I spent the formative years of my childhood in rural Connecticut at a summer camp for senior citizens run by my father. Think Dirty Dancing meets Cocoon, and you’ll have a pretty decent mental image of the environs. One of the regular campers was a gentleman in his 80′s named Ted Levy. Ted, a retired professional magician with the stage name Theodoré, was a contemporary and friend of Harry Houdini. Each summer Ted would don his dusty black tuxedo and red shriners hat and take to the rec hall stage to put on a magic show for the other geriatric campers. My sister and I served as his stage assistants. Each summer he would take me aside to teach me a few of his tricks and give me a few of his stage props. He instilled in me a love of magic that persists to this day. Ted would have been right at home at Sioux City’s “Magic Week,” the setting for the most recent episode of Supernatural. The episode concerns Sam and Dean’s investigation of some mysterious deaths and apparent real magic use at the International Association of Magicians conference there.

The episode follows the revitalization of the career of The Incredible Jay, an old guard never-quite-made-it magician. Picked on by fellow magicians, and just generally down on his luck and on himself, Jay decides to perform the incredibly difficult and dramatic “Table of Death,” and to off himself in the process. Miraculously, surprising even himself, he survives the trick. Patrick Vance, the magician that picked on him in the opening scene of the episode, does not. The falling swords that should have killed Jay instead take out Vance while he is walking down the street in a bit of voodoo doll/tarot magic. Jay’s fame rises and he begins selling out his shows. Before too long, Jeb Dexter, the Criss Angel-a-like of the episode, is magically hung even as Jay miraculously escapes from “The Executioner” a rope slip noose trick.

Sam and Dean are on the case. They interview Jay, and his cohorts Charlie and Vernon. Charlie and Vernon recognize that Sam and Dean are not really feds, and amusingly send Dean off to Bleecker Street for a S&M run-in with The Chief. The only thing the scene was missing was the distinctive song that played every time the door of the Blue Oyster Bar opened in Police Academy. Meanwhile, Sam has a run in of his own, with Ruby. Ruby advises Sam that 34 of the 66 seals have now been broken, and the angels are losing big time. She encourages Sam to cut the head of the snake off – to go after Lilith so that oceans of people do not die. Sam agrees, and when Dean returns he speaks with Dean about finding a way to finally WIN. Dean believes that the life of a hunter invariably ends bloody or sad, but Sam thinks that taking out Lilith and ending the heavenly battle may be a way for them to secure a better future.

Sam and Dean pursue Jay and tie him to a chair in his apartment, but he gives them the slip. They realize by his actions and reactions that Jay is not the one causing the deaths, but that it must be someone with a fondness for Jay doing it on his behalf. Shortly thereafter, in the midst of a scene where Jay and Charlie are talking to each other, my local network inserted a commercial break. The show came back from commercial to show Charlie dead on the floor, apparently a victim of the same sword trick that took out Vance earlier on in the episode. I have a feeling this poorly placed commercial break caused me to miss several critical plot points, because there were some things in this episode that just didn’t make sense to me.

With Charlie dead, Sam and Dean believe that the killer can only be Jay’s other friend, Vernon Haskell. They lure Vernon out of his hotel room and rifle through his belongings while Vernon meets with Jay. Jay accuses Vernon of being the killer, but Sam and Dean learn the truth – they find an old poster amongst Vernon’s belongings advertising for The Great Dessertini – a magician they instantly recognize as a much younger Charlie. Sure enough, Charlie – now very much alive and appearance restored back to age 28, walks in on Jay and Vernon and tries to convince them to join him. He explains that he was granted immortality via a spell gleaned from a grimoire given to him by P.T. Barnum, and he now wants his friends Vernon and Jay to come aboard. Vernon appears interested, but Jay questions whether there may be a price tag attached to immortality. Before they can get much further, Sam and Dean arrive on the scene and a magic throwdown ensues. Charlie uses real magic to his great advantage. He quickly gets the better of both Sam and Dean, only to be betrayed by Jay. Jay stabs himself after having planted a tarot card on Charlie’s person so that Jay is unharmed but Charlie dies as if he were the one stabbed. With Charlie dead, Sam and Dean are released.

In the episode’s closing scene, Jay is morose over having lost Charlie. He explains, “Charlie was like my brother. Now he’s dead. Because I did the ‘right thing.’” Sam decides that he doesn’t want to wind up old and alone, like Jay. Neither does he want his brother to die. He decides that he doesn’t want to do ‘the right thing,’ which presumably would be blindly following Castiel. Instead, he decides to meet up with Ruby. He is ready to cut the head off the snake and to go after Lilith.

As I mentioned above, I feel like I missed certain pivotal things in this episode. Why did Charlie come forward only now with his proposal to Jay and Vernon? How did Charlie appear young once again (or, rather, why did he ever appear to age)? Why did young Charlie warn Vernon away from touching his magic tarot deck, calling the cards radioactive? What was P.T. Barnum, famous for being a charlatan, doing with a real grimoire? Why did finding the old poster of Charlie amongst Vernon’s stuff cause Sam and Dean to conclude that the real magic user was Charlie? Just because it was a poster that described how he could communicate with the spirit world? I get that the tell-tale scar was what clued them in to the fact that The Great Dessertini was Charlie, but didn’t they already know that Charlie was a faded stage magician? Finally, I’m not sure I understand how Charlie died (twice – the second time permanently) if he was immortal. Tarot cards trump grimoire in black magic rock-paper-scissors?

Even though Ted Levy’s tricks were just sleight of hand, not “real magic,” and despite the fact that he took me under his wing to show me how they all worked, to my impressionable mind they were the real thing. Watching Ted perform each summer, I became more and more convinced that magic is real – that there are things in this world that cannot be easily explained in the light of day. I believe it is partially due to him that I have, to this day, a love for all things supernatural even if at heart I remain a skeptic. Part of me wants to believe there really are angels out there, and demons, and djinn, and all the beasties of the Supernatural universe. If there are, and if they happen to watch Supernatural, I think they would be a bit amused at the irony inherent in this episode: The episode’s title, the portrayal of Jeb Dexter, and even the portrayal of the “Ghost Facers” characters in an earlier episode, all leave no question as to how the show views supernatural posers. But Supernatural is just a poser, too. It’s a show made by ordinary humans, albeit extraordinarily talented ones. It’s a bit ironic, therefore, for the show to call out someone for pretending that they are something they are not when in the end Supernatural is just an exercise in pretend, itself. Perhaps somewhere out there is a rougarou or a mummy, TiVo remote in hand, thinking that Eric Kripke is a douchebag.

While it was not my favorite episode of Supernatural this season, and despite the apparent plot inconsistencies, I did enjoy it. I give it 3.5 out of 5 Metallicars.