Before I get things started, I would be remiss were I not to thank the hundreds and hundreds of Television Without Pity regulars and readers who contributed more than $30,000 to the site's Hurricane Katrina relief fund. Every single one of you rocks.
And on a side note, when I learned I'd be contributing to this festival of "Recapper's Choice" items, I was torn between covering something cheesy and good, like Nip/Tuck, and covering something cheesy and bad, like The 4400. That is, until a friend of mine snagged a copy of the screener for this episode, because by the end of the hour I knew this was the one for me. And it wasn't because of the loving attention the show paid to Jensen Ackles's ass, believe it or not. Well, not entirely.
Because this is a series premiere, we're treated first to a rather low-tech title card sequence that's basically a rip-off of The Ring's entire general visual style, complete with lettering that jumps all over the screen, a couple of brief flashes of TV-screen snow, and a chorus of demonic Gregorian monks who AHH-ooh-AHH throughout as faux lightning zaps the word "Supernatural" into and out of our field of vision. A single tense string pierces the silence that follows as the words "Lawrence, Kansas" emerge from the black. Crickets join the string as the camera pans across the night sky to tangle itself up in the bleakly bare upper reaches of a tree as the caption amends itself with "22 years ago." The camera eventually manages to shake itself free of the gnarled branches to dive down the façade of a nondescript suburban two-story wood-frame colonial. Well, it would be nondescript were it not for the suddenly down-wailing strings on the soundtrack. And the ominous shadow of that dead tree snaking its inky tentacles around the outer walls, as if preparing to rip that second-floor corner bedroom away from the rest of the structure. Oh, and the forlorn dog barking in the background. There's always some goddamned forlorn mutt howling away in the background of these things, isn't there? A faint creaking noise joins the rest of the soundtrack's current racket as -- get this -- the tree's shadow constricts around that corner bedroom before the shot cuts over to...
...the interior of the imperiled corner bedroom, where the silhouette of a woman toting a mid-sized rug rat enters the dimly back-lit doorway with, "C'mon -- let's say goodnight to your little brother." The silhouette flicks at the wall switch, and the imperiled nursery's unusually low lighting reveals her to be a blonde in her late twenties, clad in a demure, polyester "lace"-and-"satin" peignoir she likely picked up at the Wal-Mart. The shot cuts briefly to her POV of the squirmy little thing in the crib before snapping back to Mama Blonde placing the larger rug rat on the floor. The larger rug rat, incidentally, has an enormous head. No, seriously -- it's as big as his mom's, for Christ's sake, and it can't be all hair, despite the fact he's sporting a wicked Danny-Lloyd-in-The Shining 'do. In any event, The Head That Ate Cleveland scuttles across the imperiled nursery's floor and hoists itself over the side of the crib to devour its little brother. Oh, sorry! The Head actually just perks, "Goodnight, Sam!" as it pecks the infant on the latter's forehead. And certain segments of tonight's viewing audience will no doubt be dismayed to learn that this is the only time the brothers kiss during the entire episode. Ooops. Spoiler!
Mama Blonde leans in to coo her own goodnight just as the children's apparent father pops up in the doorframe with, "Hey, Dean!" The gentleman's apparent paternity seems to be confirmed when The Head That Ate Cleveland races over into the gentleman's arms with an over-exuberant "Daddy!" And then, accompanied by appropriate geysers of blood, The Head rips off those paternal arms with its teeth. What? The show's called Supernatural, isn't it? Am I so wrong for wishing something befitting that title would happen already? In any event, Daddy! scoops The Head up and grins, "So, whaddya think -- you think Sammy's ready to toss around a football yet?" "Nu-hu-oh, Daddy!" The Head simpers, and even though I realize It could take off all of my fingers with one chomp, I want to smack It 'til It's silly for that. Daddy!, by the way, looks like Robert Downey Jr., were Robert Downey Jr. entirely straight and completely off the junk. For whatever it's worth, the guy's also wearing a faded USMC t-shirt and is sporting a tattoo on his left bicep that I can't quite make out at the moment. Hey, you never know what'll end up being important later when you're watching a pilot, right? Mama Blonde eases past the two into the hallway as Daddy! hugs The Head That Ate Cleveland close while murmuring, "Sweet dreams, Sam." Sam, in that unnaturally precocious way infants have on television, turns his head to gaze into his father's eyes by way of acknowledgement. Daddy! exits with a fond smile on his face, flipping off the lights as he goes.
Sam, left alone, gurgles and wiggles and rather adorably hoists both of his bitty legs into the air, no doubt intending to gnaw on one of his own feet, when he's distracted by the baseball-themed mobile suspended above his head, which starts up seemingly of its own accord. Sam stares at it for a moment before darting his eyes to the lower part of the frame, presumably to glance at the transportation-themed clock on the imperiled nursery's wall. Yes, "transportation-themed." It features various dump trucks and tractors and pick-ups and speedboats on the hours, and is topped off with a little biplane that ticks off the seconds. I'm assuming that this, combined with the egregious mobile and the unnecessary football reference, are all supposed to indicate that Sam is 100% heterosexual. If you ask me, though, he's trying too hard. Yes, I realize he's six months old. Shut it. In any event, as the camera moves in on the clock from a low angle, the little second-hand biplane clicks to an unexpected stop as an unearthly and synthesized growl hits the soundtrack. The shot cuts to another menacing low-angle of Sam's stuffed animal shelf as the imperiled nursery's crescent-moon nightlight buzzes, blinks, and shorts out.
Over in Mama Blonde's boudoir, a suspiciously modern-looking baby monitor (it's a Graco!) emits both a few of Sam's aggravated squawks and a bit of harsh feedback that sounds like -- dare I say it? -- a supernatural mix of menacing laughter and mumbling. Mama Blonde groans herself awake and reaches up to switch on the bedside lamp. "John?" she sighs, wearily rolling around to address her absent husband, whose empty pillow on the far side of the bed remains in the shadows. Mama Blonde grunts a bit and pushes herself to her feet. Meanwhile, the camera pans in on a framed photo of Mama Blonde and her John just as The Plaintive Yet Spooky Piano Of This Marriage Won't Be Lasting For Much Longer tinkles on the soundtrack. Daddy! John's wearing his Marine-Corps greens in the picture, by the way. Just so you know.
Cut to the silhouette of Mama Blonde wiping the sleep from her eyes as she crosses the hall to the now most definitely imperiled nursery. "John?" she whispers at the back of the male figure looming over the crib. "Is he hungry?" "Shhhhhhhh," comes the eerie, almost hissing reply as The Plaintive Yet Spooky Piano abandons all pretense of melody and simply PING-PING-PING-PINGs until Mama Blonde grumbles, "All right," and leaves the room. The male figure looming over the crib, by the way, remains in silhouette throughout the exchange, though it seems to be wearing a terrycloth robe and what little we can see of its profile does resemble this woman's husband. The piano melody returns as Mama Blonde pivots to head back into her boudoir, but just then, the light at the far end of the hall starts buzzing and blinking on and off. Mama Blonde frowns and crosses to tap at the fixture's casing, like, what the hell is that supposed to do to the light bulb inside, you silly bint? I realize it's a television and movie cliché, hon, but you do realize you should actually be tapping the fixture itself, right? Whatever. She ignores me to continue with the useless tapping and quizzical looks and such until the light bulb stops with its buzzing. She hmmms about this for a moment before swiveling to head back to bed. Just then, she hears more noises coming from below, and the shot...
...cuts to Mama Blonde's inky silhouette delicately picking its way down the main stairs as the piano shifts into an ominous down-the-scale cascade of single notes and atonal chords before falling silent as Mama Blonde reaches the main floor. We shift to her point of view as she edges around the corner to find her real husband asleep in the La-Z-Boy while a black-and-white war movie flickers on the TV beyond. Mama Blonde gapes as the soundtrack floods with every damn string instrument the production staff could afford, the better to drive this horrifying realization home to the viewing audience. Mama Blonde gasps and spins and plunges headlong up the stairs, calling out "Sammy!" repeatedly as she reaches the upper hall. She races towards the back of the house and into the now most definitely imperiled nursery, only to pull herself up short with a stifled shriek halfway across the room.
Down in the living room, Daddy! John's eyes snap open when that stifled shriek erupts into its full-throated version above his head. "Mary?" he shouts, leaping to his feet and taking the stairs two at a time. The camera goes all shuddery and hand-held as we get his POV of his dash towards The Now Most Definitely Imperiled Nursery before it cuts inside the room to catch him as he bursts through the now-closed door, still calling out his wife's name. The nursery's empty, save for Tiny Sam, who gurgles and fusses and sticks his tongue out at his father. Daddy! John steps up to the crib to smile fondly down at the infant. Just then, a tiny, dark blotch stains the baby's duvet. Daddy! John stretches his fingers past his son's head to touch it, only to have three more of the same blotches drop onto the back of his hand from above. He slowly swivels his head around and up, and his shout of horror would be impressive indeed, were it not drowned out by the cacophonous orchestra that's arrived on the soundtrack to punctuate his discovery. And that discovery? Is Blonde Mary, looking rather Mena-Suvari-in-American Beauty-esque, actually. Well, if Kevin Spacey had imagined dreary Mena with a foot-wide gash through her torso while she was lounging around there on his ceiling, of course. The quick-cut close-up of Blonde Mary's pallid, gaping face makes it clear she's still breathing, by the way. Or trying to, at any rate.
Daddy! John collapses onto his back on the floor in terror as a sheet of flame bursts from his wife's body to ripple across the entire ceiling. As Daddy! John keeps howling on the floor, the waves of flame bounce back from the walls to engulf Blonde Mary's body and hair, leaving only her tormented face still visible. Tiny Sam's caterwauling snaps Daddy! John out of his temporary paralysis, and he snatches up his younger son to dart out into the hallway. The Head That Ate Cleveland, who'd wandered out from Its own bedroom because of the ruckus, babbles something childlike and unimportant before Daddy! John shoves Tiny Sam into Its arms, yelling at The Head to get out of the house, now. We get a brief shot of The Head That Ate Cleveland stumbling down the stairs with a swaddled log in its arms before we rejoin Daddy! John in the nursery, which is now almost completely consumed by fire. There's the briefest of shots of Blonde Mary blackening on the ceiling before a crappy CGI explosion of flame shoots down towards the low-angled camera, apparently swallowing Daddy! John as it goes.
Meanwhile, The Head's made it out onto the front lawn with The Tiny Sam Log, and It pauses to glance worriedly up at the nursery window. Just then, an entirely unsinged Daddy! John snatches both of his children up in his arms and catapults himself across the lawn as the nursery windows explode outwards above their heads.
Aftermath. Lawrence City firefighters have arrived to spray water on the still-burning house, and EMTs unlatch the back of their ambulance to retrieve a stretcher for what's left of Burnt Mary as a cop pushes rubberneckers to the opposite side of the street. Meanwhile, John perches bleakly with his sons on the hood of a black 1967 Chevy Impala as the strings once again go nuts, and the camera races in on his face before we slam into what should be the opening credits.
Here's as good a point as any to address what became a point of contention of the boards, I suppose: Several people have claimed that the real John was immolated in the nursery explosion, and that the John who snatched up the kids on the lawn is the apparent doppelganger who actually killed their mother after looming over Sam's crib. I'm not buying that, mainly because it makes little sense in light of the backstory we get from the kids-as-adults later on in the episode, but also because this is the WB, and I'm therefore inclined to believe that the explosion bursting outwards to engulf the father up in the nursery is simply yet another fuck-up in an eleven-year series of similar fuck-ups on this network. Yes, I know. Were my expectations any lower, they'd be burrowing into the Earth's outer core right about now. Deal with it.
The words "Stanford University" emerge from the blackness of the screen as some twanging alt-crap rock kicks in on the soundtrack. When I caught this via the screener, the music underscoring this transition was actually Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," which, while horribly overplayed on the radio for the last year, fits in better with everything that's going on in this episode than the anonymous garbage that's playing now. In any event, as the twanging continues to annoy, the title amends itself with "Present Day" before disappearing altogether so we can fade up on a pair of cherry-red vinyl hooker pumps clomping into a Salvation-Army-furnished bedroom from the bicycle-bestrewn hallway beyond. "Sam! Get a move on, wouldya?" the voice attached to the hooker pumps calls out, as the camera begins a slow pan up Hooker Pumps's white-knee-socked legs to take in her Clara-Barton-As-Pole-Dancer mini-skirted Red Cross uniform before landing on Hooker Pumps's overly made-up face and straggly mane of possibly bleached blonde hair. "We were supposed to be there, like, fifteen minutes ago," Hooker Pumps continues while bobby-pinning her nurse's cap to her head. The camera glances briefly off her face to pan in on that bedside photo of Daddy! John and Burnt Mary from the opening sequence -- currently resting atop a second-hand dresser -- as the now off-screen Hooker Pumps blares, "Sam! You comin', or what?" Just as his name pops up in the credits at the bottom of the screen, Jared Padalecki pokes his head around the corner to smile, "Do I have to?" Okay, I never watched The Gilmore Girls, so let's get this out of the way now: Yum. Even with that assy, touseled mop of hair on his head. Also, because I never caught the Girls, there will be none of that confusing CuteDean stuff in this recap; he was introduced to me as "Sam," and so "Sam" he shall be. Also also: Yowza. Ahem. Anyway. Back to the recap. "Yes!" Hooker Pumps insists with a broad grin on her face. "It'll be fun!" I'll be the judge of that, missy. In about fifteen seconds, in fact. Sam lankily ambles into the room, rolling his eyes as Hooker Pumps teases, "And where is your costume?" Sam shakes his shaggy head around and good-naturedly chides, "You know how I feel about Halloween." Well, no, Sam. No, we don't know how you feel about Halloween. But given the ham-fisted bout of exposition we'll be enduring in about two or three scenes, I think I can give you a pass on this one.
The music abruptly cuts to some crap rap as the shot cuts just as abruptly to a red-lit plastic skull, before launching into a brief montage of Halloween-themed "fun" that is anything but, in what I'm assuming is some Berkeley breeder bar or other. Over at a freestanding table in the center of the action, Sam perches on a barstool to a raft of half-empty pints and a number of dead shots as Hooker Pumps raises a just-arrived tequila in a toast: "So here's to Sam and his awesome LSAT victory!" "It's not that big of a deal," Sam modestly insists while clinking glasses with Hooker Pumps and the gentleman who obtained the round, a guy made up to look like Big Daddy in this past summer's Land Of The Dead. "He scored a 174," Hooker Pumps reveals, leading Zombie Man to choke out around a mouthful of liquor, "Is that good?" Hell if I know, Zombie Man, but Hooker Pumps here is under the impression that it's "scary good." Geddit? "Scary"? Okay, I'll shut up now. Zombie Man slaps Sam on the back, calling him "our number-one draft pick" and crowing that Sam can have his way with any law school in the country. Sam smiles and admits he's actually scheduled an interview for this coming Monday with Stanford's own, and that should all go well, he'll be on track to getting a free postgraduate ride from his undergraduate alma mater. Hooker Pumps makes enthusiastic supportive noises as Zombie Man asks Sam what it's like "to be the golden boy in [his] family." "Golden boy"? Padalecki? Yeah, he's cute, but Zombie Man clearly hasn't taken a gander at The Ackles yet. "They don't know," Sam shrugs with a shake of his head. This leads to a playful little exchange wherein the undead spirits of both The Brady Bunch and The Cosby Show are invoked, before Zombie Man dances back to the bar for another round of tequila over the fainthearted protests of his tablemates. Thus left alone with the apparent boyfriend, Hooker Pumps launches herself into a little "I'm so proud of you" pep-talk that would have been a hell of a lot funnier if the actress actually had played it as drunk as the character's supposed to be at this point. Sam gazes at her admiringly -- again, would have been funnier had he played up the booziness -- and murmurs, "What would I do without you?" "Crash and burn!" Hooker Pumps too-casually sighs before pulling Sam into a sloppy kiss, like, get a fucking room, you two.
Oh. I forgot. They actually have one, don't they? The unsightly heterosexual snorfling cross-fades to the darkened art-studio section of Sam and Hooker Pumps's bedroom -- I'm guessing the art is hers -- before the camera pans over and across the bed, upon which our lovebirds slumber. She's on top of the sheets in a cropped t-shirt and a pair of those for-the-ladies boxer-briefs, by the way, and we get a lingering shot of The Ass That I Have Not Actually Been Waiting For, Thank You Very Much as she rolls away from him onto her side. The camera continues up to Sam's face -- he's depressingly clad in a grey t-shirt -- as a few unearthly groans hit the soundtrack, accompanied by the soft tinkle of shattering glass. Sam's eyes snap open at the latter, and he creeps out into the blackened depths of his nighttime apartment, angling around corners and darting his eyes between a swaying door and an open window before catching sight of a figure moving through one of the outer rooms. Sam slinks down the hallway, and when the intruder creaks open the glass door to the living room, Sam pounces. Sam-fu ensues. I wish I could be more specific, but the scene's so goddamned dark, all I can see is a pair of tussling silhouettes. Well, that and my own face reflected in the TV screen, but you're not here to read about that, I presume. After the two chop-socky each other into an adjoining room, the intruder finally slams Sam onto his back on the floor and Jensen Ackles's far-too-pretty face emerges from the apartment's pervasive gloom into the low light provided by the streetlamps outside to smirk, "Easy, tiger." Um. Mrow?
"Dean?" Sam bleats incredulously, panting a bit from all of the exertion. Dean -- for that is indeed who The Ackles is this evening -- flashes his teeth and chuckles as Sam heaves, "You scared the crap out of me!" "That's 'cause you're out of practice," Dean smirks in a challenge. Sam rises to meet said challenge with...some more Sam-fu, I guess. I'm telling you people, it's too fucking dark to see what the hell is going on. Sam somehow manages to flip his brother around, leading Dean to snicker, "Or not," before ordering Sam off. Sam complies, pulling Dean from the floor in the process, and once they're on their feet, Sam demands, "What the hell are you doing here?" "Well, I was looking for a beer," Dean jokes, so that must mean he's the cheerfully louche reprobate of the family, as opposed to his brother's solemnly responsible nerd. Got it? Good. Moving along, then: "We gotta talk," Dean insists. "Uh, the phone, you dumbass?" Sam snits, perhaps leaving out that last part. "If I'd-a called," Dean retorts, "would you have picked up, you worthless little shit?" See above. This heartwarming fraternal banter is interrupted when Hooker Pumps flicks on the lights while calling out her boyfriend's name. Those feminine boxer-briefs of hers are primarily pink, bedecked with rainbow stripes, and riding so low on her hips that I shall now be calling her Hooker Pants until told otherwise. And in what I'm tempted to term a Cleansing Burst Of Synchronicity, Sam tells me otherwise. "Jess!" he blurts, startled, before turning to his estranged brother and carefully intoning, "Dean, this is my girlfriend, Jessica." "Wait!" Jessica perks, advancing into the room. "Your brother Dean?" We can now see that her cut-up bedtime t-shirt features the Lady Smurf about to get busy with one of the Guy Smurfs. This will become important in approximately five...four...three...two...
...one. Brother Dean, who'd been staring at her as if he were some sort of heterosexual carnivore and she were some sort of oppositely-gendered slab of meat, brightens his slack-jawed expression and grins, "I love the Smurfs!" as his index finger dances around in the air. The camera cuts to a gratuitously lingering shot of Jessica's Smurf-clad mammaries, and if you haven't figured it out by now, what with the sports-and-monster-trucks-themed nursery and the Marine father and the gruesome death of the nurturing mother figure and the all-male leads and the girlfriend's Halloween hooker gear and the fraternal jujitsu in the living room -- all brought to you by the producer of Fastlane, whose name just flashed by in the credits -- this little exchange should prove that yes, Supernatural is indeed the leading edge of the WB's much-publicized effort to attract more teen boys and twentysomething men to its audience. (I was going to say that Supernatural is spearheading that effort, but let's allow the series to make that sort of tasteless phallocentric pun itself.) Expect Carmen Electra to appear during November sweeps as a hot-tub-dwelling demon who lures nubile and scantily clad coeds to their watery doom. After she makes out with them, of course. Also expect entirely unintended guy-on-guy homosexual subtext to explode off the screen at any moment.
Any-way, by the time the camera finishes slobbering all over Jessica's tits and finally moves up to her face, she's assumed this "I can't believe this scumbag is related to my boyfriend" expression, though there's enough of a sparkle of amusement in her eyes to make me dread the moment she becomes one of the points in a brother-against-brother love triangle on this show. This series may be an attempt to pull in more male viewers for the WB, but it's still on the WB, so come on. You know it's going to happen. And if that's the case -- if Jessica's fated to become another goddamned Joey Potter or another goddamned Amy Abbott or another goddamned Felicity Porter or another goddamned Rory Gilmore or another goddamned Peyton Sawyer or even, God forbid, another goddamned second-season Piper Halliwell -- then she can just drop fucking dead right now. Unfortunately, Jessica pays me no mind and remains vital and vaguely charmed as Dean approaches to flirt, "I gotta tell ya, you are completely out of my brother's league." Jessica attempts to excuse herself to "put something on," but Dean stops her with, "No, no, no! I wouldn't dream of it." He takes a moment before adding, "Seriously." Jessica shoots Sam A Look as Dean backs away to apologize for dragging her boyfriend away to "discuss some private family business." Sam, annoyed, side-eyes both girlfriend and brother before darting over to the former's side, slinging a possessive arm around her waist, and declaring, "Whatever you want to say, you can say it in front of her." "Okay, um," Dean begins. "Dad hasn't been home in a few days." Jessica and her Smurfs glance up warily at the boyfriend for a moment before Sam snides, "So he's working overtime on a Miller Time shift -- he'll stumble back in sooner or later." Dean nods his head around, examines his shoes, and lifts his eyes to enunciate carefully, "Dad's on a hunting trip. And he hasn't been home in a few days." The camera slides up to Sam's suddenly stony expression as the soundtrack belches an ominous "waaahn-waaaaaaaahn" and Sam bites, "Jess, excuse us. We have to go outside..."
...where Sam and Dean meet up with the Exposition Fairy as they clatter down the apartment's wooden steps to Dean's hand-me-down 1967 Chevy Impala in the alleyway below, and thank God for the Exposition Fairy, leaden-footed and poorly spoken though he may be, because I'm only eight and a half minutes into this goddamned thing, and I certainly could use a little help, here. As the dear Exposition Fairy whacks each of the boys repeatedly with his anvil-tipped wand, Sam angrily insists that Dean can't just barge into Sam's apartment in the middle of the night and expect Sam to drop everything for a road trip -- after all, Dad went missing for a bit while chasing after the poltergeist in Amherst and the Devil's Gate in Clifton, and he ended up fine, right? Dean pleads to Sam's sense of filial loyalty, or some such crap, but Sam's having none of it. He gave up "hunting" a long time ago, and he has no intention of picking up that particular bad habit again. During the pedebabbling that follows, we learn that, when Sam told dear old Dad he was afraid of the thing in his closet, Dear Old Dad quite seriously handed the nine-year-old a .45. We also learn that Dear Old Dad led Sonny Boys on a decades-long hunt for the entity that slaughtered their mother, but they've yet to find it. In the meantime, Dad and The Boys took out every supernatural entity they did stumble upon and blah blah Sam wants a normal life and wah wah Dean thinks Sam's a deluded pussy and blee wah Sam feels abandoned by Dear Old Dad and ohmyGodshutup! Dean can't do this alone and you darling young men can get to the fucking point any time you like, okay? Sam heaves a tremendously put-upon sigh and asks for the bullet on their father's current situation. Dean flips open the Impala's trunk and lifts the not-terribly-well-concealed false floor -- seriously, Deano's not even trying with the stealth, here -- to reveal a stunning array of implements of destruction as Dean rummages around for the relevant information. Like he wouldn't have had the dossier up in the goddamned front seat. Whatever. While rooting around in the trunk, Dean admits that Dear Old Dad was flying solo because Dean himself was away dealing with "this voodoo thing down in New Orleans." Erm. Awkward. But hey, according to Our Dear Leader, no one could have foreseen those levees breaking, right?
Anywho, Dean retrieves a sheaf of Internet print-outs and exposits, "Dad was checking out this two-lane blacktop just outside Jericho, California." About a month ago, the local authorities found a gentleman's car on the road, but the driver had completely vanished. Sam glances briefly at the article his brother passes to him, an item from the Jericho Herald entitled "Centennial Highway Disappearance," and casually suggests the gentleman was simply kidnapped. Sam, honey, do you not know the name of your own goddamned show? If he were simply kidnapped, this would be called Natural. Get with the program. Dean, well aware of what this show purports to deal with, quickly flips through a bundle of similar Herald stories, one from April, another from December 2004, and others from 2003, 1998, and so on until he reveals that there have been ten such disappearances over the last twenty years -- "All men, all same five-mile stretch of road." As the pace of disappearances had ticked up sharply in the last year, Dear Old Dad decided to check it out, and subsequently remained incommunicado for three full weeks. Finally, Dean received a horribly garbled voice mail, from which I can only decipher the closing warning: "Be careful, Dean. We're all in danger." Sam squints and asks, "You know there's EBP on there?" I do now, thanks. Unfortunately, you never really explain what this "EBP" thing is, so you can go to hell. Dean's of no help, either, as he chooses to blather that he "slowed the message down and ran it through a goldwave," whatever that means. The upshot of it all is that the altered recording now contains a single voice, that of a woman who whispers, "I can neveeeeer go hoooooome." No one can, darling. Didn't you read your Tom Wolfe? Sam repeats the woman's message, and after a bit of guilt-tripping and law-school-dissing from Dean, he agrees to go. But first, Sam has to...
...hop back up into his apartment, where he slides a deadly looking mini-scythe into an overnight bag as Jessica and Her Smurfs bounce into the room to wonder what gives. Sam lies and lies and lies some more before assuring her that he'll be back in time for his interview on Monday, and with that, Sam races from the room. "At least tell me where you're going!" Jessica and Her Smurfs call out after him.
We'll let the title card answer that one for you, hon. "Jericho, California" pops up a the bottom of the screen while the headlights of what appears to be a convertible Volkswagen Golf head straight for the camera before we duck inside the car, where we find some dimwitted Norbert of a geek begging off an evening of scandalously sinful premarital sexual activity, which was to have been hosted by his girlfriend, Amy. At that moment, Norbert spots some white-clad chick wandering through the underbrush alongside the road, and hangs up on the girlfriend to investigate. Dude must have shitty night vision, because this chick's blinking in and out like the monster from The Ring, and everybody knows you don't pull over to the side of the road in the middle of the night on Halloween to offer rides to monsters from the movies. Actually, now that I think about it, his night vision's probably fine. He's just a dumbass. As he approaches, the dumbass's car stereo wonks out, due to what I'm guessing is that mysterious EBP stuff, but even that fails to deter him from his asinine quest. He eases the Volkswagen to the side of the road and calls out, "Car trouble?" Ring Lady, who's sporting a slightly shredded white cotton camisole over a flowy white peasant skirt, lets her long dark locks flutter in the breeze for a moment before whimpering, "Take me home?" "Sure!" the soon-to-be-dead idiot smooves. "Get in!" he offers, pushing open the passenger-side door. Ring Lady -- who's barefoot on top of everything else, like, duuuuuh, Norbert -- swivels her hips, saunters saucily over to the Golf, and slithers into the passenger seat. In an inexplicably nice touch, we see only the silhouette of Norbert's head through the rear window -- nice because it's creepy, inexplicable because it doesn't make any fucking sense. From this new and inexplicable perspective of ours, the passenger-side door shuts seemingly of its own accord, but Norbert of course is under the impression that Ring Lady pulled it closed. "So where do you live?" he asks of her heaving bosom. Her heaving bosom remains silent, choosing instead to...not inflate and collapse, exactly. More like inflate and inflate some more. Fortunately for the plot's sake, Ring Lady decides to answer for her heaving bosom and breathes, "At the end of Breckinridge Road." And because I'm sick of typing the italics tags, she is now "Myra." And if that's the case: Hoo-boy but Norbert's in for a big surprise when he finally gets his hand up that peasant skirt, isn't he?
"Coming from a Halloween party or something?" Norbert drools in the general direction of The Heaving Bosom. The Heaving Bosom replies by expanding itself another five inches towards the dashboard. "You know," Norbert stammers, still trying to engage The Heaving Bosom in conversation, "a girl like you really shouldn't be alone out here." Myra replies for her Heaving Bosom by fixing Norbert with a smoldering stare and slowly dragging her peasant skirt up her thighs towards her artfully hidden but nevertheless impressive candy. "I'm with you," she croons. Norbert pops a woody and, long story short, decides to indulge in an evening of scandalously sinful premarital sexual activity with Myra, Her Heaving Bosom, and Her Artfully Hidden But Nevertheless Impressive Candy down at the end of Breckinridge Road. Straight boys are so stupid. Norbert peels off down Centennial Highway, and the scene eventually cross-fades to...
...Norbert's dinky little Volkswagen convertible pulling up to Myra's lair at the end of Breckinridge Road. The house is -- how shall I put this? -- a decrepit wreck. Norbert, despite his evident lack of intelligence, agrees with me, and pshaws that Myra couldn't possibly live in so dilapidated a structure. Myra just gets this deeply sad look on her face and whimpers, "I can never go home." DUN! Norbert natters something unimportant while peering intently through the windscreen, and when he returns his attention to his passenger, she's vanished. Norbert, because he is a moron who deserves to die, looks first for her in the backseat before climbing out of the car to investigate the ruined farmhouse in his headlights. As the camera pans past the windshield, we see the spectral impression of Myra's hand as she presses it, longingly, against the glass. Norbert, rapidly losing his boner but still foolishly hoping for a little premarital fornication, approaches the house's door. The camera cuts inside to track his progress through one of the shattered farmhouse windows, in the process panning -- in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment -- past a faded color portrait of Myra and two children still hanging on one of the walls. Norbert finally reaches the torn screen door and pokes his head into the front room, only to have his calls of "Hello!" answered by a nasty-ass bat (I know: Is there any other kind?) that shoots out of the house into his face. Norbert shrieks like a little girl and dashes back to his car, which he throws into reverse to barrel on out of there. After much squealing of brakes and grinding of gears, Norbert finally makes it back out onto Centennial Highway and speeds off down the road, all the while trying to regain control of his panicked breathing.
The camera slowly passes across his huffing face to reveal a sullen- and resentful-looking Myra pouting in the back seat. She trains her gaze on the rearview mirror, so that when Norbert eventually flicks his eyes up to the thing, the first things he sees are her glowering eyes. Norbert freaks, again, some more, nearly drives off the road, and eventually plows through a massive BRIDGE CLOSED barrier. The Volkswagen screeches to a halt halfway across the span and immediately plunges through the rotted wooden deck into the roiling waters below. Sorry. My bad. It actually sits there for a bit with fogged-up windows until it begins shuddering from a violent struggle inside. Norbert screams and screams as the camera pans up to the windshield until -- wait for it -- SPLAT. Two massive gouts of arterial spray -- or, actually, now that I freeze the frame and actually examine them, entirely unreasonable facsimiles thereof -- spatter across the front and driver's-side windows. Norbert's screams are replaced by the shrill shrieking of the strings on the soundtrack before the camera skitters back across the bridge and into the commercial break.
"Ramblin' Man" blares as Dean ambles out of a ramshackle filling station in the middle of nowhere -- like, WE GET IT -- to offer some junk food to Sam, who's parked in the Impala by the pumps, flipping through Dean's battered cassette collection. The Exposition Fairy returns to belabor the boys about the face and neck with his anvil-tipped wand so that we might learn of Dean and Dear Old Dad's ongoing credit card fraud, which is how they've been paying for their missions all these many years. Sam is shocked and appalled. Dean, on the other hand, is all, "All we do is apply -- it's not our fault they send us those cards." Healthy attitude, doll. Dean finally joins Sam in the Impala so the boys can banter about Dean's apparent lack of musical taste. Sam derides Black Sabbath, Motorhead, and Metallica as "the greatest hits of mullet rock." And your point is? Shut up, Sam. Dean testily reminds Sam of the "house rules" of any road-tripping automobile: "Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole." Hey, that's what I just said! I knew there was a reason I liked the guy. Well, that and the fact that Jensen Ackles is far prettier in the daylight of this scene than he was in the half-lit gloom of his last. Little too much eyeliner, though, for me to buy his whole straight-boy schtick at the moment. As Dean shifts the Impala into gear and the opening chords of "Back In Black" slam onto the soundtrack, wimpy Sam tries to protest...something I really don't care about, frankly. Dean once again tells his whiny little brother to put a cork in it for me, in the process tossing him one of those "I will always be prettier than you are, so don't even bother trying" looks as the Impala peels out of the filling station's lot. What? Oh, shut up. You know exactly the look I'm talking about.
On the road to Jericho, Sam gets off his cell phone with news that no one matching their father's description has arrived at either the town's hospital or its morgue, just as Dean spots a couple of police cruisers blocking traffic from entering The Trestle Bridge Of Norbert's Bloody Doom. Dean wheels the Impala over onto the shoulder, keys off the engine, surveys the scene, and lunges across Sam's lap to retrieve a cigar box from the glove compartment. The box is stuffed with phony government IDs for the FBI, the ATF, the DEA, and various local and state police departments. Oh, sure. He keeps the print-outs of old Jericho Herald articles locked in the trunk beneath the false floor, but he stores all of his fake identification in the glove compartment. What the fuck ever, Supernatural. Sam gawps as Dean smacks the appropriate fake ID against the steering wheel and smiles, "Let's go!"
Meanwhile, up on the bridge, an officer from the county sheriff's department hollers down to a pair of divers who'd been searching the river for Norbert. They have, of course, found no trace of his remains. He crosses to the Volkswagen, where another deputy announces, "No sign of struggle, no footprints, no fingerprints -- spotless. It's almost too clean." Incidentally, the forensics deputy happens to be the father of Amy, who was dating the missing "Troy" before his untimely demise at the spectral hands of Myra. The boys wander up just in time to overhear this bit of information, and Dean opens his own line of questioning by casually noting, "You fellas had another one just like this last month, didn't you?" The primary deputy wonders who the new arrivals are. Dean flashes his identification with a curt, "Federal marshals." Primary Deputy remarks on their youthful appearance, Dean smarms a thank you, and long story short, the boys learn nothing we don't already know, and so head back to the Impala. But not after a couple of cute little moments wherein Sam slams his foot down on Dean's when the latter gets a little shirty with the gentlemen from the sheriff's department, followed by Dean retaliating with a whap to the back of Sam's head once they're appropriately far enough away. They heatedly bicker until they're accosted by the sheriff himself -- a good ol' boy redneck type -- after which Dean invokes the undead spirit of The X-Files before he and Sam amble off towards the Impala. Roscoe P. Coltrane watches them go.
Cut to the marquee of Jericho's Highland Theater, which advertises an emergency town hall meeting that Sunday at 8 PM along with the admonishment to "Be Safe Out There." Oddly enough, the lamppost banner adjacent advertises "The Southwest Museum," which is a strange name for a cultural establishment in Central California, don't you think? Well, it would be strange if this were filmed in Central California rather than in Los Angeles, but whatever. This recap's too long as it is. Sam and Dean approach the theater entrance to find the mournful Amy plastering missing-person flyers on the glass, where they join a number of other flyers for her also-missing townsfolk. Dean launches into one of his spiels of bullshit, but Sam cuts him short to express supposedly deep-felt sympathy along with an offer of assistance.
Cut to the interior of a diner, where Sam and Dean pump mournful Goth Chick Amy and her equally mournful Goth Chick Friend for information. It's nothing we haven't heard or seen before, but in the middle of it all, Sam takes time to compliment Goth Chick Amy on her necklace, which happens to be a pentagram Troybert gave her "mostly to scare [her] parents with all that Devil stuff." Sam smiles gently and explains that, actually, "a pentagram is protection against evil -- really powerful, if you believe in that kind of thing." I should know that after seven seasons of Charmed. And yet I don't, because Charmed sucks ass. Dean cuts through the mystical bullshit and levels with the ladies: Troybert's manner of disappearance too closely matches that of numerous other missing men. Is there anything at all the ladies might have heard? The question clearly unnerves Amy, who still has hopes of seeing her boyfriend again, so it's left to Goth Chick Friend to provide the relevant backstory. There's a "local legend," you see, involving "this one girl [who] got murdered out on Centennial, like, decades ago." "Supposedly," Goth Chick Friend continues, "she's still out there. She hitchhikes, and whoever picks her up? Well, they disappear forever." I'm not up on my urban legends at all (I know. I suck), so I didn't immediately realize what they were ripping off for tonight's plot. Errr. I meant "paying homage to" for tonight's plot. Yeah. That's it. But more on that later, for right now we have to follow Sam and Dean over to...
...the public library in Los Angele...uh. Jericho. They're digging into the Herald's online archives for information on any women murdered on Centennial Highway and having absolutely no luck at all until Sam remembers that "angry spirits are born out of a violent death." Dean is all, "...and your point is?" "So maybe it's not murder," Sam duhs. He adjusts the search criteria to include suicides, and they snag a match. In order to spare you the clunky expository dialogue, I'll give you the facts as I can read them on the screen: On April 24, 1981, "Constance Welch, 24, of 4636 Breckinridge Road, leapt off Sylvania Bridge, at mile 33 of Centennial highway, and subsequently drowned." All that is [sic], by the way. Basically, she found her kids dead in the bathtub, freaked, threw herself in the river, and left behind her distraught husband, Joseph, who begged for privacy in that, his hour of yada yada yada. The boys realize Troybert's bridge is the same as the one in the photo attached to the article, and I gotta say, it's awfully convenient for a small-town newspaper with a circulation of 18,650 to maintain so thorough a set of online archives, don't you think? And while I'm nitpicking the digitized props, I should also note that the article's URL includes "Archive/04-25-1971/," so, you know, another fuck up. Please don't hate on me, David Nutter. You simply have to understand that in this day and age, you can't launch a genre show without paying meticulous attention to such details. If you'd pulled something like this on, say, Enterprise, those Trekkies would have had your ass for lunch. Just sayin'.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah: Night has fallen in the time it took Sam and Dean to head from the library back to Sylvania Bridge. They've parked the Impala at one end and have headed to the center to contemplate the rushing water below while mulling over Constance's possible connection to their father's disappearance. There follows a lengthy -- lengthy -- dialogue wherein Dean basically calls Sam a pussy again for wanting a normal life with a normal girlfriend, and it's all so terribly boring, so I've decided to perk things up a bit by quoting the following slice of dialogue in its entirety. And entirely out of context, of course.
Dean: Does Jessica know the truth about you? I mean, does she know about the things you've done?
Sam [seething]: No, and she's not ever going to know.
Dean: Well, that's healthy. You can pretend all you want, Sammy, but sooner or later, you're gonna have to face up to who you really are.
Sam: And who's that?
Dean [gleeful]: One of us!
Sam: No! I'm not like you! This is not going to be my life!
The various purveyors of filthy slash fiction who happen to be reading this can thank me later. (Or, actually, you could make a donation! Synergy: It's A Good Thing.)
Anyway, back to the action: Sam disparages Dean's sacred memory of Burnt Mary, so Dean tosses him up against a support beam and hikes his tongue down Sam's throat. Kidding! I'm totally kidding. It's the women who make out on McG's shows, not the men. You people are so silly sometimes. Dean actually warns his brother, "Don't talk about her like that," before backing off to cool down a bit. He begins to stalk off down the bridge, but pulls himself up short (heh. "Short." Geddit?) when he spots the spectral presence of Constance atop the nearby railing. Dean quickly draws Sam's attention to the ghost, and the boys warily eye her as Constance first turns her head to fix them with a menacing glare before allowing herself to drop into the river below. The boys dart over to the side to see where she went, but they're looking in the wrong place, for sly Constance has actually taken control of the Impala. She activates the motor and fixes our two intrepid heroes in the headlights' beams. Neither they nor we can see her behind the wheel, of course, but we all know she's there. Constance guns it and tears off down the bridge to take out Sam and Dean, and...hey! Wait a minute. This isn't her M.O. at all. Is she even allowed to do this? Whatever. The important part is that Sam and Dean turn tail and run, and we get a very, very nice shot of Jensen Ackles's denim-clad ass in motion as they go. Woof. The boys, realizing there's no other way out of the situation, vault the railing halfway across the bridge and dive. Constance slams the Impala into the bit of railing the boys had just leapt, and the shrieking strings once more assault the soundtrack as we get bitch-slapped into the commercial break.
Bridge. Aftermath. Sam actually managed to grab hold of a jutting length of iron on his way down, and now scrambles back up to the bridge's railing. Panicked, he calls for his brother until he spots the muddied Dean crawling out of the muck and onto the riverbank below. "Are you all right?" Sam calls down. Dean, caked with God knows what, rather amusingly offers his younger brother an OK sign while replying, "I'm super." Moments later, both boys are again on the bridge, with Dean confirming that whatever their unfriendly ghost did to control the car, it doesn't seem to have had any permanent effects. "That Constance chick," Dean manfully rages. "What a BITCH!" The boys perch on the Impala's hood, and Sam takes a moment before noting, "You smell like a toilet." Hee.
Cut to Dean slamming a MasterCard issued to "Hector Aframian" down on the register at the town's motel. Should any of you kind folks wish to try your own hand at credit card fraud, it's number with an expiration date of January 2008. Have fun! The ancient proprietor examines the name and grunts, "You guys having a reunion or something?" The boys are all, "Whaaaa?" "Another guy -- Burt Aframian," the ancient proprietor explains, "he came in and bought out a room for the whole month." Dean stares the ancient proprietor down for a moment before tossing his head in the gayest manner imaginable in Sam's direction.
Cut to the boys breaking into "Burt Aframian's" room, though God alone knows how they figured out which one it was. There's a jokey shot of Sam yanking Dean into the room from the front porch before we get a look at the room's contents. So far, I'm spotting an unmade bed, an unpacked suitcase, a Geiger counter, and hundreds of newspaper clippings and drawings taped to the walls. You know. The usual. Dean finds a moldy fast-food hamburger on the nightstand and determines that Dear Old Dad hasn't been there "in a couple days, at least." Sam notes a ring of salt on the floor, which along with the "cat's eye shells" makes him very, very tense regarding their father's safety. Dean stumbles across the wall his father devoted to the Centennial Highway victims and starts puzzling his way through their descriptions to find some sort of common link. Thank God law student Sam's there to spot something relevant on the wall opposite, because otherwise we might be here for weeks. Dean's not the sharpest pair of scissors in the drawer, is all I'm saying. Hell, he's not even as sharp as those enormous plastic things they gave you in kindergarten to gnaw through construction paper.
Sam scans various clippings until his eyes alight on a slip of paper that reads "Woman in White." Below it is Constance's "Suicide on Centennial" article from the Herald. Sam relays this information to his brother, who returns his attention to the Wall Of Death with a somewhat admiring, "You sly dogs!" Heh. Dean gets down to business, informing his brother that if they're dealing with a Woman in White, their father would have "found the corpse and destroyed it." Ew. After all those years? Ick. Sam's of the opinion that Constance might have "a different weakness" that resulted in their father's failure to vanquish her, or whatever. It's not really clear. Sam does believe they should interrogate her husband. We get a lingering shot of an eighteenth-century engraving of another presumed Woman in White before Dean orders Sam to scare up an address for Joseph Welch, while Dean himself showers. Before we get to see Jensen Ackles lather up, however, dreary Sam interrupts to apologize for those horrible things he said about their mother last night on the bridge. Dean raises his hand to shut his brother up once more and deadpans, "No chick-flick moments." Sam guhs, all, "All right. Jerk." Dean allows a slight smirk to tug at his mouth as he retorts, "Bitch." Snerk. Dean vanishes into the bathroom as Sam discovers an old photograph wedged into the mirror's frame. It's of a five-year-old Sam and an eleven-year-old Dean on some sort of preadolescent hunting trip with Dear Old Dad, and I have to say this: There is no way the two fugly little trolls in the picture grew up to be Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles. No. WAY.
Some time later, Sam retrieves his voice messages while Dean heads out to pick up some grub at the diner down the street. He's halfway across the motel's parking lot when he spies the ancient proprietor chatting with the local constabulary and pointing in his general direction. Dean whips out his cell and calls Sam's, leaving the terse message, "Dude. Five-oh. Take off." Sam bolts through some back window, or something, as Dean finds himself busted for his fake credit card and his fake federal ID. As the lead deputy from the bridge slams Dean onto the hood of his prowler, we're treated not to the shrieking strings, but rather to a set of blaring horns as we follow the camera down Dean's throat and into the commercial break.
Back from the break, we find Dean smirking his way through a bit of chit-chat with Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane in the latter's jailhouse interrogation room, and this is all pretty pointless. I mean, I could go on for several sentences describing the many wonders of Jensen Ackles's eyelashes, but what's the point? So here's the gist of the following scene, in brief: The good sheriff believes Dean's involved in the Centennial Highway murders, despite the fact that, as Dean points out, Dean was three years old at the time of the first disappearance in 1982. The sheriff's rummaged through the contents of Dear Old Dad's motel room, and has found Dad's occult-filled day planner, which he slams down on the desk. Dean's face falls at that, for as we'll later learn, Dear Old Dad goes nowhere without his occult-filled day planner, but Dean manages to remain silent, most especially when Roscoe flips to an entry that reads "Dean 35-111." The one amusing moment comes when Roscoe lets loose with the clichéd, "I don't think you realize how much trouble you're in." Dean too casually wonders, "We talking 'misdemeanor trouble' or 'squeal like a pig trouble'?" Heh. And...that's about it. !
Sam raps on the office door of a run-down junkyard and soon meets the famed Joseph Welch, who's played by a total Hey! It's That Guy! whose name escapes me at the moment. We cover a lot of territory both already familiar and not terribly necessary before Sam, not quite believing Joseph's claims regarding his "happy marriage" to Constance, calls Joseph on it all with an explanation of what, precisely, a Woman in White (also known as a "Weeping Woman") is. These women have popped up throughout history, apparently, in places as far-flung as Hawaii, Mexico, Arizona, and Indiana, but each one's story is pretty much the same: Her husband cheated on her, so she drowned their kids, freaked, and killed herself. Now, each woman's spirit restlessly wanders down roads and "waterways" in search of other unfaithful bastards, and if they find one, they kill him. And we're supposed to be rooting against them...why, exactly? Oh, right: The dead-kids thing. Whatever. Joseph, stung by the accusation, sets his lower lip a-trembling in outrage and denies everything. Everything except for cheating on his wife, of course. Sam, armed with the information he needed, bolts. And...scene.
Meanwhile, back in detention, Dean continues to deny everything himself. A deputy pokes his head into the room with news that the department's received "a 9-1-1, shots fired," so Roscoe cuffs Dean to the interrogation table and leaves, shutting and locking the door behind him. Crafty Dean slides a paper clip from his father's occult-filled day planner and gets to work.
A short time later, Dean, now free from the cuffs, bides his time until the entire department has left to answer the 911, and the thing we know, he's shimmying down the building's fire escape from the roof to drop to the alleyway below. He's snagged one of the officers' gun belts, which he sports slung over one forearm, and pauses to yank his father's occult-filled day planner from the back of his jeans before jogging towards the street. How he fit that book down there along with all of that fine ass is beyond my powers of comprehension.
While all this is going on, Sam's busily cruising down Centennial Highway in the Impala. Alone. Yeah, real smart, there, Lawyer Boy. Dean rings Sam's cell from a payphone and congratulates his little brother on the fake 911. The two then pass along the relevant information we've already been privy to, with one additional detail: The "35-111" in the demonic day planner is actually a set of coordinates that should direct the boys to Dear Old Dad's current location. Part of Dad's "Marine Corps crap," you see. As they ponder the significance of Dear Old Dad skipping town without his demonic day planner, Sam suddenly gasps in surprise and slams on the brakes. The shot cuts to reveal he's plowing the Impala straight through Constance's spectral form. If you enjoyed this episode, do yourself a favor and do not go back and freeze-frame this moment, because the effects are pitiful. In any event, as the car passes through Constance, she disappears. Sam manages to skid to a stop a couple of hundred feet further down the road, but not without a couple of intercut shots of Dean shouting futilely into the payphone. Sam grinds to a halt and blinks, gasping for breath. The camera slowly passes across his huffing face to reveal a sullen- and resentful-looking Constance pouting in the back seat. She trains her gaze appropriately so that when she eventually demands, "Take me home," the first things Sam sees in the rearview mirror are her glowering eyes. Sam freaks right into the final commercial break.
Impala. Aftermath. Constance once again demands, "Take me home." Sam refuses, so Constance telekinetically locks both doors and assumes control of the vehicle. Sam tries and fails to wrest the steering wheel from her telekinetic grip, then tries and fails to open the door by slamming his upper body against it. Constance remains sullen yet calm throughout, though she does occasionally flicker in and out like that chick from The Ring. The happy couple eventually arrive at the decrepit Welch homestead, where Constance finally allows the car to pull to a stop so she might ply her wiles on poor, innocent Sam. But first, Sam gets to beg, "Don't do this." Constance, paying him no mind for the moment, gazes forlornly at her ruined house and whimpers, "I can never go home." Sam quickly groks the fact that it's not so much that she can't go home as it is she's afraid to go home, but before he can confront her with that realization, Constance disappears. Sam whips his head around to find her in the passenger seat beside him. She leaps on top of him, pinning him against the vinyl, and tries to get him to make out with her. Honey, I know it's been twenty-four years, but surely you're not that desperate. Why not wait for his hot older brother to arrive? Then again, we're talking about the ghost who went after that loser Troybert, so perhaps she's lacking in taste.
Sam resists mightily. "You can't kill me!" he protests. "I'm not unfaithful!" Constance's head shudders down to his ear and she whispers, "You will be." Kind of creepy, that. But mostly funny. Constance, soon tiring of Sam's chaste games, eventually gives up on the seduction portion of this evening's festivities and goes straight to the part where she rips out his heart. Constance blinks out, her face morphing into its current, maggot-eaten form at the last instant as she does so. Sam's soon wracked with pain, and shakily unzips his hooded sweatshirt to find five bloody holes piercing the t-shirt beneath into his chest. Ghoul Constance flickers in and out a few times, in the process making it clear those holes are being caused by her spectral fingernails. While Sam howls and wails, the driver's-side window suddenly erupts inward in a hail of glass and gunfire. Ghoul Constance pauses briefly to glare at the idiot who would try to shoot a ghost, and of course it's Dean, squeezing off round after round with his purloined handgun. Ghoul Constance, distracted by all of the bullets zipping harmlessly through her spectral form, relents long enough for Sam to turn on the ignition and throw the car into drive. "I'm taking you home!" he cries, and with that, he floors the Impala through the farmhouse's rotted façade to plow into the far wall of the living room. I must admit, that was pretty damn cool.
Dean races through the gaping hole left by his car, calling out his brother's name. While Dean tries to extract Sam from the Impala's mangled front seat, Constance picks her barefoot way across the wreckage to retrieve the earlier, barely glimpsed studio portrait from where it fell to the floor. I must say, the double-blend polyester knits she and her slain children sport in the thing are just perfect. If they'd left her suicide in 1971, instead of moving it up a decade to allow for that useless "I was only three!" line from the initial interrogation scene. As Constance examines the portrait with a mix of grief, anger, and resentment on her face, Dean manages at last to yank Sam from the car. The boys barely have time to pull themselves together before Constance dismissively hurls the portrait to the floorboards and pins them to the Impala's side with a telekinetically shoved chest of drawers. She seems intent on squeezing the life out of our intrepid heroes somehow, until the lighting fixtures around the room flicker to life. Distracted, she turns to find water cascading down the stairs from the second floor. Constance lifts her eyes to find two rug rats lurking on the landing above as some disembodied ovary wails on the soundtrack. Constance shudder-steps to the foot of the stairs as the rug rats link hands and whisper, "You've come home to us, Mommy!" Constance, visibly anguished, spins as if to flee, only to find her path blocked by the kids, who zip across the floor to latch onto her waist in a clinging hug. This of course sets Constance to screaming -- a gory, full-throated sort of a thing -- and in an irritatingly bad special effects sequence, she flickers between ghoul and normal, between regular-sized and enormous, and between ghastly white and blood red as, I don't know, the hounds of hell arrive to drag her down into the netherworld? Whatever. She's gone, is all you need to know, leaving behind nothing more than a puddle of water on the decaying carpet.
Shame, really. It was going so well until that last effects sequence.
Sam and Dean flip the dresser away from their lower bodies and creep towards the puddle to review the basic plot points for the retarded in the audience. Dean does, however, congratulate Sam on discovering Constance's weak spot. Unfortunately, Dean congratulates Sam by thumping him hard a couple of times on his gaping, bloody chest wound. I think Dean might be kind of a dick, you know? Or am I just totally misinterpreting the signals I'm picking up here? Sam retaliates by chiding Dean for "trying to shoot Casper in the face." They banter a bit more before "Highway To Hell" kicks in on the soundtrack, and the shot cuts to...
...the Impala, now minus a headlight due to its insertion into Welch Manor, cruising down a back road somewhere in "Central" "California." Inside, Dean drives while Sam, with penlight, plots Dear Old Dad's demonic day planner coordinates on a map and quickly determines that Dad's in "Blackwater Ridge, Colorado." No he's not. Sam also announces that Blackwater Ridge, Colorado is "about six hundred miles from here," and no. Just...no. And because the rest of the scene is filled with more pointless bickering about law school, I'll just jump ahead to the point where...
...Dean pulls up in front of Sam's apartment building, and Sam disembarks. After a little more manly sibling banter, Dean tools off in the Impala, and we follow Sam as he eases himself in through his apartment's back door. And then, despite taking great pains to enter the apartment as quietly as possible at so late an hour, Sam bellows for his girlfriend, because everyone on the WB is an idiot. He receives no response from the significant other, but he does find a plate of chocolate-chip cookies waiting for him on the kitchen table, along with a note that reads, "Missed you! Love you!" Given Jessica's preordained future as the Amy Abbott of this series, I'm surprised she didn't add a smiley face. Sam smiles almost wistfully to himself and bites into the cookie before the camera cuts...
...over to the bedroom, where he sidles through the door to hear the shower running in the bathroom beyond. Sam finishes his cookie and, beaming contentedly, flops back on the bed with his eyes closed.
The camera spins around above Sam's head as he heaves a tired-sounding sigh, and...wait. No, WAIT. What the hell? Two drops of blood land wetly on his forehead from above, and they're not really going there, are they? Are they? HOORAY! Sam squints a little bit, then quickly snaps open his eyes as his mouth gapes in some rictus of terror before the shot cuts to his point of view, and they've nailed his girlfriend to the ceiling with a foot-wide gash through her torso! And then? To top it all off? They blow her up! Flames! Everywhere! This is the best. WB. Show. EVER! I don't care that Dean bursts through the kitchen door to rescue his brother at this point for no discernable reason or justification whatsoever! I don't care! I. Do. Not. Care! This is the most beautiful thing I've seen on TV in years! They killed Joey Potter, people!
God, that was almost better than sex.
Now, where was I? Oh, yeah: Sam's paralyzed with horror, even though he can't shut up with the screaming for some reason, and Dean arrives precisely in time to yank Sam from the apartment just as the blackening Jessica goes nuclear, wiping out the entire bedroom in the process.
After the glorious flames finally fade to black, we get a scene that parallels the one at the top of the hour, with the firemen and the EMTs and the cops and the rubberneckers and such. Dean stands near a squad car, watching the last of the smoke billow from his brother's apartment before turning to join Sam down the street at the Impala. He finds his younger brother determinedly and expertly loading shells into a double-barreled shotgun. Dean wordlessly searches Sam's impassive expression for some clue as to what's going through Sam's head at the moment. By way of response, Sam tosses the shotgun into the trunk, and as the shot cuts to TrunkCam, Sam simply announces, "We've got work to do," before slamming the thing shut.
Yeah, that was a hell of a cheesy ending, but did you hear me? They killed Joey Potter, people!