Hey there, Supernatural superfans! We’ve made it to week seventeen of the rewatch project and, more importantly, to one of my favorite episodes! Sam and Dean’s trouble with the law is about to get a lot more troublesome, darlings, and I love every minute of it.
Cheers to heightened stakes!
THE OFFICIAL FYA SUPERNATURAL DRINKING GAME:
Take a drink every time:
• Dean or Sam flashes a badge
• A demon possesses some hapless schmuck
• Sam tries to talk about feelings only to be spurned by Dean
• Dean crams his face full of junk food
• Anyone makes a deal with a demon
• Either brother picks a lock
• Someone employs a Titan of Classic Rock as an alias
• The Glorious and Faithful Impala is damaged in the line of duty
2x11: Playthings
Monster of the Week: Ghost, creepy child edition
We open on an eerie old inn that houses a pair of even eerier little girls.
Scientific Fact: Kids dressed alike are 76.3% more likely to be evil.
The inn is shutting down and a mover has come to take stuff away. The scary little girls do not like that, not one bit, especially not the one on the right, Maggie. We soon come to learn she’s the other girl’s invisible friend. Warning: if your child has an invisible friend, you should always keep lighter fluid and salt at the ready and one eye out for wayward skeletons. The living girl, Tyler, retreats to her room, stuffed to the brim with old dolls.
Nope.
Tyler plays with a dollhouse that is an exact replica of the inn. A doll she had placed in a chair suddenly appears in another position, twisted at an awkward angle at the foot of the stairs. Suddenly, there’s a scream! In real life the mover has fallen down the stairs, breaking his neck.
Apparently, this isn’t the first strange death associated with the inn. Ellen puts Sam and Dean on the case. Dean is stoked.
Incorrect. The Scooby you hope to run into should always be Velma.
They ask for a room, huffily clearing up the innkeeper’s reasonable assumption that they are lovers. But they do roll with her assumption that they are antiquers. Dean tells her that Sammy has a particular interest in antique dolls as a way of snooping around the inn.
What they find is hoodoo symbols etched everywhere courtesy of a Creole nursemaid who took care of the innkeeper’s ancient mother when she was a child. When the boys ask to talk to the old woman about her doll collection, the innkeeper vehemently denies them access, saying she’s ill.
Meanwhile, a representative of the corporation buying the inn has come to stay while he finalizes the deal. Soon as he settles into his room, a doll avatar appears in the dollhouse. Tyler, busy having a tea party, looks up to find the corporate shill doll hanging from the ceiling fan. The man dies in the same way.
Dean is convinced a spirit living in the house is trying to prevent its sale. He investigates, heading to the bar to talk to the world’s oldest bellboy, who grew up in the house. The set design is straight up out of The Shining.
It’s not stealing! It’s an homage.
Later, he and Sam try to interview the grandmother despite the innkeeper’s wishes. The old woman has had a stroke and is uncommunicative and the innkeeper catches them and tosses them out. The innkeeper has had enough and tells Tyler to pack her shizz, they’re getting out of there. But Tyler says they can’t leave; Maggie won’t let them. The innkeeper snaps that she’s too old for an imaginary friend. Maggie narrows her eyes and says she doesn’t like her.
Oops.
The moment the innkeeper sets foot outside the house, she is almost run down by her own car, knocked out of the way in the nick of time by Sam. They waste no time laying out the ugly truth: her inn is haunted. They think her mother, Rose, had been using hoodoo to ward off evil, but now that she’s had a stroke and is unable to speak, it’s come back in.
The ghost is Rose’s sister, Maggie, who drowned in the pool as a child. She wants a playmate for life, and lures Tyler to the edge of the pool, shoving her in. Which leads to this magnificent shot of a watery rescue!
Who wore it better? Wet Sam or wet Dean?
Back at the inn, Rose silently conferences with Maggie’s ghost, agreeing to die so she’ll let Tyler go. When the Winchesters, innkeeper, and daughter depart, we see Maggie and another little girl playing skip rope in the hotel. So, happy ending I guess?
Brotherly Angst Quotient: Drunk Talk
Dean is pleasantly surprised that Sam wants to take a job instead of angst-ing about Ava’s disappearance. But Sam’s cool doesn’t last.
I know this comes from a place of pain, but how cute is Drunk Sammy?
Drunk, Sam calls Dean bossy (fair) and short (heh). He says he crawled into the bottle because he failed to save the corporate shill who got hanged. Apparently, he’s convinced himself that the more people he saves, the less likely he is to go evil. But on the off-chance that he does, he wants Dean to kill him. He makes him promise. The next day, completely sober, he tells Dean he’ll hold him to his word.
Yellow-Eyed Demon: Weighing on Sam’s mind, but not otherwise present.
How Drunk Are We?: Nowhere near Sammy-levels unfortunately. Take 1 drink for a lock picked.
The Quotable Winchesters: “Wow! This is a lot of dolls. They're nice...They're not super creepy at all.” –Dean, being polite.
Moment Most Likely to Inspire Troubling Fan-Fic:
No comment.
Notable Cameos:
Annie Wersching of The Vampire Diaries and 24, plays Susan.
2x12: Night Shifter
Monster of the Week: Shapeshifter
This, one of my favorite episodes, opens with breaking news. A reporter tells us there’s a bank robbery in progress with ten hostages. The camera focuses on activity at the bank and we see Dean, gun in hand! What could lead to this shocking turn of events?
Flashback to a day earlier. Dean and Sam are investigating a string of crimes where previously trusted employees suddenly go crazy, robbing their employers and then killing themselves. Posing as FBI, they interview Ronald, who barely escaped with his life after a coworker robbed the bank where they worked. Ronald has some theories about what happened.
He shows them his crazy-person mural, and says that the thing that robbed the bank wasn’t his coworker. Sure, it looked like him, but maybe too much like him, you know? Also, the security video shows his coworker’s eyes as flaring silver in the light. The Winchesters realize it must be a shapeshifter. But Ronald has come to a more sci-fi conclusion, believing his coworker had been replaced by a highly advanced robot he calls “The Mandroid.”
Ronald gets his conspiracy theories from Dr. Who. Ronald is awesome.
Fake FBI Sam shuts him down harshly, implying he’s crazy right before confiscating his research. Dean thinks its mean; the guy did good legwork. But Sam thinks it’s ultimately kinder. If Ronald actually went after the shapeshifter, he’d just get himself killed. FORESHADOWING, darlings.
Posing as security camera technicians, Sam and Dean head to the bank and immediately identify the shapeshifter as the bank manager, thanks to his patented lens-flare eyes. But before they can take him out, Ronald storms the bank with a semi automatic rifle! He’s looking for the Mandroid. Dean talks him into locking all the hostages into the bank vault while he helps him search.
Meanwhile, the cops have descended on the situation. They cut the lights, which means the boys can’t use the camera to identify the shifter. Things go from bad to worse, when an elderly hostage begins to have a heart attack. Dean escorts him outside at gunpoint, and gets caught on camera. Ronald gets shot by a police sniper and dies. The Winchesters are running into discarded piles of skin everywhere (blech) but can’t find the shapeshifter.
And then the feds show up to the party, including one FBI Agent Henriksen.
BAMF
Henriksen is there for Dean, specifically. He gets him on the phone and says he knows about the murders in St. Louis and Baltimore. He knows about the desecrations, about Sammy, about his crazy ex-Marine survivalist father. He lets Dean know that he’s hunting them, and that the only way to make it out alive is to surrender within an hour. But after he hangs up, he tells SWAT to move in on the bank in five minutes. That’s cheating, Henriksen!
The boys are scrambling, barely managing to take out the shapeshifter as SWAT storms the place. Luckily Sam manages to get the drop on two of the officers and he and Dean suit up in their uniforms, walking out of the bank and straight to the Impala to flee.
Brotherly Angst Quotient: Screwed
After Agent Henriksen’s phone call, the boys know things are only going to get harder.
Portrait of the hunter as a young man (realizing he’s totally screwed).
After a moment of trying to let it sink in, they peel out of the parking lot set to what has to be the greatest use of a Styx song ever. Seriously, darlings, you should really see it for yourself. On my first watching oh so many years ago this is the precise moment I fell in love with Supernatural. Not Styx though. Really! Shut up. You’re the one who likes Styx.
Yellow-Eyed Demon: MIA
How Drunk Are We?: Badges are flashed! Take three drinks.
The Quotable Winchesters: “This is not a robbery!” –Ronald, entering a bank, waving a semiautomatic rifle and firing in the air.
Moment Most Likely to Inspire Troubling Fan-Fic:
Back off, lady. Sam saw him first.
Notable Cameos:
Chris Gauthier of Eureka and Once Upon a Time, plays Ronald.
Next Week: Angels?