"We're the opposite of okay. But we're together."

This one is rather like the tale of two episodes for me. On the one hand there is the Monster of the Week story, which is riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies, but on the other hand I find the episode to be highly emotionally satisfying for the access it provides to Dean's emotional arc, which has remained rather opaque and unclear for much of this season. I also appreciate that, for all its flaws, the plot harks back to the S1 style of storytelling: a clasically creepy tale rich in character focus and detail. On the whole, therefore, I find that I enjoy the episode very much, in spite of its flaws.

In the course of recapping the final scene of this episode, I found myself conducting a lengthy examination of the psychological precedents for what Dean reveals about himself in that scene, and eventually decided to separate this from the body of the recap and publish it as a separate study: The Psychology of Surviving Hell.

Then

Castiel was an angel of the Lord who gripped Dean tight and raised him from perdition. Dean hallucinated Lilith, reminding him of what happened down in hell.

Flashes of Dean in hell screaming for help, and flashes of nightmares he has had since as well as of his gruesome death under the claws of Lilith's hellhound, are inter-cut with clips of the demon Alistair reminding Dean of the time they spent together in hell and Dean confessing to Sam some of what happened to him down there. He largely glosses over the torture inflicted upon him, mentioning it mostly by way of run-up to what came later, when he accepted Alistair's offer of ending his pain if he agreed to torture others instead.

Now

In a big old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, the camera pans lovingly over a collection of old family photographs displayed on the mantle before landing upon an old man finishing up a meal in front of the TV. He is slightly perturbed when the lamp goes out and wanders to the door, presumably to get a fresh bulb or check the fuse – but he finds the door locked tight.

Another door in the room opens behind him. He turns and sees the ghostly figure of a girl emerge.

"You?" he frowns, surprised but not scared. "That's impossible." The girl silently advances on him, and he starts to become afraid, rattling at the door and shouting for her to stay away from him.

A feral smile creeps across the girl's face. Off-camera, the man screams as his blood splatters across a 'home sweet home' cross-stitch on the wall.

So far so creepy, although not what you'd call out of the ordinary. Flickering light? Ghostly girl? Gruesome murder? It reads as a standard haunting, no different than the many the Winchesters have dealt with in the past.

However, it transpires, of course, that this is not a ghost story. The perpetrators – plural, because there turns out to be two of them – are very mortal, flesh and blood human. And once that twist is known, the plot holes throughout become glaring, the story riddled with inconsistencies designed purely to mislead the audience rather than to make any logical sense of the story. The flickering lights are an obvious example of this. If the house was haunted, it would make perfect sense. Once we know that feral humans are responsible for the murder, the so-coincidentally timed light failures make far less sense, as there is little reason to believe that the cellar-dwellers are capable of rigging them.

Titles

In front of a gate on an old dirt track in the middle of the woods someplace, the Impala is parked up for the night. Inside, Dean is sitting at the wheel, reading by torchlight.



Sam is stretched out asleep across the back seat – or, at least, stretched out as much as his giant stature will allow. However, although Dean is keeping quiet Sam is disturbed, either by the light or the rustling of pages. He stirs and grunts, "What are you doing?"



Dean evasively asks what it looks like he's doing and Sam, without moving so much as a muscle to actually take a look, because he already knows what he will see, says it looks like he's looking for a job. "Yahtzee," Dean tells him, eyes glued to the page.

Sam sighs and sits up. "We just finished a job, like, two hours ago," he blearily states, voice rough with sleep. He keeps his tone non-committal, though. It's not quite a protest and not quite a complaint, just a statement. He's sticking to that promise about not pushing his brother.

"Adrenaline's still pumping, I guess," Dean shrugs, putting up a determined show of normality. Move along, please: nothing to see here.

Sam sighs again and pinches at the bridge of his nose. Dean blithely asks what he thinks and tosses a few random possible destinations at him, not bothering to offer details on what potential cases might take them to those destinations. This isn't about the jobs. It is about keeping busy so that Dean doesn't have to think.

"I am all for working," Sam very carefully replies. "I really am. But you've had us chasing cases non-stop for, like, a month now. We need sleep."

"Ah, we can sleep when we're dead," Dean instantly counters, tone sharp and dismissive because they both know that death was anything but restful for Dean, and he fears more of the same if it happens again, but that subject is well and truly out of bounds again right now.



I love the set-up of this scene and what it tells us about where the brothers are at right now: the fact that they have crashed in the car rather than bothering to find a motel after finishing their most recent job, the fact that Sam is getting what rest he can while Dean will not allow himself to sleep. Disturbed sleep has been the most consistent theme in Dean's post-hell storyline.

The brothers have been chasing cases non-stop for a month now, Sam tells us. That places this episode sometime in December. Mid-winter is not the most ideal time of year to be camping out in a car, but neither brother is what you'd call wrapped up warm, so they must be someplace relatively mild.

"You're exhausted, Dean," Sam firmly says, not mentioning the fact that if he's been chasing those non-stop cases at his brother's side for the past month he must also be exhausted. Sam is at least trying to get what rest he can when and where he can, while it seems that Dean is actively fighting sleep, avoiding rest. Sleep is when his memories of hell come out to play.

"I'm good," Dean protests. He doesn't want to listen to this. He just wants to keep moving, keep busy, and not have to think at all, about anything.

"No, you're not," Sam wearily insists. "You're running on fumes, and you can't run forever."

Dean turns in his seat to glare at his brother. "And what am I running from?" he pointedly asks.

Sam sighs once again and decides to grab the bull by the horns, see where that gets him. "From what you told me. Now we're pretending that never happened."

Dean is definitely pretending that never happened. He doesn't even acknowledge that Sam said anything, just changes the subject, quick smart. Not going there – can't face it. "Stratton, Nebraska," he announces. "Farm town. Man gets hacked to death in a locked room inside a locked house. No signs of forced entry."

"Sounds like a ghost," Sam tiredly deduces. Dean agrees that yes, it does, completely focused on his research once more because that is how he is coping. Sam sighs and lays down to at least try and get some more sleep before charging back into yet another fray.



Conversation over and Sam's eyes averted once more, no one to maintain appearances in front of, Dean's attention drifts from his research and he becomes pensive. It is clear that he is just barely holding himself together.

Between the dialogue and the visual cues in this scene we are given all the information we need about where the brothers are at going into the case they are about to take on. It isn't pretty, and nor should it be – I really appreciate that the traumatic end of the last episode isn't just being brushed back under the carpet, as sometimes happens on this show, but is being dealt with head-on. The relative lack of solid and consistent character focus has been my biggest regret about what has otherwise been an outstanding season so far.

So, we learn from this scene, it has been a month since the end of Heaven and Hell and, having opened up and admitted to his memories of hell, Dean is just barely hanging on, falling back on his classic coping strategy: denial. This is how Dean always deals with trauma: he buries himself in work, in the here-and-now, and tries to carry on as if nothing is wrong.

And Sam, apparently, is letting him pretend that nothing is wrong. There is nothing else he can do. He doesn't know how to help. He can't help, and Dean won't let him help, because that might just be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Sam is useless in this crisis and he knows it. So he's doing the only thing he can do: he's taking a step back and letting Dean do what he needs to do to get by. He's quietly supporting his brother by going along with the maniacal hunting, despite his own exhaustion, and he's keeping a close, careful watch over Dean, ready to catch him if and when he falls.

In fact, it feels a bit like Sam's reached much the same place Dean hit in early season two, where it feels a little easier and safer to worry about his brother than to think about his own problems, but the overall combination of the two is exhausting and there is no relief of any kind in sight.

Right now, it seems, Dean is heading for a crash. He knows it and Sam knows it, but he's trying hard to outrun it and Sam is letting him, because they are both so horribly broken – and neither one is capable of putting the other back together again, not any more, certainly not right now.

Stratton, Nebraska. Day

The Impala pulls up around back of the farmhouse from the teaser, which now has a for sale sign up outside. What isn't so visible to a passing car is the sold notice, which had been tacked over the top but has since fallen off into the long grass.

How long has it been since the old man's murder, then, I wonder? Quite some time, apparently. Clearly Dean has been raking through old news as well as new in search of potential leads – anything to keep his mind busy, to distract himself from his own trauma.

The brothers approach the house, Dean assembling his lock pick as he walks. I wonder how they decide who is going to do the lock picking on any given day? There is no signal of any kind, but only one of them ever gets his kit out. Maybe they have a rota and take turns…

This scene is one long, uncut pan, starting with the Impala parking and the brothers getting out, following them as they walk around the house and up to the door, and ending with Dean picking the lock. Nice.

The brothers enter the empty house and start looking around. "Three bedrooms, two baths and one homicide. This place is going to sell like hot cakes," remarks Dean, not having seen the fallen 'sold' sign outside, and Sam snorts his agreement, amused.



I like the banter in this episode: Dean cracks bad jokes at every opportunity and Sam seems genuinely amused. Despite their bleak circumstances, that banter nonetheless comes across as light-hearted and effortless. Both brothers are exhausted and they both know that Dean is in a bad headspace, but they are nonetheless keeping things as normal as possible, and by playing it this way they are able to keep themselves on a relatively even keel; even the facsimile of their normal routine and banter is soothing for them both. With the way their lives have been spinning out of control in recent years, especially in these last weeks and months, they both need as much 'normality' they can cling onto, however dysfunctional it might be.

The camera angle shifts to reveal that someone is watching the brothers from inside a nearby closet, peering through the slats.

The kitchen looks like it could use some work – the new owners are going to have to replace the lino, at the very least! Dean and Sam are here to look for evidence of ghost activity, however, rather than to critique the condition of the house, so they just keep poking around without commentary. Meanwhile, the supposed spirit continues to stalk them from the safety of the walls.

Dean notices grooves on the wall marking out a square, where an opening has been sealed up and painted over. He draws Sam's attention to it, observing that it is hollow, and Sam shrugs that it was probably a dumbwaiter, that all these old houses had them.

"Know it all," Dean mutters. Sam didn't quite catch that. Dean plays dumb, and the brothers exchange a few perplexed 'what's before Sam decides it wasn't important and brushes it off. Once Sam has turned away, Dean smirks to himself; poking fun at Sam's giant brain has always been a source of great amusement to him. Hee! Dean has always been good at living in the here-and-now and deriving whatever enjoyment he can out of each passing moment.



Upstairs, Dean grumbles that there are no bloodstains, all hidden by the fresh coat of paint – just a bunch of bubkis. No clues to follow up. The EMF meter in Sam's hand is burbling away like crazy, but the power lines just outside mean the readings can't be relied upon.

Sam opens a door, and the brothers gaze down in bemusement at an object left sitting on the floor of the otherwise empty closet: a disembodied doll's head, hair shorn off.

"Urgh," is all Sam has to say.

"Well, that's super disturbing," agrees Dean.



Sam wonders if it got left behind, but Dean points out that the last occupant of the house, the murdered Mr Gibson from the teaser, was an elderly man who lived alone – not the most likely candidate for a doll head fetish.

The sound of approaching vehicles interrupts both the conversation and the search of the house. The brothers stare in dismay out the window at the approaching car and removal lorry, and wow but the several inches Sam has on Dean really stand out in this shot. Dean grumbles that Sam had said the house wasn't sold yet, and all Sam can do is point out that clearly it has been.

Outside

A nifty aerial shot shows the car and lorry pulling up out front, out of sight of the Impala, which is parked around back. There is no way the brothers can drive away without being seen.

The new owners of the farm exit their vehicle, the Carter family: mother and father, Sue and Brian, teenage daughter Kate and younger son Danny, Uncle Ted and a dog, Buster. Danny is happy to run and play with the dog after the long journey. Brian and Sue are determinedly positive about their new home. Kate's main concern is the lack of signal for her cell phone. They are very, very normal. And wow, there are a lot of them!

As the family begin to unload the car, Kate stops short and calls the others' attention to two men exiting their new house. Dean and Sam, of course. They have decided that their only course of action is to brazen it out. They whip out some random official-looking ID and introduce themselves as county code-enforcers.



Brian protests that they had the house inspected only last week, but the brothers are committed to their story now and insist that there is asbestos in the walls and a gas leak, rendering the house uninhabitable until the problem is resolved. Ted protests that they just drove 400 miles but the brothers hold firm, informing the family that there is a motel just down the road and suggesting that they stay there until the house is cleared for occupation.

Brian asks what if they don't. Dean stares him down with an offer of a fine or imprisonment.



Brian gives in and agrees to one night in the motel, rather to the dismay of his travel-weary family.

Being so completely sprung while trespassing is just the first thing that goes wrong for the brothers in this episode, but by no means the last. Their attempt at talking their way out of a tricky situation and trying to keep this family out of danger is a valiant effort, but one that is never going to work, the story spun on the spur of the moment rather than thought through in any way – and not having learned of the house purchase beforehand is a sign of sloppy research, evidence that their exhaustion is affecting their work more than perhaps they are aware of.

Trailer Park

Dean and Sam interview a Mrs Carey, one-time maid of Mr Gibson, the old man killed in the trailer. Sam asks what she found in the room and she grumbles that she already said all this to the local police before continuing that what she found was blood, everywhere. Dean asks where Mr Gibson was. Mrs Carey looks at him. "Everywhere," she repeats, and suddenly this scene is giving me déjà vu. Dean had a very similar conversation with a witness in Shadow, way back in season one.



Sam asks how long Mrs Carey had been cleaning Mr Gibson's house and she answers about five years, explaining that he was real private and not the easiest man, but adds that she can't really blame him since his wife died in childbirth and their daughter hanged herself in the attic twenty years later. "I'd be bitter, too," she shrugs.

She has some pictures saved from when the house was cleared out and gives them to the brothers: one photo of Mr Gibson and his wife and another of their daughter, Rebecca.

Sam asks why Rebecca killed herself, but Mrs Carey doesn't know. It was before her time. Dean tries asking if she ever noticed anything odd in the house, like lights going on and off or things not being where she left them. She shrugs no, and then remembers that she sometimes thought she heard rustling in the walls, but never saw any rats. Sam asks if she knows where Mrs Gibson and her daughter were buried. Turns out they were cremated.



Heading back to the car, Sam notes that the spirit probably isn't the mother or daughter and wonders who it was, then. That is the second time this season that Sam has assumed that because someone was cremated they are unlikely to be wandering around as a spirit still, and yet the brothers have worked numerous cases where the corpse had been cremated but the spirit had latched onto something else, going as far back as Route 666 or Provenance.

Dean suggests they get back to the house and give it a thorough once over in hopes of finding out.

House

Back at the house…the new owners are unpacking, having completely gone back on their promise to spend the night at a motel. Uncle Ted is adamant that there is no asbestos in the walls, and as a builder he knows what he is talking about. He has also ascertained that there is no gas leak either. They are puzzled over who Dean and Sam might have been, since they clearly weren't who they claimed to be, but aren't about to lose any sleep over the conundrum, since they have a lorry-full of furniture to unload and move in.

Turning to haul a rucksack into the house, young Kate is startled to see a ghostly figure standing in an upstairs window, but when she looks again the girl is gone. Assuming that she must have imagined it, she brushes it off. Her mother, Sue, takes the opportunity to try and assure her that they are going to be happy in their new home, so Kate gets with the programme of determined optimism and agrees that everything is going to change.

This is our first hint that this family has something of a troubled past. They take up rather a lot of screen time in the episode, and maybe aren't the most interesting or dynamic guest characters the show has ever had, but nonetheless I find them engaging enough. After recent episodes populated with angels and demons, it is refreshing to encounter such utterly normal individuals and be reminded that ordinary people can have problems too, while their situation offers subtle parallels to Dean's: they are using this house move to run away from the troubles of their past, just as Dean is using the job to run away from his.

Inside. Night

Sue yells upstairs to ask if Danny is unpacking. Sitting in the dark with just a couple of little side lamps lit, engrossed in a videogame, he calls back that he is. The closet door creaking open all on its own soon grabs his attention, however. A baseball comes rolling out. Curious, Danny picks it up and calls hello. Whoever is hiding in the shadows ducks away at the sound of his voice.

This house has people living in the walls. That is just so creepy. Makes me glad the walls here are so thin!

Instead of being afraid, which he should be, Danny calls that it is okay. Why are children in this show always idiots with no sense of self-preservation, even when they are old enough to know better? As the camera ducks back out of hiding to give us the perspective of the timid wall-dweller, Danny introduces himself and rolls the ball back. It is instantly tossed back to him but rather than being creeped out at the thought of something, someone living in the walls of his house, he laughs in delight at having found a playmate. Like I said: idiot.

Downstairs

Brian pours coffee while Sue waffles on about soil composition and what kind of vegetables they might be able to grow, wonders if he understands all this any better than she does. Instead of answering, he is distracted by a foul smell that he traces to a small side cupboard, which is just above and to the side of the sealed dumbwaiter Dean and Sam noticed earlier. Sue calls him to order and he hastily pretends to be interested in vegetable gardening.

But Sue just gazes at him, determined optimism slipping as she wonders what they think they are doing, moving their family to a farm. Brian becomes serious too, assuring her that it is going to be different and promising that they will be happy. Sue worriedly says that she can't put the kids through another year like the last. Unspoken is the rider that they also aren't sure they can put themselves and their marriage through another year like the last.

Outside

The Impala pulls up in the lane approaching the house. Inside, the brothers gaze in dismay at what is very obviously an occupied house.



"Crap," Dean mutters. "So what now?"

Sam shrugs. "We could tell them the truth."

Dean is surprised by the suggestion. "Really?"

"No, not really," says Sam. Heh. It's an old and tired stock exchange, but it's been a while since they had it!

Lacking any ideas regarding where to proceed from here, the brothers turn and watch the house some more.

Inside

Uncle Ted is busily moving boxes around when he notices something and calls Brian and Sue to take a look. The word 'GO' has been scrawled on a wall with a red crayon in foot-high letters. They all immediately assume Danny is responsible and call him downstairs to face the inquisition. Ted asides to Sue that if his kid did this…. She tiredly points out that he's not Ted's kid and to butt out. He does as he is told, drifting away into the kitchen with a huff. It's a suitably sibling exchange to imply that Ted is Sue's brother rather than Brian's.

It is never made clear why Ted has made the move with his sister and her family – whether he has been or will be living with them permanently by way of supporting them through what has apparently been a difficult time, or is just here temporarily to assist with the move, because they needed someone to drive the removal van and help carry furniture.

As Danny trots downstairs, Sue cautions Brian to go easy on him, since his teacher warned that he might act out. Brian points the graffiti out to Danny and asks if there's anything he wants to tell them. Danny immediately denies responsibility. Brian say that all he wants is for Danny to tell the truth and clean it up, no punishment, but Danny again denies responsibility and suggests that 'the girl in the walls did it'.

"She wants you to go and me to stay," Danny declares, much to the confusion and concern of his parents. "I can stay but she hates grown ups and if you don't leave she's going to get really, really mad."

Now…all this information implies that Danny has had some kind of conversation with the girl, although we never hear her speak during the episode and are otherwise given no indication that she is capable of speech.

It also sounds rather like something that should have been a source of concern to him, no matter how young he is! A feral girl living in the walls who threatens the safety of his family – shouldn't he have come to warn someone? Or at least looked more troubled when he came downstairs? It seems as if he is only getting heated about it now because his parents don't believe him, rather than because he is worried or unnerved in any way by the encounter. Strange child.

Brian sends Danny to his room and the boy clomps away in a huff yelling that if Andy were here he'd believe him. This reference is a Clue as to the tragedy this family has suffered in the recent past, but will not be picked up and expanded upon until much later.

Upstairs

Meanwhile, Kate is already in bed. Well, that's one way to avoid unpacking. She hears dog-like panting by the side of her bed and smiles, assuming that it is Buster, stretching out a hand to pet him without looking while confiding that she hates it here. A smacking sound ensues and Kate is grossed out by the 'dog' licking her hand.

The bedroom door creaks open and Buster enters. Kate is absolutely horrified by the realisation that whatever just licked her hand was not the dog. She turns just in time to see the other door slam shut and screams, long and loud.

Downstairs

The household is in uproar as Kate wigs out. "I just got molested by Casper the pervy ghost, that's what happened!" she shrieks.

Danny declares that it is the girl in the walls, which squicks Kate out all the more, and the adults in the room despair. First night in their new home and already the kids are convinced it is haunted.

Someone starts hammering on the door. Ted opens it, and Dean and Sam rush in, worriedly explaining that they heard screams.

"You two!" Brian fumes. "Did you touch my daughter?"

Dean is taken aback at the unexpected accusation, Buster the dog spots the open front door and makes a run for it, and Sam just bites the bullet and announces that the family has a ghost.

Cue still more uproar. Kate and Danny begin to clamour their vindication, while Brian expostulates his disbelief and demands to know what Dean and Sam are playing at.

By way of reply, Dean announces that the whole family is in danger and needs to get out of the house, now.

Right on cue, every light in the house goes out, much to the consternation of all.

Once again, although the failure of the lights would be consistent with spirit activity, it makes far less sense once we know that the cellar-dwellers are in fact repressed and regressed humans, uneducated and feral, and not supernatural at all. The lack of consistency in the portrayal of these unfortunate individuals is one of the greatest weaknesses of this episode. It is also worth bearing in mind that Dean and Sam are so conditioned to flickering lights as a sign of supernatural activity that it never once occurs to them that there can also be more mundane explanations, such as shorted fuses or sabotage by fellow humans.

Also, the rest of this episode is very dark! This gloomy cinematography emphasises the show's return to its season one roots in this episode, classic horror story that this is, but does make it rather hard to discern what is happening at times!

While the confused Carters mill around in bewilderment, Dean firmly shouts out for nobody to move; he seems to be shooting for a decisive and authoritative tone, but it comes across rather more like aggression. The case is spinning out of control now, and neither he nor Sam was prepared for that to happen. They have had little or no opportunity for their usual thorough investigation, while their over-tired state renders them considerably less capable than usual to think on their feet. They really are not in good condition to be going into this crisis situation.

From outside, Buster the dog can be heard yelping in pain, which horrifies the children especially. Brian and Ted dash outside to see what's going on, much to the frustration of Dean and Sam, who hurry after them. But Buster is now silent, and a bloody trail leads across the lawn to where the words 'too late' are painted in blood on the side of the removals van.

The writing on the walls is another inconsistency in this storyline, a mislead designed to point toward a ghost rather than evidence to help build up a clear profile of the true culprits. If the cellar-dwellers have been locked up all their lives, never seeing light and winding up little more than wild animals, savage and feral…how could they possibly be literate enough to leave written messages?

Sue and the kids come charging out calling for the dog. Brian hurriedly urges them back inside, and Sue swiftly takes in the situation and ushers the distraught children away once more.

"We are not the bad guys, but you're in danger," says Dean. He needs to get this man on side if they are to stand any chance of getting this family out of the situation in one piece.



Sam adds that Brian has to get his family away from the house. Brian looks at him, exchanges worried glances with Ted, and looks back at the bloody warning on the side of the truck.

Later

A few moments later, Dean and Sam usher the entire family toward their car, Dean urging them to head for the motel where they will be safe. Brian wonders what Dean and Sam are going to do, but before they can answer Dean has spotted something.



"Oh no. Oh no. Come on!" The Impala's tyres have been slashed, all four. Dean is appalled. That's the second time this season the Impala has been attacked! First eggs, now the tyres…

While Dean rants his impotent fury, Sam hurries to the trunk, while Brian checks the other car and Ted hurries to the van. The other vehicles have also been sabotaged, so that everyone is effectively stranded here at the farm. Furthermore: "Dude, the guns are gone!" an alarmed Sam calls to his brother. "So's the…." He flails. "Basically everything is gone."

Two points here. First of all, why the hell were Sam and Dean not already armed when they rushed into the house upon hearing screams? It is very out of character for them to charge into an unknown and potentially deadly situation like that without weaponry, further evidence that their exhaustion is leading them to make mistakes, very basic and sloppy errors that detract from their ability to work the job and place both them and the people around them in danger.

The second point is yet another inconsistency in the background of the cellar-dwellers. Again we must note that they are supposed to have been locked up in the dark beneath the house their entire lives, with no access to parental nurture or education or any advantages of everyday human life. They are savages. So how did they know to slash the tyres to disable the vehicles? How did they know how to pick the lock on the Impala's trunk? How did they know to steal all the weapons? They don't seem to have taken anything belonging to the family, singling the Impala out as if Dean and Sam have been identified as the greatest threat here. That's fair enough…but they still shouldn't have known to look in the Impala's trunk! It is all very rational and intelligent, educated behaviour, pre-meditated acts that directly contradict the presentation of them as little more than wild animals, creatures of instinct reacting out of fear and pain.

"What kind of ghost messes with a man's wheels?" Dean bellows.

Kate is just standing around hyperventilating, not understanding what's going on, and part of me wishes she were a little feistier while the other part of me appreciates that her reaction is very true to who and what she is – just a very normal teenage girl catapulted into a terrifying situation. Not everyone has it in them to rise to the occasion. She turns, sees the ghostly girl standing off among a little copse of trees a short distance away and screams.

By the time everyone else has turned to see what Kate saw, the girl has vanished as if she was never there.

"What's a ghost doing outside?" mutters Dean, having apparently forgotten that this is not so unheard of, depending on what the spirit has latched onto. Just look at Roadkill. Mostly, I think, he just resents that this case is not working out the way he'd wanted it to. What Dean was looking for was straightforward, an open-and-shut haunting where he could get in, make the kill and move on, nice and easy. This case, however, is proving anything but straightforward.

"You want to stay and find out?" Sam mutters back at him.

Dean takes the point and orders everyone back inside. Ted protests that he is crazy and they need to get the hell out of there, but Dean points out that they have no functional vehicles and therefore no way of escape. He angrily lays it on the line. "This ghost is hunting us. Everybody back inside. Move!"



Inside

Sam lays down a thick salt line while Dean explains. "Whatever is outside, it can't get in this circle."

Where did the salt come from? We didn't see Sam take anything out of the trunk but the couple of flashlights that were all that was left before legging it back to the house – the trunk was otherwise empty. I very much doubt the family had bags of rock salt lying around the place!

"As long as the salt line is unbroken, this is the safest place to be," Dean continues, gruff and senatorial, crouching alongside the fire clutching at a fire iron he has found, which is just about the only weapon available.

Brian is still sceptical about the whole ghost thing. Dean is impatient, since he has better things to do than keep repeating himself over and over. Brian decides he's had enough and isn't going to listen to this any more, wants to just get his family away from the house.

"Nobody's going anywhere until we kill this thing," Dean firmly insists, still curt and impatient, frustrated that nothing is turning out straightforward on this case.

Sam attempts conciliation. "Sir. Please. This is what we do. Just…trust us."



"You hunt ghosts?" Young Danny perks right the hell up. "Like Scooby Doo?"

Snerk. Sam's snort of long-suffering amusement is priceless, while Dean bridles and says, "better."

While Ted rolls his eyes, Sam tries questioning Kate about the girl she saw outside. He pulls out the pictures of Mrs Gibson and her daughters and asks if either one looks like the girl Kate saw. It is good to see that despite having assumed earlier that the Gibson women were unlikely suspects, having heard that they had been cremated, Sam is now defaulting back to them as the likeliest candidates rather than discounting them entirely. Kate IDs the daughter, although the girl she saw was paler and a lot dirtier, and Danny agrees that it is the girl in the walls.

Sue hesitantly asks if the girl in the picture is dead. Sam hesitates just slightly, anticipating how the family are likely to take the news, before replying that she killed herself inside this house. True to form, they aren't what you'd call thrilled.

Dean and Sam take themselves off to the edge of the salt circle, away from the civilians, to discuss this development. "So what, the maid got her story wrong? Rebecca wasn't cremated?" Dean ponders, having apparently forgotten that spirits can cling to objects other than their own physical remains. However, Sam restores my faith once more by offering that the spirit could be attached to something inside the house. It's as if the writers feel it has been so long since we had a ghost story we need reminding of all the basics! They are also very much emphasising the very basic assumption Dean and Sam are making that this house is haunted. Not once has any other possibility occurred to them, and every move they make is based on that assumption, false as it will turn out to be.

Dean remembers that Rebecca Gibson hung herself in the attic, and Sam suggests that his brother babysit while he goes to investigate. Not the most diplomatic language to be using within earshot of the grown men within the party needing to be 'babysat'.

Ted interrupts to say that he doesn't care who hung themselves where, if something is going on here… Dean interjects that it is a spirit, but Ted is having none of it, insisting that it is just some "backwoods hillbilly bitch and I'm not just sitting around here waiting for her to go all Deliverance on my ass." Dean firmly reiterates that no one is leaving the house, but Ted remains defiant. "Stop me," he challenges.

Dean is quite prepared to do just that and hauls the man to a standstill as he strides toward the door, rather to the alarm of the others. "Listen, man, I've got a gun," Dean menaces. "You don't get your ass back in that circle you're going to have yourself a third hole."



Dean has always tended toward intimidation where necessary, but he's kind of skating the edge here and even he knows it. Throughout the episode we have seen evidence of what Sam told us at the beginning: that after lurching from one job to the next without break for a month now, Dean is exhausted, running on empty. All his rough edges are sharp and jagged. He's a little too invested in his work, for the wrong reasons, and although that compassionate focus has always been one of his strengths it comes across as desperation here. He's not hunting for the sake of the individuals he is trying to save, but in a frantic effort to assuage his own crippling guilt and despair, knowing that it is never going to be enough. He's off-balance and over-compensating, worn down and hollowed out.

Intimidated, although still resentful, Ted subsides. Sam sidles over to his brother's side, not quite protesting the heavy-handed tactics but concerned. "Dude, you don't have a gun," he mildly points out.



"And?" Dean is unrepentant. "I'm not letting that bastard or anyone else die tonight."

The fact that Dean is completely unable to follow through on that declaration will be a source of great distress for him later.

Sam holds his brother's eyes for a moment. "You cool?"

No, Dean is pretty far from cool and they both know it, but that doesn't mean he can't or won't do his job, so he just rolls his eyes and bobs his head a little by way of non-committal gesture and tells Sam to go. Sam heads upstairs, leaving Dean to guard the civilians.



I really love this little exchange between the brothers, such a tiny moment that conveys so much. Sam's concern for his brother shines through, as does Dean's awareness of his own fragile mental state, but it is also clear that Sam isn't going to press the issue, trusting his brother to be able to hold things together and trusting in his ability to work the job, with Dean determined to do just that. It plays as a very effective contrast to Sam's deeply sceptical although no less concerned reaction to Dean's tailspin in Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things in season two, when he pushed and prodded at his brother constantly, questioning Dean's ability to function every step of the way, undermining rather than supporting him. He knows better than that now, understands both himself and his brother better now, both their capacity and their limitations, and so opts for a more measured approach, holding back and giving his brother the space he needs while nonetheless prepared to step in with more practical support if Dean needs it.

The brothers have come a long way. Their relationship is still strained, after everything that's happened, but they are making forward progress, as best they can. What other choice to they have? All they can do is lurch onward because there is no way back and they don't dare stand still. For now it is working for them, but surely sooner or later the immense strain they are each under will reach breaking point, and what might happen then is anyone's guess.

Later

Loose canon Ted messes with the line of salt encircling his family and calls to Dean. "Hey. Fonzie. Question for you. This indestructible force field made out of salt? Have to be kosher stuff, or what?"

Oh, he called Dean 'Fonzie'. Priceless.

Sue rolls her eyes and tells her brother to knock it off. Ted smirks, thinking he's funny – this is all about one-upmanship after being faced down earlier, trying to salvage a little macho male pride. Dean says nothing, just continues to pace the perimeter, fire iron in hand, not rising to the bait. Kate shushes them all, frightened by a noise she heard.

Now, it could of course just be Sam on his way back down to rejoin them, but with a supposed spirit on the prowl everyone becomes all the more agitated. Dean tenses up, seeing a shadowy figure emerging from a closet nearby. He waits at the edge of the circle, impromptu weapon at the ready, while the Carters huddle together behind him, terrified.



Feral Girl slowly walks toward them, pale and dirty. Dean tells the others to stay calm because she's a ghost and therefore can't come inside the circle. Feral Girl keeps coming. She reaches the edge of the salt circle and bares her teeth, knife in hand…and then steps right over the salt line!



The frightened civilians gasp in horror and protest that Dean had assured them ghosts couldn't cross the circle. "They can't," Dean very calmly although not exactly reassuringly confirms, rapidly reassessing the situation. "She's not a ghost."

Ted yells at Dean to shoot her, but of course he can't because he doesn't have a gun on him. He shouts at the Carters to run for it just as Feral Girl lashes out at him, fending her off with his fire iron while the others race out of the house. The girl shrieks shrilly as she lashes and slashes, and it is all Dean can do to stave her off, cornered as he is with little or no room for manoeuvre. He loses his balance and goes over backward, but then Sam arrives back downstairs just in the nick of time, yelling to draw the girl's attention away from his brother. He has a flashlight in his hand and Feral Girl yells in pain as the light hits her eyes. She rushes back to the closet she came out of, still shrieking.

By the time Sam gets to the closet, just seconds later, there is no sign of her any more.

Outside

Dean and Sam hurry out of the house to make sure the others are okay. Brian hurries over and anxiously asks if Dean is okay, which is a touch of nice characterisation for him. Instead of answering, Dean asks where everyone else is, and Brian says that they are hiding. Dean tells him to go get them and then turns to Sam for a hurried brainstorm. Clearly, they are not dealing with a ghost but a human, and so the flaws in their strategy up till now are laid bare.

"It's not just a girl – it's Psycho Nell," Dean describes. "I'm telling you, man. Humans." He said something similar in The Benders. Dean has always preferred straightforward, black-and-white cases that draw a clear line between good and evil, right and wrong. He likes creatures that play by rules, whose behaviour can be mapped and anticipated. With humans, though, all the rulebooks go out of the window and nothing can be predicted, a minefield of murky moral grey areas.



Sam wonders who the girl is then. Flustered by his close encounter, Dean suggests maybe it was the daughter and she didn't hang herself after all, but Sam points out that the girl they met was a good couple of decades too young to be Rebecca Gibson, who he estimates would be around 50 by now, if she had lived.

Really? That seems rather older than I'd have expected, based on what we see of the cellar-dwellers, who we will later learn are Rebecca's children. After all, if Rebecca's mother died in childbirth and Rebecca was around 20 when she hung herself, if she would be 50 now that would place her children in their 30s, which from the look of them clearly is not the case. I'd say Sam is a good decade out there, and that Rebecca would in fact be nearer 40 if she had lived. It still raises the question of how old – or how young – she was when her children were born…or, more pertinently, now old – or young – they were when she died. If they were little more than infants, one has to wonder how they survived at all.

Dean's out of ideas and asks what Sam found in the attic. Some junk and Rebecca's old diary, says Sam, but that's it. "Wish you'd found a Howitzer," Dean sighs, and Sam chuckles. He seems to appreciate his brother's quips far more of late than ever before.



"We've got to get this family safe," Dean decides. "It's just a human, so they can make a run for it. We've just got to hold her off."

Now, given that they now know whoever has been living in the walls is just a human – dangerous, but still just a human – rather than a spirit, they could just call in the authorities for help and leave them to sort it out. However, it has already been established that there is no cell reception out here, and the landline is never mentioned, which suggests that the family haven't had it connected yet. Moreover, the brothers have taken the job now, and intend to see it through to the bitter end, for better or for worse.

Brian returns with Sue and Kate in tow and calls for Ted and Danny. Ted comes racing around the corner, but there is no sign of Danny. Whose bright idea was it for them all to split up? I mean…why on earth would the parents let their children run off to hide alone in this kind of situation? Wouldn't they make damn sure to keep the kids with them, the better to protect them in case of attack? Safety in numbers and all that.

While Brian and Sue worriedly call for Danny, Ted turns to Dean. "Told you it was just some crazy bitch," he jeers, like a twelve-year-old.

Dean is not in the mood for bitchy 'I told you so's, since there is so much more at stake than who was right and who was wrong about what. "Yes, you did," he snips back in a tone that brooks no further conversation on the subject, while Sam calls to Brian to head into town while he and Dean take it from here.

Now, if only the brothers had allowed the family to leave when they originally wanted to, the tragedies still to unfold in this episode might have been avoided. It was the rigidity of their assumption that they were dealing with an unpredictable and violent spirit that formed the basis of their judgment that it would be more dangerous to try to leave than stay, but now that they know the truth it is rapidly becoming clear just what a dangerously bad decision that was.

Having been allowed to run off and hide all alone, Danny still hasn't shown up, and his parents are starting to panic.

Brian tries to calm Sue down as she freaks out, promising that they will find Danny. He tells her to take Kate and go while she still can, but Sue refuses to leave without her son and Kate weighs in that she is not going out there alone with her mother. She wants male protection, which may not be very enlightened but is very practical, in the circumstances.

"She's right," Dean interjects. "Until we find your son, the safest place for you right now is in the shed."

The shed? Where did that come from? Dean's improvising madly now that the case is spinning so badly out of control. It's all about damage limitation at this point.

Kate refuses to go in the shed, but Dean insists. "It is the best defence. The windows are boarded up, it's got one door – it's our best shot right now. Trust me."

He said that before. Well, Sam did, anyway. Trusting the Winchester brothers hasn't actually got the family all that far as of yet, though! Mostly everything has gone wrong. They would, however, be a lot worse off if the boys hadn't shown up. Brian makes the decision, gently telling Sue and Kate to go and they comply, hurrying to the relative safety of the shed.



Once the women are as safe as they are going to get, Sam draws up the search teams. He and Brian will take the outside while Dean and Ted search the house. Neither Dean nor Ted looks what you'd call happy about this decision but neither argues, since there is too much at stake to waste any time. The two teams set off to begin the search.

Inside

While Ted rifles through a box to find a kitchen knife, Dean heads straight for the closet the girl disappeared into. Clueless, Ted wonders what he is doing. Dean points out that since the girl is human, she had to come from somewhere.

I love that since Feral Girl has proved to be human, the family has no actual evidence of the existence of ghosts, yet they no longer question Dean and Sam's casual discussion of the difference between humans and ghosts in the slightest.

At the back of the closet, Dean finds loose boards and pulls them back to reveal a hole leading into the walls. The backs of the boards are stained with blood, and Ted recoils. "You smell that?"

"Every day," Dean grimly replies, paying very little attention to the man, focused as he is on the search.

With the knife Ted found in one hand and his flashlight in the other, Dean peers cautiously into the wall space, which is dark and dusty with the occasional bone scattered around the place. Once he has confirmed that there is no one nearby, and therefore no likelihood of imminent attack, Dean ventures inside and Ted reluctantly follows.

It is very dark in the wall space and therefore difficult to make out much of what's going on as Dean carefully picks his way along the narrow tunnel, with Ted sticking close.

Just around the bend, Dean finds a hole in the floor, just about person-sized, and peers cautiously into it.

"You're not going down there?" Ted disbelieves.

"Well, do you want to?" Dean sighs, staring down into the hole as he steels his nerve. Then he glances at Ted to see his answer, and Ted has to look away, abashed. It is his nephew who is missing but for all his bluster there is no way he'd have the nerve to explore this hole in the ground, certainly not while Dean is around, ready and willing to go down there for him.

"Please nobody grab my leg. Please nobody grab my leg," Dean breathes, like a mantra, as he carefully lowers himself into the hole, which is just barely wide enough to fit his broad shoulders, if he angles just right.

Let us all pause to remember the last time Dean left someone alone while searching a wall space with them – Jo Harvelle, back in No Exit. It didn't exactly end well, although Dean did manage to retrieve her safely. Then, Jo defied Dean by taking off on her own and he was simply unable to prevent her. Here, he is focused on the search and the missing boy, rather than on his responsibility to the civilian searching with him, who is now alone and unprotected. Over-tired and distracted – and making mistakes.

At the bottom of the hole is a dank, dirty little cave littered with the remains of dead animals. Just as in Malleus Maleficarum, Dean almost bumps right into a limp, furry limb hanging from a hook as he turns around, and recoils in disgust. The unfortunate Buster is the most recent addition to the rotting remains and Dean shakes his head in disgust. "Dog," he mutters. "That's what's for dinner." Dean always did have a habit of talking to himself when he's alone.

Dean tries calling for Danny and Ted calls down to ask if he's found anything. Dean disgustedly mutters that it is the girl's kitchen and Ted can't quite believe what he just heard.

Meanwhile, ominously, the camera angle shifts to imply that someone is watching Ted from above.

Down in the cave, Dean keeps poking around, finding more animal remains rather than any sign of Danny. He also finds a couple of stick figures painted on the wall in blood, one male and one female, holding hands, but passes over it, not realising that it could be significant.

Up above, Ted waits…and the lurking figure watching him moves in. He turns around – and shines his flashlight right in the face of Feral Girl, who shrieks. Down in the cave, Dean hears the screech too late to do anything to help Ted, who is stabbed right through the throat. Ick.

Dean hurries back toward the entrance just as Ted drops across it, dead, his head dangling down into the cave just to emphasise the horror of his brutal death. Dean instantly takes evasive action, huddling against the cave wall with a hand clamped over the flashlight, holding his breath, not wanting the girl to know he is there. He's not in a defensible position. The look on his face is heart-rending: angry, despairing and hopeless, hating himself for yet another failure, yet another life on his already over-burdened conscience.



Shed

Having concluded their search of the grounds, Sam and Brian have joined the women in the shed to wait for Dean and Ted, all of them tense and worried. Brian quietly asks Sam why they are just standing around rather than going in and checking the house, but Sam insists that they have to wait for the others to get back.

Right on cue, Dean knocks on the door and calls for Sam to let him in. They hurriedly pull away the table barricading the door so they can open it. Dean enters and closes the door behind him, head down, face closed off, not looking at anyone. Sue anxiously asks if he found Danny.

Dean looks at Sam with a little shake of his head, eyes broadcasting his shame and distress, and Sam gets the message loud and clear. Head dropping again, Dean breathes the word "no" in response to Sue's query and she is distraught, asks where Ted is. Head bowed, eyes glued to the dirt floor, Dean quietly says that he's outside. Sue doesn't get it and asks why he doesn't come inside. Dean glances at Sam again and then more falteringly toward Sue, almost but not quite meeting her eyes as he explains that he had to carry Ted out. His head drops again as he whispers that he is sorry. This is agony for him, not just losing someone on his watch but also having to break the news to the family, who still have a missing child.



Sue still doesn't get it, too frightened and agitated to think clearly. Brian is rather quicker on the uptake, quietly asking if Dean is trying to say that Ted is dead. Dean can't bring himself to say the words. Sue starts babbling that of course that isn't what Dean is saying, and Dean still can't meet her eyes as he explains in leaden tones that they were in the walls when the girl attacked and he couldn't get to Ted in time.

Sue crumples with grief and horror. Ted was her brother. Both Dean and Sam know how it feels to lose a brother.

Brian consoles his wife while Kate rants her disbelief that her uncle is dead. Dean bitterly concludes that he shouldn't have left Ted alone, turns and opens the door. He glances back and meets Brian's eyes, says, "I'm very sorry," and walks out of the shed.



Sam just stands there like a statue, stewing in his impotence. The whole case is going horribly wrong, spiralling from bad to worse, and that's partly due to circumstances beyond the brothers' control but also because they are dropping the ball rather more than they normally would. Now Sam sees more weight, more guilt, landing on his brother's shoulders, and there is still nothing he can do about any of it.

Later

Instead of going after Dean, Sam busies himself with research. He already knows that he can't help his brother, except by doing whatever he can to get this case resolved as quickly as possible, before anything else can go wrong. So he is doing what he does best: research. He's reading Rebecca Gibson's diary.

Nearby, Kate paces while Brian attempts to comfort his grieving wife, promising her that they will find Danny. Sue just sits there, rocking, as she points out that there is nowhere else to look and despairs that Danny must be dead already. Completely giving into despair, Sue laments that he must be, that the girl has killed both her brother and her son.

While Kate has quiet hysterics over all this in the corner, Brian firmly insists that Danny is alive. "Do you remember what he said about the girl who lived in the walls? She said he could stay."

Well remembered, Brian. I have decided that Brian is my favourite character out of this family. He is sensible and clear-headed, stays calm in the crisis, and even has a sense of humour – all you could ask for in a guest character.

"I just don't understand why this happens to us," Sue moans. "We're good people, we're a good family."

But life is not fair and bad things can happen to good people for absolutely no reason. This show has always made that abundantly clear.

"What happened to Andy happened, okay," Brian firmly tells her. "I cannot change that. But I will find Danny. I promise you. And when I do, we are going to be fine. You and me, the kids – we're gonna be fine."

Kate looks like she really wishes she could believe that. Sue looks at her daughter, realises that Kate needs her to believe and stay strong, and nods.

Sam glances up from his reading, eyes the family worriedly, and then turns his eyes back upon the page once again.

Outside

In rather an awkward transition, since we just saw him in the shed with his family, Brian stands and stares up at the house, despondent. Dean approaches. "Andy your son?" he asks. He must have been eavesdropping, since he wasn't in the room when Andy was discussed.

Brian explains that Andy was their oldest son who got himself killed in a car accident last year. Hearing of the family's previous heartbreak hits Dean hard, familiar as he is with personal tragedy. Bad enough that this couple has a young son missing and have lost a brother tonight; knowing that they have already experienced the loss of a child just makes it all the worse. He murmurs an apology and Brian admits that it nearly tore him and Sue apart.

"Still could, I imagine," he adds, striving for an upbeat tone because it is either that or complete disintegration. Many couples fail to recover from the loss of a child, and this couple now have another child in peril. "That's why we moved here," Brian explains. "Fresh air, fresh start. Not even my line. Marriage counsellor. She might be right. After all, what could possibly go wrong in the country?"

He offers Dean a bitter smile that Dean can't return. "I'm getting your son back," he promises, grimly determined. "If it's the last godforsaken thing I do."



Brian struggles to comprehend such fervour from a complete stranger. "Why do you care so much?"

Oh, where to begin? Dean's eyes skitter away, dark and troubled, but Sam saves him from having to try and find an answer by approaching and calling him over at this point.



Inside

Dean and Sam venture back inside the house to discuss what Sam has learned from Rebecca's diary. While Dean closes the closet door and pulls a barricade in front of it, to be on the safe side, Sam explains that, having read the diary from cover to cover, he is pretty sure the Feral Girl they have encountered is Rebecca's daughter; all she talks about in her diary is her pregnancy and how ashamed she is of it.



"Geez. Rent Juno and get over it," Dean mutters. "Wait. Why kill herself after the baby?"

"Maybe because her dad called her a dirty little whore?" Sam offers. "And said he was going to lock the baby up where nobody could ever see it."

Dean wonders why he would say that. Sam lifts his eyebrows and waggles his head suggestively. Dean's eyes widen. Sam nods. Dean is squicked. "Oh, gross. So the daddy was the baby daddy too?"



"Dude was a monster, Dean," says Sam.

"Wow," Dean grimly notes. "Story ripped from an Austrian headline."

Now, the Fritzl case first broke around about April 2008, shortly before Dean died. Of course, studying news headlines is a big part of what the brothers do, and the case remained at the forefront of media attention worldwide for many weeks, but still you wouldn't have thought Dean would have been paying that much attention to the news in the weeks leading up to his deadline, fully absorbed as he, Sam and Bobby were in trying to find a way of breaking the deal.

Are the cellar-dwellers supposed to be twins, I wonder? Or did Rebecca have more than one pregnancy and only recorded the one, later giving up on the journal, perhaps?

Dean shakes his head in disbelief and disgust. "Humans, man!" Sam can only sigh his agreement with this scathing assessment. Dean summarises. "So she's been locked up in this house her entire life?"

"You saw her eyes," Sam reminds his brother. "Has she ever seen light? She's barely human."

Dismissing Feral Girl as sub-human and therefore a legitimate prey for them as hunters places the brothers on dodgy ground, perhaps. But then again, they both know only too well that humans can become other, given the right circumstances. Once they saw their job in black and white, human versus non-human, clear-cut and simple…but they inhabit much murkier moral ground now, and it is not a comfortable place to be either for them or the Show.

"Okay, what then? She's been caged up like an animal, then she busts out and ganks dear old dad? Slash…granddad?" Dean summarises. Sam shrugs that that's his best theory. Dean looks grim. "Can't say I blame her."

Although Sam does not realise it yet, Dean is already beginning to identify with the cellar-dwellers, who were driven to insanity and murder by the horrific situation they have been trapped in their entire lives, empathising with the situation that made them this way because he can relate it to his own horrific experiences in hell and the impact they had upon his actions and reactions.

"I'm sure her life was hell, Dean," Sam snips. "That doesn't mean she gets a free pass for a murder spree."

"Like you know what hell's like," Dean grates out, stung by Sam's casual dismissal of the reason for the Feral Girl's behaviour as no excuse because he is projecting it upon himself. He knows, from bitter personal experience, in a way that Sam can't know, the damaging impact years of cumulative trauma can have on the human psyche and what it can lead to, whether excusable or not.



Sam might not realise how much Dean is identifying with Feral Girl, but he does already know a little of what his brother went through in hell, that after years of torment Dean willingly tortured others to spare himself further pain. So, realising that he has hit a raw nerve, he hastily backtracks, because what else can he do? Hell is such a horribly, painfully thorny subject for them both. It was for Sam's sake that Dean went to hell, although Sam didn't ask for or want that sacrifice, and that has never been directly addressed since Dean's return.

Dean looks away and says to forget it. Sam looks very troubled and very tired as he asks where they might find the girl.

For a moment, it seems that Dean has no more idea than Sam does…but then a lightbulb goes on in his eyes. "Kid's got to eat, right?" he offers. Well, yes. We've already seen her larder. But that isn't what Dean's talking about. "He kept her hidden, locked up," he elaborates. "But he had to feed her, didn't he? I think I know where."

Dean might be exhausted and he might have made a few sloppy and careless errors on this case, but even on a bad day like this he is still very, very good at what he does, capable of pulling together random fragments of evidence and using them to make intuitive problem-solving leaps.

Sam is still not really following his brother's logic, worn out as he is, so Dean leads the way.

Cellar

Meanwhile down in the space beneath the house, young Danny wakes up to find himself gagged and bound. He is also all lit up by green night vision, which is presumably intended to indicate how pitch dark it is down there, but mostly just looks weird, especially since it is not used in any other scenes. He struggles and flails against his bonds and tries yelling for help through the gag.

Maybe the night vision is meant to portray the perspective of the second cellar-dweller, whose existence remains unknown at this stage, but it really isn't made clear at all.

Nearby, through the gloom, Danny makes out a murky figure crawling through a hole in the wall and cowers back in fear. It is the girl.



She comes and sits beside him, eyes lit up with madness, and holds up a rat by the tail. Danny yelps and cringes. The girl laughs, snaps the rat's spine…and bites into it. Ick! Danny screams and screams into his gag.

Kitchen

Dean smashes his way through the layers of plaster and paint sealing up the dumbwaiter, while Sam explains to Brian. "He kept her hidden down here for years. Kept her fed. Nobody would ever know."

So…if Gibson used the dumbwaiter to feed his imprisoned grand/daughter (and grandson, although no one knows of his existence yet)…who sealed it up, when and why? Did he stop feeding them at some point and seal it up expecting them to starve to death down there, only for their survival instincts to take over? Or was it a contractor, preparing the house for sale? We know that the house has been freshly decorated since the old man died. Shouldn't the workmen have noticed the foul smell of rotting meat as the captive cellar-dwellers ate rats and whatever else they could find in order to survive? Between all that work and the survey the Carters had carried out on the house, shouldn't someone have picked up on the loose boards and other entrance points into the wall cavities and space beneath the house, thus revealing the presence of these savage?

Once Dean has broken through the plasterboard, Sam leans in to shine his flashlight down the shaft, and yells for Danny. Dean pulls him out of the way, announcing that he is going down. Brian immediately objects that it is his son, meaning he should be the one who goes. "I know it is," Dean fervently declares. "But I said that I would get him. I will. Let me."



Sam's part in this scene is just a tiny bit heartbreaking, when you think about it, because Dean is so frantic and it must be killing Sam to see it, but the only way he has of supporting his brother is to suppress his concern and just keep quiet, stand back and let him get on with it. Rescuing the boy has to be the priority right now, and if Dean needs to be the one who does it, Sam will let him get on with it, trusting his ability to succeed.

Brian really doesn't know what to make of Dean, but stands back and lets him have at it. Dean takes a look down and up the shaft himself, checking out the lie of the land, and then hands Sam his flashlight to free his hands while he clambers in. Once he's in, Sam hands the flashlight back and Dean begins his descent.

Sam turns to Brian. "Have you got curtains? We need rope."

That's nicely played by Sam. A rope will be needed to help get Danny back up the shaft, but this also gives Brian a practical task to focus on, thus both keeping him occupied and allowing him to feel a part of his son's rescue. Brian heads off to round up some curtains, while Sam leans back into the shaft to watch his brother's downward progress.



Reaching the bottom, Dean starts looking around, but it is so damn dark down there, minus the inexplicable green night vision from that one scene with Danny, that it is hard to make out a lot of what he is doing or seeing. In the course of his exploration, the beam of his flashlight falls upon a large wooden crucifix and rosary from the Impala that have just been randomly dropped on the floor.

Shed

Sue is trying to console Kate when the boarded up window behind them unexpectedly smashes. Kate shrieks and Sue now comes into her own with no one else to lean on, determinedly pushing her daughter behind her as she confronts the now empty window, preparing to face whatever tries to get in.

Cellar

Dean continues to pick his way through the dark, dingy space beneath the house, collecting assorted weaponry pilfered from the Impala, which he finds scattered among the bones and other animal remains littering the ground.

"She's a klepto," Dean mutters as he checks to see if his reclaimed sawed-off is loaded. The cellar-dwellers' pilfering of the weapons from the Impala comes across rather more as strategic than random kleptomania. They don't appear to have stolen anything from the house, after all, despite that being a much easier target. They went for the weapons in the trunk quite specifically, correctly identifying them as danger – another sign of intelligence and rational thinking, despite all other evidence to the contrary.

Dean collects his pearl-handed revolver, which is also lying around nearby, again checking the clip. Then he tries calling out for Danny in a hoarse whisper.

A muffled answering yell provides Dean with a direction to pursue and in no time at all he has found the hole leading to the cave where Danny has been stashed. As good luck would have it, Danny has managed to shuffle across the ground to get close to the exit, so that Dean can cut his bonds without having to try and squeeze through the hole himself, which would be a pretty tight fit. As Danny hastily clambers through the hole, Dean reassures him that his dad is just upstairs and to come on.

"Hurry, he's coming back," Danny quavers.

"He?" Dean stops short.



"Her brother," Danny anxiously clarifies.

Dean barely has time to register this new information before the second cellar-dweller has launched himself at him and they both go crashing to the ground.

It is interesting that Danny's attitude implies that the guy is the one to be afraid of, the worst of the two, when the girl is the one we have actually seen committing the two murders. Manipulation on the part of the writer, presenting Feral Guy to us as a featureless monster to be feared and destroyed, rather than as a deeply damaged individual who may or may not be beyond redemption.

Shed

Sue and Kate stand and gaze at the empty window, just waiting for the next attack, Sue clutching a broom by way of impromptu weapon.

Instead, a blade is thrust through the wall right behind them, and they both scream their shock.

House

Sam lets down an improvised rope made of curtains to haul Danny out of the shaft, while Dean grapples with Feral Guy. Dean is bigger and stronger, but Feral Guy's wiry strength is heightened by his insanity, plus he has the advantage of being on his home turf, eyes adjusted to the dark he has lived in all his life, so it is quite a fight and could easily go either way.

Danny gets the curtain-rope looped around his waist, and Sam and Brian start hauling him out.



Shed

Sue and Kate no longer know where to look for the next attack by Feral Girl, who has come at them from two different directions already. Then they see that the flimsy shed wall is being pushed open at one corner, Feral Girl striving to crawl through. Sue hurriedly rams her broom against the wall in a valiant attempt to keep the girl out.

House

Brian hauls Danny out of the shaft and hugs him tight. Sam urges him to get the boy out of there – not knowing, of course, that there are two cellar-dwellers to worry about – and they hurry out of the kitchen, leaving Sam alone to fret about his brother, who is still tussling with Feral Guy down below. He leans back into the shaft and calls for Dean.



Dean is a little busy fighting for his life to reply right now, however. It is all he can do to fend off Feral Guy's vicious knife swipes. Losing his balance in the cramped space, he goes over backward, but luckily lands right alongside the flashlight he dropped earlier and shines it into Feral Guy's face, buying himself a few precious moments to lunge for the gun he also dropped earlier in the brawl.

Feral Guy lunges at Dean, knife in hand, aiming for the killing blow, but Dean brings the gun around just in the nick of time and shoots him through the chest. Feral Guy collapses to the ground, dead.

Is this the first time we've seen one of the brothers killing an adversary who is purely human? They've killed humans possessed by demons and creatures that look human but are in some way other, but I'm not sure they've ever killed someone who was just human and murderous before. Show has always taken the escape route of having someone or something else do the killing.

Dean struggles to catch his breath, pulling himself back up onto his elbows to gaze at the corpse of the unfortunate Feral Guy, just as Sam drops down the shaft to check that he is okay, moments too late to actually help.

That's kind of Sam's theme in this episode: he is so concerned and so anxious for his brother, but completely unable to help him in any way.

Dean doesn't even try to hide his reaction from Sam – he is devastated that he had to kill the cellar-dweller, albeit to save both his own life and those of the others Feral Guy would certainly have killed given half a chance.



However, this works mainly because the actor sells it so well, making Dean's devastated self-loathing painfully apparent. Viewers feel strongly for him, having watched him struggling throughout the episode…but the scene would have a lot more impact if Feral Guy had been established as a person through the course of the episode, in the same way his sister has been. We only learned of his existence moments before he died, saw nothing of him but his fight with Dean, and therefore he remains only a featureless monster who had to be killed before he could kill. Perhaps this was deliberately done so that Dean killing him would appear more acceptable.

I can't help feeling that since Feral Guy is such a non-character, it might even have been thematically stronger if he wasn't killed, if Dean had somehow managed to just knock him out and bind him securely, if he could have been handed over to the authorities to face an uncertain fate. This could have led to commentary on what kind of life the unfortunate man could ever hope to lead, being so savage and tormented – would have raised questions over whether or not it is possible to ever recover from such an existence, leading to further parallels with Dean's situation having been pulled out of hell. At what point is there no going back?

As it is, however, Dean has been forced to kill a human being, someone that he pitied, and it is just another weight to add to his many existing burdens.

Shed

While Kate squeals her terror, Sue desperately tries to keep Feral Girl from breaking into the shed. Why Feral Girl is going for the wall instead of climbing through the window she broke, I have no idea.

Feral Girl finally manages to break the wall down, and Sue is pinned beneath it. Kate screams and flails and does nothing. Feral Girl crawls into the shed on top of the boards pinning Sue down, further trapping her. Sue also screams as Feral Girl raises her knife for the killing blow…but is unexpectedly hauled backward by her ankles, right in the nick of time.

Kate finally remembers how to work her legs and rushes to help Sue crawl out from beneath the wreckage of the shed wall and they hug one another tight as Feral Girl's animal shrieks can be heard from outside, trailing off in tandem with the sound of a blade entering flesh multiple times. Ick.

Sue clamps a hand over her mouth in horror, fearing the worst, and Kate looks on the verge of hyperventilating again.

Silence. Just for a second. Then someone knocks at the door and they both jump out of their skin. It is Brian. Sue and Kate hurry to pull the barricade away from the door to let him in.

There is dread in Sue's eyes as she opens the door. She knows, deep down, what she is going to see. She still looks shocked to actually see it, though. Brian steps through the door looking shell-shocked, Feral Girl's knife in his hand, which is covered in blood.

So, after giving Dean a more featureless adversary to kill, Show has fallen back on its established pattern of having an outsider be the one to kill the human girl we had followed through the episode. And still there are parallels to be drawn regarding the lengths a person will go to in order to protect his or her loved ones and how easily a person can be driven to violence, given the right stimulus and motivation.

House

Dawn is just breaking as Dean and Sam exit the house to check on the others. They find Sue sitting on the porch hugging her children, Kate sobbing the hopeless sobs of a child who has reached the end of her tether, Danny silent and still.

The brothers head for Brian, who is standing staring at Feral Girl's body, stretched out on the grass where he left her, having stabbed her to death with her own knife.



A tragic end to a tragic case.

Day

Knuckles a little raw after his fight with Feral Guy, Dean finishes repairing the Impala's tyres while Sam organises their reclaimed weapons back in the trunk.

Brian and Sue come out to say goodbye and Dean thanks them for the head start. Since the Winchester brothers are legally dead and all, the last thing they need is to get tangled up in any kind of police enquiry.

"Why isn't it a surprise you guys don't like the police?" Brian quips, gamely attempting to put a brave face on everything that has happened.

Sam chuckles. "Sort of a mutual appreciation thing, really."



Brian and Sue thank the brothers quite sincerely, and Dean just as sincerely asks if they are okay. They look at one another. "No," Sue admits. "We're the opposite of okay, but…we're together."

At the end of the day, family remains – even when all that remains are the remains of the family that once was.

Holding hands as a gesture of unity, the couple thank the boys again.

Middle of nowhere. Day

The brothers have parked up beneath a scenic overpass for a bite to eat. Presumably they must have driven the food here from wherever they bought it, but hopefully that wasn't too far or it'll be stone cold already.

Perching on the hood of the Impala, Sam hands a burger to Dean, who is sitting on a concrete block just across from him. Facing each other, in contrast to the final scene of Heaven and Hell, in which Dean kept his back turned to his brother, unable to look him in the face.

Is it just me, or has Sam had his hair trimmed since the last episode?

Dean opens the wrapper, looks at the burger…and sets it aside, stuffing his hands into his pockets, dejected.



Dean rejecting food is always a bad sign, and Sam knows it. "You okay?" he asks.

"You know, I felt for those sons of bitches back there," replies Dean, voice angry, eyes shuttered. "Lifelong torture turns you into something like that?"

The anger in Dean's voice here is directed very much at himself, as well as at the situation in general. Angry because he had to kill a human being and because he pitied that man despite knowing he was a savage killer, because that savage killer was created by his circumstances – all of it creating a very unwelcome reminder of the harsh realities of Dean's own recent past, some of which he has faced up to and finds overwhelming, and others that he is not yet ready to acknowledge.



Sam looks tired. He already knows that nothing he says or does is going to be of any use whatsoever here. Still, he gives it a shot. "You were in hell, Dean," he points out. Dean glances away, not the slightest bit mollified, so Sam tries again. "Maybe you…did what you did there. But you're not them. They were barely human."

Sam's little hesitation there, his inability to come out and actually say the words, suggests that maybe he's having a hard time himself reconciling his perception of his brother with what Dean has told him about hell, all the more so since he has no comparable experience by which to judge, can never understand the full horror of Dean's experience. He wasn't there, and knows only the fragments Dean has revealed to him. His imagination can take him a long way, based on those fragments. He can try to understand, try to emphasise, remains stalwart in his support of his brother. But he can never fully comprehend what happened to Dean down there and he knows it. He is way, way out of his depth here.



"No, you're right," Dean quietly agrees. "I wasn't like them. I was worse." Sam kind of rolls his eyes with helpless despair, shoulders hunching, as Dean continues, "They were animals, Sam. Defending territory. Me? I did it for the sheer pleasure."

Sam is taken by surprise, just when he thought he already knew the worst. "What?"

There isn't even a hint of pleasure in Dean's face or voice at the memory, however, both filled rather with bitter self-loathing. "I enjoyed it, Sam," he repeats, spitting the words out, harsh and angry. "It took me off the rack and I tortured souls and I liked it. All those years. All that pain. Finally getting to deal some out yourself? I didn't care who they put in front of me. Because that…that pain I felt? It just slipped away. No matter how many people I save, I can't change that. I can't fill this hole. Not ever."



Although Dean's post-hell storyline has lacked clarity for long periods this season, Jensen Ackles is doing an amazing job with the character as his development settles into more consistent delayed-onset post-traumatic stress. He takes Dean through the gamut of emotion in this little speech, from anger through self-loathing and on into quiet despair, facing Sam but not looking at him, eyes focused instead somewhere off behind and to the left of his brother so that he doesn't have to watch his reaction.

In contrast, as Dean runs out of words to try and explain the depth of what he's feeling, staring off into space, Sam's eyes are glued to his brother, bright with grief and concern. So hopeless, still knowing that he can't help. This is the price that was paid for Sam's life, and he can never repay it. Like Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki has done a masterful job in this episode, underplaying Sam's despair and exhaustion to perfection as the storyline focuses heavily on Dean.



Once again an episode fades out on the brothers, troubled, silent and still.



Now, although the actors always do a fantastic job, I do feel that these emotional post-script scenes are becoming rather over-used and predictable now. It would be nice if Show surprised us by weaving these little reveals into the body of the episode a little more. I do appreciate the nonchalance of the scene, however: that the brothers had just randomly stopped to eat along the road and Dean randomly decided that this was as good a time as any to try and explain to Sam why this case got to him so badly, to tell his brother a little more about what happened in hell and why he can't forgive himself for it. It is surely a positive sign that Dean is willing to talk to Sam about his experience now, albeit in drips and drabs, trickling out here and there. It's still just telling rather than actual conversation, not wanting to hear any excuses or absolution, but it's a start.

As for what Dean told us in this scene? Well, after writing many pages on the subject I have come to the conclusion that this is a subject that warrants a separate study of its own rather than tagging it onto the end of this recap: The Psychology of Surviving Hell.

To summarise the points made in this essay: although Dean clearly doesn't understand it, what he describes in this scene is actually a fairly common psychological reaction to extreme trauma. The mind has ways of protecting itself, by adapting to the circumstances in which it finds itself. It is a defence mechanism. More than that, it is a survival mechanism.

After the subjective equivalent of thirty years of unimaginable torture, the sudden absence of pain once Dean was off the rack would have felt exquisite. But agreeing to torture others in exchange for an end to his own suffering brought him up against an inherent contradiction: harming others is a direct violation of one of the most basic tenets of his life. Finally released from the torment he had endured for so long, the desire not to return to that pain was stronger than his conviction that harming others was wrong, but he had to justify making that choice to himself. Trapped as he was inside the situation with absolutely no hope of salvation, lacking any objectivity and identifying strongly with the role of torturer because torture and torturers were all he had known for so very long, he reasoned that if he had chosen to inflict pain on others then he must have wanted to do it. 'I did it for the sheer pleasure,' he says, not understanding that the pleasure he felt came not from the act of torture but from the euphoria of no longer being on the receiving end of it.

At this point, Dean is simply not prepared to cut himself any slack whatsoever. For all that he identified strongly with the cellar-dwellers and saw them as victims of their circumstances, he hasn't taken the next step and acknowledged or internalised the fact that he was a victim himself. Rather he is seeing himself as an unforgivable aggressor, focusing intently on what he did and the fact that he chose to do it, while barely acknowledging what was done to him, to bring him to that end. When describing his actions, he can barely bring himself to mention his own pain, deeply reluctant to recall that agony to mind and clearly considering it no excuse for what came later, for the choice that he made.

Convincing himself that he did what he did because he wanted to do it is a subconscious defence mechanism, an attempt to regain some semblance of control after having it taken away from him so completely. However, the ability of a human being to choose to do either right or wrong has always been central to Dean's philosophy of life, and what he is struggling to reconcile with now is the fact that he made a choice he considers so horribly wrong, unable to see that the choice he made wasn't really a choice at all.

Dean knows where his breaking point is now. He knows with painful clarity how fine the line is between human and inhuman – human and demon. He knows what he would have turned into and how, and how easily it could still happen. What he hasn't yet acknowledged or appreciated is the fact that what happened to him was inevitable and unavoidable, once he was in the Pit, rather than a sign of weakness that he should be ashamed of. Dean did what he did and reacted the way he did in order to survive the situation he was in, both physically and emotionally – he took on the role of torturer in order to spare himself pain and he learned to enjoy that role because it was the only way he could endure it.

'It wasn't your fault,' Anna told him in Heaven and Hell. 'You should forgive yourself.' Right now, though, Dean is a long, long way away from being able to forgive himself, something that is necessary for him to truly begin to heal.

Overall, this may not have been the most exciting episode ever, and certainly it is riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies. Nevertheless, I find it intensely emotionally satisfying, which was all I asked of it, going in. It's great to have the show back from hiatus!

January 2009

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