Quick Take: Supernatural, "The Slice Girls"
It's like the world's longest birth control PSA.
Review: Supernatural, “The Slice Girls”
(S0713) First, we need to take a moment to lament this episode title. Titles are important. They are an introduction and in a way, they are an epilogue. They are the frame that holds everything in place and sometimes they form part of the question that is gradually answered during the course of a story. I recently saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and going into the film having not read the book beforehand, I was very curious about the meaning behind the title. The revelation is a great little “aha” moment near the end of the movie and something that genuinely adds to the overall appeal of it.
So lets talk about “The Slice Girls” and why it makes me want to find those old Spice Girls cassettes that I know are stashed in a shoebox in my mother's hoarder house somewhere and burn them in effigy. This week, Dean knocks up an Amazonian warrior because we haven’t seen Jensen Ackles take his shirt off in almost three seasons. (Nice abs, bro. You’ve been working out.) The resultant spawn reaches her teens in a mere three days and, as a rite of passage, must ritualistically murder Daddy Dean by chopping off his appendages and carving a symbol of the goddess Harmonia into his chest.
Clearly, the title is meant to evoke some idea of perky teenage girls with knife fetishes, but really, it just makes me think of orange sodapop. When you consider that the previous titles considered for this episode were Amazon.com and Knocked Up, one can’t help but wonder if maybe the writers should have stopped when they realized that there is no title for this episode that won’t be terrible.
Remember when Supernatural titled its episodes after awesome rock songs like Dark Side of the Moon and Houses of the Holy? Or when the titles were nods toward classic films like The Usual Suspects and The Magnificent Seven? Or even when they were just simple and elegant, the likes of Home and Faith, evocative of an episode’s underlying theme.
This problem has been building for the last two seasons, with the likes of such nosebleed inducing fare as Mannequin 3: The Reckoning, and Season Seven, Time for a Wedding! which still sends me into a spiral of hate-rage whenever I see it. Interestingly enough, the episodes with the worst titles, seem to also be the episodes with the worst plots. I guess it’s only fitting that ugly pictures get ugly frames.
Now, to be fair, in the master list of god awful Supernatural episodes, The Slice Girls will probably land near the bottom because title aside, its not horrible so much as it’s just boring. The overarching plot for the season isn’t advanced at all, the Leviathan fleetingly mentioned, mostly just to remind us of why Dean is so eagerly chugging his way toward liver failure. There was never any question that Dean’s supernatural offspring would be a corpse by the end of the episode and the big question as to who would pull the trigger was irrelevant because either way, Dean was going to angst over it.
The high point of the episode for me was actually another possible ghost Bobby sighting when a pile of Bobby’s papers inexplicably moves to reveal a helpful bit of Amazonian lore. Of course, the juxtaposition of a ritualistic murder over Dean’s one night stand, set to AC/DC’s “Shook me All Night Long” is worth an honorable mention.
