Episode Report Card Drunken Bee: C | 8 USERS: D YOU GRADE IT The Hardy Boys Go Native
By Drunken Bee | Season 1 | Episode 8 | Aired on 11.07.2005
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Sam and Dean travel to an Oklahoman exurb to investigate the mysterious death (i.e., brains eaten out of his head) of a construction worker. After finding a couple of beetles at the crime scene, Sam is understandably suspicious. At a neighborhood barbecue, Sam and Dean are mistaken for a gay couple, and meet a teenaged boy obsessed with bugs. The kid is the son of the exurb's developer. He leads Sam and Dean to a secret spot in the woods, where Sam shows them a bone. No, not that kind! Real, actual bones, which they take first to a tweedy anthropology professor and then to a real live Injun! Whose Poltergeist story about cursed burial grounds visiting revenge upon Whitey through bug violence is accompanied by rattlesnake percussion! Sam and Dean rush to warn the developer and his family, but arrive just as the swarm of bugs descends. They all pile into the attic where they endure a bug attack for approximately three minutes before it turns into dawn and the curse is broken. The excitement was nearly too much to bear. I should give credit where credit is due, though. They were also protected by Dean and the weeniest "flamethrower" ever devised by man. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously, guts, flames, and a mysteriously dead mom. Currently: a quest for answers, and hotness.
Oasis Plains, Oklahoma. A McMansion development is under construction. Two workers are laying gas pipes. The first, named Travis, says, "Man, these are some phat houses. I'd like to live here." His partner Dustin tells him to keep dreaming, and they agree that "this neighborhood will be damned expensive when its done" while Sympathetic Strings of the Working Class slowly transform into Eerie Drone of Impending Death. Dustin furrows his brow, apparently because he can hear the show's score, and kneels to run his hand across the dirt. My closed captioning indicates that at this very moment, "buzzing intensifies," so I guess the cacophony in the background of this scene is supposed to be "buzzing." Dustin yelps and falls into a sinkhole off camera. Travis is immediately superfreaked, even though I'd imagine people get hurt all the time on construction sites, and is rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to find a rope. And although the establishing shots clearly showed the two were working about twenty feet from a gaggle of other workers, no one else is able to help get Dustin out of the hole. However, the shots of Dustin in the hole realizing he is sitting in a pit seething with beetles are pretty scary. Long story short: Travis takes about ten years to find a rope in the truck that sits about five feet from the sinkhole and Dustin gets his bloody brains eaten by beetles.
Outside a ramshackle roadside bar. Patrick Swayze is a philosopher by day and a bouncer by night. His nights are filled with fast action, hot music, and beautiful women. It's a dirty job but somebody's gotta do it. Shit, if only I were watching Road House right now. But seriously folks, the bar here is named The Loading Dock, which I guess is one way you could put it. Def Leppard 's "Rock of Ages" thumps in the background, and I'll be right back. The karaoke stage calls.
Okay, so we're outside a bar, a bar that is named rather gayly, I think we can all agree. Motorcycles rev their engines while the High Priest of Pad sits in his hot little hustler car reading the newspaper. The Acks saunters out of the bar flashing a wad of cash, to the dismay of his little brother, who whines, "You know, we could get day jobs once in a while." Sam then goes on to set up the Theme of Tonight's Episode by noting that "hustling pool" and "credit card scams" are "not the most honest thing[s] in the world." Dean sees Sam's Theme and raises him a Motif: "It's what we were raised to do. We're good at it." Turns out the Pad Man has found a notice in the paper about a gas company employee in Oklahoma who died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In other words, human mad cow disease. Thanks, college boy. Dean remarks, "Mad cow. Wasn't that on Oprah?" and launches a thousand squees in the process. Sam is incredulous: "You watch Oprah?" and Dean just changes the subject. In a very manly way, of course: by licking his luscious lips. Right about now, McG's executive producing credit flashes on the screen. Has anybody else watched the featurette on the Charlie's Angels DVD where he sums up his artistic vision, all, "More cars! More explosions! More tits!"? Simpatico, is all I'm sayin'.