Supernatural 'Paper Moon' Review: Getting Back in the Saddle

After three heavy mythology episodes to start Season 10, Supernatural rolled on Tuesday night with a standalone installment entitled "Paper Moon." The episode explored the damage caused in the first three episodes through the filter of a Monster of the Week case, a formula Supernatural has followed for years.

"Paper Moon" did two things extremely well. Firstly, it avoided the pitfall of a standard Monster of the Week case by reintroducing Kate, the werewolf from Season 8 whom Sam and Dean let go on her merry way. The standalone episodes of Supernatural always function best when they explore the effects of what Sam and Dean do every day. If you think about it, the brothers often breeze into towns and save people, but they roll in like tornadoes and leave a ton of damage in their wake. It's a necessary process, but it's also something the show ignores more often than not.

So it was good to see Kate again because her episode ended on a cliffhanger. What happened to this girl after she parted ways with Sam and Dean? Did she truly stay on the straight and narrow, or did she slip into her more primal urges and start killing people? This episode walked that line nicely and kept the viewer guessing as to Kate's true motivations with regard to her sister.

The other well-done aspect of "Paper Moon" was how directly it handled the "Sam and Dean talk about their feelings" portion of the episode. Obviously the brothers were going to go over their numerous issues in the wake of Sam's curing Demon Dean, and of course the plot of the episode was somehow going to tie in directly to their ongoing drama. It's almost become cliché at this point for the show to go this route.

So this time, Supernatural essentially took the fans' eye rolls and beat them to it. Sam pointed out how Kate would do anything for her sister because he and Dean do the same thing all the time. The brothers even laughed off the male werewolves' attempt to kill them by calling them minor leaguers. As I've said in previous reviews, episodes like this often fail to excite because there are no real stakes. After surviving numerous apocalyptic events, two werewolves don't scare the Winchesters and the fans don't believe the brothers are in danger. So Supernatural smartly owned the fact that, yeah, these guys are chumps and Sam and Dean can kill them with almost no effort at all.

The emotional stakes in this episode were high, and the parallels between Kate and Tasha and Sam and Dean worked better than those in most Monster of the Week episodes. Kate once again left on a cliffhanger, and the show left the door wide open for her to return again at some point and cross paths with the Winchesters. But this time, will they be friend or foe to her?

Finally, the episode ended with Dean remarking that he wanted to dive headfirst into the case because he wanted to do something good after all the bad that he had done in the past several months. The way the scene lingered and the way Dean spoke hinted that he might not just be talking about his time as a demon. Perhaps what he did to Sam last year still weighs on him. Or, maybe, he did more as a demon than we have seen. The lingering effects of Demon Dean and the Mark of Cain should carry us through the season, and episodes like this one should continue to flesh out those effects.

Notes from Dad's Journal:

-       Between "Samantha" and "Paul Bunyan," Sam is getting all the good nicknames this season.

-       As much as Sam and Dean needed the break, it just felt odd seeing them in sunglasses and drinking beer on vacation. Get back in the Men of Letters bunker!

-       It felt right, however, to see them behind the wheel of the Impala again.

-       Has the "handcuffing the bad guy in the Impala" strategy EVER worked on this show? Even once?

-       200^th episode in two weeks. Get hyped, people!

What did you think of "Paper Moon"? Let us know in the comments section.