Three Torches (Out of Five)
Warning: This review contains spoilers for the “Swap Meat” episode of Supernatural.
So Supernatural finally does a body-switching episode — and they mostly screwed it up.
I can’t help but compare it to last week’s episode set in the insane asylum, which I found to be an almost perfect combination of a great set-up, lots of witty dialogue, and a central emotional conflict that tied in with the over-arching characterizations and themes of the series.
This episode had the great set-up: a teenage geek dabbling in witchcraft manages to switch his body with studly Sam’s. But apart from that pretty great opening scene in a bar (where Sam orders a banana daiquiri, paper umbrella and all), the stabs at humor were strained and obvious (porn magazines hidden in his bedroom? Star Wars paraphernalia? Seriously?).
And the tie-in with Sam’s character was equally strained. Yeah, Sam’s family had a “plan” for him too — and Lucifer has a “plan” for him now.
But unlike “Sam, Uninterrupted,” the episode never went beyond the painfully obvious, thematically speaking.
But here’s the episode’s real weakness: it was a body-switching episode that didn’t allow the actors to switch bodies. When “Gary” becomes “Sam,” we see Sam in the mirror for a moment, but from then on, he’s played by the actor playing Gary. Likewise, with Sam.
This definitely doesn’t make sense within the mythos of the show: when a demon inhabits the body of a human, we don’t see the demon, right?
But far more importantly, the show lost a fantastic opportunity for Jared Padalecki to really show what he’s made of, actor-wise (and the kid too, who was admittedly terrific). Imagine the possibilities! We saw a hint of it in that wonderful opening scene.
I suspect they were worried about “confusing” the audience, so they dumbed it down. But they should have trusted their actors, who I absolutely think could’ve pulled it off — and would’ve made the episode a joy to watch.
Instead, it was just a by-the-numbers story, one that felt like I’d seen it a hundred times before — even a few times before on this particular show.
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An okay “filler” episode, but it had such an obvious set-up with Dean’s painful dialogue about wanting to be “part of a *real* family”.
The body-swapping was just lazy. Both Jared Padalecki (sp?) and the actor playing Gary seemed capable of playing the body-swapped roles just fine and it would have made the episode more enjoyable for me to have actually seen “Sam” and Dean together, especially the “drinking session”.
The evil (and stupid) kids angle was pretty dull (and an evil triumvirate of nerds has already been on “Buffy”). Still, looking forward to the next episode.
I guess every TV is somewhat hit-and-miss, isn’t it? It’s just so weird when a show like this that is usually so excellent lames out.
so does anyone notice when they were switching bodies back how it kind of looked like revenant from legend of the seeker the light part anyway
I think the word you are looking for to describe Sam is “Studly”, rather than “study.” I actually enjoyed the episode. I agree it wasn’t ground breaking or up to many of the best Supernatural episodes, but I laughed pretty hard a few times.
Thanks, fixed.