On the one hand, “Caged Heat” is a perfectly acceptable episode of Supernatural. Given the season we’ve had so far, I would happy to let perfectly acceptable see me through the season. On the other hand, it raises a couple of confusing questions. Metaphysical ones, to be sure, given Soulless Sammy, but also other, less spiritual questions like, “Can someone wash Dean’s mouth out with soap?”

Iridium Does an Alpha Bad

Crowley’s chained to a chair, being interrogating by . . . Soulless Sammy and Dean? Nope, Crowley. Seems he bagged himself an alpha. Alpha Shifter doesn’t know where purgatory is and doesn’t care if Crowley flays a nursery of his children to get the information he doesn’t have. Though iridium (not silver) works on him, even that’s not getting Crowley anywhere. So Crowley chops the alpha’s head off with a machete. Bye, Alpha!

I am sorry I didn’t get to this recap sooner, as it’s the first Season Six episode of Supernatural that isn’t Bobby- or Castiel-heavy that I loved. “Clap Your Hands if You Believe” actually starts out un-promisingly inasmuch as the X-Files rip will no doubt pale in comparison to the glory of “Changing Channels” and we already know that it’s not aliens, it’s faeries. On the other hand, how could Dean bellowing at Sam to “get those faeries” from the back of a black and white ever be a bad thing?

Let’s skip over most of the first twenty minutes, given what we know. Notable: Misha Collins’ credits only appearance and Soulless Sammy getting kind of hilariously angry at a lady who insists it isn’t aliens but faeries who have taken the fine citizens of Elwood, Indiana. Dean drags him off, and Soulless Sammy’s like, “What?” Dean: “Do you have to ask? Oh, you do have to ask.” Delusional Dean explains that the Sam of yore would have gifted the crazy lady with his Super Special Puppy Dog eyes. That hasn’t been true for years, and Dean admitted as much in “Jump the Shark,” but I can see how having Zombie Sam riding shotgun might have Dean wanting to return to a simpler, gentler, “too precious for this world” time. Soulless Sammy wonders if Dean wants him to fake having a soul. “Yes. Yes! Fake it. Fake it ‘til you make it.” And just like that, I love Dean again. Soulless Sammy points out that he was faking it before, and it was “exhausting” (how can you be exhausted yet not need sleep?).

Posing as journalists, Soulless Sammy and Dean question the Watchmaker, whose son was the first to get abducted. He’s suspicious enough that Soulless Sammy needs to be dragged off before he pulls out his daddy’s tools. Dean assigns Soulless Sammy to tail the Watchmaker while he investigates the crop circle where the abduction took place.

There are probably worse things that Supernatural could do (luxuriate in the ANGST like it used to, perhaps?), but why are we watching episodes as boring as last week's "All Dogs Go to Heaven"? When we know the show can give us "Weekend at Bobby's," why do they think we'll stand for this dog's breakfast?

In all honesty, an ep like "Dogs" isn't boring because it's poorly directed or written or acted or cast or anything of the sort. It's boring because it's wheel spinning. We see what appears to be werewolf attacks and eventually learn that they are the handiwork of a "skin walker," a human who can transform into the shape of a dog (or possibly any animal?) at will. Sam and Dean track down a Cujo who's actually broken his pack's rules by enacting vengeance on behalf of the family that took him in. Sam wants to follow the doggy all the way up to the top, snag the Alpha, and trade him for his soul, but Dean's still in his moralist snit about 1) working with Crowley (unlike, say, when they worked with him to save the damn world) and 2) not into handing over Alphas to be tortured. So in the end Sam and Dean take out the entire pack, save Lucky, our murderous dog from the opening who trots off down the road like The Littlest Hobo.

It has all the elements of a solid episode, but it ends up more or less giving us exactly what we got the week before in "Family Matters." Break it down:

The writers finally remembered that Lucifer woke up Capital-D Death in, oh, November, and comes after residents of Bobby's South Dakota home town in last night's entry, "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid." While initially lacking in the spectacular gore that made "My Bloody Valentine" so awesome (yes, awesome, even if it did make me mad), "Dead Men" was a Badass Bobby-centric episode, and who can argue against Jim Beaver?

See, Death has decided to wake up a bunch of corpses from the local cemetery, including Bobby's dead wife Karen (Carrie Anne Fleming and not Elizabeth Marleau from season three's "Dream a Little Dream of Me"), only they're more alive-again, Pushing Daisies-style, than the flesh-eating monsters we usually associate with rising from the grave. Actually, they go Daisies one better: the people, like Bobby's cremated wife, are completely restored. Of course, it takes our brainless* heroes forever to figure out what's up with Bobby, even after Dean suspects that Bobby has cleaned. Dudes, just look at Bobby's head: beard trimmed, trucker hat removed, hair parted and neatly combed. Something is just plain wrong with that picture. 

*As always, Dean and Sam are exactly as smart or a dumb as the episode needs them to be. It's consistently inconsistent.

As shows go, Supernatural requires greater suspension of disbelief than most. So long as you can pass muster, Supernatural is also a rewarding viewing experience. All we ask in return is that the show follows its own internal logic.

Unfortunately, it hasn't always done so. In the fourth episode of season one, Sam and Dean encounter a demon for the first time, but much of what we learned then about demons and how they operate didn't apply to Meg, her brother, or Azazel toward the end of the season. It was early days, so we could chalk it up to the writers figuring exactly where they were going with this whole "demon" thing (answer: down the rabbit hole).

Since those early bumps in the road, though, the show has been pretty careful to only deviate from its established rules when it's within reason, like when we learned that the Trickster is really the archangel Gabriel in the excellent episode "Changing Channels." Last night's episode, "My Bloody Valentine," however, decided to bite its thumb at us. 

If you live somewhere other than New York, L.A., or Toronto, January is a great time to go to the cinema. All the buzz movies you've heard about for the last few months are finally playing at a theatre near you. You can make time this weekend for Avatar, Brothers, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Precious, The Road, Sherlock Holmes, and The Young Victoria. I highly recommend the joyous Fantastic Mr. Fox and the beautifully romantic The Young Victoria.

If you're looking for something new to see, your options dwindle. Hollywood fare opening this weekend includes Daybreakers, about a vampire (Ethan Hawke) who searches to perfect a blood substitute or cure vampirism before the last humans die out, to feed your vampire addiction; Leap Year, where Amy Adams travels to Ireland to force her boyfriend into accepting her proposal, in case you kind of hate yourself; and Youth in Revolt, in which Michael Cera seeks to transform himself from adorable geek to rebellious sex god and which tried to use Old 97s in its trailer and on its website to manipulate me into taking an interest. 

Over at the Bytowne, you've got the goofy but middling The Men Who Stare at Goats, Colin Firth's guaranteed best actor nod A Single Man,  and Pedro Almodóvar latest Penélope Cruz venture, Broken Embraces.