In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
A leather hockey-masked scarecrow kills a couple whose car mysteriously breaks down while passing through a small Indiana farm town. Sam and Dean talk to their father in California, who orders them to keep fighting the little evils while he tracks down whatever big evil killed their mom and Jessica. He commands them to Indiana. Dean takes these orders like a soldier, Sam like Henry Thoreau. Driving to Indiana from Rockford, Illinois, the brothers get into a fight over whether or not to do what Dad says. Sam gets out of the car and storms off. Dean lets him go.
The brothers spend the bulk of the episode in separate places. Sam meets a "hot girl" named Meg (who has a supernaturally short upper lip) while hitchhiking on the side of the road; they meet up again in a bus station and she tries, with a suspicious amount of zeal, to convince him to come to California with her. Meanwhile, Dean tries to investigate the disappearance, but just comes off like a major creep. By the time he finally discovers that the town orchestrates these disappearances as sacrifices to appease their Pagan God of "Apple" Orchards (who, like Alan Greenspan, guarantees the town's fiscal health through the sale of doilies and ceramic chicken figurines), the townspeople have discovered Dean. They tie him and a young girl from town up to await sacrifice. Sam, concerned that Dean wasn't answering his phone, arrives just in time to save them, but not in time to save Uncle Farmer Man, who learns a bit too late to never trust a Pagan God, especially not a Nordic one. The brothers make up. And down. But not out.
In the last scene, Meg does some more hitchhiking, only she has a peculiar way of accepting the kindness of strangers, and that is: she slits the man's throat, catches the blood in a silver chalice, and stirs it around with her finger, an action which, obviously, patches her through to someone she calls "Father," who explains to her -- on mute for us, of course -- why it is he let her let Sam and Dean get away. Um, okay. Things just got a little more complicated around here. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
A black screen with "Burkitsville, Indiana One Year Ago" written in American Typewriter fades into a quaint Main Street scene at night. A young couple exits a store, followed by a mom and girl urging them to take an apple pie with them. The young woman accepts the pie and giggles that they "should get lost more often. Everyone in town is so nice!" Her partner foreshadows, "Yeah, what's the catch?" Out on the street, the Pop to the apple-pie Mom finishes gassing up the car and accepts the Lost Boy's handshake of thanks. The townie girl remarks on the tattoo covering his forearm, and Mom and Pop give him directions back to the "interstate."
On a dark, foggy country road, a fancy Mustang sputters to a halt, its headlights blinking. Inside the car, Lost Girl is exasperated and unhelpful, and Lost Boy finds that his cell phone has died, too. They get out and notice a light shining beyond rows of neatly planted Mock Apple Trees. Lost Boy is all Canadian ("Looooks like a hoooouse over there") and ready to take his fool block head straight into the foggy forest, but Lost Girl is apprehensive. They walk through the "orchard," dead leaves underfoot, right past a few bushels of apples propped against a tree. Please note that everything here points to "Fall." Also I'd like to take a moment to just say, kudos, location scouts. Since the Vancouver area certainly does not have any apple orchards, you did the best you could with this strange collection of manicured bushes. As they walk, they come upon what looks to be a man in an overcoat and hat, impaled through the butt on a two-by-four, suspended about five feet off the ground. Let's check it ooot! They move closer to investigate, and it only gets uglier. It has weird scraggly black hair issuing from underneath its hat, and then underneath that hair a leather-like (probably pleather, really) hockey mask on. It's a little paunchy, and altogether rather Buckethead covered in slimy mold and mildew. You're probably all "ew!" but that just shows you don't understand couture. Lost Boy thinks it's cool: "Check it ooot. 'If I only had a brain.'"
(You guys, Buckethead! That's the kind of thing that makes me so psyched to be alive. That some dude makes his living dressing up like that and wailing on a guitar. Oh, and also, as Wikipedia tells us, "On stage, Buckethead enjoys not only entertaining by means of his guitar work, but also with displays of his nunchaku kata and pop-and-lock break-dancing skills.")They remark on its crazy-lookingness, and Lost Girl flutters her hands around to indicate her feminine distress. As they walk away, she keeps her eyes on Buckethead and notices it move slightly. She nearly jumps out of her skin, which if she had actually jumped out of her skin would have taken all the fun out of it for our Malevolent Scarecrow. A truly creepy shot of Buckethead hung up there on its post. Cut to Lost Boy and Girl scooting through the "orchard," suddenly pursued by something that growls and makes branches crackle. They take off running. The camera is right behind them until suddenly Lost Girl is running alone. She stops and turns around in circles while breathing heavily and calling Lost Boy's name. More crackling branches, more gasping, and she takes off running again until she trips over something that just happens to be Lost Boy's skinless face and corpse. The camera swings around to a long shot, and we see her look up from Lost Boy's body and start screaming and trying to crabwalk backwards. A pair of big hulking shoulders comes between us and her, and then cut to a shot of the scarecrow's perch at the end of a row of trees, currently vacated by its usual resident. Metal Teeth Chomp.
For once the rainy Pacific Northwest provides some appropriately-timed pathetic fallacy. The Metallicar chugs into this Disneyland-looking version of a small town square accessed via an honest-to-god paved driveway. What, you don't drive up to your town on a driveway? Everything is miniature and precious and Victorian and picketed and white-trimmed and just begging to be kicked in with a Dean-sized boot. As the Metallicar idles, Dean takes his cell phone out and scrolls down -- Bren, Carmelita, Christian, Curtis, Dad, Donny, Robin, Sam -- pauses on "Sam" but then shakes his head and puts the phone away. He approaches a man leaning a chair against the outside of "Scotty's Cafe." Dean tries to make small talk with "Scotty" but goes wrong from the first: "Hi, my name's John Bonham." The codger isn't fooled: "Isn't that the drummer from Led Zeppelin?" He didn't add "who choked on his own vomit?" Dean is taken aback: "Wow. Good. Classic rock fan." Dean hands him a flyer with info about the missing couple, and gets no response. Dean tells him that he's already checked out "Scottsburg and Salem." And, hold on!
…Okay, I'm back. I just had to go run around the block, because it seems they've figured out how to glance at a map in the writer's room! Though Burkitsville, IN seems to be a fictional place (quite the fine choice, seeing as how sometimes stories are even better when they are made up!), both Scottsburg and Salem ARE real towns in Indiana. What's more, they are relatively close to one another, and so completely plausible as two towns Dean might have actually checked out! The codger continues to stonewall Dean, and in frustration he blurts out, "Scotty, you gotta smile that lights up a room. Anybody ever tell you that?" These country folk sure are reticent (and given to lacy curtains).
Cut to a misty roadside. Sam strolls backwards toward the camera. When he swings around, the camera swings around behind him, and a short-haired girl has come out of nowhere and is sitting on the side of the road listening to music on headphones. Sam tries to get her attention, but she is listening to some really bad music really loudly. She jumps up in surprise when Sam finally taps her on the shoulder. She seemed somewhat cute, but only before her mouth started moving, because once she starts talking you notice that she has an incredibly short upper lip, one that makes it impossible to look at her and not think about that little piece of skin that connects your lip to your gums and nobody wants to think about that, ever, right? They make hitchhiking chit-chat, and the more she talks the more awful it gets. She has completely wooden delivery, so much so that I'm wondering if maybe I simply fell asleep for a few years, woke up to find that Padelecki's career did not turn out exactly as he had planned, and am now watching a porno. I mean, her real name is Nicki Aycox, which has a certain, well, Just Add Lube quality to it. A van pulls up and offers her a ride, but not Sam. She gets in, and Sam asks her, "You trust shady van guy and not me?" She tooths, "Definitely," and they drive off.
The Fearsome Four -- Mom and Pop, Sheriff Chad, and Scotty -- tie Dean and Emily to a couple of birch, oops, I mean "apple" trees. Mom is being a real bitch, telling Emily that "there's just nobody else but you" and then telling her that's "what sacrifice means. Giving up something you love for the greater good." Uh, mah gah. As The Fossilized Four leave, Dean calls after them, "Hope your apple pie is freaking WORTH IT!" When Emily asks what the plan is, Dean tells her he's "working on it."
Fade back in to Dean and Emily, still tied up. It's night now, and Emily realizes, "You don't have a plan, do you?" Dean replies, "I'm working on it." Dean tells her to look and see if the scarecrow is moving yet. She cranes her neck, and we begin to hear footsteps. She exclaims, "Oh my god! Oh my god!" and the strings start ratcheting up, but surprise! It's just Sammy. I'm wondering: how did Sam find this "apple" orchard? He unties Dean and Emily, and when Dean asks how he got there, Sam says, "Oh, I, ah, stole a car," much to Dean's delight. Not to Dean's delight is when Sam says he doesn't see any scarecrow to keep an eye on. And the incredibly punctilious ending to this episode is underway!
Commercials. The three run through the orchard looking for the blah blah blah sacred tree, but run into the Fabulously Bothersome Foursome, who hold them all up via gun and flashlight. They hear the scarecrow, and as Pop lectures Emily about how she has to let him take her, he gets run right through the chest with a hook hand. Screaming, sadness, Mom gets taken off too, and everyone disappears. A still from this scene now appears to "anticlimax" in my personal dictionary. The episode continues to limp along: in the morning, Emily, Dean, and Sam find "My First Tree of Sacrificial Human Flesh," dump a ton of gasoline on it, and light it on fire. Boring. Then the boys take Emily to get on a bus to Boston and discuss the imminent demise of the town. Talk about a welfare state! Take away their fat cat Scarecrow God and these people are nothing but lazy, apple-pie-gorging good-for-nothings. When Dean asks if Sam wants to be "dropped off anywhere," Sam tells him that he's done with his little hissyfit. He says he realizes that "Jess and Mom, they're both gone. Dad is god knows where. You and me, we're all that's left. So, if we're gonna see this through, we're gonna do it together." Dean whips out his cheese knife and cuts a big slice of cheddar off that speech, snarking at his brother, "Hold me, Sam. That was beautiful."Cut to a van driving down a road at night, while "Bad Company" (by Bad Company) plays. Inside the van, we see Meg saying to a greasy nasty man, "How 'bout you pull over?" He does as she requests, certain in his belief that the airbrushed vignette painted on the side of his van (too dark to see, but hopefully featuring a mystical silver wolf) has convinced her that he'll give her some good lovin'. Don't tell my husband, but I think I might be EXACTLY the mark for a man who drives a conversion van emblazoned with a magical, wintry scene on the side. So, they pull over, she reaches in her bag as if for a cell phone, but instead pulls out a silver chalice, reaches into that and grabs a silver shiv, slits his throat, and then catches the blood in her Cup O' Evil. She dips her finger in the blood, says some nonsense spell, and when little thistles of demonic energy appear in the blood, she starts talking to it: "It makes no sense. I could have stopped Sam. Hell, I could have taken them both. Why let them go." The Thistles of Bad Company apparently respond to her, though they do so on mute, and she whispers: "Yes." Pause. "Yes." Pause. "Yes, Father." And I'm sorry if this wasn't the reaction they were going for but: Haaaaaa hahaha hahahaha! Do you think it asked her to pick up some milk on the way home or what?