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The episode starts with a man pulling his car into the garage and then promptly getting locked in by an unseen force. The car idles, and the garage fills up with fumes while the man yells ineffectually for help until he suffocates to death. Sam starts awake from a dead sleep having seen a vision of this death, and drags Dean out of bed to drive to Saginaw, Michigan to check it out. Once there, the boys pose as priests to gain entry to the "suicidal" man's home. They don't find out too much, but they sure look disturbingly cute in their collars. Sam has another vision -- this one coming when he's awake and causing him some major brain pain -- and sees the opening dude's brother getting decapitated by a window. Sam and Dean rush to his apartment, but are too late. After asking around the neighborhood, the brothers find that the son (and nephew) of the two dead men had long been physically abused by both, and that the abuse had long been ignored by his still-alive stepmother. Sam gets another vision of the kid, Max, telekinetically sending a knife through this lady's eye socket, and they scramble across town once again. Sam manages to have a heart-to-heart with Max, during which he finds out that Max's "abilities" started around the same time as his and that -- BIG REVEAL! -- his biological mother was killed in the same way Sam's and Dean's mother was, i.e. ceiling-kabob.
But Max freaks out again, and mind-thrusts Sam into a closet in front of which he slides a huge china cabinet. While Sam is trapped, he "sees" Dean getting shot in the forehead by Max, major blood and brains splattering everywhere. This vision sends Sam over the edge, and in a burst of rage, he finds out that he too can move furniture with his brain. He rushes in to save Dean, which works, but then Max just offs himself instead. At the end of the episode, Sam suggests that maybe their mother's death was actually caused by his then-infantile special "abilities." We'll call this the "Marissa Cooper" theory of supernatural events. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Parental discretion! Yippee!
Is that…is that Bob Seger? Why, yes, it is. Seger (The Bob Seger System, that is) pumps as an old Dodge sedan of some sort totters up a driveway at night. It pulls in to a snowmobile, and we get a close-up of the license plate: Michigan MF 6037. The driver shuts the car off just as the garage door starts going down. From the driver's confused expression, we realize that he has not set the door in motion himself. His confusion grows greater as the garage door clangs shut, the door locks on the car mysteriously get sucked into their slots, and the keys hanging in the ignition shimmy and turn the car over. A shot of exhaust pouring out the tailpipe. The radio turns on and starts jumping around stations, and I have to wonder why mysterious forces always have such a cinematic bent, making sure to have the radio produce such an eerie and incoherent clamor for our benefit. The car starts to fill with exhaust, and the man inside grunts and coughs, and groans and tries to plug the window seal up with his jacket, and flails around, yelling for help once before keeling over and ultimately dying with his eyes open. Cut to a shot of the car through a window in what seems to be the door leading from the house into the garage.
Artful transition as the windowpane illuminates to signal our entrance into a mind-y kind of place, and we cut to Sam rolling over in bed, his eyes wide. Cut between his open eyes and shots from the scene, all pretty vague except for a replay of the shot of the license plate. Sam sits up, turns on the light, wakes Dean up, and starts packing. Dean is groggy, and sleeping in a bed with an honest-to-god Liberace wavy-topped white tufted headboard. Can't make this shit up. Sam is acting a bit crazed, insisting that they have to go right then, while strings fret in the background. Pan in to a two-bulbed desk lamp, the right bulb of which is out, and...
…another artful transition as an engine rev bridges the distance from strings to rock, and we pan in to the Metallicar's dual front headlights, the right bulb of which is out. It's raining. Dean drives as Sam tries to identify the owner of the license plate he saw in his dream. Sam's on the phone with the Michigan state police, holding a police officer's ID card in his hand and reading the information off to the dispatcher: "McCready. Detective McCready. Badge Number 158, I've got a Signal 480 in progress, I need the registered owner of a two-door sedan." Sam is put on hold and Dean tells him to relax, that the whole thing was just a nightmare: "This license plate, it won't check out." Sam insists that this dream "felt different, Dean, real" and seemed similar to the times when he dreamed about Jessica dying or about the lady who lived in their old house. Dean makes a useless remark, saying, "Well, yeah, that makes sense, you were dreaming about our house, your girlfriend. This guy in your dream, ever see him before?" Dean thinks there's no reason Sam should be having "premonitions about some random dude in Michigan." The police dispatch comes back on the line and gives Sam the name -- Jim Miller, Saginaw, Michigan -- and Sam gives his brother an "I told you so" look, saying, "It checks out." Dean says they're a couple of hours from Saginaw; Sam tells him to "drive faster." Dean puts the pedal to the metal. Heh. I can't believe I just wrote that.The Metallicar pulls up outside Jim Miller's house. Lots of cops mill about while Jim's body is being zipped into a body bag on a stretcher. Sam and Dean spend a good long while furrowing brows and looking at one another and then at the crime scene.
Metal Teeth Chomp. Credits. Still outside the Miller house, about a million people are now milling about. "I was washing a dish. I heard the crash. And then I came out." Dean sidles up to an old lady, who tells him that it was a suicide. She continues, telling them that she "saw him every Sunday at St. Augustine's. He always seems -- seemed -- so normal. Guess you never know what's going on behind closed doors." I wonder, do you have to sign a contract while standing around a crime scene to say some version of that "closed doors" comment? And you just know that lady has that line all ready for when Channel 9 News gets there. Sam prods a bit, and the lady tells him how it seems to have happened and that it happened "an hour or two ago." Dean. Sam. Meaningful glances. As the lady continues, "His poor family, I can't even imagine what they're going through," we get a shot of a woman crying and falling into the arms of a man, to whom stands a manboy. I'm guessing this is the family of which she exposits. Dean works his jaw a bit, and sniffs meaningfully. We'll continue to see that the boys are required to perform a good bit of facial gymnastics during this somewhat quiet, and so very meaningful, episode. Sam storms off...about four feet away from the crowd. Dean follows him and tells him they got there as fast as they could. Sam is distraught: "Why would I even have these premonitions unless there was a chance I could stop them from happening." This sentence is grammatically problematic. Samuel, you are trying to stop the event from happening, not the premonition. Indeed, I will school you.
Sam sighs and asks Dean what he thinks killed Jim. Dean makes us all guffaw by forgetting that he lives inside a silly television plotline, and suggests that "maybe the guy just killed himself. Maybe there's nothing supernatural going on at all." Sam keeps beating the boring drum: "I'm telling you, I watched it happen. He was murdered by something, Dean. It trapped him in the garage." Dean is skeptical: "By what? A spirit or a poltergeist or what?" Sigh. I'm tired of these two having the same conversations over and over, a conversation where one of them gets in the way of the other one's brainstorming for no reason other than to create conflict in a scene that is otherwise rather boring. Shot of the boys from the back, silhouetted in front of the brightly-lit crime scene. Sam starts to drag this convo out of the shitter by actually saying something remotely interesting: "I don't know what it was. I don't know why I'm having these dreams. I don't know what the hell is happening to me, Dean." Dean looks at him rather closely and then tells Sam that he's worried about him. Aw. He keeps staring. Sam: "Stop looking at me like that!" Dean: "I'm not lookin' atchoo like anything. But I gotta say, you do look like crap." One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war! Dean suggests they leave everything be until the morning, when they'll check out the family and the house. Sam reminds Dean that the family is devastated, much as families are when fathers and husbands die. Cassie. Dean gets a glimmer in his eyes as he tells Sam he thinks he knows who the family will talk to.Cut to a finger reaching out and ringing a doorbell. Parental discretion, indeed! Close-up of Sam, who is rocking a total mother's-spit-in-the-hand slick-back hairdo, muttering, "This is gonna be a whole new low for us." Dean turns to him, and Ackles plays this with his lips shoved out to such great lengths, with such mischievousness, that I think he must be saying, "Drunken Bee, I know you love this move, this one's for you, kid." A man answers the door, and the camera swings around to reveal our boys in priest costumes. Dean takes the lead: "Good afternoon. I'm Father Simmons, and this is Father Frehley. We're new junior priests over at St. Augustine's." Haaa ha ha ha! As in, Gene Simmons and Ace Frehley. Of Kiss. As priests. That's awesome. And that's even before my mind can process the "Father I.P. Freeley" possibilities. You see how little it takes to amuse me now. I stand before you, unmasked. Anybody got a whoopie cushion? Jensen Ackles is playing this perfectly, smarmy and beatific. Dean slides right by the man who opened the door for them while Sam takes this opportunity to be annoyingly sincere: "We're very sorry for your loss."
Inside, Dean smiles as he delivers canned lines about the Lord's guidance. Their new man friend isn't having any of it, asking them to keep the "whole 'the Lord has a plan' thing" to a minimum. He then quickly exposits, "My brother is dead," just as Jim's wife walks in and admonishes him for his ungodliness: "Roger, please." Roger exits, and Simmons and Frehley move on to talk to the lady doing a Kathleen Turner circa Serial Mom impression. She apologizes for her brother-in-law while holding a casserole dish in her arms. She asks the boys if they'd like coffee.
Cut to Serial Mom pouring out the coffee and thanking Simmons and Frehley for stopping by. Dean pours it on thick: "Of course. After all, we are all God's children." Sam shoots him a look while fiddling with his collar. Serial Mom walks away, and Dean grabs a mini-wiener and pops it in his mouth. And that, my friends, is a literal recap of what happened on the screen. But I am shocked and dismayed, because what Michiganian in their right mind neglects to put the pigs in their blankets at a wake? As Dean chews his wiener, Sam lets out a disgusted chuckle: "Just tone it down, a little bit...Father." Hee. Serial Mom returns, and Dean talks to her with his mouth full of wiener. What? It. Is. What. Is. Happening. On. The. Screen. "So Mrs. Miller, did your husband have a history of depression?" She insists that they were "happy" and then tells them, in response to Sam's condolences on finding her husband "that way," that it was actually their son Max who found Jim. She gestures off screen and the camera follows her gesture, settling on the scary manboy sitting by himself in a corner. Sam offers to go talk to Max. Dean stays behind to make small talk with Serial Mom about her "lovely home." And I think this is exactly what the Baptists predicted. First the priesthood, then the wieners, then the interior decorating. Serial Mom is a bit perplexed by Dean's interest in her home, but he continues to rather awkwardly ask her about what sorts of "headaches" the old house has given her. She is now truly confused, but Dean presses on, "Well, you know. Weird leaks. Electrical shortages. Odd settling noises at night. That kinda, thatkindathing." Jensen Ackles is KILLING ME in this scene. He's got his voice set to "The Delicious Dish" frequency and his eyes are widened to Bambi proportions. Serial Mom tells him the house has been "perfect," which makes Dean go "hunh" before popping another wiener into his mouth and excusing himself to go the bathroom.Over in the corner with possibly hoofed ManBoy, Sam asks the rosy-lipped lad what his father was like. He holds the "normal" line even while looking about as normal as John Wayne Gacy, squeaking out that he lives at home because he's trying to save up for school. I cannot tell if this actor is fourteen or forty-seven. It's pretty freaky. Long shot of Sam and Max sitting across from one another rather awkwardly, Sam leaning in, Max leaning away. Close-ups of Sam and Max as Sam asks Max to tell how he found his dad. Max: "I woke up. I heard the engine running. I don't know why he did it." Sam tries to relate: "I know it's rough, losing a parent, especially when you don't have all the answers." And ACKKK! Watch out where you pause, because you could catch ManBoy readying to EAT YOU ALIVE when you look back up at the television.
Upstairs, Dean sneaks around. He takes out one of his devices (if only this scene were more wiener-related), which shoots two crossed green lasers out in front of it, and has a video display. Dean starts walking around with his laser vision thing, and keeps walking for quite some time. He knows how I love the walking. He hears footsteps, looks lively, and puts his device away (hee), only to turn and see Sam come trotting around the corner. Looks like he could have left his device out in the open after all. Sam asks, "Anything?" and Dean replies, "Zip," and they both sort of fall over one another trying to get out of the scene. Cut!
The outside of the Escanale (?) Motel. It's all lodgy and hunter-y, which is about right for Michigan. Dean sits on the bed rubbing a stick in and out of a hole. Sheesh, he's just cleaning his guns! And no, that isn't "what they're calling it these days." Sam says they've got nothing on the case, noting that there are "No graveyards, battlefields, tribal lands, or any other kind of atrocity on or near the [Miller] property." Dean sympathizes, "Hey, man, I searched the house up and down, there were no cold spots, no sulfur scent, nada." Lots of "gun cleaning" sounds during this whole scene. Dean continues, "I used the infrared thermal scanner, man, there was nothing." So that's what they're calling that thing these days. Sam starts to doubt his premonition as maybe having been some "freakish coincidence." Dean continues nonchalantly cleaning guns while Sam tries to talk the situation through. Sam sits on a bed facing away from Dean, so we can see him starting to flinch and grimace and blink his eyes a lot, but Dean can't. Sam's all, "Maybe it's ah, ah, um..." Finally, Sam's gasps catch Dean's attention, and he asks, "What's wrong with you?" just as Sam starts falling to the floor crying, "Ow, yeah, my head." Dean rushes over to him and grabs him by the arms. Sam looks blankly to the side of Dean while we flash over to a "vision."
The "vision" is a clear narrative, with Roger returning home with groceries, and opening a beer, as a shadowy figure crosses in front of a doorway between the camera and Roger. A window opens of its own volition, which Roger notices and goes over to try and shut. He gets the window back down and locks it and returns to unpacking the groceries. The window slowly unlocks itself and opens again, so Roger takes a sip of beer and tries to shut it again. This time it won't budge, so, of course, he sticks his torso out of the window, ending up somehow lying flat with his neck laid out neatly across the sill. Whatever. Horror movie REE REE REE as the window comes slamming shut, we quickly cut to a shot of the windowpane splattered with blood, and then cut back to an exterior shot where we see a little bald head roll into the flower box. Fertilizer? The "vision" turns back into shaky shots of the interior of Sam and Dean's hunter's lodge and Sam doing his best to appear cross-eyed with mystical abilities. Still with a blank look in his eyes, like he is looking inward rather than outward, he exclaims, "It's happening again. Something's gonna kill Roger Miller."Commercials. Let's take a brief moment. If they are going to pursue this whole "Sam has visions" plotline (and who knows if they will, since they abandon it for many episodes at a time), they're going to have to figure out a better way to show us what he "sees" with his mind's eye. We know for a fact that he only saw bits of what happened to Jim Miller, so why was his vision of Roger Miller's death so cinematic? Dean and Sam are in the Metallicar, Sam in the passenger seat on the phone with information getting Roger Miller's address. Sam has his head weakly tilted back and is talking in the quiet voice of a migraine sufferer. He winces, and Dean asks if he's okay. Sam says he is, and then Dean responds with the response of a deeply feeling man unable to express those feelings: "If you're gonna hurl I'll pull the car over, 'cause the upholstery, you know..." And I just realize that unbeknownst to me, my mind was making a bizarre Beaches reference when it made me type the phrase "deeply feeling." Remember? Something like, "I am a deeply feeling person. I feel deeply." WTF? Why is that line buried in my head? Sam sighs and tells Dean that he's really scared. "These nightmares weren't enough, now I'm seeing things when I'm awake? And these visions, or whatever, they're getting more intense, and painful." Dean tries to soothe Sam by ignoring his worries, basically. But Sam continues, wondering what connection he has to the Miller family. Dean gets sort of fatherly and barks at Sam that they'll figure it out: "We face the unexplainable every single day. This is just another thing." My thoughts exactly. I mean the shrimp docks in Missouri? They got through that one, didn't they? Sam's "abilities" obviously come with a side of narcissism, though, as he continues to harp on how different this situation is. He demands of Dean, "Tell me the truth, this doesn't freak you out?" The camera pans in on Dean's steely gaze, and he looks straight forward at the road and clenches, "No. This doesn't freak me out."
A low vertical shot of a multi-story apartment building. The camera motion-sicks down and around to show us the sidewalk entrance where Roger Miller approaches the building. The brothers pull up in front and yell out to him, but he tells them to leave him alone. They park the Metallicar and try to follow him into the vestibule, but he shuts and locks the door behind him. They run around back and Dean kicks in the gate into the alley. Sam and Dean run up the fire escape metal stairs, hoofing it up five or so flights. This whole scene is weirdly blue-screen and choppy-looking, so they are either using just one or two flights of actual stairs and computer generating the rest, or they've got some strange pan-and-scan thing going on. I don't really know, technically, I just know it looks pretty shitty. They finally reach the top to find blood dripping everywhere. Too late. Dean keeps his wits about him and starts wiping down their fingerprints, instructing Sam to do the same. Then Dean climbs through the window, telling Sam that he wants to take a look inside.Back down on the sidewalk, Dean tells Sam there was nothing inside the apartment. Sam tells him that in his vision he saw a "dark shape" that seemed to be "stalking Roger." Sam thinks that whatever it is, it is "connected to the family itself," as opposed to the houses they live in. Sam then suggests maybe a "vengeful spirit" and they begin to do their regularly-scheduled monster banter. They think maybe Roger and Jim were involved in "something heavy. Something curse-worthy." Sam worries that maybe Max is in danger and then whines that just like the Millers, his family "is cursed." Dean tells him to cram it: "Our family's not cursed. We've just -- had our dark spots." Sam smiles disbelievingly: "Our dark spots are pretty dark," and then Dean has a "jerk store" moment: "You're...dark." Hee.
Back at the Miller house, Max walks the brothers (back in priest costumes) into the living room, telling them that Serial Mom is resting. Max chatters, "All these people kept coming with, like, casseroles? I had to finally tell them to all go away. You know, 'cause nothing says 'I'm sorry' like a tuna casserole." This kid clearly needs some home training. You simply do not refuse free casserole, no matter how disgruntled and mad at the world you are. Sam chuckles far too generously at Max's "joke." Long shot of the three in the living room, with a table full of aluminum-foiled casserole dishes in the immediate foreground. Damn, I could really go for a casserole right now. Sam puts on his sensitive face and asks Max how he's holding up. Max's face looks like it is carved out of shiny, tight wax. Shiny, tight wax. My new punk band? Sam keeps prodding and finds out that Max's uncle used to live door to them when he was a kid, Max mentioning that his uncle was over all the time then. Sam and Dean ask about how things were when Max was little: "All good memories?" Max starts breathing a bit huffily, as Fake Priest Dean seems to be asking this boy about possible abuse in his past by men. Huh. ManBoy smiles tightly and shakes his head: "Why do you ask?" and then assures them that they "were totally normal." Dean is all "AH HA!" when he hears that shit, and immediately suggests that he and Sam leave.
Outside, Dean observes that "nobody's family is totally normal and happy," and Sam thinks Max "sounded scared" when he talked about his old house. Dean takes his collar off as he gets in the Metallicar, declaring that they pay a visit to the Millers' old neighborhood.
Old neighborhood. The boys stand on the sidewalk, talking to an old codger who's lived there for "twenty years now" and who asks if they are "looking to buy?" Hee. Everybody just wants these two to stop pretending and settle down together already. Sam and Dean ask if he remembers the Millers. As always, they immediately hit pay dirt. Old Codger: "Is that poor kid [Max] okay?" Ding ding ding ding ding! Boy, these two have a knack for immediately falling upon exactly the right person to give them exactly the information they need to solve a case. Old Codger goes on to explain that Jim was a "mean drunk" that "used to beat the tar out of Max" and that Uncle Roger joined in. Old Codger continues, "The worst part, was the stepmother. She'd just stand there, checked out, never lifted a finger to protect him." Oh yes, a woman's inability to stop her raging drunk of a husband is SO MUCH WORSE than the raging drunk deciding to whale on a kid in the first place. Methinks somebody needs to enroll in a Womens' Studies course at the local college. ["Or dropped a dime to the police his own damn self if it was so bad. Yeah yeah, he said he 'almost called' a bunch of times, but whatevs." -- Sars] Dean picks up on the whole "stepmother" piece of info and Old Codger tells them that Max's "real mother died in some sort of accident. Car accident, I think." Meanwhile, Sam has started his grimacing and gasping until Old Codger takes notice and asks if he's okay. Sam says he is, but he clearly isn't, and Dean quickly thanks Old Codger and ushers Sam over to the car. Dean could have just said that Sam's coming down with a migraine instead of acting so shiftily. Before Sam even gets into the car, though, he stares straight out into space and then we get a shot of the street he's looking at through the Handheld Camera Shakes of Impending "Vision." We end up in the Miller kitchen, where Serial Mom is chopping vegetables and arguing with Max. She protests, "You know I never did anything," but Max points out that that was exactly the problem. This ManBoy is a real slobberer. Max approaches her slowly, angrily clenching about her never stopping "them, not once." As he gets closer, the butcher's knife floats off the cutting board and zooms over and hangs horizontally in front of her face. She backs up and begs Max to stop and we get far too long to look at the crappily executed computer-generated floating knife. Does post-production work on a Commodore 64 or something? We switch to a close-up profile of Serial Mom's right eyeball with the knife point about an inch away from her cornea. She gasps and her eyeball tears. Nice. Max continues to slobber and accuse; Serial Mom says she's sorry, but Max chalks the apology up to fear. Which, yes, ManBoy, you shove a knife in somebody's eye and her apologies probably won't be the most sincere. The knife pulls back a bit, and Serial Mom groans a bit right before the knife flies back at her and stabs her through the eye and out the back of her head, pinning her to the wall against which she was leaning.
Commercials. In the Metallicar, Sam concludes that Max is doing it. Dean asks how he's pulling it off, and Sam says it "looks like telekinesis." Sam suddenly gets his "visions" in freaking HD, it seems. Dean wonders if the kid is "a psychic? What is he, a spoon-bender?" Heh. Sam realizes that he "wasn't connecting to the Millers, I was connecting to Max. I guess, because we're so alike?" Oh, cram it, Miss Cleo. Dean agrees with me -- "You're nothing like Max" -- but Sam continues to twirl his tarot-card skirts some more: "We both have psychic abilities!" Dean reminds him that "Max is a monster." Sam thinks Max was justified after being beaten so severely. Dean disagrees: "He's no different than anything else we've hunted." Also, he's about as freaky looking as that Wen-DEE-go dude. Dean wants to kill Max, but Sam reminds him that they aren't in the human-killing business. Dean quips, "Then what? Hand him over the cops and say, 'Lock him up, officer. He kills with the power of his mind.'" Hee. Sam thinks they can talk to him. Dean acquiesces, but also leans over to get a shiny gun out of the glove box to bring into the house. Great idea, Dean. Bring a gun into a house so ManBoy can mind-lift it out of your hands.
Inside the house, we get a repeat of Serial Mom and ManBoy's fight over the chopped vegetables. This time, however, as the knife begins to hover, Dean and Sam break through the front door. Serial Mom exclaims, "Fathers?" and we get a shot of the boys hilariously trying to look normal even though they just broke down the front door (and are wearing civilian clothing in this scene). Sam has a ridiculous grin on, and for a moment I love him. Sam tries to get Max to come outside and talk for a minute. Beware the priests, ManBoy! ManBoy agrees, and sort of slinks toward the door. But as Dean opens the front door, ManBoy gets a glimpse -- I'm not sure where, in some sort of reflective surface, a mirror? the shined doorknob? the windowpane? can't tell -- of the gun tucked into Dean's waistband. He uses his mind to slam the door shut on Dean and close all the wooden plantation shutters on the windows. ManBoy yells, "They're not priests!" and as Dean pulls the gun, ManBoy easily mindgrabs the gun away from him. ManBoy points the gun at the brothers and then mind-throws his stepmother through the air. She whacks her head on the countertop of the kitchen island and flops to the ground. Dean insists they just want to talk, but ManBoy thinks the gun says otherwise. Sam takes over, apologizing for all the lies and then telling Max about his visions. Max doesn't believe him until Sam reveals that he knows Max was about to jab Serial Mom through the eye with the knife. Max is slobbering and crying. Sam says they can get Dean and Serial Mom out of there so the two of them can talk alone. That's what all the priests say, you know. Dean objects, and ManBoy makes the chandelier shake with his mind, crying, "Nobody leaves this house!" Sam says Dean and Serial Mom can just go upstairs. Dean doesn't want to leave Sam alone with ManBoy, but when Sam finally gets ManBoy to agree to five minutes alone, Dean has no choice but to get Serial Mom and go upstairs. Serial Mom has a nasty cut on her forehead.
Sam and Dean sit in the living room. ManBoy's face is all pink and slobbery and waxy as he makes a letter opener twirl on the end table beside him. This conversation goes on for some time. ManBoy is getting on my nerves, because he's delivering his lines sort of like a seven-year-old. I mean, I get the whole "damaged childhood, damaged man" bit, but I don't know why the abuse has made him underpronounce his Rs and draw out his vowels: "She's a pawt of it toooo." So the conversation: Sam makes a mistake in talking about the abuse as if it were in the past. ManBoy proves him wrong by standing up and showing a crazy bruise blooming all over his ribcage. Then Sam seems sort of at a loss for how to proceed. Great negotiation skills, pal. ManBoy takes over, talking about his discovery that he could move things with his mind and how it was the only thing that made him feel less helpless. ManBoy explains that he killed his father in response to the recent beating, and then sort of just got the taste for revenge. He blathers on about needing to kill them all because he needed to "not be afraid." The twirling letter opener has quit its circus tricks and dropped to the tabletop. ManBoy says his father had "hate in his eyes" for him. Sam grunts. It's The Negotiator! ManBoy continues, saying his father blamed him for everything, even for his mother's death. Sam, vaguely paying attention to this life-or-death conversation, asks why that would be.
ManBoy sits up in his chair, and we brace for the reveal: "Because she died in my nursery. While I was asleep in my crib." Sam finally zones back in, shaking his head in disbelief and asking him to clarify. ManBoy responds that when his father would get drunk, he'd "babble on in some insane way. He said that she burned up. Pinned to the ceiling!" Dun dun dun! Pan in on Sam's face right before the Metal Teeth Chomp.Commercials. The conversation continues. Sam tells Max to listen up and then tells him that his father's insane ramblings were all real. He explains how the same thing happened to their family, but Max doesn't believe him: "Your dad must have been as drunk as mine." Sam starts to put things together: "This must be why I've been having visions during the day. Why they're getting more intense." Nice try covering your ass on this unwieldy "visions" plot development. Once a character starts having visions, it's sort of hard to have them stop having visions, but who wants to watch a show about Sam having visions all the time? So, make it all depend on Max. I'm not believing that for a second. Sam keeps trying to connect the dots: "Your abilities, they started six or seven months ago, right?" He is indeed right, and Max is starting to look kind of freaked out that somebody has just waltzed into his home and outfreaked him. And after he spent so much time baby-powdering his face and rouging his lips that morning! Sam slips in a little foreshadowing, acknowledging that Max's "abilities seem to be much further along." Then Sam really makes me groan by concluding that "for some reason, you and I were chosen." Seriously, Miss Cleo? I think there's somebody on the line wondering where her baby daddy is. When Sam tells Max about his and Dean's hunt for their mother's killer, it seems Max is almost convinced to let them go. But again, Max considers how he made sure his face looked extra-waxy that morning for his killing spree, and refuses to listen to another one of Sam's longwinded pleas that pretty much covers the same ground as the rest of the conversation. So, he finally gets the episode going again and mind-throws Sam into a closet and then mind-shoves a huge china cabinet in front of the closet. Oh, boy, will it be hard for Sam to get out of that closet!
Sam bangs on the closet doors, and we cut to the upstairs bedroom, where Dean is patting a rag on Serial Mom's head wound. Why is that how head wounds are always dealt with on television? Pat, pat, pat. The door opens in front of Max, who enters and then makes the door slam behind him. He then mind-throws Dean high into the air and slams him against the wall, where he makes quite an indentation on the plaster. As Dean struggles back to his feet, ManBoy pulls the gun on Serial Mom and then withdraws his hand, leaving the gun there floating unconvincingly. What is the big appeal of killing someone with a floating weapon? The gun then takes a little float down a river of air, stopping right in front of Serial Mom and cocking itself. Puhlease. Dean puts himself between the gun and Serial Mom and tells Max that if he wants to kill the lady he'll have "go through me first." Shot of floating gun in foreground with Max behind it. He simply says, "Okay." Shot of floating gun trigger being pulled, then shot of Dean with red bullet hole mark in the center of his head with blood splattering the walls behind him. Geez, this is a bloody episode! And just in case we missed it, a pan down the bloody walls to Dean's dead, open-eyed face. Bright lights of "Just Kidding, Folks!" transition us back to Sam in the closet, who screams in mind-pain over the image of his dead brother. Sam yells, "No! NOOOOOOO!!" and the china cabinet slides away from the door. Back to Sam inside the closet, looking confused and lost. ["…!" -- Sars] He taps on the door, which now opens easily. Cut back upstairs, where we're at the part of the "vision" where Dean steps in between the gun and the mom. This time, when Max says "Okay" right before pulling the trigger on Dean, Sam busts through the door, still looking really cutely confused by his new powers. Sam stops Max and tells him they can help. The gun floats shakily in front of Max, and when Sam suggests that none of this is "going to fix anything," he succeeds in giving Max another bright idea. ManBoy pauses and then says, "You're right," just before quickly turning the gun on himself and blowing his own head away. Serial Mom has got a real dumb gaping mouth, and then we got to commercials with a shot of Sam's "Back to Psychic School" face of shock and disappointment.
In the living room, a police officer interviews Serial Mom, who reveals herself to be a masterful liar. She tells him Sam and Dean are old family friends she called for help and that she doesn't know where Max got the gun. The policeman puts his notebook down, and she sobs, "I lost everyone." Eh, who cares, lady. Sam and Dean leave the house while Sam beats himself up over his terrible handling of the situation. Dean tells him to stop, that nothing could have helped Max, but I beg to disagree. They both totally fucked up -- Dean bringing the gun in, Sam deciding to take the exact wrong moment to start his Differently-Abled Child Survivors of Mommy Ceiling-Kabob Support Group. Dean thinks Max was "too far gone" and suggests that the only thing that would've have helped is if they had gotten there "twenty years earlier." Sam sighs and then tries to open up membership in his club to Dean: "I'll tell you one thing, we're lucky we had Dad." Dean is moved, and very pretty (his eyelashes are coated in L'Oreal Lash Extender and his lips yet again Bonne-Belled): "I never thought I'd hear you say that." Sam explains further, "Well, could have gone a whole other way after Mom. A little more tequila, a little less demon-hunting." Hmmm, What Would You Rather? I'm voting margarita. Dean sniffs in approval. Sam wanks, "We turned out okay, thanks to him."
Outside the hunting lodge, the brother pack their things. Sam tells Dean he's been thinking and then wonders aloud, "Why would this demon, or whatever it was, kill Mom, and Jessica, and Max's mom. What does it want?" Sam, surprisingly enough, thinks the demon was after Max and him. He explains, "Either telekinesis or premonitions, we both have abilities. Maybe it was after us for some reason." Dean misapprehends Sam's point as being somehow motivated by guilt rather than extreme narcissism, and reassures him, "If it wanted you, it would've taken you. This is not your fault. It's not about you. It's about that thing that did this to our family."
Sam keeps prancing to the beat of his own drum, though, confessing that he was able to move the china cabinet with his mind. Dean pauses, "Oh…right…" and then grabs a spoon and tells him to bend it. Sam tells him that he can't turn the power on and off and Dean rather simplistically demands, "Well, how'd you do it?" Sam doesn't know, but says that when he saw Dean die, "It just came out of me like a punch. You know, like a freak adrenaline thing." Dean goes back to packing, obviously rattled, but insisting that "it won't happen again." Even though I think Sam is a whiner, this scene is pretty good, with both brothers trying to deal with Sam's new freak status the only way they know how: Dean by clenching and denying, Sam by whinging and complaining. Sam asks Dean why he isn't worried that he'll end up like Max, but Dean continues rolling his clothes to pack in his duffel like a true traveller, and reminds Sam that he has "one advantage that Max didn't have." Sam asks, "Dad? Dad's not here, Dean," delivering that line the same way he always does. Close-up of Dean. "No" -- smirk -- "me. As long as I'm around, nothing bad is going to happen to you." Close-up of Sam looking slightly relieved, and very young. Awww. Dean lightens the mood by approaching Sam: "I know what we need to do about your premonitions. I know where we have to go. Vegas." Grin. Guitar licks of brotherly exasperation. Sam heads out to the car in front of Dean while Dean keeps quipping about cleaning up at the craps table. But as Dean shuts the door behind him, we get a close-up of his face, which belies the mirth in his voice. He's worried about little Sammy.