not before unnecessarily angsting up his relationship with Bobby, which was clearly of the friendly bickering sort in this episode
During that exchange where they were doing the "Thanks Bobby, I owe you" / "No, I still owe you more" / "Well add this to the list" (paraphrased, obviously), I found myself waiting for the angst that we saw in their last similar interlude and it was nowhere to be found. (You know, the implied "you killed my wife and I'll never ever forgive you for it" part of that episode.)
I haven't seen as much fic as I was expecting to explain that. I didn't get that he killed his wife, but rather that she died/was exposed to jeopardy through Bobby's oversight.
Speaking from my own experience of such adamant REPRESS REPRESS REPRESS or else I'll go mad, I can see Rufus operating superficially on a friendly level. Fuck, life goes on, shit needs doing, these are the people you got. And it's all good, just so long as you don't ask, don't talk about it. Never Mention It. But if you do, the untapped depth of emotion that can boil up --it's debilitating.
Granted, my experience doesn't come close to "you are responsible in some way for my significant other dying", but on a lesser level, I see the real potential for a dichotomy of interacting with a person that you hate/are angry-with-on-a-fundamental-level.
I almost see it as a Ellen/John relationship, if we ever got to see that. Colleagues, allies, seeming friends, but a well of bad feeling lurking.
I regret Rufus's death, but I think it was well done. So I don't think he was wasted except as a colloquialism. Not in the Supernatural universe.
I think Bobby and Rufus had a surface-level version of what Dean claimed at the end of the episode. They had to do life or death stuff together, and they trusted each other with their lives, but there was that thing. And Rufus was still mad. But that didn't mean Rufus didn't trust Bobby from here on in, and that he didn't have a reasonably good time with him.
Secondary, and tertiary, characters are fine, and I love it when they're nicely fleshed out, but in this kind of show, you have to keep focus. It's not ER where you can have endless characters and storylines floating around.
I felt his death was essentially gilding the lily... we'd already had the shocking deaths of two supporting characters in the episode, one sympathetic and one who'd been fairly important to the Winchesters (more so than Rufus, actually). I think that should have sufficed.
What I didn't like was how they staged his death. It had to be part of a narrative trick to fake us out about whether Bobby was dead. It had a whiff off "Don't worry, only Rufus died."
Random bits from the Jus In Bello convention so far:
- Misha's mother had his brother hid weed in his underpants
- Misha got arrested in a bank robbery for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (reading a book on the roof)
Misha's going to need to write a comprehensive memoir one day, I think.
