Episode Report Card Demian: D | 5 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT The Hardy Boys Waste An Hour Of Our Lives
By Demian | Season 5 | Episode 20 | Aired on 04.29.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So, the new plan to defeat Lucifer involves luring him into that divinely constructed cage beneath St. Mary's Convent and locking him in there for the next several millennia using The Horsemen's rings, as I'm sure you'll all recall from the end of last week's episode. With War and Famine's rings already in their hot little hands, Our Intrepid Heroes hit the road in search of Pestilence, whom they think is slowly spreading Croatoan across the desert southwest, but that is nothing but a vile bit of misdirection on the crafty Horseman's part. He's actually spreading a particularly virulent strain of swine flu in order to panic the population into demanding a vaccine, now, no matter how shoddily formulated that vaccine might be. This brings us to The Niveus Pharmaceutical Corporation which, in addition to bringing us Herpexia, has been tasked with concocting a newer, faster-acting version of the traditional influenza vaccine. Unfortunately, Niveus's remarkably youthful CEO is actually a demonically enhanced former classmate of Sam's from Stanford -- more on that below -- who's colluding with Pestilence to spread Croatoan through the swine flu vaccine. DUN!
Meanwhile, Crowley pops up again for the first time in half a year with a little proposition for the boys: Because he still doesn't want Lucifer to win, especially after all that unpleasantness with The Fucking Colt That Can Kill Anything Except When It Usually Can't, he'll help Sam and Dean collect the remaining two Horsemen rings for free. Despite some initial misgivings, Our Intrepid Heroes agree to the temporary alliance, and Dean and Crowley head over to Niveus's corporate offices to kidnap the remarkably youthful CEO, whose name is Brad or Brody or some similar atrocity of like Chipster heinousness, and when they drag the guy back to Crowley's hovel, we get a ton of backstory on Sam's college years that we weren't exactly clamoring for at this point in the fifth season's overall arc. Long story short, Broheim got himself demonically enhanced during their sophomore year at Stanford because Azazel thought Sam was getting a little too soft even back then, Bromeister then introduced Sam to Jessica, and Brosephus ended up being the one who nailed Jessica to the ceiling with a foot-wide gash through her torso right before blowing her up, thereby setting the entire series in motion. Thrilling, yes? Not really, because come on: Who still gives a shit about Jessica Moore at this point, anyway?
And in the end, nothing happens, because they wasted too much time on Sam's psychodrama. Pestilence is still out there, the Croatoan virus is about to be unleashed, and Bobby sells his soul to Crowley to get a shot at Death. Ooops. That last bit might be kind of important, right? Whatever.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Rattle, Rattle THEN! A very long time ago, Darling Sammy didn't know what he'd do without Jessica Moore until Azazel nailed her to the ceiling with a foot-wide gash through her torso right before blowing her up, after which Darling Sammy quickly figured out a Plan B. Meanwhile, a very long time into the future, Dashing El Deano found himself trapped in a post-Apocalyptic Kansas City wherein each and every inhabitant had been infected with the Croatoan virus, so he beat the crap out of a little girl, as one does in such situations. Somewhere in between those two points, Our Intrepid Heroes met Crowley, the ancient demonic force in charge of the Crossroads gang, who gave them The Fucking Colt That Can Kill Anything Except When It Usually Can't, mainly to prove that said Colt cannot kill Lucifer. And finally, Gabriel just last week posthumously gifted the boys with a massive information dump that included the following: If Sam and Dean somehow manage to collect all four of The Horsemen's rings, and if Sam and Dean somehow manage to lure Lucifer back into his divinely constructed cage deep beneath the ruins of St. Mary's Convent in Ilchester, Maryland, then The Apocalypse can be averted simply by locking Satan up again for the next few thousand years.
Rattle, Rattle NOW! Frisky little lab rats frolic about comfy-looking aquarium cages bedecked with HerpeXia print ads as two white-coat researchers steam past a burly night janitor to bitch about their current experiment, which involves some new, "faster-acting" H1N1 vaccine that "Niveus Pharmaceuticals" plans to push into human trials this week despite the fact that, in the researchers' considered opinion, the vaccine is nowhere near ready. "Have you even seen it?" White Coat One asks. "No," White Coat Two admits. "I have!" the janitor smiles, and with that, the janitor...jams a hypodermic into White Coat One's neck! "VIOLENCE!" shrieks Raoul The Big Gay Supernatural Dragon, positively a-flutter over this absolutely shocking development. "Is that sarcasm I detect in your tone, missy?!" Raoul shrieks again, evidently annoyed with yours truly, and it might be, friend of friends, but why don't we see if we can make it through this remarkably brief pre-credits sequence with a minimum of sidebar chit-chat, okay? "Okay!" It's such a joy when you're agreeable, Raoul. "Don't mention it!" I wasn't...oh, never mind. So, as White Coat One bugs out his eyes before dropping to the floor, either unconscious or dead, White Coat Two howls, "What the hell?" Exactly, White Coat Two. Exactly. For his part, Janitor Man replies by backhanding White Coat Two clear across the lab. "VIOLENCE! WANTON ACTS OF UNREPENTANT PETA-APPROVED VIOLENCE!" "Relax," Janitor Man grins down at White Coat Two's now-battered form, "you're part of it, too!" With that, Janitor Man swipes himself out into the hall, then hammers the lab's locking mechanism with his fist until it sparks and zots and shorts out, trapping White Coat Two inside with his partner and several cages' worth of mildly annoyed Capuchin monkeys. And as White Coat Two pounds uselessly against the exit door's tempered glass, White Coat One rises rather ominously from the floor with vivid red bruises now swelling beneath his eyes. The camera darts in for an extreme close-up of his vaguely threatening face just as White Coat One's pupils expand to swallow his irises with a bitterly black demonic foulness, and the next thing we know, it's gone all 28 Days Later there in the lab, with White Coat One yanking his hapless partner out of our line of vision while the increasingly agitated Capuchins screech and whine, and there are some gruesome, bone-cracking noises on the soundtrack as Janitor Man watches what we can't see with avid interest, and finally, at long last, a mighty gout of White Coat Two's arterial spray rips across the lab's exit door. "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" Janitor Man allows his eyes to flip beetle black and smirks, "Looks like it works!" right before we all get slapped in the face with the...