Supernatural, Three Men and a Baby

I will give Supernaturalkudos and love for this: I don't know who is right and who is wrong regarding Lucifer's (Mark Pellegrino) monster baby. Is the little bastard truly a new and just god that the world desperately needs to be born with all of his special angel powers intact? Or is he just playing everyone in a calculating bid for self-preservation? My money is on self-preservation, but that hunch is based on how jaded this series has made me over the years and the fact that I want Kelly Kline (Courtney Ford) to be wrong as payback for being such a dimwit this entire season.

Angels and demons alike have repeatedly told this woman that her precious little monster is destined to kill her and burn the world to the ground. He. Was. Fathered. By. SATAN. This is the plot of more horror movies than anyone has time to count but sure, Kelly, your little fetus of horrors saves your life -- and by extension HIS LIFE -- and shows you a bright and happy future for humanity with the freaky powers he inherited from Lucifer, and suddenly we have a modern Jesus on our hands.

Whatever, Kelly.

Kelly, at least, has an excuse. She's human and not a terribly bright one at that. Pregnancy is weird even when you aren't carrying the literal spawn of Satan, and then there are the doors for a good old fashioned pro/anti-choice debate that Supernatural has somehow managed to avoid straying too far into during this entire storyline that add a whole extra layer to this cheesy nonsense burrito. Kelly gets a pass because as painful as it has been watching her revel in obliviousness for the past several months, she is, again, only human, and the idea of living the plot of Rosemary's Baby wasn't on her radar when she thought she was just banging her boss instead of the devil himself.

There are no excuses for Castiel (Misha Collins).

I know, I know. Season 12 has been all about establishing Castiel's lack of self-esteem and his great and terrible aimlessness and all the baggage that comes with betraying Heaven's ranks and getting all of his friends and family killed and finally dealing with an infinite lifetime of following orders and endless trauma. Castiel is fragile and confused and it's all just SO BEAUTIFUL because after a literal decade of dealing with Winchester angst, we are finally paying attention to Cas... except we did that, in Seasons 6, 7, and 8, when Castiel was feeling blue and decided to suck down a bunch of Leviathan, elevate himself to a better breed of god, betray Dean, break Sam's brain, disappear for awhile, and then pay for all of his sins by doing time in a psych ward and actual literal Purgatory.

This isn't new territory. We aren't covering new ground. For as much as I generally dislike the British Men of Letters stuff (and appreciated the break from their doom and gloom this week), that's at least something that the show hasn't really done before in any other form. With a little tweaking, it could actually be an interesting and not-entirely-WTF story. Castiel feeling bad about himself and making some bad decisions because of it is not new. Castiel and the Winchesters disagreeing about how to save the world from the latest flavor of the apocalypse is not new, though Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) spend so little time actually doing anything this season that it's hard to tell what Dean and Sam actually feel about anything at the moment. That whole harebrained "let's just suck all the grace out of the baby when it's born so that it's just a regular human baby and everyone lives" plan felt so contrived, just to remind us that Sam is The Brainy One, and the grace-extraction plot was, honestly, kind of silly the first time around and didn't work, even on a giant manly moose with a masochistic streak like Sam. Tell us more about how it was going to miraculously work on a newborn full of archangel grace?

I guess it would have and could still, since this season has been all about the miraculous cures for all manner of supernatural woes suddenly and inexplicably working for the Winchesters even though they've never ever worked for anyone else ever in the entirety of history. This is why we aren't allowed to have nice things on this show anymore, like the Colt, which was unceremoniously melted after weeks of implication that it would be a big deal and a treasured link to when Supernatural knew what to do with itself.

Supernatural airs Thursdays at 8/7c on The CW.

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