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The Winchesters get a prerecorded video from Kevin Tran that basically says, "If you're getting this, it means I'm dead and it's your fault. But here's all my Demon Tablet research!" The brothers pore over the countless notes and pictures until Sam realizes he recognizes one of the symbols from his college days. It's Metatron's symbol, but it's been used by the Two Rivers tribe, who've managed to hold onto their original land despite the onslaught of white settlers. Thinking that perhaps Metatron has been protecting them, Sam and Dean set off on a good old fashioned road trip to look for him.
What they find is a Two Rivers hotel that hasn't had a guest in seven years, a hotel manager who hasn't aged in a century or more and a regular shipment of books. Sam starts remembering all sorts of tiny details from the past and confesses to Dean that even as a child he felt somehow impure, as if he knew all along about his demon blood. He feels the Trials are purifying him, because... whatever. He also begins hearing painful ringing noises. It's not the tinnitus they all got from the indoor shooting range last week, but a sign that Sam is "resonating" with Metatron. Dean and Sam the Giant Tuning Fork soon find Metatron holed up at the very same hotel, where he's been gushing over books like some kind of Heavenly Henry Bemis. He's been hanging out with the Two Rivers people since God went on walkabout, in hiding from the rest of Heaven. He's so out of touch that he didn't know that all the archangels are dead and/or gone. He didn't even know who the Winchesters are, so he obviously hasn't gotten around to those "Carver Edlund" books yet.
Meanwhile, Kevin Tran is not dead, but in Crowley's clutches. Crowley has demons pretending to be the Winchesters, trying to trick Kevin into revealing where he's hidden the other half of the Demon Tablet. You know who Crowley also has in his clutches? Castiel, that's who. Thanks to a double agent angel named Ion, Crowley manages to capture God's Dreamiest Angel just before Naomi can do it herself. Crowley shoots him with a special bullet made from melted angel swords. His intent isn't to kill Castiel (yet), but to find the Angel Tablet, which he eventually figures out Castiel is carrying in his abdomen and digs it out with his bare hands. It seems like everything's coming up Crowley, but Kevin soon figures out that the demons are too nice to be the real Winchesters. When Crowley explodes in a fit of rage and tries to kill Kevin, Metatron rescues the little prophet. Kevin, having snatched Crowley's half of the Demon Tablet, announces that the final trial requires that Sam cure a demon.
At the end, the Winchesters are driving back to the Lair of Letters when a familiar rumpled shape appears in the middle of the road. It's Castiel, who's in pretty bad shape, but you would be, too, if the King of Hell had just given you an impromptu C-section. Stay tuned for the full recap.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!THEN! Sam wondered what might the Angel Tablet do, if the Demon Tablet can shut the Gates of Hell. All Castiel knew was that he had to protect it from both Naomi and Dean. (Technically, he said he had to protect it from "you," so we don't know if he meant it in the general "you humans" sense or in the more specific "you, the man who wears three shirts and two jackets regardless of the weather or season" sense.) Dean finally got to meet Naomi, but he didn't exactly shower her with muffin baskets, seeing as how she did all kinds of horrible things to Castiel after she got him out of Purgatory. Castiel wasn't the only angel to go through Naomi's Re-Neducation therapy, as he discovered when poor, doomed Samandriel told him Naomi had been turning their minds to mush. Naomi tried to make like she had Castiel's best interests at heart when she turned to Dean to find the wayward angel, but Dean didn't quite buy it. In other off-and-on plots of the season, the Lord's Loopiest Prophet, Kevin Tran, discovered that the gates of Hell could be closed after passing God's three trials. Dean intended to undertake the trials, but it was Sam who slid into home at the last moment and took his place. This led to Sam becoming melodramatically ill while Dean fretted over him like a hen over her eggs with a fox in the coop. The Lord's Loopiest Prophet began to suffer a breakdown of his own, of the mental sort, when he became convinced that Crowley was infiltrating his dreams. He decided to hit the road without leaving a forwarding address for the Winchesters.
NOW! Kevin wakes up on Garth's houseboat, covered in sticky notes and burgeoning stubble, as if he'd never left at all. Clearly something is amiss, since we saw him skedaddle a few episodes ago, and again just now in the previouslies. He rolls out of bed, adds a sticky note to a wall that is already several layers thick with sticky notes. When a pounding comes at the door, he gulps and approaches with great trepidation. The pounding comes again, this time accompanied by Dean's familiar voice: "Come on, Kevin! Open up! It's us." Kevin opens the door and sprays Dean in the face with a Super Soaker of holy water. Dean sizzles only in the sexy way, and not in the "ahhhh I'm melting!" way. "You forgot the knock," Kevin grumps. "What's the point of a secret knock if you don't use it!" A heretofore unseen Sam leans into the doorway, only to get a blast of holy water. Sam, looking healthier than he has in a long while, just smiles and holds up a satchel. "We got it," he says with a waggle of his brows.
Kevin lets them in as Dean explains that they've managed to get hold of Crowley's half of the Demon Tablet. "It's the light at the end of your tunnel, kid," Dean says. Kevin takes the tablet and immediately dives back into figuring out the trial. "We can finally close the Gates of Hell on Crowley's ass forever!" Sam wastes no time in not-so-subtly trying to get Kevin to dig up the other half of the tablet, but Kevin says he doesn't need to. Sam seems none too pleased about this, but tries not to show it. "Keep your nose to the God stone, Special-K," he says. He says some other stuff, but Kevin is already too deeply engrossed in his work to pay attention.
As Sam and Dean leave the houseboat and walk towards the screen, the backdrop behind them goes all wibbly. Sam and Dean turn into guys who are not Sam and Dean, and only resemble the Winchesters in that they are both ostensibly male and maintain the relative heights of the originals. They walk through a tattered movie screen and into a decrepit theater that is standing in this week for the more common factory or warehouse. It is serving as Crowley's literal staging area, where his demonic minions study a bank of monitors as if going over fresh dailies. Crowley sits in the director's chair amid the graffitied ruins of the theater. "So it's three trials and the Winchesters get to lock the door on me," Crowley muses. He has some notes on his demonic actors' performances: "You, fake Sam, if you tip our hand, I'm gonna have to scrub Kevin's short-term memory again, and that's risky, so watch the patois in there." Fake Sam has no idea what that means, so Crowley has to explain that it's his choice of slang. "That's the way Dean speaks," Crowley says. "Sam is..." Here, he searches for the right words. Finally: "...more basic, more sincere." Crowley has spent too much time thinking about the Winchesters. "I want two distinct, authentic performances," he says, waving them back to their work. He lets out a long, self-satisfied sigh and says, "I was born to direct." Ready... set... fiery title card!
At the Lair O' Letters, Sam huddles at the map table, a green woolen blanket pulled around his shoulder like a cape, looking like the world's biggest, saddest, sickest Hobbit. Dean went looking for something to do in the back half of this season and comes back with a tray laden with food, which he sets down with care in front of Samwise. "Here we go - John Winchester's famous cure-all kitchen sink stew," he says. "Enough cayenne pepper to burn your lips off, just like dad used to make." Sam nudges the tray away without so much as a "thanks," because he coughed out all his manners sometime during his last bout of trialberculosis. He even looks a bit annoyed, as the tray is blocking his view of whatever papers he's studying. "You want me to do the whole airplane thing with the spoon?" Dean asks, picking up said spoon and giving it a tantalizing wave. Sam just frowns up at him and goes back to his studies, so Dean drops the spoon and decides he's going to stop coddling people who don't want to be coddled. Or maybe he just pesters Sam about not eating for three days. He's probably keeping track of Sam's bathroom schedule, too, but he doesn't give voice to such. Instead, he takes out a digital thermometer and advances on his brother.
Sam tries to simultaneously throw off his makeshift cape and get up from the table, doing neither particularly well. Dean fixes him with an accusatory stare. "The bloody handkerchiefs, the fever, the shaky legs... This - " He gestures in Sam's general direction. "-- is not good!" Sam looks exasperated or sick or both, and says, "Well, I'm not good, and I'm not going to be good until we can start moving again." He seems to be under the impression that starting and/or completing the last of the trials will somehow make him all better, where all signs would indicate he will turn into silken tofu before long. "You know how bad I wanna slam the door on all those sons of bitches," Dean says, "but you gotta let me take care of you." Because what else is Dean supposed to do now that his awesome Purgatory storyline is dead and gone? Sam reminds Dean that this isn't just a cold or the flu or even a simple case of cranio-rectal inversion. "This is part of it all," he says. "Those first two trials, they're not just things I did - they're doing something to me, they're changing me."
Luckily, their 8,745th argument about their brotherly issues is interrupted when they get an email from Kevin. Subject line: ****WATCH THIS VIDEO NOW**** Dean clicks on a link in the email and up pops a video of Kevin's sickly face. He looks nearly as bad as Sam at this point. "Sam, Dean, I set up this email with some software on a remote server so it would send itself to you if I didn't reset it with a command once a week. Which means I didn't reset it this week. There's only one reason I wouldn't. If you're watching this, it means I'm dead." Kevin rails at them, at God and everyone else who was responsible for this inconsistent plot. "Crowley must have gotten to me," he says once he's calmed down a bit. "And the one thing I know is I won't break this time. Not sure how I know, but I do." He probably read ahead in the script. He tells them he's giving them a link to all the notes and translations he's uploaded. He starts to cry and says he's sorry. "I know it was my job, but I couldn't..." He can't finish, so he stops recording the video. Dean flings some books off the table and stomps off. Soup isn't going to fix this one.
Later, Sam prints out all of Kevin's notes while Dean tries and fails to track down Garth. Is he dead? Still on vacation? They haven't heard of any new prophets being activated, either, but this doesn't seem to comfort them with the thought that Kevin might still be alive. Dean's frustrated they don't have any leads. "We should have moved him here," he says. I've already gone on and on about this in past recaps, so this time I'll let Beethoven's Fifth Symphony say it for me: "Duh duh duh DUH!"
Meanwhile, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, God's Dreamiest Angel is having some coffee at a Biggerson's. Going on the lam has taken its toll on Castiel's hair, which he's neglected to gel into its usual state of perkiness. A waitress refills his cup. "You know, I remember when you first discovered it," he says of coffee. "Before you started brewing it, you'd just chew the berries. Folktale is true, by the way; you learned it from the goats." The waitress looks at him like he's crazy, which he may well be. "Been on the road a long time?" she asks. "Feels like I've been on the run forever," he says. With a backwards glance at what is probably her manager, she tells Castiel that he needs to order more than coffee if he wants to keep the table. So he orders something called the "Smart-Heart Beer-Battered Tempura Tempters," which probably comes with a side of coronary stents. As the waitress walks away, Castiel's table begins to quiver. "They're getting closer," he says to nobody in particular. This catches a nearby waiter's attention, and he looks over in Castiel's direction just in time to see him vanish. A moment later, two more angels flutter in, one of whom looks like a poor man's Jake Gyllenhaal: Prince of Persia edition. They quickly determine that they've just missed Castiel and flit away again.
Poor Man's Jake Gyllenhaal lands in Naomi's office. "Ion, tell me that you have good news," she says. "He's... using a clever tactic," says the negatively charged atom. "It's a restaurant called Biggerson's. The humans built hundreds of them, almost exactly alike." While he's explaining this, we get flashes of Castiel sipping cups of coffee in Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and so on. The franchises all look the same, except for the changing CGI scenery in the windows behind Castiel. "It's their sameness," Ion says. "We try to orient ourselves, but it's as if we're in every Biggerson's at once, trapped in a quantum superposition!" Castiel looks increasingly worried as he quantum leaps from restaurant to restaurant. "He chooses which one to go to ; that's what gives him the edge," Ion says. That, and the 500 cups of coffee he's almost simultaneously ingesting. "There's just so many Biggersons," Ion says, looking ashamed and defeated. Are they really that low on angels these days? Even if they just have a handful of angels, they could occupy all the restaurants like Castiel is doing, and catch him in no time. But apparently not! Naomi thinks for a moment and hatches a plan: "You say he can't be caught? Then we will simply have to make him stop."
While looking over Kevin's notes, Sam keeps coming across a symbol made up of a group of geometric shapes. He says he recognizes it. "Kevin has it down as a sort of signature - Scribe of God. It appears when Metatron makes one of his editor's notes." He also remembers it from one of his college courses, from a lesson on Native American petroglyphs. Dean, of course, has no idea what a petroglyph is. Quick! To the expository depository! Sam digs up a book and explains that the symbol belonged to the Two Rivers tribe in Colorado. "It says here that they held onto their scrap of mountains while all the other tribes fell to the white man." He scans through the book and comes to the part where it says the symbol means "Messenger of God." Sam rolls his eyes as the epiphany hits him. Dean stands there in uncomprehending silence. Sam wants to hightail it to Colorado and look for Metatron, but Dean is more than a bit skeptical. "So you think this Metatron is hiding out in the mountains with a bunch of Indians?" he asks. "Yeah, I do!" Sam says, then adds, "You're not really supposed to say 'Indians.'" Having thus schooled his uneducated slug of a brother, Sam giddily galumphs away as best he can to get ready for their trip.
Castiel cycles through a number of Biggerson's restaurants before returning to Santa Fe to find his table covered in blood. Why would he go back there when he knew the angels were getting close? More importantly, why did he stop somewhere along the way to fix his hair? It's all perky again. Anyway, the dining room is full of dead people. The only one left alive is the waitress, and she's just barely so. Her eyes have been burnt from their sockets. They're still sizzling when Castiel kneels down beside her in horror. "They said you have to stop," she whimpers. "You have to stop." He reaches out to touch her with a healing hand, but Ion and the other angel intercept him. The poor waitress is still repeating the message when the commercial break chomps her off the screen.
The Winchesters arrive in Colorado and pull up at the Two Rivers Hotel and Casino. It's a stony, imposing sort of building, more like a cross between a mental asylum and an apartment complex than a place that invites the reckless wagering of money. Inside, the brothers find the place deserted. A motif of wood flute in the soundtrack tries to lend some authenticity to the proceedings. Dean rings the desk bell and a moment later, a man with long, black hair appears. He doesn't say anything in welcome, and more or less just kind of stares at Sam and Dean. "We'd like a room," Dean says. The guy just stares some more. Dean has to reiterate the request before the guy finally hands over a registration book. While Dean signs in, Sam wanders off to look around with blurry vision and hear with ringing ears.
"You have to stop," the waitress is still saying when we drop back in on Santa Fe. By now, Naomi has joined the party and grown tired of the endless loop. With a snap of her fingers, she breaks the waitress's neck. "We were supposed to be their shepherds, not their murderers," Castiel says. "Not always, angel," Naomi says. "There was that day back in Egypt, not so long ago, when we slew every firstborn whose door wasn't splashed with lamb's blood." Castiel's like, "Well, I wasn't there, so nyah." She says he was there, but doesn't remember. She's been messing around in his head for a pretty long time. "Honestly, I think you came off the line with a crack in your chassis," she says, snapping a chair into place so she can sit down across from him. She grumps about how Castiel's always been a rebellious one, never quite doing what he's been told. "Where is the Angel Tablet?" she asks, even though from her own recounting of history, he's not likely to tell her. Indeed, he gets a sly sort of smile and says, "In the words of good friend: bite me." She promises to do just that, then sends her minion angels off to search every Biggerson's for the tablet.
On the fake houseboat, with fake Sam and fake Dean, Kevin stops working for want of food. He sends the Winchesters off with a list of specific foods (not just mashed potatoes, but garlic mashed potatoes), which Sam and Dean seem amenable to fetching for him. "Those guys aren't half bad," Crowley says, watching the monitors from his director's chair. One of his toady demons is quick to agree with him: "No, sir! You chose well!" If that guy kisses up any harder, Crowley's going to have to perform an exorcism on his ass to get his lips out. "Of course, if I weren't so busy I could have played Dean myself," Crowley says. "Oh, you would have made a great Dean, sir," the toady says. Sensing he may have laid it on a little thick, the toady quickly turns back to his work.
Back at the Overlook Hotel, Sam is sprawled out in bed when Dean returns to give him the rundown. "We're the only guests in the whole place," he says. "Last entry in the registry was in '06." Sam's too busy having fever dreams to pay much attention, though. He starts reminiscing about the time their dad took them to the Grand Canyon on mules and Dean's mule farted constantly. Little did Dean know at the time that it would help prepare Dean for long road trips with Sam. Also, since when is John Winchester the dad who takes his kids on mule rides through the Grand Canyon and makes them soup when they get sick? Anyway, Sam lolls and LOLs until Dean decides there are more important things to do. "I'm gonna go check out the Two Rivers travel museum," he says. "I'm gonna follow the hotel manager," Sam says. "Doctor Scowly Scowl. He's like a villain from Scooby Doo." He sits up, all raring to go, but just as quickly falls back onto the bed when Dean suggests he get some rest.
At the museum, Dean learns the history of the Two Rivers people from one of its own. The land was nigh uninhabitable back in the day, but their leader insisted they stay. "He claimed that this is the home on Earth of the Great Spirit's sacred messenger," he says, "and that if they made offerings, their blessings would be many." Dean listens to all this and asks, "What were the offerings?" The tour guide is a little confused at first, like nobody's ever asked him that. Maybe the museum doesn't get any more visitors than the hotel does. "He asked the people to tell him stories," the guide says. As Dean pokes around the museum, he comes across a badly Photoshopped picture that is probably supposed to pass for a daguerreotype. One of the men in the picture looks vaguely like the hotel manager. Musical stings signify that this is Very Meaningful, but it would probably make more sense to assume it's an ancestor since it doesn't look exactly like the manager. "I bet I know what the blessings were," Dean says. Not Photoshop skills, that's for sure.
Meanwhile, Sam looks like he's just pooped himself or is very near to doing so. With considerable effort, he flings himself out of bed and stumbles into the hallway outside his room. His vision goes shaky and he hears that buzzing, ringing sound again. Man, someone really needs to vacuum that hallway. I don't care if you haven't had guests in seven years, it's just gross to let that much dust pile up. Sam squeezes himself into an alcove when he hears the elevator doors open. He can sort of make out the hotel manager dropping off a stack of boxes outside one of the rooms. Sam waits until the coast is clear, then tears into one of the boxes. It's full of bubble wrap! Joyous bubble wrap! And also books. Sinister music plays. Maybe they're eeeevil books. Sam stumbles back to his room and fishes his phone out of his pocket. He manages to call Dean, but passes out before he can say anything.
You know who else is having a rough time? Castiel, that's who. The angel who isn't Ion is currently doing his best to ugly up Castiel's face. It's not an easy task. Ion returns to tell everyone that he hasn't found the Angel Tablet at any of the other restaurants. Naomi tries to appeal to Castiel's sense of duty: "Let us put the tablet back where it should be." He shakes his head. "I need to protect it," he says. "From all of us." Naomi decides it's time to get serious with the torture, but the sound of gunfire interrupts her. The angel who isn't Ion goes down in a spray of blood and angelic light. Another gunshot and Ion is winged; the wound in his arm glows as if he'd been stabbed by an All-Purpose Angel Sword. Naomi is aghast to see Crowley holding the offending firearm.
Back at the Overlook, Sam wakes up in a bathtub of ice water. He flails and makes a series of incoherent sounds and bats away Dean's hands when he tries to help him out. "I found you on the floor, passed out with a temperature of 107," Dean says. He wraps a towel around baby bro's shoulders. "Metatron is here," Sam says between bouts of shivering. "I know it, I can hear him!" He says he's connected to Metatron somehow. He tells Dean about the books the manager has been delivering to him, which makes Dean remember what he heard about the messenger's yen for stories.
Back to Biggerson's, where Crowley is showing off his new gun. "I had my R&D people melt down one of your [All-Purpose Angel Swords] and cast it into bullets." That doesn't seem like it should be possible, but whatever. Naomi skedaddles without taking Castiel with her, for some reason. Ion has left behind, as well, but it turns out he's working with the King of Hell. Crowley shoots Castiel in the gut; the wound glows, but God's Dreamiest Angel manages to cling to life.
Ion brings Castiel to Crowley's office so everyone can have a chat. "I assume you won't die just yet," Crowley says. "Takes a painful long time to bleed out from the gut." Why would bleeding kill an angel? It's not like it's the angel's blood. I've got to stop wondering about these things or I'll never make it through the recap. "You can do whatever you want, Crowley," Castiel says. "I'll never tell you where I buried the tablet." Crowley doesn't think that will be a problem. He's gotten the backstory from Ion about how Castiel touched the tablet and broke his connection to Naomi. "I was thinking to myself, 'Self, if Cass got away from her by touching the tablet, why would he ever stop touching the tablet?'" Castiel looks nervous because his powers do not include a working poker face. Crowley pokes his fingers into Castiel's bullet wound and fishes around in his innards until he pulls out the tablet while Castiel gurgles and screams. Congratulations! It's a five-pound chunk of stone! Ion looks away, surprisingly squeamish for someone who's been selling out the angels. Before he can work up a really good gloat, Crowley gets a call from fake Sam and fake Dean. Kevin sent them off in search of the other half of the tablet and instead imprisoned them in a Devil's Trap with "Spanish Flea" blasting at full volume. Crowley flounces off to deal with his latest string of incompetent minions, leaving Ion in charge of Castiel.
Having dried himself off and styled his hair anew, Sam leads Dean back down the hall in search of Metatron. He also takes a trip down Memory Lane, remembering how Dean used to read an illustrated King Arthur story to him. "All the knights were on a quest for the Holy Grail," he says, "and I remember looking at this picture of Sir Galahad, and he was kneeling, and light streaming over his face..." Speaking of faces, Sam is doing a lot of very distracting things with his. It's like there's a fly somewhere on it and he's trying to crush it using only his facial muscles. Sam goes on: "I remember thinking I could never go on a quest like that... because I'm not clean." Dean looks a bit heartbroken to hear that, so he must not be as distracted by the facial gymnastics as I am. "You think maybe I knew, that deep down I had demon blood in me?" Sam asks, teary eyed. "Sam, it's not your fault," Dean says. "It doesn't matter anymore," Sam says, "because these trials are purifying me." They are the highest of high colonics. Maybe that's why Sam looked like he was about to poop himself. Crap out the evil, Sam! By the time they get to the elevator, the boxes that had been stacked up to it are gone. Dean notices that the nearest room's door is ajar and nudges it open.
Inside, books have been stacked from the floor to nearly the ceiling. It's like a rather tidy version of Hoarders, for although the books are many, they are arranged in neat columns. However, all I could think when first seeing this scene was, "Holy crap, I would hate to work for the props department that week." So... much... stacking. As the Winchesters push further into the suite, they find themselves face to face with the barrel of a rifle. At the other end of the rifle is Dudley "Booger" Dawson. The music goes "EEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeEEEeeeeeeeeeeEEE!" for kind of a bizarrely long time before the screen just can't take it anymore and goes to commercials.
"Who are you?" Booger asks when we return. "This is Metatron?" Dean asks instead of answering. He's obviously unimpressed. Metatron instantly appears behind the Winchesters, gun still raised, and orders them to sit down. Since the place isn't exactly laid out for guests, Dean takes the sole chair while Sam contorts himself onto the coffee table. The ringing in Sam's ears grows louder; his vision blurs. "Who sent you?" Metatron asks. "We came on our own," Sam shouts above the sound in his own head. "We're the Winchesters!" There's no immediate sign of recognition from Metatron. "Did Michael send you?" he asks. "Or Lucifer?" Sam can't believe Metatron hasn't heard of them. They're practically the Kardashians of the hunting world, for crying out loud!
Castiel is trying to reason with Ion. "This charge was left to us," he says. "It's our mission." He's clutching his belly, trying to keep his angelic intestines from spilling out. As much coffee as he's been drinking, he should be leaking more java than blood. "They've been in all our heads," Ion says, fed up with all the angel mind games. While Ion paces and pouts, Castiel takes the opportunity to sneak the slug out from his wound. Also, Crowley has apparently made a Chinese law firm his new office. Was he having the carpets cleaned at his old office?
Speaking of Crowley: the King of Hell has returned to the fake houseboat to confront Kevin. There's a Devil's Trap in front of the threshold, but Crowley just knocks the door over on top of it and walks over. "You little prat," he seethes. Kevin doesn't bother to get up from his repast of barbecue rips and (garlic) mashed potatoes. In fact, for the first time since this all began, Kevin looks completely unafraid. "Screw you," he says with a smile. Crowley sets down the still-bloody Angel Tablet. "How'd you figure it out?" he asks. "It started when they forgot the secret knock," Kevin says. "But really, it was the way they acted. I don't think on their best day Sam and Dean would get me a barbecue dinner, not when there are leftover burritos in the fridge." That would make more sense if we hadn't seen the Winchesters bringing him food at least twice before.
"Michael and Lucifer, those dudes are in the deep fryer," Dean tells Metatron. "We put them there ourselves!" Sam shouts, holding onto his ears. Metatron is further surprised to learn that Gabriel and Raphael are dead, as well. "Can you turn that down?!" Sam practically yodels. This is what finally gets Metatron to lower his rifle. He realizes that Sam is "resonating," which is the new "sparkling." "You're undertaking the trials. You're trying to pull one of the great levers, aren't you?" Sam's dumbfounded look is all he needs for confirmation. "When you get this far along, you start resonating with the Word," he says. "Or its source on the material plane." Meaning, of course, Metatron. He tells them his backstory, which is that he was kind of a low-level angel before God chose him. When God decided to leave, he had Metatron write down his instructions. "Then He was gone," he says. "After that, the archangels took over. They cried and they wailed, and they wanted their father back." Eventually, the archangels decided to start running the show themselves, which led to the wreckage that was Supernatural's fifth season. But apparently, they want to do more than that, and want control of the whole universe. (Which will more likely than not center on the Midwestern United States.) "But they couldn't do anything that big without the Word of God," says Metatron. He realized that they would realize they needed him to find the tablets, and so he hid.
Ion is in the middle of an existential crisis when Castiel finally works up the strength to knock him upside the head. While Ion is lying prone and helpless, Castiel jabs him in the eye with the slug he just fished out of his gut. For some reason, this kills Ion more or less instantly. Are the eyes of an angel especially vulnerable?
Back to more sitting and talking with Metatron and the Winchesters. Dean sums up for us what has already pretty much been established: "So, you've been holed up here, or in a wigwam, or before that in a cave... listening to stories and reading books?" Metatron laughs like a naughty Frenchman. "What you brought to His earth... All the mayhem, the murder. Just the raw invention of God's naked apes - it was mind-blowing!" He seems to mean all this as a compliment. What really impressed him, though, was mankind's storytelling. "That is the true flower of free will - at least as you've mastered it so far," he says. He goes on gushing about all the books he's read, and he still hasn't read them all. Obviously he hasn't gotten around to Chuck's books, yet, or he would have known who the Winchesters are. Sam has had just about enough of all this and begs Metatron to kill him. "All this time you've been hiding here, how much suffering have you read over?" he asks, pulling the gun to his chest. Dean gently nudges him out of harm's way and faces Metatron himself. He takes the scribe to task for not looking after Kevin Tran, which, you know, is true enough. But it's not like the Winchesters have much room to talk after failing to invite Kevin to their totally evil-proof bunker.
Houseboat. Kevin indulges in a little taunting as he flaunts that Sam is now up to the third trial. "You have no idea what's on the tablet," Kevin says, holding up the half that's been in Crowley's possession. "The power you could have gotten from this, if you hadn't been running around like a chicken with its head cut off..." Crowley finally gets pissed off enough to grab Kevin by the throat and shove him up against the nearest wall. A moment later, angelic light pours out of Kevin's eyes, then explodes, sending Crowley flying through the as if shot from a circus cannon.
Kevin has been brought to Metatron's hotel room. He seems fairly dead until Metatron places a healing hand over his chest. Kevin's heart beats again and the bruises around his throat fade. Even the circles under his eyes lessen. He remains dutifully asleep so that Metatron and Dean can have a talk in the room. "How did you get past Crowley's angel warding?" Dean asks. "I'm the Scribe of God," Metatron says, like duh. Dean is intent on shutting the Gates of Hell, and wonders if Metatron is going to help. Metatron says it's Dean's (and Sam's, I guess) choice to close the Gates. "But you're going to have to weigh that choice. Ask yourself: What is it going to take to do this, and what will the world be like after it's done?" Finally! Finally somebody (besides recappers and viewers) asks what the Winchesters should have been asking themselves since they first learned of the trials. Dean thinks about this for a while, but Kevin wakes up before any further discussion can take place. He has Crowley's half of the Demon Tablet. "Third trial," he says. "What is it?" Sam asks. "To cure a demon," Metatron answers for him. Sam's face goes, "Ruh-roh!" It's like a dog out of a Scooby Doo cartoon!
Dean is still having fits over the thought of curing a demon as they're driving back to the Lair O' Letters in the middle of yet another rainy night. Presumably, they've left Kevin in Meatron's care. "If we do this," Dean says, "you get better, right?" Sam says he feels better already, just having a direction to move in. Maybe that means Dean won't have to make him soup or wash his hair anymore. They seem cautiously optimistic about heading towards the end, but what they're heading towards is a man lying in the middle of the road. Dean steps on the brakes and swerves to a stop. He gets out of the car, sees the familiar overcoat-clad shape in the Impala's headlights. "Cass?!" Castiel looks up, bloodied, and groans, "A little help here?" Sam and Dean trade startled looks for a while. We'll just have to assume that they do eventually help Castiel, because that's where the episode ends.
Tippi Blevins has been possessed by a recapping demon. Send holy water to b_tippi@yahoo.com, or chant spells at her on Twitter: @TippiB.