

Previously on Supernatural, aka a limerick for Astrid, who backed my Kickstarter recap campaign:

Dean once had a friend who’s a vampire

Who helped him get free of a quagmire.

Although Benny’s now dead,

And freed of his head,

Death is merely a pause that expires.

Currently on Supernatural, aka 1973:

A teenage girl is just trying to watch her cartoons, but her family is being annoying. Her mother wants her to do the laundry and preemptively cuts off any argument: “And none of your Betty Friedan stuff!” Her male chauvinist brother laughs.

The girl heads downstairs to the washing machine, but decides instead to pick up a sledgehammer and break down a wall for some reason. Work those strong, feminist arms! Behind the wall is a vault bearing the Men of Letters crest. She tries to open the vault, but a blast of green, glowing smoke knocks her out and zips up the stairs.

That mist totally matches the washer-dryer set. Good job, decorators.

When she wakes some time later, she finds her father and brother have killed themselves. She runs to her mother, who assures her that everything’s going to be just fine. Then Mom slits her own throat with a kitchen knife.

In the present day, we’re back at Sam’s sooper-sekrit meeting with Rowena. “Kill my son,” she says, naming her price for translating the Book of the Damned. She starts to go into a long, boring explanation for why she wants Crowley dead, but Sam just cuts her off. “I’ll do it,” he says.

In the middle of negotiations, he gets a text from Dean. “HITTING A NEST IN TULSA. JOIN IF YOU WANT.” The Mark of Cain is making him type in all caps! It’s worse than we thought!

Rowena tells him she needs some dead witch’s old codex to translate the book, but it’s currently in the possession of the Men of Letters.

Meanwhile in Tulsa, Dean has just finished killing six vampires all by himself and is celebrating with an ice-cold beer when Sam arrives in a huff.

Back at the bunker, Dean falls asleep watching Speed 2: Cruise Control. (For reals.) Sam checks in on him before settling in for some sooper-sekrit research.

The music in this scene sounds like one of those “hidden object” games. Find those files, Sam! And that butterfly and baseball for some reason!

He finds a recording from the meeting when Cuthbert “Magnus” Sincair was kicked out of the Men of Letters. The membership is peeved that he created a magical vault called the Werther Box. Sure, it’s good at hiding the witch’s codex, but it’s also super good at killing people, including two of their own when they tried to disarm it. I wish someone would ask him why he named it the Werther Box.

In the end, they decide to just sort of block off the box and guard it for the rest of eternity because Magnus won’t tell them how to shut it down. The plan is brilliant in its awfulness!

Sam calls Rowena, who was asleep in full makeup. You know someone’s a powerful witch when she wakes up and her winged eyeliner is still fresh instead of looking like she’s cosplaying the Winter Soldier. She suggests a spell to help him disenchant the box, but he declines to have her accompany him.

********

Sam heads to St. Louis. It’s the house from the beginning, but it looks a right dump, so he assumes it’s abandoned and starts picking the lock instead of knocking. What did he even tell Dean about why he was leaving? St. Louis is about 500 miles from the bunker.

Anyway, before he can pick the lock, a woman points a gun at him through the mail slot. It’s aimed right at his moosticles. He backs off, preserving the future of the Winchester genome.

When he gets back to the car, he’s shocked to find Dean waiting for him.

Dean thinks Sam is taking on a case by himself to teach him a lesson about going after those vamps alone. So he tracked Sam down to tell him it’s all fine, and he wants to help him on the case.

Sam covers his behind by explaining he’s there to shut down the Werther vault, which is true. He just sort of neglects to mention that his end game is undoing the Mark of Cain.

Much exposition takes place, courtesy of Dean and sitting. The gist of it is that Suzie, the girl from 1973, still owns the house and she’s the one who almost turned Sam’s gonads into gone-nads. Wouldn’t Sam have looked this up on his own? Protecting his crotch, Dean decides to introduce himself to this lady while Sam sneaks into the basement.

Dean pretends he’s with the neighborhood watch, looking for the guy who just tried to break into her house. “If you could give me a description,” he says. “Tall white fella with pretty hair,” Suzie says. Well, that narrows it down.

Sam clodhops around downstairs, alerting Suzie to his presence. She pulls her gun on Dean, concluding that he’s working with the noisy fella currently in her basement. She also concludes they’re there for the vault she’s sworn to protect so it wouldn’t kill more people.

“He’s my brother and we’re here to help,” Dean admits. He calls for Sam, but Sam decides to try opening the vault even though his disarming spell didn’t work. Bright idea, ya big dork.

The green mist travels upstairs and zaps both Suzie and Dean in the eyes. Suzie immediately starts hallucinating her dead family. She runs from them, but they follow her and taunt her for killing them until she turns the gun on herself. Meanwhile, Dean suddenly finds himself in a misty forest.

The ghost of Suzie materializes and berates Sam for all the collateral damage he’s causing in his quest for Dean’s cure. Sam realizes he’s hallucinating her. She makes a good point, though. She tries to guilt him into killing himself, but she’s kinda overselling it.

Rowena shows up and poofs HalluciSuzie away with a wave of her magical hands.

Sam’s worried about Dean seeing Rowena there, but Dean is busy being chased by a Leviathan in his mental Purgatory. To prove he’s oblivious to the real world, she boops him on the nose. Meanwhile, imaginary Benny saves him from the Leviathan.

Imaginary Benny wants to be friends, but Dean knows he’s not real. “You’re just a figment, okay?” Dean says Benny’s just there to stop him from waking up. They end up walking in circles, unable to find a way out of Hallucinatory Purgatory. Imaginary Benny points out that maybe Dean doesn’t really want to leave.

In the real world, Sam and Rowena have tied oblivious Dean to a chair while they get to work on the Werther box.

There’s an inscription in Latin on the front of the vault. “To silence the box, slake its thirst with the blood of our own.” Sam takes this to mean that they need Men of Letters blood–his “legacy” blood–to defuse the box. There’s even a handy basin on the front of the box to receive said blood. Yet the Men of Letters could never figure this out?

Dean and ImagiBenny keep walking past the same trees, like characters in a cartoon with a tight budget for background animation. Benny says Dean would be able to kill all the monsters he wants in Purgatory, like the old days. He suggests Dean kill himself. “You can’t say you haven’t been thinkin’ about it.”

Dean rejects the idea, but ImagiBenny presses on. He asks what would happen if Sam and Castiel had to kill him. “You think they would ever recover from that?”

“It will ruin them,” he says. Dean looks tempted. In the real world, he Hulks his way out of his bonds and smashes the bottom off an empty liquor bottle. “No one needs to know,” ImagiBenny says. “What happens in Purgatory, stays in Purgatory.” If thousands of fanfics hadn’t already been spawned from that storyline, this would have done it.

Downstairs, Sam cuts his arm and bleeds into the basin. Rowena helps by squeezing him like an overripe grapefruit.

Meanwhile, in his mental landscape, Dean comes to a decision. “I’d do it, if I really had to,” he says. “But the real Benny would never let me.” And neither will the Mark of Cain. So he stabs ImagiBenny and gives him a sad hug goodbye.

Dean rushes downstairs as Sam is starting to lose consciousness. That is one greedy box, because Sam’s gotta have at least three normal-sized people’s worth of blood.



Somehow, Dean doesn’t see Rowena. (Magic!) Sam groggily explains that the Werther box needs legacy blood, so Dean starts adding his own.

Having gotten its fill of not just one but TWO Winchesters, the box pops open. As one does. Rowena flits away in a puff of smoke. Dean takes out the witch’s codex.

Dean destroys the box while Sam recuperates a bit in the car. Dean points out that the box separated them and almost got them killed. You know who got actually killed, though? Suzie! “The universe is trying to tell us something we should both already know,” Dean says. “We’re stronger together than apart.”

So, like, they should know it, but they don’t change any of their behavior. Dean doesn’t tell Sam about the momentary demon eyes, and Sam doesn’t tell Dean about his worst plan since the Apocalypse. It would be nice if one of these lessons actually stuck at some point, eh?



Sam meets with Rowena in some abandoned building. As soon as she confirms that the codex will help her translate the Book of the Damned, he slaps some power-draining cuffs on her and chains her up. The framing totally looks like they’re getting married.



And that’s the episode: Saving each other. Doing unwise things. The family business.

I give the episode 3 Hellhounds

and some juice and cookies, in case you come across a moose that’s donated a lot of blood:

– Tippi Blevins