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Molly McNamara and her toothy husband David (surely as much of a bastard as all others of that name) motor through the night along a deserted back-country highway on the occasion of their fifth wedding anniversary, until a mangy-looking redneck unexpectedly appears in their car's headlights. At the wheel, Molly panics and manages to total their sedan against a tree, and when she awakens from her temporary daze to find her toothy bastard of a husband missing and the mangy-looking redneck lurking about menacingly in the snowy woods with half of his intestines spilling from his stomach, she screams her way out of the car, back up to the highway, and straight into the waiting arms of Our Intrepid Heroes. They just happened to be passing through, you see, in search of the unquiet spirit of a certain mangy-looking and disemboweled redneck named Jonah Greeley who, since his untimely and splattery demise on that very road fifteen years ago, has made a habit of reappearing each year on the anniversary of his death to torture a hapless passerby. And apparently, this year's designated hapless passerby is Molly McNamara.
The twist? Every year's hapless passerby is Molly McNamara, for Molly's actually dead as well, and caught in an endless ghastly loop of terror and torture with Jonah because it was she who splattered him all over that road fifteen years ago right before she splattered herself all over her sedan's windshield. The toothy bastard? Absolutely fine, and living with his new wife in the same town. Sam and Dean withhold this information from Molly (and the audience), of course, until after they've enlisted her aid in successfully unearthing and immolating Jonah's remains, partly because they are LYING LIARS WHO LIE, but mainly because -- as Captain Empathy puts it -- they need to ease the poor woman into the realization that she's been a corpse for the last decade and a half. In the end, Molly accepts her fate, of course, and vanishes into the sunrise, leaving Our Dear Boys to muse about the nature of hope, or something like that. It is, at its heart, a nice little ghost story, indeed, and the role of Molly was beautifully acted by Tricia Helfer of Galactica fame, but seriously. Yaaaaaawn. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Crackle, Crackle THEN! Did you know a storm's coming, and that Sam and Dean are right in the middle of it? Not that that matters much to Our Intrepid Heroes, who have soldiered on nevertheless, picking up where their father left off saving people and hunting things. You know, the family business. They've seen things most other people couldn't dream about, and if those things are supernatural, they kill them, end of story, for that is their job. Well, except when their job is hunting evil, apparently, and as not every supernatural entity counts as evil, sometimes they must leave the thing alone. I think. The point is, Our Dear Boys do their best to be as morally complex as the gang over on Battlestar Galactica, and while they rarely succeed, what I guess you really should know is this: Their lives are weird, man. Got all that? Good.
Crackle, Crackle NOW! A battered and filthy steep-curve warning sign emerges from the blackness for a moment in the headlights of an approaching car before it slips back into the darkness as the car passes by into the night. Those headlights then cover a length of rural blacktop before the camera hops inside the car itself, where the digital radio's tuned to 1250 on the AM dial just in time for the opening guitar lines of The Animals' cover of "The House Of The Rising Sun," and oh, gross. I just now got the song title's connection to the end of the episode. "Eeeeeeek!" shrieks Raoul The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon, clapping a paw against his forehead at his own stupidity regarding the matter. "I feel like such a silly!" Indeed. Now, where was I? Oh, yes: The camera slides past the radio to a roadmap in a gentleman's lap right before the shot flips around to reveal that gentleman to be Dan Gauthier, best known to me as a tawdry knockoff of Tom Cruise, but far better known to soap opera fans, apparently." "It's Kevin Buchanan!" shrieks Raoul, giddy with delight and positively dreamy-eyed. I should have guessed you'd have known that, my scaly friend. "And how could you not?!" Raoul shrieks again, appalled. "On One Life To Live! Where he and his third wife had a screaming argument with each other in the depths of St. Jude's rectory the very day Michael and Marcie were to be wed, and that led to his third wife having sex with his son right there in the rectory right after Kevin stormed out but just before an unexpected tornado ripped through Llanview to bury the two vile fornicators in piles of debris from which they were presently extracted suffering from life-threatening injuries, and when they were wheeled into the emergency room at the same time, poor Kevin had to make a Sophie's Choice over which one would hit surgery first, and he picked his trampy wife over his vicious homewrecking slut of a son, and so of course his wife lived even though they were about to get a divorce, and his vicious homewrecking slut of a son died, and poor Kevin was very sad, indeed, until he found out that his trampy wife was actually now pregnant with his vicious homewrecking slut of a son's child, so he reconciled with her for some asinine reason, and they all moved to London so he could raise his grandchild in a place that rarely, if ever, gets tornadoes!" "It was fabulous!" Raoul pantingly concludes, breathless from the exertion. I am so glad I don't watch soap operas.
ANY-way, sitting to him in the driver's seat is Tricia Helfer from the aforementioned Battlestar Galactica, who rolls her eyes and groans, "We're lost." "This is a shortcut," Kevin Buchanan From One Live To Live insists. "Babe," Tricia Helfer From Battlestar Galactica wearily condescends, "we've been on this road over an hour, and we haven't seen a single car." "Molly," Kevin Buchanan From One Live To Live testily begins, thereby gifting Tricia Helfer From Battlestar Galactica with a proper name for this evening's festivities before continuing, "I know how to read a frigging map, okay?" Molly sighs and suggests they turn around to head back to the gas station they passed forty miles ago to ask for directions, and the conversation devolves into one of those "men never ask for directions" things when Kevin Buchanan From One Live To Live refuses, insisting that they're on "Highway 99." Molly quickly proves him wrong as she angles the car past a marker for Route 41. Ooops. "Highway 99, huh?" she sighs. "So we're taking the scenic route," Kevin Buchanan From One Live To Live attempts to joke with a bit of an embarrassed chuckle. "David," Molly groans, thereby gifting Kevin Buchanan From One Live To Live with his proper name for this evening's festivities before continuing to exposit, "it's our anniversary, and we're spending it stuck in the car." Well, that's what you get for marrying a bastard named Dave, doll: A lifetime of annoyance and regret. "Perhaps not that long, Demian, darling!" Raoul titters. Shhhhh! Spoiler! "Hee! Ooops!"
In any event, Dave smears on the charm by way of apology, and he and Molly quickly get all giggly and schmoopy as she continues to maneuver the car along this treacherous and slick stretch of rural highway, and soon enough, what you've been expecting to happen actually does. The instant Molly takes her eyes off the road to playfully bat her husband back over to his side of the front seat, David catches sight of the trucker-capped redneck who's suddenly appeared in the car's headlights, and he shouts out a frantic warning. Molly screams and yanks the wheel to the left while slamming onto the brakes, but it's all for naught as the now-locked tires skid straight across the icy asphalt to send the car hurtling over the embankment at the side of the road. The car plows down a hillside, rapidly picking up speed until its front end crashes into a tree. We get a brief glimpse from behind of Molly and David flying forward into the windshield before a cacophony of splintering glass and crumpling metal smacks us into a blackout.
After a long silence, an owl hoots as the camera fades up on a slowly spinning overhead shot of the ruined car far below. The camera pans down through the pine branches for a moment before cutting to the spiderwebbed windshield, through which we presently focus in on Molly, slumped against the steering wheel. With steam hissing from her car's blasted radiator, Molly eventually opens her eyes and grunts, pushing herself away from the dash while calling out her husband's name. She swipes at a bit of blood trickling from the right corner of her mouth before discovering the passenger-side door wide open, with her husband nowhere to be found. Molly, wincing in pain, struggles to emerge from the wreck while continuing to call out for her vanished husband. She gets no answer. Starting to panic, she bellows his name, and the sound echoes a bit through the woods as she staggers off down a path.
Moments later, she spots a decrepit, tumbledown hunting cabin deep in the woods, and as the soundtrack's suddenly assaulted by The Plinking Mandolin Strings Of Supernaturally Spawned Destruction And Doom at this point, I'm guessing this is not a very good thing. Thunder rumbles ominously overhead as Molly picks her way through the underbrush to the cabin's front door. After banging a couple of times against the wood and calling out, "Is anybody here?" Molly finally twists at the knob to find the door unlocked, and she eases herself across the threshold to discover a blood-spattered work table along with a vast array of knives arrayed on the walls inside. DUN! As the menacing mandolin gives way to a little flourish of surprise on the piano, a trucker-capped redneck unexpectedly appears in the dim candlelight in a far corner of the room. "It's you!" Molly realizes instantly, correctly identifying him as the old coot from the highway, despite the fact that his back is to her at this moment. "You're okay?" she stammers before apologizing, "I'm so sorry -- I didn't see you there!" She's been approaching him slowly from behind, and the camera now pans across one of his blurry arms in the foreground of the shot to focus in on his filthy right hand, which happens at this moment to be holding half of his stickily squishy intestines inside a gaping and bloody hole that's been ripped straight across his midsection. "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" shrieks Raoul, waving his claws around in the air with unrepentant glee. "Are you hurt?" Molly continues, oblivious both to the fiendish redneck's rather audibly oozing insides and to Raoul's howls of delight at same. The fiendish redneck slowly spins around to grant Molly a devilish smirk with an almost Satanic glint in his eyes before his face morphs into that of a rapidly decaying corpse. Molly's eyes snap wide with horror and fear as they dart from the bitterly black blood pouring from the fiendish redneck's corpsemouth down to the gaping hole in the man's belly, and the METAL TEETH CHOMP! lunges in to gobble up her immediate scream of abject terror almost as soon as its flown from her mouth.
RAAAWWWR! "Eeeeeeeeeeeee! You know, I just never get tired of that! You could put that in front of me on an endless loop for days and days and days, and I'd still keep shrieking every single time I saw it!" This does not surprise me as much as you might think it should, Raoul.
Molly plunges headlong through the woods, racing away from the grizzled and grisly old coot in the hunting cabin, and manages to reach the rural highway just as a couple of familiar-looking headlights appear in the distance. She charges out in front of the approaching car, waving her arms around in the air while frantically pleading for the car's occupants to stop. El Deano stomps on the brakes with a startled and pissed, "Holy [shit]!" and the Impala skids across the road's rain-slicked surface for a bit before squealing to a halt with its front bumper mere inches from Molly's legs. Molly hitches her breath a couple of times as her eyes almost glaze over in a stunned stupor before she finds her voice again and pleads directly into the camera, "You've got to help me!" The shot cuts away from her face to rear up behind the Impala as she skitters around to the passenger's side door to bat her hands against the window. Riding shotgun, of course, a gape-mouthed Sam repeats, "All right!" a couple of times as he shakily rolls the window down. "Calm down!" he instructs before asking Molly to tell them what happened.
Mere moments later, it's begun to rain again as the boys plus Molly stand around the now-silent Impala so Molly might fill them in on recent events. Molly's about to describe her grisly coot of a pursuer when Dean interrupts her narrative to ask, "Did he look like he lost a fight with a lawnmower?" Sam, who'd been offering the still-panicky and somewhat grief-stricken Molly the full Super-Special Puppy-Dog Eyes treatment, drops that schtick immediately at this to glare at his insensitive jackass of a brother. Hee. That never gets old. In any event, Molly responds by murmuring, "How did you know that?" Dean noticeably blanks at this and flounders around for an appropriate response before flashing his blinding smile and shrugging, "Lucky guess." Sam glares at Dean once more before he slips easily into that Captain Empathy attire of his to offer "Molly McNamara" a ride back into town to sort everything out. "I can't," Molly protests, "I have to find David -- he might have gone back to the car!" "We should get you somewhere safe first," Sam gently suggests, "and then Dean and I'll come back here, we'll look for your husband..." "No!" Molly insists. "I'm not leaving here without him!" Sam and Dean shoot each other alternately befuddled and exasperated looks as Molly whimpers, "Would you just take me back to my car, please?" A moment passes before Sam chooses to sigh, "Of course," and as Dean crawls in behind the wheel, Darling Sammy rather gallantly opens the back door for their unexpected guest.
A few hundred yards down the road, Dean pulls over onto the snowy shoulder, and Molly wastes not an instant hopping out of the back seat to rush over to the scene of her accident. Sam and Dean pull a little flashlight-fu as they trail along after her, but there's one big problem: No sedan smashed up against a tree at the bottom of the hill. "This doesn't make any sense!" Molly waveringly announces, sobs of frustration threatening to choke up in her throat as she makes her way down the hill towards the killer tree. "Ooops! Wasn't that a spoiler?!" Hell if I care. This episode's starting to drag. In any event, while Molly's thus otherwise occupied, Sam urgently whispers up at the side of the road, "Dean, we gotta get out of here -- Greeley could show up at any second!" "What're ya gonna tell her?" Dean shoots back. "The truth!" Saint Sammy Of The Grievously Afflicted claims. Dean hisses back that should they do that, Molly'll "take off running in the other direction." Molly herself interrupts them at this point from the bottom of the hill to insist she rammed her car into that particular killer tree, and pleads with them to believe her. Our Intrepid Heroes humor her with a little more officious flashlight-fu before Dean finally manages to convince Molly of the need to report the entire incident to the police, pronto. "It's the best way we can help you and your husband," he argues. Molly, lost, glances around the bare earth at her feet once more before biting her lower lip and nodding, "Okay."
Metallicar grumbles down the road while inside, Molly forlornly notes she and her husband were supposed to be in Lake Tahoe by now, and she ruefully admits they were having "the dumbest fight" in the moments before the accident. "It's the only time we ever really argue," she confides, "when we're stuck in the car." "I know how that goes," Sam grins commiseratively. Dean, being quite nonverbal about the whole thing, hoists his eyebrows into the air all, "Only in the car?" and shoots his massive and massively aggravating younger brother A Look. Hee. Molly then bemoans the fact that the last thing David heard from her mouth was that he's a jerk. "Oh, Molly," Raoul hastens to assure her. "That's not the last thing he heard from you at all. As a matter of fact, I'm quite certain the last thing he heard from you was, 'OHMYGAAAAIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!' [Thunk.]" Such a comfort you are, Raoul. Captain Empathy, deploying a far more traditional method of consolation than Our Scaly Friend, here, pivots around to unleash The Super-Special Puppy-Dog Eyes upon the brothers' unexpected guest and vow, "We're gonna figure out what happened to your husband, I promise!"
Unfortunately for everyone involved, the radio chooses to respond to this by squealing on of its own accord and tuning itself to a station that just happens to be playing "The House Of The Rising Sun." Our Intrepid Heroes shoot Looks Fraught With Significance at each other before Dean demands, "Did you...?" "No," Sam curtly replies, warily eyeing the radio like it's about to leap out of its jury-rigged mounting and tear chunks out of their throats. "That would be delightful!" shrieks Raoul. Keep dreaming, my friend. For her part, Molly leans forward into the front seat with a stricken expression on her face. "This song," she breathes disbelievingly. "It was playing when we crashed." Dean hilariously rolls his eyes around, all, "Oh, fucking hell! while Sam just goggles. Heh. Just then, the radio decides to retune itself far up the dial, and when it settles somewhere around 106.66 KISS-FM -- because you know all of the radio stations in Hell are owned by Clear Channel -- the signal descends into a haze of EVP before a man's voice breaks through it all to claim, "She's mine, she's mine, she's MINE!" "What is that?" Molly mewls, practically vomiting with fear. Before either of the boys can answer, however, the grisly old coot snaps into view on the roadway ahead. Dean, his eyes widening a bit, makes a split-second decision and orders the others to hold on as he flattens the Impala's gas pedal against the floorboard. "What are you doing?" Molly howls as Sam braces himself for impact and the Impala leaps forward with ever-increasing amounts of speed. Dean plows Metallicar's front end through the fiendish redneck, and in a pretty nice effect, the old coot's form instantly dissolves into a black cloud that swirls around in the roiling air currents left in the Impala's wake for a moment before it dissipates and disappears completely. "What the hell just happened?" Molly gasps, whipping her head around to confirm that the grisly old coot did indeed vanish into thin air behind them. "Everything's going to be all right," Sam hastens to assure her. Alas, Metallicar decides now's the perfect opportunity to expose Sam as the LYING LIAR WHO LIES that he truly is, and it allows its engine to knock around for a little bit before finally letting it die. Dean wheels the Impala over onto yet another snowy shoulder of the road, and tries and fails to turn the engine over. After a bit of this, he accepts defeat and slumps back in his seat. Looking a little panicked himself, he turns to face Sam and blurt, "I don't think he's gonna let her leave." Sam gapes in dismay while Molly slowly edges back away from the two freaks in the front seat, rather inadvertently allowing the METAL TEETH CHOMP! to tear off a piece of her ass.
Aftermath. The three disembark from the Impala, with Molly making some more wrecked and wasted noises of disbelief until El Deano purposefully strides around to the trunk and starts pawing through Metallicar's bottomless cache of implements of mass destruction. As Dean expertly loads a sawed-off shotgun, Molly makes to flee, all, "Um, thanks for the offers of help, you fucking serial-killing whackjobs, but I think I've got it covered from here on out." Sam hastens to explain the situation, but because he's trying to ease her into the whole ghost-hunting thing when she's all of two seconds away from screaming off into the night, Dean decides to cut through the crap and level with her. It's a long story that we already know, what with the pretty boys gallivanting about the countryside in their boss car to shoot monsters in the face with rock salt and all that, but at least all you Galactica fans tuning in for the first time now know what's going on. "Not that it's terribly difficult to understand!" Raoul snorts. Raoul! Be polite. We want them to hang around, don't we? "..." Don't we? "Fine! What I meant to say is that Galactica fans, intelligent folk they must be in order to make any sense whatsoever of that impenetrably dense space opera masquerading as entertainment that they're apparently so fond of, wouldn't need our show's premise spelled out for them in so elementary a manner as this! Happy?!" Um. Yes? "Good!" My Lord, but Raoul turns into a big old crankypants when he's denied his gore, doesn't he?
In any event, while Dean turns his back on Molly to continue rattling around Metallicar's bottomless trunk, Sam eases up to her to offer the necessary exposition. "We think his name is Jonah Greeley," he explains, referring to the particular ghost they're hunting this evening. "He was a local farmer that died fifteen years ago on this highway." "Jus-s-st stop!" Molly stammers, shaking her head, still refusing to believe a word of this. "One night a year, on the anniversary of his death," Sam continues over her protests, "he haunts this road. That's why we're here, Molly -- to try to stop him." "And I suppose this...ghost made my car disappear, too?" Molly challenges, barely able to spit out the appropriate words, so ludicrous to her are they. "Crazier things have happened," Dean affably shrugs as he hustles on over to biff Sam in the latter's remarkably broad chest before Captain Empathy might reveal something both of them might later wish he wouldn't. "You know what?" Molly shudders, backing away from them. "I'm all filled up on crazy. I'm gonna get the cops myself." With that, she turns to head off down the road, abruptly halting when Dean's voice calls out behind her, "I don't mean to be harsh, but I don't think you're gonna get too far." "Plan A was trying to get you out of here," Dean explains. "Obviously, that didn't go over too well with Farmer Roadkill." Molly turns slowly to face them again, blinking bleakly, and I have to admit, Tricia Helfer has that bleak blinking thing down. "Molly, we're telling the truth," Sam insists, begging her to believe them. "Greeley's not gonna let you leave this highway." "You're serious, aren't you?" she shudders. Sam hesitates, wondering if he should admit to anything more just yet, then decides she's ready to handle it and reveals, "Every year, Greeley finds someone to punish for what happened to him. Tonight, that person is you." "Why me?" she moans, beginning to cry. "I didn't do anything!" Sam takes this in, and with a gentle sort of smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth, he replies, "Doesn't matter. Some spirits only see what they want." Molly suddenly understands that if all this is true, then Grisly Greeley must be holding her dear husband captive somewhere. Neither of Our Dear Boys addresses that issue, with Dean choosing to remain silent while Sam promises, "We're going to help, all right? But first you gotta help us." Molly's all, "Let's get to it, then."
thing we know, Molly's led them back to the hunting cabin. The boys flashlight-fu their respective ways past the bloodied work tables and the thousands of knives lining the walls and the various meat hooks dangling from the ceiling as Sam admits he was unable to find any grave markers outdoors. At Molly's prompting, the boys introduce her to the entire concept of disinterring fifteen-year-old corpses for the sole purpose of salting and burning the bones. "Naturally," Molly responds as well she should, for we all know salting and burning fifteen-year-old corpses is one of the most natural things in the world. She might have been a tiny bit sarcastic in her delivery of the line, however. Dean is then rather rude and abrupt towards the poor woman who just lost her husband after a terrifyingly violent car accident on the evening of her fifth wedding anniversary, but we'll be skipping right past his egregiously obnoxious behavior in favor of following the three of them back out into the woods where, as Sam explains, they must now locate Greeley's actual house on the off-chance his widow buried him there before she vanished from the face of the planet way back in 1992.
Dean heads off in one direction while Sam and Molly trudge through the underbrush in the other, and despite Sam's warning that Molly remain close to him, the idiot woman immediately breaks away to wander through the trees on her own when she hears some unknown man's voice whisper, "Help me!" Believing it to be her bastard of a husband, she begins calling out his name while frantically whipping her head this way and that in an attempt to peer through the gloom that surrounds her. As one would expect, Grisly Greeley pops out from behind a tree after a bit of this to wrestle her into the bushes. Molly's near ultrasonic with the screams and such, but she's entirely ineffectual with the struggling to get away, and Grisly Greeley would abscond with her were it not for the sudden appearance of El Deano, who levels his sawed-off shotgun at Greeley's head. "Whoops!" Dean deadpans, right before blasting a round of rock salt straight into the spook's face. Kickass. Grisly Greeley instantly dissolves into a cloud of black ghost bits, leaving Molly alone to tumble into the dirt, where she gasps and pants for a bit, near paralytic with fear until she finally manages to pull herself to her feet. "You all right?" Action Sammy bellows, barreling over to her side as Dean immediately sets to training his flashlight on something further back in the trees. "What has that son of a bitch done with my husband?" Molly yowls, enraged. Sam tries to calm her down a bit as Dean barks, "Hey!" He directs Sam's attention towards a path through the woods and snarks, "Follow the creepy brick road." Dean starts down the paved sylvan thoroughfare in question, with Molly and Sam banging along after him in that order.
"You know," Dean opines once they've reached their expected destination, "just once I'd like to round a corner and see a nice house." For yes, gentle reader, Greeley Manse is yet another tumbledown, decrepit mess. After Dean confirms the absence of headstones in the front yard, the boys plus Molly and copious amounts of flashlight-fu make their way indoors to poke around the still-furnished yet ruined first floor. They quickly agree to split up, with Sam and Molly taking the second floor while Dean remains below to check out the downstairs. Sam and Molly soon enough stumble into the master bedroom, where Sam finds the floor littered with deeds and financial statements and newspaper clippings while Molly drifts over to the desk by the window to discover an old photo album among the dust-encrusted tchotchkes. She hoists it up into the air and hauls it over to the bed where, once both she and Sam have perched themselves upon what must be the vermin-infested mattress, she passes the thing over to him for a look. A quick glance through the pages reveals them to be filled with photos of Jonah and his wife, Marion, in happier times, along with dozens of love letters they penned each other over the years. Molly skims through one of them and breathes, "My God, it's beautiful!" After a moment, she confesses, "I don't understand how a guy like this could turn into that monster," so Sam -- in a Captain Empathy mode so extreme it comes close to the sort of self-parody we were subjected to in "Tall Tales" -- very quietly and very carefully and very deliberately explains The Trouble With Spirits, noting "they're like wounded animals -- lost, and in so much pain that they lash out." When Molly questions the purpose for their existence in the first place, Sam takes a second to consider his words, and eventually replies, "There's some part of them that's keeping them here, like their remains? Or, um, unfinished business -- could be revenge, could be love, or hate -- whatever it is, they just hold on too tight." "Can't let go," he continues, gently eyeing her, "so they're trapped, caught in the same loops, replaying the same tragedies over and over." "GEE I WONDER WHO HE COULD BE TALKING ABOUT!?!" Raoul! Again with the volume! Knock it off! "Well, I'm sorry, but could it be any more obvious?! JUST BECAUSE I'M A REPTILE DOESN'T MEAN MY BRAIN IS THE SIZE OF A WALNUT YOU KNOW!" Oi! Quiet so I can get through this scene, please! "Oh, fine! Be that way! Hmmph!" ANY-way, Molly gazes at the expression on Sam's face as he says all of this and offers, "You sound almost sorry for them." "Well, they weren't evil people," Sam hastens to explain. "A lot of them were good -- it's just, something happened to them, something they couldn't control." Dean barges in on the quiet moment at this point to smirk, "Sammy's always getting a little J. Love Hewitt when it comes to things like this." "Me?" he continues, despite the fact that no one present asked him to elaborate at all. "I don't like 'em, and I sure as hell ain't making apologies for them." Captain Empathy gifts his obnoxious older brother with yet another tremendous bitchface. Hee.
Dean drops the issue to focus on a suspiciously placed piece of furniture, and he shoves aside the awkwardly angled bookshelf to discover a small door that would allow them into what they presume is a bit of attic storage space, were the small door not locked from the inside. Dean boots the wood with his heel a couple of times, however, and the lock quickly gives way. He stoops down to crawl through both the doorway and a massive tangle of cobwebs on the other side before rising to his feet and announcing, "It smells like old lady in here." Once he's joined by his brother and their unexpected guest, the three bumble across the source of the smell: The desiccated corpse of an actual old lady who hanged herself from one of the roof's beams many, many years ago. "You'll never believe me when I tell you this," Raoul confides, "but for my fifth birthday party, my mother got me a piñata shaped just like that!" Oh, I can believe that. What I can't believe is that you can remember back that far. "You bitch!" In any event, and long story short, they quickly realize the dangling corpse is actually what's left of Marion Greeley, who quite evidently killed herself after the untimely demise of her beloved husband, and after a bit of initial reluctance on Dean's part, the boys cut the corpse down and set to burying it out in the front yard. This despite Dean's earlier insistence that they have only until dawn to deal with the woman's Grisly life partner, but whatever, because the tedium of this episode is now threatening to eviscerate what's left of my sanity, and I can't deal with crap like that at this point.
Outdoors, as Dean and Sam start shoveling dirt into Marion Greeley's impromptu grave, Molly again peppers them with questions for which long-time viewers have already received the answers. Sort of. Well, okay, long-time viewers don't have answers for these questions, because they're all about where the unquiet dead go after the brothers have salted and burned their bones, and this show has wisely chosen never to deal with the afterlife at all, especially in this scene, but again: Whatever. DRAGGING! At some point, Sam posits that because no one truly knows what comes after, an additional motivating factor lashing the unquiet dead to this world of ours is fear of the unknown. This prompts Molly to gaze dejectedly at Marion Greeley's rapidly disappearing corpse and admit, "The only thing I'm scared of is losing [my bastard husband] David -- I have to see him again." Our Intrepid Heroes pause in their shoveling for an awkward moment, so I'm guessing things aren't looking so good for David right about now, but none of that matters because they've chosen to send us all into the commercial break most woefully CHOMP!-less. Worthless sons of bitches.
Grisly Greeley Manse. As Molly wanders through the kitchen examining that old photo album, Sam approaches Dean out in what remains of the living room for a hushed and urgent tête-à -tête regarding what Molly should and shouldn't know about her beloved bastard of a husband. Sam's advocating full disclosure, here, but Dean insists Molly remain in the dark until this long night is over. "I know you feel guilty, all right?" Dean hisses. "But let's just stick to the plan -- let's get her out of here, and then we'll tell her." "Tell me what?" the suddenly appearing Molly demands, having overheard this last bit as she unexpectedly exited the kitchen to join them. "What aren't you telling me?"
The conversation quickly descends into a screaming bitchfest regarding the current whereabouts of Bastard Dave that would have gotten very loud, indeed, had the Manse radio not chosen this juncture at which to sputter to life, squealing up and down the dial until it lands on a station that just happens to be playing "The House Of The Rising Sun." "He's coming!" Molly immediately frets. "Good God, I hope so, you silly woman!" Raoul interjects. "If something of interest doesn't happen soon, I might just have to get violent myself!" Not in my living room, missy. In any event, Dean orders Sam to remain with their unexpected guest while he himself bow-leggedly clomps off to investigate. In a corner of the kitchen, Dean lifts a cobwebby dropcloth off one of those ancient radio consoles that feature AM, FM, and various shortwave tuning capabilities. As the song continues tweedling eerily in the background, Dean crouches to the floor to find the console's frayed and useless power cord abandoned on the dusty kitchen tiles. DUN! The wind outside suddenly kicks up, and Dean warily approaches the kitchen door, where an unearthly frost races across the still-intact glass to reveal the finger-drawn words, "SHE'S MINE." Dean tenses his jaw and darts his eyes around, while out in the living room Sam mimics those actions as Molly stands very still by the window, her apparent calm betrayed both by the expression of utter dread on her face and by her fingers nervously twisting themselves into knots. Sam edges towards the kitchen himself, and that's a very bad move, indeed, for it's at that moment Grisly Greeley chooses to strike, smashing through the remaining panes of glass in the window behind Molly to wrap his arms around her waist from behind and haul her out through the now-shattered windowframe into the dark woods beyond. Our Intrepid Heroes give chase and give chase and give chase and give chase and give chase and give chase and give chase and give chase and give chase some more, but Grisly Greeley and his fetching victim are nowhere to be found. We do, however, get a lovely shot of the boys standing side-by-side in the misty woods, an expression of unalloyed panic on each of their faces, and The Ginormotron is positively towering above Li'l Stumpy in the shot. Hee.
Back at the Manse, the boys barge into the kitchen from outdoors to babble at each other about their current predicament until Sam quite fortuitously stumbles across a relevant clue in that photo album from earlier, and oh, gross. Right beneath the pertinent snapshot of Jonah and the missus posing outside his hunting cabin (which was apparently as decrepit when he was alive as it is now, fifteen years after his death), we can see a yellow Post-It upon which Jonah had penned, "Marion I love you XXX OOO more as I write this than i did last night when we spoke with Deep and tender love." That's the sort of crap that made Molly all misty-eyed and verklempt? Maybe she deserves to die. "No question about it!" Raoul shrieks in agreement. "I am sickened and repulsed! That is absolutely the most disgusting thing I've ever seen on this show!" I'm inclined to agree with you, my scaly friend. In any event, Sam notes while the date of the photograph in question was two weeks before Jonah got his redneck self splattered all over the highway, he "could swear there's a tree there" now, "right where they're standing." Dean does not immediately go, "Um, duuuuuuuuuh, College Boy! It's a fucking forest, for Christ's sake! There are goddamned trees everywhere that weren't around in 1992!" Instead, he allows Sam to ponder this particularly perplexing conundrum for a minute until Sam arrives at the only logical conclusion: "Sure! It's an old country custom, Dean! Planting a tree as a grave marker!" Beat. Dean: "You're like a walking encyclopedia of weirdness." Hee. Dean bow-leggedly stompy-clomps on out of there, leaving Sam to bumble about for a bit before following.
Over in the hunting cabin, Grisly Greeley's already roped Molly's hands together and lashed them above her head to one of the meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. She's barely able to touch the floor with the tips of her toes, here, which is far more disturbing an image than you might imagine it would be. In any event, Molly immediately demands to see her husband. Grisly Greeley, in low, gravelly tones, coolly replies, "You shouldn't be worried about him anymore." "Oh, my God," Molly breathes, quickly losing it as the camera leaps in on her anguished and terrified face. "You should," Grisly Greeley continues as the shot cuts over to him, "worry about yourself." Greeley's played by an apparently well-known character actor in Canada named Winston Rekert, and I have to say, the guy's got a pair of uncommonly kind eyes he's putting to uncommonly incongruous use in this scene, to most awesome and creepy effect. Forget the Manson Lamps -- it's always so much worse when a guy whose facial expression codes "cuddly grandpa" goes berserker on some bit of Monster Chow's ass. Anyway, Molly protests that she's done nothing to deserve Grisly Greeley's wrath. Grisly Greeley responds to this assertion by raising a luridly bloodstained finger into the air and tut-tutting her as if she were a particularly bothersome child. "I know about your wife!" Molly pleads desperately as Greeley lightly draws that bloodstained hand down her cheek and across her throat. "Hurting me won't bring her back!" Molly continues. With his fingers tapping on her neck, Greeley intones, "My wife is gone. All I got left's hurtin' you." And with that, he slices one of his filthy fingernails through the skin atop her collarbone, gouging a bloody red trench through her flesh in the process. His eyes crinkle as he then smiles at her, and as she begs to be set free, he ambles around her twisting form before answering her pleas with, "You're not gonna leave. You're never gonna leave." Grisly Greeley gouges another trench through her stomach just as Our Intrepid Heroes finally arrive outside. Sam quickly identifies the memorial tree planted by Greeley's deceased wife and orders Dean inside to snatch Molly away from the fiend while he himself salts and burns Greeley's bones. Dean's all, "Righty-o," and darts inside the cabin to blast another round of rock salt into Greeley's head. Given the fact that Greeley seemed to be standing directly between Molly and Dean when this happens, I have no idea why that round would not then smack Molly square in her face, but again: WHATEVER!
"Oh, thank God," Molly sighs once Greeley's vanished. "Call me Dean," comes the reply, and that's a bad, bad line, my friend, especially given the way you've been so contemptuously treating this woman all evening, so we'll be ignoring it entirely in favor of noting that Grisly Greeley seems to have recovered from that last round of rock salt awfully fast, for he now menaces his way back into the frame behind Dean to toss a little mad slasher mojo directly at Dean's cheek. Um. The one on his face. I mean, I didn't quite word that last sentence properly, so you might think I meant Greeley slashed Dean's...you know what? Let's keep this moving, shall we? "Good idea!" Dean spins around to launch another round of rock salt into Greeley's face, but Greeley quite unexpectedly hurls a bit of telekinetic mojo into Dean's chest, and Dean hurtles backwards through the air to slam into the far wall of the cabin, hard. As he bounces down to the floorboards, he loses his grip on the sawed-off shotgun, which goes skittering away from him, just out of reach.
Meanwhile, Action Sammy's digging up that grave out front like nobody's business. Good thing The Widow Greeley was only able to shovel up about a half-foot's worth of dirt before her strength gave out and she decided that six inches under would be good enough for her beloved, thanks very much. She might as well have just left his decaying ass out in the open.
Back in the cabin, Grisly Greeley telekinetically summons one of his many, many knives into his bloodstained fist and prepares to gut El Deano like a trout.
Sam salts his bones. No, not like that. Ew.
Inside, Grisly Greeley steps forward to perform an entirely unnecessary tracheotomy on El Deano.
Outside, Sam sprinkles gasoline all over his salty bones. No, not like that, either. God, what is wrong with you people? Sam also manages to light a match, and soon his gasoline-sprinkled salty bones are ablaze.
Just in time, too, for Greeley was about to plunge that nasty old knife of his right into Dean's mouth. Though, you know, given the way Dean's always compulsively shoving things into his mouth anyway, he might not have minded. As the flames take hold outside, Greeley first loosens his grip on El Deano's jacket, then releases it entirely as he staggers backwards through the tiny room. Gouts of flame leap up from his feet to consume his entire body, and oh, my GOD, give me a FUCKING break. This is a vanquish, people! This is a vanquish ripped right out of CANCELLED!, for Christ's sake! I might as well continue with "and Grisly Greeley blazes his merry way down to The Waste Land, or wherever the hell it is they're sending demons ever since The Colethazor did away with that stupid Jenny Craig sandworm oh, so many horrendous episodes ago," and left it at that. And sweet Jesus on a stick! They even have the knife fall from his hand at the last minute to embed itself in the floorboards! Should I have been calling that goddamned thing a fucking athame all of this time, too? Huh? HUH? Oh, Supernatural! Why do you have to SUCK like this? And look at that! You made me miss the METAL TEETH CHOMP!, too! I'm really starting to hate this episode. "I've noticed! And I also expect you never to whine about my volume choices again!" Oh, leave me alone, Raoul.
Afterwards, out on the highway, Dean tiredly lopes up to the Impala and pets it, sighing, "Oh, baby, it's been a long night." As he slings his duffel into the back seat, Sam approaches through the steady rain with Molly and once again gallantly opens her door for her. "Let's get you out of here," he offers. Molly, looking rather worse for wear after enduring her encounter with Grisly Greeley, plants herself at the side of the car and insists, "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what happened to my [bastard of a] husband [named Dave]." Sam stammers for a bit, so Molly, with ever increasing anger, accuses, "All this time, I've been looking for him, and you knew that Greeley killed him, didn't you?" Sam hems and haws and examines his shoes and finally drags his eyes up to meet hers to reply, "No, Molly. David's alive." Molly, as one would expect, is overjoyed at the news, and eagerly slides into the back seat of the Impala so the boys might escort her to David's current location. As she laughs a bit with relief and almost starts crying over the good news, Dean flicks his eyes up to the rearview mirror to glance at her reflection apprehensively.
A short time later, Metallicar grumbles up in front of a nondescript suburban ranch home, and Sam explains, "He's in that house, right there." "I don't understand," Molly begins, but Sam just quiets her with, "You will." The three disembark, and Molly races up the walk to the picture window, through which she spots David puttering around in his robe in the early-morning kitchen, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Molly stops dead in her tracks at the sight of him ("Oh, you!" Raoul interjects. "So clever with the puns!"), and whispers, "That's not...that can't be!" Barely have those words left her mouth when a perky little brunette bounces into the kitchen to peck David on the lips. Bastard! Worthless, cheating bastard! I told you it would all end in nothing but heartache and pain and tears, but did you listen to me? No!
Okay, I'll shut up with that now, because that's not what's actually happening here at all. Molly spins back to the boys and ices, "Who is that?" "That's David's wife," Sam sadly explains. Molly glances once more behind her at the scene of domestic bliss, then turns back to Our Intrepid Heroes, befuddled as all hell. "I'm sorry," Sam finally explains. "Fifteen years ago, you and your husband hit Jonah Greeley with your car. David survived." Dean butts in to elaborate that there have actually been two spirits haunting Route 41: Grisly Greeley and Molly herself. "For the past fifteen years," Sam adds, "one night a year you've been appearing on that highway." Molly protests some more, but Sam and Dean rather firmly inform her of the fact that she has not been spending the evening of her fifth wedding anniversary with Our Intrepid Heroes on a hunt for the ghost of Jonah Greeley, because the evening of her fifth wedding anniversary was in 1992. "It's 2007," Dean insists, and FLASHBACK!
We cut all the way back to Sam and Dean hitting Nevada City, California, for the first time and watch as they zip through the initial conversation they always conduct regarding the true nature of this week's dark demonic beastie, and then we follow them into the local library, where they unearth an old newspaper article regarding the initial incident on Route 41 that killed Jonah and Molly. By the way, I should probably note that said article goes to great lengths to assure us that Molly was innocent of any wrongdoing, and it also establishes something of a neat little parallel in that David staggered away from the wreck to stumble across Marion in her Manse on the night of the accident, much as Molly's been staggering away from the wreck to stumble across Jonah in his cabin during every nightmarish anniversary since. In any event, the boys learn from David that Molly had been cremated, and so puzzle over what, exactly, is holding her to that particular place if she no longer has any remains lingering beneath the local cemetery. In an answer that isn't, really, we get a couple of reminders of the crash itself before Sam hops in to repeat his line from earlier this evening about "some spirits only see[ing] what they want," and everything barrels forward from the moment of this night's replay of the crash to the point where Dean slams on the brakes and halts the Impala inches away from Molly's legs. This time around, though, we get to hear their reaction inside the car. "Dean, I don't think she knows she's dead!" Sam gasps. Duh. And finally, after repeating a few key lines about spirits holding on too tightly, or whatever, we at long last arrive back at the present, where Molly realizes that everything they've just told her must be true. She gapes something about Greeley's role in all of this, and Sam's forced to explain that because Molly never allowed herself to "see the truth" about what actually happened, Greeley's undead spirit thus gained an opening through which he was able to chain her to that particular stretch of highway so he might hunt her down and torture her for what she'd done to him. Or something like that. Is this episode over yet? We've got another commercial break first? Crap.
As we fade back up for the denouement, the storm that had been raging the entire evening is now breaking up just in time for the sunrise. And I wish I had the strength to do justice to the following scene for one reason and one reason only: Tricia Helfer acts the hell out of it. Unfortunately, any strength I had has long since been drained away by the deadening pace at which this episode's been running, so long story short, Sam and Dean convince Carol Anne here to go into the light, despite the fact that none of them have any idea might be waiting for her on the other side. Even though she wants so desperately to speak with her husband one last time, Molly eventually agrees and steps forward towards the sunrise. And after, um, saying goodbye to all of her cares and worries, or something, her form bursts open with a white light that envelops her completely before merges with the rays of the rising sun and vanishes. "I guess she wasn't so bad for a ghost," Dean muses after she's gone. "You think she's really going to a better place?" Captain Empathy, looking particularly pained, mutters, "I hope so." "I guess we'll never know," Dean shrugs, "not until we take the plunge ourselves, huh?" "Doesn't really matter, Dean," Sam quietly replies. "Hope's kind of the whole point." Dean and I are thinking the same thing about that, and our thoughts are far from pleasant. Choosing not to vocalize what's leaping around in his head, Dean instead affably thumps Sam on the arm and smirks, "Well, all right, Haley Joel. Let's hit the road." As a light rain patters against the street, Sam and Dean cross back to the Impala, and while an aggravatingly mournful woodwind tootles on the soundtrack, Dean collapses into the driver's seat. His final slam of Metallicar's door takes us to black.
Christ. "I've never been so bored in all of my life!" That's saying something, considering how old... "SILENCE!" Oh, whatever. Can I at least tell them all what to expect week? "Oh, absolutely! It would be terribly rude of you not to!" Good. up: Werewolves, motherfuckers. "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!"