SUPERNATURAL Review 13.09 “The Bad Place”

Read the previous review here.
This post contains spoilers for Supernatural.

“The Bad Place” kicks off with Jack finding a dream walker to help him find Mary over in apocalypse world, and quickly escalates to Sam and Dean tracking him down to see if he committed murder. Turns out angels are just being dicks again, but Sam and Dean believe Jack’s looking for Lucifer, so they don’t find murder too far out of the realm of possibility.

Thankfully, they go out of the Supernatural norm and only have this little misunderstanding last for a few minutes rather than a few episodes. The boys find out that Jack knows where their mother is, and all is forgiven. Maybe the fact that he didn’t kill the dream walker helped, maybe it didn’t. These boys make big bad choices when their mother is on the line.

It’s been a hot second since we’ve had crazy pants Dean, and there isn’t a moment on record when he was more John Winchester than tonight. He’s murdered monsters that didn’t deserve it, and even gone full demon, but threatening an innocent person for his own gain is something that should be out of his depth. Since the episode lacked the time, that’s not used as a plot point, but it’s something to add to your list of stupid shit Dean Winchester’s done.

That stupid shit obviously leads to all of them being in danger. The angels want Jack to help rebuild their numbers, and they’re willing to bowl through anyone necessary to accomplish that. They’re all able to escape by following the dream walker to another world, but because this is Supernatural things don’t go according to plan. Jack ends up in Apocalypse World where he meant to, but it appears Sam and Dean are in the Bad Place (which has dinosaurs, which is important) while Kaia seems to have remained on Earth.

Kaia remaining on this plane is handy, considering the fact that “The Bad Place” set up the pilot for Wayward Sisters. Patience (daughter of Mercedes, the psychic) see’s Jodi’s death, and she gives up everything to go warn her. She warns Jodi that something big is coming, but we currently have no idea whether or not that bad is from one of the other worlds that Jack and Kaia just ripped open, or if it’s a good old fashioned domestic threat. We do know that when we return next season it will be with the Wayward Sisters pilot, so perhaps the boys will remain on these other worlds for more than one episode.

It wasn’t the strongest midseason finale in the books, but “The Bad Place” has a few good moments. Dean calling Jack family, no matter how much it’s because of Mary, is a big step for him. The episode could have done with more Cas and Lucifer, but there wasn’t a solid way to bring them back into the mix without Lucifer finding his son. At the end of the day, new worlds give us something interesting to chew on while we wait for Supernatural to return next year. As always, if you had thoughts on the episode, you know what to do.