In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
I seriously don't know where to begin with all of the awesomeness, so you'll have to forgive me if I ramble a bit.
The season finale opens about twenty-four hours before Dashing El Deano's time on earth expires, and we find Our Intrepid Heroes plus Bobby flying about in an understandable state of panic due to the rapidly approaching deadline. After Bobby works some fancy mojo to pinpoint Lilith's location in New Harmony, Indiana, several Lilith-related strategies are proposed and discarded before Darling Sammy sneaks off and summons Ruby the Sparkly-Haired Demon on his own. He believes they can off Lilith with Ruby's Knife That Can Kill Anything, you see, and hopes to persuade the sassy demonette to hand it over. Princess Sparkle is having none of that asinine plan, however, because she claims the only way they can defeat Lilith and save Dean's life is if Sam re-accesses his "dormant" abilities from last season to fry the terrifying little bitch. Dean arrives on the scene just as Sam's about to give in to the Dark Side or whatever, and after a supremely satisfying demonette-on-Winchester throwdown, Dean manages both to swipe The Knife and to ensnare Princess Sparkle in a devil's trap, so the boys plus Bobby head off to Indiana to spear themselves a little preadolescent nightmare.
And what, precisely, has that little preadolescent nightmare been up to in Hoosierland? Tormenting a suburban family, Twilight Zone-style, of course, abetted by an entire posse of minions stationed in and around the surrounding houses to stand guard while she indulges herself on a psychotic-demonic vacation. The boys plus Bobby and Princess Sparkle -- who has somehow managed to wriggle free from the trap -- make quick work of the posse, but just as Sam's about to gut the preadolescent nightmare's preadolescent host, Dean realizes Lilith's switched bodies. With time running out in the midst of their frantic search for Lilith's new form, Sam, Dean, and Ruby barricade themselves in a desperate attempt to keep the hellhounds at bay. And then?
Turns out Lilith has evicted Ruby from Princess Sparkle and proceeds to let the hellhounds in so they can actually, honest-to-God rip Dashing El Deano to shreds! I know! It is awesome. Unfortunately for Lilith, her Super-Special Death Ray Hand fails completely when deployed against Apparently Even Super-Specialer Action Sammy, and she flees Princess Sparkle's corpse so Darling Sammy can have himself a good long cry over Dean's. And then?
We dive down into actual, honest-to-God Hell to find Dashing El Deano poked through with meat hooks! AND THEN? Hiatus! God, Kripke sucks. And I totally want to marry him in California. See you in the fall, kids!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Rattle, Rattle THE ROAD SO FAR! Ah, Kansas. The unmistakable opening wails of "Carry On Wayward Son" hit the soundtrack as the Impala grumbles out of the blackness to roar towards the audience, and while I was worried about this song's overuse prior to the finale's airing -- especially after taking into account its disappointing appearance in last season's last episode -- I'm feeling better about it, especially now that I know there most certainly will not be peace for Our Intrepid Heroes when they are done tonight. So, as the song plays beneath -- and if I've got all of this right -- Our Dear And Soon To Be Sucking It Boys burst through a door to find an entire slothful family mummified on their sofa in front of a Dallas rerun before Deadly Action Sammy, as part of this season's most awesome kill, tightens a length of razor wire around Whackjob Gordon's neck until the latter's damn fool vampiric head pops right the hell off of his body. "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" shrieks Raoul The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon, writhing about with delight upon his overstuffed armchair, for he's always happy to witness that excellent scene all over again. "Indeed!" In the far less impressive sequences that follow, Dashing El Deano plunges The Knife That Can Kill Anything (And Actually Does) repeatedly into Demonic Piper's back before both of these strapping young gentlemen blast a few rounds of rock salt into the unfortunate possessed of Monument, Colorado. Darling Sammy ruefully and guiltily sneaks sad little side glances at his doomed yet defiant brother for a bit, and Dean endures an acid flashback that somehow involves both Mama Cass and an incredibly bendy yoga instructor on a picnic blanket before he aerates some vampire's skull with The Fucking Colt That Can Kill Anything Except When It Usually Can't. As the song's opening lyrics give way to the initial instrumental bits, we're reminded of the deal Dean made with the delightful Ona Grauer in last season's finale, and also of Darling Sammy's failed attempt to cancel said deal by shooting Jared Padalecki's adorable fiancée in the face. Demonic Piper resurrects her dead ass to chit-chat about The Wicked Witch Of The West, and Ruby's off-camera sneer introduces everyone to Lilith just as that preadolescent monstrosity's eyes flip a milky, opaque white as she raises one of her creepy preadolescent hands to flood a tiny Colorado precinct house with a horribly brilliant light.
Elsewhere, Posh Bela spends her final minutes on earth blowing snot into a telephone receiver that other people are going to have to use after the hellhounds drag her sorry carcass away -- like, thanks for nothing, BELA -- while also letting Dean know that the abovementioned preadolescent monstrosity holds all contracts brokered by the various sassy Crossroads Demonettes, Dean's included. And as we rise above the noise and confusion, we're also reintroduced to Ruby The Sparkly-Haired Demon, who demonstrates the almighty powers of The Knife That Can Kill Anything by taking out The Seven Deadly Sins right in front of Gaping Action Sammy. She also insists that Darling Sammy's "special, in that ESP-vision kinda way," giving the dear and modest Ginormotron an opportunity to insist his powers vanished around the same time Dean brokered That Deal. We also are treated to a rather vivid example of what hellhounds do best before Dean convinces Princess Sparkle to admit there's no way he can avoid what's coming to him. And after Dean confesses his Hell-related fears to his brother, Sam vows they'll find some way out of That Deal, somehow, right as we're flung into another Montage Of Violence, with Sam breaking and entering, Dean fleeing a roiling and flashing cloud of bitterly black demonic goo, both of them feeding knuckle sandwiches to louche gentlemen I'm certain deserve it, Dean injecting Harmony with something foul, Sam beating that dream-walking douchebag to death with a baseball bat, and Dean blasting away at the spectral form of Freeman Dagget before we all get booted all the way back to the second season's second episode so we might watch as Our Intrepid Heroes weep over the funeral pyre of their worthless bastard of a so-called father just as Kansas tells them not to cry no more. And then? "You're gonna die!" Demon Dean roars, his beetle-black eyes blazing in the dim light afforded by Dream Dean's imagination. "AND THIS IS WHAT YOU'RE GONNA BECOME!" I would offer that a DUN!, I'm sure, were it not time to shut the hell up for the...
...Silence, Silence NOW! Heavy, frantic human panting emerges from the blackness a split instant before the lights rise on a mad, victim's-POV tear through a remote stretch of forest. Several helpful people on the boards (along with their significant others) have reminded me of the fact that this sequence is a rip-off of -- um, "homage to" the first Evil Dead movie, and for their assistance, I am grateful, because my aging brain never would have pulled that bit of pop-culture trivia out of its ass on its own. The camera flips down from the victim's POV to capture the heavily frantic panter's legs, and as we can discern a distinct bow to the limbs in question, we know the victim here is Dean, a guess that's confirmed when the camera eventually rises to take in his frantically panting ducky lips. And because I've been avoiding spoilers like the plague since late last summer, for a very brief moment I thought The Kripkeeper was going to pull a fast one on all of us and slaughter Our Intrepid Hero within the first two minutes of the finale. Then I noticed how bright this entire series of shots is, slapped myself out of it, and realized it's all just a dream sequence. So, Dashing And Doomed El Dreamo pants and heaves and gasps as he runs and runs and leaps over fallen logs and dodges, like, errant ferns, and such until a harsh, lashing snarl erupts in front of him. El Dreamo jerks himself up short -- geddit? -- and gapes at the never-seen hell-sent beastie now coiling itself up on the forest floor in order to pounce, and the shot shifts to Hellhound-Cam for a second so we might get a dog's-eye view of this evening's prey before El Dreamo takes off in the direction he'd come, the hellhounds snapping at his heels until the one with the camera mounted on its forehead hurtles up through the air to flatten El Dreamo across a convenient clearing's dead leaves and dirt, and just as Camera Dog lunges forward to rip an extreme close-up of El Dreamo's nostrils from Our Intrepid Hero's face...
...Dean snaps awake in this week's motel room! Where he'd been reading about hellhounds by candlelight for some ridiculous reason before he nodded off. Oh, sorry! My bad. He apparently retired to some decrepit, barn-like ruin of an outbuilding on Bobby's expansive Dakota estate for this bout of last-minute research, which is why an entire cathedral's worth of candles are blazing around his pretty little photogenic freaked-out face. "Dig up anything good?" Darling Sammy smiles, ambling up from somewhere else. Tired El Deano flips the hellhound book shut and shakes his head. "Well, Bobby has!" Sam brightly reveals. "A way to find Lilith!" "Wow!" Dean allows, just a hint of sarcasm coloring his tone. "With just thirty hours to go!" "Hey, why don't we just make a T-J run, yeah?" The Dean Of Denial hopefully suggests. "Some senoritas?" he prods. "Cervezas?" he adds, overemphasizing his Latin-flavored inflections on the appropriate words. "We could...what's Spanish for 'donkey show'?" In a sign of how dire their situation has become, prissy, pissypantsed Sam does not furrow his mighty brow and purse his sorely celibate lips together in righteously indignant outrage at the very suggestion of such a sordid pursuit, but instead offers his doomed older brother an indulgent and conspiratorial grin before replying, "So, if we do save you...let's never do that." Heh. Dean shrugs it off with an easy enough "Eh," and Sam settles down at Dean's side to promise that, despite their unnerving proximity to Dean's sell-by date, they will figure out a solution to his problem. "Whatever it takes, Dean," Sam vows, "you're not gonna go to Hell -- I'm not gonna let you, I swear. Everything's gonna be okay." Dean wiggles his eyebrows around by way of expressing his thanks for these sentiments and would open his mouth to acknowledge Sam's welcome determination, I'm sure, were Sam's freakish Cro-Magnon skull not so busy transmogrifying itself into that of a hideous ghoul! DUN! Dean ably masks his true reaction to this hideous hallucination, and he mildly nods, "Yeah, okay" right before the...
...RAAAWWWR! lashes out to snatch him into the title card! "Eeeeeeeeeeeee!" shrieks Raoul as per usual before he settles back in his overstuffed armchair to toss me A Look. What gives, my scaly friend? "That...that horrendous abomination is what gives, if you care to ask!" The title card? I thought we already discus... "NO, you SILLY LITTLE MAN, not the TITLE CARD!" Dude, I believe the volume is reaching uncomfortable levels again. "Oh, I do apologize, I'm sure!" Raoul shrieks, though at a far lower decibel level than his sentence. Thanks for taking it down a notch. "Don't mention it!" Now, what were you howling about just now? "You know what I'm howling about! That...that...thing!" I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific than that. "Oh, fine! Make me say it! You don't care about me! You never have! [Wail!]" Raoul, the histrionics aren't getting us... "It's that girl, if you must have me spit it all out like some common...common thing! [Sob!] That LITTLE GIRL!" Oh! You mean Lilith? "[Whimper!]" Well, what am I supposed to do about it? It's not like I can skip over her scenes tonight, or anything. "YES! YES YOU CAN! YOU CAN SKIP OVER EACH AND EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HER AWFUL EVIL AWFUL WICKED AWFUL FOUL AWFUL PERVERSE SCENES THIS EVENING!" But I... "YOU MUST!" Okay, how about I warn you when she's about to appear, and until she's gone you can, like, scamper off to disembowel a cat, or something? "Capital idea...hey! I do not disembowel cats! Honestly! And ruin my manicure?! What sort of déclassé creature do you think I am!?" Never mind. So, it's a deal? "It is!" And I may continue? "You may!" Thanks, friend of friends. "My pleasure, I'm sure!" Oy.
In yet another of the innumerable run-down shacks occupying Bobby's expansive Dakota estate, the lord of the manor himself places an unnecessarily elaborate tripod atop a map on a table and promises Our Intrepid Heroes that, by the time he's done with the ritual he's about to perform, he'll have pinpointed Lilith's current coordinates down to the very street she stands upon. And yes, I called the tripod system here "unnecessarily elaborate" because The Manor Morons achieved the exact same results by deploying nothing more complicated than a tawdry bauble suspended from a string for eight godforsaken years, so don't go thinking you're all so fancy there, Bobby. Especially because The Glamorous Idiots also got the job done sans Latination, which Bobby chants until the tripod's swinging pointer lands on New Harmony, Indiana, which is a most inharmonious place, indeed, if that Wikipedia entry's anything to go by. Oh, show. Oh, clever, clever show. In any event, Darling Sammy's all fired up to hit the road right this very second, but Dean has a number of reservations he'd like to elaborate upon, thank you very much. "First of all," he explains, "we don't even know if Lilith holds my deal -- we're goin' off of Bela's intel? When that bitch breathes, the air comes out crooked!" Not anymore, it doesn't. "Hooray!" "Second," Dean continues, "even if we could get to Lilith, we have no way to gank her, and third, isn't this the same Lilith that wants your giant head on a pike? Should I continue, Sam?" "Ain't you just bringing down the room?" Bobby snorts, for he is witty that way. Dean's all, "Whatever!" to the snorting and Sam's continued objections and whatnot, and insists, "Either we go in smart, or we don't go in at all." So, that means there's no chance of them going in, ever? Sorry! Sorry -- he set me up for that one. In any event, Sam shoots back, "Fine! If that's the case, then I have the answer: A sure-fire way to confirm it's Lilith and a way to get us a bona-fide demon-killing ginsu!" Dean, understanding Sam wishes to summon Ruby The Sparkly-Haired Demon, voices his objections to calling upon "the Miss Universe of lying skanks" for aid -- loudly -- and the entire conversation quickly degenerates into screamy, hair-pulling slapfight until Dean howls, "No! We are not gonna make the same mistakes all over again!" This shuts Sam and Bobby up, mainly because neither of them has the faintest clue what "mistakes" the ranty and doomed little bow-legged midget is yelling about here. "If you guys want to save me," Dean continues after an uncomfortable pause, "find something else." The doomed little bow-legged midget clompy stomps back over to his hellhound-related research, so I guess we're actually in the same decrepit, barn-like ruin of an outbuilding on Bobby's expansive Dakota estate as we were before, but that's not important right now. No, what matters is the fact that Bobby's wasting no time at all shrugging himself back into his trusty down vest. "Where you going'?" Sam asks. "I guess to...find something else!" Bobby flails before exiting the frame. The camera lingers as Darling Sammy determinedly sets his remarkably broad jaw, and at the last moment, it freezes on his steely expression before cross-fading over to...
...yet another of the innumerable run-down shacks occupying Bobby's expansive Dakota estate. I'm pretty sure this time. I mean, Darling Sammy wouldn't be stupid enough to summon Princess Sparkle one room over from his surly and doomed older brother, now would he? "Do you really want an answer for that?!" No, I do not, my faithful lizardly companion. Now, do you mind? "I do not in the least!" Thanks. "Don't mention it!" So, we join Sam as he squeakily chalks the last bit of a summoning sigil onto a stretch of basement concrete somewhere, and in a sequence of shots I believe parallels his own worthless bastard of a so-called father doing the same at the beginning of the second season, Darling Sammy and his sweaty neck Latinate for a bit before lighting a match and tossing the flame into a bowl of something green, the latter of which erupts into a quick torch of flame. Sam warily rises to his feet as the decaying structure surrounding him creaks in the wind, and finally, Princess Sparkle's off-screen voice snots, "Phones work, too." The camera swings around with Sam's gaze to find the sparkly demonette in question leaning casually against a rotting support beam, and I worry about her weight snapping that rotting support beam in two before I remember how scrawnily insubstantial her stick-figure of a body is. "Hey, Sam!" Ruby perks. "How's tricks?" "How do you get around so fast?" Sammy seethes on the audience's behalf, for we've been vexed by that very same question since the first season. "I got the super bullet jet pack," she eyebrows, not answering the question at all, and if anyone can tell me what the hell she's talking about, I'll give you a cookie. Or, you know, my copious and sincere thanks. Whichever arrives first.
In any event, Princess Sparkle pushes herself up from her most unladylike slouch and saunters on over in The Ginormotron's direction, wondering what gives. Sam blusters about Lilith and That Deal and secrets! and outrage! and such, but Princess Sparkle calmly reminds Our Intrepid Hero that had she earlier informed them of Lilith's involvement in this season's overarching storyline, Our Dear Boys would have taken that information and "charged off after her half-cocked." And then? "Lilith would have peeled the meat off your pretty, pretty faces." "SEE?!" shrieks Raoul, blowing out my eardrum, again. "Do you see why that...THING is so LOATHSOME!?" "DEATH!" he roars, really getting into it, and oh, Jesus -- there goes the other one. "DEATH TO HER WHO WOULD PEEL THE PRETTY FACES!" I think I got your point, my scaly friend. "Oh, goody!" Now may I...? "Of course! By all means, do continue on with your charming story!" Thanks. "Never a problem, I'm sure!" Rrrrgh. So, where was I? Oh, yeah: Sam's response to Princess Sparkle's taunt involves an epic bitchface that primly insists, "Yeah? Well, we're ready now, and I want your knife." Slyly dodging the demand, Princess Sparkle casts an appraising eye across his remarkably healthy form and allows, "You're right about one thing: You are ready." "And now's the time, too," she adds, slowly circling him. "Lilith's guard's down," she reveals. "She's on shore leave," Ruby continues, as Sam keeps a suspicious side-eye pinned to her face as she sways around behind his impressively broad back. "A little R and R?" The Princess prompts. Sam's all, "Buh?" and Ruby's all, "You don't wanna know," and Raoul's certainly in cringing agreement with that assertion, and Princess Sparkle finally wonders if Sam and Dean still have those hex bags she tossed their way many, many episodes ago. The boys do, and this is a very good thing, indeed, because those bags, as you'll recall, jam Lilith's demonic LoJack, or whatever, and the boys will thus remain invisible to her. Unfortunately, Ruby flat-out refuses to surrender The Knife That Can Kill Anything, and things get very shouty, indeed, until Ruby lays the following bit of science upon The Ginormotron's tantalizing ass: "Sam, you've got some God-given talent -- well, not 'God'-given, but you get the gist -- [and it's] not gone." Nope. Apparently, the super-special abilities he acquired as a result of last season's Demonic Miss America Pageant and Sam's back-door victory in same have merely been lying "dormant" for the past year, and now that he's "desperate enough" to access them, he can "wipe [Lilith] off the map without moving a muscle." "You don't like being different," she accuses him when he initially balks at her solution. "You hate the way Dean looks at you sometimes, like you're some sort of side-show freak? But suck. It. Up! Because we got a lot of ground to cover, and we gotta cover it fast, but we can do it." Sam can sneer at her and taunt at her and call her names, but she's never, ever lied to him -- true -- and she's not lying now. "You can save your brother," she insists, "and I can show you how."
"So that's you, huh?" sneering, taunting, name-calling El Deano challenges as he emerges from the shadows to surprise them both. "Our slutty little Yoda?" Oy. Again with the Star Trek. What kind of a nerd does The Kripkeeper think I am? "Well...!" Don't! "But you...!" I said no! "But you got the wrong mov...!" Stop it! "Hmph!" So. ANY-way, Princess Sparkle greets the new arrival with a too-bright smile on her face and a few witty remarks. Dean replies by punching her in the face! Well, after she calls him a "dumb, spineless dick," but never mind that because... "VIOLENCE!" roars Raoul, happily clapping his paws together with giddy amounts of delight now that we're finally getting some after waiting nearly twelve minutes for it. And then? Ruby nails him twice in the face with fists of her own before spinning into a roundhouse kick that biffs The Ginormotron into a post so she might continue to hand the stumpy little bow-legged midget his own equally tantalizing ass on a platter. "WANTON ACTS OF UNREPENTANT VIOLENCE!" Princess Sparkle boots El Deano repeatedly across the floor until she finally gets tired of the whole one-sided battle and hauls his bruised face up to hers so she can head-butt him against the stone foundation wall down there in whatever basement they're in, and when he lifts his head to smile at her, he's practically drooling blood onto the cement. "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" "The hell you grinnin' at?" Ruby pisses, drooling copious amounts of blood herself. Dean's smile simply broadens as he produces The Knife That Can Kill Anything from wherever he'd been storing the damn thing after he swiped it off her during the late scuffle. Pretty sneaky, Dean. Princess Sparkle, outraged, charges, but so sneaky is El Deano that Ruby's found herself ensnared in a devil's trap Dean spray-painted onto the basement ceiling in anticipation of her visit. After gloating for a moment, Our Intrepid And Slightly Damaged Heroes wearily drag their battered behinds up the stairs while Ruby rages at them from below. "You deserve Hell!" she shrills as their feet disappear from her line of sight. "And I wish I could be there, Dean! I wish I could smell the flesh sizzle off your bones! I wish I could be there to hear you scream!" "And I wish you'd shut your pie-hole," Dean tosses back, "but we don't always get what we want." And with that, Sam and Dean vanish into the METAL TEETH CHOMP!
Upstairs, the boys load various implements of demonic destruction with rock salt in silence for a while until Sam wonders if Ruby's telling the truth about his dormant abilities. Dean stares at him like Sam's some sort of side-show freak. "Quit looking at me like that," Sam frowns, averting his gaze. I don't know whether to laugh or whack Dean upside his judgmental, doomed head with a spoon. In any event, debate ensues until Dean seethes that crap about not making the same mistake again, and Sam flails his arms around, all, "I don't even know what that means!" so Dean patiently explains the entire situation to College Boy, here. Every single time one of them's been facing death, the other's been far too willing to trade away his soul. It happened with their worthless bastard of a so-called father when Dean was lying comatose at the beginning of the last season, it happened again with Dean when Sam was lying actually dead at the beginning of the last finale, it's happening again right this instant with Sam, and as far as Dean's concerned, that touchy-feely self-sacrificing yoga crap stops now, bitch. "All I'm saying," Dean ultimately admits after they've seated themselves side-by-side for a heartfelt chick-flick Suisse Mocha moment, "is that you're my weak spot. You are. And I'm yours. And those evil sons of bitches know it, too. I mean, what we'll do for each other? How far we'll go? They're using it against us!" "This sounds familiar!" Raoul brazenly interrupts, and be quiet, you shrieky fool! You're interrupting A Touching Scene. "Well, you'll excuse me, I'm sure, but if you failed to transcribe this speech the first time it was delivered, why are you bothering with it now?! Have we no VIOLENCE to witness!? Is there no GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE?!" You're right, my scaly friend, you're right: I have no excuse. I just thought it was kind of cute that The Kripkeeper had Dean unwittingly parrot Loki, or whatever the hell that guy's name was. "Unless the dear little doomed boy is not just mindlessly aping that tedious little speech from earlier in the season! There are no coincidences!" Wait, so you're saying...? "Yes!" The Trickster planted this...this made-of-fail speech into both their brains during that episode? "Yes!" Thereby ensuring Dean's ultimate doom in the season finale? "YES!" Raoul! You're awfully smart for someone whose brain is the size of a walnut. "Thank...HEY!" Oh, I kid.
You know, the dizzy lizard's idea's not that farfetched when you think about it. Especially when Dean ends his little speech with the following call to arms: "We [gotta] stop being martyrs, man! We [gotta] stop spreading it for these demons! We take this knife, and we go after Lilith our way -- the way [our worthless bastard of a so-called father] taught us to!" The way Sucky John taught them to? Dead Sucky John? That guy? Yeah, they're fucked, and The Trickster's behind it all.
So, they quite naturally finish up their Touching Scene by breaking each other's balls. "Whaddya think?" Dean wonders, referring to his Mighty Plan Of Epic Failure. Sam pauses for a deeply contemplative moment, then replies, "I think you totally should have been jammin' 'Eye Of The Tiger' right there." "Aw, bite me," Dean shoots back. Hee. "Totally rehearsed that speech, too," Dean adds. Why Sam neglects to note he heard that very speech before from one of their occasional enemies, I'll never know, but let's ignore all of that until season and keep this moving, shall we? "Tell me something," Dean begins, referencing Ruby's assertion regarding Lilith's current whereabouts, "the hell does a demon do for fun?"
Raoul? "Yes?!" Leave. "What!? But whatever for, you silly little man?! It's just starting to get good!" Her. "Oh! A hasty yet heartfelt au revoir to you all, I'm sure!"
With Raoul safely ensconced in his den -- where he, by the sound of it, is watching La Vie En Rose for what has got to be the 842nd goddamned time -- let's hop over to Inharmonious Indiana, where an ice cream truck tootles through a cul-de-sac as two elderly gentlemen emerge from their tastefully appointed homes to deposit some mail in their driveway boxes. Do people still do that? If I leave mail sitting in the box, our demented carrier just eats it. I think. Anywhoodle, "Pat Fremont" affably greets "Tom Weprin", and the two chit-chat about this and that, most particularly Pat's granddaughter, who seems to have been laid momentarily low by "that bug that's going around", and Pat sure as hell doesn't know how far that bug's spread, for if he did, he wouldn't be surreptitiously slipping "Tom" a slip of paper inscribed with a frantic "HELP US". We have little time to linger on "Tom's" reaction to this, though, for we must rejoin Pat as he shuts his front door behind him and gingerly steps over...the fly-encrusted corpse littering his foyer! I'm sorry Raoul had to miss this, but perhaps it's for the best, as you'll recall his taste for wanton acts of unrepentant violence tends to sour when the victim's a little old lady, which is what this fly-encrusted sweetie seems to have been. You know, up until a couple of days ago, when Lilith apparently ripped the poor old broad's lungs out through her nose.
"Where is she?" Pat demands of his daughter-in-law when he shuffles into the kitchen. The daughter-in-law, who's spreading one last bit of chocolate icing on this massive and oddly pointed cake, whispers, "Upstairs, playing with Freckles." "We just sit here, we're dead!" Pat hisses at his wimp of a son, who promptly hisses back a cautionary, "She'll hear you!" "It's her or us," Pat insists, not taking any crap from the mealy-mouthed morons in front of him. "It's my baby girl!" Daughter-In-Law Of Pat mewls. "Not anymore!" Pat seethes. "There's something inside her!" "Shut your mouth!" Son Of Pat spits. "She's coming!" And sure enough, in prances some bucktoothed brat whose sporting a staggering amount of blood and guts sprayed down the front of her pretty pink party dress. "What's that?" Daughter-In-Law Of Pat more or less splutters. "Oh, Freckles was mean to me," the brat replies, and, okay, two things: One, the brat's actually Lilith's current hostess, as if that weren't obvious, and two, this child actress suh-huuuuuuuucks. That last line of hers was clearly overdubbed in post, and I'm willing to bet it was overdubbed by some fortysomething voice-over artist who specializes in demonic moppets of the female variety, because there's no way in hell that smooth, professional-sounding delivery's coming from this tiny embarrassment to the acting profession. NO WAY. So. ANYWAY, the surrounding adults are, of course, appalled by The Child Who Just Ruined The Entire Episode For Everyone, and before I start flinging Raoul's bowl of wriggly snacks at the television screen in disgust, I suppose I should note that this subplot's coming straight from The Twilight Zone -- where the family's name was also Fremont, natch -- and skip past the depressingly enacted bits that follow so we might rejoin...
...Our Intrepid Heroes, one of whom (and I'll let you guess which) is attempting to activate Metallicar. One problem: The engine's not turning over. Because Bobby The Bad-Ass yanked out the distributor cap! D'OH! "Where do you think you're going?" Bobby too-casually wonders, twirling the cap in question right beneath Dean's nose. Sam and Dean, instantly grumpy, disembark from the Impala to inform Bad-Ass Bobby that they'll no longer be requiring his services this evening. "Do I look like a ditchable prom date to you?" Bobby quite awesomely squints directly in Doomed El Deano's face. "Family don't end with blood, boy!" Well, Bobby, I hate to clompy stomp all over your most excellent point, there, but the Winchester family actually does tend to end with blood. Except when there's fire involved, of course, in which case it ends with ash by way of blood, but let's not get too technical about it. The point is, don't let these two dunderheaded goons -- who might possibly be unwittingly acting under Evil Influence at the moment -- get you killed, okay? Kisses. In any event, Bobby correctly guesses that Dean's been plagued with hellhound-related hallucinations as of late, thereby somehow proving his use to them, or whatever, and flips the distributor cap into Dean's doomed chest with, "I'll follow. And don't be stoppin' to pee every ten minutes, either!" Did I mention that Bobby is awesome?
Later that evening, Sam attempts to instigate a heartfelt chick-flick Suisse Mocha moment of his own as they sit side-by-side in the Impala's front seat, but Hypocritical El Deano's having none of it, and shuts that crap down with a quickness. "If this is my last day on earth," he announces, "I do not want it to be socially awkward." Instead, he flicks on the radio for some awkwardness of another kind: Impromptu karaoke, with Bon Jovi. The blissful minute is filled with Our Intrepid Heroes singing -- badly -- along with "Wanted Dead Or Alive" by that horrific hair band from northern New Jersey, and while it's great fun initially for both of the boys, the too-relevant lyrics turn Doomed El Deano into a depressing mope by the end of the sequence, so let's skip ahead to the point where a state trooper pulls out of his hiding spot to flash his lights at the just-passed Impala, shall we? Sam quietly freaks until Dean rolls his eyes, remembering the broken taillight the car's sporting at the moment. He eases over to the side of the road with the trooper right behind him, and wearily rolls down his window while Sam passes him the registration from the glove compartment. "You do realize you have a taillight out, Mr. Hagar?" the cop inquires, reading the LYING LIAR'S latest alias from the latter's fake license. Dean lifts his luxuriously lashed doe eyes up to offer an appropriate response and -- almost imperceptibly -- freaks the fuck out at what he sees. A camera reverse shows the audience a standard-issue middle-aged officer of the law, but Dean continues to jitter and stammer until he...slams the car door open directly into the cop's crotch! Sam howls in consternation as Dean leaps from the driver's seat to pummel the trooper with his fists for a bit before sliding The Knife That Can Kill Anything from his belt and ramming it up the guy's neck. A quick-flaring burst of familiar-looking orange energy illuminates the cop's skull from within for a moment before dissipating almost as quickly as it'd appeared, and the gurgling human remains of the now thoroughly depossessed trooper drop to the asphalt, dead. "How'd you know?" Sam gasps as Bobby jogs over from his just-arriving car. "I could see its face!" Dean shouts, now utterly horrified on top of all his freaking. "Its real face, under that one!" Bobby and Sam gawp while the METAL TEETH CHOMP! scuttles in to snack upon The Manfully Imposing Ducky Lips Of Impending El Deano Doom.
Raoul's still in his den, by the way. "Non, rrrrrien de rrrrrien!" I'm not letting him out until I know that wretched excuse for an actress is off the screen for good. "Non, je ne regrette rien!" No, I'm not talking about Katie Cassidy. "Ni le bieeeeeen! Qu'on m'a faaaaaaaaait! Ni le maaaaaaaaal!" Shut up. "Tout ça m'est bien égaaaaaaaaaaaal!"
Back from the break, the boys plus Bobby have pushed the dead trooper's prowler off the road and are now busily camouflaging it with shrubbery. It's Car 54, by the way. Clever show. "So, what? Now you're seeing demons?" Sam bluntly demands, staring at his brother like Dean's some sort of side-show freak. Ha! Payback's a bitch, isn't it, Dean? "It's not all that crazy," Bobby offers. "You're piercing the veil, Dean -- glimpsing the B-side!" "Little less new-agey, please?" Dean requests. "You're almost Hell's bitch," Bobby shrugs, "so you can see Hell's other bitches." "Thank you," Dean sarcastically replies. It quickly becomes clear, however, that Doomed El Deano's magical new ability will be of no small use to them once they reach Inharmonious Indiana, as Lilith's likely to have peppered the town with lookout minions in human form, much like the unlamented state trooper, here. Doomed El Deano snorts something about this masterful plan of theirs getting worse by the minute, or something, and with that, we're off to...
...oh, gross. Seriously. This kid sucks, so let's keep this scene at Chez Fremont a brief as possible, okay? Long story short, one of Lilith's minions -- and I think we all know who's responsible -- informed her of Pat's frantic plea for help, so Lilith telekinetically snaps the old guy's neck, and Poor Dead Pat face-plants into a plateful of delicious-looking cherry pie. Mmmm. Pie. !
The camera zooms in on the nighttime façade of a nearby home that's quite conveniently unoccupied at the moment. Peering at the Fremonts' place across the way through binoculars, Dean quickly identifies The Child Who Has Ruined The Entire Episode For Everyone as Lilith's hostess for this portion of the evening's festivities, so Sam springs into action. Well, he springs into action until Dean points out the other demonically possessed denizens of the neighborhood, including a mailman suspiciously still on the clock at 9 PM and Pat's friendly neighbor Tom from earlier in the episode. "Fine!" Desperate Action Sammy blurts. "We ninja past those guys and sneak in!" "Then what?" Dean demands. "Give a Colombian necktie to a ten-year-old girl?" I think I speak for Raoul -- nay, for the entire viewing audience -- when I say, "Fuck yes, you give a fucking Colombian necktie to a goddamned ten-year-old girl, moron. GOD, do you want to stay out of Hell or not? Idiot." "She's got to be stopped," Bobby agrees, and I knew there was a reason I liked him so much. "Dammit!" Dean seethes. Shut up, you stumpy little bow-legged nitwit.
"Read it again, Mommy!" Ooops. Forgot about this part. Shame Raoul's going to have to miss such a lovely little shout-out to his lovable lizardly self, but I simply cannot trust him with my ceiling while this preadolescent abomination remains on the screen. Maybe I'll turn the mom's audio into a ringtone for him, or something. In any event, the story Daughter-In-Law Of Dead Pat has already read twenty-six times and is now reading again to the preadolescent abomination goes a little like this:
Once upon a time, in the town of Silene, lived a beautiful princess named Cleo, but the town was plagued with an evil dragon that demanded the blood of the children, and the princess was doomed to be sacrificed to the dark and terrible dragon.
Maybe I've been recapping with Raoul for too long, but I'm not seeing a whole lot wrong with the above scenario. Go figure.
Meanwhile, Daring But Doomed El Deano lures the demonic mailman away from his truck so Deluxe Action Sammy With Super-Special Glow-In-The-Dark Stabby Hands might gut the demonic mailman like a trout. Elsewhere, Bobby's brewing up a very special batch of holy water while Our Intrepid Ninjas take out Neighbor Tom. Just as the three are about to regroup, however, Princess Sparkle pops up out of nowhere, slams Doomed El Deano against a chain-link fence, and sneers, "I'd like my knife back, please, or your neck snaps like a chicken bone." Deluxe Action Sammy With Super-Special Glow-In-The-Dark Stabby Hands, fortunately, remains in possession of the knife in question, and leaps up from behind to press the pointy end of the thing against Ruby's throat. Ruby, of course, jumps back, and just as the sniping's about to begin regarding her miraculous escape from Dean's meticulously detailed devil's trap, Dean gets a gander at her true face and Keanus, "Whoa." Entirely unable to meet her eye, he apologies, then admits, "I couldn't see it before, but you are one ugly broad." Heh. And the sniping may commence...now. While Our Intrepid Heroes plus Princess Sparkle bicker amongst themselves over the relative merits of Ruby's plan versus the ones the boys ended up going with, every single demonically possessed neighbor in the cul-de-sac -- which, you know, would be all of the neighbors in the cul-de-sac -- steps out onto his or her front stoop to glower in the increasingly noisy idiots' direction. "So much for the element of surprise", Dean glums once he's realized how many people are staring at them. The three race across a lawn to pick the Fremonts' lock as dozens of the neighbors charge, but fortunately for Sam and Dean, Bobby activates the Fremonts' rather comprehensive sprinkler system, which immediately kicks up an encircling spray of freshly brewed holy water around the home's entire perimeter. Several of the possessed find themselves caught in the middle of the torrents and quite satisfyingly zot and sizzle before dropping to the ground. Kick ass.
Their temporary safety thus ensured, Our Intrepid Heroes plus Ruby slink into the darkened Fremont manse, side-step their collective way past the fly-encrusted corpse littering the foyer, and shimmy through the main floor until...Son Of Pat attacks! No, not like that, unfortunately. The wimp has yet to be possessed, which Dean of course instantly knows, and after the three attempt and fail to explain the urgency of the situation to a traumatized Son Of Pat, Dean sucker-punches the worthless weakling into unconsciousness and stores the senseless jerk in the cellar. Sam and Ruby, meanwhile, creep up the main stairs to the second floor, where they stupidly split up to investigate! Haven't any of these morons realized that every single time they split up, something horrible happens? Ugh. In any event, Princess Sparkle prances into a room at one end of the hall while Sam sweatily approaches a suite at the other. He eases open the door and, with Knife raised, slowly approaches the pink canopied bed, whose sheer curtains have been drawn to obscure, partially, its occupants. And I must admit, when this episode first aired, and The Ginormotron was thus tippy-toeing through the preadolescent abomination's boudoir during this very long and surprisingly tense-making scene, I was dead certain Lilith had jumped from the daughter into the mother, and that poor Sammy was going to give a Colombian necktie to a ten-year-old girl only to have Lilith -- in the mother's body -- hop up after it was all over to go, "FACE! I'm in here, asshole!" Doesn't happen, of course, but how much more awesome would this episode have been if it had?
In any event, just as Sam's about to plunge The Knife That Can Kill Anything into the daughter's throat, Doomed El Deano lunges up from behind to stay Sam's arm, shouting, "Don't! It's not in the girl anymore!" It's also, apparently, not in the mother, either. Hmmm. I wonder where Lilith could be? Oh, hello, Princess Sparkle, just arriving from points unknown to join the boys as they slide into the commercial break most woefully CHOMP!-less! "Any fool can see the foul fiend has found a new hostess in that silly little blonde woman!" Oh, hello, Raoul. I didn't hear you toddle back from your den. And how were Marion Cotillard's eyebrows? "As gruesome as they've ever been!" Indeed? "I know! I keep waiting and waiting and waiting for the delightfully unnerving effect to wear off, and if anything, the upper half of her head only seems to get even more grotesque with each additional viewing!" I'm so pleased you were able to enjoy yourself. "Quand il me prend dans ses bras!" Oh, Lord. "Il me parle tout bas! Je vois LA VIE EN ROOOOH-ZAH!
Aftermath. Bobby's still trapped in the hideout across the way. From his perspective, the bad news is it's getting awfully close to midnight. The good news, however, is that the line of holy water sprinklers continues to hold, so the Fremonts' demonic fiends and neighbors remain harmless. For the moment. Meanwhile, Our Intrepid Heroes plus Ruby hustle Daughter-In-Law Of Dead Pat into the basement, where Dean instructs her to remain with her lousy wimp of a husband and their now-depossessed brat of a daughter, no matter what dire sounds emanate from the floor above. Once the civilians have been safely stowed away, Our Intrepid Heroes start screaming at each other, with Desperate Action Sammy pleading with Princess Sparkle to tell him what he needs to do to access his long-dormant powers, and Doomed El Deano refusing to allow that to happen, no matter what. It goes on like that until the Fremonts' expensive-looking mantel clock hits midnight, and as the chimes slowly sound, Our Intrepid Heroes get all teary-eyed and snot-streaked while still offering each other valiant Buck Up, Little Camper smiles. No sooner has the last of the chimes echoed through the room when the baying of the hellhounds kicks in from somewhere outdoors, with a subsequent low growling almost instantly arising from the floor at Dean's back. He turns, slowly, and can see it lurking in the dining room, and as he warily backs away from the thing, the shot cuts immediately over to Hellhound-Cam, and the Camera Dog pounces. The boys plus Ruby scamper away into a nearby room, where they slam the doors behind them so Dean might hastily lay down a few lines of graveyard dirt mixed with snakeskin, ash, powdered sulfur, salt, red and black pepper, powdered bones, powdered insect chitin, herbs, and iron filings. The howling and the battering of the hellhounds against the door presently halts, and once it does, Ruby wheels on Sam and demands he turn over The Knife That Can Kill Anything, Up To And Including Hellhounds, Apparently so she can try to fight the beasts off. One problem: "Sam, that's not Ruby!" dazed El Deano whispers, once he's finally -- after that whole entire scene that lasted a full two minutes -- gotten a good look at her face. Sam, horrified, tries to plunge The Knife into Lilith's chest, but Lilith telekinetically backhands him up against the wall while flattening Dean across a table in much the same fashion.
And I have to give credit to Katie Cassidy, here, because when Lilith drops her Ruby act once she's got the guys pinned, Cassidy convincingly ratchets her voice up a mincing, sing-songy, childlike octave and similarly alters everything about the way she moves, switching from a pattern that had been rather butch, frankly, to something altogether more lithe and coquettish -- and therefore, in this context, altogether more disturbing. After casually mentioning how easily she rid the earth of her host body's occupant, Lilith swivels over to Sam and simpers, "I've wanted to meet you for a very long time!" right before she hikes her tongue down his remarkably broad throat. I don't know about you, but I'm thinking the possessed have breath issues. "It's positively beastly, I'm sure!" Raoul agrees. Once Sam's free to breathe again, he attempts to barter his own soul for Dean's, but alas! "If you want to bargain, you have to have something I want!" Lilith perks. Unfortunately, Sam doesn't, so Lilith releases the hounds. "VIOLENCE!" Oh, Raoul. You disappoint me. "You object to my glee for some reason?!" Only because you're so easy to please -- this is some of the fakest gore-work I've ever seen on this show. And that's saying something. A lot, in fact. "Oh, do stop being such a pill and let me have my fun!" Sigh. As you wish, my scaly friend. So, the hellhounds first drag Dean to the floor by digging their claws into his legs and yanking. "WANTON ACTS OF UNREPENTANT VIOLENCE!" And then they flip his floppy little body back and forth until geysering founts of blood erupt from every square inch of exposed skin. "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" Well, you know. Except his face, 'cause that's just too pretty to claw. "GOOOOOO...ooops! NOT THE FACE! DEATH TO THE HELLHOUND WHO SCRATCHES THE FACE!" Meanwhile, Sam's hanging from the wall, screaming, "Noooooooooooo!" "Yesssssssssssss!" hisses Lilith, and she raises her Super-Special Death-Ray Hand into the air to shoot Darling Sammy into the final METAL TEETH CHOMP! of the season upon a stream of horribly brilliant white light.
When we return, Lilith's ramping down her Super-Special Death-Ray Hand, and as it peters out, the irises of her eyes roll back into their proper place. She should have kept them rolled all the way into the back of her skull, though, for when they focus on what should be a bitty pile of Sam Ash on the floor, she finds instead the fully intact Ginormotron, cringing behind his hands. Hee. Sam eventually draws his arms away from his face and seems almost as freaked over this unexpected development as Lilith is. "Back!" she weakly cries out as our favorite looming portent of doom rises from the floor to bear down upon her tiny frame. "I said back!" Lilith ineffectually repeats as Sam stoops to retrieve The Knife That Can Kill Anything from where it had fallen during the scene. "I don't think so," Deadly Action Sammy sneers, drawing back his right arm to plunge the blade through Lilith's skull, apparently, judging from the angle he's working on, here. And then? Lilith snaps back her hostess's head and roars, expelling a foul and somewhat shrieky pillar of bitterly black demonic goo from that hostess's mouth. The pillar rockets upwards through a ceiling vent, and once it's gone, this dead blonde chick no one knows anything about flops down onto the floorboards to Dead El Deano's rapidly cooling corpse, and oh my God. "What!? What did I miss?!" Oh, nothing --it's just that Jared Padalecki's an even sloppier crier than I remember him being. "Oh, poop! That's no fun at all!" Well, if it makes you feel any better, there's a bloody meat hook coming up in the forty seconds. "Then why are you wasting our valuable time dithering about upon this tedious nonsense!? Get to the meat hooks, posthaste!" I'm tryin... "CHOP-CHOP!" Okay! Okay! So, the enormous slobbering puppy dog gets his big brother's pretty corpse all sticky and wet as he rocks it back and forth and promises to hug it and pet it and squeeze it and pat it and pet it and give it security and keep it warm like a mother hen so it never feels rejected or lack of love, and then the camera dives down into...
...Dean's luxuriously lashed doe eye? Buhznuh? And further and further it goes, down into the blackness of Dean's blank pupil, from which emerges a tightly constructed network of chains spread out across a background of varying patches of darkness and light, and from the distance at which we're looking at all of it, the entire visual closely resembles certain representations of the brain's neural network, particularly when flashes of lightning zip across the screen. Amidst the crashing thunder, we hear one single person screaming, and the camera spirals ever closer towards a Dean-like form that ends up actually being Dean (or some reasonable CGI facsimile thereof), stretched out and suspended at the center of one set of chains via the meat hooks embedded in his wrists, ankles, rib cage, and shoulder! "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" Are you happy now, Raoul? "Blissful! Thanks ever so!" Never a problem, my faithful lizardly companion. So, the camera eventually reaches Dean's heavily bloodied face, and the instant he screams, "SAAAAAAAM!" the screen snaps black, and we're left with nothing more than Dean's howl of terror echoing away into the distance as we head into what promises to be a most lengthy summer hiatus. "Eeeeeeeeeeeee! And kisses! Hiatus kisses to all of my pretties! Whee!"
Demian thinks you should get out of the house more often. Raoul, for once, agrees. "It's the summer, you sillies! Go out and get a slushie! Perhaps with a little vodka in it! My treat!" You may reach the former at demian_twop@yahoo.com. The latter is an imaginary gay dragon on the Internet.