Supernatural: Hell's Angel

Filed under: Recaps & Reviews

What do you get when you have Lucifer and an object touched by the hand of God? Not much.

Never underestimate the resolve of a desperate man. That is exactly what Crowley did when he released a soul from its contract he made long ago after the man secured the Horn of Joshua; another hand of God relic. After having killed the man and gotten the horn, Crowley wants to make a deal with the Winchesters: they can have the horn as long as they use it to destroy Lucifer. Sam and Dean aren't liking that deal very much because they want to turn Lucifer loose on Amara because they think he has a shot at stopping her first. Eventually, they convince Crowley to put his ego aside and but they still had Rowena and the book of the damned the last time Lucifer got out of his cage. Elsewhere, Rowena is very much alive and helping Amara to recover from the angel smiting she suffered several weeks back. Siding with the latest superpower seems like a good idea until she understand that Amara's power is something else entirely and she may not have made the best choice. She sends a quick distress call to Crowley and agrees to help them in their trap for Lucifer but, of course, that doesn't go as well as planned. Lucifer is more powerful than what the boys are used to handling and Castiel is doing nothing to hold him back. Crowley enters Lucifer's body and tries to plead with Castiel but he seems too oblivious to even care. Eventually Lucifer gets free and takes the Horn of Joshua from the boys. He planned to kill them but then Amara shows up, fully powered and ready for the face-off between God's sister and his fallen son.

Though it had all the makings of an exciting episode, Hell's Angel's lack of focus and poor pacing prevented the show from being great. After a solid start in Saudi Arabia, Crowley was quick to make a deal with the Winchesters but his desire for revenge on Lucifer wasn't allowing him to see the bigger picture. After that, the shifting focus between the three of them, Lucifer and Amara started to mess with the pacing too much. The Winchesters were setting a trap for Lucifer with the King of Hell but as soon as things got interesting, the show shifted to Amara recovering with the help of Rowena and then to Lucifer in heaven. It's all one big story but the three were quite separate from one another and Lucifer's time in heaven didn't go anywhere during the episode so it just felt like it was taking away from the other two.

As far as surprises go, it was definitely a surprise to see the return of Rowena. While her surprise will definitely shake a few things up for the remainder of the season, I wish that they didn't completely reveal how she survived in this episode. Doing so in a later episode would have kept the mystery for a later time and taken up less time in an already packed episode. Ideally, the episode would have spent more time with Crowley in Castiel's head, trying to convince him that he needed to expel Lucifer and ultimately failing which would make Castiel appear more lost that we previously thought.

Speaking of Castiel and Lucifer, it's become easy to forget how good Misha Collins is as Castiel since his dull turn as Lucifer. Collins doesn't walk the fine line between charming and utterly menacing the way that Mark Pellegrino does and his take on Lucifer just comes across as goofy. Besides a similar smirk that Pellegrino sometimes used, Collins never comes across as rebellious archangel in the role but more like a powerful child that people don't want to upset.

All in all, Hell's Angel did a lot to further to the plot but rushed the big moments before the episode could hit its stride. It looks like Supernatural will take another break from the war between Amara and God when it returns on April 27th with The Chitters.

Tags: Supernatural, Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki, Castiel, Misha Collins, Mark Pellegrino

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