Supernatural 9.20 "Bloodlines" Review: The Monster Mafia

    This week’s episode of Supernatural, “Bloodlines,” was written by Andrew Dabb and directed by Robert Singer. The episode is a “planted pilot” for a potential spinoff series. The spinoff has not yet been picked up by the CW and its fate will, no doubt, be decided by the ratings for the episode. The episode was shot in Chicago which is where it is set.

    The episode was better than I’d anticipated it being, but it still lacked the basic components that really attracted me to Supernatural. I was initially attracted to Supernatural not because it was a monster show but because it was a supernatural show that was shot in a dark and creepy way and that generally had good mysteries around its interesting supernatural monsters. While there were werewolves and vampires and ghosts, it wasn’t your typical vampire show. I was interested in the mysteries not the romances.

    That said, there are a number of rather heavy-handed similarities between “Bloodlines” and Supernatural. Ennis (Lucien Laviscount) loses his fiancé (Erinn Westbrook) and that sets him on the road to hunting the supernatural – anybody else immediately think of Jessica? And of course, at the end of the episode he gets a mysterious call from his supposedly dead father? Will the first season be Ennis trying to find his father by any chance? I did think it a bit funny that Ennis is introduced to the “hunter’s wall” by the person they are hunting  - Marv (Gardiner Millar) - rather than an actual hunter. It’s also rather amusing that the “monster” is actually a human pretending to be a human monster from a horror film – Freddy Kreuger.

    I still have a great deal of trouble with how the basic concept actually fits into the Supernatural universe. Dabb has never been particularly interested in following canon, however. So we have the entire city of Chicago divided up and run by monster families. They even have their own bar. Yet somehow, this has never made it on to even one hunter’s radar? While we’re talking about canon – whatever happened to shapeshifters actually having to shed their skin to shift?

    Instead of having two brothers at the center of the story – and this episode was very light indeed on Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) – we have two pairs of brother/sisters: David (Nathaniel Buzolic) and Margo (Danielle Savre) the shifters and Julian (Sean Faris) and Violet (Melissa Roxburgh). We already see that these relationships are fraught with sibling angst. Margo says she’s happy to have David back when she clearly sees him as an inconvenience to her running the family and the shifters. We know that Violet is merely a pawn to be used by her family. She tells David that she’s only a “bitch” – clearly meaning female dog in this instance, and indicating that women are considered to be less than men in werewolf society. Given Supernatural’s fraught relationship with women viewers over their treatment of women, it is nice to see them tackling issues at both ends of the spectrum here.

    Having the Romeo and Juliet parallel between Violet and David with a heavy dose of we must keep the bloodlines pure, doesn’t really interest me. Having her keep it a secret from David that she didn’t meet him in Union Station because his brother threatened her, was a stupid secret to keep and becomes an even stupider secret when Sal (Bryce Johnson) ends up dead. Why continue to keep the secret when the person who threatened you is now dead? Well, they can continue to be star-crossed lovers. I did, however, really appreciate Dean calling David Romeo and David giving it right back to Dean by calling him Buffy – after all, Dean had just saved Ennis from a vampire!

    Even though Sam warns Ennis that if he gets in too deep, he’ll never be able to get back out – a clear indication that Sam feels that he has sunk into the tar pits of hunting and no longer has a chance to get out – it’s clear that Ennis is going to keep hunting. Dabb had indicated that David and Ennis are destined to be partners, so no doubt, David will need to keep the monster families from going to war and will end up working with Ennis to bring down anyone or anything threatening the monster families.

    We didn’t see much of Savre or Faris. My impression is that they have the potential to create interesting characters. Faris, however, reminded me somewhat strikingly of Tom Cruise. The “old man” of the show is Stephen Martines (Freddy Costa). Costa also does a good job establishing this character. Roxburgh does a good job, and I should perhaps attribute my lack of high praise to her to the fact that I don’t like the subservience of her character. She does do a good job with the emotional scenes that she’s asked to handle.

    This brings us to our two leads. I wasn’t familiar with either of them prior to this episode. Buzolic is really excellent and puts in a particularly strong performance. He has the emotional range to deliver the comedy but also knocks the drama out of the park. He’s even got the one perfect tear down! Laviscount, on the other hand, failed to impress me, and I don’t believe he’s got the talent needed to carry a show as the primary lead.

    I will say that the VFX team really delivered in this episode. I loved all the effects associated with Marv’s blade glove having talons of silver. I especially liked the shot of Marv drawing the blade down Violet’s cheek, leaving a smoking red mark that sizzled back to normal. Violet’s werewolf change was great – even if her leap on Marv was over dramatic. Really all the silver-sizzle moments were well done. Using the city of Chicago as a backdrop was great – but will the show actually shoot there? There are already a number of other shows that do shoot there and feature Chicago landmarks. The fact that the Chicago exteriors were clearly shot in March - cold and no leaves - and that there were other scenes shot outside that featured very leafy landscapes was a definite continuity problem for me. Something that always bothers me about Castle, actually, that is set in New York and shot in LA...

    The episode did nothing to advance the storyline of Supernatural. If you missed the episode, you won’t have missed anything important to that arc. Given how late we are in the season, and how many balls are in the air with only three episodes to go until the end of the season, I found this episode to be as frustrating as another week of repeats. I’m not sure that left me in the best possible frame of mind to view this episode. In addition, as a backdoor pilot, the episode had to pack in a lot of exposition and with so many characters that didn’t give it a lot of time to do justice to any of them.

    What did you think of the episode? Were you intrigued by this new wrinkle in the Supernatural universe or were you left struggling to buy it? Were you intrigued by any of these new characters? Most importantly, will you support the show and tune in if it does get picked up to series next season? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!