A Man. And His Blog.

Another original episode, and another good one. Though it was all about vampires, and therefore about known mythology, I liked what the Japanese writers did with it. Like the episode “Bloodlust” from the second SUPERNATURAL season, it depicted the vampire as humans, though they are still monsters in the series mythology of SUPERNATURAL. Then again, I’m pretty much bored with this show. Again I’m proven that I’m not much into animes, mangas or Japanese stuff in general. I’m trying, but I never get into it. Which is why this episode will be the last I’m gonna watch.

I had a few problems with Dean’s little flashback scene. In the original series, whenever John was seen, he was shown to be the caring father, who would never risk his sons to be in danger, or who would never do careless things, talking down to them or something similar. Here, the anime-John did talk down to Dean, even though it was all about learning a lesson. I just found it to be a bit ridiculous that the Japanese writers wouldn’t recognize John as the character he was supposed to be. Though I can accept this “free storytelling” as a method of getting the message over to the audience, and depict it within the choices and actions of the characters.

The story itself was a bit lame. Sam and Dean knew they probably have some vampires in this town, but both don’t really do anything against it. Dean bonds with a boy he probably sees himself in, and Sam does nothing but stalking a possible suspect. And at the end of the episode, the story was nothing more but a re-imagination of the plot in “Bloodlust” plus a re-imagination of the Gordon character in Jason. Not really much of surprises when you know the real SUPERNATURAL. But then again: The Japanese writers try to be original in their original episodes, yet they are not really able too, because they still steal from the original show.

Well, at least the friendship between Dean and Ryan was good. It could have been a different episode of the franchise, when it would have been less about the supernatural, and instead more about Dean trying to be a father figure for a lost child, like he was somewhat of a lost child in his childhood. I don’t even wanna talk about the vampire twist, because it is riddled with plot holes. (I thought vampires are hungry for blood, yet Ryan never craved for blood and had to be “transformed” to be a vampire? Woot?) 6.5/10

Dean has been catching kids lately

Sam has been punk'd

Oh la la, an original episode. I knew there would be some in the animated series, but I didn’t expect they would come so early. First I thought it would be an updated version of the ghost truck episode, and though the stories are somewhat similar, this episode proved to be good. Okay, not a great episode, which I will remember for a long time, since it had some awkward moments, but for an original episode surprisingly better than expected.

It was a good idea to take the ghost truck episode and heavily rewrite it. I loved the anger Dean had towards the whole episode, because his “relationship” to the closest thing he has for a girlfriend is the reason why he is in jail, and why Sam painted the Impala white. Though it was a bit ridiculous that Dean would be in such a strong rage, I’ll take it, because it’s an animated show. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much about the relationship between Dean and his car. I know from the original series that there is a lot between the two, and the chances of showing it all in this episode were not used. Except for that one scene.

Michael was an awkward character. He lets the brothers escape, because he says they can’t be in jail forever; he thinks that the Impala driver is not human, and yet he doesn’t believe at first about the brothers being hunters; then he tells the story about the Impala driver; yet he was not believing that it was a police car. In addition, Michael was kinda written as a teenager or something, so it was always awkward to hear that he was in the force, and that he was one of them who killed the Impala driver. Even more, the artsy scenes of not always showing Michael’s face totally annoyed me.

Another plot hole: The accident happened two years ago, and the crashed car with the dead body inside was still at the crash site? Ha ha ha, I was laughing when I saw that here. So, that was ridiculous. I blame the fact that the Japanese script writers probably didn’t want to get too deep into the whole story, after they’ve wasted like two minutes on the background story. That Michael would save the day at the end was cool though. Expected, because Michael’s death came way too sudden and without repercussions, but it has a nice touch. As if Michael wanted to die to get the driver at the end. Nice sacrifice, and there’s a message here. 6/10

In jail over and over. With a burner btw

Meeting with a ghost

Remake of first season’s “Home”, and I hated it. Again, the Japanese writers copy from start to finish, don’t manage to get something new into the story, and have to live with the story feeling cropped and smushed together in 20 minutes, so that every “important” scene in the live-action episode (which were basically all of them) has to be in the animated episode. Which just feels wrong.

But what worked in the last episode (Sam’s point of view about the world after the afterlife) didn’t work here. First, there wasn’t even some sort of point of view, except the question, whether Mary’s spirit moved on or died. But that’s just it. There was nothing else. And since there wasn’t much time for the episode itself to get a bit deeper into its story (not that I don’t know what’s supposed to happen), the writers managed to blow off the poltergeist story. Instead, Sam and Dean were mostly talking about finding out what happened in that house 20 years ago. And the original episode mostly worked because of the poltergeist hunt. This episode? Naah, it had nothing of the poltergeist plot, except the word in one scene, and probably the scene with the daughter in her room, surrounded by flying books and stuff. And the fact that both Missouri and Mary were seeing an evil spirit in the house. That was less than a minute of the poltergeist plot in 22 minutes – weak! Seems like the Japanese writers were only working on the background story of the house, and letting Sam and Dean talk with their mother.

That made the episode pretty much boring. And not because I knew what (was supposed to) happened, but because the writers are not able to bring the essence of the original series to their version. Instead of copying the storylines, they should feel the message being the originals and spin their own thoughts around it. Like they did with the first episode (even though it miserably failed on so many other levels). If the animated series continues to be that way, I will be bored out of my mind all the time, and that does not make me happy at all. So, either the Japanese writers start to be emotional about Kripke’s show and stop copying the storylines 1:1, or they continue like that and risk the series to be completely unimportant and forgettable. 3/10

Bro-love disrupted

Looks like the fantasy is gonna get epic in colors

The remake of the “Roadkill” episode, and it was a good choice to change it up a bit. Even though the twist of Molly being dead for 15 years wasn’t not that surprising anymore, I was wondering if the Japanese writers would differ from the original ending. After all, they let Greeley’s wife being one of the ghosts, which wasn’t in the original episode. And I was wondering why Greely was found so fast and burned.

I have to say, this episode did a little better with the whole “what comes after the afterlife” tone. When Sam was talking to Molly in front of her husband’s house, there was a bigger sense of epicness, of the beauty of the world we haven’t seen yet. It’s like Sam knew what would come after the afterlife for the dead, but he couldn’t be sure, because he has never seen it. And I loved the sequence, where the time stood still for both Molly and Sam. Even though it was typically Japanese beauty shot with a deep message behind it, it brought the episode a bigger sense of what the original wanted to tell. Two episodes into the animated series, and it succeeded its original in one part of the series already. I wouldn’t have expected that after the very shitty first episode.

Other than that, the episode was fine. It stayed more true to its original work than the previous episode (it only differed with the Marion plot), which made it a bit boring at first. But maybe it wasn’t such a big mistake to copy whole episodes and cut them down to 20 minutes, just so that this series is basically a best-of of two seasons SUPERNATURAL. I really would wish though for an original story. Something the Kripke team was maybe working on, but they’ve scrapped it for whatever reasons. Something new, which would go further into a story we already know. Something deeper than the discussion of what world awaits for the dead.

Dean was funny this time. Burning his own clothes to burn Marion, and walking around naked, because he didn’t have a replacement shirt. I always wondered what the brothers would do, when they don’t have anything to start a fire with… 6/10

This is not Tricia Helfer!

It's cold in the snow. Especially when you're naked

Wow, this was terrible. Not that I was expecting anything or wouldn’t watch it, when I wouldn’t have a daily marathon of SUPERNATURAL here, but it couldn’t have been THAT bad. I mean, expanding the story of “Skin” to a different level was not such a bad idea, but I’ve had the feeling that 20 minutes were missing. While the first act seemed to be an almost exact copy of the live-action episode, the other parts were horrendous. They didn’t make sense, they had an improper pacing, they had implausible events, and they didn’t use the actually great story of the confusion between the brothers (is Sam Sam, is Dean Dean?). Instead of asking the question who the shapeshifter might be, there was just a hell of confusion here, followed my a bitchy fight in the car, which didn’t bring anything. And where was Sam coming all of a sudden? What was actually happening between Sam and Dean escaping from the sewers, and the stunt on the road? I really lost the overview here. Very bad storytelling, I have to say.

Well, there’s not much to say about the story. There was some flirtation between Dean and Kathryn, which could have been taken right from the live-action series; there were some moments, when I was thinking that this was the actual first episode of the animated series (a.k.a. the pilot); and the animation was actually good. Considering I’m not much of a sucker for animes, and I still try to get into them. The episode could have made more clear what’s it all about though. Since it started in the middle of the road, it has the feeling that you have to know one or the other episode of SUPERNATURAL to actually know what is going on here. The writers tried to get as much exposition into the story as possible, but that was not enough. At least not enough for viewers, who just saw the very first SUPERNATURAL episode in their lives (I couldn’t care less, I know what’s going on).

Hopefully the episode was just written to smash an adaptation on the Japanese screens, and the writers learned how to tackle the storylines in future episodes. This was not working at all. Confusing, illogical, deus ex machinas included. That’s how storytelling is not working. If that continues to be part of the show, I’m done with it at the end of the week… 3/10

When the scene looks like it means something ...

... smoking hot in here ...