Season 5 Episode 1: "Sympathy For The Devil"

Supernatural Season 5 Episode 1

a.k.a Oh great the Angels are here!

Synopsis:

The Season 5 premiere picks up right where Season 4 ends.  Sam and Dean are still stuck and Lucifer's cage is opening.  Then mysteriously they are warped to a nearby plane that was just flying overhead.  We meet Nick and follow him through as Lucifer manipulates him into saying yes so he can use him as a vessel.  We also meet Becky, a Supernatural fangirl that Chuck task to give Sam and Dean a message about Michael's sword.  Figuring out that Michael's sword might be in one of their dad's storage units they rush there to find Zachariah.  It was then revealed then that Dean was Michael's sword.  His vessel.  

Review:

During a Season finale is when you usually get a resolution of some kind to the "big" problem the Winchesters faced during that Season.  At the end of Season 4, we didn't get that.  Instead we got a Season premiere that was no tasked with not only introducing the new problem for this Season, but also resolving some problems that were left unsolved in Season 4.  I believe that is why this episode is full of Deus ex Machina and while leaving Season 4 at such a cliffhanger was unique for Supernatural, I feel it really hurt this Season 5 premiere. When you use not only one but three moment of Deus ex Machina, it sets an odd tone for the rest of the season.  The first moment of Deus ex Machina was right at the beginning when Sam and Dean were flashed to a nearby plane and out of harms's way.  The next moment was when Sam realized that his Demon Blood addiction was magically cured and the final moment was towards the end when Castiel comes back from the dead and reveals that God was responsible for the plane, the cure, and him being alive.  Deus ex Machina literally translates to "God from the machine" when it was used in Greek tragedies when a god would come down and just fix everyone's problems.  In this episode we get a literal deus ex machina.  God came down and fixed everyone's problem and there was no prior indication that God would do something like that.  I am curious though if this was intentional.  Because it seems so literal, I wonder if the writer's used God to solve these problems knowing it was deus ex machina.

Question/Concerns:
Like I mentioned earlier I am very curious if the writers purposely wrote these solutions as deus ex machina to use God as the solution.  Part of me hopes so because the other option would be lazy writing and using spontaneous and random solutions to fix problems in a show that is constantly introducing new problems doesn't bode well for the show.