Season 10 Episode 6 – “Ask Jeeves”

Supernatural does an episode with more than a few nods to the classic game Cluedo -or Clue to my U.S. etc readers- and tries to keep the tone light after the comedy heavy 200th episode last week. It should be noted that there is a real Supernatural edition of this game, I couldn’t review this episode without giving it a mention.

I was kind of on board with having another comedy episode directly after the 200th outing because it was nice to be reminded of the ability Supernatural has to make their audience laugh and keeping it light for another week wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Unfortunately this episode doesn’t work for me and just comes across as being lazy for the most part.

I almost felt like this episode was originally supposed to come before the 200th episode as none of the character development was present here. It was clear in “Fan Fiction” that Sam and Dean ended that episode with a far stronger connection than they started but you wouldn’t know that by watching this episode. Any conversations they do have are played for laughs or are entirely superficial. They are also back to the hiding things from each other thing which I really can’t be bothered with after 10 years of this back in forth. We all know how it’ll end up so why spin it out over the course of several tiresome conversations in a variety of episodes?

The Lacroix family were a bunch of walking stereotypes which I suppose was the point to enhance the comedy of the situation but I don’t think the episode succeeded in making this extended joke land in any memorable way. Some laughs were found in the older sisters having the hots for Sam mostly due to Padalecki’s priceless reactions. The man knows how to throw an expression that never fails to provoke a chuckle or two.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a shapeshifter on this show so I was glad to see one of my favourite monsters revisited. Her motivations for attacking her mother’s siblings made sense and were strong enough but as with the rest of the episode I found it to be too over the top. At least it was believable that Bobby would let her live as long as she remains locked up, something that’s very in keeping with the fan favourite character.

There was an odd twist moment where Dean fired too many shots into the already dead shapeshifter which caused Sam to be rightly concerned and question it. Dean dismisses it as just making sure considering how rusty he is but this moment throws up a number of questions. Is Dean being affected by the Mark of Cain? Is Dean still a Demon? The discussion Sam and Dean have doesn’t lend anything interesting to the episode but the question of why Dean did this is by far the most interesting part.