Episode Report Card Drunken Bee: B | 5 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT The Hardy Boys: It's What's (Almost) For Dinner
By Drunken Bee | Season 1 | Episode 15 | Aired on 02.13.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.While in Minnesota investigating a young boy's claim that he witnessed a mysterious kidnapping, Sam goes and gets kidnapped himself. Dean convinces a policewoman to help him search for Sam, and the two eventually find themselves poking around the backwoods. What they find is pretty gruesome: a family that kidnaps people in order to release them into the woods, hunt them down, kill them, and then put their teeth into decorative jars around the house. Martha would most definitely not approve. I think she'd recommend a more beachy theme involving sand and sea shells, probably in an oversized hurricane lamp. The Minnesotan hillbillies catch Dean and the policewoman, but despite putting their heads together -- a brain trust totaling negative 4,657 IQ points -- they are unable to contain anybody. The hillbillies eventually start shooting each other by accident, showing that they have more in common with the Bush Administration than cumulative IQ. Oooooh. The policelady shoots the head hillbilly, avenging her brother's death, and then the episode just sort of stops.
But if there is one rule in television, it's that people like to watch things involving crazy inbred evil rituals, and we'll forgive just about anything, including but not limited to: unidentifiable accents, inaccurate hillbilly genealogy (shouldn't these guys have been more militia types?), the unlikely sympathy the officer shows Dean even after discovering he's stolen a police badge, Sam's continually problematic hair, the ungodly number of cultural references made in place of a compelling, original plot -- and trucker caps. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
In Hibbing, Minnesota, a little boy sits in bed watching something scary on television. He clutches the covers to his chest until he's distracted by the sound of a chugging truck engine outside. He goes to the window and looks out, past a flickering neon sign, into the parking lot/alley below. A man walks toward a dumpster holding a garbage bag in his hands. Cut to the man in the lot, who looks spooked by something. Some draggy noises, and the man gets down on his knees to look underneath a car. Never will get that. What's the use of knowing what is making that creepy sound when you're DEAD? He peers, and we hear some more draggy noises and get a shot of the man opening his mouth in horror. He tries to get up to run, but gets dragged back under the car feet first. The little boy continues to look on. This scene could have been scary, but the sound effects sizzucked -- I mean, something dragging on the pavement? Oooh, so scary. Ultimately, I guess, a man getting slowly pulled under a car by an unseen something-or-other is rather underwhelming in the fright department.
Cut to the interior of the boy's room. An aerial shot shows us that two policemen are asking questions of the boy and his mom. The policemen are in full-on Smokey the Bear, State Police, Brown Hat Rangerman getups. A confession: I've always wanted one of those wide-brimmed policeman's hats for a very particular reason: so that I could then also have one of those awesome made-to-fit elasticized hat raincoat thingies. The very fact that those things exist make me happy and giggly. And now that I'm talking about them, I sort of want to take a field trip to the factory where they make them. Because there is one. A factory where they make specifically-sized elasticized hat raincoats. Ah, life.
The mother mentions that the police have already been there and she doesn't understand why they have to tell the story again. She adds that the more the boy tells the story, the more he believes it is true. Pan over to the policemen, who simultaneously doff their hats to reveal something nobody would ever have suspected...it's Sam and Dean!!! Sam looks sensitive and his hair looks like complete ass, feathered back at the sides like goddamned John-Boy Walton. (You guys, totally click on that link and look at how smarmy Richard Thomas is! Especially check out the photo depicting his marriage to second wife Georgiana. Bitch is wearing some sort of pearl sweatband around her forehead to her wedding!) Sam asks the boy to tell them what he saw. He does: "I was up late watching TV" -- is this a Culkin? -- "when I heard this weird noise." He describes the noise as sounding "like a monster." The boys nod and jot this intriguing detail down in their notebooks. Um, not really. The mom then intervenes and asks her son to tell them what he had been watching on the tube. He complies: Godzilla Versus Mothra. Dean geeks out with him for a second, saying that that is his favorite Godzilla, too. Then he throws Sam under the bus in order to bond with Pseudo-Culkin: "He likes the remake," while nodding his head in Sam's direction.Sam clears his throat and tries to get back on track. Pseudo-Culkin narrates the scene we just saw back to the brothers, which, given the truncated nature of the end of this episode, seems to not be the best use of narrative time here. Pseudo-Culkin tells them that the monster made a "whining growl" when it left.