Episode Report Card Demian: D | 5 USERS: B YOU GRADE IT The Hardy Boys...Don't Do Much of Anything, Actually
By Demian | Season 6 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.25.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.It's been a year since whatever the hell happened in last season's finale, and when we catch up with Dashing El Deano, we learn he's spent the previous twelve months as quietly an unobtrusively as possible with Bendy Lisa and her son in Cicero. Of course, Dean's Indiana idyll quickly spirals down the crapper when The Ceiling Demon pops up from out of nowhere, his yellow eyes a-glint with merry malevolence, to make with the threats and the taunts and such until Darling Resurrected Sammy also pops up from out of nowhere with a nasty-looking syringe, which he promptly plunges through The Ceiling Demon's suddenly vaporous body and into Dean's chest. Whaaaaaaaaa?
Turns out Dean was actually infected with some sort of genie goo, and said goo filled his brain with a remarkably vivid Azazel hallucination. Had Darling Sammy not arrived with a needle full of genie goo antidote at that very moment, Dashing El Deano would likely have dropped dead. And just where did that genie goo come from, I hear you ask? Well, you remember that elaborately tattooed beastie from Season Two's "What Is And What Should Never Be"? He had three kids, and those kids are pissed that Our Intrepid Heroes offed their daddy. So pissed, in fact, that they waited more than four years to exact their revenge, but that's not important at the moment, because what is important at the moment is the fact that Sam's out of Hell.
Not that Sam has any clue how that happened, naturally. One minute, he was writhing about in agony down below with that bastard, Adam, and the next thing he knew, he was sprawled out topside all by his lonesome on the sere Stull Cemetery grass. Still, that's not as surprising as the other news Sam can't wait to spring on all of us: Their maternal grandfather, Samuel Campbell, was also resurrected shortly after Lucifer's abortive Armageddon, and he and Sam have spent the last year hunting creatures the likes of which neither have seen before with a passel of sullen-looking Campbell cousins who will likely be dead by the end of November sweeps. Well, you know. With a little luck.
In any event, the boys plus the Campbells quickly take out the frigging pissed-off genies, and when it's all done, Sam asks Dean to rejoin him on the road. Unfortunately, Dean's developed a deep sense of responsibility for Bendy Lisa and Bendy Lisa's brat, so he declines, and we have to wait at least another week to see the Impala out on the open road again. Under normal circumstances, I'm sure I'd whine about that fact, but after sitting through this borefest, all I really want to do is take a nap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Whisper, Whisper ONE YEAR AGO! The ONE YEAR AGO!, by the way, looks like it's been lacquered onto the screen with a couple of bottles of Scented Taffy Clear Blue Glitter Nail Polish from Hot Topic, and as wary as I've been of this season's quality before now, this just makes everything worse. Anyway, what follows is the briefest of recaps covering the abortive Armageddon from last season's finale, artfully drained of color and sharply edited to make it look far cooler than it actually was. Well, it looks far cooler than it actually was until they get to the bit where Bastard Adam and Darling Sammy take a tandem header into The Pit Of The Audience's Everlasting Despair, at which point the whole thing goes back to being as lame and insulting as it was the first time around. And when that crap has passed, the scene shifts to remind us of Dashing El Deano's lonely ride back to Cicero, Indiana, as Sam's voiceover urges, "You gotta promise not to try to bring me back -- you go find Lisa, you go live some normal, apple-pie life! Promise me, Dean! Promise me!" Wow. Did I yell about that last season? That whole "apple-pie life" thing? 'Cause, I mean: Who the hell talks like that?
In any event, gritty, grieving, and forlorn Black-And-White Flashback Dean vanishes into the recap-ending darkness, and when his face finally reemerges, everything's gone all bright-and-saturated full-color, so I'm guessing we've arrived in the present. Clad in little more than a grey t-shirt, apparently, and suffering somewhat from the aftereffects of what appears to be yet another in a string of sleepless nights, bedbound Present-Day El Deano rolls his head around on his pillow to avoid getting an eyeful of the sunlight streaming in through the off-camera blinds and almost manages to get the jump on his clock radio before the thing destroys his contemplative early-morning solitude with a series of earsplitting beeps. Almost. Instead, he just tiredly switches off the alarm while leaving the radio on, and the audience can faintly hear the opening lines of Bob Seeger's "Beautiful Loser" as the camera leaps up to the ceiling for a wide-angle overhead of what follows.
Ominously enough, what follows is The Scented Taffy Clear Blue Glitter NOW! materializing at the center of Dean's expensive-looking comforter to mince its tacky way towards the television screen, but that's not important right now, for barely has The Scented Taffy Clear Blue Glitter NOW! appeared when Bendy Lisa stirs around on her side of the bed to shoot her yearlong houseguest a look. By this point in their relationship, all it takes is a glance at Dean's face for Lisa to realize he's spent one more evening staring wide-eyed into the gloom, mourning his past while waiting for the monster that's certain to be lurking beneath the bed to rise up and devour them whole, so she flips her bendy self around to snuggle up close to him, places a hand on his chest, and asks, "You okay?" Dean takes her hand in his own and LIES, "Yeah, I'm good." Nice to know some things never change. Bendy Lisa takes a moment, then decides not to call him on that crap, instead kissing his troubled knuckles and hauling herself out of bed to prepare for another grueling day of downward dogs at her chic Cicero studio, leaving Dean alone to sigh and press an exhausted palm against his overtired forehead while Bob Seeger croons, "Beautiful Loser, where you gonna fall when you realize you just can't have it all?" and do you get it? No, seriously, do you get that Dashing El Deano is both beautiful and a loser who has fallen into the cesspit of Central Indiana due to the fact that he can no longer have it all, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean? Because I have no problems stopping this recap right now to wait for you to catch up. You're good? Okay, then. And next?
Montage! Oh, I do so love a good montage. This one, set to the ongoing Seeger, features brief vignettes of Dean's present-day apple-pie life (ugh) interspersed with sudden flashbacks to his far more gruesome -- and therefore far more awesome -- past, and the present-day scenes are so incredibly boring, I want to kill him to put him out of his obvious misery, then kill myself for having sat through this trash. One good bit about all of this, however, is that it's clear Dean's present-day actions are triggering the flashbacks, so, you know. Nice, quiet little psychological insight into Dashing El Deano's post-hunting mindset, here. Not that we particularly needed to start the sixth season with a nice, quiet little psychological insight into Dashing El Deano's post-hunting mindset, but whatever. It is what it is, I suppose. And, just to be thorough: When Present-Day Deano salts the scrambled eggs he's preparing for Bendy Lisa and her suddenly gargantuan son, Our Intrepid Hero flashes back to multiple instances of laying down salt lines to keep the beasties at bay; when he opens the toolbox in the bed of his pickup, he flashes back lifting the false floor in the Impala's trunk; when he slams the toolbox shut, he remembers the end of the second-season finale; when he backs out of his driveway, he remembers Metallicar; when he hammers a spike into a plank at his construction job, he thinks of the time he nailed that vampire to a log at the sawmill; and when he draws a bitty little power saw down on a two-by-four, we get a shot of him most spectacularly drawing that massive industrial-strength power saw down on the above-mentioned vampire's neck. God, Dean's life sucks now. The remaining bits of this sequence involve Dean surreptitiously reminiscing about various chick-flick moments he shared with his gargantuan and shaggy-haired brother, so I'll be skipping to the end, where we watch as Dean, at the end of another excruciatingly dull day, methodically locks all of the doors and windows on the main floor of that fabulous house he's sharing with Bendy Lisa and The Brat before heading up to bed because, you know, old habits die hard. And once he's checked in on Brobdingnagian Ben -- who's already asleep beneath the glow-in-the-dark constellations Dean no doubt affixed to the gargantuan monstrosity's ceiling, natch -- Dean crawls back underneath the expensive-looking comforter with Bendy Lisa, who throws an arm around his neck and snuggles up close as Our Dear Boy settles in for what promises to be yet another sleepless night, if that jar of holy water and sawed-off shotgun he keeps under the bed is anything to go by. Dean might be totally fucked in the head, but I swear to God: Bendy Lisa is one lucky bitch.