Supernatural: Patience

Posted by: Kyle Tetarenko  •  October 27, 2017 @ 12:10am

Filed under: Recaps & Reviews

When a monster feeds on the brains of psychics, an old friend will put herself in harm's way to protect her family.

After a psychic is found dead inside of her shop, Dean gets a call from Missouri Moseley to meet in Omaha, Nebraska. Sam suggests that they send Jody to handle it while they watch Jack but Dean refuses to babysit and let Jody take all of the risk. Instead, he leaves Sam at the bunker to babysit while he goes to help. After arriving, Dean, Moseley and Jody investigate the psychic shop where Moseley receives a vision. They confirm that the monster is a wraith and hunting psychics to feed on them. Unfortunately, that wasn't the only thing that she saw in her vision. Missouri saw her family, slaughtered by the wraith. She calls her son to warn him but he doesn't believe her due to their already strained relationship. Instead, she sends Dean and Jody to go to Georgia and save them, leaving her behind only to die that night when the wraith comes for her; just as she saw in her vision. Back at the bunker, Sam is trying to train Jack to control his powers but is not having any luck. Jack feels like his powers are connected evil and is afraid to become the monster that Dean desperately wants to kill. It's not easy but Sam is there for him. Back in Georgia, Dean and Jody arrive in time to see Missouri's family, hopefully they can convince them of the danger before it's too late.

Overall, Patience had a lot of good moments that revisited some key memories of the Winchesters that long-time fans of Supernatural were bound to enjoy. Though it mostly fell into the monster of the week category, Patience moved beyond that by bringing Missouri Moseley back, a character all the way back from season one's episode, Home. Missouri had ties to John Winchester and was a welcome face but Patience didn't quiet use the character to the potential that she had. To start, the episode began with the death of Missouri's psychic friend, Dede, and that did little to serve the overall story. If Missouri's death scene had been the opening of the show, that would have had a far greater impact. From there, Patience could have started with a mystery of why Missouri was killed and gotten the story started with how she predicted her own death and left subsequent clues to Dean and Jody to protect her family. If this had been tied into Patience's psychic ability in the process, this would have further reinforced the abilities that Patience now had. While I understand the desire to give Missouri Moseley more screen time, her death didn't quite push the story further along than what was already done.

While it didn't detract from the story as much as other elements, the odd direction choices did distract from the overall quality. Robert Singer's use of zoom in the tense moments made undercut the scenes they were meant to serve and came across and jarring and cheesy rather than suspenseful. Add that to how many times the wraith monster was standing there with his wrist blade and it looks more like a 1980s slasher flick. I'm not sure if the impact he was supposed to have was to be like Freddy or Jason but it wasn't good.

A surprising highlight of the season so far is still the relationship between Jack and Sam. Sam sees himself in Jack and remembers how he was the freak, the one that his father said should be killed and was only going to be evil. He sees the good in Jack and the struggle that he went through when he was younger when he thought he would be a monster himself. The dichotomous viewpoints between him and Dean further add to this in a strong, emotional way. Dean sees Jack as a monster that needs to be put down while Sam wants to prove that people can choose to be good and deny evil. It's a theme that Supernatural used to entwined with but hasn't been there for a long time.

Patience had some misses but overall, it was a good episode with a focus on family, good and evil. We'll see what happens next week in The Big Emprty.

Tags: Supernatural, Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki

Related Posts

• Supernatural: A Farewell
• Supernatural: Carry On
• Supernatural: Inherit the Earth
• Supernatural: Despair
• Supernatural: Unity

Comments Posted ()