Review

Office worker Madison and her girl pals are enjoying a quiet bevvie or two after work in a San Francisco bar. Madison’s boss hits on her but is good natured enough to handle her brush off and accept a cab Madison had already ordered him. An ominous note is struck when Madison notes her ex-boyfriend Kurt is in the same bar and watching her intently. The next morning Madison is making coffee in the office, wonder if my female office workmates need to catch this show, when she notes there’s something strange in her boss’s office. That would be something strange in terms of blood stains and one demised boss who looks like he went a round with Freddy Krueger.

Sam and Dean show up in San Francisco after reports of a number of bodies turning up with their hearts ripped out. Hey, drop in your very own “I left my heart in San Francisco” joke here. Dean is as happy as Carrie at a fifth avenue shoe sale over hunting down a lycan, Sam is somewhat less enthused. Naturally this all leads to the Winchester Bros firstly guarding Madison from a werewolf, then having to defend themselves from a werewolf, before discovering Madison is also a wolf in sheep’s clothing. A pretty emotional episode ensues. Ready to go howl at the moon? (Actually always wanted to say that in context).

Director Manners goes all out in this episode and nails a storyline that quite frankly wouldn’t be amiss in a major Hollywood production. We get angles from left, right, and freaking centre. Some truly gnarly werewolf points of view. And if I’m not completely off the mark, multiple tint colours going down. Manners shoots like he is making a possible breakout hit movie and keeps it up from opening scene to closing credits. The only slight issue I had was with some overheads during city shots; they seemed slightly out of place for a television episode. Maybe something to do with relative expectations though, so I simply passed this one back to the keeper and called no foul on it. What should be noted is Manners knows when to go with the crazed angles, the action parts, and when to go with the standard three points of view, the dramatic parts. The Director is throwing on a story here and he means to count coup with it.

Backing the Director to the hilt are the special effects crew who turn on some top notch effects in Heart. Besides some well believable bodies, all ripped and torn, we get creature morphing that is some of the best I’ve seen, and the usual post production shenanigans that add just that extra touch of class.

Of course, a good Director and crew is all very well but you also need a decent script to be going on with. With Heart, Supernatural regular Sera Gamble turns in one of the best scripts of the second season if not the best script of the franchise thus far. At one stage I was worried that Gamble had maybe dropped the ball with Madison clearly going to turn out to be a werewolf, but this isn’t the surprise or shock result Gamble is after. In fact the writer has far different fish to fry and delivers an emotional roller coaster ride to delight female fans of the series. So pretty much for the first half of the episode we get the action and gore content, sort of the Dean stuff to keep male devotees of the show happy, while in the second half we get the Sam touchy feely emotional side of things to keep female fans happy with life. It’s this surprise move in Heart that I think adds to the overall excellence of the episode; you simply aren’t expecting a lycan outing to resolve in quite this fashion.

A surprisingly strong emotional episode that avoids the trap of being overly sweet while exploring notions of good and evil in the individual

Of course, Sera Gamble is well aware that what gives each Supernatural episode its charm is the humour injected throughout. Gamble has Dean spouting the one liners and Sam gets a few licks in for good measure. The character of Madison is wonderfully developed, and in particular the notion that she is both unaware that she has a monthly lunar condition and being totally oblivious to the carnage she commits while baying at the moon. Excellent stuff. Special mention of Dean introducing himself and Sam to Madison as Detectives Landis and Dante respectively; both are names of Directors, of course, and more importantly both directors have delivered classic werewolf flicks in the past. So I’m a horror geek, go sue me or something, I dig this sort of self reference within the genre.

Gamble does reference one plot arc via dialling into the whole concept of whether or not Sam is turning to the darkside and what implication this might have for the brothers Winchester. Gamble focuses on what determines if someone is good or evil via the character of Madison. Because Madison is unaware of her lupine nature during the full moon, does this make her a good or evil entity? Clearly the Winchesters cannot allow Madison to prance about during the full moon, her darkside, but equally are they justified in ending her life when she clearly has no notion of that side? A real Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy there to be honest, and one that reflects directly on the question of Sam’s future prospect in the battle against the forces of evil. Special note here: the resolution of the Madison issue is perhaps the most emotionally charged scene yet in the Supernatural franchise’s history, and Director Manners hits it out of the park with how he films the required developments.

Emmanuelle Vaugier (Madison) is well cast as the sassy chick who has no idea of her dark side, comes to accept it slowly, and then decides on the only cause of action available to her. Vaugier plays well off Jared Padalecki (Sam) and there’s some real screen chemistry between the two.

Guess the central concept of the person who doesn’t know about their darkside has raised its shaggy head before, but I’m not calling any direct borrowings from other horror outings. It’s simply one of the tales in the tarot deck that gets an airing from time to time.

Mullet rock fans rejoice, finally an episode that goes all out on that rocking goodness. We get “Smoking Gun” by Kip Winger, Queensryche’s “Silent Lucidity”, “Look At You” from Screaming Trees, and the icing on the cake, “Down on the Street” by The Stooges. You really can’t ask for more … well okay, besides a Black Sabbath number.

Did I enjoy this episode, do lycans howl at the moon? Heart rocked the house down with its take no prisoners stance and ability to flip from one style of horror to another without missing a beat. I was seriously digging what Manners and Gamble laid on here and am simply demanding we get the duo back for an encore before the end of season two.

Of interest to possibly only five people in the known universe, Heart marks the first appearance by a werewolf in a Supernatural episode, though it could be argued that Wendigo (Season One, Episode Two) fits the fur coat. After the Writers’ strike, which ran for fourteen weeks and impacted season three, the Producers of Supernatural could be facing an Actors’ strike during season four, with SAG officials not ruling out action from Monday 30th June. Fingers crossed a new contract is signed between the Studios and SAG without the necessity of industrial action.

If you are a Supernatural fan then Heart is must-watch stuff and is perhaps thus far the best episode of the second season. For those that dial in on a piecemeal basis then don’t miss this episode, and finally for the dozen or so people who have never seen an episode then this might just be the one to catch. You don’t need to know much about the background of any of the characters, though it does help explain a couple of things, the episode can be watched as a stand alone. With Heart, director Manners puts more bite into Supernatural than one might have expected.