Dean and Castiel pretend to be FBI agents while trying to find God, though they make time to visit the local whorehouse. Sam feels guilty for starting the apocalypse and getting addicted to blood and spends some quality time with his dead girlfriend, who turns out to be Lucifer,  in between working as a busboy and setting a barmaid’s heart aflutter by being tall, dark, handsome stranger with a mysterious past.

“Free to be You and Me” picks up pretty much directly from where “Good God, Y’all!”, last week’s episode,left off. Accidentally starting the apocalypse being apparently too much for even the brothers Winchester, they divided their massive amounts of psychological baggage between them and went their separate ways. This has been a long time coming, and I must applaud the show for sticking to it. It makes for uncomfortable viewing, and it certainly has their fans in a tizzy, but glossing over it would cheapen the story immeasurably. Since it’s dealing primarily with that, this episode is understandably not the most rocking, but it still works well. One one level, the episode highlights their separation and emphasizes their success. But subtextually, it constantly undermines that premise and reveals it to be false, proving that this show does not always resort to beating its viewers over the head with 2×4s to get its message across (yay!).

Sam’s half of the episode is actually the easiest to sum up, for all that its moodiness.  He’s feeling just awful about the whole apocalypse and demon-blood addiction thing, so he’s hitch-hiked out to the middle of nowhere from his demons, both figurative and literal (and really, if he’d ever watched “Courage the Cowardly Dog,” he’d realize why this was doomed to failure.) He finds work as a busboy at a bar, where he catches the eye of a beautiful blonde barmaid by being tall, dark, and handsome and a mysterious stranger to boot. He goes around feeling guilty, flinching a bit whenever people say things like, “It’s like the end of the world out there, sheesh.” The barmaid spends every opportunity trying to solve the mystery of “Keith”, somehow managing to preface her interrogations with phrases like ‘I don’t mean to pry.’ She also gives him a pep talk about beating your (figurative) demons and how he can turn his life around and find forgiveness. Sadly, she misses her opportunity to say, “Whatever you did, it’s not like it’s the end of the world.” It all goes wrong, however, when Sam notices some demonic and apocalyptic omens and calls Bobby to tell him that someone should take care of it. Bobby is less than sympathetic with the wallowing and angst, but sends in some people to deal with the situation. Of course, for some reason he sends total idiots, who within not five minutes of arriving manage to blow Sam’s cover and also gets the pretty barmaid thinking they’re all mafia hitmen or something. But they soon leave, only to get their asses handed to them pretty damn fast. They return to the bar with the most idiotic plan ever: having heard about Sam’s role in the apocalypse, they’ve decided to force him to drink demon blood by taking the pretty barmaid hostage so that he’ll go all incredible hulk and kill all the demons for them. Yes. I’m kind of sorry that the show passed on the opportunity to make a “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” joke. Instead, they first showed Sam getting his ass handed to him (boo), but they made up for it by having him shortly after kick the crap out of the other guys. Shortly thereafter, we randomly cut back to the story the show started with: Sam having meaningful conversations with his dead girlfriend, who’s a bit bitchy, and who is revealed to actually be Lucifer. (Don’t you hate when that happens?) With this comes the reveal that Sam destiny is to (open the gates to hell) (lead a demon army) (stop the apocalypse) (start the apocalypse) be Lucifer’s one true vessel. Which really would be a bummer, but he seems happy to finally have something really easy and obvious to rebel against; Lucifer needs his consent, after all. And “Just Say No” really worked out for him earlier in the bar, so you have to suspect he’s feeling a teensy bit relieved that that’s all averting his destiny will take. Still, as this episode ended, you have to wonder what happened with the barmaid. She seemed pretty freaked, and booking it out of town might seem the logical next step for Sam, but he seemed to indicate he meant to hang around for a while longer, so…yeah. The transition between the two story lines was not the smoothest.

While all that’s going on, Castiel shows up in Dean’s hotel room to let him know he’s got a lead on the archangel Raphael (incidentally, the one who smote him and thereby inducted Castiel as a member of the fast-growing “Alive Again” club on this show), and he needs Dean’s help. Castiel thinks Raphael will know where Castiel can find God, so they go to see if they can find Raphael’s abandoned vessel, because apparently he’s like an direct phone line to the archangel and all they have to do is know how to dial (I’m not even paraphrasing there.) No, seriously. I’ve got a running list in my head of things to support my theory that the writers all sit around and get drunk (and/or stoned) to generate ideas, leaving one sole writer sober in order to turn the crazy into awesome. This is definitely going on that list.

Anyway, in between tracking Raphael (or at least his vessel) down, Dean and Castiel give some team bonding a try: Dean makes Castiel ride in the car, he drags him along on his investigation, and takes him to a whorehouse.  There are a lot of amusing moments concerning Castiel’s complete incomprehension of how the normal world works. The people behind the show undoubtedly thank their lucky stars that they managed to find someone as talented as Misha Collins to fill the role, for it’s the gravitas tempered with earnest naivety he brings to these scenes that really make them work.

This is the half of the story, however, that really begins to feel off in subtle ways. Dean’s always waiting a beat and half too long for responses that don’t happen, and his punchlines fall flat because Castiel doesn’t understand the references. Castiel’s attempts to emulate Dean (“you’re my little bitch now,”) are equally stilted (if still funny). These are characters who are reading from slightly different scripts. Kudos must go to the actors for maintaining that element of misfiring chemistry. These are characters who aren’t quite on the same page; they’re projecting different people and different relationships on to each other, and it doesn’t quite click.

In the end, they do manage to find Raphael, and they trap him in a magic fiery circle and proceed to ask him where God is hiding. After some bluster and some exploding windows and blacking out the entire eastern seaboard, he gets a bit teary eyed and tells them he just misses his daddy and thinks he must be dead, especially because of how awful the 20th century was. Now granted, the 20th century sucked, but obviously the archangel has a very short memory, because the 19th century was also full of suckitude, as was every century preceding it. But let’s move past that into the real issue here, shall we?

I’m talking of course of the daddy issues. I’m getting a bit tired of daddy issues, and I can’t be the only one.  In retrospect, the earlier line about “This entire industry runs on absent fathers,” seems more like an apology.  Plus remember my earlier comments about subtlety? This is where the show reverts to the 2×4. It jumps up and down and says, “Hey! Hey! Do you see!  Did you notice?! See the parallels? God’s totally like John Winchester! We’ve only made this comparison about ten million times! Maybe we’re being too subtle here. Let’s get a neon sign next time, what do you think?” Bad show, bad. You were doing so well.

Next week looks pretty exciting. Looks like we’re going back to the future. Fun stuff.