8x08 Hunteri Heroici aka The episode that's on drugs

[seeing_ghosts]

Wow, I'm late on this one!

I have to admit, I expected to hate this episode. Lately, my second-hand embarassement tolerance is pretty low - especially when it comes to characters I like - so I had issues with it and generally, the jokes didn't seem as funny to me as they probably should have been. But the episode itself keeps getting better everytime I watch it and while I wouldn't call it the best episode of the season so far, it certainly ranks among them (not for the humor factor, though!) 

Blah, blah, blah, spoilers below, you know how this goes. 

Firstly - how many fanfics got kripke'd by this episode? I mean, Cas leaves heaven to become a hunter, Sam gets a girl and buys a house...? It makes me wonder a little if the writers are actually doing this on purpose, if they found and browsed, like, AO3 and took notes and write the episodes accordingly? ;D And another thing, do I want that to happen? (No, I don't...) 

And I have to admit that surprisingly, I did like Sam's flashbacks this time (despite their soap opera feel). I liked Amelia, and her weirdo father, and Sam's awkwardness - but I still think she's not real. Despite some of the spoilers that talk about Sam, Amelia and her recently revived husband (what a nice Dean parallel, by the way, coming back from the dead so suddenly) forming a "love triangle of sorts" I still think Amelia is just a product of Sam's mind - and this episode just kept proving me right. One flashback triggered by the (tattooed!) nursing home worker saying, "A lot of these people, they just live in their own heads, it's like, maybe the real world was too much for them and they just run and hide," another one by Dean saying that, "it seems to me like dude's living in a dream world," and then, of course, Sam's whole speech to Mr Jones (and Cas, too, even though Sam didn't even realize) about not running away from your life and living in a dream world. Talking from experience there, Sammy?

The whole episode has this on-going theme of dreams vs. reality and everything paralleled everything (Cas's whole story in this episode mirroring Sam's choices in the past year, Dean's return being mirrored by Don's return...). 

I like parallels so I think it was... Nice. And interesting to watch. 

And the best joke of the episode was definitely Dean's, "What's the word, Cas?" and Cas's reply, "It's a shortened version of my name." I like Cas's deadpan humor and people who say he doesn't have on just do not get it.