Playthings
Original
Airdate: Jan 18th, 2007
After
what I thought was a decent, albeit weak in some aspects,
return to our favorite series with last week’s Hunted,
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Playthings.
Let me start off by saying that if Hunted left
me wanting more, Playthings left me feeling happy
and completely sated. I even smoked a cigarette after. Just
kidding. But this was a high-grade episode, and I’m
going to tell you why. So here comes the recap:
What
great episode is lacking the pre-title card slaying of at
least one poor, unsuspecting soul? Not this one. Here we
see an unfortunate Goodwill worker coming to cart some old
toys out of a closing inn in Connecticut. Like all good
inns in Connecticut should be, the place is big, old and
creepy, a perfect background for the Winchesters to play
in. After an odd exchange between the young mother and purveyor
of the inn and her two young daughters, the younger daughter
is off to play with a dollhouse, an equally creepy replica
of the inn itself. A doll takes a mysterious tumble down
the dollhouse stairs, and sure enough, the incident is replicated
in the real inn shortly after, with the Goodwill worker
falling and breaking his neck. Possessed dollhouse? Evil
doll? The theories begin.
Cut
to Dean and Sam in their usual digs, a crappy looking motel
room, where we see that Sam has been doing his best the
past month to track down Ava, the psy-kid who vanished at
the end of Hunted, leaving only her engagement
ring and a pinch of sulfur behind. He appears ready to give
it a rest at this point though, and tells Dean about a new
case- the inn in Connecticut- that he’s heard about
from Ellen. So helpful, that Ellen. So after a funny moment
where Dean essentially tells Sam he is acting far too well-adjusted
for his comfort, they’re off. Once they’ve checked
into the inn and been mistaken for a gay couple a few times,
the mystery begins. Who carved the hoodoo five-point into
the banister and vase? The creepy old grandma in the attic
that we can’t visit because she is sick, perhaps?
When the brothers explore the inn’s playroom, filled
to the hilt with dolls, they discover the dollhouse and
the miniaturized staircase accident. Sam questions and is
told by the younger daughter that she and her sister ‘found
it that way’. So… dollhouse, again? Or, evil
little girls? Then there is another death, a hanging in
one of the rooms, and another smaller hanging in the dollhouse.
After Dean consoles the young mother, he returns to he and
Sam’s room to find his little brother in a very bad
way. There are a few tense seconds before it’s revealed
that Sam is simply drunker then he’s probably ever
been, and it becomes shortly clear that, despite a strong
front, he isn’t handling the revelation about his
potential destiny, or the loss of Ava to the demon, very
well at all. After ranting about how the more people he
saves, the safer he is from becoming a monster, he as much
as begs Dean to watch out for him, and makes him
promise that he will do as their Dad asked and kill him
if he ever starts to change. Dean promises, puts him to
bed and that seems to be the end of that. The next day,
hung-over Sam and Dean- relieved that Sam seems to have
forgotten about the unpleasant promise- break into the sick
grandmother’s attic, discover she’s had a stroke
and thereby can’t be working any hoodoo, and are promptly
found and thrown out by the young mother. The brothers don’t
go far, of course, and Sam saves the young woman before
she can become the next victim of the… um, whatever
it is. We still don’t know yet. Until Dean reveals
to the understandably freaked out woman that it is definitely
a spirit, as evidenced by the manner of her attempted murder-
a car driving itself. She tells them the grandmother had
her stroke right before the first death, and we determine
that the hoodoo she worked was in fact repelling
a spirit. One that has now got loose and gone haywire. It
is then, when asked about her daughters’ whereabouts,
we find out that she has only one child, the youngest one.
So the other little girl was our spirit all along, the daughter’s
imaginary friend Maggie- the same name as the grandmothers
sister who died as a child in the inn’s pool. Currently
she is trying to kill the daughter in order to keep her
playmate from leaving the house to which her spirit is confined.
Sam makes his second rescue of the day when he bravely pulls
the little girl from the pool where she is drowning (though
a bit slow on the CPR-uptake, if I may say). The spirit
is gone. Called to the attic by the close-to-death grandmother,
the reunited siblings make a deal to allow the living family
members leave the inn unharmed. The grandmother passes away,
and the ordeal is over. The final shot of the episode shows
us the grandmother, now a spirit as she was when she and
her sister were children, in the doll room with Maggie,
reunited and free to play together undisturbed. This, of
course, occurs after our weekly farewell to the Winchesters.
The last time we see them, after Dean reassures Sam of his
usefulness when it comes to saving lives, Sam tells Dean
that he remembers the promise he made to him, and the dark
cloud that seems to have lifted after a job-well-done has
once again descended on the Impala as they drive away.
So, all of that was hard to
remember, and I hope it made sense to you.
First,
and I don’t always say this, I thought Playthings
was beautifully filmed. Though I’m relatively sure
it was shot in Vancouver, whoever chose the location for
this episode did a great job of capturing the atmosphere
of a small town in Connecticut. The nature, and the inn
itself were spot on (I say this having grown up in Connecticut
myself). And the mystery was extremely well-written, the
kind great episodes are made of. We are given a dozen possibilities
of the cause of the supernatural occurrences here- the dolls,
the dollhouse, both of the little girls, the grandmother.
The weird old concierge-slash-bartender who first shows
Dean a photograph of the grandmother as a child with her
Creole nanny (which was kind of random- spoken as a New
Orleans resident for the last third of my life), the obvious
source of grandmother’s hoodoo skills. It isn’t
until it’s spelled out that we can be certain of the
source. Maybe I was just being slow, but I had
no idea that Maggie was ‘imaginary’, or rather
dead, until the end. But then again, I was fooled by the
Sixth Sense the first time… Anyway, the conclusion,
when the young mother hugs Sam warmly and thanks him for
giving her ‘everything’ is heartfelt, and bittersweet
considering poor Sam’s situation.
Spookier
even than the spirit, or any of her murderous activities,
was the scene in the middle of the episode between the brothers
that seemed to come out of nowhere. It was half-way through,
(we were all still laughing about Sam’s first drunken
remark- you’re bossy, and short), before
the severity of the situation set in. For the first time
since he was devastated by the news that not only may he
eventually be swayed to evil, but that his brother has been
charged with putting him down should this occur, we see
the weight of his destiny slowly crushing Sam. Through the
magic of alcohol, his defenses are down, and he finds himself
momentarily unable to pretend that this case is anything
other then what it is- a well-timed distraction. His naïve
insistence that he has to keep saving people to save himself
is desperate and sad, and when he begs Dean to kill him
it’s close to heartbreaking. For awhile, I’ve
been thinking about the double-meaning of John’s last
non-whispered words to Dean, watch out for Sammy,
as I’m sure a lot of fans have It seemed that the
brothers were resolved to believe that this simply meant
to take care of him as he always had, so I was glad when
Sam repeated the words here that he seemed to understand
them more completely. Not so much an order, as a warning.
So this was my favorite part of the episode. And the last
image of the Winchesters that we are left with reminds us
that whatever happens between now and then, whatever horrible
thing is coming is always in the front of their minds. Dean’s
profound relief when he thinks that Sam has forgotten his
promise to kill him is robbed by Sam, leaving him speechless
for once. Sam’s final expression as they drive away
tells us he isn’t alright with losing Ava, or with
anything.
So,
we got one great Winchester moment to remind us of the demon
plot, laid on top of a great story with nothing to do with
the demon plot. Now, just for fun, I would normally find
some things to nitpick about, but honestly, I can’t
think of anything. Playthings was not only of the
caliber we’ve come to expect from the series, but
a great hour of television in general. This was a pretty
short episode, but to me it felt long, which just proves
the adage of quality over quantity. The previews for next
week’s episode look promising too, and I just hope
that the rest of season two maintains the excellence of
Playthings as far as combining good-pacing with
scary one-shot stories (these will always be at the heart
of the series, after all) and little revelations about the
overall plot along the way. I can’t even think of
a sassy question to end this review with. Wait, I thought
of one.
Who wants to start placing
bets on how many more episodes Jared wears that cast for?
Added:
Jan 21st 2006
Reviewer:
Amber
D
