I've only watched a couple of episodes of Supernatural, but it sounds like a heck of a lot happened in one season.

Heh, really? I actually got the opposite impression, but that's what happens when you condense a season into fifteen seconds.

Nutty -- I agree with you.

And yeah, JDM needs to stay out of hospitals while appearing in dramatic series.

Sail - you can Netflix or otherwise rent or buy the first season on dvd.

Yeah, see, I thought is was going to be another MotW kind of show. Now it turns out it's all about family. Which is much more interesting because then the monsters are the family itself. Fun!

Oh, it really was a Monster of the Week show for a long time, with little bits and pieces about the family arc. Then, end of the season, lots of family, NSM with the random monster action. I full expect the early-middle of this season to return to the random monsters, and maybe some new iteration of family will come up again in spring Sweeps.

(Not that there are a lot of physical candidates for "new iteration of family," but, on this show, it's a long time after you're dead before you have to stop guest-starring.)

I think Kripke said that there would be less arc in the beginning -- but the brothers' relationship is the glue to me and that is always there.

Although it's a tactical mistake for Sam to have refused to kill his father, it was a decision that supported the familial political situation going on. If Sam had done it, Dean would never have forgiven him, and the family would have been destroyed. (Presuming Dean would have survived, which is a shaky presumption to go with.)

Well, if Sam had shot his father, the car accident wouldn't have happened and Dean's life wouldn't have been on the line like it was in this episode.

I do agree that Dean probably wouldn't have forgiven Sam for shooting their dad, though he would have pretended he was okay with, since it was an "order". Which, yeah, would have destroyed the family.

Well, if Sam had shot his father, the car accident wouldn't have happened and Dean's life wouldn't have been on the line like it was in this episode.

This isn't so -- the injuries the doctor recites (presumably the ones that have Dean teetering on the edge) are liver and kidney damage. If Marble-Eyed John had been squishing Dean from the inside, then he would be likely to go into organ failure and die whether or not a car accident happened.

(One presumes that Dean was seat-belted in, and he was on the side away from the truck, so he probably got whiplash and some glass cuts, maybe a fractured wrist, but the insides-squishing was what was going to kill him.)

For someone reason I thought it was the head trauma the doctor was emphasizing.

Eh. I don't remember and it's not like I hated the episode, so I'm just going to let it go.

You might be right about the head trauma -- I vaguely recall having heard the phrase. I think my bullshit meter kicked in, however, because from where he was in the car, there doesn't seem like anything he could have banged his head against hard enough! (The window he was leaning against wasn't broken.)