Episode Report Card Demian: A- | 6 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT The Hardy Boys in the Garden of Good and Evil
By Demian | Season 5 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.01.2009
ion of a specific variation on apocalyptic mythology, it failed, but then again, I am not and have no desire to be an expert on such things, so whatever. Anyway, Sam argues that they can fight back, and Dean agrees with that, as long as they remain apart. "We're not stronger when we're together," he claims. "Whatever we have between us -- love, family, whatever it is -- they are always going to use it against us. And you know that." Well, he should, at any rate. Sam's speechless, and as Dean misinterprets his brother's silence as acquiescence, he concludes, "We're better off apart -- we got a better chance of dodging Lucifer and Michael and this whole damn thing if we just go our own ways." "Don't do this," Sam begs, finally regaining his voice, but Dean's had it, and he snaps shut his phone to brood while the screen slowly fades to black.Cut to the lavishly appointed suite's alarm clock, and we immediately know something's deeply amiss, because we saw the previews. Ooops! I mean, "because the clock's face is shattered, and the lavishly appointed suite's bedside table is encrusted with several years' worth of dust and grime." Our Intrepid Hero suddenly snaps awake on the ripped-up boxspring that is all that remains of the formerly lavishly appointed suite's bed and hops to his feet to gawp, because he saw the previews as well. Dammit! I mean, "he's instantly suspicious of the formerly lavishly appointed suite's current state of extreme disrepair." Automatically keyed up over his dramatically altered surroundings, Dean bow-leggedly lopes his wary way to the broken windows, and his jaw drops open in disbelief once he gets a glimpse of the new view outside, for Kansas City now lies in ruins, from the burned-out hulks of the buildings lining the short little street beneath him to the shattered city skyline just visible beneath the ominously lowering clouds in the distance. The camera pans back from this desolate tableau to linger on Dean's manfully furrowed brow for a very lengthy moment until...
...SPLAT! "EEEEEEEEEEEEE!" shrieks Raoul, enthusiastic as ever over this season's delightfully gruesome title card, and I take it you've forgiven me for the joke I made at your expense? "I have not!" Uh oh. "But!" he shriekily adds. "In the interest of perpetuating our longstanding record of amicability, I am willing to overlook your base transgression for the nonce!" Perpetuating longstanding amicability, my ass. You just want me to get to the part where Dean smacks the living crap out of that little girl. "You are correct!" Then I shall continue with the recap? "With all haste, most certainly!" You're so easy to please. "I am not inclined to disagree!" Silly lizard.
Dean emerges from his now-decrepit hotel to examine the ruined streetscape surrounding him, and I suppose I should point out that they filmed this sequence on a redressed version of The Watchmen's Vancouver backlot, so if certain of the storefronts seem a tiny bit familiar to you, and if you were one of the three people who actually paid to see that mess in the theaters, that might be the reason why. The Supernatural production staff did, however, go to great pains to trash the place, graffitiing the walls and liberally littering the asphalt with tons of debris -- including a score of burnt-out car wrecks, bales of garbage-bedecked razor wire, and at least one bizarrely incongruous smashed piano -- and I have to admit that the final result really is quite creepily effective. Dean wanders through the lifeless mess for a while until...a sheet of glass shatters somewhere close by! DUN! He jogs through the alleyways until he finds a wee disheveled moppet plonked down in the middle of the filthy blacktop, stroking the jagged shards of the mirror she'd just broken while a temporarily abandoned dirt-blackened teddy bear stares emptily up at the sky beside her. "Eeeek!" shrieks Raoul, whose abject terror when confronted with tiny human females has been well documented within the pages of this website. "EVIL! THE CHILD IS EVIL!" Simmer down, you -- do you want me to get to the good part, already, or not? "[Meep!]" You big sissy. "[MEEP!]" Ugh. ANY-way, Dean calls out to the grubby wretch a couple of times, but the child -- her face entirely obscured by her hair -- doesn't reply, choosing instead to stare down at her fragmented reflection while a thick line of blood mixed with drool drops from her mouth to splatter on the ground. Dim Dean, not getting it, hunkers down next to her with a friendly sounding, "You know the not-talking thing is kinda creepy, right?" and for his troubles nearly gets his genitals sliced off when the tiny terror slashes at his business area with a shard of glass! "DEATH!" roars Raoul, the mere idea of such fiendish violation snapping him out of his moppet-induced fear coma. "DEATH TO SHE WHO WOULD HARM DEAN'S JUNK!" That's rather an uncharacteristically indelicate way for you to put that, don't you think? "DEATH!" Happily for Dean, Raoul, and, oh, everyone in the audience, Our Intrepid Hero thinks fast and -- get this -- punches the little girl in the face! "VIOLENCE!" howls Raoul, clapping his perfectly manicured paws together in a rapture of ecstatic delight. "WANTON ACTS OF UNREPENTANT VIOLENCE DIRECTED AT SNIVELING LITTLE BRATS AND GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" The hateful little would-be junk-slasher goes down like a French prize fighter, and while it's all very gratifying in the extreme, what happens next is far more important to the plot, so we'll leave the now-unconscious monster buried face-first in a pile of garbage where she belongs and join Dean as he slowly spins around to find "CROATOAN" smeared against a distant wall in five-foot-high letters of blood. "Oh, crap!" Dean mutters with his typical flair for understatement, but barely have those words flown from his mouth when a dozen bedraggled rage zombies appear at the far end of the alleyway. D'OH! Dean sprints in the opposite direction, and the camerawork goes all 28 Days Later as the rage zombies chase after him, and Jensen Ackles at full tear is a sight everybody should enjoy at least once before they die, but it's looking pretty grim indeed for Our Intrepid Hero when the rage zombies corner him up against a tall, barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence. Uh oh. Fortunately, The United States Army Reserve miraculously arrives at this, Dean's darkest moment of need, and proceeds to rip through every last rage zombie with a hail of gas-tipped slugs! "VIOLENCE! VIOLENCE! VIOLENCE! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" I'd warn Raoul he's in danger of passing out, but to be perfectly honest with you, so am I, because that's how awesome this sequence is, and it gets even more awesome when one of the grunts in the armored Humvee hits Play on the thing's dashboard, and The Contours' "Do You Love Me?" blares from the vehicle's side-mounted loudspeakers, and then it's simply an all-out orgy of gut shots and exploding heads and torsos and thighs ripped apart by machine guns and Raoul's hyperventilating and I'm yelling at the television set for him and Dean somehow manages to dive into a cellar for cover and the screen fades to black and Raoul's down for the count and I'm still screaming and the spent shell casings flying through the air and the music and the blood and that was FUCKING AWESOME.
Much later, after night has fallen, Dean burrows around a section of chain link and shimmies his way through the tight opening to emerge on the other side of the fence, where he finds the following sign: "CROATOAN VIRUS HOT ZONE NO ENTRY by order of Acting Regional Command August 1st 2014 KANSAS CITY." The "August 1st 2014" bit naturally throws him for a loop, but he pushes that bizarre detail aside for the moment in favor of hotwiring a car. The next thing we know, he's cruising off down the highway, not getting any bars on his cell, as the telephone networks are apparently down. Also apparently down ar