Season Six saw Sera Gamble assume the showrunner role, something that delighted me based on all the episodes she’d written since Season One. She was intimate with Eric Kripke’s vision and understood the brothers viscerally, and in my opinion – and Eric’s, evidently! – she came up with a very creative way to carry on the series in the aftermath of “Swan Song.” This became their experimental noir season, one in which we viewers didn’t understand what was actually going on – why and how it was “all about the souls” – until late in the season, because our narrative viewpoint was deliberately, carefully restricted to preserve the mystery until it was time for everything to be revealed, with that reveal changing everything we thought we knew. My episode haiku were written contemporaneously with my viewing of each individual episode on its initial airing, so they reflected only my understanding at the time; not my subsequent reconsideration of the action in each episode once I knew what had really been going on.
Knowing now what we do about the reality behind each episode, how would you rewrite these haiku to reveal the hidden truths in each episode?
Season Six
Exile On Main Street
Monsters break patterns.
Finding Sam alive again
Breaks Dean’s “normal” world.
Two And A Half Men
Baby shapeshifter
Makes Winchesters, Campbells ask:
Who’s your family?
The Third Man
Heaven’s civil war
Sets lost weapons loose on Earth;
Angels deal in souls.
Weekend At Bobby’s
With help from his friends,
Bobby threatens Crowley’s bones
To regain his soul.
Live Free Or TwiHard
Sam lets Dean be turned.
Hunter spy in vampire nest
Kills,but stops nothing.
You Can’t Handle The Truth
Under compulsion,
Humans tell the truth and die:
Only Sam can lie.
Family Matters
Demon Crowley plots
To annex Purgatory,
Home of monster souls.
All Dogs Go To Heaven
Fear your family dog:
Sleeper skinwalker army
Pretend to be pets.
Clap Your Hands If You Believe
New Age masquerade:
Fairies pose as aliens,
Stealing first-born sons.
Caged Heat
Brothers team with Meg,
Hunting Crowley’s Alpha jail
To demand Sam’s soul.
Appointment In Samarra
Dean makes a wager:
One day as Death for Sam’s soul.
He loses – but wins.
Like A Virgin
Sam wakes as Dean’s bro
With no soulless memories.
Teamed, they hunt dragons.
Unforgiven
Sam’s forgotten past
Spins a present spider trap;
Memories surface.
Mannequin 3: The Reckoning
Shy girl’s vengeful ghost
Targets men whose prank killed her.
Dean gets parent-trapped.
The French Mistake
Heaven’s civil war
Puts bros in bizarro world
Acting out their lives.
…And Then There Were None
Eve makes new monsters,
Planning to cage human food;
Hunters’ families die.
My Heart Will Go On
Titanic effect:
Changing the past mints new souls
But Fate still prevails.
Frontierland
To burn the Mother,
Brothers travel to Colt’s time
For phoenix ashes.
Mommy Dearest
Eve builds new hybrids;
Castiel faked Crowley’s death –
All about the souls.
The Man Who Would Be King
Sam, Dean, saving Earth:
Castiel’s good intentions
Pave his road to Hell.
Let It Bleed
Lovecraft opened doors.
Crowley takes Ben and Lisa;
Dean’s Achilles heel.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Memory endgame:
Castiel drops Sam’s mind-wall,
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