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Supernatural – Clap Your Hands If You Believe…

This week’s Supernatural takes a break from heaven’s civil war and monsters rallying for battle to take a comedic viewpoint on alien abductions. This new outing also brings a spiffy X-Files inspired intro. The show has always seemed to take some inspiration from X-Files and this is probably their most direct reference yet. There hasn’t been much comedy this season due to the mysterious and dark nature of it, so this episode was a welcomed change. Going from one of your main characters not having a soul to an episode that’s supposed to be funny isn’t an easy task, but Sam not hiding his now heartless nature does lead to some laughs.

As the brothers investigate the source of kidnappings that are being blamed on alien abductions, Dean is captured. Nonchalant Sam spends a few hours looking for him, but once he’s out of the leads he does what anyone else in his situation would do… he bangs a hippie chick. Sam does show some worry for Dean by telling him to watch out for probes while he’s being chased. It’s nice to see the show is getting back to a more even approach between the brothers. Other than the last two episodes, it’s mainly been Dean’s show. Clap Your Hands If You Believe... has the duality of Sam’s adjusting to life plotline and Dean’s mini-vendetta against his captors. Whether Dean suffered any prodding or serviced any kings remains ambiguous, but he is uncharacteristically on edge for most of the episode.


The reveal that the alien abductions were really done by faeries wasn’t a surprise because of the CW marketing department. They seem to not like for fans of  the show to be surprised, since between this spoiler and saying Sam didn’t have a soul in a promo several episodes ago, they’ve already hurt two pretty good twists. Of course, the chances of aliens existing were already slim to none. In reality, aliens existing seems more plausible than many of the creatures on this show, but adding aliens would make the show sci-fi, which is a road they probably shouldn’t travel. It is interesting to see how far down the fantasy rabbit hole Supernatural will go. The beginning of this season has already introduced purgatory, alpha demons, and now faeries that have subspecies like trolls, leprechauns, and several races others with their own dimension. Perhaps that said dimension is related to purgatory. The leprechaun talking about Lucifer, angels, and god with no fear could show how powerful they are… or maybe he’s just a really good salesman.


While soulless Sam is interesting, I can’t see that lasting for a long time, since he lacks variety and emotion. Of course, there could be added conflict if he decides to stop listening to Dean or if he decides he doesn’t want his soul back anymore. Dean isn’t exactly doing a great job on selling him the reasons why he should want it back. I will somewhat agree with Dean that your soul, or perhaps we should say emotion, does lead to suffering, which should also lead to growth, happiness, etc but that isn’t very good advertisement for someone in Sam’s shoes. This season already has multiple plotlines that are grand, so the Sam looking for his soul adventure hopefully won’t last all season. Since Sam has been in the cage this whole time with Lucifer and Michael, there is probably going to be some residual damage to him once he comes back. Dean was only in hell for months our time and Sam has been there for over a year. This wasn’t a very deep episode, but that’s one of the reasons it works so well. It expands the mythology, develops the brothers’ new relationship, and has a nice change of pace by being lighthearted. It looks like things are going back serious in the next episode, but we’ll have to wait two weeks to see it.  
Rating
8.5

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