Episode Report Card Drunken Bee: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Hardy Boys Get the Night Sweats
By Drunken Bee | Season 1 | Episode 14 | Aired on 02.06.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The episode starts with a man pulling his car into the garage and then promptly getting locked in by an unseen force. The car idles, and the garage fills up with fumes while the man yells ineffectually for help until he suffocates to death. Sam starts awake from a dead sleep having seen a vision of this death, and drags Dean out of bed to drive to Saginaw, Michigan to check it out. Once there, the boys pose as priests to gain entry to the "suicidal" man's home. They don't find out too much, but they sure look disturbingly cute in their collars. Sam has another vision -- this one coming when he's awake and causing him some major brain pain -- and sees the opening dude's brother getting decapitated by a window. Sam and Dean rush to his apartment, but are too late. After asking around the neighborhood, the brothers find that the son (and nephew) of the two dead men had long been physically abused by both, and that the abuse had long been ignored by his still-alive stepmother. Sam gets another vision of the kid, Max, telekinetically sending a knife through this lady's eye socket, and they scramble across town once again. Sam manages to have a heart-to-heart with Max, during which he finds out that Max's "abilities" started around the same time as his and that -- BIG REVEAL! -- his biological mother was killed in the same way Sam's and Dean's mother was, i.e. ceiling-kabob.
But Max freaks out again, and mind-thrusts Sam into a closet in front of which he slides a huge china cabinet. While Sam is trapped, he "sees" Dean getting shot in the forehead by Max, major blood and brains splattering everywhere. This vision sends Sam over the edge, and in a burst of rage, he finds out that he too can move furniture with his brain. He rushes in to save Dean, which works, but then Max just offs himself instead. At the end of the episode, Sam suggests that maybe their mother's death was actually caused by his then-infantile special "abilities." We'll call this the "Marissa Cooper" theory of supernatural events. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
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Is that…is that Bob Seger? Why, yes, it is. Seger (The Bob Seger System, that is) pumps as an old Dodge sedan of some sort totters up a driveway at night. It pulls in next to a snowmobile, and we get a close-up of the license plate: Michigan MF 6037. The driver shuts the car off just as the garage door starts going down. From the driver's confused expression, we realize that he has not set the door in motion himself. His confusion grows greater as the garage door clangs shut, the door locks on the car mysteriously get sucked into their slots, and the keys hanging in the ignition shimmy and turn the car over. A shot of exhaust pouring out the tailpipe. The radio turns on and starts jumping around stations, and I have to wonder why mysterious forces always have such a cinematic bent, making sure to have the radio produce such an eerie and incoherent clamor for our benefit. The car starts to fill with exhaust, and the man inside grunts and coughs, and groans and tries to plug the window seal up with his jacket, and flails around, yelling for help once before keeling over and ultimately dying with his eyes open. Cut to a shot of the car through a window in what seems to be the door leading from the house into the garage.
Artful transition as the windowpane illuminates to signal our entrance into a mind-y kind of place, and we cut to Sam rolling over in bed, his eyes wide. Cut between his open eyes and shots from the previous scene, all pretty vague except for a replay of the shot of the license plate. Sam sits up, turns on the light, wakes Dean up, and starts packing. Dean is groggy, and sleeping in a bed with an honest-to-god Liberace wavy-topped white tufted headboard. Can't make this shit up. Sam is acting a bit crazed, insisting that they have to go right then, while strings fret in the background. Pan in to a two-bulbed desk lamp, the right bulb of which is out, and...
…another artful transition as an engine rev bridges the distance from strings to rock, and we pan in to the Metallicar's dual front headlights, the right bulb of which is out. It's raining. Dean drives as Sam tries to identify the owner of the license plate he saw in his dream. Sam's on the phone with the Michigan state police, holding a police officer's ID card in his hand and reading the information off to the dispatcher: "McCready. Detective McCready. Badge Number 158, I've got a Signal 480 in progress, I need the registered owner of a two-door sedan." Sam is put on hold and Dean tells him to relax, that the whole thing was just a nightmare: "This license plate, it won't check out." Sam insists that this dream "felt different, Dean, real" and seemed similar to the times when he dreamed about Jessica dying or about the lady who lived in their old house. Dean makes a useless remark, saying, "Well, yeah, that makes sense, you were dreaming about our house, your girlfriend. This guy in your dream, ever see him before?" Dean thinks there's no reason Sam should be having "premonitions about some random dude in Michigan." The police dispatch comes back on the line and gives Sam the name -- Jim Miller, Saginaw, Michigan -- and Sam gives his brother an "I told you so" look, saying, "It checks out." Dean says they're a couple of hours from Saginaw; Sam tells him to "drive faster." Dean puts the pedal to the metal. Heh. I can't believe I just wrote that.The Metallicar pulls up outside Jim Miller's house. Lots of cops mill about while Jim's body is being zipped into a body bag on a stretcher. Sam and Dean spend a good long while furrowing brows and looking at one another and then at the crime scene.