Lake Manitoc, Wisconsin. An idyllic morning in an idyllic cabin. A cute redhead bounds out of bed, excited to begin her day as a professional Irish dancer. No, wait, that's a Folger's commercial. The one that appeals to red-headed Irish dancers, a major demographic that has historically been so difficult for marketers to reach. Here, instead, we have a hot blonde in a sweatsuit bounding into the kitchen to give her crotchety old dad a peck on the cheek. Another demographic that has been hard for advertisers to crack: the Madonna who is really a WHORE and so must die. A late-teenaged boy sits on the counter slurping cereal and tells his sister that she better stop working out so much since "guys don't like buff girls." She sweetly retorts, "Yeah, well girls don't like guys who still live at home." She heads out the door while the camera gives us a low angle of her father ominously intoning, "Be careful." The low camera angle impends doom every damn time.
Outside, Sophie braces herself for a dip in the MOTHEREFFING FREEZING WINTER LAKE WATER. Cut to a long shot of the skinny girl as if through binoculars. She dives in (in her workout BIKINI, of course -- see above re: "whore") and the camera immediately gives us Jaws-o-View of her vulnerable body from below. She treads water looking around herself, suspicious that her morning ritual is suddenly accompanied by a soundtrack of clicks and hisses and low woodwinds. She swims a short distance and we get a few gynecological shots of her breaststroke kick -- thanks, Dr. Eliot Mantle! -- and then back to more suspicious glancing around on her part. Back underwater, the camera moves in closer to her submerged, kicking legs; above water, the girl really starts to panic, and then gets rather unceremoniously sucked under. We pan in on the bubbling surface of the water for about ten minutes. The end!
Oh, not really. Roadside diner. A trashy blonde waitress suggestively asks Dean if she can get him anything else. Shhh! Quietly now. Here we have that most elusive species, the hot greasy spoon waitress who wants nothing more than to bang someone over the grease pit out back. Any sudden move may cause this exotic figment of Hollywood's imagination to fly off into the morning fog. Oh, dammit -- here comes Sammy, cockblocker extraordinaire, telling the horndog they just need the check. Dean hangs his head and unsuccessfully tries to get Sam to appreciate the, ahem, plumage of the Blue Tit he just scared off. To no avail. Sam only has eyes for mysterious gore. Of which, luckily, Dean also has a supply. Dean pushes Sophie's newspaper obituary over to Sam, and explains that she's the third person to have disappeared in the lake that year, and that no bodies have ever been found.
Dean offhandedly mentions that the family had a funeral despite not having found the body, for "closure." Sam quickly pulls his hammer and nails out of his tool (ha!) belt, hastily constructs a soapbox, and steps upon it: "Closure? People don't just disappear, Dean. Other people just stop looking for them." Dean is like, "Dude, quit it with the stupid hastily-constructed soapboxes." Dean asks Sam what he really wants to say. Sam replies with some crap about how their father's trail is getting cold. Dean takes offense at Sam's implication that Dean doesn't care about finding their dad, and reminds the young upstart that he was "with him every day for the last two years while you were off at your pep rallies." Pep rallies? With who, George McFly? Also, I find it difficult to recap this angst about finding their father, having seen later in the season what a waste of space their dad really is. Dean tells Sam that they will find their dad, but that "until then we're going to kill everything bad between here and there." This scene has been cutting between extreme close-ups of the boys' faces. Sam gives Dean the most Bad Teen "what-EVER" look as he gets off his imaginary soapbox. The Blue Tit walks by again, and Dean's eyes follow her. Sam is like, so Dean? Lake Manitoc?
Ratt! The Metallicar! Did I mention Ratt?! They chug up to the idyllic cabin from the opening scene. The thick-necked malook brother answers the door and Dean lies while flashing a badge that they are with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In search of more Blue Tits, I'm sure. Cut out back to where Sophie the Whore's dad sits on a rustic wooden bench looking out over the lake. The Malook stands with Sam and Dean out back of the house and tells them that he is sure that his sister the whore was dragged under, since she was a varsity swimmer and "as safe out there as in her own bathtub." Sam starts checking off his list of immediately creepy things to ask: "Did you see any shadows? Some dark shape breach the surface?" The Malook wants to know what they think is out there. Sam asks if they can talk to his father, but The Malook says he's been through too much and didn't see anything anyhow. Odd camera angle with Sam in the extreme foreground nodding, "We understand." The angle insinuates that the father is involved somehow. But we don't believe that, now, do we, JonBenet?
In some sort of ranger cabin or woodsy police station, the boys talk to a friendly old man who wants to know why Fish and Wildlife are interested in the drowning. Blue Tits, I told you! They tell the rangerpoliceman that Sophie the Whore's brother saw something drag her down. He replies that there aren't any "indigenous carnivores" in the lake. Last episode we had DANGEROUS!BACKCOUNTRY! This eppy we get INDIGENOUS!CARNIVORES! The Rangerpoliceman thinks The Malook is just traumatized, and reminds Sam and Dean that they dragged the lake and found nothing. Dean leans in closer and does some reminding of his own: "That's the third person this year." Rangerpoliceman sighs, "Well, it won't be a problem much longer." Dean and Sam are immediately little mice in a maze. Rangerpoliceman drops a few crumbs for them to follow: "Well, the dam, of course." Dean starts following the trail while Sam chews on his tail: "Of course, the dam...it...it...it's...sprung a leak." Nice work, little mousie. Come here and get in my pocket. Rangerpoliceman clarifies, telling us that the dam is falling apart and they can't get money to fix it, so they're slowly letting the lake drain out through the spillway. He makes a point of saying, "But as federal wildlife, you already knew that." Dean does this dramatic blink/nod move and luckily gets saved by the pecking of a sweet little chickadee.
A pretty brunette pokes her head in the office. Rangerpoliceman introduces her as his daughter. Dean is first in line to coo at the bird, shaking her hand. She tells him her name is Andrea Barr, and a little red-headed boy appears out from behind her. He looks about seven or eight, I'd guess. I love how Amy Acker is already totally Oldy McOld in Actress Land. She's... thirty. When Rangerpoliceman mentions that Dean and Sam are here about the lake, the little boy, Lucas, leaves the room and Andrea is all traumatized "oh." She follows her son, and Sam asks if Lucas is okay. Rangerpoliceman says they've all been through a lot. So there isn't really much left for the boys to do except go over to Andrea and harass her into walking them two blocks to a cheap motel. She agrees.
Amy Acker and her zero percent body fat (so maternal!) walk the boys the short distance to the motel. On the way, Dean remarks, "Cute kid. Kids are the best." LOVE it. She takes them across one street, gestures toward the motel, and says, "Like I said, two blocks." Sam thanks her, and she turns to Dean: "Must be hard, with your sense of direction. Never being able to find your way to a decent pick-up line." Zoinks! Dean furrows his brow as a wacky guitar lick starts up, but not even bad acoustic pathetic fallacy can take away from how awesome this little scene is. Sam, with an adorably crooked mouth, just says, "'Kids are the best'?" and then reminds his brother that he doesn't even like kids. Dean protests, "I LOVE kids!" and Sam retorts, "Name three kids that you even know," before turning toward the motel and leaving Dean to try to puzzle that one out.
Inside the motel, Sam works on their little Goth girl laptop while Dean unpacks. Sam finds that over the 35 years, six people have drowned in the lake, and posits that whatever is in the lake is just now hungrier than ever. Sam says he isn't convinced by the whole "lake monster" theory, because in most cases of lake monster-itis, there are plenty of eyewitnesses. Dean looks over his shoulder as he clicks through newspaper articles online. The name "Christopher Barr" jumps out at Dean and they look more closely at the article, finding that he was Andrea's husband and Lucas's father, and drowned in May, which isn't too long ago, but long enough for his widow to enjoy spiriting around with inept suitors. Sam continues to read the article; Lucas was on a floating dock on the lake when his father got pulled under. They enlarge the newspaper photograph of a wet little Lucas wrapped in a blanket after his eventual rescue. Sam realizes they might have an eyewitness. Dean looks pained. "No wonder the kid was so freaked out. Watching one of your parents die isn't something you just get over."
At a playground. The boys accost Andrea and ask if they can join her. Sam sits down with her while Dean goes to say hi to Lucas on the playground. Andrea tells Sam to tell Dean "that this whole Jerry Maguire thing is not going to work on me." Sam tells her that he doesn't think that's what it's about. Which, when you think about it, is a sort of ouch thing to say. She's all, "I know he wants me I'm so hot" and Sam comes in with a "Hey, lady, didn't your husband and father of your child just die with no explanation? Yeah, we're here to figure it out what happened."
Dean kneels down with Lucas, who's doing some coloring on a bench. Dean picks up some tiny plastic army guys and tries to make conversation with "I used to love these things" before reverting -- like it is written in the ancient texts that all men must -- to making a bunch of plllssshhheehh explosion noises with his mouth and sending the plastic army man fly through the air going, "Aiiiyyyyyggg!" I think the relevant text for this is actually the Genesis Apocryphon, which declares, "And verily I say that those with testes shall make upon their lips the sounds of destruction when having come upon tiny green men of plastic. And verily those sounds shall be followed by the sounds of death as it has been written that death shall sound, as with one upon whose foot a thousand oxen have trampled, or as so: 'Aiiiyyyyyggg!'"
These man sound effects don't really get through to Lucas, though; he keeps coloring and ignoring Dean. Dean keeps trying, though: "Crayons are more your thing. That's cool. Chicks dig artists." He flips through some of the drawings he's already completed, the top one of which is a vortex done in the black pastels of childhood insanity. Dean picks up a crayon and sits down to do some drawing himself. He keeps talking to Lucas, telling the boy that he knows he probably just doesn't want to talk. "I don't know exactly what happened to your dad, but I know it was something real bad." Pianos of Trying to Make the Lonely Women Cry start plinking as Dean confesses that when he was his age he saw something pretty bad, too. Dean sort of chokes up before telling Lucas that he promises to believe whatever he says. Lucas is still totally clammed up, so Dean suggests that maybe he draw him a picture about what happened on the lake that day. Still no response. So Dean shows him a picture he just drew of four stick figures, explaining that it is his family: "My dad, my [emotional pause] mom, my geek brother, and me." When Lucas still doesn't respond, Dean gives up and tells the kid he'll see him around. As Dean walks away, Lucas picks up the stick-figure drawing and looks at it intently.
Dean returns to Sam and Andrea who are talking. Andrea tells Sam that Lucas hasn't said a word about anything, even to her. The three make small trauma talk together, commiserating over how hard the situation is. Andrea says they've moved in with her father, but that she gets upset every time she thinks of what Lucas had to see. Dean and Sam give one another pointed looks, and Dean tells Andrea that she'd be surprised what kids can deal with. Andrea says Lucas "used to have such life," but now he just sits and draws. Just then Lucas walks up and hands Dean a drawing. It's of a cozy-looking cabin with a red roof.
Back in Sophie the Whore's cozy-looking cabin with a red roof, her father sits in the dark in front of a flickering TV, looking pretty catatonic. The Malook pokes his head in the room and suggests his father eat something. No response. The father turns his head to the side and keeps mouth-breathing. If ever there were a sign of guilt, it is mouth-breathing.
In the kitchen, The Malook saws a fish head off a fish to a running faucet. The water starts gurgling and then starts running brown. The Malook is confused, as malooks get. He turns the water off, but then it starts bubbling up all black and nasty from the drain in the old cast-iron sink. It fills nearly to the top and stops. Eeep! The Malook pushes up his sleeve and plunges his bare arm into the full sink. Eeeeeeeeep! He pulls up the stopper, but the sink doesn't start to drain. He sort of cocks his head in frustration and anticipation and plunges his arm back in. Omigod omigod omigod STOP IT!!! He doesn't hear my warning cries, though, because as he fishes around in the murky water some more, something grabs hold of his arm and pulls his whole torso into the sink. He kicks and struggles and kicks and struggles until he just quietly sinks into the water. The water drains away, leaving him dead in the sink. Metal Teeth Chomp, which is good because I need a minute to get up and shiver and shimmy and just generally freak out.
In the motel, Sam comes in, his lake-monster-incredulity vindicated, because, as he tells Dean, he just drove by the The Malook's house and found out that he died. By drowning. In the sink. Dean is all "the hell?" before launching into some "brain"-storming about what it could be if it isn't a lake monster. He proposes "water wraith maybe? Some kind of demon?" The brothers realize aloud that whatever it is, it's controlling the lake water, and have a patently-belated "aha" moment, putting together the facts that the lake is being drained while the lake-related drownings are increasing. They realize that if the mean water thingamajig can get through the pipes to kill, it can get to anyone, so they've got to work fast. Dean quickly gets to work putting his shoes on, Mr. Rogers-style. All the deaths are connected to Bill Carlton, crotchety old dad of Sophie the Whore and The Malook. They decide to go pay him a visit.
Out by the lake, the brothers try to ask Carlton some questions, but he refuses to answer any. They tell him they think his kids' deaths are connected, and he responds by tearing up and telling them, "My children are gone. It's worse than dying." As they walk back to the Metallicar, Dean says that Carlton has been through hell, but he thinks the old man isn't telling them something. He pulls up short as they get to the car and, seemingly for the first time, notices that the Carlton Cabin of Soggy Death looks just like the house Lucas drew for him. Sam and Dean exchange glances set to the tune of plinky suspicion.
Andrea Barr tells the brothers that she doesn't want them talking to her son. Close-up shots of the boys as they each, bathed in creepy light, insist that "something else" is going on here, they can tell she senses it too, and so she has to let them talk to Lucas. Dudes are some intense Fish and Wildlife guys. I wouldn't want to be caught smoking a joint around the campfire by these two.
Upstairs, Lucas continues to draw. Silently. His room is wallpapered in some really bad toile. Like, ship-vignette toile. Dean leans in and shows Lucas, who doesn't even look up from his coloring, the drawing the boy gave him. Dean asks him how he knew how to draw the house, whether he knew something bad would happen. Lucas continues to not look at Dean. Dean goes back into his "I understand, I saw something bad too, I was scared" blah blah blah same exact conversation from like three scenes before. This time, though, Dean continues, telling Lucas that his dad wants him to be brave, a comment that gives the boy pause. Andrea looks on in awe that her walking-dead son seems to have registered something somebody said to him. Lucas hands Dean another drawing, this time featuring a church and a yellow house. Damn! How could I have missed it? It's the Presbyterians, of course!
In the Metallicar, scenery rushes by the clearly stationary-on-the-sound-stage car. We seem to have been plopped down in the middle of another non-starter fight between the brothers, where Dean is arguing that they need to go find the house Lucas drew because maybe he's psychic and Sam is also arguing that there have been cases where a trauma causes someone to become a little bit psychic and so they should go find the house the kid drew, and it is abundantly clear they are in agreement so what's with the jaw-clenching and staccato line-deliveries of argument? Why insinuate an argument where there is none? Oh, that's right, because the middle "investigation" section of the show is always about as catatonia-inducing as the Tonys. (Cram it, Chita Rivera, you know it's true.)
Dean continues to be nonsensically cranky, saying they'll never find the house, as there's probably a thousand yellow houses in the area. Sam "Stephen Hawking" Winchester suggests that they look for the church featured in the drawing as well. Dean joke-smarms that "college boy thinks he's sooo smart," and the boys fall into a companionable brief silence. Sam's smile fades, and he glances nervously at Dean before trying to tell his older brother that he appreciated hearing him talk about their mother to Lucas. Dean shrugs the comment off, but Sam continues to gaze at his brother like he's an extra-large ramekin of créme brulée until Dean shuts him up with his moldy Men are From Mars shtick: "Oh God, we're not gonna have to hug or anything, are we?"
The boys walk up to the church Lucas has drawn and look to their right to find the yellow house. We get a shot of the drawing, which also depicts a little boy and red bicycle out front of the house. The boys cross the street, and we cut inside the yellow house, where they ask an old lady if a little boy lives there. She shakes-her-head-by-numbers and tells them that "Peter has been gone for 35 years." Pan across the room to find framed school photos of a young teenager in a '70s turtleneck. The old lady says Peter "just disappeared" and then adds, in an unnecessary echo, that "losing him...it's like dying." As she tells him he just never came home one day, we get a shot of another photo, this time Peter and a friend, arms slung around one another, and unless we're catatonic from just having watched the Tonys (Chita, seriously, get off my back), we know that the friend is Bill "Mouth-Breathing Through the Grieving Process" Carlton.
However, though we know this information, some guy HAS, after all, been hired to plink the piano during this scene, and he is NOT done plinking, so Dean slowly walks into the frame, slowly picks the photo up, slowly turns it over and reads off the names: "Peter Sweeney and Billy Carlton, 1970." So now we extra-double-super-sure know. Are you satisfied now, Plinky?!?!
Back at the lake, PLINKY IS NOT IN FACT SATISFIED, as he continues to plink while Carlton talks to the lake: "You've taken everything. Everyone. I've got nothing left. I didn't understand. I didn't believe," before concluding, "I think I finally know what you want."
The boys zoom in the Metallicar, thinking aloud what connection Carlton has to all this. They think that he perhaps killed Peter Sweeney and so Peter's spirit has been taking revenge on Carlton. We know, though, because we're at minute 31, that it could not possibly be so simple as that. We know that something more dramastic certainly is going on, and though we may not know it, we feel that it may just involve Patty LuPone and some spangly leotards.
The Metallicar chugs ups to the Death Cabin. Even though everything in the episode so far made it seem like the lake was behind the cabin, Dean turns away from the cabin and looks out across the lake to see Carlton puttering along in a rusty old motorboat. Timpani of Winchester Athleticism accompanies the boys as they hustle toward the shore, their man coats flapping in the breeze. They are both yelling, and we cut between them yelling and Carlton's perspective of their yelling overpowerd by the sound of the motor, which turns them both into the "wah wah wah wah" teacher from "Peanuts." Which I, of course, enjoy. Carlton continues to putter along...when suddenly! his boat! flies! up! into! the! air! Actually, the occurrence does not really deserve six exclamation points, just a notation that it was vaguely surprising. The boys, for their part, also look on in sort of vague surprise. Metal Teeth Chomp.
In the Rangerpolice Station, Andrea sits with a bucket of fried chicken in her lap, tending to her child. She greets Sam and Dean, as they walk in with her father, who is surprised she knows them on a "first-name basis." Mister, you don't even want to know who your bucket-o'-lap-chicken freak daughter is on first name bases with. Lucas sits and rocks back and forth while Andrea asks her father about what happened to Carlton. Lucas whimpers and tries to run out of the room; Dean tells him "it's okay," which seems to really get through to the traumatized kid. Wonder why nobody thought of that approach before? Andrea leads her still upset but calmed down child out of the station.
Rangerpoliceman goes over Sam and Dean's story, of which he is tremendously incredulous. They've told him something attacked Carlton's boat, sent him into the water, and they never saw him again. Rangerpoliceman doesn't believe them for a few reasons: Carlton is a good swimmer, he's "sonar swept" the lake (already?), and Sam and Dean aren't really employed by the federal government. "That's right. I checked." The boys look surprised, even though they've done nothing since they initially introduced themselves as USFWS to maintain the illusion that they are employed by the government. Rangerpoliceman basically tells the cads to shut it, and that the only reason he hasn't arrested them yet is because a neighbor saw Carlton take the boat out, too. He continues on, turning into a real bad-ass dad, telling the boys they have two options. He either arrests them for impersonating federal officers, or they get in their car and leave town, and "never darken my doorstep again." The camera slowly pans in on each man's face as Rangerpoliceman gives them this fatherly talking-to, and Sam finally says, "Door number two sounds good." Rangerpoliceman replies, sternly, "That's the one I'd pick." Now THAT'S the way you act the stern dad, if you ask me. John Winchester, we'll find, is quote-unquote stern, with the emphasis on the quote. And also a little emphasis on the "Good-For-Nothing Piece of Crap Whose Cranky Face Was Misinterpreted By His Vulnerable Sons as Heroic."
Well, now, not totally sure where that anger came from, but I'm gonna go with it and maybe try to go scrub my floors right now.
Aaaand, I'm back, floors squeaky-clean thanks to my repressed rage. In a dark bedroom, Lucas sits on the floor and practices his black-vortex art, a style he learned about from his friend Aidan from The Ring. A shadow briefly darkens the door to his room (intentional visual echo? If so, artful!), but it's just his mother asking why he's still awake. She puts him back in bed.
Dean idles the Metallicar at a green light. Sam prompts him to go, and Dean determinedly turns right. Sam: "Ah, interstate's the other way?" and Dean says he knows. Looks like they're not going anywhere fast.
Oh, great. Andrea has decided to take a bath by placing the stopper in the tub veeerrrrry slowly and then turning the water on. Come on, lady!
Back in the Metallicar, Sam suggests to Dean that the case is probably over. He says that if what they think was happening did come to pass -- Peter getting his ultimate revenge on Carlton -- then case closed. Dean isn't so sure, however, and asks Sam what if "this thing isn't done?" Honorable intention, though probably he's just being petulant because someone yelled at him but good. Dean comes clean and tells Sam that the reason he's still anxious over the case is because Lucas was so scared in the police station. Sam marvels, "Who are you and what have you done with my brother?" Dean turns to him and sighs, "Shut up." So now Dean can count one kid on his list of kids he knows. Luckily, by the end of the season he'll be able add a few more kids he's taken an unnaturally keen interest in.
Back in the House of Didn't You Watch that Michelle Pfeiffer Movie, You Know the One Where Amber Valletta Attempted A Slash-ectomy on Her Model-Slash-Actress Career, Andrea drags her hand through the EVIL WATER. She continues to insist on taking a bath in the pitch dark. She leans back in the tub and starts to relax, propping her feet up under the old-timey faucet. She closes her eyes and so gets to miss the exact moment when the water begins to run brown. Open your eyes! Open your eyes! But no, instead she caresses her face and neck and décolletage with a washcloth. She finally looks about her and notices somehow, even in the pitch black, that the water is brownish. She starts screaming and trying to leap out of the bathroom, and her instantaneous reaction is a bit unbelievable, like if you weren't expecting that some evil force was trying to KILL you through brown water, you'd probably be like "Ew!" and sort of hop out rather than immediately and animalistically clawing your way out of a claw-foot tub. On the other hand, if you were expecting that some evil force was trying to kill you through brown water, then...WHY THE EFF WERE YOU IN THE TUB IN THE FIRST PLACE? So Amy Acker thrashes about just enough to provide the suggestion of imperiled boobs. Lucas bangs on the locked door from outside while his mother continues getting water-boarded. She finally goes all the way under and the water takes on a frothy, gunky appearance.
Meanwhile, the boys walk up to Andrea's house just as Lucas flings open the front door, eyes wide and hyperventilating. They all charge upstairs. Water spills out from under the locked bathroom door. Dean tosses Lucas to Sam while he does what he does best: kicks in some mothereffing doors. Sam charges through into the bathroom, reaches into the water, and with some artery-popping efforts and crown-necessitating grinding of teeth, pulls the boobs -- whoops, I mean, the mom out of the tub. Metal Teeth Chomp.
In the morning, Sam sits with Andrea and asks her to tell him what happened. She says she's going crazy. Meanwhile, Dean is in a pitch-black room rifling through notebooks. Andrea reluctantly confesses that she heard a voice that said, "Come play with me." Dean finds a scrapbook labeled "Jake, 12 years old." We cut to the scrapbook splayed open to a page with a Boy Scout troop photo. Dean asks if she recognizes any of the kids. She's confused, but picks out her father. Oh, don't tell me that the only decent father figure in this whole series is some Lake Killer Wacko. Dean realizes that the connection between the drownings wasn't Carlton, it was Rangerpoliceman. Sam deepens the gayness of the connection by remarking, "Bill and Carl. They were both involved with Peter." Andrea is like "say what?" as the boys do their rapid-fire postulating. Dean notices Lucas standing at the doorway, about to go out.
Lucas opens the door and leaves, the three adults trailing behind him. He's dressed in massively oversized sweats. He stops on a little patch of spongy moss and looks up at Dean. This kid is like Lassie or something. Dean sends him and Andrea back to the house, and the brothers start digging. Okay. They immediately get to a "thud" about six inches down. Convenient. They dig up Peter's bike, but before they can even put it down, Rangerpoliceman shows up, gun cocked, asking, "Who are you?" Sam tells him to put the gun down. He demands to know how they knew the bike was there, and Dean takes this opportunity to teach the man a lesson in extended metaphors: "You and Bill killed Peter and buried his bike? You can't bury the truth. Nothin' stays buried."
Andrea watches this exchange from the window of her home. She sends Lucas upstairs and tells him to stay there, door locked.
Cut back out to Dean's Deep Thoughts While Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun. Andrea runs up to the men and then pauses to let them continue their discussion. The discussion with gun, that is. Sam tells Rangerpoliceman that Peter's spirit is pissed and that it is going to take Andrea and Lucas and then come after him. Then it'll take their bodies "God knows where" so that they all feel like Peter's mom did. Rangerpoliceman is like, "You bitches be crazy," but Dean and Sam don't really care. It's Dean's turn to be stern now as he tells it to Rangerpoliceman straight: "We need to find the remains, salt them and burn them. Now tell me you buried him somewhere. Tell me you didn't just let him go in the lake."
Lucas is watching all this, crouched behind a fence, when he hears a voice whisper, "Come play with me." He heads off toward the voice.
Andrea demands her father tell her the truth. He take the deep breath of the I Acted Sternly and Now I Must Die Because Hollywood Is a Liberal Bastion of Touchy-Feely New-Age Types and doesn't say anything. Andrea realizes her father really did kill Peter all those years ago. Now he confesses: they were at the lake, they always bullied Peter, this time it got rough, they held his head under the water and he died. But they didn't mean it! They let go of the body and it sank. Sam has tears in his eyes. Rangerpoliceman begs his daughter to listen to reason: "To say I have anything to do with these drownings, because of some ghost? It's not rational." With no remains to burn, Dean realizes they just have to get away from the lake. What better time, of course, to notice that Lucas is hanging around the lake's edge.
Lucas, on the dock in front of the Carlton's house -- is that where they were? I thought they were at Andrea's house (please note how politely... er, passive-aggressively I just pointed out that the location is whack) -- leans toward the water as the voice whispers to him. He's reaching for some little green thing, which I don't quite get. The Foolsome Foursome rush toward the lake just as a sooty-dark child's arm reaches up and drags Lucas into the water, while metal clashes clash -- as they do quite often on the soundtrack.
Dean and Sam steam onto the dock while Rangerpoliceman gets stopped in his tracks by the appearance of the half-submerged dead face of the sooty-blue Peter, who is staring at him. He mouth-breathes a whole bunch. If only I had noticed his mouth-breathing earlier, I wouldn't have been taken in by his fatherly shtick! Dean and then Sam dive without hesitation straight into the water. And now I must dive without hesitation straight into a cold shower because damn, that was hot. Andrea makes like she's going to jump in, too, but we all know boobs can't save a child, so Sam tells her to stay on the dock. Meanwhile Rangerpoliceman wades into the water pleading to Peter, apologizing, asking him to take him instead. Andrea yells for her father, but we cut to a luminously disgusting child swimming up from the pitch depths of the lake toward her father and we know that's about it for him. He gets pulled under and we watch him go stunned and quietly into the dark deep.
Andrea, who is having one hell of a traumatic moment here, with her son underwater and probably dead and her father most definitely just drowned dead, sort of paces and furrows on the dock. Sam treads water, ducks his head under, comes back up, and shakes his head at her. The sound goes out, and Andrea goes into slow motion, and I have to confess right now that if ever you want me to be moved by ANYTHING, all you have to do is cut the sound, put the scene in slow motion, and overlay it all with an affecting tonal score and I am putty in your hands. So Andrea is screaming "Noooo!" we can tell from the motion of her mouth and her hair is flowing in a beautifully tragic way and we cut to the still water where we imagine her son floats all dead and potentially lost when just then! Dean! emerges! out! of! the! water! gasping! for! breath! and! grasping! Lucas! Now THAT moment deserved all those exclamation points and more. We cut back to Andrea, whose silent "Nooooo!" has turned into more of a silent "Whhaaaattt thhheeee fuuuuckkkk?" and she could be yelling, "My feet are stinky!" but keep doing it in slow motion without sound and I am so there. The violins continue swelling as Dean floats heroically. Commercial.
The boys pack up the Metallicar rather solemnly. Sam tells Dean that they can't always save everyone. Dean dejectedly agrees just as Andrea runs up with Lucas. They've brought them lunch for the road, sandwiches that Lucas made. He timidly asks if he can give the sandwiches to them, and Jodie Foster materializes out of nowhere, a fellow linguistic savant, to say, "Trouble go away at nigh', an' Nell caw Mi'i -- an' Nell an' Mi'i -- ye', Nell an' Mi'i -- like t'ee in the way!"
Aw, you guys know I make fun because I...am emotionally stunted.
Dean tells Lucas they should go load the sandwiches in the car, which sounds suspiciously like something the kids are calling something these days. Sam asks Andrea how she's holding up. And I'll say, something about her storyline has been more affecting than most. She says she has a lot to work through. Sam apologizes to her, and she replies, "You saved my son. I can't ask for more than that. Dad loved me, he loved Lucas. No matter what he did, I just have to hold on to that."
At the Metallicar, Dean takes this opportunity to make Lucas cutely anachronistic, an opportunity I take at every turn with my nieces, to whom I've introduced the song "Panama" by Van Halen, and who have returned my kindness tenfold by mistaking the word "panama" for "cannonball," ensuring that one day in sixth grade, that song will come on the classic rock station and they will embarrass themselves mightily by telling the cool girl they're hanging out with that they love this song "Cannonball" and the cool girl will reply with one coolly arched eyebrow and my nieces will continue along in their journey of becoming complicated and awesome dorks. In any case, Dean is doing the same thing to Lucas by telling him that now that he is talking he has to know one phrase that will come in handy in all kinds of places. Lucas nods, and high-fives Dean while blurting out, "Zeppelin rules!" Dean tells Lucas to take care of his mom, who has sauntered over and then decides to give Dean a really sexy kiss on the lips to say thank you. What? Where did that come from? Taking a page from Cassie's My Dad Is Dead, Now Come Bed Me, You Jerk Playbook? Or, oh, I get it...here we have yet another sighting of the rare Blue Tit. Funny how they congregate in L.A.