They have been doing a good job of paralleling the heavenly story with the Winchesters. But there was a moment in this ep where Sam was like, I'm fine, a little depressed, but it's the apocalypse. And that was the moment where I was like, yeah, this is so big, their emotional issues seem pretty petty. And it's the family drama stuff that made me like the show to begin with. But now it's so heightened and on such a grand scale it's completely drowned out the meaty, interpersonal, nuanced stuff that I like.

But yeah. This ep? Was just...yawn. Fine, whatever. But pretty predictable, and we've heard all this before. This wasn't like when we saw Dean's djinn-created world, or heard him call his father an obsessed bastard, or watched same fall apart on the groundhog day ep. This was just a statement of the emotional state we all know they've been in for awhile. Nothing new. Just more of the same. And that's what I'm getting to about the staticness of the characters.

I think it's a problem with most tv franchises--that the tension and change that drives the show at the beginning eventually gets resolved, and then you're just running through episodic plots with no underlying arc. Mulder learns the truth. Rodney gets used to heroic acts. Daniel accepts the military part of his job and being on the team. And once that happens, it's kind of like the elastic getting shot on a pair of shorts.

Here we no longer have any doubt that Sam and Dean care about each other and will stick together. Both of them have stopped shutting each other out of things--Sam doesn't have a big secret anymore, and Dean is only giving lip service to trying to keep Sam safely out of the game. Dean has, if not dealt with his daddy issues, reached a point of functional acceptance about them. Sam isn't looking for a normal life anymore. So what are we left with? They have to save the world. Okay, fine, that's a plot, but it's not as compelling, at least not to me.