raloria - Screencapping Goddess (raloria) wrote,
raloria - Screencapping Goddess

First Impressions: 8x09 "Citizen Fang"

Was able to watch the East Coast feed this week along with live on the TV on West Coast time. These notes are a combination from the 2nd West Coast viewing only.

I'm trying to give myself a break and not kill myself doing these reviews. We'll see how it goes this season.
What's here are basic reactions I typed out during the show, with a few bits and pieces put in afterwards. Hopefully it'll be brief, but still interesting.

CCR song "Born On The Bayou"...awesome. :)
That's the gal from "The Kids Are Alright". Heh. Love it when show reuses actors.
Benny's lookin' good without the heavy coat. Just sayin'.
Martin....uh oh.

Lots of noisy frogs in Louisiana. :P
Benny's tracking someone and Martin's tracking Benny.
Ooop. Dead body with teeth marks...

So Sam stuck Martin on Benny's trail. Peachy.
Hee! Martin Creaser....Named after camera operator Brad Creaser. ;)
Martin's "mostly" okay? Um, who else besides Dean sees this as a bad scenario?
But Dean gives in, says they should look into it.

Benny's been clean up until this first death, working at a gumbo cafe, and going by the name Roy.
Yeah, Martin is not normal.
He didn't even see Benny kill the dude.
Sam's trying to keep things calm and he gives Dean a couple of hours to see what's what.
Martin can't believe it and questions why a Winchester would trust a vampire.
Sam: "Sometimes it's not easy to see things for what they are."
This line underlines the theme of the season laid out by Jeremy Carver: reality vs perception.

And Sam Flashback time....
Amelia doesn't know what to do about Don returning. Sam knows they've got a good thing going, doesn't want to give it up and neither does she. Amelia says she needs a couple of days to clear her head.

Dean's at the gumbo cafe...and of course he wants pie. :D
Asks about Roy and finds out he's headed out to do some fishing for a while.
He leaves a voicemail message for Benny, telling him he knows about the body. "Do I have to to tell you what this looks like?"
Meanwhile, we see Benny hanging up his phone and standing over a dead woman's body.

Benny's just finishing burying the body and washing blood off his hands when Dean finds him.
He tells him straight off he's not responsible for the deaths.
Even though Dean's armed and ready, he agrees to listen to Benny's story.
Benny's in his hometown and and old vampire friend, Desmond, is trying to lure him back into the nest, leaving bodies to get Benny to come back.
"I know it's hard to believe but I haven't always been this cute and cuddly." Heehee!
The gal at the gumbo cafe, Elizabeth, is Benny's great-granddaughter. She doesn't know who Benny is or what he is.
Love that little bit of whether Dean did anything with Elizabeth. Heh. Awkward! :P
Dean warns Benny about Martin and Sam being on his trail, but Benny's only goal is to kill Desmond.

Dean returns to Martin and Sam but Martin doesn't buy Benny's story. Sam wonders why they're just going on trust.
Dean: "One thing I can say about Benny is that he has never let me down."
Sam: "Well good on you, Dean. Must feel great finally finding someone you can trust after all these years."

Ouch! Don't do this guys!!!!
Sam thinks Dean's too close to this and Dean fires back threats to the two of them, that if they go after Benny they'll be killed.
Gah! Martin knocks Dean out. Geez.

Sam's apparently alright with just leaving Dean behind. WTH? But he warns Martin that he's calling the shots. And why work with someone who's that hard to control, huh Sam???
Martin: "Just sayin' - Brother chooses a vampire over a brother? Know how I'd feel."
Well, Sam once chose a demon over Dean....just sayin'.
Which brings us to the 2nd Sam Flashback....
Sam meets Don at a bar. Don's a pretty good guy. Says he can't blame them for what happened, but they need to leave this decision up to Amelia and respect who she chooses. Sam agrees.

Dean wakes up bloody and handcuffed to the radiator. WTH?
He calls Benny right away and warns him that Martin and Sam are on their way.
Benny you really shouldn't underestimate Sam...
Dean wants to find Desmond, but Benny won't tell him where he is unless he can come along. He already told Desmond that he's in, setting up a meeting with him.

Martin & Sam are where Benny buried the body and Sam get's a text from Amelia. She's in trouble, come quick. He just takes off, leaving Martin. Geez.

Dean joins Benny and they go inside a building to hunt Desmond. They split up and Dean runs into the vamp first, easily getting knocked down. He tries to inject him with dead man's blood, but loses the struggle. Just as Desmond is about to chomp on Dean's neck, Benny cuts off the vamp's head. Seeing the blood on Dean's neck, Benny starts to lose control just a bit, but calms down and steps away.

Benny knows his time in his home is over.
Dean: "Guys like us, we don't get a home. We don't get family." And hasn't this been the overall theme of SPN.
Benny: "You got Sam."
Dean: "Yeah."
And that regretful look on his face.... :(
Dean tells him he's got to go deep underground, but Benny's got one last person to see.

Sam's driving and tries to call Amelia, but it doesn't work.
Another Sam Flashback...
He's packing and Amelia wants to know what's going on.
Sam wants her to give Don a chance like she did with him.
"Amelia, you saved me."

Benny's looking in on Elizabeth one last time. He thanks Dean for not giving up on him and takes off.

Dean calls Martin and tells him the situation is over and he and Benny killed the other vamp. Benny's not coming back. Martin says something cryptic about being long gone, too and Dean tells him to find another line of work. Heh.
Yeah, this isn't going to end well...

Sure enough....Benny gets a phone call from Elizabeth, except it's Martin on her phone...calling from the gumbo cafe as he eats some pie. He's overly creepy here, grabbing Elizabeth's wrist sharply over the pie and telling Benny to get there in 45 min. Gah!!!!

Benny arrives and finds the lights off and Martin holding a knife to Elizabeth's throat. Crap.
Benny points out they don't have a beef with each other and to let the girl go, the bad guy is gone. Martin realizes that Elizabeth doesn't know Benny's a vamp. He cuts her neck to get a reaction from Benny and it works....for a few seconds. He has to turn away to regain control.
Martin's really lost it here...
"I want your head on a stake."
Benny gives in and lays his head on the counter. Nooooo.

Sam arrives at Amelia's house, gun at the ready. But all he finds is her safe and sound with Don.
It was all a set up. Damn.

Oooooh, Dean singing. Just a tiny bit. Damn, I wanted more.
He gets a call from Elizabeth. She won't really say what's wrong, just asks him to come.
Dean arrives and finds her sitting on the steps and bloody.
He goes inside and finds a big trail of blood....leading to Martin's dead body. Oy.
No sign of Benny either. WTH happened???

Sam at another bar...he calls the number he got Amelia's text message on.
It dials a phone in the Impala's glove compartment. Oh, no.
Dean set it all up in advance in case he needed it and it looks like he was right.
He tells Sam it's done.
Sam's not happy to hear about Martin.
And then he won't let Dean explain about Benny 'cause he "knows what happened." Dude! You don't! Gah!!!!! *tears hair out in frustration*
Sam hangs up the phone, turns around, and there's Amelia..."I knew that was you."
Nice song choice for the bar...."That old familiar pain...."

Phew! What an episode. Fandom may well be talking about this one until the show returns in January.

Let's get to the main gist of the episode, the thing we all care about...namely what the hell is up with the brothers?!
I am a Dean girl and it's easy to take his side in all this, but I'm still trying, fighting with myself even to understand what on earth Sam is doing.

Let's hit the highlights...or lowlights depending on how you feel.

-- Sam enlists crazy Martin Creaser to watch Benny.
BAD move Sam! Bad, bad move. Why on earth would you use a guy just out a mental hospital? No other hunters were handy? Surely there was someone around more mentally balanced. I'll give Sam points for even telling Dean about it though. He could've easily just disappeared (granted, Dean would've followed) and dealt with this on his own.

-- Dean gives in and agrees to see what's what with Benny in Louisiana.
He didn't have to say yes, but he does. Maybe due to Sam's treats to kill Benny. Maybe because he figured that was the easiest choice.

-- Sam gives Dean 2 hours to see what's going on with Benny.
I thought this was a dumb idea. If Dean was so sure of Benny's innocence, then he should've taken at least Sam with him to find Benny. Then Sam would've seen and heard for himself what happened. It might not have worked, but it had more of a chance than Dean trying to convince him alone.

-- "One thing I can say about Benny is that he has never let me down."
Low blow here really by Dean. I could excuse that when the spectre had control of him, but not this time. I know he's pissed at Sam for not believing him, but this isn't going to help. Sam fires back about Dean finally finding someone to trust after all these years and Dean doesn't say a damn thing. Hurtful stuff, only laying the groundwork for what's to come. *sigh*

-- Martin knocks out Dean, who ends up handcuffed to the radiator.
And Sam goes right along with this! Not cool. Sure, he was shocked at first, but then he goes off with Martin to find Benny. WTH Sam? Why are you still working with this guy?

-- Sam gets a text from Amelia being in trouble and simply takes off.
Ok, I get it, Sam's worried. He even tries to call and gets no answer. That would amp up the worry for anyone. But leaving Martin behind was another dumb move. And you would think he would at least let Dean know where he was off to.

-- It was Dean who tricked Sam with the text from Amelia.
Rotten thing to do though as metallidean_grl pointed out, maybe Dean was getting Sam out of harm's way from Benny. It's possible, though I'm pretty sure Sam could handle himself against the vampire. What I'm thinking is that he didn't want Sam in the position to kill Benny. Didn't want a friend killed by his brother. I can't remember....Does Dean know about Amelia's husband or not? I'm thinking not since Sam really hasn't told Dean much about his year off, just that he was with a woman and then he wasn't. So the pain inflicted on Sam here by seeing Amelia with Don again might've been unintentional on Dean's part. Doesn't excuse him from the main deception, but it might lessen the blow a little.

-- Sam refuses to hear Dean's/Benny's side of things.
This is sort of typically Sam, isn't it? He gets pissed and he runs away. It's textbook Sam. He has it so set in his mind that Benny's a vampire and therefore bad that he's unwilling to go with Dean's judgement of the guy. Makes no difference that he supposedly helped Dean get out of Purgatory, he's a monster and needs to die. Doesn't matter that he's never seen Benny do anything wrong. In a way Sam's reverted to who Dean was back in Season 2. Kill first and worry about the truth later. In fact in a twisted sort of way, this episode mirrored S2's "Bloodlust" a lot. But in that ep, Sam was the open-minded one and Dean was ready to kill, kill, kill. In that ep too, the brothers disagreed and didn't really trust each other.

Remember this bit of dialog from "Bloodlust"?

DEAN: What part of 'vampires' don't you understand, Sam? If it's supernatural, we kill it, end of story. That's our job.

SAM: No, Dean, that is not our job. Our job is hunting evil. And if these things aren't killing people, they're not evil!

DEAN: Of course they're killing people, that's what they do. They're all the same, Sam. They're not human, okay? We have to exterminate every last one of them.

My but how the tables have turned.

Both of the brothers made poor choices during the episode and both are at fault for their current situation. However, if one takes stock of all the points, I think Dean comes out as more correct. Yes, part of this could be because I'm a Dean girl. It can't be helped. But like I said, I'm trying to find answers for Sam's actions. We've been shown no reason to believe Dean's trust in Benny is misguided and you'd think that Sam would know his brother enough to realize that he doesn't give his trust easily, especially to monsters. Yet he has trust with this vampire. But instead of taking Dean at his word, Sam has fought it from the start and refuses to hear anything different. I've suspected some of this might be jealousy for Benny helping Dean escape Purgatory and that theory still holds at this point. After all, Sam wasn't able to save Dean from Hell either. That's got to eat away at him.

As for Sam...and Amelia. She's growing on me. We now know she's real and not just a figment of Sam's imagination. Really doesn't change the way the flashbacks of them are being presented, which is as a dreamy fantasy world. He says Amelia saved him and I have no doubt of that. But it really was a dream world....no hunting, no danger, no big brother to worry about dying or telling him what to do...none of the life he left behind. The question still remains what brought Sam away from that world, what made him leave Amelia in the middle of the night to go to the cabin. I hope we find that out soon.

Not sad about Martin dying. He was a loose screw and really never should've been put in that position in the first place. Why Sam is so upset over his death is beyond me. You put him there, Sam! What did you think was going to happen, especially when you left him like that? Gah! So frustrating.

Still totally loving Benny. He's a cool guy and minor moments of weakness aside, you've gotta give him points for sticking to his guns and not killing people for blood. The question is...if he did indeed feed on Martin is the cork out of the bottle now? Will he keep on killing now that he's tasted fresh blood for perhaps the first time in years?

We know the boys will reunite otherwise there wouldn't be a show. The questions as to when and how are answered in the promo for the ep in Jan. Hopefully they'll find a way to talk it all out and trust again. Until then...we wait and analyze and wait some more.

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