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To Sam's surprise, Dean plans to take on a case by himself. It could be a healthy step toward severing familial ties, but then they end up hitting the road together like always. It seems a young woman was killed while taking selfies alone in her bedroom, and some of the pictures show a faceless creature skulking around behind her. Alas, when the Winchesters arrive on scene, they find the woman's grieving mother has already hired Ed and Harry, also known as those goddamned Ghostfacers.
Ed and Harry are sort of revoltingly gleeful at the thought of how much fame this case is going to bring them. (Are we entirely sure they're not some sort of ghouls?) Dean feels like a ghost is behind the murder, but Ed and Harry's pet theory is that a creature called Thinman is to blame. The Winchesters have never heard of such a thing, but the Ghostfacers are downright experts! Why, they even wrote a book about Thinman, and set up a website where users can report their own sightings of the elusive monster. The weird thing is that those pictures from the victim's phone somehow ended up on the site. Either Thinman posted them himself, or someone fiddled around in the evidence locker. Someone like.... the completely obvious sheriff's deputy who was in charge of the case!
When Thinman kills a restaurant manager, the CCTV footage of the murder again ends up online. Suddenly Ed wants to turn the case over to the Winchesters. He admits to them that he totally made up Thinman. Harry was ready to leave the Ghostfacers and marry his girlfriend, but decided to stick around and hunt Thinman with his buddy. Thus begins the rain of anvils as Ed and Harry argue about lies and secrets, while the Winchesters stand around waving neon signs that say, "These are totally us, you guys!" Ed was selfish and wanted to keep Harry with him, like Dean was selfish and wanted to keep Sam with him. Now, I suppose there's a chance that this isn't the message they're trying to get across. Perhaps this painfully simplistic version of the Winchester angst is trying to convey the exact opposite of what it seems. But you know what? I wouldn't hold my breath.
In the end, the completely obvious sheriff's deputy captures Sam and Dean. He has an accomplice in the form of a skinny psycho who wears the Thinman costume and enjoys killing people on film. So they're not supernatural creatures, but human monsters who decided to copycat Ed's creation. Just before they can snuff the Winchesters, the Ghostfacers barge in and save the day. Dean kills one guy and Harry kills the other to save Ed's life. This doesn't mean they're getting back together, though, and end up going their separate ways like the Winchesters really should. Stay tuned for the full recap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!THEN! Sam's voiceover reminds us of these guys named Ed and Harry who called themselves the Ghostfacers. They were ridiculous and clownish, and played at being ghost hunters when they were really just shameless fame whores. The Winchesters met them early in the series, when Sam still had bangs and Dean wasn't yet dead inside. Over the years, the angst between the Winchesters grew and festered, and erupted like a painful ass boil. Several times over. "We are family," Dean reminded Sam recently. "Everything that has ever gone wrong between us is because we're family," Sam reminded him right back. To illustrate this latest boil, the show plays back a scene of Dean beating the ever-loving snot out of Sam. Mind you, this is a fight that took place entirely in Sam's head, but they're not going to let crap like imaginary scenarios get in the way. Anyway, Sam said he would keep working with Dean, but the brotherly relationship was off the table. What, exactly, did that mean? They never really explained. "You didn't save me for me," Sam said. "You did it for you."
NOW! It's nighttime in Springdale, Washington, according to the helpful chyron. A teenaged girl prances about her bedroom, taking selfies with her phone and listening to terrible music. She hears a loud thud downstairs and peers into the hallway. "Mom?" she calls out. She gets no answer, so she goes back into her room. She's worried enough to lock her door, but not worried enough to stop perfecting her duck-lipped poses. When she swipes back over her pictures, she sees a man standing over her shoulder. His head looks like it's made of Silly Putty and coconut husks. The girl makes a face like, "Ugh, photobombers are the worst." She turns around slowly and sees him standing in the corner behind her. The lights blink out.
The girl runs into her closet and draws the louvers shut. She calls 9-1-1 on her phone. "There's someone in my room," she whispers. She starts crying and can't manage to get out her address when asked. A knife inches toward her shoulder from behind, held by a normal-looking human hand. She screams and the camera jumps outside the closet door just as blood comes pouring through the louvers. Cue the winged title card. Flap... flap... kaboom!
Lair O' Letters. Sam's poking at his laptop in the library when Dean stops by, carrying his duffel in one hand. "All right, I'll be back," Dean says. He starts to leave without waiting for a response. "Where you headed?" Sam asks. No! He was almost gone! Let him go, dammit! "Washington; I caught a case," Dean says. "You want me to come with?" Sam asks. Dude, if he'd wanted you to come with him, he would have asked, or at least dropped some passive-aggressive little hints. "Do you want to come?" Dean asks, a bit surprised. "Why wouldn't I?" Sam asks. "Because lately with you, up is down and down is sideways," Dean says. Sam is like the Kama Sutra of emotions! Dean says he doesn't know what Sam wants, and Sam gives a frustrated sort of sigh, but says nothing. So Dean waves goodbye and hauls ass up the stairs.
Or maybe he drops his bag onto the nearest table and tells Sam all about the case. As we saw in the teaser, the girl's windows and doors were all locked from the inside. Dean shows Sam a picture of the girl and her murderous photobomber, which somehow ended up posted online. "Who's the wallflower?" Sam asks. "Best guess? A ghost caught on film," Dean says. Sam thinks it over, then starts packing up his gear, much to Dean's surprise. Couldn't they at least take separate cars? I know it's bad for the environment, but whatever. It's just the fictional environment anyway.
So they drive in what must be a painfully awkward silence all the way to Washington, where they pretend to be FBI agents to meet with the girl's mother. The carpet in the closet is still bloody. "I scrubbed for hours," she says. "I'll have to rip up the carpet. My daughter, Casey, picked out the color herself." Sam makes a sympathetic face and says, "We're very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Miles." Yes, it's very sad to lose a carpet.
While Dean slips away to scan for funky EMF readings, Sam questions Mrs. Miles. Did Casey have any enemies? Did they notice the electricity acting up? Mrs. Miles says there was nothing like that, and no cold spots, either. Dean looks up from across the room, like, interest piqued. "Why do you mention cold spots?" he asks. She explains she was frustrated with the police, and couldn't afford a private investigator. "So, when the supernaturalists called... I know to the FBI it's not exactly orthodox, but these men had answers had answers no one else had." She says they're coming by later to have a look. "Did these 'supernaturalists' give you a name?" Dean asks.
For an answer, we cut to a white van emblazoned with the Ghostfacers logo. Sigh. Goddamned Ghostfacers. Sam and Dean come face to face with the van as the goofy theme music plays. "Son of a bitch," Dean grumbles.
The van is parked outside a diner, and inside the diner sits the goddamned Ghostfacers themselves. Ed checks his phone. "Oh, wow, look! We got two more followers!" Harry makes a noncommittal sound, because he's busy checking his own phone. He's obsessing over someone's Facebook page. "What did Dana post?" Ed asks. "It's just... she changed her profile pic," Harry says. He shows his pal the pic in question, complaining that he can see some guy's arm around her shoulders. His obsessing is cut short when the Winchesters slide into the booth seats to them. (Notice that the seats are parallel and that Sam sits to Harry while Dean sits to Ed. "NOTICE IT!" screams the show.) "Oh, the Winchesters, yay," Harry says. "Says no one ever," Ed amends for him. Dean ignores the snarky greeting. "You two clowns are going to get in that Mystery Machine outside, and you're gonna leave town," he says. "Or I'm gonna put holes in your knees." The goddamned Ghostfacers scoff at the very idea.
Before the discussion can continue, though, a waiter approaches the table to offer them some coffee. The fellow is tall, skinny and conspicuously awkward. His boss comes over to conspicuously berate him for the poor job he's doing. "There's still crud on these plates," the boss says. "Sorry, Trey," the waiter mumbles before slinking away... conspicuously.
"First of all," Harry says, "you guys don't scare us." He pulls up his shirt to reveal the small gun tucked into the waist of his jeans. "Say hola to my little pistola!" Ugh. Thanks for the close-up of his gnarly belly button, too, show. It looks like his stomach is eating a lima bean. Dean smirks. "Am I supposed to be impressed by that treasure trail, or by the lady gun you got hiding in your pants?" He calls them out for being the gross little fame whores that they are. Arguments ensue. Boring, boring arguments. During the bickering we learn that Ed and Harry – or the Dumpy Duo, as Dean calls them – is all that's left of the Ghostfacers. The others had the sense to ditch them, it seems. Dean makes one last push to get them out of town. "Look, this ghost will land you two dead in five seconds flat," he says. "They think it's a ghost," Harry laughs to Ed. "Okay, what do you think it is?" Sam asks, finally joining the conversation. Instead of answering, Harry sneers and blurts out, "Amazon me, bitches!" So the Winchesters go find some of those murderous Amazon women from Season 7 and sic them on these idiots.
Or maybe they go back to their motel room and hop online, where they learn that the goddamned Ghostfacers have written a book titled The Skinny on Thinman. "What the hell's a Thinman?" Dean wonders, reading the laptop screen over Sam's shoulder. Sam clicks on a picture that shows a skinny, faceless guy wearing a fitted cassock, while a jogger speeds by him, unaware of his presence. "That does look kind of like whatever was behind Casey Miles," Sam says. Dean rolls up his sleeves, and for a moment I get excited that they're going to give us a peep of the Mark of Cain. But no, his forearm appears to be as featureless as Thinman's face. Dean isn't impressed. Sam reads from an excerpt of the book: "Thinman, an urban legend started on the world wide web, lurks in the background of his victims' lives until he's ready to kill them."
The Winchesters argue. Sam thinks they're onto something new; Dean thinks it's just a regular ghost. Sam thinks Dean is letting his dislike of the goddamned Ghostfacers cloud his judgment; Dean reminds him he got EMF readings from Casey's room. Sam points out the house was close to power lines which could have messed with the readings; Dean points out right back that the girl died in a locked room. Sam blah blah blah; Dean blah blah blah. Dean pulls out his own laptop and gets busy looking up any deaths that might have spawned an angry spirit.
At the Miles house, the goddamned Ghostfacers are doing their "jobs." This basically entails filming themselves being colossal assholes. Well, mostly it's Ed being an asshole at the beginning. "The closet: the setting of the sunset of Casey's life," he says into the camera. He notices that Harry is busy checking his computer. "Would you stop Facebook stalking your ex-girlfriend?" he asks. "She changed her relationship status to 'it's complicated,'" Harry says, ignoring him. Ed reminds him that it was Dana who broke up with him. Harry sets side his laptop and takes a deep, cleansing breath so he can refocus on the task at hand. "We're so close to finding Thinman," Harry says. "I can smell him. I can smell his musk!" He proceeds to sniff around in the closet and buries his nose in the dead girl's bra. What a class act. "This is really serious," Ed says. He suggests turning the case over to the Winchesters. Harry is incensed. "What the hell is wrong with you? We can't let those jockstraps steal our glory!" He says they have to prove that The Haterz were wrong – specifically that the team members who left were wrong to pursue a normal life. "We're gonna be on Dr. Phil," Harry says.
Ed gets psyched up again and goes back into the closet so that he can restart his narration. "The bedroom of a teenage girl was meant for two things," he says as Harry records him. "Giggles... and joy. Until one night, Thinman turned the giggles into blood." Harry gives a delighted laugh. "You are so money right now! This is gonna pay off in ladies, Ed. Lots and lots of ladies!" He very nearly gets out that they're soon to be swimming in pussy, but Mrs. Miles walks in just before he can get out the censor-worthy word. "I thought you boys might be thirsty," she says, and beats them over their heads with a tray of lemonade. Or maybe she just gives them a disapproving look while comedic music plays.
Motel du Jour. The Winchesters sit across from each other and read each other their research. So much info dumping. At this point, I would be open to new forms -- any new forms -- of delivering exposition. I don't care if it even makes sense to the plot. They could take turns beat-boxing and rapping details to each other. They could bust out in interpretive dance. They could don berets and mime to each other the pertinent information, or put on puppet shows, or...or compose limericks!
Dean:
There once was a creature quite thin,
Whose origins were really so dim.
All my research has said
That no one who's dead
Unearthed a ghost, vamp or Jinn.
Sam:
But a legend was urbanly known,
On the 'net with images shown.
A man with smooth head
Stalked the soon-dead.
The proof should leave your mind blown!
"So, Thinman's stalking folks?" Dean asks. "According to the lore," Sam says. "According to the idiots," Dean corrects him. He wonders why they haven't heard of any of the deaths before now. Sam says the deaths themselves didn't seem terribly supernatural, plus all the photos except Casey's look pretty fake. "Casey's photo wasn't doctored," he says. "Whatever was behind her... was really there." Dean is more boggled than ever. "How can something be both real and fake at the same time?" he asks. I dunno... how can you guys be brothers and not brothers at the same time? Anyway, don't most of the monsters on this show look pretty awful in the CGI department? That's why so many of them just look like regular people with glowing hands. They decide to figure out how Casey's pictures got from her phone to an internet forum.
So their stop is the sheriff's office, where the deputy greets them with a big box of evidence from the crime scene. "Is the sheriff around? We got a couple questions we'd like to ask him," Dean says. "Sorry to disappoint, but the sheriff's on a hunting trip," the deputy says. "But I sure appreciate you agents being here! I could use all the help I can get." He's so obviously in on the murder that he shall henceforth be known as the Completely Obvious Deputy, or COD for short. "Was this cracked when you found it?" Sam asks, holding up Casey's phone. "Yeah, maybe she dropped it," says COD. The Winchesters are baffled about something, and talk it out.
There once was a problem of time,
'Tween death and pictures online.
How does one post
To the 'net if a ghost?
Boy, do our suits make us fine.
COD floats the idea that there's a supernatural explanation for all this. "A couple of fellas came by asking questions about the girl's death," he says, "suggested they might be able to help." He gleefully mentions the book these fellas gave him. The Winchesters are so annoyed that maybe this is why they don't notice how weird the deputy is acting.
Diner. That annoying manager is counting up the receipts, all alone and in the dark, when he hears a knock at the front door. He peers outside, sees nobody, and goes back to work. He hears the knocking again, and pulls up the security camera feeds on his computer. He cycles through all the cameras, noting nothing out of place until he gets around to the one that's pointed at him. That's when he sees the bald, faceless man in the cassock standing behind him. He turns around just in time to get slashed across the throat. His blood sprays across a fridge full of mayo and ketchup. Nooo! Not the condiments!
The Winchesters arrive at the diner the morning to find the goddamned Ghostfacers already there. "What are these two crap shoots doing here?" Dean asks COD. "Well, I figured it wouldn't hurt to go a little Medium," COD says. Ed and Harry crawl all over the counter to contaminate the crime scene and record footage of the dead manager. Dean makes no attempt to hide his disdain for the whole situation. Sam heads off with COD to look at the security camera video.
Dean walks over to the counter and slaps Harry on the ass. Harry yelps and clambers down off the counter. "I thought I told you to beat it," Dean says. "What, are you gonna out me, agent?" Harry asks, making air quotes around the last word. This gets Dean to back down just a bit, instead of making him punch the guy in the throat. They argue about whether or not they're dealing with a Tulpa (they're not), and whether or not the goddamned Ghostfacers are just fame-seeking assholes (they are). "Thinman is part man, part tree," Ed explains. "Some people believe he emerged from the nightmare of an autistic boy," Harry says, speaking melodramatically into the camera.
Sam and COD call everyone over to watch the security video. "Check it out," Sam says. Good thing you said that, Sam, or nobody would have known to look at the screen. "Whoa," Ed and Harry say in unison. "How did he jump from the parking lot to the diner?" Dean asks. "Everyone knows Thinman can teleport," Harry sighs. "I didn't even get a blip on my EMF," Ed notes, consulting his reader. "You Feds believers now?" asks COD with unconcealed excitement. Ed and Harry scamper away, with Ed seeming particularly nervous for some reason.
Under the light of a full moon, the goddamned Ghostfacers speed away in their ridiculous van. "Holy wow," Harry gushes, checking his laptop. "Someone posted the Thinman diner footage to the comments section of our blog!" Harry is thrilled, but Ed seems genuinely freaked out. Harry starts changing out of his street clothes into an all-black ensemble. "Why are you putting your ninja outfit on?" Ed asks. "I'm not gonna wait for somebody else to die," Harry says. "I'm gonna find Thinman tonight!" He plans to go wander around the woods, since that's where everyone knows Thinman likes to hide. Again, Ed wants to hand the case off to the Winchesters, and again Harry scoffs at the idea. He sees this as their chance to make up for everything they've lost.
Motel. The Winchesters have another sit-and-chat over beers and road food. "When I think of teleporting, I think of Crossroads demons," Sam says. I think of Star Trek. "Yeah, a demon that likes to stab and watch YouTube," says Dean, around a mouthful of trans fats. Sam mentions that the diner video is already online. "It's like somebody wants people to see Thinman in action," he says. "'Cause people are sick," Dean says. All this talk of viral videos reminds Dean of happier times: "Remember when you were five, and got dressed up as Batman and jumped off the shed because you thought you could fly?" Sam's like, "After you jumped first!" Dean's all, "Hey, I was nine, and I was dressed up like Superman! Everybody knows that Batman can't fly." They both have a laugh about it. Sam broke his arm and Dean took him to the emergency room on the handlebars of his bike. Say it with me now: Aww. Then they get all sad, because of how much they suck now.
Ed barges into their room before they can get any sadder. "I gotta tell you guys something important and then the case is yours," he says. The Winchesters make serious faces.
Before I can translate the ensuing exposition into limericks, we join Harry in his hunt for Thinman. With camera in hand and flashlight perched atop his head, he prowls around a parking lot at the edge of a wooded area. A woman packing groceries into her minivan gives him a wary look, but keeps packing away. You'd think with two murders in the last few days, people would be a little more freaked out by random weirdos like that. "Harry here," he narrates to his camera. "Investigating a possible Thinman habitat... in the woods!" A car drives along a well-lit street mere feet away. He blathers on and on in "comedic" fashion, but it's nothing you need to remember.
Back at the motel, Ed is in the middle of his confession. The other Ghostfacers left to pursue their own dreams, and Ed was mostly happy for them. "But Harry? I couldn't let him give into his girl," he says. "I mean, she called the Ghostfacers stupid!" Ed continues his confession...
There once was a buddy named Harry,
Whose girlfriend he wanted to marry.
But Ed hadn't the stones
To go it alone,
So he invented a monster so scary.
The Winchesters look horrified. Ed looks embarrassed. Recapper looks at a rhyming dictionary.
Meanwhile, Harry is still on his crawl through the suburban wilds. He's so busy narrating his hunt that he doesn't notice Thinman hiding in the shadows behind him.
Back to the motel room of revealed deceptions. "So you're saying this crap is actually crap," Dean recaps. Ed explains how he did it: "One old photo of a butler and a lot of Photoshop later, I posted it online horror forums under Anonymous." He says he just faked the one case, but then other people started posting their own pictures. "It was so awesome to have a following," he says, "and Harry was just so into it!"
"You have to tell him," Sam says. "If I tell him, he'll leave the Ghostfacers," Ed says. "If you don't tell him, he's gonna leave anyway," Sam says. "Trust me: secrets ruin relationships." The camera's focus shifts to Dean, the teller of secrets and ruiner of relationships. Ed resists, but even Dean – the lying liar who lies – has to insist upon the truth.
Harry comes across a few scattered twigs on a pathway. "It looks like a formation... of sticks," he describes for his future viewers. "It could have been left here for us by Thinman." He hears a rustling in the distance and freaks out. "We! Are not! Alone!" He turns the camera around to record his reaction, and sees Thinman peering over his shoulder. He turns around and gets a blade to the gut. Even still, he manages to knee his attacker in the nuts. Thinman makes a mental note to invest in an athletic cup as Harry makes his escape.
He runs into the road just as the Winchesters and Ed drive up. Everybody stares at him, and at the blood pouring through his fingers where he's holding his belly. His knees buckle, but the Winchesters rush to catch him as Ed looks on in guilty horror.
It all seems very dire, but Sam bandages him up during a commercial break and he seems none the worse for wear. His enthusiasm certainly hasn't dimmed. "We were right, Ed! Thinman's real!" Ed just makes a guilty face. Dean rejoins them after having a look around. "There's some fresh tire tracks back there," he says. Harry doesn't understand why they're looking for a car when Thinman doesn't drive. The Winchesters fix Ed with accusatory looks. "Uh, Harry," Ed starts to say.
Then suddenly they're at the motel, and Ed's already confessed his dirty sins. Not that I was looking forward to the talk, but it seems like a weird transition. "Why didn't you tell me that before?" Harry asks. "Because I thought you were gonna get mad," Ed says. "I am mad – really, really mad," Harry says. "I was gonna get married! I left her to run around with you, living some lie!" They then proceed to have a rehash of any number of the Winchesters' arguments, about Dean saving Sam for selfish reasons and Sam being forced to give up what he wanted. "You couldn't have been that hot to marry her if you ran off with me based on a fuzzy internet picture," Ed says. Or maybe he actually just tells Harry to call his ex and try to get back together with her. But Harry says it's too late for that, because blah, blah Facebook status. "I can't trust you anymore," says Sam – er, Harry.
Ed leaves the room to give him some time to think, and runs into Sam in the hallway outside. "How'd it go?" Sam asks. "It... went," Ed says, wandering off to investigate the coffee machine.
Sam takes his turn talking to Harry. "None of it was real, Sam. Ed was just pretending, and now he wants me to pretend, like this is just something I could get past." Sam makes a serious face and says, "Yeah, I know what you mean." Because I'm totally you and you're totally me! Harry gives him a confused look, so Sam goes on to explain. "Look, there are things you can forgive, and there are things you can't." Harry doesn't know which one of those this is, and Sam can't decide for him. Dean knocks on the door to tell Sam he's got info on the tire treads he found.
They take the discussion into the hallway. "The tires were only made for one kind of car: a 1989 Geo Metro," Dean says. How incredibly convenient. It's like on those CSI: Wherever shows, when the killer leaves behind a fiber that could only come from one individual shirt. The Completely Obvious Deputy says there's only one of those in town and it belongs to some guy who works at the local mill. "So this thing teleported, but it has a job and a car," Sam says. "What are we dealing with?" Dean says, "Let's go find out." As they head out, we get a look at the motel hallway. The place has a sawmill theme, so the walls are festooned with rusty ol' saws, which seems like a big ol' lawsuit just waiting to happen.
Ed, who was hiding around the corner, has overheard the whole conversation and rushes back to the room to tell Harry. They argue about what they should do, and why they should or shouldn't do it. "I can make this right for the both of us," Ed says. "We can make it right," Harry corrects him. "You wanna come with me?" asks Dean – er, Ed – with clear surprise.
Mill. The Winchesters are surprised to find the Completely Obvious Deputy waiting for them. "I thought we said my partner and I would care of this," Dean says. "Look, guys, my boss is AWOL," COD says. "I killed him and now I've lured you here so I can kill you, too!" Or maybe he just says he needs to be there because they don't have a warrant. As soon as the Winchesters turn their backs, the guy zaps them both with stun guns. Sam and Dean drop like sacks of oblivious potatoes.
They waken some time later, cuffed to chairs inside the mill. COD busies himself with setting up a camera and lights. "So you're Thinman," Dean grumps. "That would make sense if it didn't look like you just ate a fat camp." Not everyone can live and eat like a long-haul trucker and still look like a male model, Dean. COD ignores him and goes about finishing his stage preparations. He pulls down a backdrop like a cheap photography studio would use. Why use the actual trees outside when you have crummy-looking picture of them instead? "So, what are you, Norwood?" Sam asks. "A demon? How'd you teleport back at the diner?" He finally stops his prep work to answer: "Team effort." Thinman, who's been waiting nearby for his cue, steps out of the shadows to reveal himself. He reaches for the back of his head and peels off his mask, revealing himself to be the conspicuous waiter from the diner.
Dean rolls his eyes. "So there was no teleporting," he says. "Just a couple of douchebags doing a Scream thing." Hey, now that he mentions it, Thinman does kind of look like that guy in the Edvard Munch painting, what with the face and the outfit... Oh, he probably meant the movie. Anyway, the waiter killed his boss because the guy was a jerk, and he killed Casey because she wouldn't go out with him. At this point, Dean notices the sheriff's corpse off to the side, wrapped in plastic. "I see the sheriff didn't make it out of town," Dean says. "He really should have given me that time off I asked for," COD says. "So you killed him?" Sam gapes. "I didn't kill anyone; Roger did," says COD. "He's the psycho, I'm the visionary." Yeah, pretty sure y'all are both psychos. The villains proceed to exposit their backstories.
Deputy:
There once was a lawman ignored,
By all that thought he was bored.
Yes, you and your kind
Were blind to the signs
That I'm really quite out of my gourd!
Roger:
In a town that was known to be tiny
I was always left wondering "why me?"
No one knows I exist,
And yet I persist,
And seek fame as a killer so whiny!
Sam nods to Dean: Keep them talking while I try to free myself. Villains love talking, so it's easy to get them to blab about how they first met at a bar and soon found out they had a lot in common. By the time they get around to turning on the camera, the cavalry has arrived. The two psychos tape over Sam and Dean's mouths and go confront the goddamned Ghostfacers.
Ed and Harry poke around the old mill with flashlights drawn. They split up at one point, leaving Harry and his nuts vulnerable to Thinman's vengeful kicking. While Harry flails in agony, Thinman advances on him, knife drawn. Ed pops up behind him and points a gun at his head. "It's Scooby Doo time, douchebag! Take off the mask!" Man, when are amateurs gonna learn not to go for the quip? Somehow, this turns into an argument about the pronunciation of "meme," which gives COD plenty of time to show up and bash Ed over the head.
Thinman and COD march the goddamned Ghostfacers over to their staging area, blabbing about how and why they're going to kill them. This has given Sam and Dean the time necessary to escape their bonds. Fisticuffs ensue. Roger (for he's lost his mask again) moves to slit Harry's throat. Dean intervenes, and he and Roger struggle for the knife. Dean grabs the guy's hand and forces him to stab himself. It takes kind of a long time. Sam watches the whole thing with a frown, but doesn't say anything. I know the killing has sparked some debate on the forums about whether or not Dean did the right thing, but I found the death at the end of last week's episode far more disturbing. The Winchesters trussed up that guy Del and invited Mrs. Tran to kill both the demon and the innocent human being he was wearing at the time. ("Plus, they totally neglected to rescue me," says Jerome.) But back to the show at hand.
By now, the Completely Obvious Deputy has remembered he has a gun and has aimed it at Sam. "Wait!" Ed screams. He rushes to place himself between Sam and any imminent bullet. "This is all my fault," he says. "I got enough bullets for both of you," COD points out. Then Harry shoots him, because neither of the bad guys frisked him, or they would have found the little gun in his pants. Harry looks like he's going to puke as the deputy falls to the floor, dead. Dean lowers his gun for him.
Sometime later, the Winchesters pack up the car. "So, are we good in there?" Sam asks. "Yeah," Dean says. "With the Thinman footage and the way I set the bodies, there should be enough breadcrumbs to make it look like those two psychos offed each other." Sam looks concerned, either about Dean's mental state or about the state of humanity. "They were just people," he says. "They weren't demons, they weren't monsters..." I'd argue that you can be a person and a monster. Evil isn't a purview exclusive to the supernatural. Also: they kill people all the time. That most of them happen to be wearing demons at the time doesn't make them not people.
Nearby, Ed and Harry are having their little breakup scene. Just replay any number of recent arguments between the Winchesters and you have the gist of it. "I did all this crap for us," Ed/Dean says. "No, you did this for you," Harry/Sam says. He leaves Ed standing by the van and heads over to the Winchesters. "Can I get a ride from you guys?" he asks. "Yeah, sure," Dean says. They all pile into the Impala and drive away while Ed watches with tears in his eyes. Too bad nobody's there to shove a camera in his face and callously narrate it.
"Harry, are you okay?" Dean asks. "Yeah – I mean, no," Harry sighs. "You roll with a guy so many years, you start to think he's always gonna be to you." I know it looks like droplets of rain on the windows, but they're actually tiny remnants of a giant anvil that broke up in the atmosphere above them. "Like when you're old, drinking on the porch, he'll be in the other rocking chair. Then something happens, and you realize that other chair is gone... empty." Shouldn't he have been picturing his future wife at his side? The Winchesters cast furtive glances at each other. "You know what I mean?" Harry asks. Sam and Dean just make sad faces without saying anything. They know what you mean, Harry. They know it like a hammer to the head, over and over and over again. And that... is how the episode ends. Maybe time, Garth will show up with his sock puppets and reenact the Winchester angst that way, just in case the viewers haven't gotten it by now.
Tippi Blevins isn't 100% sure that lying to someone to stop him from getting married is the same thing as lying to someone to save his life. Contact her at b_tippi@yahoo.com, or find her her on Twitter: @TippiB.