Supernatural: Season 6

Season six of the fantasy-horror-drama series Supernatural continues its almost perverse streak of setting the bar at the end of each season so impossibly high that its successor could never surpass the roadblocks in its path, only to leap over them with the same amount of aplomb, wit, and complexity the program has shown throughout its network run. When audiences last saw the Winchester brothers at the end of season five, Dean (Jensen Ackles) had abandoned hunting demons in favor of family life, while Sam (Jared Padalecki) had apparently lost his battle with Lucifer in the season finale. But as season six reveals, Sam is alive and well, though missing a soul, which makes his subsequent hunts with a reluctant Dean merciless and focused on a plan not entirely understood by either man. As the brothers grapple with shape-shifting infants ("Two and a Half Men"), vampires (the unfortunately titled "Live Free or TwiHard"), leprechauns (Robert Picardo in "Clap Your Hands If You Believe…"), horror icon H.P. Lovecraft ("Let It Bleed"), and a variety of homegrown monstrosities, they discover that Sam's soul is in the possession of the demon Crowley (Mark Sheppard), who is using it to manipulate Sam into locating the souls of Purgatory, which could turn the tide of a civil war raging in Heaven towards Crowley and renegade angel Castiel (Misha Collins). The Winchesters must then stop the infernal duo's scheme before an even greater apocalypse can occur. With such high stakes and grim fates hanging in the balance, it's a wonder that Supernatural can spare a moment for its trademark quirky humor, but such episodes as "The French Mistake," where the brothers arrive in an alternate reality where they assume the identity of Ackles and Padalecki, or the aforementioned "Two and a Half Men," display the producers' knack for combining the lighthearted with the show's trademark depth and darkness. Most impressively, the season sets up Supernatural for a seventh go-ro