I love Crowley. Not just because he’s played by Mark A. Sheppard, but it’s hard to believe the character would be anywhere near as enjoyable played by anyone else. A great part of what that actor brings to just about any role he’s performed is a certain level of irony and world-weariness, and it’s hard to imagine a series more in need of such a presence than the sometimes painfully earnest environs of Supernatural.
But if Sheppard’s Crowley is both of those things—and he absolutely is—then the storyline of his character this season is almost inexplicable. I mean, the whole, hanging out in a bar with Dean, drinking and singing karaoke was a stretch, but what we’ve seen since then is truly unbelievable and largely beneath the level of writing we’ve come to expect from the show.
In other words: Rowena—WTF?
The appearance of Rowena had a lot of potential. I mean, who wouldn’t want to know how exactly one becomes so twisted that they end up going from mortal to being the King of Hell. Sure we know part of the story, but learning his first steps along that path should have provided not only some great insight but a lot of fun. Instead, we have learned that it takes little more to push one over the evil edge than a neglectful Irish-Jewish mother.
Which, had the thing been handled in a way that made sense in relation to Sheppard’s character—with sharp, biting wit and a real edge of humanity—might have come off quite well. But as the last couple of episodes, “Paint It Black” and “Inside Man” have shown, that is not to be.
To begin with, most of the scenes with Rowena in them are just painfully bad. “Paint It Black” begins with one of Crowley’s minions coming to him to complain of abuse at the hands of Rowena: she’s given him a second face on the back of his head, one that talks. Must be a good story behind that one. And a particular point to that punishment, right?
Wrong. Aside from a lame joke with literally no context about the victim being two-faced, there’s nothing of the kind and the scene instead becomes yet another opportunity for her to bitch and moan about his mistreatment of her (“Why do anything but cause me more pain?”).
Look, it’s clear what her narrative purpose is supposed to be. Crowley and the Winchesters have gotten extremely chummy of late. If not friends, they are at least friendly, and thus those who should be natural enemies are instead uneasy allies. Fine for a season or two but strange for the long haul. Enter Rowena to shake things up. She comes in, assesses the situation, reminds her son what his position is (or should be), perhaps subtly poisons the well re: the Winchesters, provides Crowley with the companionship he has obviously been craving, and voila! Suddenly he’s a real player again, the balance of power is reset, and it’s a whole new game.
Instead, we, along with Crowley, have been saddled with a nagging, belittling, conniving, but ultimately transparent bitch with too petty an axe to grind. Even when her son capitulates to her demands and deliver into her hands the head of the coven who has forbidden her to practice magic (which, as he points out, has not slowed her down in the slightest) in order that she may “convince” the group to release her from that constraint, it’s still not enough to appease her. She discovers that the coven has not had power over her for quite some time and, in what feels for the first time less like fan homage and more like theft, turns her rival into a rat (shades of Buffy) as punishment.
Her confrontation with Olivette did, however, reveal to her that the Winchesters are related to the Men of Letters who evidently had custody of a lot of powerful magic. And just further cemented her desire to remove their influence from her son’s life.
Her attack on Dean in “Inside Man,” though, proves fairly fruitless on a personal level for her. It didn’t have to, of course. After all, she does learn that Dean is powerfully warded (and later from her son, in what way he is protected) which could be quite useful to her. But as is her style, she resorts to the most obvious and ridiculous of manipulations available to her, injuring herself and returning to Crowley playing up her wounds and expecting him to want to avenge her by punishing Dean.
If we were not so frustrated at her in general, we might laugh at the fact that Crowley seems to buy that Dean beat her up—he’s fallen for her little trick—but it’s made no difference whatsoever simply because he feels that she had it coming. After all, despite her protestations to the contrary, he is the King of Hell; he’s not likely to have a normal son’s reaction to seeing his mother bloodied and bruised (especially when it’s been intimated more than once that she might have been responsible for him being in a similar condition as a child).
The irony we’re so used to associating with Sheppard is not limited to just this, however. It turns out that Rowena gets her wish after all. She repeatedly tells her son that she is tired of him being a “colossal numbnuts” and that he must stand up and start acting like a monarch he is by asserting his power. That he might do so by kicking his own mother to the curb obviously never occurred to her, but it’s a far more compelling argument for him deserving the title of King of Hell than killing the Winchesters would be. Taking them out is too easy to read as simple survival. Exiling your own mum? Now that’s evil.
But at least it looks like Crowley has some of his fire back, so that’s good, even if it’s not particularly directed (despite his protestation to Rowena) at the brothers. So she has served at least a little of her narrative purpose. And of course, we are not, for a moment, supposed to believe that she’s about to walk off into the sunset. It’s clear that she will come into play around Dean, the Men of Letters, and the Mark of Cain again sometime in the not-so-distant future. In fact, with no other big bad revealed this season, it appears that she’s supposed to be it.
Which would be great if she had been built up to be an actual villain. But let’s face it. Everything she’s accomplished, she’s gotten done pretty much on accident. That’s not to say that such a villain cannot work. Done right, there would be great comic effect in a bad guy who always got what she wanted but never on purpose—one who literally fell into evil over and over. But unfortunately, while Rowena is often laughable, she’s rarely actually funny. Instead, she’s a thinly drawn stereotype with no discernable interior life or anything else to interest us.
This does not bode well for the remaining episodes this season. For the first time, I’m genuinely disappointed in the series.