In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close. First things first: Metallicar! Restored! "Hallelujah!" sings The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon! Sam and Dean motor to Montana, where a series of cattle disembowelments and human decapitations have led Our Intrepid Duo to suspect Satanic doings afoot in the shadows of the Bitterroots. After indulging in a couple of rounds of creatively attired investigation, however, the boys realize they're actually dealing with a nest of vampires that someone else has been slaughtering. That someone turns out to be a fellow hunter named Gordon, who initially seems to be their kind of people but -- in a shocking twist that totally isn't -- ends up actually being a frothy-mouthed, wild-eyed psychopath. Much manly tussling ensues before the guys subdue the whackjob and allow the vampires -- led by Amber Benson in a nice little guest turn -- to escape. (The vamps, you see, have sworn off feeding on humans. Thus the gutted cattle, and thus their newfound right to be left alone to live their unnatural lives in peace.) All in all, a very entertaining return to the sort of lighthearted one-offs to which we'd grown accustomed before the string of increasingly dark episodes that closed the last season and opened this one. Well, except for the occasional flare-ups of cloudy-browed angst from both Dean and Sam, of course. Can't let them have too good a time, now can we? Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Crackle, crackle, THEN! Oh, hell. I told these guys to knock it off with the mullet rock montages, but do they listen to me? No. Never. This one's set to Journey's "Wheel in the Sky," and while it's particularly well done, I can't stand Steve Perry, so I'll not be rewinding to pass through it again. Here's what I remember: Dean with his great big doe eyes imploring Sammy to carry on with the good fight, as their father would have wanted. A wendigo goes up in smoke, and Dean breaks the surface of Lake Manitoc with that annoying child. Sammy gets loud, railing against both his brother's blind obedience to their father and his father's seeming lack of, um, whatever Sam's entire life. Metallicar suffers grievous injury at the grille of a Mack truck, soon followed by Shut Up Daddy suffering fatal injury at the Thriller eyes of The Ceiling Demon. As the boys cremate their father's mortal remains, Dean LIES to Sam about John's last words, because Dean is a BIG, FAT LYING LIAR who LIES. And then? DEAN SMASH! Poor Metallicar.
Crackle, crackle, NOW! The blazing NOW recedes into the black, to be replaced by the full moon hovering over a title card that reads "Red Lodge, Montana," a real town that is quite seriously in the middle of nowhere. Crickets chirp as the camera slowly slides out of the sky towards the leafy foliage nearer ground level, but their crickety glee is soon drowned out by the racket that accompanies a young brunette as she barrels headlong through the thick underbrush of some sort of wooded area. And I'm not just talking about all the snapping twigs and panicky gasps for breath and whatnot, because the foolish brunette's dragged an entire orchestra along with her on her midnight jaunt through the forest. You know, if she jettisoned that massive string section, I'm pretty sure she'd be able to outrun whatever it is that's chasing her. She manages to bolt from the underbrush onto an actual footpath, but immediately tangles her feet up in something on the ground and sprawls face-first into the dirt. Just as she staggers to her feet, her pursuer's silhouette pops into the blurry background of the shot. The thundering herd of horns on the soundtrack shriek at the figure's entrance. The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon tosses the thundering herd of horns a foul glare for this transgression, then pops another clawful of Bugles into his maw. "This is getting a little exciting," he opines before sniffing, "but that silhouette looks waaaaay too much like Freddy Krueger for my taste." The imperiled brunette races off down the path with Freddy hot on her heels for a lengthy period of time before she...slips behind a tree, thereby effectively hiding herself from Freddy, who obliviously charges past her down the forest path, still believing she's ahead of him? Okay. We'll go with that. But only because the brunette ends up decapitated anyway. Ooops! Spoiler! The brunette shakily regains control of her breathing and, after cowering in fear behind the tree for a good fifteen seconds, slowly edges around its trunk to...BAM! Freddy pops up right in front of her and instantly unsheathes a miniature scythe that glints in the moonlight before he swings it all the way back with one arm. As the strings scream downward on the soundtrack, we hear the blade slice through a thick bit of flesh and bone as a burst of arterial spray splatters the bark of the tree behind which the brunette had so briefly found sanctuary. Awesome! The camera scuttles to the opposite end of the tiny clearing to take in what follows from a distance: After the briefest of pauses, the brunette's head thumps to the earth beside her still-standing body right before that body clunks down to its knees to drop straight into the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
RAAAWWWR! "Eeeeeeeeeeeee!"
The blackness that follows lingers in silence for a moment before the opening chords of "Back in Black" slam onto the soundtrack, and I'm going to repeat here what I said on the boards about this moment, because it is 100% true: I was dead tired last Thursday at 8, so when "Back in Black" started playing, I was painfully slow on the uptake. "The hell? How many times are they going to use this stupid song on thi...OH, HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, THAT FUCKING RULES!" And then I giggled out loud. For yes, gentle reader, Metallicar makes its triumphant return to the small screen -- in all of its black, shiny glory -- in the lovingly filmed sequence that follows. And it is beautiful. Completely egregious car porn, but still: Fabulous. Through a shimmery heat haze, the Impala initially crests a far hill on a sun-flooded strip of backroads blacktop, then leaps forward to positively growl past us before shooting off down a flat stretch of pavement. We peek inside for a second to find Dean just stupid with happiness behind the wheel, while Sam rather nonchalantly chills out in the passenger seat beside him. Sam's less-than-thrilled demeanor is likely due to the fact that -- as we shall shortly learn -- they are more than nine hundred miles into this particular road trip, and so it makes sense for his initial Metallicar-related enthusiasm to have waned way back around, oh, say, Lake Elmo, Minnesota. Dean, though? He'll likely still be grinning like a fool seven hours from now when they finally hit Red Lodge. After some more completely egregious and completely fantastic car porn, we hop back into Metallicar proper to find Dean hooting, "Whooo! Listen to her purr!" "Ya ever heard anything so sweet?" he beams in Sammy's direction. Sam's all primly, "You know, if you two want to get a room, just let me know." "Don't listen to him, baby," Dean croons while stroking the dash. "He doesn't understand us." Hee. The boys then banter back and forth about Dean's good mood, which Dean attributes wholly to the fact that he's got both his gloriously restored car in which to motor around and a new bit of supernatural mischief to investigate, and really, what more do you need? Then again, Metallicar plus anything would equal nirvana, now wouldn't it? "Wow," Sam snorts. "Give you a couple of severed heads and a pile of dead cows, and you're Mr. Sunshine." Sam, were you not listening? Metallicar plus anything -- up to and including severed heads and dead cows -- is cloud fucking nine. Pay attention. Dean just laughs and, upon learning from Sam that their destination is still another three hundred miles distant, guns the Impala's engine to speed off down the road.
Cut to the interior of the Carbon County, Montana, sheriff's office, where the middle-aged sheriff himself -- along with his remarkable walrus moustache -- explains in tones indicating he's delivered this speech before that the murder investigation is ongoing, and that he can share no further information with the gentlemen of the press. The camera jumps around to reveal those gentlemen, and they are of course Sam and Dean, clad in their shabby mix-and-match suits from "Something Wicked," here accessorized with faux credentials dangling on lanyards around their necks. Jared Padalecki, through the grace of God, has finally trimmed back that assy mangle of a mop of his a bit, and the tousle that remains has been neatly groomed into a less-severe version of his priestly coif for this bit of costumed subterfuge. In any event, Sam, with pen and notebook in hand, presses for relevant details about the two decapitated corpses found last week and two days ago, respectively. Just then, however, the sheriff's perky assistant raps on the door to tap on her watch in what I'm assuming is a prearranged interruption of a meeting the sheriff never wanted to take in the first place. As the sheriff announces that time's up, both Sam and Dean beg to ask about the recent spate of ruptured cattle found scattered about the area. "Excuse me?" squints the sheriff. "You know," Dean leads, "the cows found split open? Drained? Over a dozen cases?" He tilts his head in the most adorably inquisitive manner imaginable as the sheriff huffs, "What about them?" Our Intrepid Duo link the mutilated cattle to the severed heads and suggest that perhaps some sort of Satanic ritualizing might be taking place within the good sheriff's jurisdiction. The good sheriff laughs in their faces. Until he realizes they aren't kidding. So he lays a little science upon their tantalizing behinds thusly: "There is no such thing as cattle mutilation. Cow drops, you leave it in the sun? Within forty-eight hours, the bloat will split it open so clean, it's just about surgical." How...vivid. The sheriff continues, enunciating carefully as if he were speaking to two particularly dimwitted eight-year-olds, "The bodily fluids fall down into the ground and get soaked up -- 'cause that's what gravity does." "But, hey," he finishes sarcastically, "it could be Satan." He then rather snippily asks for the name of their publication once more, and Dean biffs the cover story that they're working for The Weekly World News. D'oh! "Get out of here," Chief Walrus sighs.
Cut to the low-slung façade of the Candler County Hospital, because Kripke & Ko. couldn't find suitably cheap stock footage of the corresponding facility in Carbon County, Montana. Though, you know, where in hell did they find stock footage of this place, which is in deeply rural -- as in Deliverance rural -- Georgia? People will take pictures of anything. ("Delicious!" approves The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon, smacking his lips.) ANY-way, where the hell was I? Oh, yeah: Inside, Dean and Sam, clad in white doctor's jackets for this portion of the evening's entertainment, burst through a door to find an unsettlingly attractive morgue assistant named "Jeff Manners," whom they proceed to LIE TO in order to gain access to the morgue's contents. As soon as poor, unsettlingly attractive Jeff has scampered off on his fool's errand, Sam locks the door so Dean can ask, "Those Satanists in Florida, they marked their victims, didn't they?" "Yeah," Sam confirms as he grabs a pair of proffered latex gloves from Dean, "a reverse pentacle on the forehead." "So much effed-up crap happens in Florida," Dean sighs to himself as he follows Sam into the morgue proper, and I don't even know where to begin with the links in support of that statement, so I'll just jump ahead to join the boys as they...
...slide open the drawer containing what remains of the brunette from the top of the hour, who was identified in the last scene as "Christina Flanagan." "All right," Dean nods at the plastic container between Dead Christina's legs, "open it." "You open it," Sam frowns, freaked. "Wuss!" Dean smirks amusingly as he hoists the container over to an examining table. Sam looks beleaguered. And broad-shouldered. Very, very broad-shouldered. Yum. Has The Padalecki been working out or something? 'Cause it looks like he got yoooge over the summer. And, you know, he wasn't that small to begin with. Ahem. In any event, Dean's flipped the lid off the container to reveal Dead Christina's head lolling around inside. Our Intrepid Heroes are disheartened to note a dearth of suitably Satanic carvings on Dead Christina's forehead. A cute little moment follows wherein Dean invokes the undead spirit of The Silence of the Lambs to tease Sam into examining the corpse-head's mouth for Buffalo Bill-like leave-behinds, and as Sam's latexed fingers begin squishily probing Dead Christina's gullet, Sammy bleats, "Dean, get a bucket?" "Why, you find something?" "No, I'm gonna puke." Awwww. Sam eventually ends his fruitless poking and withdraws his fingers, volubly squicked. "Wait," Dean interrupts. "Lift her lip again." "You want me to throw up!" Sam protests, but Dean actually caught sight of something unusual at Dead Christina's upper gumline. Dean reaches in past the disgustingly mottled skin surrounding the corpse head's lips and presses, in the process forcing a single fang to emerge and drop over Dead Christina's front teeth. DUN! "Well, this changes things," Sam breathes. "Ya think?" Dean duhs.
Cut to Metallicar grumbling past a relatively busy cowboy bar. The boys exchange Looks Fraught With Significance before Metallicar growls away.
Sam and Dean, having presumably parked the car, now ease their way through the front door, ambling past cluster after cluster of hearty rednecks rural Montana folk to the bar. A solitary gentleman eyes their progress from his secluded table halfway across the room. Long story short, Sam slides a fifty over to the bartender, asking for information on any suspiciously rowdy drunks who might have moved into the area about six months ago. The bartender accepts the bribe and directs them to the current occupants of "the Barker farm," a group of "real winners" the bartender's had to "eighty-six" once or twice. The boys thank the barkeep for the dirt and exit. As they go, the camera pans down to the solitary gentleman's table to find it empty, save for his half-finished beer and just-lit cigarette, so we know from his very first scene that Gordon Walker is very bad news, because not only does he smoke, for holy God's sake, he also leaves booze behind. "Evil!" shrieks The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon, who clearly knows the score.
There follows a lengthy and wordless sequence wherein Sam and Dean stroll along the sidewalk to disappear down an alleyway as the camera lands on positively evil Gordon Walker lurking behind a truck. The infernal orchestra -- which he obviously swiped from Dead Christina after he sliced off her head -- goes nuts on the soundtrack as Gordon slips down the alleyway after our apparently oblivious Intrepid Duo. Incidentally, I spy Convenient Shipping Pallets Of Grave Bodily Injury in this dank and forbidding alleyway, but alas. They will not be coming into play tonight. Evil Gordon rounds the corner Sam and Dean just turned and finds...nothing! Gordon then swings his head around in the light drizzle as the camera pulls a brief, swift-footed-and-shuddery fake-out to skitter up behind him before Sam and Dean, with ninja levels of stealth, attack from the other side to toss him up against a wall with a knife to his throat. "Smile!" Dean demands. "Show us those pearly whites!" "I'm not a vampire!" Gordon claims. Sam and Dean squint in confusion. "I heard you in there," Gordon explains. Sam barks, "What do you know about vampires?" "How to kill them," Gordon replies, rather calmly. "Now, seriously, bro," he continues, warily eyeing the weapon at his neck, "that knife's making me itch." Sam and Dean stare him down until Gordon grudgingly curls back his upper lip to reveal his gums. "See?" he eyebrows. "Fangless. Happy?" The boys withdraw a bit, so I guess they are. "Now, who the hell are you?" Gordon demands in return.
"Sam and Dean Winchester," Evil Gordon admiringly repeats some time later out on the street, where the three have gathered around Evil Gordon's Evil El Camino for the conversation that follows. As Gordon slides his weapons stash -- including that hand scythe from the top of the hour, natch -- out from behind, uh, the back seat, I guess, Gordon speaks of the boys' late father in admiring tones, adding his condolences along with his assurances that the boys will fill Daddy Shut Up's shoes quite well, if what he's heard of their superior hunting skills is anything to go by. Sam and Dean, still not getting the whole concept of "a hunter's grapevine," make suspicious noises about how Gordon could know so much about their family before Sam changes the subject to inquire about the two recently deceased vampires. Evil Gordon confirms the kills were his. "You check out that Barker farm?" Dean wonders. "It's a bust," comes the reply. "Just a bunch of hippie freaks, though they could kill you with that patchouli smell alone." I hate it when I wholeheartedly agree with characters I don't like. Not that Gordon, through his actions thus far, has given us any particular reason to dislike the guy, but come on. He smokes. That very fact alone makes him so irreparably, so irredeemably wicked by today's television standards, I don't know why I'm bothering to deal with him at all. Well, you know, aside from the fact that he's an integral part of tonight's main plot. Stupid TV.
ANY-way. Dean would very much like to join Gordon on the latter's current vampire hunt, but Gordon's "kind of a go-it-alone type of guy," and so he demurs. "But, hey," he offers affably enough. "I hear there's a chupacabra two states over. Go ahead and knock yourselves out." And with that, he crawls into his Evil El Camino and tools away. Sam and Dean, artfully bathed in the streetlight-illuminated mist that surrounds them, shoot "That motherfucker's got to be kidding with that shit" side-eyes at each other.
Establishing shot of a silent and ramshackle lumberyard, a run-down conveyor belt loaded with logs taking up the foreground. Inside, Conrad the night watchman hears ferrety noises coming from outdoors. Conrad grabs a nightstick as he rises to his feet to investigate. He crosses the yard, climbs up the stairs to the conveyor's level, and, in the bluish gloom of the widely spaced fluorescents above his head, picks his way towards what sounds like the yard's dock area. I know nothing about logging. Leave me alone. Just as Conrad slides his nightstick into attack position, an angry crow bursts into the frame from above, and I have to admit that that cheap horror movie stunt made me jump a little bit. Conrad shakes his head and rolls his eyes at his own stupidity and baseless paranoia, then turns to...almost get a faceful of scythe, courtesy of Evil Gordon! The infernal orchestra ramps up as Conrad vamps out to begin Evil Gordon's almighty smackdown. Seriously. Conrad whales the crap out of Gordon with the nightstick and bangs him against a couple of walls before hoisting him bodily into the air and slamming him down on the conveyor belt right beneath an industrial-sized chainsaw. So much for going it alone. Hooray! Conrad lands a couple of meaty punches to Gordon's face -- the better to beat him into unconsciousness, you see -- before reaching up to yank the saw down towards Gordon's neck. Unfortunately, at the last instant, Sam drags Gordon away by the latter's feet while Dean snatches up a conveniently placed logging pike, with which he whacks at Conrad until the vampire himself is flat on the conveyor. Dean then most awesomely rams the pike through Conrad's chest to pin him to the log below, and then reaches up to pull down the industrial chainsaw on Conrad's neck. The doomed vampire remains just below the bottom of the frame for this, but his gurgling howls of torment combined with the nifty sound effect of chainsaw-through-meat plus the impressive spray of arterial blood now painting Dean's pretty face red all make for a most delicious moment of televised gore, indeed. The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon, in fact, is practically peeing himself with delight. "Whee!"
With the vampire now decapitated, the soundtrack ramps down to the point where we're serenaded solely by The Single Plaintive Horn Heralding The Increasing Psychic Anguish Of Our Lonely Heroes as Sam gapes, completely horrified, and Dean just looks spent, and maybe more than a little dead-eyed. Evil Gordon, on the other hand, is chuckling loudly in the background, offering to buy the boys a drink to celebrate such a magnificent kill. Sam glares at Evil Gordon for the briefest of moments before anxiously staring his brother down. With blood trickling down his face, Dean stares back, a hint of defiance pushing through the blankness, until they're all gobbled up by the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
Bar Of The Rednecks Hearty Rural Folk Of Montana. The camera swings around Gordon, Dean, and Sam as a waitress delivers a couple of shots to their table. Gordon and Dean jocularly toast each other with the just-arrived shots while Sam slouches in his chair in a state of supreme snittiness. A state of supreme snittiness entirely unrelieved by any amount of healing booze, if that untouched beer in front of him is anything to go by. "Lighten up a little, Sammy!" Gordo grins. "He's the only one who gets to call me that," Sam sniffs, nodding curtly in Dean's direction. The fan fiction arising from that one line promises to be gruesome. Evil Gordon tries to good-naturedly needle Sam into having a bit of fun, but Sam huffily rebuffs him with, "Decapitations aren't my idea of a good time, I guess." After a little more of this, Sam pushes himself out of his seat to return to their motel. Dean, knowing that Sammy's being Sammy, passes a tired hand across his face before tossing his brother the keys to the Impala with a joking, "Remind me to beat that buzzkill out of you later, all right?" Sam just snatches the keys out of the air with one hand and glooms his way out of there. Dean blows this off in favor of challenging Evil Gordo to a game of quarters for the round. Mmmm. Booze.
Meanwhile, over at the Adobe Court Motel, Sam bangs Metallicar's door shut and lopes into their room, where he removes his jacket -- the better for the audience to admire The Shoulders of The Padalecki -- before pointedly hanging the car keys on a small decorative cactus on the night stand.
Back at The Bar Of The Rednecks Hearty Rural Folk Of Montana, Dean's sharing perhaps his most trenchant war story with Evil Gordon. It is, I am forced to admit, a speech riddled with so many horrendous clichés that I'll be skipping past it in favor of giving you its central point: Dean realized at the tender age of sixteen that the hunter's life was the one for him, and that's pretty much it. It does, however, offer Dean a nice enough segue to ask Evil Gordon how he, himself, got started in the business. Evil Gordon's long story short -- because I don't want to spend any more time on the character than I absolutely have to -- amounts to Evil Gordon finding his beloved sister being ravished by a vampire one night in the family's home. Evil Gordon put up what he now knows to be weak resistance to the attack, was knocked out, and awoke the morning to find his sister gone. Because he couldn't tell anyone else in the family what he saw, he ran away and self-trained in the art of tracking and killing vampires. Eventually, he got quite good at it, and here we are. Yawn. And then they segue into yet another heartfelt discussion regarding Daddy Shut Up's untimely demise at the hands of The Ceiling Demon, the vital part of which is this: "Can't talk about this to Sammy," Dean admits with a too-casual smile and half-laugh that scarcely distract from his bravado's cracking veneer. "You know, I gotta keep my game face on, but, uh, the truth is, I'm not handling it very well." WE KNOW. Get back to shooting monsters in the face with rock salt, for Christ's sake! Dean ignores me in favor of continuing, "I feel like I have this..." "...hole inside you?" Evil Gordo finishes for him. "And it just gets bigger and bigger and darker and darker?" Dean looks up at him as if Gordon's the first person ever to understand him. Which, you know, BULLSHIT, because SAM, but Dean's supposed to be half in the bag at this moment, so I'll let it slide. For now. Evil Gordon lays some Bizarro World pop-psychology on Dean's fine ass, blathering on about how Dean's deep pit of emptiness will only make him better at the business he's chosen for himself, or whatever, and that "it's not a crime to need your job," and Evil Gordon needs to SHUT UP. Now.
And look at that! He did! The camera's cut over to last week's ROADHOUSE, and now that the sign's been turned on for the evening, we can see that it's actually "Harvelle's ROADHOUSE." Who in hell is Harvelle? No, seriously. Who the hell is she? Though I must admit, that trashy-sounding name of hers only makes me want to meet her more. You just know that any woman with a name like that is going to end up being the kind of gnarled old broad who could take out both Sam and Dean in a fistfight, likely with both arms tied behind her back. Blindfolded. In any event, the phone rings inside, and Ellen answers to find Sam on the other end of the line. "Sam!" she affectionately greets him. "It's good to hear from you," she adds, and you can tell she means it. "You boys are okay, aren't you?" Sam notes that they are, then asks if she's ever heard of a guy named Gordon Walker. She has. "And?" Sam leads. "Well, he's a real good hunter," she replies noncommittally. "Why you askin', sweetie?" Several on the boards took umbrage to Ellen so casually addressing Sam with that endearment, and to them, all I have to say this: If you've never had a bartender -- male or female -- call you sweetie, you've never been to a bar. Moving on. Sam admits he and Dean "ran into him on a job" and now they're "kind of working with him." Ellen wastes not an instant before chiding, "Now, don't do that, Sam," in a tone of voice that will brook no dissent. "I thought you said he was a good hunter," Sam buhs. "Yeah, and Hannibal Lecter's a good psychiatrist," Ellen grunts. "Look," she continues, "he is dangerous to everyone and everything around him. If he's working on a job, you let him handle it, and you boys just move on." Sam's all, "But!" and Ellen's all, "Zip it!" and Sam's all, "My brother!" and Ellen's all, "ZIP IT!" so Sam agrees to follow her advice.
SHUT UP, GORDON. He pays me no mind in favor of speechifying about how most people live their lives in shades of grey, but hunters like Dean and himself are fortunate enough to exist in a world where everything finds its way into neatly delineated groups of black and white. If something's evil, you kill it. Oh, yeah? Then how come you're not dead yet, GORDO?
...and if it's Thursday, Sam must be getting his lanky self kidnapped by agents of doom. Sam's left the relative safety of his motel room to futz around with the soda machine out by the parking lot. The camera gets all shuddery and hand-held as it tracks his remarkably broad-shouldered form from afar, as if from the perspective of whatever hell-sent beast is tracking him. Or, you know, from the perspective of the motel's night manager, who's having a tipsy smoke outside the main office. Oh, sorry, I forgot. Smoking makes you evil, so they must be one and the same. Or are they? I'm so confused. ("Moi, aussi," interjects The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon, pretentiously in French.) Anyway, after a few tense moments wherein our poor imperiled Sammy tensely eyes the empty parking lot, he finally slides the key into his room's lock and scurries inside. Once the door's secured behind him, he allows himself to relax, then allows himself to realize he's probably being a massive hyperparanoid loser about the whole thing, and he laughs a little at his own stupidity as he sets the soda down on a nearby table. Got news, Sam: You were right to be a pissy-pantsed little bitch about monsters lurking in the parking lot, because one of them's jumping you right now. And not in the good way. Sam shakes off his attacker and sends the guy to the floor with one well-placed biff to the schnozz. Another intruder leaps from the shadows only to get a mouthful of knuckles for his trouble. Alas, the first guy's quickly recovered, and now bashes Sam in the back of the head with the telephone. "Ding!" goes the phone. Hee. Sam drops into black.
Somewhere else, an truck emerges from the black to cross a long, rickety wooden bridge, only to vanish into the blackness once more.
And somewhere else, Sam's trussed to a chair with a bag over his head. A hand reaches to yank it off, and Sam blinks his eyes into focus to find...the bartender! Um. DUN!? I mean, Sam did pass that guy a fifty. Maybe Sam was inadvertently giving off these "I'm way into abduction fantasies and a bit of light bondage, so once I ditch my brother here, why don't you haul your fine self over to The Adobe Court Motel and indulge me a little?" vibes. It's been known to happen. Oh, never mind -- it's definitely a DUN!, because the bartender just vamped out. Still, they'd make a cute couple. The vampire bartender snarls through his fangs as he stalks up to loom over poor imperiled Sammy, who bugs out his eyes in terror just as he's swallowed by the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
"Wait! Step back, Eli," a woman's voice calls out. We get a brief glimpse of a vaguely gothed-over Amber Benson before returning to Eli, who slowly edges away from Sammy and allows his fangs to retract. "My name's Lenore," Amber announces as she quickly crosses the room to rip the gag from Sam's mouth. "I'm not gonna hurt you," she assures him, "I just need to talk." "Talk?" Sam snorts. "Okay, but I might have a tough time paying attention to much besides Eli's teeth!" He's hitting those fricatives awfully hard, don't you think? "He won't hurt you either," Lenore claims, "you have my word." Sam's all, "Oh, your word? Whatever, Elvira, you're not the first amply endowed vampire I've met." "We're not like the others," she calmly asserts. "We don't kill humans, we don't drink their blood, and we don't twirl tassels hot-glued to our pasties on national TV -- we haven't for a long time." Lenore herself might have omitted part of that last line. Sam challenges her assertion, because if the vampires haven't been twirling tassels hot-glued to their pasties on national TV, they'd be dead by now. No, no! Kidding! If the vampires haven't been drinking blood, they'd be dead by now. Look at you, with all your silliness. Lenore reveals they've found other sources of nourishment, which Sam correctly guesses to be the slaughtered cattle. "It's not ideal," Lenore nods. "In fact, it's disgusting, but it allows us to get by." Sam wiggles his eyebrows, but decides to play along with her for now. "Okay, why?" "Survival," she states simply. "No deaths, no missing locals, no reason for people like you to come looking for people like us. We blend in." "Our kind," she explains, "is practically extinct. Turns out we weren't as high on the food chain as we imagined." Eli interjects with some outraged exclamations regarding the late, lamented Conrad and Sam's role in the latter's death before Lenore tells him to put a sock in it. She returns her attention to the remarkably broad-shouldered gentleman in the chair and reveals she and her people intend to leave town that very night. All she asks is that Sam and his fellow hunters allow them safe passage and agree to stop tracking them. "We have a right to live," she argues. "We're not hurting anyone." Sam again challenges her, so Lenore leans right into his face and whispers, "Fine. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to let. You. Go." And I should say right now that I'm really enjoying Amber Benson in this role, what with the intelligent menace she's giving the character, which is in blissful contrast to the marble-mouthed doormat she played on Buffy for oh, so many years. Ugh. She draws herself away from Sam's fear-tautened face to instruct Eli, "Take him back -- not a mark on him." Sam darts his eyes around in confusion until we cut to...
...Eli and a henchvampire leading the still-bound and rehooded Sam out to the truck. Eli throws the thing into gear and drives away from the cow-suckers' cozy-looking farmhouse.
Back at the motel, Dean and Evil Gordon strategize over a map of the local area until Sam bursts through the door. "Where you been?" Dean slurs from the depths of that age-old combo of fatigue and booze. "Mind if I talk to you alone?" Sam clenches.
Outside, Dean and Sam clomp down the short wooden staircase into the parking lot, and long story short, Sam fills Dean in on the whole vampire situation, adding that he believes they should leave this nest of apparently reformed vamps alone. Dean, caught up in Evil Gordon's "ours is a black-and-white world" thrall, protests. Loudly. So loudly, in fact, that Evil Gordon slinks out into the shadows behind them to eavesdrop on the rest of the conversation. Way to go, Dean. The upshot of what follows is this: Dean's firmly on Gordon's side with regard to the entire matter, and vows to "exterminate" every single vampire on the planet. Sam's just as firmly siding with Lenore and her cow-sucking pals, and vows in turn to prevent any such extermination from happening. Sam then gossips that even Ellen thinks Gordon's bad news, and Dean just sneers at that, because what does she know, anyway, and besides, she only just transferred to Rydell, and they totally don't know her at all! "'Cause Gordon's such an old friend," Sam snots. "You don't think I can see what this is?" Sam demands. "He's your substitute for Dad, isn't he? A poor one. He's not even close, Dean, not on his best day." Dean, by this point, has slid from haughty annoyance through outraged incredulity to land somewhere around self-serving denial, and, shaking his head, has turned his back on his brother. Sam, not dropping it, continues to pick away at Dean's defenses until he finally accuses Dean of insulting their father's sacred memory by attempting to fill the hole John's death left in their lives with someone so unworthy as Evil Gordon. Dean takes a moment, doing that "I'm smiling and nodding my head even though I really should be caving your motherfucking skull in with a brick right now" thing people do when they're utterly blindsided by attacks as personal as this one is. And then he sucker-punches Sammy in the eye. If you've ever been in the position where you've been forced to smile and nod your head when you really should be caving some bastard's motherfucking skull in with a brick, all you can do at this moment is applaud. Bravo, Dean. Despite the fact that Sammy is totally right, and you are being a complete douchebag schmuck about Evil Gordon. "You can hit me all you want," Sam shrugs after he's recovered, "but it won't change anything." Dean makes blustery man noises and charges back into the motel room from which...
...Evil Gordon has fled. With the keys to Metallicar! Bastard!
Dean hotwires the Impala while Sam does some mad College Boy triangulation with a map. Or something like that. Sam actually paid quite close attention to what was going on while Eli and the henchvamp were driving him back to the motel, and thus can pretty much pinpoint the cozy little cow-sucker farmhouse's location based on prominent landmarks and time it took to travel between them. "You're good," Dean admits admiringly. "You're a monster pain in the ass, but you're good." And with that, Metallicar growls out of the parking lot.
Lair Of The Cow-Suckers. Moo! Lenore boxes up some books as Eli grumps into the room to bitch about the nest just turning tail and fleeing without taking out the hunters before they go, and as he does this, he pretty much offers her the same sort of argument regarding the immutability of a given group's true nature that Dean spouted in Sam's direction regarding the vampires. Lenore reaches a calming hand up to Eli's face and gently tells him, "I'm not giving up hope. If we can change, they can change." They share a moment before she urges him into town to collect the others, as they need to be gone before sunrise.
Meanwhile, Evil Gordon's Evil El Camino crosses the bridge Sam had earlier with the vampires, and hangs a left. An evil left. Evilly.
The Impala's about a mile behind him.
Over at The Lair Of The Cow-Suckers, Lenore descends from the front porch to load another box into the back of the truck. She glances around for a bit, perhaps aware of how alone she really shouldn't be at this moment, and turns to head back into the...Evil Gordon! Inexplicably present despite not knowing the farmhouse's location! With a bloodied dagger! That he lifts high above her struggling body after spinning her into a chokehold! Which he then plunges into her ample, heaving bosom! "Dead Man's Blood, bitch." METAL TEETH CHOMP!
The Lair Of The Cow-Suckers, Guantanamo Subdivision. Evil Gordon lovingly immerses a dagger in a jar of Dead Man's Blood, and I'm sorry, but even in the shadowy gloom they're calling "lighting" for this scene, it's totally obvious that the knife is slathered with karo syrup dyed red, so whatever, and MOVING ON. Evil Gordon gets his Evil Jollies by torturing Poor Lenore with the Dead Man's "Blood." Damn, Amber Benson looks like crap in this scene. Her already pallid vampire complexion is that much more wasted and wan, and she's got blood dripping from what seem to be a hundred different wounds covering every expanse of exposed skin. As she gasps, Evil Gordon tears a fresh gash through her upper chest. Sam and Dean wander in, and it sure as hell took them a long time to get here given the fact that they were no more than a mile behind Gordon, who had to find this place on his own without benefit of Sam's mad College Boy triangulation skillz. ON, MOVING!
Sam's clearly disgusted by the scene he finds here in the farmhouse dining room, and even Dean's a little unnerved by the glee Evil Gordon displays while gouging yet another bloody trench in Lenore's forearm. Evil Gordon crazies something about Our Intrepid Duo joining in on the Guantanamo fun, but Sam's had it and steps bravely forward to free Lenore from the clutches of this sick twist. Gordon immediately holds a regular, non-Dead-Man's-"Blood"-encrusted knife up against Sam's chest. Dean, rapidly losing faith in his new hero, warily attempts to talk Gordon down a little bit, going so far as to make conspiratorially disapproving mention of the vampire who killed Gordon's sister, and Jesus Christ, here we go: The vampire didn't kill Gordon's sister; he turned her. And then? Gordon hunted them down and decapitated them both to death. With extreme prejudice. Oy. Amber Benson's all slumped in her chair, like, "You know, I think I've heard this one before." "You and me both!" shrieks The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon. "And I didn't even watch those crappy-ass shows!"
In any event, Evil Gordon finally pulls the extremely stupid tactical error we've all been waiting for when he attempts to prove that a vampire can't change her spots, or whatever, by slicing Sammy's forearm open with the knife and then using the blade to force him towards Lenore's side. Dean's immediately all, "Bros before batshit psychotic vampire-obsessed hos!" and whips an automatic out of the back of his pants that he aims directly at Evil Gordon's head. "Let him go, NOW!" Dean roars. Not happening. Evil Gordon's yanked Sam's slashed forearm over above Lenore's head, and he now squeezes to force a couple of drops of Sam's blood from the open wound to spatter wetly on Lenore's upturned face. She struggles against her natural urges for a moment, but eventually vamps out to hiss and strain upwards. Evil Gordon begins speechifying about the neverending whatever of yawn when Lenore suddenly pulls herself together and consciously devamps to collapse back into the chair and seethe, "No! NO!" Gordon's momentarily taken aback by this latest development, allowing Sammy the chance to wrest himself from Gordon's grasp and grit, "We're done here." With his brother's permission (and under that brother's protection), Sam lifts Lenore from the chair and backs out of the room with her limp form in his arms while Dean wags his gun around all, "Gordon? I think we got some things to talk about." Catfight!
"If you want those vampires, you gotta go through me," Dean warns. Evil Gordon glances at the enormous hunting knife in his hand, shrugs, sighs, and embeds the thing in the dining room table. Dean's all, "Uh, a fistfight? Um...okay," and stupidly -- oh, so very stupidly -- ejects the cartridge from his automatic, placing that in his jacket pocket before stupidly -- oh, so very stupidly -- dropping his gaze from Evil Gordon's to slide the disarmed gun back into his pants. Evil Gordon, of course, clocks him immediately. Dean flails back in defense, but Gordon just whirls around and retrieves that hunting knife from the table, and then it's a blur of manly tussling, with Dean eventually managing to slam Gordon up against the wall, where he pounds and pounds and pounds some more until Gordon's dropped the knife. Gordon recovers enough to boot Dean backwards through a coffee table in the room, but Dean, from the floor, pulls one of those sweeping kicks that flattens Gordon onto the carpet before he flings the "sadistic bastard" through something that shatters (sorry, it's dark), eventually beating his would-be mentor into a stupor. Dean then twists Gordon into a headlock and accidentally-on-purpose rams the jackass's skull into the doorframe as he drags the worthless waste of space from the parlor back into the dining room. Kick ass. "Oh, sorry!" Dean grunts. Hee. Dean slings Gordon into a chair and straps him down with a length of rope while making with the quippy remarks that oh, so unfortunately get lost in the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
The following morning, Dean paces restlessly around the still-bound Gordon as Sam arrives back at the farmhouse, his forearm now swaddled in gauze. "I miss anything?" Sam eyebrows sardonically after getting a good look at the battered faces in the dining room. "Not much," Dean lightly shrugs before asking, "Lenore get out okay?" "Yeah, all of them did," Sam replies, pointedly scowling at Evil Gordon, who lifts his gaze to gift Sam with a baleful glare of his own. Dean informs Gordon that he and Sam will be waiting "two or three days" before calling on someone to head out to The Lair Of The Cow-Suckers to free the evil bastard, whom they're leaving tied to the chair for what I'm assuming are obvious reasons. "Ready to go, Dean?" Sam asks, tired. "Not yet," Dean replies, ambling back over to Gordon, whom he bids farewell with, "It's been real!" Dean then socks Evil Gordon so hard in the face that the latter crashes backwards with the chair to the floor. "Okay, I'm good now!" Dean perks. "We can go!" Sam gets this dizzy "That's our Dean!" smirk on his face before turning to follow his older brother out onto the porch.
And in a very cute moment, Dean stops as they're halfway across the front yard to say, "Sam, come on, clock me one." Sammy fully appreciates the gesture, but as Dean looks like he "just went twelve rounds with a block of cement," he'll take a raincheck, thank you very much. Dean pouts a little bit, then trails after Sam towards Metallicar while moping, "I wish we never took this job -- it just jacked everything up." "Everything" being, of course, the certainty drilled into him by his father from a very early age that everything they hunted deserved to die. Sam does his best to lighten his brother's mood by assuring him that -- what, that when it mattered, Dean did the right thing? Sam, I love you dearly, but you clearly suck as a counselor. You couldn't tell him that maybe perhaps it's not such a bad thing to have at the very least the potential to understand two or more sides of a given situation? Whatever. They banter a bit about what a pain in Dean's ass Sammy is, with Sam vowing to stick around for a while so he can continue being a pain in Dean's ass, and don't go there, no matter how much you want to go there, you filthy-minded bastards, and instead revel in the fifteen full seconds the camera now spends just lingering on Jensen Ackles's face as Dean takes a long moment to stare back over his shoulder at...yeah, all of that angst and torment in his past, but mainly at the vampire's farmhouse. Dean eventually slides behind the Impala's wheel, and Metallicar kicks up mighty amounts of gravel and dust as the boys head off down the farm's dirt road into the sunrise.
week: Zombies! Suck on that, Jericho!