Reviews That I Missed: Supernatural Episode 9.20, “Bloodlines” aka Why am I Watching This?

Ugh, “Bloodlines.” I never did a review for this though, so I took one for the team and did a rewatch for you. I’ve only seen the episode once since it aired. So, did my perceptions change after seeing it again? Absolutely not. It was every bit the pile of garbage I remember the first time. Actually, it was worse. So many flaws and poor judgment calls that had me shouting after just about every scene, “WHY AM I WATCHING THIS?”

Episode recap

Talk about the predictable teaser. You knew Ennis’ girlfriend was going to bite it as soon as they went into that restaurant. A monster bar? Yikes. The swagger of the monsters came straight out of a horrible third rate nighttime soap opera (cheese factor to 11), the dialogue was hideous and cliche, and the acting was cut rate garbage. This was actually worse than anything I’d ever seen of the soap opera genre. Then Freddy Krueger came out of nowhere and killed lots of monsters, including Sal. Then he kills Ennis’ girlfriend while fleeing. Yay, campy third rate low budget horror! This already had failure written all over it and we’re in the teaser.

Supernatural title card. This is not Supernatural!!

Sam and Dean make an appearance just to remind us that this is their show, and then it’s back to the same. Bad acting, bad acting, bad dialogue, bad story, monster war, bad acting, bad acting, bad acting…oh for Chuck’s sake, WHY AM I WATCHING THIS??? Even cut rate CW garbage was better than this. I was never horrified this badly by the one episode of Gossip Girl I watched.

In the middle, it did pick up a little. It started with “Little Black Submarine” and the visuals that came with it, like the L train to remind us of the scenery of Chicago. It was the only scene that came close to selling a gritty story of the Chicago underworld that this episode needed. And then, moment over. Ennis checks the monster bar, vampire catches him, Sam and Dean show up with a machete. So, over a beheaded vampire body, now they confess monsters are real. But Ennis shouldn’t have any part of this. It’s a dangerous life. Dudes, isn’t this how hunters get started? It’s textbook. His girlfriend is dead. Sound familiar? Plus, the way hunters die in numbers, a new recruit isn’t a bad idea. He did the homework after all. He might be good at this. This is not Ron Resnick all over again.

So, Ennis goes back home and has a visitor. He does the glowing eyes through the cellphone camera trick and man, this kid learns fast! Why shouldn’t he be a hunter? Turns out it’s David Lassiter, and just like his brother Sal, he can shape shift easily in a flash without shedding skin? Isn’t that against the shapeshifter lore that’s been present…IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF SUPERNATURAL? If the Lassiters were some sort of special case that genetically were given a gift, I might have accepted that. BUT THEY DIDN’T DO THAT! Nope, we are just meant to believe that this is the norm. That is lazy writing.

Oh, and there are five monster families running Chicago, but we only get to hear about two of them in a casual line (tell the ghouls, the Djinn, and whoever I run this family now). This episode only showed two of those families, shapeshifters and werewolves. Why do I not care who the other three are? I’m not caring about the two we were seeing. WHY AM I WATCHING THIS?

Ennis does the same basic detective work as Sam and Dean and what do you know, they both end up in the same spot, the werewolf family mansion. David is there and is attacked by Freddy Krueger. Ennis shoots at Freddie and he runs, saving David from being skewered like Sal. On but Freddy takes Violet, so Sam, Dean, David and Ennis all pile into the Impala. Ennis is a little horrified that they are taking on this mission with David since he’s a monster, so Dean says…”And sometimes you got to work with the bad guys to get to the worse guys.” What? What a terrible line.

All four guys search the hideout of Freddy Krueger, and thanks to Violet hulking out (???) she gets the jump on him, and David talks her down before killing him. Okay. Then Ennis shoots Freddy anyway even though he’s defeated, unarmed and he half heartedly apologized for killing his girlfriend. Sam and Dean…well, they just watch it all. Um, what? That’s our big showdown? That’s hardly the haunting mystery of the Woman in White. So that means in “Bloodlines” it’s okay for humans to kill other humans? Isn’t that kind of against the code of hunters? Sure the scumbag deserved it but…. it’s a little too early in this premise to be exploring these grey lines. Ahem…WHY AM I WATCHING THIS?

David and Violet are together and he tells her Sal’s last words. He asks her if she knows what that meant. She then recalled in her mind, right in front of David of course who wasn’t at all concerned that she was taking this time to think, a past conversation with Sal in the train station where he basically scared her away from running away with David, because, wait for it, he didn’t want them to mix bloodlines. Basically, he didn’t want to see a shapeshifter/werewolf hybrid come out of this Really? So this is monster racism? Does anyone want to see a story like this? Then, she doesn’t tell David any of it and lied that she didn’t know what Sal meant. He’s dead now, so what’s holding her back? He can’t hurt her anymore. Her actions made no sense and certainly didn’t paint her as a sympathetic or even interesting character. WHY AM I STILL WATCHING THIS? WHY ISN’T IT OVER YET?

Then, it all closed with a scene of Supernatural: The Godfather. Dad on his sick bed warns David his sister Margo wants a war between the families. David tells Margo that it wasn’t the werewolf family that killed Sal but a non-monster psycho, and he’s back in the family business now. Everyone hugs him like Michael Corleone has returned including Margo, who’s smile falls during the hug while David isn’t looking. Oh boy, how cliche is this?

Sam and Dean have to leave because Castiel has a line on Metatron. I thought they were trying to find Abaddon? Yeah whatever, they leave, promising to call in other hunters and look into the whole monster situation. Oh, and Sam warns Ennis not to get into this. You seriously think that will work??? WTF??? Oh, and BTW, we never hear of this monster situation again.  Ennis digs into this anyway and gets a call warning him to back off from supposedly his late father, and…we can only assume he listens because we never hear from him again.

Well, that’s 45 minutes of my life I’ll never get back again.

The Analysis

How in the world did this drivel even pass the script approval process? The network should have seen this, and went “we pass” before it was ever made. Either that or people just wanted to see Andrew Dabb make an utter fool of himself. Is this what Dabb would have written if he did the Supernatural pilot? There were so many poor choices here!

First, at this point in The CW history, Mark Pedowitz had been running the network for three years. They were long past the girl power Dawn Ostroff era of campy soaps like Gossip Girl and 90210 (the remake). He was guiding the ship to new male audiences with Arrow and The Flash was in development, after their crossover episode was a massive success. I was so excited about a potential spinoff after watching that episode partnering Oliver Queen and Barry Allen for the first time. It was a freaking awesome hour of television! What in the world made Andrew Dabb think he would succeed with Dynasty for monsters? Didn’t he watch his own network?

If Dabb was trying for a twisty monster story, The CW already had The Vampire Diaries and The Originals. They didn’t need this! How fucking tone deaf could he be? This spinoff had to be a natural extension of Supernatural. Why kill Sal? At least a story of monster brothers at odds would have been more of a parallel. I know, he likely wanted to make this more like The Godfather, where the estranged son had to step in to run the family business after the older brother was killed. What sold The Godfather was the right tone along with rich and compelling storytelling, very layered characters, cinematic quality and stellar acting. That was NOT this. Why veer in campy soap opera direction instead of making a gritty, mean streets type of story all in the urban backdrop of Chicago? Yeah, I’m going to use that tone deaf comment again.

It was a risky premise to do a potential spinoff with all new characters that we’ve never seen before. While the choice of Chicago was an ideal setting, the idea that Chicago was being run by five underground monster families was…yuck. This premise needed a little setup before this episode. I would have been more excited to see a spinoff of something familiar, like perhaps Aaron and the Golem from “Everybody Hates Hilter.” That was an episode that left an impression for new characters! That’s rule number one. The impression better be good, or it fails.

I find it utterly and completely ridiculous that Sam and Dean, being the caliber of hunters that they are, had never heard of the five monster families controlling Chicago. They could have done a lead up to this, where they knew that there were stories of such of thing, but there was no real proof and activity was light…until now. Why were they there? Why did they suddenly pop in after Sal’s murder? The murders of the others were covered up. They didn’t even know Sal was a shapeshifter. Because Freddy Krueger fit a profile? That is super weak setup for stumbling into a huge monster network like that. It made them look like accidental tourists instead of the uber hunters we know them to be.

The lines were even hideous in this episode! Sam and Dean’s lines didn’t sound like Sam and Dean. What show were we watching again? It was cut rate fan fiction. Take this line from Sam. “Well, if we’re lucky, someone who knows what happened to that monster boy.” Boy? Why were they so discouraging of Ennis? I could see where one brother would be against it, another brother would be on the fence and then once Ennis got in deep it would be too late to go back. They could have offered to be mentors, thus setting up a launching pad for the series. But nope, apparently Dabb didn’t want them part of this at all, which was a tragic mistake.

So much of the story didn’t make sense. If the monsters were laying low, why would they kill an 8 year old boy? That didn’t seem like their style or anything they usually do. Did someone in the family just go a little cuckoo? Maybe Violet could have set the record straight as to what really happened? You know, make this act of revenge mean something emotionally and not basic words from a cartoon villain? Show, don’t tell. Also, what in the world did David see in Violet? She seemed very wooden and not a great character. It’s that weakness in writing female characters that hit most of the Supernatural writers, but especially Dabb. Her rejection of David didn’t make much sense, despite Sal’s words. There was just no thought into the little details, and those do matter, especially in a pilot. The emotional beats that are supposed make the characters and draw the audience to them just weren’t there, which also was a major shortcoming of Andrew Dabb scripts.

Was there anything I liked? Okay, one thing. I liked David Lassiter. I found him believable, but that all belongs to the great acting of Nathaniel Buzolic. He is a familiar face to me though. I loved him as Kol in The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, even though they really butchered his character after a while. At the time when he was announced for the cast, I was optimistically curious that he could pull off a character in this shaky premise. You know, do something special with the shit he was given. He did pull the strongest performance of the bunch, but it still wasn’t enough to save this piece of crap.

Overall grade, an F-. I know, there’s no such grade, but there has to be something to depict the “Epic Fail” this episode was. It is still the worst episode of the series to me. This was a very, very bad idea that failed because of poor execution, a unbelievable premise, a weak script, zero originality and not giving the network what it needed at the time. Instead, broad assumptions were made about what the network wanted, and it was very, very wrong. Also, just making a monster story does not make it Supernatural. Way more care and thought should have gone into this. “Bloodlines” is an embarrassment to this storied franchise and really shouldn’t be spoken of again.

Coming up next, only more episode review needed for season nine, thank heavens! This has been a painful season to review. It is “King of the Damned,” and if I recall, this wasn’t a half bad episode. Given it was Brad and Eugenie script it certainly wasn’t perfect, but still one of their better outings.