<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"THEN! Sam took a year off from hunting and fell in love with vet Amelia, while Cas also has women troubles - he&amp;#039;s being forced to report to angel queen Naomi on the Winchesters&amp;#039; movements\u2026 with no subsequent memory of having done so. NOW! After a rocky start, the eighth season of Supernatural seemed to have hit its stride with a string of solid episodes - the inventive horror of &amp;#039;Bitten&amp;#039;, the tragic romance of &amp;#039;Blood Brother&amp;#039; and then Castiel&amp;#039;s suitably epic return in &amp;#039;A Little Slice of Kevin&amp;#039;. Unfortunately, having taken a week&amp;#039;s break, the show returns with one of this year&amp;#039;s weaker offerings. We open with an Oklahoma man&amp;#039;s heart bursting from his chest - a horrific death that appears to have been realised with some laughably bad CGI. But we shouldn&amp;#039;t have been so quick to judge, since this &amp;#039;cartoonish&amp;#039; effect was intentional\u2026  &amp;#039;Hunteri Heroici&amp;#039; is the story of an aged, near-comatose psychokinetic who is inadvertently projecting a &amp;quot;bubble of weird&amp;quot; that warps reality and anything that comes into close contact with him goes &amp;quot;Daffy&amp;quot; - as the Winchesters and Castiel struggle to solve the case, the bodies keep piling up in an &amp;#039;animated&amp;#039; fashion... One man briefly levitates, before plummeting to his death Wile E Coyote-style, while a bank&amp;#039;s security guard is crushed by an anvil. Bump your head and hear birdies, fire a gun and get nothing but a &amp;#039;BANG&amp;#039; flag... you get the idea.  Having - to his knowledge - cut himself off from Heaven, Castiel (Misha Collins) still wants to seek redemption for past crimes so decides to try his hand at being a hunter. But his unorthodox methods on this cartoon caper don&amp;#039;t go down well with Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) - Cas lacks the personal touch and his detective skills have seemingly been gleaned entirely from Columbo episodes. Misha Collins has of course perfected his &amp;#039;fish out of water&amp;#039; schtick over the past four years, but his Columbo impersonations and cat interrogations feel like a step too far into the absurd. Having Cas comically struggle with human interaction is fine, but having him act like a buffoon damages the character. Going too far is a problem that &amp;#039;Hunteri Heroici&amp;#039; suffers from in general - while the TV-mocking of &amp;#039;Changing Channels&amp;#039; and self-referencing of &amp;#039;The French Mistake&amp;#039; worked to great effect, the broad central gimmick of this episode robs proceedings of any drama.  Thankfully we do get a little substance courtesy of Sam&amp;#039;s ongoing flashbacks - our latest jaunt in the past charts his awkward first encounter with Amelia&amp;#039;s hostile army vet father, who - like Dean - has a few harsh words for the younger Winchester about running away from his responsibilities.  But Sam&amp;#039;s got bigger problems - his blossoming romance hits a major snag when Amelia receives news that her presumed-dead husband Don is still alive. Guest star Brian Markinson impresses as Amelia&amp;#039;s disapproving dad and these low-key but powerful sequences drew us in in a way that the frothy case of the week failed to do. Like Dean, we&amp;#039;re &amp;quot;freaking thrilled&amp;quot; to have Castiel back - the latter&amp;#039;s haunted confession to the former about his reluctance to return to Heaven is a stand-out scene - and Sam&amp;#039;s romantic troubles helped hold our interest, but too frequently &amp;#039;Hunteri Heroici&amp;#039; is cartoonish in all the wrong ways.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/supernatural/review/a441728/supernatural-recap-sam-and-dean-get-animated-in-hunteri-heroici/>