Supernatural: Game Night
April 9, 2019 7:00 PM - Season 14, Episode 17 - Subscribe

Sam and Dean race to help a friend in need; Mary is concerned for Jack's well-being; Castiel enlists help from Jo to track down a miracle.
posted by litera scripta manet (8 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I liked Dean breaking out the Mousetrap, I am sad that it wasn't "that" kind of Game Night after all.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:11 PM on April 9, 2019


It's been long enough since this episode aired that my impressions have gotten kind of fuzzy already. I do remember wondering if Mary was going to die because they seemed to be having an awful lot of "moments" with her and the boys. They were really telegraphing their punches there.

I was surprised to see Jo back, and as kind of a good guy now. The last time we saw her, wasn't she having a falling out with Lucifer in heaven? That whole plot just seemed to end without a lot of closure.

Jack clearly seems off but he still doesn't seem evil or even that different really. It's more like he's having issues with impulse control. He took a little too long frying Nick but he had a fair point that Nick was really, really bad and Nick was in the middle of bringing Lucifer back. I'm not sure if Nick is gone for good but I suspect that Mary's not. More likely Jack just wished her off to the cornfield someplace. But we shall see. Lucifer is definitely coming back, and I imagine that the Inky Entity will have something to say about that.

It's looking like Michael really is dead. What a weird arc that character had. He wasn't scary for the longest time, then he got really scary in a hurry, then he got offed by Jack like it was nothing and Dean didn't even have to go in the box under the sea! This season has been all over the place, and since they've only got a few episodes left I'm not sure if they have time to make sense of all this.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 7:33 PM on April 10, 2019


Yeah, I'm finding this season exasperating. It's just a bunch of random stuff happening, or seeming like it's going to happen and then not happening. I was left with the impression that they stopped Lucifer from coming back but that would be stupidly anticlimactic, so you're probably right that he's coming after all. (Maybe that's in a preview I haven't seen.)

I'm still wondering what happened to Garth and Kaia and alt-Charlie and alt-Bobby and Ketch.

One interesting thing we saw in the episode before this one was that Cas apparently lives at the bunker now. I always wondered why he didn't and where he was and what he was doing when he wasn't there (which seemed to be most of the time.) But the way Sam and Dean talked about him having left last time, it was clear that they saw it as unexpected.
posted by Redstart at 8:46 PM on April 10, 2019


Yeah, I'm finding this season exasperating. It's just a bunch of random stuff happening, or seeming like it's going to happen and then not happening.

It seems like with both this season and the previous season, the overall story arc has been really muddled, but this season is definitely doing an even worse job than the previous one.

I really hope that both Nick and Lucifer are gone for good. Unfortunately, the show seems to really love both Lucifer and Mark Pellegrino, but I'm super tired of both characters.

I do think they seemed to be heavily foreshadowing killing off Mary, although it wouldn't be the first time the show has acted like she was killed off screen only to have her actually be alive. Actually, that whole final scene with Mary and Jack was frustrating, because Mary had just seen Jack brutally kill Nick, and Jack was clearly about to lose it, and I feel like Mary is smart enough that she should know the smart thing is just to say whatever Jack needs to hear until she can get out of there. She was with Jack in Apocalypse World, so she knows how powerful he can be.
posted by litera scripta manet at 10:53 AM on April 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


I think she was trying to not upset him with saying how much she cares and that he's family, but she didn't want to lie to him like she's done with the Winchesters, like this is her chance to raise a third son right.

I think the writers set off too many branching stories last season and tried their best to tie them together this season, with an eye that the show will just keep going. Now that we know they're wrapping up next season, maybe we'll see a more cohesive final one.

I'm in the camp that I don't think Lucifer is gone for good, but I also want him to be, since it's a huge breathing room to give to the show and allow all the other plots to finish up next season.

Like the promise that the Empty made to Castiel is a good twist for next season while Jack being the mcguffin big bad.
posted by numaner at 1:37 PM on April 12, 2019


Trivia:

- In 14.11 Damaged Goods, Sam tells Nick he can "burn" for all the death and pain he's caused. In this episode, Jack kills Nick by burning him alive, from the inside out.
- Mary says Mouse Trap!, the board game, is Dean's favorite game when he was a child.
- It is revealed that God is the only one that can restore a soul.
- Nick: "Come on, Sam. Nobody stays dead anymore. You know that." A meta reference to the fact that many long-thought-dead characters have made reappearances on Supernatural in recent seasons. Also, it references the fact that characters in general tend not to stay dead.
posted by numaner at 2:17 PM on April 12, 2019


Quote

Mary: [as she and Jack prepare snacks in the bunker kitchen] Do you think we have enough?
Dean: [yelling from the library] Son of a bitch!
Mary: What --
Jack: I thought this was supposed to relax him.
Mary: Um, it will... I hope.

Trivia

Thallium sounds like an exotic (and possibly radioactive) poison but it used to be commonly available as rat poison. The tasteless and water soluble salts of thallium were so frequently used to murder elderly relatives that it was called "inheritance powder".

The number on the house that Mary and Dean run into is 216, which is 6×6×6.

In the game Mouse Trap, you are supposed to put the trap pieces on the board AS you play, not have it already set up as Dean does at the beginning of the episode.

The title of this episode is "Game Night". At first that seems to refer to the actual fun family game night that the Winchesters are trying to have at the start: Dean is setting up Mouse Trap, Mary and Jack are making popcorn, and Sam is on his way with pizza. Of course, their game night is cancelled by Donatello's distress call. However, the end of the episode circles back to the "game" theme, when Dean tells his injured brother, "We're just gonna play a little game. We're gonna count," as a way to keep Sam from succumbing to his head injury, suggesting that any "games" the Winchesters play will always be deadly serious.

In "Mamma Mia" (ep. 12.2), Mary says to Sam, "You're looking at me like I'm gonna explode". In this episode, she actually does, on an atomic level.

When Dean and Mary enter Donatello's home, both of their guns are cocked. Dean's model 1911 pistol is carried that way. Yet when they encounter Nick, a gun cocking sound is heard. This same error takes place a few minutes later when Dean pulls in Nick.

Sam says that the voicemail from Donatello is "ancient Hebrew" and identifies it as from 1 Peter 5:8. However, 1 Peter was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew.
posted by orange swan at 10:28 AM on March 31, 2022


Was that the Samulet that Castiel found in the pawnshop?

Why couldn't Jack read Nick's mind and find out where Donatello was and what he'd done to him and what his plan was? Castiel can do that sort of thing and Jack is far more powerful than Castiel.

I'm shaking my head over how inept everyone is at keeping Nick physically under control. He's just one human being, albeit a large one who is apparently skilled in personal combat. Though I'll give the Winchesters a pass on not realizing he'd secreted a blade in his arm wound. That was extreme.

Mary really should have kept away from Jack as he was telling her to when he was clearly losing it. She was basically trying to calm down a nuclear bomb.

Pretty cool effect with Nick's twisted hands, and Jack whispering "Mary?" after the final fade to black was chilling.

I wish this episode were the last we'll see of Mark Pellegrino, but he's in three more episodes after this one.
posted by orange swan at 10:30 AM on March 31, 2022


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