Episode Report Card Tippi Blevins: C- | 17 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Schoolhouse Schlock
By Tippi Blevins | Season 8 | Episode 18 | Aired on 03.27.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.For some reason, the show decided we hadn't seen enough of Krissy Chambers from last season's Adventures in Babysitting, so they brought her back for another round of smirky teenaged hijinks. This time, she's hunting vampires with two young friends, and doing a mostly capable job until they get caught on video dispatching one of the beasties. Recognizing her, Sam and Dean track her down in the middle of her and her friends' next hunt. What happened to living a normal life with her ex-hunter father? Well, sadly, her father was killed by one of the very vampires they're hunting. Dean suspects something is off when a targeted vamp tearfully begs for his life. He points out this is very odd behavior for a bloodsucker, but the teens make the kill anyway.
Sam and Dean go with the teens to their new home, and find to their surprise that it's a very nice suburban house and not a ratty motel. They're even more surprised when they discover a former hunter named Victor has taken in the kids to feed them waffles, help them with their trig homework and teach them how to kill monsters. Victor tells them about how a wendigo killed his family, so he decided to train a new generation of smarter hunters. The kids do seem pretty apt with tech, but the "smarter" part is up for debate. Surprisingly, Sam is pretty okay with the arrangement, because the kids at least get some modicum of normalcy. Dean, however, grows more and more suspicious.
Victor announces that he's found the vamp who killed Krissy's dad months ago, but Dean discovers the vamp is only a day or two old. He convinces the kids to hold off on killing her, because they can cure her if they find her maker. Meanwhile, Sam is hanging out at the suburban house when said maker shows up. Victor has been colluding with the vamp, and even hired him to kill the teens' parents in order to fuel their desire for revenge. They tie up Sam and explain all their evil plans to him like the boring villains they are. Unfortunately for Victor, the kids show up before he can carry out any of those plans. They kill the vamp, cure the girl and decide to let Victor live with the horror of what he's done. Victor's not down with that, though, so he shoots himself in the head.
Sam and Dean leave the kids to raise themselves in Victor's house, like that's not going to raise any questions. The kids promise to only hunt things that come looking for them. It's supposed to be a feel-good ending, I think, but it's dumb and boring. On the plus side, though, Sam and Dean manage to make it all the way through a vampire episode without bickering about Benny once. Stay tuned for the full recap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!THEN! The show introduced us to its own particular brand of vampires, who weren't sparkly or brooding, but outfitted with teeth like a piranha's and an appetite for sweet, sweet human blood. The show also introduced us to Krissy Chambers, who packed more annoying smirkiness into her tiny teen body than should be physically possible. When her father went missing while hunting Vetalas, she wedged herself into the Winchesters' rescue plot. Straight out of the Annoying Teen Handbook, she saved the day while being unbearably sassy and spunky. She promised Dean she was retiring, but...
NOW! ...it wasn't a promise she could keep. Damn it. She's currently making out with a boy in a parked car near a dam. The screen helpfully tells us that this is taking place in Conway Springs, Kansas. I spent about two minutes trying to find out if there was actually a dam in Conway Springs, then realized I didn't care.
As is usually the case, the episode opens at night. Krissy doesn't seem too into the macking, even with "I'll Surely Die" by The Rubens playing in the background. While the teens tepidly mash their lips together, a blue van drives up behind them. A few seconds later, Krissy notices movement outside the car. "What was that?" The boy, who looks a bit old for her, wants to get back to the kissing. "There's no one out here but us, Krissy." Romeo wipes some fog off the window just as the car's hood springs open. The lovebirds gasp. Romeo tries to start the car to no avail. He produces a flashlight from somewhere on his person and goes out to check the car. "Don't leave me here, Aidan!" Krissy shouts. The passenger side window breaks beside her and a man yanks her out of the car. She screams and kicks. Aidan pops up behind her attacker and lops off his head with a machete. A young woman runs up to join the group. "You okay?" she asks. "That was close," Krissy says. "Next time, you get to be the bait." Aidan looks down at the two pieces of dead body lying on the ground at their feet. "That's him," he sniffles. "One down, two to go," Krissy says. The three of them then stand around displaying the kind of boredom that seems particular to teenagers, or to mediocre actors in a sub-par Supernatural episode.
Luckily, a much more exciting cast member soon cruises onto the screen to liven things up. I refer, of course, to the Impala. The Winchesters pull up outside the Conway County Sheriff's Office. They were kind enough to save their exposition until now, instead of laying out their plans on the drive over as logic would dictate. Dean shows Sam a newspaper article about two dead bodies found with their throats ripped out. "Sounds vampy to me," Dean says. "Yeah, maybe," Sam blahs. They then have their obligatory discussion about the subatomic woes Sam is suffering as a result of the Hell Gate Trials. Sam is displaying no overt symptoms this episode, so they needed to remind us of his impending doom by talking about it. Dean suggests he take a break from the case, but Sam insists he's fine. His electrons are turning into tapioca, but he's totally fine. "Are you okay?" he asks. He reminds Dean that Castiel "dinged him up" pretty good. He also subsequently healed Dean, but of course Sam is talking about feelings, much to Dean's dismay. "I'll go find some herbal tea," he snarks, "and you can find some Cowboy Junkies on the dial, and we can talk it out." It was funnier back in the pilot episode, when their "no chick flick moments" seemed like a refreshing promise and not like big, fat irony.