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Woooo! Whackjob Gordon's back, and this time it's personal, as he abducts Dean in an attempt to lure Darling Sammy into an abandoned crack house for a little Winchester slaughterfest. But first things first, I suppose: The Big Fat Hairy Secret! Revealed! And it's really, really boring! Basically, Daddy Shut Up warned El Deano that The Ceiling Demon's got special plans for Darling Sammy, or something, and if Dean doesn't carefully ensure Sam remains on the path of righteousness, Dean'll have to kill him one day. Um. Duuuuuuuuh. We knew that already!
In any event, armed with this newfound bit of information, Sam throws a tremendous snit and huffs off on his lonesome, dropping by Harvelle's for a little intelligence gathering with Ash and Ellen before heading off to Indiana to research the murder of yet another of The Demon's super-special mommy-free kids. Meanwhile, a Peoria-based super-special, mommy-having, Sammy-like, and entirely awesome psychic named Ava's been dreaming of Sam blowing up into a thousand gory bits, so she motors over to Indiana to warn him. They end up working together to unravel the murder mystery, which is when Gordon makes his appearance, shooting up Sam's motel room before absconding with El Deano to the above-mentioned crack house to bore the chair-bound Dean with a lengthy dissertation on the nature of evil, or some such bullshit. But none of that matters, because Sam -- knowing of the trap Gordon's laid for him thanks to Ava's mad precognition skillz -- skillfully avoids a gruesome dismemberment to thwack Gordo unconscious, and then? He and Dean scamper away just in time to watch the local police -- whom Sammy called with an "anonymous tip" -- arrest Gordon for all sorts of weapons violations and the murder of the super-special mommy-free kid. Whew!
And then it all ends on a deliciously ominous note when Sam and Dean roll into Peoria to check up on Ava, only to find her fiancé lying in a puddle of his own blood, their bedroom littered with demon-related sulphur, and Ava completely gone missing -- save for her engagement ring, which poor little emo Sammy finds abandoned on the carpet. I cannot wait to see what happens . Hooray! Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Crackle, Crackle THEN! "You know the truth about Sammy and the other children?" OH, MY GOD, YES. YES, WE DO. Shut UP, Mr. Ceiling Demon! Um. Sir. Please. If, you know, you sort of feel like not talking for a little while. Sir. Ahem. What I'm trying to say is that Frederic Lane's yellow eyes still creep me the hell out. In any event, Shut Up Daddy LIES to Sam, and then El Deano LIES to Sam some more, because Shut Up Daddy and El Deano are LYING LIARS WHO LIE. We jump back a year ago so Sam might chat with Max The Homicidal Telekinetic once more about how super-special they and all of the other survivors of The Great Mommy Immolation Of 1983 truly are. Finally, we skip forward to Sam admitting the truth of it all to the fabulous Ellen Harvelle. "The Demon said he had plans for people like us," Sam warns her. "What kind of plans?" Ellen demands. "We don't really know for sure," Sam confesses, slightly abashed, as all the imps of Hell wail down the soundtrack to slam into the...
...Crackle, Crackle NOW! The image of a microcassette recorder pushes through the flaming lettering as an off-screen gentleman's voice gently leads, "Don't be afraid, Scott -- you can tell me anything. You know that." The camera's panned past the recorder to reveal it's resting atop a manila folder labeled "Private & Confidential Dr. George Waxler M.D. Patients Log." "Whatever you say," this evening's good doctor continues, "won't leave this room." The camera continues along to travel up the rumpled form of an extremely haggard-looking young man slumped on the good doctor's overstuffed sofa. "It started a little over a year ago," Scott begins, training his sunken eyes on the good doctor. "Migraines at first. Then I found I could...do stuff." Scott's right knee involuntarily shudders up an down beneath his hand at that, which is a nice little touch. An even nicer touch involves the opening bass line of "White Rabbit" hitting the soundtrack simultaneously with the confession and the knee jerk. "What do you mean, 'do stuff'?" the good doctor inquires. The militaristic rat-a-tat-tat of the song's drum enters to join the bass line as Scott admits, "I have this ability." The song's primary guitar line twangs into our ears as Scott elaborates, "When I touch something, I can electrocute it if I want." The camera leaps behind Scott to give us our first, blurry glimpse of Dr. Waxler through the office's aquarium as the trippy primary guitar line threatens to hurl those in the audience who were so inclined to indulge in their younger years into an acid flashback. "How do you know?" Waxler quite reasonably wonders. Scott takes a moment and averts his eyes uncomfortably before allowing, "I did it to the neighbor's cat." "It's, uh, insides," he continues uncomfortably, "fried up like a hamburger." "Delicious!" shrieks Raoul The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon, whose self-imposed diet as of late precludes the occasional indulgence in such tasty treats. "Not that anyone needs to know," Raoul huffily sniffs in my direction before adding, "but the holidays were more than a little beastly on my waistline. Now, can we stop nattering about my eating habits and get back to this delightful little scene?" But of course, Raoul. Anything for you.
The good doctor's face remains impressively impassive as he nods down to scribble something into the notebook on his lap. Just as Grace Slick delivers the opening line of the song, Scott's expression hardens a bit. "You don't believe me," he quietly accuses the good doctor. "I believe that you believe it," Dr. Waxler offers in that maddeningly unresponsive way television analysts have. "Wanna shake on it?" Scott nearly sneers, leaning forward to reach out with his right hand in a challenge to the good doctor's apparent disbelief. As Grace suggests we all go ask Alice when the latter's ten feet tall, Waxler blankly appraises the proffered hand before shifting the conversation's focus with, "Why would you want to kill the neighbor's cat, Scott?" "I don't," Scott growls with frustration as he slumps back onto the sofa. "He does, and he doesn't want me to stop there." And who He? Why, the yellow-eyed Ceiling Demon, of course! He's been visiting dear Scott -- much as he did Anson Weems earlier -- to tell him to do "awful things." "I tell him no," Scott insists, "'No, I don't want to!'" but the crafty Ceiling Demon counters by hinting at all of the grand plans he has for his little kitty fryer. "What kind of plans?" asks the good doctor. Scott remains silent about that, biting his lower lip instead as he looks down, dismayed, thereby allowing Grace Slick's wailing to assume complete control of the soundtrack.
The camera cuts to Scott trudging through the nighttime mist down an otherwise deserted paved walkway to the fenced-off tracks of a light commuter railroad. He nervously glances behind him for a moment before continuing down towards his car, which he's parked in an isolated spot beneath the railroad's viaduct. Trains rumble past overhead as Grace Slick starts going nuts, and just as she makes it through the bit about the White Knight and the Red Queen and the Dormouse, Scott reaches his car and moves to unlock the driver's-side door. The camera slides past Scott's shoulder to catch the inky silhouette of some hulking interloper reflected upon the back window's glass. Scott whirls around to catch the dim streetlights glinting off the massive blade of a serrated hunter's knife, and as Grace Slick starts full-on baying about feeding your head, the interloper plunges the blade into Scott's stomach. Scott's mouth gapes open in a howl of pain, but between the trains above and Grace on the soundtrack, we can't hear him scream. He shoots his right hand forward to fry his attacker's entrails like a hamburger, but the interloper both snatches at Scott's wrist and pushes him back against his car with the knife, digging ever deeper into Scott's torso before yanking the knife upwards to gut Scott like a fish. Scott falls backwards -- bonelessly -- against the car's door, and a thick stream of blood pours from the side of his mouth down his neck as he gasps and he chokes and Grace Slick is baying and his eyes glaze over and she's squalling and yowling and...
...RAAAWWWR! "Eeeeeeeeeeeee! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" I couldn't agree more, Raoul. That was fucking awesome.
Suddenly, we find ourselves back at that ridiculously scenic lake from the end of "Croatoan," picking up more or less right where we left off with Our Dear Boys, and if they did film this sequence the same day they filmed that last one, they switched filters in the camera, or something, because everything's now endowed with a decidedly greyer cast than it all had the first time we ran through the following bits of dialogue. "Before Dad died, he told me something," Dean chokes out. "Something about you." "What?" Sammy breathes. By the way, they're pulling that camera trick again -- the one that makes the guys look impossibly small against their ridiculously scenic surroundings -- by filming the initial part of this exchange from about twenty yards away with a very large tree in the foreground that's taking up most of the left half of the screen. We finally leap over to Our Intrepid Heroes as Sam repeats, "Dean, what did he tell you?" Raoul leans forward in antici-- "I AM NOT LEANING FORWARD IN ANTICIPATION!" Raoul shrieks. "For God's sake, after four months' worth of absolutely ludicrous levels of teasing regarding The Enormous Secret Imparted Upon The Loyal Son By The Soon-To-Be-Dead Bastard Of A Father, do you really think I'm going to fall for what's certain to be an absolutely pathetic reveal?" Um, I guess not, then. Calm down, dude. "I WAS CALM UNTIL YOU ATTEMPTED TO TARNISH MY REPUTATION WITH ABJECT FALSEHOODS." Whoa. Okay. Backing away from the Raoul, here. Where were we?
Oh, yes: "He wanted me to watch out for you," Dean sort of shrugs, clearly reluctant to continue, but forcing himself to do so anyway, "to take care of you." Sam, both annoyed and confused as well he should be, buhs, "He told you that a million times." "This time was different," Dean insists. "He said that I had to" -- and here he really struggles to get the word out, unable even to meet Sammy's eyes -- "save you." Dean finally looks back up at Sam. All the way back up at Sam, because Jared Padalecki is a fifteen-foot-tall freak of nature. "Save me from what?" Sam demands. Dean hasn't the faintest clue, of course. Naturally. Obviously. Because Daddy Shut Up sucks so loud and so hard, he's still fucking up his sons' lives even now, months after he entered Hell for what I think everyone agrees is his just reward. "He just said that I had to save you -- that nothing else mattered -- and that if I couldn't, I'd...I'd have to kill you." Sam's decidedly nonplused. "He said I might have to kill you, Sammy," Dean repeats, almost whimpering. Awwww. Poor puppy. And that's the only bit of sympathy either one of them will get from me for the remainder of the scene, for Our Intrepid Heroes quickly descend into a bout of rampant internecine douchebaggery so shouty and overwrought and clichéd that I'm mightily inclined to fast-forward to the bit where Sam steals off into the night to kick-start the episode proper. The fact that Sam takes a page from Lana Lang's playbook to start screeching about Secrets! and Lies! certainly isn't helping matters, either. God, I hate that little, self-satisfied pink squirrel, and damn her to Hell alongside Daddy Shut Up for infecting Darling Sammy here with her particular brand of obnoxiousness. Long story short, Sam wants to hit the road immediately in order to find out What It All Means, but Dean insists they need to lie low for a little while to figure out their move because "this whole thing is spinning out of control," what with Sam's immunity to "some weirdo demon virus" and their bastard of a dead father's final warning and Dean doesn't know what the hell what else anymore. "Please," Dean pleads, "just give me some time -- give me some time to think, okay? I'm begging you, here. Please. Please." After a beat, Sam reluctantly nods his head around, but his eyes have gone all shifty and suspicious-looking.
That evening, Sam -- with a backpack slung over one shoulder and some kind of saddle pouch dangling at his side -- quietly exits a motel room to amble too-casually through the adjoining parking lot in the rain. He sidles up to a sedan, glances around to ensure he's not being watched, jimmies open the lock with a strip of metal, and folds his fifteen-foot-tall self into the driver's seat. Moments later, he's tooling off into the night alone.
Some time later, Sam examines an address scribbled onto a sheet of paper from The Blue Rose Motel in Lafayette, Indiana. And this must be a very, very, very long some time later, if Sam's driven all the way to Lafayette from Washington State. Just saying. The camera moves away from the note to take him in as he warily peers through the mist at the apparently deserted street surrounding him before it follows as he picks his way towards the decrepit crack den at 5637 Monroe Street. Sam edges across the trash-bestrewn front porch to peek through the slats of a boarded-up window, then decides to break in through the back door. He picks the lock, tiptoes inside, and steps towards the front of the crack shack to...stumble across a trip wire! The wire snaps, and Sam -- in near slow-motion -- jerks his head to his right in time to spot the wire yanking the pin from a grenade tucked into an eye-level hole in the nearby wall. The camera cuts back to Sam, who hasn't even a second to react before the grenade detonates, and Sam's remarkably broad-shouldered form instantly dissolves into a spray of red Sam Bits, most of which batter loudly against the wall opposite. The camera leaps outside a nearby window to capture the full extent of the luridly roaring blast, and as the smoke and flame billow through the room, a meaty little Sam Bit SPLATS wetly against the suspiciously unshattered glass. "Oh, don't be dragging the physics of explosions into this," Raoul chides. "Sam Bits! Splattering everywhere! Wheeeeeee!" Once the explosion subsides, the camera leaps back inside the wreck of the room to linger upon one of the ginormotron's impossibly large and now-smoking shoes. "And you know a good part of his foot is still in there!" Raoul bellows approvingly before losing all control of himself and shrieking, "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" for the second time in less than ten minutes. "If you don't give this episode an A," Raoul pants, attempting to collect himself after all of the excitement, "I am never speaking to you again."
Oh, sorry. You might be wondering why Raoul and I aren't collapsing into shuddering and sobbing heaps of grief and dismay over poor Sammy's untimely and violent dismemberment. It's because we've already seen this episode, and so understand it's all yet another fake-out on The Kripkeeper's part. "Albeit one that was quite delightfully gruesome!" Raoul giggles. "Good show, Mr. Kripkeeper!" Yes, we linger for all of five seconds on Sam's miserable and sooty ankle boot before the screen shudders around, dancing between the image of Sam erupting into a spray of bloody foulness and a shot of moonlight streaming through a set of partially closed blinds before the camera lands on a sweaty brunette gasping herself awake in bed to her significant other. "Honey?" the guy at her side mumbles, still half-asleep. "You okay?" "I just had another nightmare," she breathes, somewhat disoriented and shaking her head as if to clear it. "It's nothing," she assures him. "Just go back to sleep." "You sure?" he wonders, concerned. "Yeah," she insists as she settles back onto the pillows with him. The significant other promptly dozes off, but the brunette fretfully stares the camera down until she's gobbled up by the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
Harvelle's. Sam enters and nods noncommittally at the two or three hunters who immediately stare him down before heading over to the bar, where Ellen greets him affably enough by name. "You don't seem that surprised to see me," Sam realizes. "Your brother's been calling," Ellen confirms, "worried sick, looking for you." "Yeah," Sam bites, "figured he might." "What's going on between you two?" Ellen leads, her gentle tone indicating Sam should feel completely comfortable confiding in her. Sam declines the offer of a shoulder to cry upon by pointedly changing the subject, inquiring after Ellen's daughter. Ellen smiles and nods at the inelegant dodge but plays along with it, admitting she doesn't really know what Jo's been up to lately. Seems after Jo's experiences with Our Intrepid Heroes in The City Of Brotherly Love For All Except Skinny Little Blonde Yuppies Too Stupid To Move To Camden, she decided to continue hunting. "Not under my roof," Ellen told her, so Jo skipped out on her own, and there's been no contact between the two women outside of a few postcards for the last few weeks. Sam takes a moment to process all that, then apologizes by half-joking, "So, I'm probably the last person you want to see right now." "Oh, don't get me wrong," Ellen chuckles, shaking her head, "I wish I could blame the hell out of you boys." "It'd be easier," she admits as Captain Empathy suits up to gift her with Action Sammy's Super-Special Puppy-Dog Eyes. "Truth is," Ellen continues, "it's not your fault, Sam." "None of it is," she emphasizes, perhaps referring to more than the current spoken topic of conversation, which happens to be whatever the hell Daddy Shut Up did to get her husband killed all those many years in the past. "I want you to know that I forgave your daddy a long time ago for what happened to my Bill," she assures him before adding, "I just don't think he ever forgave himself." "As well he shouldn't!" Raoul interjects, sharing in the undying collective loathing of Our Intrepid Heroes' worthless father. "Bastard!" Captain Empathy ignores Raoul completely to gaze deep into Ellen's pained eyes and whisper, "What did happen?" This time, it's Ellen's turn to pull an inelegant dodge of her own as she shrugs off the question to wonder why Sam stopped by. Given Sam's earlier almighty snit about Secrets! and Lies!, I'm surprised he doesn't call her on it, but he lets it slide to admit, "I need help."
"What am I looking for?" Ash asks by way of response as the scene cuts a little bit forward in time. Incidentally, the growth atop Chad Lindberg's head has never so clearly been a wig as it is right now, to the point where I keep expecting him to excuse himself to the bathroom, where he will gaze upon his reflection in the mirror with craziness and loathing before ripping that shit off to show us the scar! Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah: Sam, in hushed tones, tells Ash to track down all of the other psychics like Sammy himself, nationwide. Ellen interrupts to note that not all of The Ceiling Demon's super-special kiddies endured The Great Mommy Immolation Of 1983. Sam acknowledges this, but instructs Ash to begin with that detail.
A short time later, Dr. Badass bangs through the door of his lair to amble up to Sammy at the bar, flicking a bit of folded paper around in the air with a prideful, "Done, and done!" "That was fast," Sammy gulps around a mouthful of ale. That would likely be due to the fact that Ash was able to unearth a mere four survivors of The Great Mommy Immolation Of 1983: "Sam Winchester, of Lawrence, Kansas; Max Miller, of Saginaw, Michigan; Andrew Gallagher, from Guthrie, Oklahoma; and, uh, Scott Carey." Ash grimaces as he flips the wad of paper down on the bar. "You got an address?" Sam asks. "Kinda," Ash winces. "The Arbor Hills Cemetery, in Lafayette, Indiana. Plot 486." "So, he's dead?" Sammy gapes, eyebrows all a-flutter. "I sure hope so," Ash replies. "Otherwise, we got some super-special psychic scratching on the lid of his coffin right about now." Oh, he does not, even though he so totally should have. Instead, Ash relates the scant available details of Scott's pre-credits murder, adding that the local constabulary find themselves woefully short on suspects at the present time. Sam thanks Ash for his assistance and immediately heads off towards his stolen automobile for the long drive to Indiana. Amusingly enough, Ash wastes not a moment to snatch up Sam's half-empty pint to finish it. Heh. "Sam!" Ellen calls out to stop him before he's made it to the door. "I gotta call Dean," she insists, "I gotta let him know where you are." Sam shakes his shaggy head around. "I'm trying to find answers about who I am," he explains, "and my brother means well, but he can't protect me from that. Please." Ellen heaves a wary sigh, but agrees to keep her mouth shut. That should last.
By the way, it was at this point in the recap that Raoul and I took a break to catch the first two hours of this season's 24, and when Jack Bauer bit through that terrorist's jugular and spat the gristly gobbets of flesh out onto the floor, Raoul shrieked himself into such a delighted tizzy, he nearly dropped into the depths of his overstuffed armchair in a boneless faint. You'll be pleased to know, though, that he's now entirely recovered. "Well, mostly recovered," Raoul corrects, fanning a paw in front of his face to calm himself once more. "Just the mere thought of that scene is enough to give me the vapors! Why they can't present something like that on this show is beyond me! Wheeeeee!" Oh, Raoul, just give them time. Once again, 24 has raised the bar for prime-time gore, so I'm sure we'll be getting something very similar here, very soon. And now, back to Supernatural.
As the camera pans down through the yellowed leaves of an old tree to land on the façade of a small ranch home, we hear a man's voice ask, "You said you went to high school with Scott?" "Yes, sir, I did," Sam's voice LIES, adding, "I just heard what happened." We cut inside to find Mr. Carey hunched over with grief in one of the armchairs in the living room. "He was a good boy," Mr. Carey assures Sam, "but he changed a lot since you knew him." "What do you mean?" Sam wonders. "Started about a year ago," Mr. Carey tells him. "These headaches, and then he got depressed. Paranoid. Nightmares." At Sam's prompting, Mr. Carey admits that Scott never confided the content of those nightmares in his father. Mr. Carey did try to get help for his son, "but nothing took." "He'd just lock himself in his room for days," Mr. Carey sighs, looking lost. Action Sammy with The Super-Special Puppy-Dog Eyes leaps at this entirely unexpected investigatorial opening and asks to see Scott's room. A slight frown of confusion passes across Mr. Carey's face, but he, apparently, is as much of a sucker for The Super-Special Puppy-Dog Eyes as El Deano, for the thing we know, Sam is wandering -- unaccompanied -- into Dead Scott's room to root through the deceased's effects. On the bedside table, Sam finds numerous prescription bottles, and tilts the one full of clonazepam to note they were prescribed by the good doctor Waxler. Sam surreptitiously pockets one of the other bottles before turning to bang into Scott's closet. Spotting some sort of bizarre collage on the back wall, Sam pushes aside the shirts to find the sheetrock papered over with oversized eyes ripped from magazines. All of the preexisting irises have been scratched out, replaced with the yellow, marbled look of The Ceiling Demon's own. Sam gulps. DUN!
Back at The Blue Rose Motel, Sam hikes across the glistening and deserted parking lot to his room. If the camera's leap over to a corner of the building to follow his passage from that different vantage point is anything to go by, he's being watched. And sure enough, just as Sam fits his room key into the door's lock, a pair of heels clicks up behind him. Action Sammy wheels around to snatch the intruder up by her shoulders and fling her against the motel's wall. "Who are you?!" he shouts. "Please!" comes the heaving response, and the camera swings around to reveal...that sweaty brunette chick from the earlier scene! "You're in danger!" the brunette -- no longer quite so sweaty, I must note -- pants. DUN! I think! I mean, I'm pretty sure! But we'll have to see how this plays out, of course! And maybe I should knock it off with all of this and get to the scene already! "You really should!" Okay, then!
The room's wallpaper is an optical nightmare of overlapping, concentric circles in silver, blue, and white, but goddamn if Jared Padalecki doesn't look adorable perched in front of it all on the television set's credenza. Meanwhile, the brunette's been babbling, "Okay, I know how all this sounds, but I am not insane, and I am not on drugs, okay? I am normal, and this is way, way off the map for me." Sam instructs her to calm down, and eventually, introductions are made. Meet "Ava Wilson," and I wish there were something frightfully off about her appearance that I could mock at this juncture, but aside from a set of eyebrows that are perhaps a little too heavily penciled in, she's entirely normal-looking. The actress's resume isn't giving me anything to run with either, as Katharine Isabelle's yet another Vancouverite who's appeared in scads of Canadian television productions few in the United States would ever have known about. So, long story short, Ava looks, dresses, and behaves just like any anonymous early twentysomething you might pass on the street, and this, as we shall soon discover, is A Very Good Thing Indeed. With Sam's patient assistance, Ava reveals her backstory, and it's very similar to ones we've heard before: She'd been leading an completely ordinary life up until about a year ago, when she started receiving both aggravating headaches and terrifying nightmares. The former she fended off with aspirin, and the latter she pretty much ignored until about a month ago, when she had a particularly vivid dream of a young man being gutted like a fish in an isolated parking lot beneath a light-rail's viaduct. A couple of days later, she stumbled across a wire service report of the pre-credits murder in her local paper, and immediately recognized the accompanying photograph of poor Dead Scott. "I saw this guy die days before it happened," Ava squeaks, a little panicky and still distraught from the experience, "and I don't know why, it's just, some reason, my dreams are coming true!" Captain Empathy's about to leap forward to reveal he shares her precognitive ability, but something in Ava's tone keeps him perched silently upon the credenza in his ridiculous tights.
"Last night, I had another one," Ava admits, avoiding his gaze, "about you." She forces herself to look him in the eye for this bit: "I saw you die," she states with almost equal amounts of sympathy for the remarkably broad-shouldered impending spray of gore, here, and apprehension over the fact that the remarkably broad-shouldered impending spray of gore now likely thinks she's batshit crazy. So she's a bit thrown, then, when Sam simply responds to her warning by wondering how she knew where to find him. "Oh! Uh," she flusters before collecting herself and blurting, "you had motel stationery, and I Googled the motel, and it was real, and so I thought I should...warn you." Towards the end, there, she started running out of steam, twisting her fingers around with hesitation while perhaps realizing how stupid she sounded. And from her perspective, Sam seconds that emotion by snickering, "I don't believe this!" Ava's face falls and she rather endearingly flails around the room for a bit to moan, "Of course you don't -- you think I'm a total nutjob!" "Wait, no!" Sam hastens to assure her. "I mean, you must be one of us!" Ava's all, "Sore-y?" so Sam excitedly explains he's a psychic, too, and he and Ava must share a "connection." "A-ha!" Ava snorts. "So, you're nuts! That's great!" In an attempt to convince her, Sam mentions The Great Mommy Immolation Of 1983, but that's a non-starter, because Ava's mother is alive and well and living in Palm Beach. "So, you don't fit the pattern, either," Sam realizes. Ava just goggles at him.
Somewhere else, Metallicar grumbles through the night as Dean's cell phone chirps. "It's Ellen," she announces when he answers. "Have you heard from Sam?" Dean asks immediately. "Yes, I have," she admits, "but he made me promise not to tell you where he is." "Come on!" Dean protests. "Please! I mean, something bad could be going on, here, and I swore I'd look after that kid!" "Now, Dean," she begins, launching herself into a little down-home lecturing. "They say you can't protect your loved ones forever." On his end of the line, Dean looks pissed, but remains silent. Ellen, for her part, realizes how asinine that sentiment sounds coming from her after that nasty kafuffle over Jo in Philadelphia, and nearly rolls her eyes at herself before continuing, "Well, I say screw that -- what else is family for? He's in Lafayette, Indiana." Ellen is awesome. Dean issues a gruff thanks and snaps shut his phone.
Back at The Blue Rose Motel, Ava's quite reasonably wondering, "Why can't you just leave town? Please? Before you blow up?" Hee. They've perched themselves on the edge of one of the beds for this portion of the tête-à -tête, by the way. "I can't," Sam insists. "There's something going on here, Ava, with you, with me -- there are others like us out there, and we're all a part of something, and I gotta figure out what." He gazes with aching sincerity at her through those heart-melting Super-Special Puppy-Dog Eyes of his. They don't work. In fact, they fail spectacularly -- perhaps for the very first time in his life -- which might just be yet another reason to like Ava. "You know what?" Ava begins, having had more than enough of Sam's gibbering whacko voodoo talk. "Screw you, buddy, because I'm a secretary from Peoria --" "Poor thing," Raoul interjects. "-- and I'm not a part of anything!" "You see this?" she demands, hopping to her feet to flash her antique engagement ring in Sammy's face. "I am getting married in eight weeks." "I am supposed to be at home addressing invitations," she exasperates, "but instead, I drove out here to save your weirdo ass, but if you just wanna stay here and die, fine!" "Me?" she snaps, snatching up her purse. "I'm due back on Planet Earth." And with that, Ava stomps towards the motel room's door. "Don't you want to know why this is happening?" Sam calls out at her retreating form. "I mean, don't these visions scare the hell out of you?" This gets her to stop. We can see her take a deep breath and tensely dart her eyes around as Sam continues, "'Cause if you walk out that door right now, you might never know the truth." This gets her, period, and Ava turns back to face him, all the defensive hostility and sarcasm gone from her face. "I need your help," Sammy pleads.
"So, Miss Wilson, you're new in town?" we hear the good doctor Waxler open as the camera shoots over to his office to land upon Ava, fidgeting nervously on his office sofa. "That's right!" she nods, a little too eagerly. "And what made you decide to seek out therapy?" the doctor wonders. Ava rather hysterically works her mouth around a series of lies she attempts to improvise until she gives up and blurts out, "I have no idea," which is closer to the actual truth than most people on this show would offer in this situation. Long story short, during the cute scene that follows, Ava basically distracts the good doctor's attention long enough for Sam to break into the outer office and swipe Scott Carey's confidential file. What's really amusing is that Sam -- for whatever reason -- must break into that outer office through the one of the windows, which apparently are set high above the ground, so we're treated to a glimpse of fifteen-foot-tall Jared Padalecki inching his way across the ledge outside, from Ava's understandably startled perspective. "Holy crap!" she exclaims as the ginormotron shimmies past. "What?" the good doctor asks, pivoting to look out the window himself, but by that point, Sam's disappeared. "I, uh, just remembered," Ava stammers, attempting to cover for her outburst, "when I was a kid, I swallowed, like, eight things of Pop Rocks and then drank a whole can of Coke -- you don't think that that counts as a suicide attempt, do you?" Hee.
Back at the motel, Sam and Ava enter through the sliding glass door, and Ava shakily makes her way into the room as Sam dumps Scott's confidential folder on the kitchenette's table. "Are you okay?" Sam asks upon noticing Ava's frazzled demeanor. "Am I okay?" she repeats, dazed. "I just helped you steal some dead guy's confidential psych files," she shudders, advancing upon him. Sam frets. "I'm awesome!" Ava sings, totally stoked at their little adventure. Sam grins. As do I, despite my better instincts. The fun Katharine Isabelle's having with this role is simply too infectious, I suppose.
A short time later, the two burglars are listening to Scott Carey's final therapy session. Outside, Dean wheels the grumbling Metallicar into the motel's parking lot and cruises down the row of rooms until he spies Sam's remarkably broad back through a set of sliding glass doors. "Thank God you're okay," Dean breathes. Just then, Sam darts off to another part of the room, revealing Ava's presence therein. "You're better than okay!" Dean grins approvingly. "Sam, you sly dog." "Callback!" Raoul shrieks. Dude, stop screaming at me. I think everyone got that reference, okay? "If you don't want my help," Raoul pouts, "I won't offer it. I have better things to do, you know!" Like what? Pasting screenshots of that jugular bite into your Special Moments With My Special Agent scrapbook? "You heartless wretch!" Raoul sobs, clutching the scrapbook in question to his chest. "Just because you've never experienced true love!" Oh, don't be like that, Raoul. [Sniffle.] No, seriously, don't be like that. People are going to think you're some kind of psycho stalker. Now, anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Sam and Ava have reached the part of Scott's session we didn't get to hear the first time around, and Scott explains via the microcassette, "He says he has plans for me -- he says there's a war coming, and people like me, we're gonna be the soldiers. Everything's about to change." Sam, with a pained expression on his face, shuts off the playback. "He's not talking about us, is he?" Ava worries. "How can we turn into that?"
Before she gets her answer, Sam bends down towards the file, and a just-arriving bullet smashes through one of the tacky blue-rose glass panels right where his shaggy head had been. As Ava whoops and screams, the camera skips outside in time to catch one of the sliding glass doors collapse into a cascading shower of shards from the same bullet. Inside, Sam pulls Ava to the ground as another bullet shreds through the remaining glass door. As the two rant and holler on the carpet, we scamper outside again to find good old Gordon Walker atop a nearby roof, armed with a massive sniper rifle affixed with an equally massive silencer, squeezing round after round into the motel room below. After a few more shots whiz past Sam and Ava to embed themselves into the wall, we get Gordon's through-the-scope perspective of the situation for a bit until stupid Sammy lifts his forehead into Gordon's line of fire. Just as Gordon's about to blast off the top of Sam's fool skull, however, Dean shouts out Gordon's name and boots the would-be Sammy killer hard in the chops. The boot's force flips Gordon onto his back, and Dean pounces on the guy's chest to beat him like a redheaded stepchild. Dean's fists connect four times with Gordon's face before Dean hauls the guy up by the latter's lapels to seethe, "You do that to my brother? I'll kill you!" "Wait," Gordon woozily pleads, but Dean's having none of that waiting crap, bitch, and thwacks him twice more before Gordon finally manages to grab hold of his rifle and ram its butt into Dean's head, knocking Our Intrepid Hero unconscious. Gordon rises to his feet in triumph, and the blood from his late beating pours from his lower lip directly down into the METAL TEETH CHOMP! below.
Sam and Ava, apparently recovered from their earlier scare, climb a rickety staircase to the roof of the motel's outbuilding, recently occupied by Gordon and Dean, neither of whom are in sight at the moment. Sam kneels to retrieve the shell casings Gordon so sloppily left behind, and immediately identifies them as "two-twenty-three caliber subsonic rounds." "The guy must have put a suppressor on the rifle!" Sammy croons. "Dude!" Ava protests. "Who are you?" Heh. Sam bumbles out an excuse that involves a television diet heavy on the T. J. Hooker reruns before whipping out his cell phone to call Dean. After a couple of rings, El Deano answers. "I've been looking for you," Dean tells his brother. By the way, in the shot we get here of Dean's face, we can't quite tell if he's holding the phone himself. Sam quickly passes along his current coordinates. "I know," Dean replies. "I talked to Ellen. Just got here myself. It's a real funky town." During all this, the camera's been panning up Dean's legs and arms, lashed tightly to a chair with lengths of thick rope. When the camera finally reaches his head, we can spot one of Gordon's hands pressing the cell to Dean's ear while the other trains an automatic on Dean's kneecap. That's hardcore, dude. "My husband Jack Bauer would wholeheartedly approve," Raoul nods. Raoul's still clutching that scrapbook to his chest. I thought you should know. In any event, the rest of their conversation doesn't really matter at this point, save for the bit where Dean LIES that he's staying at 5637 Monroe Street, which the eagle-eyed amongst you would have recognized when this originally aired as the address from Ava's Splattery Sam Bits premonition. Sam agrees to meet Dean there, and the boys sign off. "Now, was that so hard?" Gordon smooves, snapping shut Dean's phone. "Bite me," Dean snarls. Get it? No, seriously, do you get it? I mean, I'd have Raoul explain it for you, but he's too busy scrawling "Mrs. Jack Bauer" over and over again on his scrapbook to care.
Back on the roof, Sam furrows his brow. "What is it?" Ava wonders. "My brother's in trouble," Sam growls. "What?" Ava gapes. "He gave me a code word," Sam reveals while pulling out a pad of Blue Rose Motel notepaper to scribble down the Monroe Street address. "Someone's got a gun on him." "'Code word'?" Ava repeats, incredulously. "Yeah," Sam replies, casually enough, "'Funkytown.'" Ha! Ava gives Sam this, "You're kidding me with this bullshit, aren't you?" tilt of her head. Heh. "He thought of it!" Sam hastily explains, embarrassed. "It...it's...kind of a...long story," he stammers before hustling her off the roof. Hee! To all of it, but especially to the bit about Dean picking "Funkytown" to indicate someone's got a gun to his head, because I find that entirely plausible. "My husband Jack Bauer loves Lipps Inc.," Raoul claims, "but I can see your point here."
Crack Shack. Dean, in cocky mode, chides Gordon with, "I know Sam and I aren't your favorite people, but don't you think this is a little extreme?" Gordon, who's unloading a small arsenal on a nearby table, menaces, "You think this is about revenge?" "Well," Dean smirks, "we did leave you tied up in your own mess for three days." Dean pauses for a moment before snickering, "Which was awesome." Heh. "Sorry, I shouldn't laugh," Dean adds, not feeling terribly sorry about that particular situation at all. "This isn't personal," Gordon coolly insists. "I'm not a killer, Dean, I'm a hunter, and your brother's fair game." Gordon rams a clip into another automatic for emphasis. DUN! Dean's ducky-lipped glare of fraternal outrage burns holes through the back of Gordon's blue flannel shirt.
Elsewhere, Ava wants very much to remain in Lafayette to help Sammy rescue Dean, but gentlemanly Sam insists she return to Peoria, where she'll be safe with her fiancé. It takes a little bit of convincing, but Ava finally motors off in her blue Volkswagen bug, after eliciting a promise from Sam that the latter will call the minute he and his brother are safe.
Crack Shack, and dear God. Gordon's speechifying. Again. "My husband Jack Bauer doesn't waste time with mere words," Raoul would like to remind everyone. Raoul, your "husband Jack Bauer" is a fake person on the television set. Get a grip! "See? Words. Words just like those. My husband Jack Bauer doesn't waste time with mere words like those." Sigh. I must confess, I really hope tomorrow night's 24 episodes aren't quite as gore-tastic as tonight's were. I'm afraid we'll lose Raoul for good if they are. Anyway. Recap. Crack Shack. Speechifying. BOREDOM. The only amusing bit comes when Dean discovers Gordon ended up killing a teenaged girl in Louisiana as a result of the torture he inflicted upon the demon possessing her, and...I haven't even finished the set-up, and already it's not funny anymore. Long story short, Dean calls Gordon a son of a bitch for letting the girl die, and Gordon promptly whaps Dean upside the head before calmly reminding his captive, "That's my mother you're talking about." See? Not so funny once I've typed it all out. And by the by, I've got nothing against Sterling K. Brown at all -- he's been doing a stellar job with Gordon's off-kilter mellow-yet-psychotic version of menace since he first appeared on the Supernatural screen three months ago -- but I just wish Gordon would stop talking already.
Anyway, before he snuffed out the life of the demon's host, Gordon managed to learn both of The Coming War and of The Ceiling Demon's plans to transform Sammy and the other special children into his very own foot soldiers. Gordon then claims he confirmed the demon's accusations with a little research of his own -- "You got your Roadhouse connections, I got mine" is the way he puts it -- which led him first to poor Dead Scott, and thence on to Sammy himself. There's a lot more yammering after that, but the upshot of it all is that Gordon's actually setting two tripwires, just to make sure he gets the job done when Sam tries to sneak into the Crack Shack through the back door. Oh, and Gordon still has his own blood caked onto his chin! Ew! "Pffft," Raoul snorts. "Did you see that deep gouge in my husband Jack Bauer's shoulder? And the gruesome mass of scar tissue just covering my husband Jack Bauer's left hand?" Yeah, Raoul, riddle me this: How in hell did your husband Jack Bauer manage to scrape off two years' worth of Chinese grime and unruly facial hair in a minute and a half using nothing more than a bowl of lukewarm water in an airplane hangar? Answer me that, huh? "Again, you just don't understand true love." Good Lord. Is this scene over yet? What? I missed the METAL TEETH CHOMP!? Thanks for nothing, Raoul!
Crack Shack. We watch Gordon string one of the tripwires before following him back into the front room, where Dean argues for Sam's life, and Gordon will not stop talking already! And OH MY GOD. He even pulls out that tired old "If you got the chance to kill Hitler before Hitler became Hitler, you'd have to do it, right?" non-argument I grew weary of in high school. SHUT UP, GORDON. SHUT UP AND DIE. Is this scene over yet? I think this scene is over. We have to wait for Gordon to tie a gag around Dean's mouth first? Okay. So, he did it? And this is over? Good.
Outside the Crack Shack, Sam steps into a real-time reenactment of Ava's nightmare, from examining the address on the motel's stationery to edging across the trash-bestrewn front porch to peek through the slats of a boarded-up window to...HEY! He didn't see Dean bound and gagged in that chair before! Nor did he see Gordon sitting stonily at Dean's side with a rifle in his lap! Rip off! In any event, now that we know why Sam picked the lock on the Crack Shack's back door in the premonition, we get to watch him sprint 'round to do it all over again. Meanwhile, Dean's growing increasingly frantic. "You hear him?" Gordon murmurs, cocking an ear towards the rear of the shack. "Here he comes!" Gordon whispers as Sam clicks open the back door. Dean strains against the ropes until the first grenade detonates, flashing red and yellow through the back room. "RRRRAAAAAAAHM!" Dean screams through the gag in his mouth, and I must assume he's calling not for my United States Representative, but for his brother. "Hold on," Gordon croons, "not yet. Just wait and see." And the strings go apeshit on the soundtrack until a second, even larger explosion rips through the back room with enough force to send shards of wood spinning through the air past Dean's head. When the blast wave passes, Dean looks like he's going to cry. Awwww. Not. What a fricking pussy.
"Sorry, Dean," Gordon allows, and if I cared enough about the character or his motivations, I'd go back and overanalyze that moment in an attempt to determine if he really meant that particular sentiment, but I don't, so I won't. Dean fights back sobs of agony through his gag as he manfully struggles once more against the ropes, but it's all for naught. Dean remains firmly strapped to the chair while Gordon carefully picks his way through the debris into the back room, his rifle at the ready. Through the haze, Gordon catches sight of Sam's impossibly large and now-smoking shoe. Not quite willing to believe that bit of evidence just yet, he continues to stalk through the ruins, turning a corner just as...Action Sammy emerges to press the business end of a cocked automatic against the back of Gordon's skull! "Drop the gun," Sam simmers. "Shouldn't take your shoes off around here," Gordon calmly advises. "You might get tetanus." "Put it down now!" Sam growls. Out in the Crack Shack's meticulously appointed parlor, Dean whips his head around at the sound of Sam's voice. Back at the action, Gordon finally complies, carefully placing the rifle on the floor. Gordon then eggs Sam on, taunting the "saint" to shoot a now-unarmed man, and for a moment, we think Sam might just do it, but Gordon eliminates whatever temptations Saint Sammy might have had by suddenly and unexpectedly spinning around to knock the automatic out of Sam's hand before pretty much kicking the ginormotron through a wall. I hate to say this, but Sam su-huuucks at the hand-to-hand. Well, at least until Gordon foolishly overplays his advantage by taunting the now prone and bleeding Sammy. "You're no better than the filthy things you hunt," Gordon asserts, and for some reason, this taunting reinvigorates Sam, who in short order flips Gordon to the floor, and then -- get this -- beats Gordon in the teeth with his cast. Awesome. Once Sam's managed to stun Gordon into some form of submission, he rises to his full height, pointing Gordon's own sniper rifle at the guy's head. And would you believe it? Gordon still will not stop talking already! Fortunately, Sam rams the rifle's butt against Gordon's head a couple of times, and Gordon finally shuts up. Hooray!
By the way, if you were wondering why Raoul did not insist I note the callback to the bar scene in "Bloodlust" that ended that exchange, it's because Raoul long ago drifted off to sleep in his overstuffed armchair, cuddling his Special Moments With My Special Agent scrapbook, with visions of a faaaaabulous Massachusetts wedding no doubt dancing through his head. Shhhhhhh! He's had a most exhausting night.
Aftermath. Sam staggers into the front room and struggles to free one of his brother's wrists. If by "struggles," of course, one means, "tugs lightly at the prop rope until it quite easily flops bonelessly to the floor." Dean hastily relieves himself of his other bonds and immediately leaps to his feet, dragging Sam up with him and anxiously examining his brother's wounds. "Son of a bitch!" Dean rages after taking in the gouges on Sam's face, and he stomps off in a bow-legged fury towards the back of the shack. "Dean, no," Sam stops him. "I let him live once, I'm not making the same mistake twice," Dean vows. "Trust me," Sam insists, "Gordon's taken care of." Dean squints in confusion, so Sam just sighs, "Come on," and tugs Dean through the Crack Shack's front door.
Our Intrepid Heroes lope tiredly towards the street...until Gordon pops up on the front porch with guns blazing! D'OH! The boys take off and leap behind a convenient mound of dirt across the street. Gordon keeps shooting in their direction until -- wait for it -- two "Lafayette Metro Police Department" prowlers scream up on either side of him to disgorge four cops who immediately scream for Gordon to drop his handguns and get down on the ground, pronto. Before complying, Gordon takes a moment to glare in Sam's general direction. Meanwhile, Sam's practically peeing himself with glee, and Dean -- finally grokking to Sam's master plan -- gets the sort of goofy grin on his face I don't think I've seen since his "Hook Man" horndog glory days. As Our Intrepid Heroes peer through the underbrush, Lafayette's finest poke around Gordon's El Camino and waste no time in finding Gordon's impressive weapons stash. "Anonymous tip," Sam whispers to Dean. "You're a fine, upstanding citizen, Sam," Dean admiringly replies. The boys snicker at each other as the camera jumps back over to the handcuffed Gordon so we can all get one last look at him before The State Of Indiana slings his insane ass into the METAL TEETH CHOMP! for a very, very long time.
Harvelle's. Ellen's on the phone with Dean, and Dean is reading her the riot act regarding Gordon's purported Roadhouse connections. Ellen assures him that if Gordon did receive information on Sam from someone at Harvelle's, that person most certainly was not Ash, Jo, or Ellen herself. "You can say a lot of things about us," Ellen warns him, "but we are not disloyal, and we aren't stupid. We haven't breathed a word of this." Dean won't drop it, however, so Ellen's forced to remind him that the Roadhouse is full of other hunters, at least twelve of whom she could name right now who could have figured out the details of The Not-So-Great Mommy Immolation Of 1983 on their own. On the other end of the line, Dean works his mouth around as if to counter this with yet another accusation, but he ultimately remains silent. "I am sorry about what happened, Dean," Ellen finishes, "but I can't control these people, or what they choose to believe." I should note I'm taking Ellen at her word, here, but I do think she has more than a little misplaced faith in Ash. We'll see what happens.
Metallicar. Sam, miraculously healed of all his wounds, attempts once more to reach Ava, but ends up leaving her yet another message when the call falls into voice mail. Our Dear Boys natter about Gordon's prospects in prison for a bit before Dean shoots an affectionate side-eye at Sam and playfully warns, "Dude, you ever take off like that again..." "...you'll kill me?" Sam just as playfully finishes for him. "So not funny," Dean grumps. "So, where to , then?" Sam wonders, changing the subject because the script says he must, because the script says we need to stop everything fun to listen to an endless dialogue about Capital-D Destiny with fewer than three minutes left to go in the episode. It's making me wish Raoul were awake to scream for more gore. "Snurf? Gore?" Ooops! Go back to sleep! No gore! Well, not yet anyway.
So, where were we? Oh, yeah. Dean replies, "One word: Amsterdam," because Dean's still on his whole "screw the job, let's have some fun" kick from the end of the last episode, though I must admit it's not nearly as fraught with The Angst this time around. Long story short, Sam ends up insisting, "You can't run from this, and you can't protect me." At this last, Dean shoots Sam A Look. "I can try." Fangirls by the thousands spontaneously combust. "Thanks for that," Sam offers softly with his trademark sincerity. And the fangirls that didn't blow up at Dean's line just blew up at Sam's. "Look, Dean, I'm gonna keep hunting," Sam states. "Whatever's coming, I'm taking it head-on, so if you really want to watch my back, I guess you're gonna have to stick around." Dean shakes his head, knowing he was going to stick around anyway, and snorts, "Bitch." "Jyeeeerk!" Sam replies, completing the familiar call-and-response refrain. They enjoy an easy-going silence for a moment until Sam redials Ava's number. It hits her voice mail again, which -- because the script says it must -- activates Sam's Spidey-sense this time around. Sam quickly convinces Dean to make a side trip to Peoria. DUN!
House Of Ava, later that night. Our Intrepid Heroes, pulling a little bit of flashlight-fu, barge into the place like they own it and start bellowing for its occupants. They both shut up quickly enough, though, when they round a corner into the bedroom to find Ava's fiancé swimming in a pool of his own blood beneath the duvet. "...gooooooooooooooore!..." Raoul croons in his sleep, his nostrils flaring to emit a tiny puff of smoke as he unconsciously tightens his grip on the Special Moments With My Special Agent scrapbook. Awww. Precious. Dean runs his flashlight's beam up the guy's blood-spattered leg and across his crimson torso before landing it squarely on the near-decapitating gash torn through his throat. Dean then shifts his attention to the windowsill, which he finds sprinkled with sulphur. "Demon's been here," Dean needlessly elaborates. Sam looks deeply pained -- a pain that instantly deepens into Action Sammy's Super-Emo Wincing Mien Of Agony when he quite literally stumbles across Ava's antique engagement ring in the middle of a rapidly drying bloodstain on the carpet. "Ava!" Sam whispers bonelessly as The Plaintive Piano Of Oh, Jesus, Here We Go Again With The Goddamned Angst escorts us into the final blackout.
week, Our Intrepid Heroes happen upon an ornate Victorian mansion secretly -- and evilly! -- controlled by some crone locked away in the attic. I think. The promo was pretty vague, but it looked like something executive producer Robert Singer did back in the '70s with Bette Davis and Karen Black, so I'm going with that until shown otherwise. See you then!