What’s most surprising about this season premiere is not that it remedies many of the problems of the ninth season in short order, but rather, that a relatively small amount of narrative ground was ultimately covered.  And it didn’t matter.  There was so much to love about this episode that the characters could have just been sitting around sniping at each other, and it would have been worth the wait.

 

Much like the audience, Sam is convinced that Dean is possessed, and he’s on a rampage to have the situation resolved.  That’s the first big leap forward.  We’re not caught in a period where Sam is unaware of what happened, with Dean hiding his true colors.  Everything’s on the table so far as that goes, and it means the writers can just get to the good parts sooner rather than later.

 

It doesn’t take long to see what that means: Dean isn’t possessed, but rather, his use of the Mark of Cain and the First Blade is pushing the transition from human to demon in short order.  So depending on one’s interpretation, Dean is either a human being giving in to demonic impulses, or a demon with lingering human motivations.  Either way, he’s a huge wild card, and Crowley seems both proud and suffering from a huge dose of buyer’s remorse.

 

The best season of Supernatural was the fourth, in which Dean’s time in hell and it’s weight upon his soul featured heavily.  If Carver’s three-season arc has been essentially revisiting old concepts from the entire run of the series and bringing them in new focus (with greater or lesser success), then this is a very good way to go.  Because it’s not just Dean’s darker impulses that are in play; it’s Sam that is straying into darker territory as well.  And in both cases, it’s the unleashing of the darkness within, not an external threat to be conquered.  As the crux of the final season of Carver’s arc (at least, as originally conceived), that’s a logical direction for the Hero’s Journey to take.

 

Meanwhile, we have Castiel struggling with the aftermath of his successful rebellion against Metatron and the new order in Heaven.  He has a mess to help clean up, but on the personal side, he’s also dying from the lack of an actual Grace to sustain him.  Stealing the Grace from other angels is simply not going to be sustainable.  Where the Brothers Winchester are struggling with control over the existence of darkness within themselves, Castiel’s similar struggle is over the lack of something intrinsic to his survival.

 

In essence, this premiere managed to be all about the headspace of the three main characters, yet filled with enough action and plot developments to flesh out the post-civil war periods for both the angels and the demons.  There’s still plenty of mess to clean up in both situations, and yet, the focus appears to be on the characters above all.  The key is going to be moving forward quickly enough with the character progressions, so that the feeling of being stuck in neutral (like much of the ninth season) can be avoided.