A show like Supernatural tends to have a lot of darkness. Innocent people get killed by the boat load per episode, and the main drama revolves around making the heroes suffer as much as possible. At times the darkness can seem to have almost fetishistically excessive, however this wasn’t the case with Unforgiven. As dark as it got, I’ll go as far as to say this was one of their better episodes in a while.
Sam and Dean return to Bristol, Rhode Island, a town where Sam and Grandpa Samuel worked a case during Sam’s soulless year. Though Dean argues that they should avoid revisiting a town, Sam feels they need to set things right. Skeletons start to come out of the closet for Sam as it turns out that this job is a set up. While hunting a spider monster called an arachne a year earlier, soulless Sam’s action are ruthless and cold blooded. He makes friends with the town sheriff only to use him as bait for the monster. He doesn’t try to save the victims instead shoots them to put them out of their misery. When he leaves the deputy tries to stop him and he beats him into a comma. Though at the time his actions seem more efficient to him, and he saved lives, he caused more suffering and actually created more monsters. Kind, ensouled Sam isn’t just person, but a better hunter. The sheriff long believed dead comes back. Now a spider monster, he turns Sam’s former girlfriends into monsters all to torture our hero. As the title suggests, the younger of the Winchester brothers remains unforgiven.
Like I said this episode gets very dark, but it works in this case. Sam says that he knows trying to recover his false memories is dangerous but he does so anyway. The character could get self pitying, or whiny but instead he gets proactive. It might destroy him to remember, but he has to set the wrong things right . He’d rather loose his mind than his soul. That’s why the darkness works in this episode. The shadows don’t exist to destroy our humanity. They exist for light to shine through. For everything our hero has been through, he remains a good person. When he does remember being tormented by Lucifer in hell maybe it’s this strength of character that will allow Sammy to recover. Jared Padalecki plays the two versions of himself extremely well, and is able to solicit sympathy for his character without being melodramatic.
Another thing that this episode did was touch well, was briefly touch upon the idea that monsters are growing their ranks. In “Like a Virgin” the brothers are shocked to hear that they’re facing dragons. Most people think they’re only stories. No one has faced an arachne within the last 2000 years. Combined with a dozen or so new spider creatures around, vampires trying to create an army of blood suckers, and shape shifters breading with people to grow their ranks I’m beginning to think that a supernatural war is on the horizon. Are these random monsters about because Mother has escaped Purgatory?
On a scale of 1 to Epic, (Epic= 10) I’d give it a 8.7