I really think the witch's head should have blown off as soon as he tapped into Sam and Dean's psyches.

Ditto! If I'd written this episode, he would have been all "Now scream as I reach into your minds to confront you with your worst memor—AHHHHHHHHHHMAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOP!!!1!"

This is another one co-written by Bob Singer's wife. Her episodes always have sex in them, and most of them seem weak and/or vaguely icky to me. See Dean's curiosity about bestiality. He does have some tact, you know? He's also not a complete fool. I don't like the way she writes him. Well, she and her writing partner. Not sure if it's the same one all the time.

Are we talking about pre-"Apointment in Samarra" or post-?

I'm talking about the Sam (avec soul) that tells Cas he can't hug him because it would be awkward. It has only come up once, right?

It didn't occur to me that the witch was stopping to see what they saw in their heads until you said so--I thought he was just unleashing the ugly stuff they had going on. And I love that Hell isn't enough for Dean. It was only 30 years of torture, that's nothing now.

Both boys felt a bit off to me--why would Sam walk up to a suspicious noise without a drawn weapon? I may have bought more of the Dean than you did, Amy. He's frank about sex, and he did not respect either of them much at the time. But in general there were too many voiced thoughts--Dean's inability to go undercover in the witch bar--he must have gone under with people he found suspicious or untrustworthy before. That was painful to watch, and if you're going to name the cat THE CAT (I don't care if Dean doesn't speak that much French--I do--do all the feline familiars share the same surname, or are there some El Gatos too?) having him not be able to work out he's having an allergic reaction to one is pretty dense.

It didn't occur to me that the witch was stopping to see what they saw in their heads until you said so--I thought he was just unleashing the ugly stuff they had going on.

I suppose that's possible, but I'd think if you're mucking around in people's heads to find their traumas you'd have to have some awareness of what it is you're stumbling over. Like, at least on the level of "how can there be a terrabyte file in the Bad Memories folder of a 200 GB drive?"

Plus, it just occurred to me that it's odd Sam still has his memories from the Cage. If Cas didn't transfer that experience to himself and leave Sam blissfully free of the details, wouldn't they still be incapacitating the latter?

My interpretation was that he yanked the door open labelled Trauma without looking inside. It's pretty vague, but he had his familiar to kill and his friend to frame for it--he was swamped. In my watch, anyway.

Did Cas get memories of Hell? I know he had a little Lucifer, but again, in the variability of how people process things, I thought he took the stink of Lucifer himself off, not the events. That's the magic of calling it "the problem", I guess. They can pretend they meant anything, since their metaphysics is holey to the core already.

I might not be as open-minded as I should be but ewww. I don't know that I am okay with sexytimes with Familiars. I guess human form does the consent part?

Christian Campbell's eyes show so little white, every time the camera pans to him I think momentarily that he's possessed.

He looked like a possessed Ryan Reynolds the whole time to me. I mean, not in a bad way.

Did Cas get memories of Hell? I know he had a little Lucifer, but again, in the variability of how people process things, I thought he took the stink of Lucifer himself off, not the events. That's the magic of calling it "the problem", I guess. They can pretend they meant anything, since their metaphysics is holey to the core already.

I don't think they've said explicitly, but as most of the PTSD effects could be offset by putting up a block around Sam's memories and it was portrayed as the later recollection of those memories that was killing him, I assume they had to go as a package deal with the resultant trauma for Sam to get better.

But they had the whole bit where he was re-integrating his different selves, at which point they were really indistinct about what was killing him, since Hallucifer was very much in the here and now of his brain, and they didn't show him having flashbacks that were driving him nuts.

I'm not saying that my interpretation is solid--just that for one reason or another they've been so vague it's hard for me to know if they're contradicting themselves.

for one reason or another they've been so vague it's hard for me to know if they're contradicting themselves

I was reading a blog about writing this morning, and the author was talking about reading and writing with your humanist brain as opposed to your critical brain, and I very much watch this show with my humanist brain.

Because there are so many holes -- if Dean's body was dead and still present when he went to hell, how come Sam and Adam's bodies disappeared? They clearly didn't need to be in the cage to be tortured, since physical!Sam was topside for a year while his soul was being hate-banged.

That's just one. If I think too hard about the memories or demons' ever evolving powers or even Azazel's plan (which was no plan at all, imo), I get angry and then I have stop and go to my happy place.

So I just don't think too hard about those parts. But I get that other people do, and have to.