Supernatural: Family Remains (Episode 411)

Parting is such sweet sorrow.Welcome back, everyone! After a long decade month of hiatus, show is back! 

In a large farmhouse, a man is eating dinner in front of the TV when his lamp suddenly turns off.  When he gets up to get a new light bulb or something, a door across the room swings open.  Out steps an adolescent girl, deathly pale with tangled black hair and the weirdest looking teeth I have ever seen.  “You?” the man says, clearly terrified.  “That’s impossible!”  He tries to keep the girl away, but she advances anyway, and the man’s blood splatters across a cross-stitched picture reading “Home Sweet Home.”

WINGS.  TITLE.

The Impala is parked in the middle of Buttfuck, USA.  It’s the middle of the night, and Sam sleeps in the backseat while Dean reads a newspaper.  Sam wakes up and immediately realizes that Dean is searching for another job, even though they just finished a job a few hours before.  It seems that Dean has had them going nonstop for a month now, and Sam says that they need a break.  He also says that Dean needs to stop running from what happened to him in Hell, but Dean ignores this and suggests that they go to the farmhouse we just saw in Stratton, Nebraska, where there appears to be a homicidal ghost.  Sam just lies back down and Dean continues to not sleep.

The boys arrive at the farmhouse and break in.  They go into the shabby kitchen and find a hollow spot on the wall that Sam thinks is a dumbwaiter.  God, I have always wanted one of those.  Remember when Michelle Trachtenberg got to ride in one in Harriet the Spy?  That’s basically my dream.  Anyway, Dean teases Sam about his enormous brain and they go off to investigate the rest of the house.  Unfortunately there are power lines nearby, so the EMF meter is useless.  They open a closet and find a freaky-ass shaved doll head on the floor.  Well, that’s completely normal.  They hear something outside and see that a car and moving van are driving towards the house.  Looks like the house is little more sold than they thought it was.  When the car pulls up a family gets out, consisting of a young son, a teenage daughter, a set of parents and a sarcastic uncle.  Sam and Dean come out of the house, posing as health inspectors, and tell the family that the house in “uninhabitable.”  Though they complain, they agree to stay in a motel for the night.  Is it just me, or is anyone else kind of bored so far? 

The boys go to talk to the victim’s housekeeper, who was the one to find the body.  She gives us the man’s sob story; his wife died in childbirth, and his daughter Rebecca hung herself in the attack twenty years later.  She even has a few pictures of the family, and the daughter looks suspiciously like our homicidal ghost.  The housekeeper also mentions that she sometimes heard rustling in the walls at the house and that both the mother and daughter were cremated.  This pretty much rule both of them out as suspects.  FYI, still bored over here.

Back at the house, the sneaky family has decided to check for potential dangers themselves.  When the contractor uncle says that the house is clean, they commence moving in.  The daughter, Kate, sees the creepy ghost girl in the window, but she disappears and Kate assumes she just imagined her.  Um, if I’d already seen two strange people come out of my house that day who had no logical reason to be there I think I would take seeing a third person a little more seriously.  Her mom Susan assures her that everything will be great here, and Kate agrees that “everything is going to change.”  I smell a traumatic past!  That night, Danny (the young son) is playing video games in his room when his closet door creeks upon.  A ball rolls across the floor to him and he asks who is there.  He rolls the ball back, and the thing in the closet starts up a game of catch with him.  Once again, perfectly normal.  Downstairs, the parents are discussing gardens and vegetables and other very boring things.  Susan abruptly stops and asks what they’re doing, and her husband Brian promises that “everything will be better.”  Oh, will you just spit out what your issues are and get it over with?  I realize that we’re only fifteen minutes into this episode, but it feels like we have been watching these people do nothing forever.  Maybe if they didn’t talk about whatever happened to them in the most roundabout, clichéd terms that we’ve heard a million times I would care, but alas, my cold heart remains unmoved.  The uncle tells the parents to come look at something upstairs, and when they get there we see that the word “GO” has been written on the wall in red crayon.  No one seems particularly startled by this, and they all immediately assume that Danny did it.  Apparently his teacher did say that he might “act out,” and I somehow manage to care even less about whatever they’re talking about.  I also manage to go from feeling indifference towards the uncle to feeling flat out dislike, since he gives his sister an obnoxious “you know what I would do if he were my kid.”  No one asked what you would do, Uncle Sass. When Danny arrives on the scene he says that he didn’t do it, but of course no one believes him.  They believe him even less when he says that the “girl in the walls” did it and send him back to his room.  Let me tell you, this Danny kid is acting circles around all of the adults in this episode.   As he skulks off to his room Danny shouts that “Andy would believe [him],” which means that the traumatic past probably has something to do with this Andy’s death.  Wait for it, wait for it...nope, don’t care. 

Later that night, Kate hears a rustling while she’s lying in bed and assumes it’s their dog Buster.  “Buster” starts licking her hand, which she thinks is gross but not terribly concerning.  Suddenly the door to her room opens and the real Buster strolls in.  Kate looks over just in time to see her closet door slam as whatever was licking her retreats, and she lets out an earsplitting scream.  Can’t really blame her, because that shit was creepy as fuck.  Her whole family gathers in the hall to try and calm her down but only her brother believes that the house is haunted.  There’s a knock on the door and Sam and Dean barge in, alerted by Kate’s scream.  The boys flat out tell the family that they have a ghost, but Brian still isn’t buying it.  Is anyone else getting a really strong asshole vibe from this guy?  Really, all of the adults are rubbing me the wrong way, and I can’t figure out if it’s because they’re genuinely annoying characters or if it’s because they’re getting so much fucking screen time.  The lights cut out, and Danny realizes that Buster slipped out of the door when Sam and Dean entered.  Oh, please don’t go there, show.  There are several grating adults just waiting to be killed off instead of the poor puppy.  Said adults rush outside just in time to hear Buster yelp off-screen, and by the time they find him the ghost has killed him and used his blood to spell out “too late” on the side of the moving van.  And with that this episode just became Secret Window.

Sam and Dean tell Brian and Uncle Sass that they have to get the family out of the house immediately.  The two men don’t even look vaguely concerned but decide to heed the advice anyway.  When they try to leave, however, they find that the tires to all of their vehicles have been slashed, including the Impala’s.  Oh, this shit just got personal!  The Impala’s trunk has been cleaned out as well.  Kate sees Creepy Ghost Girl standing in a field near the house, but when everyone else looks she’s disappeared.  The boys are shocked that Creepy Ghost Girl can leave the house, but they don’t have time to question it.  They heard everyone back inside and enclose them in a salt circle.  We get the standard “You guys hunt ghosts?” “Yes.” “No, seriously?” “Why would we make this shit up?” exchange before Sam whips out the pics they got from the housekeeper and shows them to Kate.  Kate IDs Rebecca the suicide victim as Creepy Ghost Girl, which is surprising since the Rebecca was cremated.  Before the boys can figure out what’s going on, Uncle Sass gets to sassing, saying that he’s not going to sit around and wait for “some backroads hillbilly chick” to “go all Deliverance on [his] ass.”  Dean, who is as fed up with the sass as I am, shoves Uncle Sass against a wall and threatens to pop a few caps if he doesn’t behave.  You tell ‘em, Dean!  Sam brings up the semi-important fact that Dean doesn’t actually have a gun on him, but Dean thinks that irrelevant; he’s not going to let anyone die tonight, no matter what.  Oh, see what just happened there?  This is now about Dean’s issues as is everything else.  My guess would be that he’s trying to make up for what he did in Hell, but that’s just a shot in the dark. 

Sam goes to dig around the attic for clues about Rebecca, leaving Dean to babysit the family.  Uncle Sass continues to be rude and sassy, but I have to admit that he gained a couple of points with me my calling Dean “Fonzie.”  I can’t hate on that.  Suddenly a door opens across the room and Creepy Ghost Girl enters.  She walks right up to the salt circle, pauses, whips out a knife, and steps over the line of salt.  Uh oh, curveball!  The family runs outside while Dean swashbuckles with Not So Ghostly But Still Very Creepy Girl.  Sam comes into the room and ends the fight by shining a light the girl’s eyes, making her instantly recoil.  She flees to the closet and disappears.  The boys head outside, where they tell Dad to gather the family.  They have to assume that Not So Ghostly But Still Very Creepy Girl is human, and Dean expresses how much he just doesn’t understand people.  Show, you already did this episode.  It was called “The Benders” and it was awesome.  This?  Substantially less awesome.  Sam mentions that he found Rebecca’s diary in the attic, so he’s going to go through it and see if he can figure out who the girl is.  I’ll bet any amount of money that it’s Rebecca’s illegitimate child.  When Brian brings the family around Sam tells them to head to town on foot.  They agree to go, but realize that Danny is missing.  Parenting fail.

Since it’s not safe for them to go off to town on their own, Susan and Kate wait in a shed while the men look for Danny.  Because this is apparently a man’s world and the woman couldn’t possibly be of any assistance fighting off another woman.  Anyway, Sam and Brian check outside while Dean and Uncle Sass search the house.  They go back to the closet Not So Ghostly But Still Very Creepy Girl came out of and Dean finds a door into the space behind the walls.  Ah, so now this episode is “No Exit.”  I’m not saying situation isn’t creepy, but it (along with the rest of the episode) would be a lot more so if they hadn’t done it before.  They walk behind the walls until they find a hole in the floor leading to another level of the house.  This is probably a really inappropriate time to be reminded of the climbing structure at my local Children’s Museum.  Dean goes down through the whole, chanting “please nobody grab my leg” as he does.  When he gets to the room below he comes face to face with a hanging squirrel and finds half-eaten pieces of Buster all over the place.  Oh, that’s just gross.  The two men continue to explore their respective floors.  Uncle Sass walks around for a minute before coming face to face with Not So Ghostly But Still Very Creepy Girl, and for the love of God, someone tell me what her real name is so I don’t have to keep typing that. The girl stabs him in the throat with a knife, leaving his body hanging through the hole for Dean to find. 

Sam and Brian have joined the helpless women in the shed, and they’re all waiting for Dean and Uncle Sass to return.  Dean finally does show up and tells everyone that he didn’t find Danny and that Uncle Sass is dead.  He’s almost as distraught as the family, saying that he “shouldn’t have left him alone.”  Oh, Dean.  They all stay on the shed for a while, giving Sam a chance to read more of Rebecca’s diary and the family a chance to grieve.  Susan is convinced that Danny is dead and wonders why so many bad things happen to their family.  “What happened to Andy happened,” Brian tells her.  “I cannot change that.  But I will find Danny.”  At some point Brian must leave the shed, because we cut to him standing in front of the house.  Yeah, stand alone and out in the open when there’s a psycho killer on the loose, Einstein.  Dean approaches him and asks if Andy was his son.  “Oldest,” Brian says.  “Got himself killed in a car accident last year.”  He goes on to say that they only moved to the country on the advice of his and Susan’s marriage counselor, and he sounds all kinds of bitter that something so horrible still managed to happen to them.  Dean promises to get Danny back and Brian asks why he cares so much, but Sam interrupts before Dean can answer.

The boys head back inside the house and Sam tells Dean that he thinks Not So Ghostly But Still Very Creepy Girl is Rebecca’s daughter.  He also thinks that Rebecca killed herself because “her dad called her a ‘dirty little whore’ and said he was going to lock the baby up where no one could ever see it.”  Why so much shame, you ask?  Sam thinks it’s because the father was also the father of Rebecca’s baby. So let me get this straight; there is now canon incest on this show?  Oh Kripke, way to feed the flames.  I guess that the grossness of the situation could be his attempt to get people to stop wanting Sam and Dean together, but at this point he should realize that that’s not going to happen.  You know that kid from the movie Honey, I Blew Up the Kid that keeps getting bigger and bigger the more he’s exposed to electricity?  Wincest is like that kid, and everything this show does just seems to make it stronger.  Anyway, it looks like Rebecca’s daughter has been locked up for her whole life, which is why she’s barely human.  Yet somehow she is still literate enough to write threatening messages.  Dean almost sympathizes with her, since she’s been through hell her whole life and he actually knows what hell is like.  Cut to a hidden chamber of the house, where Danny is tied up and just regaining consciousness.  For some inexplicable reason this is shot in night vision, but that’s so far down on the list of my problems with this episode.  He’s trying to scream through his gag when Rebecca’s daughter enters the room with a live rat.  She holds it before him like an offering before snapping its spine and chowing done.  How she is not dead from food poisoning, we will never know.

Back in the kitchen, Dean and Sam are breaking down the hollow spot in the wall that they found earlier.  It opens to a tunnel, and they think this is how Rebecca’s father kept his daughter/granddaughter fed.  Brian is with them and wants to go after Danny himself, but Dean pulls the Big Damn Hero card and insists that he go.  Down in the tunnel, Dean finds several of his guns and arms himself.  He finds Danny and frees him, and the boy quickly warms him that the girl’s brother is coming back.  Say WHAT now?  Someone starts making Tasmanian Devil noises and Dean is suddenly attacked.  He fights with the brother while Danny runs to the end of the tunnel, where Sam has thrown down a curtain-rope to get him back into the kitchen.  Dean shines his flashlight in the brother’s eyes, which distracts him long enough for Dean to get his gun.  When the brother attacks again, Dean shoots him point blank.  Meanwhile, the weak and powerless women are waiting in the shed.  Someone breaks down one of the windows.  When they retreat to the other side of the shed, they almost get impaled when a knife is thrust through the wall.  They try to keep the girl from getting in, but they don’t have much luck.  Just when the girl is about to start stabbing, someone grabs her from behind and pulls her outside.  The women listen to her screams as she’s hacked to death, and Brian meets them at the door to the shed covered in blood.

The next morning, Dean and Sam finish fixing the Impala and the trunk before saying goodbye to the family.  They’re still pretty shaken up by the ordeal, but they insist that they’ll get through it together.  A while later the boys pull over to the side of the road to eat some food.  Oh, there’s no way this is happening.  Are we seriously getting another roadside confession?  Show, just because you’ve been on hiatus for the last century month doesn’t mean that we don’t remember how the last episode ended.  Dean admits that he felt for the incestuous twins, since he understands how “lifelong torture can turn you into something like that.”  Sam insists that Dean is nothing like those monsters.  Is that the parallel that we’re supposed to have drawn from this episode?  Because I didn’t get that at all.  Dean agrees with Sam, but he thinks that he’s even worse than the wall-dwellers.  “I enjoyed it, Sam,” he says.  “They took me off the rack and I tortured souls and I liked it.”  This is probably a really, really inappropriate time to start singing “he tortured souls and he liked it!” in the style of Katy Perry, but lord knows I need something to distract me from this overused sequence.  Dean goes on, saying that, no matter how many people he saves, it will never make up for what he’s done.  ‘I’ll never be able to fill this whole,” he says while Sam stares at him.  “Not ever.”

So that’s it folks!  Y’all might have heard by now that Buzznet has decided not to pay its recappers anymore.  While we’re invited to continue as volunteer recappers (and thanks so much for giving us that privilege, Buzznet), I will no longer be working here.  Don’t get me wrong, I love recapping and I especially love recapping Supernatural, but it’s far too much work to continue without compensation.  I really want to thank everyone who reads these recaps as well as those who comment.  I can’t even tell you how pathetically happy getting your positive feedback has made me.  Seriously, it’s really sad.  I got a better reception than I ever thought I would and you guys made this experience totally worthwhile.  I only wish that I could have gone out on a better episode, because anyone reading my last three recaps would think that I hated this show.  Which is NOT TRUE AT ALL.  I love this show in a borderline unhealthy way, and I hope that showed even when I was yelling at it for being so sucky.  If y’all ever want to gush or rant about this wonderful and frustrating show in the future, just ask for my Livejournal in the comments.  May the guy love always be strong, may the manpain always be palpable, and may the Impala always be on the road.