters of badness).

I don't think he is. Not after he made Dean a reaper for a day just to make a point about how difficult it is and how important it is to be impartial to the souls one reaps.

The minute l saw that this ep's writers were Brad Buckner and Eugenie Ross-Leming, my expectations plummeted. Why the folks who brought us Racist Ghost Truck are still writing for Supernatural after all these years is beyond me, but it was more of the same tonight: weird pacing, lack of emotional resonance, and a…

It's not the same as cranberry sauce. You grind up an orange and about 1 lb. of cranberries, no sugar, and you've got relish.

Except that sometimes it feels more like the writers are straining harder than Dean is.

That ep inspired me to make my own pepperjack turducken slammers. Turducken is easy enough to score in south Louisiana in November-December. They're actually quite tasty if dressed right. (I like 'em with horseradish and a dab of cranberry relish.)

I wasn't listening carefully because I was getting very impatient with the episode right at that point, but I assumed it was a fraternization situation, since that's the only thing likely to get military personnel in trouble.

I don't think they need to be punished on a meta level (not sure what that would be, anyway). Whether the hunter's family was killed by a natural disaster spawned by the apocalypse or pack of demons loosed when Sam broke the final seal, it amounts to the same kind of collateral damage that's mentioned in the story a…

It's Ms. Jizzmopper, actually, but thanks. There are so few women in the field that I try to be a mentor and role model, but jizz-mopping can be such a boys' club that some days even I wonder why I do it.

It's a constant struggle between the desire to have well-written, believable female characters and the imperative to have chicks of CW-approved hawtness levels woodenly reciting lines.

Or maybe Dean reasoned that Ezekiel wouldn't let anything happen to his vessel, so the nuclear option was always a fallback.

Agreed. The Zero Dark Thirty fell flat because it was recycled from last season. Also, sometime about the "movie titles as verbs" gag strikes me as straining too hard for a pop culture reference.

That's probably why Kevin worked him over with a hammer. Kevin's also too smart to fall for elementary head games, not after S8 took pains to show him deploying a few clever fail-safes against Crowley. That Tran resourcefulness was why I refused to believe that Mrs. Tran was really dead. Plus Crowley would be very…

Well they kind of are Ken dolls. The hostile Biggerson's waiter from S7 even called Dean one to his face.

I didn't much care for the actress playing Tracy (oh boy, another skinny hawt chick with unnaturally hair, bland facial features, and no acting ability), but the character delivered a message that the boys needed to hear: saving the world is the least you can do when you endangered it in the first place, and even then…

He always gets outshined by Ackles, but you're right that the writers don't give him much to work with. He's always improves dramatically when he's playing an abnormal version of Sam.