At this point in the story, Cain is probably knocking together some new frames for his beehives and musing on colony collapse disorder.

But all we really have to go on about that is Naomi's word, and Kevin never corroborated it with the tablets. (It still bugs me that she showed up at the eleventh hour with no proof to back up her claim, and Dean just went with it.)

The SPN writers keep comparing themselves to GotT. I suppose the reasoning is that if you repeat it emphatically enough, it might come true, but the two shows are apples and oranges.

He was a much better Gadreel than Tahmoh Penikett, and he was good all this season. He's just rarely given material with the same weight as Ackles, who's been doing the heavy lifting for so long that nobody bothers to give his co-star anything challenging.

I don't know what you're talking about. There was no episode called "Bloodlines" this season. Nosiree.

I think it's only my retrospective justification for their haphazard writing.

Wild speculation on my part and probably not gonna happen, but…
Can Sam still close the gates of Hell by completing the final trial, or has that ship sailed? 'Cuz I can think of one demon now that he might give his life to cure.

But what was/is his prize? He's back in charge of Hell, but that just means that the status quo has been restored. Does he really want anything beyond that? I tend to think not, which is why I thought the blood junkie thread was utterly pointless. His first appearance on the show was marked by his desire to keep…

I'm pretty sure the beard will be back as scheduling permits.

Self-righteousness is a great mask for self-loathing. And when hasn't he berated Sam for minor faults when his are as bad, if not worse?

If they can lock up Crowley for several episodes, why not Metatron? I just pray that they hack off his fingers so that he doesn't inflict any more shitty fiction on us.

That's exactly what I was reminded of, too. Dream!Dean's warning works just as well for S3/4 as it does for 9/10. (That was the only episode that ever made me sob out loud, but it could have had something to do with all the table wine I'd had that night.)

Ackles can make puking in a corner seem compelling. He's the series MVP, period.

Metatron's entire MO ever since "Metafiction" has struck me as nonsensical posturing, but it just occurred to me that he might have been trying to attract followers because he didn't have enough juice to be God in a proper sense and was trying to power up in the same way as some of the lesser gods that the boys have…

Abused? I'm pretty sure John didn't beat his kids or touch them funny. Was he a dictatorial hardass? Most likely. He always struck me as more of a Great Santini figure than a deranged "no wire hangers" type of parent.

I hope and expect that Sam won't repeat Dean's mistakes in a celestial register but will hit the books in the bunker and figure out something through research.

The biggest shocker for me is that I agree with the grade and assessment, more or less. (I'd begun to think I had taken on the Mark of Phil and couldn't fight the urge to savage every new episode and every misfired pop culture reference therein.) The finale felt like a decent recovery from a wildly uneven season. But…

I reminded me more of Vampire: The Masquerade, which already had an unsuccessful, quickly cancelled TV show in the mid-90s.

I'd like to see Becky and the Ghostfacers team up as a hilariously inept monster-hunting crew.

"Backdoor Pilot" is volume 19 of the Casa Erotica series.