We open looking out from behind some palm trees onto crystal blue water. A ukulele of island breezes plays. A man in a v-neck sweater/suit jacket combo appears in the foreground, in a close three-quarter shot, suddenly making the island scene look very blue-screen. He also appears to be rising up from the waist after having snorted a couple of lines off a hot chick's tits. My hopes, however, that this episode would feature Tubbs and maybe, just maybe, a little Phil Collins are dashed when the camera pans out to show the man get up from a seat that was simply placed in front of an island mural. The ukulele fades out and the sounds of an airport fade in as the man fishes his boarding pass out of his jacket pocket. Cut to the bathroom, where the man mouth-breathes loudly while splashing his face with water. Another man comes out of a bathroom stall and notices Mouth-Breather pulling at his collar and generally looking sweaty and weird and, well, like he's been doing a bunch of cocaine. Friendly Bathroom Man remarks, "Nervous flyer, huh?" and Mouth-Breather responds, "It's that obvious?" Friendly Bathroom Man chuckles and evilly asks, "What are the odds of dying in a plane crash? Twenty-thousand to one?" He clearly didn't get the memo regarding the Ineffectiveness of Reason When Applied to Irrational Fear. Mouth-Breather bends back over the sink to continue with the splashing when the camera pans up to show a plume of rascally black particles flowing into the room through an air vent. What is it with this show and mischievous inanimate objects? When Mouth-Breather looks up, he notices the plume, turns to face it, and it, of course, flows into his body through his eyes.
The cockpit. Hee. Pilot Chuck flirts a bit with Stewardess Amanda as she welcomes people onto the plane. Mouth-Breather gets on and flashes his black, black eyes -- so black that they let you see into the depths of hell -- at Amanda and she...furrows her brow. Action/Reaction, folks. Amanda shakes off her shivers and returns to her greetings. Cut to a model airplane suspended by a string in "flight." Cut back to the interior of the plane, where Mouth-Breather makes small talk with his seat mate: "Do you know how long we've been up?" She answers, "About 40 minutes," and he responds, "Wow, time really does fly." Apparently the Rascally Plume makes you both evil and likely to have a regular gig at a stand-up club in the Poconos. Mouth-Breather gets up to "stretch his legs" -- oh, I should have mentioned that his evil black eyes have disappeared for some unknown reason -- and starts hovering suspiciously around the emergency exit door. An alert twenty-something keeps his eyes on this suspicious character -- thanks to the Patriot Act, no doubt -- and when he sees Mouth-Breather touch the handle, he yells out, "Hey! What the hell are you doing?" Right before Mouth-Breather opens the door, he turns to stare the kid down with his back-to-evil eyes, and the kid shrinks back into his seat. Mouth-Breather gets sucked out of the plane, along with the emergency door, which hits the wing and causes it to shear off.Back inside the plane, we get the requisite THE PLANE IS CRASHING! THE PLANE IS CRASHING! visual cacophony -- drink carts pinning people to the wall, papers flying everywhere, that eerie sight of torsos bumping and moving all around while legs and bottoms stay strapped onto a chair. But really, between Alive, Fight Club, and Lost, there's no need to ever watch a reconstructed plane crash again. So: the plane crashes. End scene.
Praise Allah, Hallelujah, and Shalom, we pan up on Jensen as he slumbers face-down on a bed wearing little shorts. Unnecessary strings wail in the background as we hear keys fiddling in the lock, and then see a large figure looming behind this weird glass-brick wall between the door to the motel room and the room proper. Dean's eyes snap open, and the strings continue to wail even though the one-celled organisms living in the dust on my television know it's just Sam. There's no need to start every scene with a little mini...SURPRISE!, is my opinion on the subject. Sam comes into the room holding coffee and says, "Mornin', sunshine!" as Jensen pushes his chest off the bed, craning his neck backward, in a total beefcake pose. Then Jensen's thighs move this way. Then Jensen's thighs move that way. Then Jensen's thighs decide to get out of bed. I'm thinking this would not be a bad way to continue the recap. What are Jensen's thighs doing? WWJTD? Anyhoo, it is a quarter to six in the morning, and Dean remarks that when he woke up at 3 AM, Sam was watching "the George Foreman infomercial," and then asks Sam when he last got a good night's sleep. When Sam says, "It's no big deal, but I appreciate your concern," Dean does his tough guy act and retorts that he isn't concerned, he just wants his brother "sharp," the better to fight the bad guys. Then Dean loses the tough-guy act and asks Sam, "Seriously, are you still having nightmares about Jess?" It's all a ploy to get Sam to sit down across from him and look lovingly into his eyes. It works! Sam sighs, faces Dean, and confesses, "Yeah, but it's not just her, it's everything. I forgot, this job. Man, it gets to you." And it's dialogue like this that make me love my job. Listen, I subbed in for Al Lowe on an episode of Deadwood and I'll take Padalecki's ungrammatical grunts over Ian McShane's iambic pentameter any day. This show is a recapper's dream: 30 minutes of grunted dialogue, 15 minutes of walking around corners in spooky places, done.
The boys continue talking, and Dean tells Sam that he "can't bring it home like that." Sam is incredulous: "So, what, ah, all this? It never keeps you up at night? You're never afraid?" Dean answers "no" on all counts, and Sam spits out a sigh of disbelief before reaching over and pulling a huge knife out from under Dean's pillow. Dean still doesn't admit fear: "That's not fear, that's precaution." No, precaution is double-checking that you locked the door at night. Dean's cell phone rings and he furrows his brow before answering. We cut to a guy in a short-sleeved plaid dress shirt sitting at a desk and announcing, "Dean. It's Jerry Panowski." Cut back to Dean with the furrowing. Jerry reminds him, "You and your dad helped me out a couple years back?" Dean remembers, "Oh, right, up in Kittanning, Pennsylvania. The poltergeist thing." Ugh. Dean, why must you deliver such terrible lines? Jerry requests to talk with Dean in person, and I think we all know what Jerry wants. The Metallicar glides across the screen against a darkening Midwestern sky. The brothers and good ole Jer walk through some sort of factory while Jerry thanks them for getting there so quickly. Sam tries to make conversation with Jerry -- "Yeah, it was a poltergeist?" -- just as some malook walks across the foreground saying, "Hey, Poltergeist, I loved that movie!" You and the writers of this show both, Mr. Malook. I've got half a mind to send them a copy of The Turn of the Screw or something to at least vary this show's cultural touchstones. Jerry "The Geek" Panowski gives Sam his weekly dose of "No, Daddy really does love you" by telling him that his father was real proud and talked about Sam all the time. Then Dean gives Sam the first of this episode's meaningful glances. Sam's got a lot of medicine to take, it seems. The three are now walking by an airplane, so it looks like they are in a hangar. Jerry the Geek asks about their father, and Dean lies that he's "wrapped [up] on a job right now." Jerry then says brightly, "Well, we're missing Dad? We get Sam. Even trade," so that Sam can wallow some more: "No, not by a long shot."
The three finally finish their interminable Walk of Chit-Chat Devoted to Sam's Low Self-Esteem when Jerry the Geek brings them to his office, saying he wants them to listen to something. He puts a CD into his computer and explains that he got hold of the "cockpit voice recorder for United Britannia Flight 2485. It was one of ours." I resisted before, but I'll let it fly now: they couldn't brainstorm a better name for their fake airline, apparently run out of the United States, with American flight attendants and American pilots, and seemingly American passengers? "United Britannia"? Especially since all these new carriers are coming up with loopy names like "Song" and "Ted"? "Lashed Together With Twine Airlines" would have been better than "United Britannia."
They listen to the voice recording, which starts out pretty normally, with a pilot issuing a crackling mayday, but then ends with a crazy lion-monster roar. Sam continues to smell farts while Dean seems to have perfected the art of sleeping with his eyes open in this scene. Jerry the Geek interrupts the brothers' catnaps by telling them that the plane "took off from here, crashed about 200 miles south." The camera swings around behind Jerry the Geek, and if you pause right here, you'll see both Jensen and Jared staring off into space mentally making grocery lists, trying to remember if they left the iron on, and calculating when their last period was. Jerry the Geek doesn't believe the official story of "mechanical failure" and tells them that out of the hundred on board, only seven got out alive. Sam finally shifts into gear and counts off on his fingers: "Jerry, we're gonna need passenger manifests, a list of survivors, and a plan for how to translate our modest success on this genre show into big-time movie careers." Dean finishes his own grocery list -- "Oh, and plastic wrap, don't forget the damn plastic wrap again, dummy!" -- and joins the conversation to ask whether there is "any way we can take a look at the wreckage?" Jerry isn't sure about the wreckage because "the NTSB has it locked down in an evidence warehouse." Cut to Jensen, who is wearing more peach blush than Tiffany, circa "Tiffany." Then cut to me, slackjawed that they expect me to believe Little Miss is going to break into a federally-guarded warehouse with his lips all BonneBelled like that.In front of a "Copy Jack" shop. A woman passes Dean as he exits the store. He, of course, trails her with his eyes and then mouths a "wow." You're not fooling anyone, there, Deborah Gibson. Sam is outside leaning on the car -- why is he always outside leaning on the car? Have they explicitly addressed this? -- and complains that Dean was "in there forever," but Dean simply flashes what look like two fake ID cards and says, "You can't rush perfection." Sam dorks, "Homeland Security? That's pretty illegal, even for us." Dean fires back a baffling line: "Yeah, well, it's something new. You know, people haven't seen it a thousand times." Is this supposed to be some sort of meta-commentary on the show? Because if it is, I'll tell you what people haven't seen a thousand times, and that's Jensen Ackles belting out the soundtrack from Glitter. Ah, a girl can dream, right?
The brothers get in the car, and Dean asks Sam what he's got on the case, and I brace myself for what's sure to be a number of lame acronyms. Aaaand I must have E.S.P. or something, because Sam tells Dean that "There's definitely E.V.P. on the cockpit voice recorder." And I totally LOL'd about how D.O.A. that line reading was. I mean, WTF? Sam plays the recording back on his computer, isolating a creepy voice moaning, "No survivors." Dean wonders what that means, since there were supposedly seven survivors of the crash. Sheesh, Dean, with your expectations. Hey, even Rascally Plumes make mistakes every once in a while. Dean and Sam start their weekly game of Name That Force when Dean asks, "So what are you thinking, a haunted flight?" Sam replies, "There's a long history of spirits and death omens on planes and ships, like phantom travelers. Or, ah, remember Flight 401." Dean nods and is all, "Do I?" replying, "Right, the one that crashed and the airline salvaged some of its parts, put it in other planes, then the spirit of the pilot and co-pilot haunted those flights." I just, I mean...you guys, this is my LEAST favorite part of the show every single week. All this serious-faced, arms-crossed, head-nodding, monster-genealogy-creating "Mm-hm, could be the old Bicycle Head demon." "Oh yes, you mean the demon that steals bicycles from little children, fills the hollow aluminum tubes with chocolates and then returns the bicycle and waits for the children to crash their bikes and find the haunted chocolate and then eat the haunted chocolate?" "Yes, that's the one." The brothers decide to go visit a survivor from the crash named Max Jaffe who lives around there and who is now in a psychiatric institution.
Riverfront Psychiatric Hospital. The brothers walk the grounds with Max -- the kid who saw Mouth-Breather approach the emergency door -- and he wonders why they're there, since he's already talked to Homeland Security. Dean does his deep-voiced liar thing: "Right, well some new information has come up." They ask if Max noticed anything unusual, "like strange lights, weird noises, maybe, voices." Max says no. Dean starts to play hardball, asking why Max checked himself into the loony bin. Max has a completely reasonable response: "I was a little stressed. I survived a plane crash." Dean continues to act the jerk: "And that's what terrified you?" Max says he's done talking with them. Dean tells him he thinks he saw something up there and "we need to know what." Max continues to stonewall: "No, no. I was delusional. Seeing things." Sammy jumps in, playing the sweet-talking Rey Curtis to Dean's raspy Lenny Briscoe, and asks Max to just tell them what he thought he saw. Max spills the beans about Mouth-Breather: "He had these eyes. These, um, black eyes. And I saw him, I thought I saw him. He opened the emergency exit. But that's impossible, right? I mean, I looked it up. There's something like two tons of pressure on that door." I like this little guy, he's sorta cute in a pasty, tiny-mouthed sort of way. Sam asks if the man appeared and disappeared suddenly, "like a mirage." Max is getting the feeling that these guys aren't Homeland Security. Max, this guy is Homeland Security, so I don't see how you could possibly think these two are, as well. Max asks if Sam is nuts and then tells him that Mouth-Breather was a passenger.
The Metallicar pulls up in front of a house. Sam exposits, "Here we are. George Phelps, Seat 20C." Dean gets out of the car and says, "Man, I don't care how strong you are. Even yoked up on PCP or something, no way you could open an emergency door during a flight." Dean clearly never had to watch Angel Dusted in high school health class. Sam suggests George was perhaps "a creature in human form." Dean points out that the lovely Tudor-ish house does not really look like a "creature's lair."
Inside the house, the brothers harass a widow. A hot widow. Way too hot for Phelpsie. George was a dentist by trade, which confirms that he in fact was fundamentally evil, quaint house and hot wife notwithstanding. The wife tells the brothers that George was scared of flying, and Sam asks her if she ever noticed anything "strange" about George during their thirteen-year marriage. Boy clearly doesn't get that one's spouse does something "strange" pretty much every hour on the hour. That's a lot of "strange" to bother noticing. George's wife replies blankly, "Ah, he had acid reflux, if that's what you mean?"The brothers walk down the front steps of the property. Sam is nonplussed over not turning anything up, while Dean remarks, "Yeah, middle-aged dentist with an ulcer's not exactly evil personified," and then says they need to get into the NTSB warehouse to take a look at the wreckage. Sam agrees, and adds, "If we're gonna go that route, we better look the part." Cue Dressing-Room Montage Guitars!
We pan down on the storefront of "Mort's for Style" while Black Sabbath wails in the background. The brothers emerge wearing full on Men in Black/Cigarette Smoking Man/State Farm Insurance get-ups. I feel totally robbed! I truly thought I was going to get a Dressing-Room Montage where Sam asks Dean if these pants make him look fat and Dean hops out of his dressing room and mugs around while wearing a gold lamé leisure suit. Sigh. I just have so many great ideas for this show. ["The season isn't over yet. Keep hope alive!" -- Sars] Dean isn't happy: "Man, I look like one of the Blues Brothers." Sam reassures him by telling him, "No you don't. You look more like a seventh-grader at his first dance." Dean tantrums some more and they get into their very non-government-issue Impala and chug off toward the warehouse.
Cut to the boys flashing their fake badges and a security guy nodding in approval, all still to the strains of "Paranoid." Inside the warehouse, Jokey Montage Music fades into Plinky Xylophones of Mystery as the brothers continue their Sisyphean walking. Sam asks what Dean is holding, and Dean tells him it's his "EMF reader. It reads electromagnetic frequencies." Sam is all, "No duh," and asks him why "that one looks like a busted-up Walkman." Dean stops and turns to his brother and seriously tells him that if he thinks this prop looks stupid, he's not going to be happy with the plastic spiders that are in his future. But perhaps my levity here is misplaced, because what Dean really says is, "Because that's what I made it out of. It's homemade," and gives this adorably proud smile, only to get completely shat upon by stupid Sam, who snarks, "Yeah. I can see that," like, really great comeback, you big wet noodle. Anyway, Sam hurts Dean's feelings and thus earns my wrath. Lots of walking and swinging around of EMF detectors. Best scene ever! Dean stops at the emergency door handles and scratches at the black soot covering it. As Sam leans in to collect a sample, Dean wipes his finger off on the back of Sam's jacket. I would have preferred him to administer a sooty wet willy.
Cut back to the security checkpoint outside the warehouse, where two men -- dressed identically to both one another and to Dean and Sam -- walk up and flash their badges in unison like the government robots they are. The security guy tells them that a pair of Homeland Security investigators are already inside. They then all of them run into the warehouse, guns drawn, looking for Sam and Dean, but the brothers are already gone. Good ol' boys! Outside the warehouse, Sam and Dean do a little run-walking while an alarm sounds and scale a fence to get out. Dean's suit jacket gets caught on the fence, and as he leaps up to grab it, he quips, "These monkey suits do come in handy." I don't really get this joke, and so am plunged into a few hours of soul-searching because things are really getting bad when I'm unable to get the jokes on Supernatural.A waiting lounge at a small airport. A real Joe Schmo in a terrible bowling-stripe shirt reassures a nervous-looking Pilot Chuck: "Look, Chuck, it's like gettin' back on a horse. Only in this case, a little twin engine. Not even a horse, a little pony." Joe Schmo is tremendously ugly, and Pilot Chuck looks like he might be the on-set janitor or something. Nice budget. When Chuck doesn't seem to relax, Joe Schmo tells him they "don't have to do this today." Chuck says that "the waiting is worse" and Joe Schmo gets up to leave Chuck sufficiently alone for evil things to occur. The Rascally Plume again flows out of the air vent and dances around behind Chuck like goddamned Mikhail Baryshnikov before cutting the interpretive dance crap and zooming into Chuck's eyeballs.
Sam, Dean, and Jerry the Geek stand around in a dark office while Jerry looks at, presumably, the black soot sample under a microscope. The image from the microscope is projected onto a computer screen and it looks like a loofah sponge. So, the Rascally Plume is just trying to evangelize about exfoliation? Jerry the Geek tells them that "the stuff is covered in sulfur" and then leaves, saying he "has an idiot to fire," in reference to some clanking and clonking happening in the background. Dean peers through the microscope and explains, "There's not a lot of things that leave behind a sulfuric residue." Sam looks up and posits, "Demonic possession," and Dean seems to agree: "That would explain how a mortal man had the strength to open up an emergency hatch." When Sam talks a bit more about possession, Dean dorks, "Yeah, but this goes way beyond floating over a bed or barfing pea soup." These two have officially become Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters. All "Spates Catalog" and "Tobin's Spirit Guide." If only Bill Murray were around. ["Just wait until you recap the Hook Man episode. You're going to throw your shoe." -- Sars]
Back at the airport, Chuck is a changed man, all hopped up on Rascally Plume. Up in the air, he tells Tremendously Ugly that he feels great, and then asks the time. Uh oh. The Rascally Plume of Bad Comedy strikes again! Pilot Chuck makes the same "time really does fly" joke as Mouth-Breather did, and then promptly points the plane directly at the ground. We cut between close-ups of Chuck's blackened eyeballs and a farmer driving a tractor along the ground until the plane shoots out of the clouds and whams right into the ground.
Commercials. Back at the motel, the boys do research. Sam, apparently surfing www.obviousfacts.com, finds that every religion in the world has the concept of demonic possession, and tells Dean that, "according to Japanese beliefs, certain demons are behind certain disasters, both natural and man-made." Dean isn't buying this theory, but Sam gives him the sigh of "that's all I got, man, and I am the college boy after all." So Dean decides to go with it and starts thinking out loud -- or I should say "thinking" out loud -- suggesting that they are dealing with a demon that has "evolved with the times and found a way to ratchet up the body count." Sam agrees and then gets all mournful: "Who knows how many planes it's brought down before this one." Dean sighs and scratches his head and tells Sam that "this isn't our normal gig. I mean, demons, they don't want anything. Just death and destruction for its own sake. And this is big. I wish Dad was here." Awww, with all the head-scratching. Dean's cell phone rings and he finds Jerry on the line with news of Pilot Chuck's plane crash. Jerry the Geek tells Dean that it happened "about 60 miles west of here, near Nazareth," and Dean responds by muttering, "I'll try and ignore the irony in that." Yes, the irony of something bad happening near a place in United States vaguely related to the Christian religious tradition. Totally ironical, dude. Call up Alanis, she'd probably agree.The Metallicar chugs past a sign that says "Nazareth 3," about fifty feet beyond which lies the smoking wreckage of the crash. Enormous mountains loom behind that, and given that Nazareth, PA is like eight miles west of New Jersey, nowhere near the Tuscarora or Appalachian mountain ranges, I am baffled as to why they didn't pick some other meaningfully-named town in Pennsylvania to set this episode. Like, for example, the famous Intercourse, PA? Anyway, the brothers seem to have simply zoomed past the wreckage straight back to Jerry the Geek's office. What? They couldn't cut thirty seconds of the interminable walking footage from this episode to give us a scene of the boys poking around the wreckage or something? Well, in any case, they've found the same sulfuric residue, and Dean brainstorms, incorrectly, that it seems the demon was simply after Pilot Chuck the whole time. Sam jumps in to observe that both flights went down exactly forty minutes in. Jerry the Geek asks what that means, and Dean blabs, "It's biblical numerology. You know Noah's Ark, it rained for forty days. The number means death." Oh, freaking Jehosephat in a goddamned handbasket, this is like trying to mallet a Pentacostal peg into a doctrinally unrelated hole. Sam has found six crashes over ten years that went down at minute 40 of the flight. There have never been any survivors, except in the case of Flight 2485. Then it clicks into place for Dean: "It's going after the survivors. It's trying to finish the job."
Rush plays in the background as we cut to Dean and Sam driving through the night. Sam is on the phone taking a fake "United Britannia" survey to find out if any of the survivors are planning on flying soon. Surprisingly enough, the male survivors are not, but a certain cute female flight attendant is flying out of Indianapolis at 8 PM that night. Sam worries that "this is a five-hour drive, even with you behind the wheel" -- which, no, no it is not. And don't even try to convince me that they just decided to drive west for five hours before figuring out where exactly they needed to go, because I think the explanation is less that these brothers have some sort of preternatural sense of where danger is, and more that if I were to call up somebody who works on this show and ask why they insist on not only paying no attention to continuity but, more infuriatingly, paying no attention to continuity while simultaneously making sure to throw in all kinds of specific place names, dates, travel times, et cetera, that that person would simply say, "Sorry, I'm snorting coke off a hot chick's tits right now." Sam worries about not making it there in time, but Dean pushes his lips forward and toughs, "Oh, we'll make it," as he zooms down the back roads that I'm sure will be so much faster than the interstate, what with all the unnecessary zigging and zagging.Indianapolis airport. The brothers run in the doors and look up at really high-tech departure screens -- Indianapolis my ass. They've still got thirty minutes till boarding and so go looking for an airport services phone. They page Amanda Walker, and she picks up. Dean does a song and dance about her sister being in a minor car accident. She calls his bluff and tells him that she just got off the phone with her sister. Dean gets tongue-tied as she peppers him with suspicious questions, finally asking, "Is this one of Vince's friends?" and then ranting about how "Vince" just needs to mind his own business. Dean tries a new lie, saying that Vince really needs to see her. She's a sucker and is almost moved, but tells Dean to have "Vince" call her later that night and then hangs up.
Amanda greets her fellow flight crew while above her head the Rascally Plume starts to gather. Dean and Sam mill about helplessly. Sam's bangs are very greasy. Sam declares that they have to get on the plane to save the hundred passengers on board. He then declares a moratorium on wax-based hair products. Or so I wish. Dean is looking cutely stunned as Sam rattles off the plan: they need to exorcise the demon, so Dean needs to go back to the car to get whatever will make it through security and meet him back there in "five minutes." When Sam finishes, he notices Dean's deer-in-headlight eyes and asks him if he's okay. Dean sort of rocks back and forth on his feet, licking his lovely lips nervously, and finally blurts out, "No, not really," and confesses to being scared of flying. Dean is being very, very cute in this scene, with confused-looking eyebrows and exasperatedly asking, "Why do you think I drive everywhere, Sam?" When Sam offers to do this job alone, Dean protests, but when Sam says that there are only two options, do it together or Sam'll do it alone, Dean is persuaded by the cries of fangirls everywhere, "Do it together! Do it together!"
Inside the plane. Dean looks intense. Sam tells him to "just try to relax" and Dean fires back, "Just try to shut up." Sam smirks, Dean pees his pants, the plane takes off. Dean gets crazy eyes as he hears the wheels retract, which I love, because whenever I'm feeling a little scared of flying, I imagine that I am the only person on board that hears THAT CRAZY NOISE WHAT THE EFF IS THAT CRAZY NOISE and it is always just the wheels going up or down or something.
Commercials. Dean is shaking and weird and Sam tells him that he has to stay focused. They try to figure out who the demon is possessing this time. Dean says it will be "somebody with some sort of weakness, a chink in the armor that that demon can work through. Somebody with an addiction or some sort of emotional distress." Mirror, mirror, Dean. But they think it will be Amanda, who they imagine must be "pretty messed up" to be flying for the first time since the crash. Dean spots her and says he'll go talk to her "to get a read on her mental state." When Sam asks what he plans to do if she's already possessed, Dean whips a huge water bottle out of his bag: "I brought holy water." Sam grabs it from him and says they need to be more subtle. Hee. Sam says "if she's possessed, she'll flinch at the name of God." Dean: "Ah, nice." He pops out of his seat with the fire of a thousand nerves of nervousness. Before he gets away, Sam reminds him to "say it in Latin" and then calls him back once more to tell him, "In Latin, it's 'Christo.'" Dean is annoyed: "Dude, I know, I'm not an idiot," and the nitpick forum comes alive because indeed, in Latin, "Christo" is not the name of the Lord but instead the name for tourist-pandering landscape art.As Dean makes his way to the back, the plane seems to hit some turbulence. When he gets back to Amanda, he tells her he is a nervous flyer and just likes to walk around a bit. They make small talk for quite a while as Dean tries to dig up her anxiety over flying. She doesn't bite, and is all serene and smiley toward him. In a pause in the conversation, Dean looks down and quickly says, "Christo." She doesn't flinch. He says it again. She doesn't know what he's talking about, and he slinks off. Back in his seat, he looks annoyed and tells Sam that she is "the most well-adjusted person on the planet." The plane shakes, and Dean starts to freak out. Sam tries to calm him with a soothing voice as Dean clutches his seat and snaps, "Dude, this plane is going to crash, don't treat me like I'm friggin' four," and then "Stow the touchy-feely, self-help, yoga crap. It isn't helping." Ha. Sam points out that Dean is leaving himself open for demonic possession and needs to calm down. Dean starts doing some Lamaze breathing and I fall over laughing. Sam gets back to business, telling Dean that he found a good exorcism, called "The Ritch-U-Al Ro-Mahn." He explains how it works, and I take a brief cat nap from recapping. I personally would prefer pointing and laughing at the animatronic chimpanzee for sale in the SkyMall magazine.
They are still trying to find whom the demon has possessed, and so Dean walks up and down the aisle with his stupid little EZQ thing-y, pretending he's just listening to his Walkman. He's not finding anything. Sam comes up behind him all desperate-acting. I am not fooled. The Walkman starts buzzing as one of the pilots comes out of the bathroom. Dean says "Christo," and the pilot turns around with Death Eyes before returning to the cockpit and locking the door.
Commercials. The brothers march to the back of the plane -- and if I had been on this plane, I would have tackled the shit out of them by now, they're acting so suspicious. They accost Amanda with their standard "this is gonna sound nuts" prelude, and Dean babbles on about not having time for the "the truth is out there" speech. They spill the beans about knowing about Flight 2485, and when Amanda tries to get past them, Dean manhandles her back in place. He tells her about Pilot Chuck and begs her to believe them about there being something strange on board. She finally gives in and tells them about the man with eyes of death. They tell her to get the co-pilot and bring him to the back.
As the co-pilot and Amanda come back down the aisle, the brothers get the exorcism book out. The pilot comes through the little curtain and gets a face full of Deanfist. As he lies on the ground stunned from the punch, they duct-tape his mouth, and Amanda protests over all this nonsense. They pour holy water on him and he starts burning up. Amanda starts pulling at her hair and muttering. Sam tells her to "keep the curtain closed," as if that will succeed in preventing the screaming and sizzling from alarming the passengers. Dean holds the co-pilot down as Sam speaks a bunch of crappy Latin over him. Lots of punching and flinging around, the holy water goes flying, but Sam keeps on keepin' on until the demon makes it personal: "I know what happened to your girlfriend. She must have died screaming. Even now, she's burning," which earns him another faceful of Deanfist as Sammy looks on all stunned and paralyzed. Dean calls Sam back to the task, and he jabbers some more Latin. The soundtrack is all crazy strings and weird growling, which get louder as the Rascally Plume exits the glargling co-pilot and goes to hide out in the vents. During all this, the exorcism book gets kicked out into the aisle.As the brothers leave the co-pilot to find the Rascally Plume, the plane takes a major dip and everyone starts falling all over the place. Sam goes after the notebook, but it's sliding down the aisle. Cut to Dean in strobe light bracing himself against the wall, his mouth open in a hilariously rigor mortis manner. Sam lies in the aisle, grabs the book, and gets back to his jabbering. Continue cutting to Dean acting the cute baby. Cut back to Sam jabbering. Cut to exterior of model plane, wrapped in bolts of electricity as the demon is finally exorcised. The plane stabilizes, and Dean looks about himself nervously. Jensen Ackles's lips are emoting totally differently from their normal shoved-out toughness. Here, they went rather ducky with fear. Love it! Sighs of relief all around. Meaningful glances between the bros.
Commercials. Back in the airport, passengers limp off the plane; the police interview the co-pilot, who is sitting in a wheelchair, claiming not to remember even getting on the plane. Amanda gives her statement and mouths a "thank you" at the boys. The boys start to leave, but Sam is full of angst: "Dean, it knew about Jessica." Dean tries to tell Sam that demons lie, but Sam doesn't seem to buy it. Cut to a parking lot, where the boys accept thanks from Jerry the Geek. They shake hands and Jerry starts to walk away. Dean calls out to him to find out where he got his cell phone number and Jerry tells him that their dad gave it to him. The boys sort of rise up a little, and Dean asks when he talked with their father. Jerry tells them that he didn't exactly speak with him, but when he called, Dad's voicemail instructed him to call the boys.
Violins of Important Plot Point play as we cut to a shot of a plane flying against a blue sky. Pan down to the boys leaning on the Metallicar by the side of the road. Sam complains that it doesn't make sense because he's called Dad's phone "like fifty times." Dean dials his phone and gets the voice message: "This is John Winchester. I can't be reached. If this is an emergency, call my son Dean, 785-555-0179. He can help." Sam tears up and then flings himself off the car and into the passenger seat. Dean gets in the driver's seat, and the Metallicar takes off. We end on a filler shot of the boys driving down the road.