Episode Reivew - It's a Terrible Life
Supernatural Episode 417
In a surprising twist, the audience is taken from the end of the last episode, where Dean tells the angel Castiel that he refuses to be the savior of Earth, to a world where Dean is a sales director for a large company, hates rock music, and spends his free time trying to find the perfect detox diet. The viewer is left to try and figure out the mystery of this new reality as the episode progresses, making for a fun departure from the show's usual format.
Eric Kripke's Supernatural - "It's a Terrible Life" starring Jensen Ackles
Dean "Smith" seems happy with his life, but when Sam "Wessen," a tech support employee, stares at him in the elevator and asks if they know each other, Dean assumes he's being hit on and tries to ignore Sam, especially when Sam starts talking about the dreams he's had of the two of them fighting demons and vampires.
Once people start dying at work after paying a visit to the human resources department and Dean sees a ghost right after an employee kills himself, Dean can't help but talk to Sam and can't help but try to figure out what's going on, even though they know nothing about ghosts and figure they're crazy for even thinking they're real.
They find the ghost, and Dean is amazed to find that he instinctively knows how to fight it. Convinced that ghosts are real, the two do some research, and viewers are given a special treat: the return of the Ghost Facers, self-described paranormal investigators that constantly needed to be saved by Sam and Dean due to their gross lack of knowledge about the supernatural. Sam and Dean visit their website to learn the basics of how to fight ghosts, which is ironic, considering Sam and Dean were the ones to teach the Ghost Facers everything they knew about real ghosts.
Sam and Dean head out to fight the ghost, and are surprised (and totally psyched) when they're able to kill it. They decide that it might be something worth doing for a living, and Sam reveals that he had seen himself and Dean hunting ghosts in his dreams, and that their current lives might be fake. Dean rejects the idea and the two go back to work, but Sam can't help but quit, and Dean can't help but follow suit when his boss offers him a bonus. His boss (played quite well by Kurt Fuller) reveals himself to be the angel Zachariah, and tells Dean that the fake life was meant to show Dean that hunting is in his blood and he can't help but be who he was meant to be.
The Final Word On "It's a Terrible Life" starring Kurt Fuller
This is a really fun episode, and proves that Supernatural does best with a twist of comedy. It's a take on the classic "what your life could have been like" tale, and though it's not the first time this has happened on Supernatural (Dean had previously been shown a world in which he and his brother had never started hunting), the way it was set up was a nice way to confuse the audience at the beginning and not reveal the true cause of the mayhem until the very end. A well-rounded episode where excellent production and performances blend together.
Dean, Sales Director
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