From MadCap's Couch - Supernatural: "Fresh Blood"

The time has come for another vampire episode! In particular, an almost direct sequel to Bloodlust, Hunted, and to a lesser extent the previous Bad Day At Black Rock and Red Sky At Morning given the impetus for this episode. The last, epic battle of Gordon Walker, in life... and in death.

Let's get into it.

We begin with Bela Talbot having closed a deal and heading back to her car to be met by a vengeful Gordon Walker. Bela is notably worried when he introduces himself, but maintains a cool exterior even at gunpoint as Gordon demands to know where Sam and Dean are. They work out a deal for the mojo bag on Gordon's belt... something that I don't think ever gets mentioned again after this scene... and Bela calls up Dean rather gleefully.

Elsewhere, Sam and Dean are hunting down a vampire, saving a victim and then Dean facing off against a particularly thirsty-looking Harmony Kendall. No, it's just Mercedes McNab in a role as another vampire, but you just know the casting department was having fun with that one. After Dean uses his own blood to bait her in, then dosing her with a shot of Dead Man's Blood (a point we'll get back to later), the brothers interrogate her. She doesn't know anything about vampires or the like, apparently believing that she was given some kind of drug that she can't come down from. She gives them the name of a club, Spider, but blanks on the name of the man who gave her the blood. After revealing this, despite Sam lamenting the fact that they have to do so, Dean decapitates her off-screen.

Lauren Cohan actually does really good with the fear reaction here.
Gordon is bad news and Bela knows it.

Gordon and Kubrick have arrived onscene and speak to the victim that Sam and Dean saved, learning that the brothers are indeed there.

Sam and Dean head out to Spider, tailing the vampire once they find him and preventing him from turning another girl. Gordon and Kubrick show up and attempt to kill the brothers off with the cunning use of firearms. At one point, Dean runs at the line of fire as a distraction and the two manage to escape. Gordon and Kubrick split up to search for them and Gordon is attacked and rendered unconscious by the vampire.

Back at the motel, Sam calls Dean out for being reckless, but they are soon distracted with trying to figure out how Gordon's out of jail and more to the point how he found them. Dean puts two and two together and comes out with Bela being an ass. He calls her up, and she attempts to play it off... and Dean promises that the first thing he's going to do after they get out of this situation is kill her.

In a secluded warehouse, Gordon finds himself tied to a box spring and the vampire, Dixon, has two girls suspended by their wrists from the ceiling. He calls Gordon out on murdering vampires left and right, killing off his family and now that he'll finally get his chance to avenge his daughter and others from his nest that were murdered by hunters. Dixon at first wants to turn him into a meal for his new 'daughters', cutting Gordon's arm and then his own, bleeding into the man's open wound... as Gordon screams bloody murder in protest.

Back at the motel, Sam and Dean talk about the situation and Sam seems all too ready to kill Gordon outright given the situation. Dean seems impressed, though Jensen Ackles plays it with approval mixed with an undercurrent of mild worry. No doubt, Azazel's taunt is still very fresh in Dean's mind. Bela calls the boys with some information from a talking board, giving them Gordon's exact location. The spirit she spoke to also passed on a message for the boys: leave now, run like Hell, and don't go after Gordon.

Once more at the warehouse, Gordon wakes and attempts to adjust to his new senses, which are overwhelming him. There is an absolutely cold-blooded shot of Gordon's face after one of the two blondes pitifully begs him for help, and we'll see why it's cold-blooded in a moment. Once outside, Gordon finds the bright lights hurt him a great deal and attempts to avoid succumbing to his hunger before it consumes him... and he consumes a man changing his tire.

Sam and Dean arrive at the warehouse to find a distraught Dixon and two headless corpses, the two blondes that he had chained up earlier. Dixon puts up no fight, telling them what Gordon did and what he had done to Gordon. A little parallel here to Sam here as Dixon mentions having lost everyone and staring down an eternity alone. Then a little parallel to Dean as Dixon mentions not caring anymore... like he's already dead.

Sam inspects the bodies, finding that the heads weren't cut off - they were ripped off.

Sterling K. Brown is absolutely terrifying as Gordon.
You love to see it.

They realize that Dixon has turned Gordon into a creature of the night, a fact that Kubrick learns at his RV when Gordon arrives. Gordon makes a confession to him and while Gordon begs him to let him finish off Sam and then kill him, Kubrick ultimately cannot allow him to live and attempts to kill him... only for Gordon to kill him, though even Gordon for all of his deranged mania is clearly distraught at having to do so.

Back at the motel the next day, Dean and Sam have searched the city and found... nothing. Dean plans to go after Gordon with the Colt on his hands, but Sam calls Dean out on his kamikaze crap that he's been doing since he's made his deal. When Dean tries to flip it around on Sam, Sam calls him out on it. He's been watching Dean since he was four years old, studied him and followed him and wanting to be just like him. He knows Dean, better than Dean knows himself.

Dean is scared of going to Hell, laughing at the darkness to ignore for another second that it's there. Sam just wants him to drop it and be his brother again. This seems to get to Dean, and they change the plan to bunkering down and waiting the oncoming night out with some fortifications and some herbs. Day turns into night and the boys get a call on their new cell phones - Gordon. He draws them out using a victim he has taken, giving them an address to a factory where he wants to meet them. Dean attempts to appeal to his better nature, saying that Gordon is still a hunter and doesn't hurt innocent people. Gordon says that he isn't that anymore, he's a monster.

The boys get to the factory and save the victim, but Sam and Dean end up getting separated by a falling metal door, trapping Sam inside. The lights go out, and Sam and Gordon have a very Return of the Jedi-esque exchange. Since Gordon has been an evil villain from the jump, the monologuing isn't so much of a surprise. Sam attempts to appeal to Gordon's better nature once again, saying that he has a choice and that he didn't kill that girl... and Gordon agrees, he didn't. He did something worse: turned her.

Dean dispatches her with the Colt when she attacks him.

Gordon continues taunting Sam from the darkness, telling him that he's going to kill him and then kill himself to make sure two monsters no longer harm humanity. The two have a very heavy fight, Dean even busting in and getting involved before Gordon starts trying to chow down on him. As they struggle, Sam manages to get his hands on some razor wire and wraps it around Gordon's neck. As the vampire struggles against it and Sam struggles to pull it tighter and tighter and tighter... Gordon's head is severed from his neck, killing him. Dean gets in a joke about Sam being a little reckless as they depart.

"I! HAVE HAD! ENOUGH OF YOU!"

Later, Dean is working on the Impala while the boys are parked by the side of the road and, over some beers, Dean teaches Sam some of the car maintenance. Sam asks him why he's letting him work on the car, Dean saying that he'll need to know these things for the future. It's his job to show his little brother the ropes, after all. We close on this little sweet, somber moment to end the episode.

Fresh Blood is a good conclusion to the string of episodes with Gordon. We get some parallels to both Sam and Dean's arc this season through Dixon. As I said before, Dixon is also a character who has lost everyone (Sam, on in Sam's case he will lose everyone in his family) and a man who has nothing left to lose and may as well be dead already (Dean) and, yes, we get the prize fight between Sam and Gordon that we've been wanting see since Hunted. Sam's patience for dealing with Gordon has clearly run out as we see from early on in the episode in the mildly worrisome exchange he has with Dean.

We also get a little touch on the morality of hunting here in a few ways, though a bit more skewed from how we saw the examples back in Bloodlust. As a refresher, I assigned the aspects of the Freudian concept of the ego, superego, and id onto Dean, Sam, and Gordon respectively. Whereas Sam served as Dean's conscience (his superego, his call to greater things) in this episode... he doesn't, here, at least not in the same manner as before. If anything, the parallels are becoming a bit more corrupted. Sam has abandoned the need to see Gordon as a human, putting him in a category that Sam finds acceptable to kill if only for pragmatism (e.g., if they don't kill Gordon then he will kill them). In this way, he's leaning more toward the id - pushed toward survival at all costs.

Enjoy the small respite, boys... trouble is ahead...

Dean's reckless behavior is very much grounded in his id as well. He seems to care so little for his own life in multiple instances in just this episode, and it's something we've noticed in previous episodes this season as well such as in The Magnificent Seven when Dean was only too willing to throw himself into the line of fire against the Seven Deadly Sins so that the others had a chance of escaping. We also see it with his using his own blood to bait not-Harmony into attacking him so he could dose her with Dead Man's Blood as well as his immediately wanting to take the Colt and go after Gordon while Sam stayed hidden at the motel. However, we also see Dean clinging to life pretty hard in some ways, such as in how quickly he shoots the vampire Gordon turned with the Colt in order to save his own skin. It seems that Sam is right, Dean is reckless... but his survival instinct hasn't fully left him in spite of his behavior. 

Then we have Gordon, who is probably the most egregious example of the id. Worse off, he is the id trying to disguise itself as the superego. He claims to want to only use his new abilities to kill Sam and then kill himself, in his mind a very noble gesture. However, he callously murders in an incredibly gratuitous manner Dixon's two victims (even if they had been turned by that point) as well as kills another man before kidnapping and turning another victim to use as bait to draw the brothers in. While he does have some clear conflict in some scenes, particularly when he has to kill Kubrick, Gordon is so consumed by the monster that has been awakened within him that he cannot see anyone but himself completing the mission. What might have happened if he had killed Sam? Would he have gone through with his suicide after that fact?

We don't get an answer to that, thanks to Sam Winchester and some razor wire.

I particularly like the inter-connectivity with this episode. Despite the issues that some have with Bela, it is good to see her and see her having some impact on this episode as it makes the world feel more real. Things are indeed going on when Sam and Dean aren't there, which is something to remember going forward.

Next time, it's time to put on the jingle bells and drink all the egg nog. That's right... it's finally time... for A Very Supernatural Christmas...