'Sacrifice' -- SPN 8x23

Warning Spoiler Alert

Well, at least one thing that I was fairly certain would happen (or in this case not happen) was Kripked instead of Jossed. I didn't see there being any way for the boys to actually close the gates of Hell by the end of the season, not when there was another season coming. Cuz if they closed up Hell, it didn't seem like there would be enough filler for an entire season (even with the run-of-the-mill boogeymen or angels roaming around and causing trouble). It seemed like they would still need to have the demons around to cause a stink, since that's the show's bread and butter (and as Dean said, fighting demons is what they do).

Was rather disappointed that Metatron turned out to be the ultimate baddie for the season, since I love the idea of using Metatron as a helper (or even as someone who would be willing to fight a bit, even if that isn't necessarily what he was originally created for ... whether we're saying that he was originally Enoch, or was originally from the secretarial pool). In my head, he's got a mixture of SPN did with Gabriel/Loki (where he wasn't necessarily a fighter, but he still stood up to Lucifer to protect the boys) and what Kevin Smith did with Metatron in Dogma.

I'll also freely admit that I still have a bit of a hard time believing that Naomi would have jumped ship on what she was doing previously to warn Castiel about Metatron. After all of the shady things that she's done to Cas and the boys, and always giving the impression that she was trying to trick the boys so that she could use them (or even kill them) later on, her leaving Metatron alone to warn Cas seemed a bit out of character to me. And she ended up feeling like a tool to me, which I didn't care for. I was hoping that she would turn out to be a little more ... competent? ... menacing? ... and a little less of a masochist for the sake of having an angel that seemed to enjoy hurting people. She kind of reminded me of Alistair in a way, and I'd love it if someone did a meta comparing the two of them.

I'd still love to know exactly who the shadowy figure was that we saw in the first episode. Were we supposed to think that it was Don? I have a feeling that we could always handwave that figure into being Don, but I have more of a feeling that the figure was part of a plot thread that the writers either forgot about, or dropped and just didn't bother to go back and explain.

Also in the WTH? category ... when did Mama Tran die? Did I just completely black out or something? I mean, that's entirely possible, but ... I don't see how I could have forgotten something as important as that ... especially after remembering how odd it was that she hadn't tried to find Kevin after he was kidnapped by Crowley. Someone ... please ... tell me that I'm just forgetting something and that isn't one of those times when the writers just threw in a statement about how something happened like we should have remembered it when they never did anything about it in the first place.