Lower Decks

The following review contains spoilers for Supernatural through the current episode, “Wishful Thinking,” originally broadcast November 6th, 2008.

The teaser to this episode was brilliant. A beautiful woman is taking a shower, some creepy kid is leering at her, he disappears, she thinks she hears something, creepy kid gets a towel thrown over him, begs the woman not to tell his mom, woman screams. Not exactly what one would expect (the woman lived, after all) from Supernatural. And the episode only got better. The first few minutes after the opening credits were reminiscent of “Monster Movie,” with the Brothers Winchester hearing about strange happenings in Concrete, Washington and assuming nothing is really going on.

But something is going on. And it isn’t a shape shifter. It’s a wishing well. A magic wishing well that is going to tear the town apart. After a simply hilarious scene in which Sam and Dean stumble upon a living, breathing, human-sized teddy bear with “lollipop disease” (a.k.a. depression) and wonder if they have to kill it, the two stumble upon the source of the strange occurrences: a wishing well in a Chinese restaurant. At the bottom of the well is a coin that the brothers can’t move, even with a crowbar and a hammer. Sam makes a rough etching of it but then has a eureka moment and hands it to Dean to decipher.

Finally, Dean has to step up and do some research. And he does, learning that the coin is Babylonian and depicts Tiamat, the Babylon god of primordial chaos. Priests apparently filled the coin with black magic and it has destroyed several towns over the centuries. It even got Dean, who wished for a sandwich to test the ability of the wishing well, only to become very, very sick after eating it. Now all they have to do is figure out who threw the coin into the well.

Stuck in between arriving in Concrete and finding the coin’s owner (none other than Ted “Joxer the Mighty” Raimi) are some wonderfully creepy moments. The depressed teddy bear shoots himself in the head, complete with blown out stuffing, only to survive and scream out “Why!” (the suicide note was almost too much). And Sam reveals that his wish would be Lilith’s head on a plate. Bloody. He’s got some problems.

The one issue I had with the episode was the lack of resolution for several of the wishes. Dean’s wish turned sour — literally — within hours of being made. But many of the other wishes had been made sometime during the last two weeks, meaning they could have been going on for much, much longer than Dean’s. So what happened to Audrey’s parents, who went to Bali? They had to have been gone for a few days so the wish should have started twisting. But it didn’t. They just showed up at the end of the episode, looking a little depressed, reuniting with Audrey.

And what about the invisible kid? Aside from being hit by Sam and Dean’s car — which wasn’t all that terrible, seeing as how he picked himself up — nothing bad seemed to have happened to him. Was his horrible fate to be stuck in the ladies’ showers for all eternity? And the millionaire shown on the newspaper was never mentioned again until the end of the episode, when his ticket was revealed to be a fake. Up until then, it seemed as if the money hadn’t ruined his life.

Anyway, I would also have liked to have seen a little more brotherly discussion (or couples therapy, as Dean called it) about what Dean experience in Hell. Then again, given how the episode ended, what else was there to say? After wrapping up the wishing well, Dean admitted to remembering everything that happened to him and apologized for lying to Sam. But he still won’t talk about it. He doesn’t have words for what he saw. And he’ll never forget it. What a downer of an ending.

As wonderful as Season Four has been thus far, I think we’ve had enough amusing, funny episodes (“Monster Movie,” “Yellow Fever” and now “Wishful Thinking”) for a while. It’s time to get back to the end-of-the-world, opening-of-the-seals, raising-of-Lucifer havoc that we all know is coming.