Episode 7.03 The Girl Next Door

The trick to this one is to see everyone's perspective, or you end up hating someone in short order, and that is not what we're here for... >.>

While I like to stick to the watsonian perspective when I talk about the show, and I do in the episode, I want to mention the doylist perspective here for just a second. This one really feels like the assignment was "have Dean cross a line to show just how poorly he's coping" since so much of the first two episodes were about Sam's lack of touch with reality and the couple attempts they made to poke at Dean's mental state through everything were dismissed as unimportant in the face of the rest of their problems, even though it was clear that was a bald-faced lie at the time.

So this feels like an overcorrection on that front, using the unfortunate sequence of events and kind of almost glossing over Sam's Hallucifering, or showing us from Dean's perspective just how subtle it can look, as he does Mostly Okay from what WE see after the initial disconnect from reality in this episode. Yet it has Dean going so far off the rails that he's choosing murder as the safety net of protecting Sam from himself... and of course this will come back to bite him a lot, even into next season. And that I do get into during the episode.

But the writing choices here just lead to some of the emotional unevenness of the early part of s7, and I do find that mildly annoying. >.>

LINKS!

The Superwiki page (with additional links to interviews with Jensen about filming, under the Minutiae section)

My tag

Filming locations map

The Production Draft script, Blue Revisions, and Pink Revisions, plus the Second Unit Call Sheet

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