heidi | I think the issue I had re 6.20

I generally do trust that the Ben Edlund episodes will make me laugh and think a bit. I've generally enjoyed his scripts to date, and oddly enough, until last night, I'd felt like he *got* the Winchesters, as characters and as the focus of the show.

And it's not that he's a neophyte director per se, because what Jensen did with "Weekend At Bobby's" was, I thought really good. He used creativity where it was necessary and appropriate, but didn't go over the top with any of it, and in an episode that had as much blood as that one did, it fit.

I think what Ben did last night with the scenes with Crowley and Castiel was high-quality, but the confrontation scene, Sam should have been able to ask his questions without all the cutaways - don't flick to Dean when for that one moment it is entirely about Sam and Castiel.

One bit of direction that I liked in theory was in the absolute final scene when Dean and Castiel are silhouetted against the window with the anti-angel markings - is it supposed to be evocative of Sam and Dean in the first episode, after their reunion-fight? If so, it was an interesting call-back, but again, given Castiel's ditching of Dean for the year after they averted the apocalypse, and the fact that in the last year they haven't been on the same page once and Dean knows that now, I'm not sure the parallel is, well, parallel-ish.

And I think that's the other thing that really bothered me about this episode - how it fits in the temporality. It's been coming on two years - well, at least 19 or 20 months - since God[Chuck] brought Castiel back, and just under that since he's been at war with Castiel and teamed up with Crowley. I wonder, especially from the last few eps, if the writers forgot how long it's been, because even if Dean and Castiel had a Profound Bond in seasons 4 and 5, there is so much water that's gone under the bridge since then.

So many of us predicted many aspects of this episode, if not just in the last week then as far back as when Castiel "burned" Crowley's bones - I know I theorized it then and I remember reading others who did as well. And there's nothing wrong with an episode that goes in the direction that many of the more, shall we say, obsessive fans expect - in my daily newspaper today someone sent in a question to the TV column asking if Jared and Jensen's relationship IRL was like it was depicted in "French Mistake" so we know there are fans who are not fandom participants to any degree. And as I said, I like the story/plot in and of itself.

I'm just not sure that Edlund was the right person to direct this specific episode.