Supernatural: Drag Me Away (From You)
October 22, 2020 6:43 PM - Season 15, Episode 16 - Subscribe
Sam and Dean are asked to investigate the murder of a childhood friend, calling them back to a motel from their past and perplexing the brothers with a case they thought was solved long ago.
Reactions to this one seem pretty mixed but I liked it. People are saying this will be the last MOTW episode (sob!) and I guess it'll also probably be the last time we get to visit with the baby Winchester boys. I thought Baba Yaga was legit scary, and you throw in some creepy stuff with Billie to move along the big arc and I'd say this was pretty solid. (I am still not sold on the idea of Billie as a Winchester ally. I'm guessing she betrays them big-time, soon.)
I was glad they made a big point this time that secrets between the bros are BAD. These guys made themselves miserable for several seasons with BS secrets, and it's good to see that the Winchesters (and the writers) are finally beyond all that.
So, I'm a little confused about Chuck's endgame. He wants the Winchesters to kill each other to finish the story, and he wants to destroy all his "failed" Earths, but is he planning to destroy our Earth too? That would be the end of everything he'd created, and he'd have nothing to watch anymore!
The idea I floated in the thread for the previous episode, about Chuck and Amara re-merging into a more benevolent entity, seems so obvious to me that now I kind of doubt they'll do it. If I've learned anything in all my years of watching this show, it's that the fan theories are hardly ever right.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:16 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]
I was glad they made a big point this time that secrets between the bros are BAD. These guys made themselves miserable for several seasons with BS secrets, and it's good to see that the Winchesters (and the writers) are finally beyond all that.
So, I'm a little confused about Chuck's endgame. He wants the Winchesters to kill each other to finish the story, and he wants to destroy all his "failed" Earths, but is he planning to destroy our Earth too? That would be the end of everything he'd created, and he'd have nothing to watch anymore!
The idea I floated in the thread for the previous episode, about Chuck and Amara re-merging into a more benevolent entity, seems so obvious to me that now I kind of doubt they'll do it. If I've learned anything in all my years of watching this show, it's that the fan theories are hardly ever right.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:16 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]
I think in any other season I would have been fine with this episode, but with so little time left of the series it did feel frustratingly filler-y to spend so much screen-time with mini-Sam & Dean.
I don't know what to expect from the finale. I just hope they don't do something disastrously Battlestar Galactica/How I Met Your Mother unsatisfying. And that maybe the shutdown-hiatus gave them time to reconsider if the original plan was a show-killer finale.
posted by oh yeah! at 6:55 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]
I don't know what to expect from the finale. I just hope they don't do something disastrously Battlestar Galactica/How I Met Your Mother unsatisfying. And that maybe the shutdown-hiatus gave them time to reconsider if the original plan was a show-killer finale.
posted by oh yeah! at 6:55 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]
This still feels like a weird combination of playing the hits (I use the term generously) and burning off leftover story ideas. I had a second of being bummed wondering why they weren't using the usual mini Sam and Dean before I remembered, you know, how time works, and felt One Thousand years old.
It was just plot business, but "we should go to this funeral, we were invited, we never get to go to a real funeral" straight into "oh yeah sorry, the funeral was last week actually but can you kill something" was extremely funny to me.
I do kind of feel for Sam at the end there. Dean's not wrong that if Sam has all the information he'll argue and it might not change anything, but they've also learned the hard way many times why trying to control each other by withholding important information is dumb. (Though, playing that out--if everything went as planned and Jack died, Dean and Castiel would both know they'd let it happen and chosen not to tell Sam, which seems as poisonous a secret as I can think of. So maybe Billie egged him into it to tie up loose ends, or maybe Dean just thought like two steps further ahead than normal, maybe a little of both.)
posted by jameaterblues at 9:02 PM on October 25, 2020 [1 favorite]
It was just plot business, but "we should go to this funeral, we were invited, we never get to go to a real funeral" straight into "oh yeah sorry, the funeral was last week actually but can you kill something" was extremely funny to me.
I do kind of feel for Sam at the end there. Dean's not wrong that if Sam has all the information he'll argue and it might not change anything, but they've also learned the hard way many times why trying to control each other by withholding important information is dumb. (Though, playing that out--if everything went as planned and Jack died, Dean and Castiel would both know they'd let it happen and chosen not to tell Sam, which seems as poisonous a secret as I can think of. So maybe Billie egged him into it to tie up loose ends, or maybe Dean just thought like two steps further ahead than normal, maybe a little of both.)
posted by jameaterblues at 9:02 PM on October 25, 2020 [1 favorite]
Quotes
Dean: 'Cause I know my brother's going to ask -- do you have arugula salad or kale?
Waitress: We have iceberg lettuce, with ranch.
Dean: Good for you.
Trivia
Dean mentions Sam's imaginary friend who was revealed to be the zanna Sully (Nate Torrence) in "Just My Imagination" (ep. 11.8).
This is the second episode to feature an unfinished hunt from the brothers' past, the first being "Something Wicked" (ep. 1.18), involving a Shtriga, but it's the third episode to feature an unfinished hunt in general, the second being "Safe House" (ep. 11.), which involved a Soul Eater from Bobby's past.
In the flashbacks in this episode, Dean is almost 14 while Sam is 9. It is also two years after Sam learns the truth about "the family business" in "A Very Supernatural Christmas" (ep. 11.16).
The title of this episode is a reference to Toto's song "Africa". It may also be a reference to the song of the same name (from the album Automatisme Psychique) by Act Noir.
In 2017, the state of Texas passed a bill making it illegal to text and drive across the state. Jenson Ackles did TV and radio commercials talking about the new law.
In most of the Russian fairy tales about her, Baba Yaga is a witch who punishes bad children, not good ones. She usually lives in a house that stands on chicken legs, and travels in a mortar steered with a pestle.
posted by orange swan at 11:54 AM on June 17, 2022
Dean: 'Cause I know my brother's going to ask -- do you have arugula salad or kale?
Waitress: We have iceberg lettuce, with ranch.
Dean: Good for you.
Trivia
Dean mentions Sam's imaginary friend who was revealed to be the zanna Sully (Nate Torrence) in "Just My Imagination" (ep. 11.8).
This is the second episode to feature an unfinished hunt from the brothers' past, the first being "Something Wicked" (ep. 1.18), involving a Shtriga, but it's the third episode to feature an unfinished hunt in general, the second being "Safe House" (ep. 11.), which involved a Soul Eater from Bobby's past.
In the flashbacks in this episode, Dean is almost 14 while Sam is 9. It is also two years after Sam learns the truth about "the family business" in "A Very Supernatural Christmas" (ep. 11.16).
The title of this episode is a reference to Toto's song "Africa". It may also be a reference to the song of the same name (from the album Automatisme Psychique) by Act Noir.
In 2017, the state of Texas passed a bill making it illegal to text and drive across the state. Jenson Ackles did TV and radio commercials talking about the new law.
In most of the Russian fairy tales about her, Baba Yaga is a witch who punishes bad children, not good ones. She usually lives in a house that stands on chicken legs, and travels in a mortar steered with a pestle.
posted by orange swan at 11:54 AM on June 17, 2022
It was nice to get a final monster of the week episode as the final season winds down, but I do wish it had been better quality. We got another glimpse of Sam and Dean's childhood, and it's more of the same old, same old: the two of them on their own, whiling away time in some crappy motel, forming temporary connections whomever they happen to meet, and a mention of Sam's nascent college ambitions. There was one good sequence of nine-year-old Sam wistfully placing a dog-eared two-year-old college catalogue on his hotel room bed, and then unpacking the weaponry in his duffel bag onto the bed beside it. It is against all odds that he was ever able to win a full scholarship to Stanford. The two kids who played young Sam and Dean did have a reasonable resemblance to Ackles and Padalecki and did a decent job of inhabiting their characters.
I love Baba Yaga, but she deserved a better treatment than she got here.
The therapist who told Travis to face his fears because they weren't real steered him SO WRONG. I wonder how many therapists in the Supernatural universe unintentionally wind up fucking over their patients because they take the approach that their traumatic experiences with monsters weren't real. It's no wonder Dean has no use for therapy.
posted by orange swan at 12:05 PM on June 17, 2022
I love Baba Yaga, but she deserved a better treatment than she got here.
The therapist who told Travis to face his fears because they weren't real steered him SO WRONG. I wonder how many therapists in the Supernatural universe unintentionally wind up fucking over their patients because they take the approach that their traumatic experiences with monsters weren't real. It's no wonder Dean has no use for therapy.
posted by orange swan at 12:05 PM on June 17, 2022
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I hope the final four episodes really bring it.
posted by Ruki at 8:37 PM on October 23, 2020