Yeah, I'm even gonna take the slightly cringe episodes seriously, at least for my purposes of character analysis. And while the racist truck is basically a slow-motion car crash, so are my feelings for what is revealed about Dean in this episode.
Even with my sad Dean feels, a segment at the beginning of the episode I took to explain how I think of Death's role in the cosmic structure of the Supernatural universe, AND a long and slightly rambling story in the outro, this one still clocks in at under an hour. Totally not surprised, but it's also a weirdly a refreshing break for me! It's a lot easier to edit myself when I'm not concerned about how long the final product is going to be. :'D
Hopefully some of the background info on how this episode came to be in the first place might at least help others over the hurdle of looking too closely at the overall plot, and at least be able to take away some wonderful understanding of Dean's past and why he shields himself so much when it comes to opening up to and trusting people with the depth of his love for them.
Things I refer to in this episode include:
The Superwiki page for this episode
The full studio draft of the script for this episode
And even though there's only a few pages of posts there, my tag for this episode
Drive carefully! :D
