"Slash Fiction" Recap

Hmm, methinks the Sam and Dean who are robbing a bank and killing all the patrons and employees are not the real Sam and Dean.

Next we have Bobby trying to make the captured leviathan talk and he's having no luck. When Dean asks the leviathan how he found them, the guy says it was easy and starts talking about using algorithms tracking their known aliases.

Bobby: "Great. Just what we need, a Mensa monster."

The monster says he's the least of their worries, and Sam and Dean see the news that they supposedly robbed a bank and killed everyone.

Dean: "Those sons of bitches Xeroxed us. We find these ass monkeys and we kill them ourselves."

Bobby sends the boys to see a friend of his, Frank, but when they arrive the guy pulls a gun on them and asks who sent them. "NSA, the Feeb, March of Dimes?"

Frank seems freaked out and trigger-happy when the respond with Bobby's name. Okay, this guy is funny. He gives the boy new aliases, Tom and John Smith, and tells them no more rock shout-outs with their names. He tells them to ditch the Impala.

Dean is obviously not happy about having to leave the Impala behind, saying something about putting baby in a corner.

Sam: "You know that's a line from--"
Dean: "Swayze movie. Swayze always gets a pass."

LOL! Dean starts singing to the radio playing Air Supply's "I'm All Out of Love."

Sam is looking at a map of where the dopplegangers have hit, and he realizes they're places where he and Dean have done cases before. Jericho -- Lady in White. Black Water Ridge -- Wendigo. Lady Manatonka -- the kid in the lake. They're in order, from the day Sam left Stanford. Hello, Season 1!

Sam and Dean roll into the next town the dopplegangers are to hit and see them, but the cops roll up and arrest the real Sam and Dean. Oops.

Meanwhile, back at Bobby's cabin, the leviathan has turned into Bobby but then something starts dripping from the ceiling and burning holes in the guy. It's the first thing that has had any effect. Bobby runs upstairs where the lady sheriff (Jodi) is cleaning the floor and...he kisses her!!! Then he asks what was in the bucket.

The dopplegangers switch forms into two cops to get into the police station to see Sam and Dean.

Hey, look, the sheriff is Col. Tigh from Battlestar Galactica.

Sheriff sees the baddies eating one of his deputies and decides to trust Dean. He helps him take out bad Sam. Then we see bad Dean talking with real Sam, and he spills the beans that real Dean killed Amy a couple of episodes back.

Uh oh, one of the FBI agents is a leviathan (I had that suspicion) and comes back to kill the sheriff and his daughter, the medical examiner.

Crowley shows up in the car of the head leviathan trying to make deal, but the head leviathan doesn't think too highly of demons and tells Crowley so in no uncertain terms. I'm thinking this will tick off Crowley enough that he will go back to helping Sam and Dean, but who knows. Maybe I just want to see Crowley on the side of good because he cracks me up sometimes.

Sam confronts Dean about killing Amy then walks away, telling Dean he can't be around him now. And then Sam walks off. Sigh. Brothers separated again. I wonder how long this will last.

"Shut Up, Dr. Phil"

We had some technical difficulties, so we apologize for not having our usual timely, amusing, insightful recap and review of the most recent episode. :(

I'm sliding rapidly into the semi-conscious blur that comes with having two books coming out one day apart (Behind the Scenes on 10/31 and Under the Moon on 11/1! /plug), so this is just an impression review rather than a full recap.

This episode has the long-awaited featured guests Charisma Carpenter and James Marsters, formerly of Buffy and Angel fame. They played husband and wife witches having a little feud. Don Stark stepped out on Maggie, who is punishing him by murdering everyone connected to his affair—the woman he slept with, the guy who introduced them, someone who covered for him. Don retaliates by killing Maggie's best friend and ruining the art she's so passionate about. But, as the boys point out in an under-duress counseling session near the end, there must still be love there, because they're not trying to kill each other.

This wasn't a high-emotion, high-intensity, high-mythology, high-anything episode, but as I break it down, I really liked it. The boys engaged in true sleuthing-style investigation, following clues and conducting interviews like someone from a non-paranormal crime drama or something. They worked really well together, despite New!Sam irritating the hell out of Same!Old!Dean, and Dean getting even further into the bottle (I wonder when that's gonna come to a head?).

Bobby's presence on the show was so solid I have to keep reminding myself he never was actually there. I loved how Maggie knew the boys were hunters from the get-go, and Don was actually a pretty quiet character, so different from his flamboyant Spike, while Maggie could have been the original high-school Cordelia all grown up.

A show this old starts to struggle with freshness. But I thought they altered the familiar just enough. They offered great, gruesome new deaths (frying under a hair dryer, nail gun through the eyes, little tiny beating hearts in cupcakes and literally coughing up a lung). We've had witches before, but these are old married witches with no grand agenda, no evil plans, just a typical, personal battle taken a little (lot!) too far.

Probably my only quibble with the whole thing was that Dean killed Amy when her motivation had been pure, when she'd worked hard not to kill in the first place, and now he didn't seem to try hard enough to kill the Starks. Yes, they are extremely powerful witches who totally outmatched the boys, and they haven't actually defeated witches before, but they seemed to give up too easily against people who killed innocents without compunction.

On the other hand, Don Stark putting a spell on the Leviathan and saving the boys from his wife was kind of cool, and left things open for them both to return, which I'm fully in favor of.

So what did you think? Love or hate the episode? Did the guest stars make the show, or was their cult standing too distracting? Do you want to see them again? Weigh in in the comments!