Supernatural recap: Sam's wound leads to a big discovery
Well, this was a fun one. Not only did this Supernatural episode deliver a tipsy, singing Dean Winchester, but it also managed a great case of the week and furthered one of the biggest mysteries of the season: What’s going on with Sam’s bullet wound?
We start in Texhoma, Texas, where Angela is trying to help her very drunk friend, Sally, to the car. But when the Sally stops to vomit, well, Angela is the one who really winds up having a bad night: While her friend isn’t looking, she gets kidnapped and ends up in a basement, tied up, with some caged monster drinking her blood. Trust me, Angela WISHES a hangover were her biggest worry right about now.
Speaking of hangovers, back at the bunker Sam and Eileen are fighting off a couple. It seems the two have been having a bit of fun lately, and when case-hungry Dean sees that, he decides it’s time for him to give them some space. All he tells Sam is that he’s hitting the road to clear his head, but really he’s headed to Texas to investigate the headline that read “My friend was raptured while I was drunk.” Not gonna lie, I would click on that story.
After Dean teases Sam about leaving a sock on the door, he makes his way down to Texas, where he runs into a local sheriff who seems to think that Angela, the missing girl, simply left town to chase her acting dreams in Los Angeles. After all, who doesn’t try the L.A. thing once in their life, right? He actually thinks Dean should give it a try. “You got the look,” he tells Dean. (All fun aside, he does give Dean one piece of helpful information: The name of the bar where Dean can find Sally, Angela’s friend.)
Dean enters the bar and promptly puts his cell phone into a basket — bar policy — before he turns and sees a familiar face. Enter Lee (Christian Kane), Dean’s old friend from way back in the day. How far back? The last time they saw each other John was still alive and Sam was in college. It turns out that Lee owns the bar, so the two of them sit down to catch up over a couple of beers.
It seems Lee used to hunt with Dean and John and was supposedly the best fighter John had ever seen. But now? He’s out of the game, just enjoying life as a bar owner. Dean admits he thought Lee was dead. “That’s usually how this ends, isn’t it?” Dean says in what we can only hope isn’t a foreshadowing moment. When Dean asks Lee if he ever regrets walking away, he responds, “Not once.” And seeing as how Dean has been feeling pretty defeated lately, this conversation probably isn’t helping.
One thing that is helping? The booze. Dean and Lee keep drinking and from what I can tell, they’ve made it through about four seasons worth of catching up because Dean is telling him about ghost sickness and all things “Yellow Fever.” “Everything was scary,” Dean says, in what you might call a perfect callback. “This cat jumped out at me…” Then, skipping ahead about 11 seasons, Lee asks about the case Dean is currently working, but when Dean shows him Angela’s picture, he says he doesn’t recognize her.. until a co-worker jogs his memory. And just like that, this Lee guy is looking suspicious.
But for now, it’s back to the fun. Lee pulls Dean up on stage for a little duet, because as he tells Dean, he’s saved thousands of lives at this point and “you deserve a break…hell, you might even deserve two.” It’s hard to argue with that. Lee then once again takes us back to “Yellow Fever” as he tells Dean, “You can’t sit around lip-synching ‘Eye of the Tiger’ while no one’s watching.” (Trust me, plenty of us were watching.)
Once the two finish their song, they notice a couple of guys messing with a young lady, so they kick them out. And when the guys don’t want to go, well, they physically throw them out. And it just so happens that the young lady they were bothering is Sally Anderson.
Dean sits down with Sally, but the one thing he still can’t figure out is the missing car. Even if Angela had been raptured, her car wouldn’t have been. So Dean heads to the scrapyard while Lee says he’ll check out the lake. But spoiler alert: Lee is just as suspicious as he seemed.
Not only does Dean find Angela’s car, but he finds her body in the trunk. And that’s when Lee shows up and knocks him out. Next thing he knows, Dean is tied up in the basement of the bar. As Lee explains, the monster in the cage is a Marid. As long as Lee feeds it blood, it gives him money, health, and everything he’s ever wanted.
But Lee should’ve known that a single wooden chair wouldn’t hold Dean Winchester. Dean breaks out in no time, chops off the Marid’s head, and delivers it back to his old buddy Lee. But here’s the thing: Dean’s remembered who he is and what he does, and as he tells Lee, he can’t just leave because “I kill monsters.” Just like that, Dean takes on the best fighter John Winchester ever met, and guess what? He wins.
In the end, Dean stabs Lee with a pool cue, and we get this crucial interaction:
Lee: “Why do you care so much Dean?”
Dean: “Because someone has to.”
Dean Winchester is back, guys! And he’s ready to fight! And that’s a good thing, because it might be time to go after God.
While all of that was going down in Texas, Sam and Eileen made a discovery. Well, first they tried to make out but Castiel showed up and kind of killed the mood. (But yay, Cas is back!) Cas tells Sam he wants to “probe” his wound. He thinks the gun fired a piece of Sam’s soul, which means some of Sam’s soul is in Chuck, so if he studies the wound, they might discover something. But when he does, Sam ends up unconscious.
Cas then makes a call to Sergei, the shaman, and threatens to burn him alive if he doesn’t help. So naturally, Sergei shows up, and he quickly deduces that Sam is dying so that’s GREAT. Sergei explains that Sam’s soul is connected to something or someone somewhere, and right now, it’s being stretched. And much like a rubber band, it will snap.
Sergei says he can fix Sam, but first, he makes him worse by putting something on the wound that allows Sam to see some of Chuck’s memories. When Sam is in pain, Sergei tries to negotiate: Apparently Death’s key — which will open Death’s library — is in the Men of Letters bunker, and Sergei wants it in exchange for saving Sam. But Castiel has the situation under control. Right after he called Sergei, he called Bobby and had him go watch Sergei’s niece. With one word, Bobby will kill her.
Accepting his defeat, Sergei heals Sam. Well, the wound is still there but he at least undoes what he did. (So is Sam still dying?)
By episode’s end, Dean returns and Sam tells them all that he saw inside Chuck’s head, and Chuck is weak. “I think we can beat him,” Sam says. “I think we can beat God.”
But here’s my question: What does that mean?! Does beating God mean…destroying all existence? I’d like for the boys to ponder this a bit more before taking out Chuck, that’s all I’m saying.
Overall, I thought this was a solid episode of Supernatural. I loved all the Dean-Lee stuff, and it certainly served to get Dean back onboard, bring Cas back into the mix, and ultimately, set up next week’s mid-season finale.
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