Recap – “Unforgiven”
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This part got my husband and I the most. The cougar woman from earlier is pouring herself some box wine. It says 16l, 4.23 US Gal. Gallons?? Seriously? You can buy wine in that many gallons? The box wine we buy is only 3 liters and the biggest out there is 5 liters. I found out through internet research that is indeed a common size for box wine in Canada. Damn, you Canadians know how to drink! Next time I’m in Windsor, I’m stocking up! Â
Right, the story. Woman snips at husband with the best line ever. “The box stuff doesn’t get better with age Don.” Exactly! It must be consumed when you open it. All 4.23 gallons! The box is out, though, so she goes to get more. Dark basement, the light doesn’t work, all the classic horror warning signs, but dammit, she needs her wine! Yeah, something gets her from under the stairs and she’s toast. Too bad. I liked her. She was a horny devil that knew RoboSam’s number. Lucky woman. Â
Sam is back at the abandoned house going over some clippings, and he’s looking pretty agitated. We know something is clawing at that noggin. He hears a noise outside and doesn’t presume it’s Dean? No, instead he pulls out his gun and goes behind the door. It’s Dean. Oh, yeah, Sammy’s a bit edgy. Dean hears the click and calmly puts up his hands, but Sam is freaking out. Dean decides taunting now works anyway. “Hey, Sam. So, how does it feel to be a fugitive again?” Sam puts the gun away and gives him a bitchface. Dean doesn’t let up, though. “Hate to say I told you so.” Hee, Sam should really smack his big brother. Nah, he knows the truth. “You’d love to say I told you so.” Dean so agrees.Â
Dean found out something. He found out something on “crazy eyes McGee.” “Turns out you two knew each other. Biblically. I just spoke to her roommate. I gotta say, man, you really got around. Soulless or not, I’m actually kind of impressed.” You and me both, Dean! Sam doesn’t have time to react, for the police scanner he was listening to reports another missing person. Dean will go check it out, and he orders Sam to stay there. Sam, still very agitated, agrees. Liar! He waits until he hears Dean get into the Impala and takes off. Â
Dean is at the box-wine lady’s house, talking with the husband, who actually looks worried now. Man, you didn’t seem that way when your wife was around. Dean assures him they’re on it and then makes a call. It’s to Sam, who doesn’t answer. Dean’s not happy about that and leaves a message. He found the connection between the victims. “They all banged the same dude. You.” Everything has been a trap for Sam. He asks Sam to call him back, but right, Sam’s off doing something else.Â
Brenna Dobbs enters her house at night, and Sam steps out, scaring the bejesus out of her. Sam apologies, but she cleverly mentions he can’t be there. Yeah, the rules about being a fugitive, huh? She asks what happened to Debbie Harris. Sam is surprised to hear it was her. Gee, Sam, that wouldn’t be the case if you’d just check your damn phone messages. Brenna sees the coincidence, she lets him out and Debbie disappears. Sam is surprised by the accusation, but in fairness, how can Brenna believe anything he says. Sam gets to the point. He needs her help. He needs the case files about the disappearances last year. She tells him to go to the station to find it, he says he already did. They aren’t there. He has a good idea of where they are. He promises they want the same thing, to find out what happened last year and stop what’s happening now. She falls for the puppy eyes again and goes upstairs to fetch the files.Â
So Sam just takes it casually while he waits, right? Hee, this is Sam Winchester we’re talking about. The dude can’t get enough misfortune. Time for a good, long flashback, one triggered by the living-room furniture. First its a gunshot and Samuel yelling at him.  Then it’s a beer and Brenna on the couch. This flashback has Sam and Samuel on one couch drinking a beer and Brenna and Roy on the other. Brenna is fascinated about their life, traveling around everywhere. Doesn’t it get hard? Samuel, who’s not soulless, is turning on the charm. “When you’re young, it’s great. When you’ve got a family, it’s tougher.” He talks about Mary and how much she was a blessing and the complete love in that man’s eyes…as a parent it gets me right there. He nailed it! Brenna and Roy are captivated. Â
Samuel goes to get another beer so Brenna turns to Sam next. She realizes how much he misses Mary. “At least you have each other.” RoboSam, being the total dick he is, takes a sweet moment and turns it sour. “Samuel wasn’t really around when I was a kid. We have more of a business relationship.” The director goes for the close-up of Sam’s eyes this time, and they’re vacant and cold. Brenna asks if he has any other family. Instead of talking about his big brother Dean, this dickwad explains why he didn’t talk to Dean for a year in one perfect sentence. “Family just slows you down.”
Back to current Sam, who is having a full fledged internal freak out in the living room when Brenna comes back. Sam snaps out of it, but man is he shaken. He takes the box and starts looking at the files. More flashbacks just hit him like a freight train when he sees a picture of a victim. Then he finds an evidence bag of some white cotton-like stuff. The same wad Samuel was holding a year earlier in that seafood restaurant. Â
Sam starts to remember that conversation. Samuel’s best guess, it came from an arachne. The noirish look of this flashback becomes totally different. The angle is looking upward from the floor, the glasses on the table blurry and the faces clear. The shots again jump back and forth a lot and at different angles and close-ups. Really cool.  Arachnes are from Crete and haven’t been seen in 2,000 years. Sam wonders what they know about them. Zip! At this time, the guy behind them finishes the Surf and Turf challenge, so the picture goes snap! Guess who’s in the background? Â
They have no clue how to kill the thing, so Sam has a plan. Oh, no, no wonder Samuel starts hating Sam after this. Sam has an idea where it might be and pulls out a map. The victims have been men in their 30’s and all have gone missing in a 2-mile radius. Searching that parameter wouldn’t be realistic, too much sprawl. Sam points at Lonely Pines Park. He wants it to come to them. “How do we do that?” Don’t ask, Samuel, you don’t want to know. Â
Alice Jester is the founder, editor-in-chief, head writer, programmer, web designer, site administrator, marketer, and moderator for The Winchester Family Business. She is a 30 year IT applications and database expert with a penchant for creative and freelance writing in her spare (ha!!) time. That’s on top of being a wife, mother of two active kids, and four loving (aka needy) pets.
I’m so glad you’ve decided to do more recaps, since I found this site I have gone back and read all of the ones you did for the previous seasons. I will take my time and read this one later as my laptop battery is about to die on me, but I’m sure it’ll be a good one. Catch you later.
Hi Alice. I thoroughly enjoyed your recap of this episode, much more than I enjoyed the episode itself, I’m afraid. I think I just have a hard time dealing with sociopathic RoboSam. He is so scary and really so very cold and unemotional in all his evilness. I believe Samuel would have tried harder to get through to Sam if he hadn’t been actually afraid of his grandson by that time. And, the way Sam was back then, he had good reason to be afraid he would get in Sam’s way and be tossed aside without a qualm. 😥
Anyway, again, loved your recap! 🙂
Sam is burning alive and laughter is heard in the background. Really??? I don’t remember the laughter, I’m going to watch it again.
wow you know?
on Sunday I was remembering that you did this recaps, and I was wishing you did this again, at least for the bests episodes and you did 😆
You don’t know how much I enjoy your Recaps.
Im going to quote Bevie here “I enjoyed, much more than I enjoyed the episode itself”.
I loved the scenes with Sam struggling with his memories and Dean trying to protect his brother but I don’t know why I didn’t enjoy a lot the arachne part, cause I love the Spiderman movies….
My favorite favorite episode of the season is 6×19 “The man who would be king” I have watched that episode a lot of times 😆
“Dean is at the box-wine lady’s house” hehe
“You can buy wine in that many gallons?” I would have thought someone in the set decorator made a mistake… so that’s a common size in Canada? wow 🙂
I was able to finally go back to the episode and get the shot of the box wine. I put it in the recap. It’s definitely a size only sold in Canada. Wow!
[img]https://www.thewinchesterfamilybusiness.com/images/Unforgiven/boxwine.jpg[/img]
I enjoyed the recap and revisit to what I consider one of the best episodes in season six. It was just very well put together and the mystery and the monster were cool.
I disliked them calling/considering the bathroom woman a cougar. What is she at most: 10 years older than Sam? The box of wine cracked me up, and of course I’m looking at the label, but wine is sold by the liter in the US. 750 mL is the standard bottle and 1.5 L being the big one. Boxes of wine are labelled by liter and I think the biggest is 5 L. So that was kinda weird for the set people to mark the box that way.
I love soulless Sam! I love the fact that, for the most part, soulless Sam is the closest thing to Lucifer there is. He is soulless and emotionally vacant and will do anything that suits his agenda. Sounds pretty much like the angels on Supernatural.
I think Grandpappy was way in over his head with that “boy”!
Well I finally read your recap and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I loved everything about that episode. I’m with AndreaW, I loved RoboSam. Jared played him so brilliantly and with such coldness, exactly like the sociopath he was without a soul. The cinematography was absolutely gorgeous, I love b&w movies and those flashback scenes were pure film noir. It gave me chills, especially the end with Sam on the floor burning in Hell. OMG!!!
I’m on vacation and away from home and I already miss my SPN DVD collection. I am so suffering from Supernatural Obsessive Disorder! Thank God I brought my PC with me so I can check into the WFB every day to get my SPN fix.
Oh wow, Alice. I never noticed the laughter in the background before. It’s very faint, but you CAN hear it if you put on some good headphones and listen closely. I honestly never noticed that before. Thanks for pointing that out! So I wonder if that Lucifer laughing at Sam? Hmmm… very interesting.
So glad to see you’re back recapping. It was kind of a case of ‘You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone’ with you!
Your narratives and jumping between thoughts as you write are such fun to read. It’s kind of like sitting next to you on the couch while you’re watching, after that box of wine….
And thank God you came back to such a gem of an episode! An investigative one into Sam, body and soul (though temporarily without memories) was always going to be good. And your heart can’t help but ache for Sam and Dean, both during the episode and after it because while Sam has to deal with Soulless Sam and the wall, he certainly won’t do it alone. Dean would climb into Sam’s soul himself and shoulder that wall for an eternity if he could.
Poor old Dean seems to be floundering in this one. His desperation at Sam’s desperation is palpable. It’s not that Sam won’t stop thinking about his time as Soulless Sam, I don’t think he can’t. How hard would it be to actively put something like that to the back of your mind? The more you deliberately don’t think about it, the more you end up thinking about it. Even if he and Sam had scarpered after they realised he was there before, it wouldn’t have done any good. I think the seepage through the wall would have been greater had they left, to be honest. This new, glued together Sam is something Dean doesn’t know how to deal with yet. In fairness, he hasn’t met his real brother for over 18 months and now that he’s back gung ho, he’s bound to be tentative around him.
My expectation before this episode (based on speculation) was that we’d learn things about Sam we didn’t known prior to it; how Sam and Samuel hooked up, the order of their relationship (and thank God we have season 7 to possibly address that), shit, even small things like how Sam arrived back topside. We had that amazing scene in Lazarus Rising where Dean dug himself out of a grave to see he was surrounded by fell trees, I’d like to know what greeted Sam when he got up, how he processed things in those first few weeks, months etc. Even Soulless Sam had to have had a degree of confusion there. Anyway that’s my wishful thinking list for today!
I know that we learnt nothing new about Sam but it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. Sam’s gradual realisation of what he learnt about himself more than made up for it. The dark of Soulless Sam makes Souled Up Sam seem to shine all the much brighter. Yaay!
Plus, given that this was the last we saw Soulless Sam before The Man Who Knew Too Much, I’m glad he got to such a big episode. He such a unique, complex character. I kinda want to tie him to a chair and say ‘Dude, whassup?
In regard to Sam, I think inwardly, Samuel was a wee bit scared of Sam. I mean, who wouldn’t be? A guy he’s never met but is his grandson turns up. We’ve no clue under what circumstances they met ie who approached whom etc (though it is on my top 5 list of things I want to see) The scene in Two and a Half Men kinda indicated to me that Samuel deferred to Sam, and Soulless Sam made it very clear that he answered to no-one.
It’s interesting that while Samuel obviously found what Sam did um… distasteful, he never once stopped him. Perhaps he kept quiet because he knew they did what they had to do, and he was relieved he didn’t have to make the hard calls.
I appreciate that we got the opportunity to see Samuel as a (somewhat) likeable man before he ends up selling out Sam and Dean. The way he speaks about his daughter shows how deeply he loved her and that does go some way towards explaining his actions in Caged Heat. He did what he felt he had to do, and somehow got lost in the enormity of it. He gradually chipped away who he was bit by bit and he did it for love; same as John, Dean and Sam. Guess the Winchesters and the Campbells aren’t too different after all.
On an aside, it’s good to know that while the puppy dog eyes are potent they’re not potent enough to have a woman, whose husband Sam set up to be turned into a big spider and then killed, twice (once right in front of her), forgive him. Maybe next time he should stick out his tongue and pant?
Re: the laughter. I hadn’t noticed it but when I rewatched there’s definitely a chuckle oh sweet Jesus, it ups the horror factor in that scene by a million. (Michael and Lucifer, you pups! What did you do to my boys baby boy?)
Anyway, thanks so much for this. Looking forward to your next recap (hopefully soon…..)
Hi Alice
Cant tell you how pleased I was to see one of your recaps back. They have always been one of my favourite things around here. I have really missed them and I know am not the only one.
It was very interesting to read with distance between viewing and the episode, I think it made it even better. It made me want to go and watch again.
I know they take a lot of time to produce but I do hope you intend to do more
Thanks Ju
I want to do them, but we’ll see how my time constraints go. I can at least get the next one started for Mannequin 3: The Reckoning. I love writing recaps for bad episodes. I have a lot of fun ripping into them with little guilt. Oh, but then there’s the French Mistake. I really ought to do that one too. Maybe I’ll have time on vacation.
Wonderful recap. I will anxiously await the next one, which is one of my favorite episodes (tho others disagree it seems) but I liked the flow from “I can fix this” to the futility of their jobs and the realization that sometimes there just aren’t any easy or correct answers; but there is hope.
Alice, basically there’s no need to tell you how much I love your recaps. I’ve told you countless times, eh?
That you took this particular episode on, despite your tight schedule, was a real treat. Thank you!
If you found time to do more of these in the future, I’d be frightfully happy… But only, of course, if putting them together remained fun and not stress… you’ve got enough of that at work (as do I). And we’re not stressing with things we love!
Hugs, Jas