Episode Report Card Demian: C+ | 5 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT The Hardy Boys Realize Hope Floats
By Demian | Season 2 | Episode 16 | Aired on 03.14.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Molly McNamara and her toothy husband David (surely as much of a bastard as all others of that name) motor through the night along a deserted back-country highway on the occasion of their fifth wedding anniversary, until a mangy-looking redneck unexpectedly appears in their car's headlights. At the wheel, Molly panics and manages to total their sedan against a tree, and when she awakens from her temporary daze to find her toothy bastard of a husband missing and the mangy-looking redneck lurking about menacingly in the snowy woods with half of his intestines spilling from his stomach, she screams her way out of the car, back up to the highway, and straight into the waiting arms of Our Intrepid Heroes. They just happened to be passing through, you see, in search of the unquiet spirit of a certain mangy-looking and disemboweled redneck named Jonah Greeley who, since his untimely and splattery demise on that very road fifteen years ago, has made a habit of reappearing each year on the anniversary of his death to torture a hapless passerby. And apparently, this year's designated hapless passerby is Molly McNamara.
The twist? Every year's hapless passerby is Molly McNamara, for Molly's actually dead as well, and caught in an endless ghastly loop of terror and torture with Jonah because it was she who splattered him all over that road fifteen years ago right before she splattered herself all over her sedan's windshield. The toothy bastard? Absolutely fine, and living with his new wife in the same town. Sam and Dean withhold this information from Molly (and the audience), of course, until after they've enlisted her aid in successfully unearthing and immolating Jonah's remains, partly because they are LYING LIARS WHO LIE, but mainly because -- as Captain Empathy puts it -- they need to ease the poor woman into the realization that she's been a corpse for the last decade and a half. In the end, Molly accepts her fate, of course, and vanishes into the sunrise, leaving Our Dear Boys to muse about the nature of hope, or something like that. It is, at its heart, a nice little ghost story, indeed, and the role of Molly was beautifully acted by Tricia Helfer of Galactica fame, but seriously. Yaaaaaawn. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Crackle, Crackle THEN! Did you know a storm's coming, and that Sam and Dean are right in the middle of it? Not that that matters much to Our Intrepid Heroes, who have soldiered on nevertheless, picking up where their father left off saving people and hunting things. You know, the family business. They've seen things most other people couldn't dream about, and if those things are supernatural, they kill them, end of story, for that is their job. Well, except when their job is hunting evil, apparently, and as not every supernatural entity counts as evil, sometimes they must leave the thing alone. I think. The point is, Our Dear Boys do their best to be as morally complex as the gang over on Battlestar Galactica, and while they rarely succeed, what I guess you really should know is this: Their lives are weird, man. Got all that? Good.
Crackle, Crackle NOW! A battered and filthy steep-curve warning sign emerges from the blackness for a moment in the headlights of an approaching car before it slips back into the darkness as the car passes by into the night. Those headlights then cover a length of rural blacktop before the camera hops inside the car itself, where the digital radio's tuned to 1250 on the AM dial just in time for the opening guitar lines of The Animals' cover of "The House Of The Rising Sun," and oh, gross. I just now got the song title's connection to the end of the episode. "Eeeeeeek!" shrieks Raoul The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon, clapping a paw against his forehead at his own stupidity regarding the matter. "I feel like such a silly!" Indeed. Now, where was I? Oh, yes: The camera slides past the radio to a roadmap in a gentleman's lap right before the shot flips around to reveal that gentleman to be Dan Gauthier, best known to me as a tawdry knockoff of Tom Cruise, but far better known to soap opera fans, apparently." "It's Kevin Buchanan!" shrieks Raoul, giddy with delight and positively dreamy-eyed. I should have guessed you'd have known that, my scaly friend. "And how could you not?!" Raoul shrieks again, appalled. "On One Life To Live! Where he and his third wife had a screaming argument with each other in the depths of St. Jude's rectory the very day Michael and Marcie were to be wed, and that led to his third wife having sex with his son right there in the rectory right after Kevin stormed out but just before an unexpected tornado ripped through Llanview to bury the two vile fornicators in piles of debris from which they were presently extracted suffering from life-threatening injuries, and when they were wheeled into the emergency room at the same time, poor Kevin had to make a Sophie's Choice over which one would hit surgery first, and he picked his trampy wife over his vicious homewrecking slut of a son, and so of course his wife lived even though they were about to get a divorce, and his vicious homewrecking slut of a son died, and poor Kevin was very sad, indeed, until he found out that his trampy wife was actually now pregnant with his vicious homewrecking slut of a son's child, so he reconciled with her for some asinine reason, and they all moved to London so he could raise his grandchild in a place that rarely, if ever, gets tornadoes!" "It was fabulous!" Raoul pantingly concludes, breathless from the exertion. I am so glad I don't watch soap operas.