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At Sam's insistence, the boys head back to Lawrence to visit Burnt Mommy's grave, only to stumble across some -- as Dean puts it -- "full-on zombie action." ("Yessssss!" hisses Raoul, The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon. "Zombies rock!") You see, a comely college coed went off the rails after catching her boyfriend in flagrante with her roommate and ended up smearing herself all over her car's dashboard, so this dweeb TA who'd been pining after her for years ritualized her corpse back to undead life in hopes of finally getting some. From a zombie. Idiot. Of course, Zombie Angela has other plans, namely the gory murders of the boyfriend and the roommate, but, you know, no big loss there. Cheating bastards. In any event, after trying to take Zombie Angela down with silver bullets and, like, poison-tipped arrows, or whatever, Dean manages to impale the monster in her coffin, and that's the last we'll be seeing of Angela. Well, until Kripke & Ko. run out of ideas in Season Four and decide to bring her back for what will undoubtedly be horrifically assy and massively contrived reasons. Meanwhile, in season-arc news, Dean ends the episode by pulling Metallicar over to the side of the road, where he finally confesses his true feelings regarding their father's death to Sammy. It's a well-delivered, nicely teary speech, but damn. The forums are going to be a sloppy mess for days. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Crackle, crackle, THEN! Due to budgetary issues beyond our control, tonight's opening montage -- indeed, tonight's entire episode -- will be mullet-rock-free. Repeat: Tonight's episode is entirely devoid of mullet rock. Good thing, too, because that means I can limit my coverage of this week's THEN! sequence to the following, without having to synch it all up with Portentously Relevant Lyrics: Sam and Dean, whilst on the road shooting monsters in the face with rock salt, sought out and found their father, who sacrificed his life for that of older son, who in turn has been taking the loss rather badly indeed. Are we all caught up? Excellent.
Crackle, crackle, NOW! What? No location card fading into view out of the blackout's gloom? I can live with that, I suppose. A morose-looking brunette slumps in a chair behind a kitchen table as an affable-seeming gentleman of her apparent acquaintance enters the frame with a couple bottles of beer and a bag of M&Ms, which he sets on the table in front of her. "Okay," he narrates as he draws her attention to each item he's brought, "we got booze, we got chocolate, and -- wait for it -- tortured emo rock." He's flipped on some barely audible yet strummy ovary with the remote as he eased himself into a chair opposite, and now faces her with a comforting smile. "Guaranteed cure for any broken heart." She puts on a brave little face at all this pampering, but it's clear she's about to lose her tenuously corralled shit at any second. She leans across the table, taking one of his hands in her own, and sniffles, "Thanks, Neal. You're a good friend." She's either his hag, or he's nursing an unrequited crush of massive proportions on her. How I wish it were the former. Just as Neal pshaws that it's nothing, or whatever, a harsh rapping hits his apartment's front door. "Oh, God, it's probably him!" she whimpers, crouching back in her chair, so Neal manfully assures her he'll take care of it and pushes himself from the table. Incidentally, though we can't see her entire outfit, the brunette is sporting what appears to be the top half of a White Nightgown Of Doom, so, yeah. She's going to be dead in about thirty seconds. Just so you know.
Neal flings open his front door to find a thick-necked, plaid-clad jock-type standing on his front porch. Christopher Jacot then betrays his Canadian roots by telling Jocko, "Let's just chill oot and think aboot this for a second, ookay?" It's kind of cute. In any event, Jocko muscles his way into Neal's apartment and blunders back towards the kitchen, with Neal trailing ineffectually behind. When tonight's bits of Monster Chow hit the kitchen, however, the mopey brunette is nowhere to be found. "Angela?" one of them calls out.
Cut to some late-model import speeding down an out-of-the-way nighttime highway through the patchy fog currently hugging the ground. Mopey Brunette Angela's behind the wheel, blubbering to herself as her cell rings. She takes her eyes off the perilous road for a full ten seconds -- and yes, I counted -- to burrow into her purse with her right hand before finally retrieving her phone to note that "Matt" is calling. For whatever reason, she answers to grit, "Leave. Me. Alone!" through her blubbery lips. Matt -- the thick-necked jock from the scene, obviously -- begs for forgiveness for some unspecified transgression, but Angela's had it with him and his unspecifically transgressing ways. "I'M DONE LISTENING!" she yells into the mouthpiece, the car's speed increasing with her anger. She then drops her eyes from the increasingly foggy road so she might oh, so stupidly whimper, "I love you" at her meathead of a soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. Why "soon-to-be-ex"? Because this idiot's about to plow her import straight into a wall, of course. Angela lifts her eyes just in time to scream at the onrushing slab of concrete as she slams on the brakes, but it's all so very, very late. The front end of the import nearly explodes upon impact, and the suddenly rising cloud of steam hissing from its shattered radiator combines with the low-lying mist to obscure the windshield for a moment as the camera climbs slowly from the car's busted grille past the crumpled hood. And as for that windshield? It's now decorated with a starburst of cracks blossoming out from the point where Angela slammed her stupid mopey face. The camera darts inside the wreck to find Angela's phone on the floor mats, still connected to her now ex-boyfriend. A near torrent of blood spills onto its screen from above. By the way, the date visible through all of that blood is Tuesday, August 22, 2006. Don't read too much into that, though, 'cause this isn't Lost, for Christ's sake. ("And thank God for that!" sighs, Raoul, The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon. "Two years of my life I give to that show, what do I get in return? Jack having daddy issues in a fish tank, that's what! Oh, Boone. Why have you forsaken us?") "Angela?" Matt's tinny voice calls through the speaker. The camera cuts up to pan down from the rear-view mirror until it lands upon Angela's glassy-eyed head resting at an unnatural angle against the steering wheel. The copious amounts of blood now flowing freely from her gaping mouth run down her chin to pour into the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
RAAAWWWR! "Eeeeeeeeeeeee!"
Metallicar growls out of the blackness that follows to leap down a brilliantly sunlit stretch of road. We hear Dean's bitching long before the camera knocks it off with the car porn to join Our Intrepid Heroes inside the Impala. Apparently, Sam deployed his mighty puppy-dog eyes to persuade his brother to travel back to Lawrence to visit their mother's final resting place, and now Dean's having second thoughts about the entire adventure. "She doesn't even have a grave!" he grumbles. "There was no body left after the fire." And if I cared about the matter at all -- which I most certainly do not -- I'd offer my gratitude to The Kripkeeper for clearing up what had been a point of contention on the boards during the first season. The Ceiling Demon's immolation of Burnt Mary left Shut Up Daddy with no remains to inter. Check. Now I'm going to have to deal with all of the overinvested wondering how her ghost was able to wander around for twenty-three years without benefit of a corresponding set of bones moldering away in the ground. Thanks for nothing, Kripke. ANYWAY, where was I? Oh, yeah: Sam protests that Burnt Mary has a headstone in place for visiting purposes, but Dean craps all over that with, "Yeah, put up by her uncle, a man that we've never even met, so you want to go pay your respects to a slab of granite put up by a stranger? Come on." Sam blusters something about Burnt Mary's sacred memory and how, after the loss of Daddy Shut Up, "it seems like the right thing to do." "It's irrational, is what it is," Dean snarls. One would think Darling Sammy would now artfully change the subject just to get Dean to SHUT UP ALREADY, but alas. He chooses instead to snit back, "Look, man, no one asked you to come!" conveniently ignoring the fact that Dean's the one with the ride, so whether he was invited or not, he didn't really have much of a choice, and WHATEVER, and you can shut up, too, Sam. Oy. Can I ignore Dean's unsuccessful ploy to convince Sam to hit up Harvelle's instead and just jump ahead to the bit where darling Sammy lovingly inters his late father's dog tags at Burnt Mary's headstone? I can? Good.
Somewhere in or near Lawrence, Sam kneels in front of a headstone engraved, "Mary Winchester 1954-1983 In Loving Memory." Or however you're supposed to punctuate tombstone epitaphs. The headstone, by the way, is pink granite. ("Taaaaaa-kaaaaay!" sings Raoul, whose taste in memorials tends towards the traditional. Don't get him started on those coffins you can write on, either. You'll never hear the end of it.) Sam uses a small pocketknife to cut away a patch of sod, then lovingly inters his late father's dog tags while whispering through tears, "I think Dad would have wanted you to have these. I love you, Mom." Awww. Though, you know, I'm sort of on Dean's side as far as this gesture is concerned. Don't hit me.
Meanwhile, Dean stands some distance away, frowning down at a memorial left for a father who died at the unusually young age of forty. Just pointing that out in the event we discover during some future episode that this graveyard's positively littered with people dead before their time. Dean shrugs off whatever hint of an emotion he might accidentally have felt at that moment and turns to wander through the headstones alone until he spots a suspiciously withered tree in another section of the cemetery. He ambles over and knocks on the trunk before taking a few steps back to realize he's standing in the middle of a perfect circle of dead vegetation -- a circle whose center lies atop a very recent grave, as evidenced by its temporary marker. A temporary marker, I must note, that spells the "cemetery" part of "Greenville Cemetery" with two Es and an A. Sigh. ("Good memorial park help is so difficult to find these days," opines Raoul, who really shouldn't have any way of knowing that, and yet somehow inexplicably does.)
A short time later, Dean finishes up a conversation with the cemetery manager and strolls over to Sammy with news that the recently deceased was "Angela Mason, a student at the local college" whose "funeral was three days ago." Sam's all, "...and?" Dean's all, "Are you blind? Everything dead around her grave in a perfect circle? You don't think that's a little weird?" and I refuse to recap the subsequent I Really Don't Think This Is Our Kind Of Gig/I Think This Is Exactly Our Kind Of Gig debate that follows, for reasons the lovely and talented Drunken Bee articulated in her recap for last season's "Bloody Mary," wherein she wondered, "Why will you continue, over the course of the ten episodes, wondering if the case you are investigating is actually not a supernatural case, a suggestion that merely draws out the intensely boring part of the show?" She, of course, never received a satisfactory answer to that most excellent question, so it is left to me to tell Our Intrepid Heroes this: It is always your kind of gig, boys, so knock it off with the intensely boring chatter and get to the zombies already. I was promised zombies, goddammit! Eventually and at very long last, Sam agrees to accompany his brother into town to visit Angela's father, "a professor a the school."
On a lovely, leafy campus, a gaggle of coeds saunters up towards a building whose sign proclaims it to be The Faculty Of Arts Department Of Archaeology And Greek Studies, which, whatever, because in Lawrence, Archaeology is associated with the Anthropology Department, whereas "Greek Studies" would find themselves under the aegis of the Department Of Classics, and all that took was a quick trip to Google, show, and MOVING ON. Inside, Sam and Dean knock at Professor W. Mason's door and LIE to the kindly gentleman who answers that they were friends of his daughter's, and wanted to stop by to offer their condolences. Professor Mason invites the LYING LIARS WHO LIE into his office with a grateful smile on his face.
Sam's settled with Professor Mason on one of the room's sofas to flip through the good professor's scrapbook featuring photographs of his daughter in happier times while Dean rudely paws through a bookshelf. Eventually, he lands upon a suspicious-looking volume he hoists into the air and, with more than a hint of incrimination in his voice, he sneers, "This is an unusual book." "It's ancient Greek," Professor Mason replies, mildly enough, adding, "I teach a course." Dean has the good grace to look slightly abashed as he returns the book to its shelf before he wanders over to the couch with an overly suspicious and leading, "So, a car accident? That's...horrible." Well no shit, Dean. Weren't you just in one of those? I have to confess, I didn't see Dean's little breakdown at the end the episode coming at all, so I spent most of the hour absolutely hating the guy for the unnecessarily surly attitude with which he confronted nearly all of the grieving people he encountered during the course of the evening. Bottom line, Dean's a complete asshole through most of tonight's proceedings, and the fact later-to-be-revealed that he's spent the entire time secretly despising himself for causing his father's death neither excuses nor mitigates any of the absolutely rotten behavior leading up to that moment of revelation. So a great big WHATEVER to old Deano, here, gang, and I'll be shooting through these scenes as quickly as possible, because I have neither the energy nor the desire to rant at him for twenty-seven pages, and besides: Zombies!
ANY-way, Professor Mason, visibly wrecked by his daughter's loss and never lifting his eyes from one of her photos in his hands, reveals he still hasn't shaken the habit of calling her several times a day to check in before admitting, "Angie was the most important thing in my life, and now, I'm just lost without her." "We're very sorry," Sam offers, pointedly glaring at his asshole of a brother, who just as pointedly directs his gaze elsewhere with an overemphasized air of indifference.
Back at their motel, the boys continue with The Debate I Shall Not Be Recapping, save to note the fact that Sam rather obnoxiously believes Dean's fabricating this entire hunt simply to avoid dealing with their parents' deaths. Dude, I thought you were Pre-Law. What's with all of this tedious undergrad Psych bullshit? "I don't have time for this crap," Dean snarls before snatching up his car keys to hit the local bar -- alone -- for copious amounts of healing booze. "Neither do I!" shrieks Raoul. "Bring out the evil undead, already!"
"Whee!" For yes, gentle reader, we have finally entered the evil undead portion of this evening's entertainment. Meathead Matt slouches on the sofa in his darkened living room, staring blankly at a home video he shot of Angela frolicking through a park, or wherever. I suppose he's grieving. He eventually rises to grab himself another beer from the kitchen, and while he's gone, the small houseplant on his coffee table withers and dies. DUN! Meathead Matt returns, collapses back onto the couch, takes a depressed swig of his beer as his onscreen self assures Angela, "You're beautiful, you know that?" and finally pauses the tape on a still of Angela's broad, toothy smile. We stare at the image on the television for a very long time until a figure clad in white emerges from the living room's shadows to cast her elongated reflection on the picture tube's glass. "This can't be good!" Raoul hisses, leaning forward in eager anticipation. Meathead Matt squints his bleary eyes at the reflection, willing it into focus, and the recognition that follows forces him forward in his seat in disbelief as the orchestra goes nuts on the soundtrack. Matt whips his head around, and we catch a hint of his goggle-eyed and gaping horror at the intruder's identity right as the camera cuts back to the TV screen. Matt emits a strangled shout before a sharp, slicing noise heralds the arrival of the -- wait for it -- SPLAT! The arc of Meathead Matt's arterial spray that managed to hit Dead Angela square in her televised face trickles towards the carpet as the soundtrack's strings scream upwards until they hit the roof of the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
Took them long enough.
The following morning, I suppose, Dean uses one of his fake credit cards to jimmy the lock on an exceptionally large and well-appointed apartment. He wanders through the apparently unpopulated rooms until he stumbles across a framed studio portrait of Angela, which he lifts from its shelf to examine. In a little parallel to the scene just passed, a woman's form unexpectedly appears in the glass, and Dean whips his head around to find some startled brunette chippie in the hall, clad in nothing more than a strappy pink t-shirt and a pair of matching hooker shorts. "Who the hell are you?!" she shouts before darting into a nearby room to barricade the door and scream, "I'm calling 9-1-1!" "I'm Angela's cousin!" Dean hastily LIES. "Her dad sent me over to pick up her stuff! My name's, uh, Alan? Alan Stanwyk?" Dean pulls this funny little "Eh, it's good enough, and she'll never get that reference" grimace-slash-eyebrow wiggle as Pink Chippie warily unlatches the door to pucker, "Her dad didn't say that you were coming." "Well, um," Dean begins, fumbling before he pulls it together to LIE once more, "How else would I have the key to your place?" With that, he jingles his own keys around in the dim Pink Chippie's face.
Freakish amounts of beauty and charm apparently get even LYING LIARS WHO LIE anywhere, for the thing we know, Pink Chippie's slumped on the living room couch, heaving sobs and loudly blowing her nose in an ornately overwrought display of grief for her former roommate Angela Mason. Dean none-too-subtly pumps her for information on the deceased, leading Pink Chippie to offer, "She was great. Just...great. I mean, she was so..." Lengthy pause. "...great?" Dean offers. "Yeah!" Pink Chippie agrees before dissolving into another round of tears as Dean heaves a beleaguered sigh and passes her another tissue. Heh. "It's not just her," Pink Chippie eventually reveals. "It's Matt." Dean's all, "Who in the what, now?" so Pink Chippie clarifies, "Angela's boyfriend! He killed himself last night -- he cut his own throat. Who does that?" "No one, moron," Dean thinks to himself before delicately inquiring as to Meathead Matt's frame of mind since Angela's untimely demise. According to Pink Chippie, the Meathead was a complete basket case. "He kept saying that he saw her everywhere," she gossips, "as in an acid trip, or something." Pink Chippie then, at Dean's prompting, too-vociferously claims Matt and Angela were perfectly happy together, so Dean cunningly asks, "And where did Matt live?"
Back at the motel, Sam's perched anxiously on the end of one of the beds, staring intently at the television screen as a female announcer lasciviously promises, "on The Skin Channel, Casa Erotica IV -- a tale of two Latin beauties..." At this point, Dean bursts through the door, and Sammy's reflexes fail him as he's a little too slow in switching off the set. Dean paces up to his brother as Sam's all with the casual, "Hey, what's up?" Beat. "Awkward," Dean enunciates before slinging his jacket on top of the TV, where he side-eyes the motel's three-sided standing flyer for "HOT XXX PAYPERVIEW." Hee! To all of it. Good thing, because that bit's followed by more of The Debate I Shall Not Be Recapping, save to note that Dean's discovery of a houseful of dead plants and goldfish at Meathead Matt's finally convinces Sam that this is, indeed, Their Kind Of Gig. Oh, by the way, Dean swiped Angela's diary, too, so the boys are off to interrogate Angela's "bestest friend in the whole wide world," who just so happens to be...
...Nerdy Neal. "I didn't realize the college employed grief counselors," he puzzles as Dean LIES to smarm, "Oh, yeah -- you talk, we listen, maybe toss in a little therapeutic collage? Whatever helps jump-start the healing." Throughout this, Sam's been furrowing his mighty brow in disbelief and irritation, because he's the one with the custom-fitted Captain Empathy suit, dammit! Long story short, Nerdy Neal's real "sore-y" to hear of Meathead Matt's untimely demise -- but, he snits, if Matt did indeed kill himself, it was more from guilt than from grief. You see, the night of the accident, Angela caught Matt in bed with "another girl." The subsequent emotional turmoil more than anything else -- like, oh, say, her crappy driving skills -- is what caused Angela to run off the road. Necessary exposition thus delivered, Nerdy Neal politely declines Sam and Dean's grief-counseling services and excuses himself to get ready for work. The instant he's closed his door, Dean shoots Sam the wordless "I told you so" ducky-lip-and-head-nod combo of gloating.
Cut to Our Intrepid Heroes ambling down the street and into Metallicar. According to Dean, as they now have reason to believe Angela's a vengeful spirit, there's only one way to make sure she doesn't slash anyone else's throat: "Burn the bones." "Burn the bones?" Sammy freaks. "Are you high?" There's a terribly amusing moment wherein Dean considers how, precisely, to respond to that question. "Angela died last week!" Squeamish Sammy continues to protest. "There's not gonna be bones -- there's gonna be a ripe, rotting...body in the coffin!" Hee. "Since when you afraid to get dirty, huh?" Dean teases, gunning the Impala and rumbling off down the street.
Get this sly transition: As the edge of Metallicar's sloping rear window and trunk pass through the frame, the screen wipes along with it to reveal the cemetery late that night. It's all so very Young Frankenstein. Which, you know, is appropriate, because the camera's landed on Our Dear Boys digging up yet another grave. If they burst into a rousing chorus of "Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Life" the moment their shovels thunk onto the casket, I might have to marry Eric Kripke. Doesn't happen, of course. Sigh. That would have ruled. In any event, the boys finally hit the coffin and grab flashlights as Sam hoists the lid open to reveal...nothing but a white satin pillow. DUN! Well, DUN! except for the fact that we already knew this was going to happen, because the promos promised us zombies. The ominous horns grow loud on the soundtrack as the camera cuts over to...
...the interior of Nerdy Neal's apartment, where the gentleman of the house is currently unbolting the door to his basement. That's not suspicious at all! We follow him down the pitch-black staircase until he turns a corner to find...Zombie Angela! Perched on a cot! Smiling oh, so very coyly at her would-be master before rising to saunter on up to him, decaying-boobs-first! "I missed you," she purrs, and with that, the reanimated corpse hikes its putrefying tongue down Neal's throat. Neal pulls back sharply, then grins lewdly and dives in for some more of that hot zombie action. Raoul's mighty "EEEEEEEEW!" echoes all the way into the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
Back at the cemetery, Our Intrepid Heroes quickly recover from their mutual befuddlement to spy the ripped lining of the empty coffin's lid, along with the strange markings etched into the surface of the wood below. "I've seen these kinds of symbols before," Dean grits.
Smash to Dean pounding on the door of a house that is not zombie-fucker Neal's, with Sam anxiously whispering, "Take it easy, okay?" beside him. There will be none of that touchy-feely taking-it-easy crap for old Deano today, unfortunately, as he barks, "We need to talk!" the second Professor Mason answers the door. For whatever foolish reason, Professor Mason invites the obnoxiously rude strangers on his front porch into his home, only to have Dean light into him almost immediately after the door's shut behind them. The symbols they found on the casket's lid, you see, are from an ancient Greek necromancy ritual, and Dean's convinced himself that Professor Mason dug up his own daughter to turn her into a monster. Puffing himself up with self-righteous indignation, Dean rages, "Look, I get it -- there are people I'd give anything to see again, but what gives you the right? What's dead should stay dead! What you brought back isn't even your daughter anymore -- these things are vicious, they're violent, they're so nasty they rot the ground around them, I mean, come on! Haven't you seen Pet Sematary?" Meanwhile, Sam's been eyeing Professor Mason's increasingly incredulous response to this increasingly unhinged attack and, thus convinced of the good professor's innocence, screams for his brother to shut up. Dean ignores him completely until at long last Professor Mason seethes, "You're insane!" and charges over to his phone to call the police. Dean bats the receiver out of the good professor's hand to shout, "Where is she? I know you're hiding her somewhere -- where is she?!" Sam all but slaps Dean in the teeth to capture his attention and redirect it towards the cluster of vibrant orchids the good professor's growing in a sunny corner of his living room. As even Batshit Dean understands that live plants equal no zombies, Sam's finally able to drag his felonious aggravation of a brother out of the house, all the while spouting profuse apologies to Professor Mason.
Out on the sidewalk, Darling Sammy erupts into a fury of his own, pederaging alongside Dean, who determinedly makes his stompy and bow-legged way up the street away from Professor Mason's house while doing his best to ignore what his brother's howling at him. "I don't scare easy," Sam claims, "but, man, you're scaring the crap out of me!" Blowing past Dean's dismissive and condescending retort, Sam continues, "You're lucky this turned out to be a real case, 'cause if it wasn't, you just would have found something else to kill!" As Dean tries and fails to bluster his way through all of this, Sam enumerates, "You're on edge, you're erratic -- except when you're hunting, 'cause then you're downright scary -- you're tailspinning, and you refuse to talk about it, and you won't let me help you!" Dean does that same nodding and smiling thing he pulled back in Montana, but it's not really working, either because he's sober this week or because Sam's hitting at truths a bit more fundamental this time around. "I can take care of myself, thanks," Dean bluffs. "No, you can't!" Sam explodes. "And you know what? You're the only one who thinks you should have to!" "Dean, it's killing you!" he adds, over Dean's warnings against going in that direction again. "We've already lost Dad, we've lost Mom, I've lost Jessica, and now I'm gonna lose you, too?" Dean, out of snappy replies, just buhs around a bit before pulling it together and managing to change the subject by stating correctly, "Look, we better get out of here before the cops come." Sam, out of steam, rolls his eyes in frustration. "I hear you," Dean hastens to assure him, "I'm being an ass, and I'm sorry, but right now we got a friggin' zombie running around, and we need to figure out how to kill it." Sam stares at him for a moment before shaking his head around and wheezing out an I-can't-believe-this "Our lives are so weird, man." Dean's all, "Yeah, dude, whatever, vámonos!" and bolts from the frame. Sammy shakes his head around some more as the camera cuts over to...
...The Lair Of The Zombie Fucker. Nerdy Neal's beginning to harbor a couple of doubts regarding his Corpse Bride, especially in light of Meathead Matt's mysterious suicide. Zombie Angela deploys her zombie feminine wiles to lure him onto the couch, where she -- get this -- straddles him to hump all of his cares and worries away. "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEW!"
Back at the motel, Our Intrepid Heroes' latest bout of strategizing has hit a bit of an impasse due to the fact that "there's a hundred different legends on the walking dead," "they all have different ways of killing them," and there isn't any one thing they all have in common. Well, except for silver weapons, which are mentioned in quite a few of the zombie-related myths, as it turns out. Now all they need do is figure out who brought Angela back from the dead in the first place. Dean stumbles across a cunning plan and whips Angela's diary open to a particularly revealing passage: "Neal's a real shoulder to cry on -- he so understands what I'm going through with Matt." "There's more here where that came from," Dean notes. "It's got 'unrequited Duckie love' written all over it." But...but...Jon Cryer played a repressed adolescent closet case in that movie, Dean, and Neal's fucking Angela's reanimated corpse. There's a bit of a difference there that I don't think you qui...oh, the hell with it. Such subtle distinctions are likely lost on the boy anyway. By the way, did Dean mention that the zombie fucker is also Professor Mason's TA and thus has access to all the same books? Well, he did now.
Cut to the darkened Lair Of The Zombie Fucker. "Hello?" Dean calls out after he and Sammy have picked the front lock. "Neal? It's your grief counselors! We've come to hug!" Snerk. The boys make with the quippy remarks as Dean pulls an automatic loaded with silver bullets from his waistband. They pick their way through the main floor of the house, making note of a half-dozen dead plants before catching sight of the secured bolt on the basement door. "Maybe this is where he keeps his porn," Dean shrugs, teasing once again. Even though Sam pretty much has his back to me at this point, I'm certain he's pressing his prissy lips together as he unlatches the door. And despite the fact that the orchestra's going as apeshit here as Dean was in Professor Mason's house earlier, the basement's empty, save for Zombie Angela's rumpled cot. DUN! Also: "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEW! Pity the poor soul who has to rinse out those sheets! Eeeeek!" "You think Angela's gone after somebody?" Sam whispers. Dean quickly finds the broken grate half-covering a window leading outside and snarks, "Nah, I think she went out to rent Beaches." Heh. "Look, smartass," Sam chides, "she might kill someone. We gotta find her." Dean agrees, then runs through several possible victim scenarios in his head before landing upon the following: "She clipped Matt because he was cheating on her, right?" Sam's all, "Yes, and?" "Well," Dean explains, "it takes two to, uh..." He pauses, searching for the right metaphor. And then he gives up. "You know, have hardcore sex." Sam frowns. Be quicker with the remote time, darlin'. Snort. Anyway, to Dean, you understand, it seems as if Angela's roommate was maybe perhaps somewhat a little too broken up about Meathead Matt's suicide. "I mean, like, really broken up."
Cut to Pink Chippie sniffling over some glamour shot of Angela and Meathead Matt at what I'm sure is some asinine fraternity formal. Meathead Matt just seems like he rolled that way, you know? Soon enough, Pink Chippie's distracted by ferrety noises coming from the front porch's general direction, so she rises to investigate. "Hello?" she calls out before -- oh, my God, must they all be so dumb? -- twisting open the doorknob and poking her head outside. Fortunately for her, there are no axe-wielding serial killers waiting on her welcome mat. Unfortunately for her, Zombie Angela's popped up from behind and launches herself into a hair-pulling smackdown with a singsongy, "Hi, Lindsay, I'm hoooo-ome!" Lovely emphasis on the "ho" bit there, by the way. In any event, Lindsay's keening rictus of terror gets gobbled up by the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
"Aaaaahhhhhhhiyyyyiiiiiiiaaaahhhhh!" Lindsay screams as she wrests herself from Zombie Angela's grasp to flee down the hallway into the kitchen at the back of the house. Zombie Angela, of course, is hot on her trampy slut of a former roommate's trail, managing to snatch up a handy pair of shears on her way. "I am so, so sorry!" Lindsay The Worthless Trampy Homewrecking Slut pleads. "Not sorry enough!" Zombie Angela seethes, plunging the shears towards the spot where The Worthless Trampy Homewrecking Slut's heart should be. "I must admit, I'm inclined to take the zombie's side in this whole sordid affair," Raoul notes, as well he should. Lindsay manages a dodge, unfortunately, so Zombie Angela's fist just crashes through the glass front of the kitchen's cupboard. The zombie wheels around to have another go at the black, gaping emptiness The Worthless Trampy Homewrecking Slut has in place of a soul, but Lindsay simply falls onto her back on the floor ("They didn't call them roundheels back in my day for nothing," Raoul sniffs), managing from that position to land a boot in Zombie Angela's stomach. Zombie Angela crashes face first into the linoleum at The Worthless Trampy Homewrecking Slut's side, and remains still for some reason. Lindsay flips the zombie over to discover the shears have inadvertently embedded themselves in Angela's chest. The Worthless Trampy Homewrecking Slut ohmigods about the entire situation for a very lengthy period of time until Zombie Angela snaps her eyes open, latches once more onto her faithless former roommate's hair, and uses those tresses to yank herself slowly up, first into sitting position, then finally to her feet, all the while sliding the shears menacingly from her chest. Just before Zombie Angela gets a chance to finish off The Worthless Trampy Homewrecking Slut for good, however, gunshots ring out from Dean's automatic, and Zombie Angela staggers and jerks backwards, gasping for breath. Zombie Angela recovers quickly enough, however, and spins around to bare her teeth at Our Intrepid Heroes. Dean's response? Shooting another hole in the zombie's chest. Yes! These strange, whickering noises hit the soundtrack as Zombie Angela flails around and gracelessly leaps through the window in a manner physically reminiscent of her compatriots in 28 Days Later. Dean leaps after her as Sam draws The Worthless Trampy Homewrecking Slut into a soothing embrace -- and we really need to get him laid, now don't we? -- but Dean's soon reentering the kitchen through the window, grunting, "Damn, that dead chick can run." Heh. "What now?" Sammy blurts. "I say we go have a little chat with Neal," Dean suggests.
Cut to another round of strategizing in Metallicar on the way to The Lair Of The Zombie Fucker. I'm just going to assume they dropped The Worthless Trampy Homewrecking Slut off at a hospital or something, rather than leaving her alone in that apartment. Long story short, as silver bullets didn't kill Zombie Angela, their best bet is "nailing" her back into her "gravebed." "How the hell are we gonna get Angela back to the cemetery?" Dean frets. Sam doesn't have an answer for that one. "Oooh! Oooh! Pick me!" Raoul shrieks. "You could drag Lindsay out from whatever safe house you dumped her worn-out fanny and tie her to that dead tree to Zombie Angela's grave! Then, after Zombie Angela's sent that trollop straight to the Hell she so richly deserves, you could, I don't know, do that spiky thing, or whatever, so this painful episode might finally reach its end." I think Raoul has issues.
Back at Professor Mason's office, Sam and Dean swing through the door to find Neal scribbling something at the good professor's desk, and how the hell they knew he was there I'll never be able to figure out, so let's keep this moving, shall we? Long story short, Dean roughs The Zombie Fucker up a little bit until Neal admits he did indeed resurrect Angela, and that she's back at his house now. Dean darts his eyes through the general gloom of the office to spot a couple of Professor Mason's pet orchids dead on the windowsill. Dean's all, "You sure she's back at your place?" Neal nods his head repeatedly, but tosses a deliberate glance over at a closed closet door. Dean thinks fast and repLIES, "Listen, it doesn't really matter where she is. There's only one way to stop her -- we've got to perform another ritual over her grave to reverse the one that you did." "It's very complicated," he adds after rattling off a list of supplies they don't really need in Sammy's direction, "but it'll get the job done. She'll be dead again in a couple of hours." "I think you should come with us," he finishes, a friendly enough smile on his face. The smile falters when The Zombie Fucker pouts. "I'm serious," Dean vows as Sammy clenches his jaw. "Leave with us, right now." Neal, completely zombie-whipped at this point, just shakes his head, chewing at his lower lip and dropping his eyes to the desk. Dean issues one final, hushed warning before hustling on out of there with the younger brother.
Left alone with his reanimated and now somewhat less-than-fresh corpse, what with all those bullet holes and puncture wounds in her torso, Neal, terrified, pretends to listen to her side of the story (in brief: "Slutty boyfriends and trampy roommates deserve to die!" Raoul howls with approval) and agrees to haul her decaying ass over to the graveyard to stop Sam and Dean's ritualizing. He flusters that he'll head outside to pull the car around while she remains in her father's office. Zombie Angela gazes appraisingly at his retreating form. Good Lord, he's a dumbass.
Neal makes his shakily panting and increasingly panicked way out to the car, only to fumble the keys promptly to the asphalt, and wouldn't you know it? Zombie Angela's right there when he eventually rises from retrieving them to sneer, "Neal. You look nervous." "Were you going to leave me?" she snarls, and then Tamara Feldman goes near-ultrasonic with the shrill accusations of abandonment and philandering and whatnot, so I'll skip ahead to the point where Zombie Angela just grabs onto Neal's face as he's midway through a babbling apology and twists hard to the left. The Zombie Fucker's neck makes gratifyingly crunchy noises as his vertebrae snap, and Angela allows his poorly deceptive and now-dead ass to drop to the ground.
Cut over to the cemetery, where Our Dear Boys carefully arrange the various supplies for their fake ritual on the ground surrounding Angela's still-open grave, and I'm not going to wonder how a cemetery plot so blatantly violated would escape detection for twenty-four hours because I still have six and a half minutes and one character's enormous nervous breakdown to get through before this is all over, and so I will be MOVING ON. Hearing forest noises emanating from the far end of the cemetery, Sam slides an automatic from the back waistband of his jeans and Jazz-Hands his way around the various headstones and monuments until he's reached the underbrush beyond, and there he loiters and loiters and loiters until Zombie Angela lurks up behind him. Action Sammy With Super-Special Puppy-Dog Eyes whips around to point the gun in Angela's face. "Wait!" Angela gasps. "It's not what you think!" she breathily continues with much heaving of pallid bosom in the moonlight. "I didn't ask to be brought back, but it's still me -- I'm still a person. Please." And just when you think Sammy's going to buy that line of bullshit and in turn attempt to convince his brother to let her live, Action Sammy With Super-Special Puppy-Dog Eyes blows a hole right through the zombie's forehead. Kick ass. "I still think she had a point," Raoul insists. "Well. Earlier. You know what I mean."
The bullet affects Zombie Angela not one bit, so Sam takes off, tearing ass through underbrush and graves until Angela catches up to him at the last instant and tackles him to the ground. Even though Jared Padalecki is fifteen feet tall and Tamara Feldman is all of about, say, four. Let's just pretend she took a flying leap at one of his calves and somehow managed to dig her teeth into the back of his knee. Just as Zombie Angela's about to twist Sam's neck into new and exciting shapes, Dean leaps out from behind a marker and pumps her full of silver. The force of each bullet's impact propels her further backwards until she tumbles into her own coffin. Dean pulls a completely awesome running slide into the grave to land right on top of her, and he then jams this enormous metal spike through her stomach into the floor of the casket below. Angela's reanimated corpse ceases struggling almost immediately, and Dean slowly hauls himself out of the ground to growl, "What's dead should stay dead." The camera pans slowly up towards his face until everything vanishes into the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
Aftermath. The boys finish tamping down the dirt on Angela's grave and grab their jackets to return to Metallicar, bantering along the way. In case you haven't read any of the interviews associated with this season, this was the episode during which Jared Padalecki fractured his right wrist performing a stunt, and for continuity purposes, he had to film half his scenes this week without a cast. Ow. In any event, I mention this because Our Intrepid Heroes now set up the explanation for the cast Sam'll be sporting for the five installments as Sam himself kvetches that Zombie Angela might have broken his hand during that improbable tackle the night before. "You're just too fragile!" Dean smirks. You really should have gone for another porn joke, there, Deano. Just a suggestion. As they're about to reach the car, Dean stops dead in his tracks for whatever reason and takes a moment to glance over at Burnt Mary's headstone. "You want to stay for a while?" Sam asks gently. "No," Dean replies emotionlessly. After they sling their shovels into the Impala's trunk, the two climb into the front seat, and Metallicar chugs away. Poor Jared. He had to open and close his door with his left hand, taking great care not to jostle his right. Awww. I'm sure I'd feel even sorrier for him if he didn't make more in one week than most people do in an entire year.
And now, The Scene. Dean, oddly pensive behind the wheel, unexpectedly pulls the Impala over to the side of a ridiculously scenic mountain road and keys off the ignition to disembark and settle on the hood. Sam follows immediately to ask, "Dean, what is it?" Dean squints, hands pushed down into the pockets of his leather jacket, and finally admits, "I'm sorry." "For what?" Sammy buhs, shrugging his remarkably broad shoulders around in confusion. "For the way I've been acting." Sam, realizing this is the beginning of the conversation he's been wanting to have for over a month, makes a face pained with empathy and silently joins his brother on the hood. "And for Dad," Dean finally adds. "He was your dad, too, and it's my fault he's gone." "What are you talking about?" Sam breathes. "I know you've been thinking it," Dean says, "and so have I. Doesn't take a genius to figure it out. Back at the hospital, I made a full recovery. It was a miracle, and five minutes later, Dad's dead and [that fucking] Colt's gone. You can't tell me there's not a connection there. I don't know how [The Ceiling Demon] was involved, I don't know how the whole thing went down, exactly, but...Dad's dead because of me. And that much I do know." "We don't know that," Sam counters, "not for sure." "Sam!" Dean whispers, swallowing hard, having had enough of all the ongoing denial. "You and Dad were the most important people in my life, and now?" He pauses for a moment, letting that sink in before asserting, "I never should have come back, Sam. It wasn't natural, and now look what's come of it." "I was dead," Dean continues, tears beginning to well up in his eyes, "and I should have stayed dead. You wanted to know how I was feeling? Well, that's it." Sam nods his head encouragingly, but Dean can't really see it. "So, tell me," Dean concludes. "What could you possibly say to make me feel all right?" And with that, Dean at last turns to face his brother, the tears running down his face. Sam looks away, helpless. The camera cuts to a far angle so the boys look very, very small against the mountains that surround them, before cutting once more to black.
What a fucking pussy.
week: Psychokinesis, with special emphasis on "psycho." See you then!