Tonight’s episode is all about Death! Fun times. Even Death and Death’s death is the “Then” segment. Since we can’t keep Death waiting, let’s get right to the recap.
Colorado. Two teenagers approach a house in the woods with a camcorder. There’s a sign for an abandoned mental health facility. It looks like Stanley Park to me. This looks like the ideal setup for a teen death! They check out the place and I notice this is the same place they filmed “The Real Ghostbusters” so you know something is going to go wrong. They find creepy masks and decided to take one, but the ghost with the drill doesn’t like that. He manages to drill to death one of the kids and the other escapes for his life. Roll credits!
Dean is making a PBJ in the Men of Letters kitchen for breakfast. Sam gets him a beer to go with it! Dean finds that to be odd, as do I. What are you up to Sammy? Sam mentions the weird murder in Colorado and proposes they go, leaving Jack behind. He’s catching up on Sam’s old Fantasy DVDs. Red Sonja? Hmm, what a dork. I always pictured Sam being a Lord of the Rings kind of guy. We already know his love for Harry Potter.
They arrive in Colorado dressed as FBI, and they’re Page and Plant again this week. They question the mother of the surviving kid, named Sean, and it turns out he can’t talk. They try to talk to the kid and he’s drawing pictures of the mask that he lifted. He’s talking about what is going on. Dean has a heart to heart with the kid, telling him he and his brother kill monsters, but it doesn’t do any good.
Sam proposes going to a strip club to Dean, and Dean figures out something is up. Beer for breakfast, he didn’t complain about Dean’s music during the trip, and even let Dean have the Agent Page alias. He also ordered the chili fries for lunch. Sam explains he’s doing this because Dean isn’t fine and doesn’t believe in anything. He’s in a dark place and wants to help him. Dean believes he will fight his way back but Sam wants to know how. “Bullets, bacon, and booze. A lot of booze.” Okay, I’m ready to watch that plan! In a dream come true, we get it.
Back to the distraught teenager Sean who has a nightmare. Mom checks in on him and he seems fine, but then the drill monster dude comes out of nowhere and the kid has a freak out before a metal teeth chomp.
Sam wakes up to the alarm and Dean’s bed is empty. He finds Dean passed out on the floor with his tie wrapped around his head, a bra around his neck, a whip in his hand, and a bottle of half drunk booze on the floor next to him. He’s sleeping on his shoe. “Great,” Sam says. Actually, this is! Sam gets dressed and leaves Dean there, who is snoring.
Sam interviews dead kid’s friend and figures out the kid is lying. He told Sam where they went. Dean in the meantime is having the breakfast buffet, with full plate of bacon, while wearing sunglasses and looking like death. Wow, we even get the bacon!!! Sam even brings him a beer to have with it! Sam tells Dean what he found out, there was a doctor who was arrested in the 60’s that would lobotomize his patients and those that survived he would experiment on them at his house, aka the place the kids went. Sam had a picture of the creepy mask, which was a plague mask. They had to hold the doctor down to rip it off when he was arrested.
Sam’s phone rings. It’s the mother. Next scene they’re at the house. She said her son Sean seemed fine after having a nightmare and then it got cold. Now he’s gone. They conclude they need to go check out the house. They run into drill dude pretty fast who tosses Sam across the room and does his drill thing on Dean. One commercial later we go back to the drill coming toward Dean’s head, but Sam shows up with the crowbar just in time to swipe the ghost away.
Sam and Dean go upstairs and find the masks. They figure the ghost is tied to the masks and decide to burn them all. Drill dude shows up to attack but Sam fights him off long enough for Dean to burn the masks and the ghost goes up in smoke. Wait a second though, they can still see their breaths! Something isn’t right. Suddenly doors close, lights start exploding, beds start coming toward them and they realize they’re dealing with more than one ghost. Probably many. Ones that are on the wrong side of the veil. Dean has a solution. He pulls out a syringe, tells Sam he needs three minutes and stabs himself in the heart. He collapses in front of Sam. He’s instantly greeted by a reaper. She quickly figures out who he is an announces back at the Reaper library, “Dean Winchester is in the veil!”
Sam puts a salt circle around Dean and I’m wondering, “Why aren’t you making the circle big enough for yourself as well??” Like, what happens if he gets tossed before he can revive Dean? Anyway, he gets the syringe ready for the three minute mark. On the other side of the veil Dean runs into ghost Sean and it’s revealed the doctor ghost entered Sean, essentially possessing him, and Sean put the mask he took on and took it back to the house. The kid then gave himself his own lobotomy. It was fatal.
Three minutes are up! Sam injects the adrenaline in Dean’s heart while ghost Dean watches, but nothing happens. He doesn’t wake up. Suddenly Billie is at the top of the stairs with a badass long leather coat and a sickle. “Hey Dean, we need to talk.” Another commercial later, while Sam is trying to revive Dean, ghost Dean asks Billie how she’s there if Castiel killed her. Billie drops the big reveal! Kill one incarnation of Death and the next Reaper to die takes his place. She has his sickle now and his white ring. She got a promotion! She died so she could become death. That is pretty awesome.
This is where crap gets real. Billie takes Dean to the death library and wonders how he’s slipping in between dimensions. He’ll tell her if he frees the ghosts. So she does. Dean tells her about Lucifer’s son and how he ripped a hole into the other dimension. Why does Billie care? She explains that the whole multiverse is like a house of cards and the last thing she needs is a “big dumb Winchester knocking it all down.” Dean’s response is good, “That does sound like us.”
Billie has noticed Dean has changed. When he made that bargain just now, he didn’t ask to go back. What happened to the guy who has been dead so many times that it hasn’t stuck, the one who saved the world, the guy who thinks he will win no matter what? “You have changed, you tell people it’s not a big deal, you tell people you’ll work through it, but you know you won’t, you can’t, and that scares the hell out of you.” Dean doesn’t think he matters because he couldn’t save Mom and Cas, couldn’t save the kid. Sam keeps trying to fix it but he keeps dragging him down. If it’s his time, it’s his time.
Billie realizes he wants to die. On the shelf are notebooks of all the ways he could die, but he’s not dying today. “Since I got this new job, I stand witness to a much larger picture. Do you know what I see? You, and your brother, you’re important. You have work to do. That’s all you need to know.” She tells him to keep living and then sends him back before he can ask about Mary. He wakes up and Sam falls backward in total relief.
Back at the house the coroner pulls out the bodies. Sam offers sympathy to the mother and then asks Dean what happened. He won’t tell him but Sam pushes. Dean comes clean and tells him that Billie is now Death. She wanted intel, that they’re important and they have work to do. “What does that mean?” Sam asks. “I have no freaking clue,” answers Dean. Sam asks Dean if he’s okay and he is not.
“You know, my whole life, I always believed that what we do is important. No matter what the cost, no matter who we lost, whether it was Dad or Bobby or…I would take the hit but I kept on fighting because I believed…that we were making the world a better place. And now Mom, and Cas, and I don’t know.” Sam asks, “So now you don’t believe anymore?” Dean answers, “I just need a win. I need a damn win.” Shot of the boys getting into the car while the Impala pulls away.
So the episode is over, right.? Psych! We get the musical montage to “It’s Never Too Late” from Steppenwolf (thanks Shazam!). We get the touching shot of Sean’s mother grieving over her son’s dead body, Dean brooding in the car, Billie in the library going over the death books, then back to Sam sleeping in the car while Dean broods. But wait, Dean gets a phone call. Sam wakes up to see Dean’s heart drop full into his stomach. They pull into a dark alley and low and behold, guess who’s at the payphone? It’s Castiel! Now it’s time for credits!
Well, there’s a few scenes to chew on, don’t you think? Here are some questions to ponder:
Was the ghost story interesting or just background noise for the other stuff?
What do you think of Billie’s new “promotion”?
Any thoughts on Dean’s latest Death wish and his talk with Billie?
What did you think of that “extra” ending? Is this the win Dean needs?
Was this episode a win?
Leave a Reply