*seconds everything you said here*
I'm really surprised by how many of the people on my friends-list agree with me, and with you, about the beginning of this new season. I didn't realize how much I'd missed good old Azazel until he showed up.
If they kill off Lisa, I will be very, very angry at them. God, just thinking about that poor woman and what she's going through now that Sam is back and she's losing Dean makes my heart break. I was so happy that Dean chose to stay with Lisa, and that she didn't turn out to be just a convenient plot device like so many of the women in Supernatural are; it makes me happy knowing that his heart is in the right place.

It took me a while to learn to really like Sam, and longer to love him, but by early season 5 I adored him and by the end I had become a full-fledged Sam girl. Seeing him like this is hard for me, in ways that seeing Dean broken at the end of season 4 doesn't even compare to. My perspective on what's going on as far as the weird interactions between him and Dean is that being ridden by Lucifer pretty much shattered him, and killed a lot of who he was, and being near Dean is, for lack of a better, less slashtastic way to put it, bringing his heart back to life. Hopes, I has them. We shall see.