Criss Angel is a Douchebag

Season 4 Episode 12

“Criss Angel is a Douchebag”

                The episode begins with us seeing magicians, not wizards and witches but old masters of illusion. An old man who didn’t like that the younger generation is getting all the attention so he does an impossible escape trick. However, he succeeds in getting out of it but someone else dies the way he should have. He does this multiple times but the boys pick up that something is wrong and come to stop the “wizard”. However, they find out it was the magicians friend who was actually casting the magic, and in the end they get their “monster”.

                We saw a lot of magic in this episode in the sense of illusions, just like the ones we would see from actual magicians which was fun. However, to link it to actual magic there were tarot cards left at each of the victim’s bodies. Tarot cards have always been a link to the mystical in many parts of the world, so it was not surprising they were used in Supernatural to connect the magicians to the wizards. They have always been used to predict the future and look into the fate that lies in store for someone but instead in the episode they show the fate that had transpired. Of course the cards were left there beforehand, still they are not shown to the viewer until after the act had already taken place. The actual perpetrator wasn’t even a super powerful wizard just a man who was given a grimoire a multitude of years ago. Of course in the end the brothers got help from the old man that he was helping. They beat the bad guy but at what price for the old man. He lost his best friend and his other friend left because he could stand what he had done.

                However more so this episode was a good parallel to Sam and Dean’s situation. At the end of the episode the old magician says that he had to help kill his friend, his brother. The brothers try to justify it as it being the right thing to do. However, he questions if it was, if it was right of him to kill his “brother”. The parallel to the Winchesters is that Sam and Dean are also in this predicament. Sam has powers that can let him exorcise demons, but Dean considers them to not be human powers. The only thing he could mean by that is that they are “monster” powers. Is it the right thing to just kill all monsters? We’ve seen them let vampires go that weren’t killing people, Sam isn’t killing humans. At some point there will have to be a confrontation about what does and does not, a monster make. There was some backstory that came up as well. Sam wanted to be a magician and Dean thought the very concept of magicians was a slap in the face, an insult to the very work they do. They have to fight against real magic and seeing cheap parlor tricks did not make him very happy. It would have been interesting to see child Sam and Dean having an argument about that.