In The Beginning Review

Supernatural keeps a strong season going with another winning episode. This time going back in time to give us some answers and ask a whole lot of questions.

 
Castiel shows up and sends Dean back to 1973 to stop it. Dean wakes up on a bench and stumbles into a café where he meets John in a café.  A pre-hunter John surprises Dean by being softer and more gentle than Dean remembers seeing. Dean convinces him to buy the Impala over a VW and ends up running into the business end of Mom’s knee to the groin.

 
Dean follows Mary home and ends up invited for dinner by a reluctant Grandpa Samuel Campbell and Grandma Deana. One of the family secrets is that the Campbells were hunters. Sweet Mary grew up knowing about the supernatural but she was so desperate to live a normal life and raiser her kids to be normal that she didn’t tell John.

 
Dean, anxious to find and stop YED, uses John’s journal to locate a victim in town and arranges to have them show up to stop him. Samuel laughs at idea of killing a demon – he doesn’t know how. Dean heads cross country to find the colt – still in the hands of Daniel Elkinson. Dean tells him where he can pick up the gun in a couple of days.

When the three of them hit the house, they find YED already there, he’s asking the resident for something simple, an invitation for 10 years in the future. Dean tries to get off a short, but he’s brushed aside. As he goes past Mary, he’s taken with her spirit and vanishes.

 
Dean and Samuel go over the days events while Mary goes out to meet up with John. Dean tells Samuel the truth about why he’s here, how Mary dies, everything. As he does, Samuel’s eyes turn yellow and he pushes Dean back. He cuts Samuels’s stomach open and then snaps Deanna neck and walks out of the house.

As John gears up to propose to Mary, Samuel appears and pulls her out of the car. John runs around to help her and YED snaps his neck. He tells Mary that everyone’s dead, Mommy and Daddy and now John, she’s alone and will be alone. She takes the deal of an invite in 10 years. She doesn’t have to give up her soul, just let him in and don’t do anything. Dean arrives to find YED kissing Mary. He aims but YED jumps and Dean has nothing to shoot. Castiel pulls him back to the present just as John wakes.

Deal is frustrated at not having stopped YED and at Mary’s deal. Castiel lets him know that he couldn’t stop it, he can’t stop destiny.  What Dean needs to stop is YED’s plan. YED played it close to the vest and no one seems to know what the plan is, but Sam’s path takes him to a dangerous place. Either Dean stops him, or they will.

Jensen Ackles had to carry the show for the brothers, but he had a lot of help. Genre favourite Mitch Pileggi gave a great performance that had him playing the grizzled and weary hunter and the psychotic YED.  His ability to slip in and out of the characters gave a great sense of weight and history to the family tree. It’s a role that I hope somehow can be expanded on. It seems unlikely, but the dead don’t always stay dead for long.

Backing him up were Alison Hassock as  Mary’s mother,   as young John and   as the young Mary. John was played as very much the innocent in regards to the Supernatural, a far cry from the man we knew him as. Mary was ??? first lead role. For a show with an iffy background on picking female actors, she showed a wide range with a strength coupled with a believable fragility.

Dean’s heartbreak watching his mother seal the family’s fate was palatable. The two of them were so alike; both wanted desperately to be part of a family. Mary wanting so desperately to have a husband with no ties to the supernatural and raise her kids normally sends them on the same path as she took. Dean desperately begging her to stay in bed the night YED comes to visit because he wants the same thing, a normal family, to grow up with a living Mom and a baseball playing Dad.