Now the choices are getting a bit more difficult.  It only gets harder from here, folks!  Go vote in Part 1 of Round 2!

Here we go, the last part of Round One!  A couple of these are thinkers…it only gets more challenging from here!

Sam does a fairly decent impression of the Season Two title card. Don't try this at home, kids.

It’s not too tough to figure out to whom the title of this episode refers.  Without his soul, Sam did some horrendous things, and having Dean around again after a year only somewhat mitigated that horrendousness.  And in this second episode with his soul reinstated, he comes face to face with one instance.  Sam being Sam once more, he wants to atone for his misdeeds, even if he’s not entirely sure what they are.

In the first of what will be a series of flashbacks to Bristol, Rhode Island, when Sam was hunting with Samuel, we find Sam calmly shooting several someones or somethings, and Grandpa doesn’t look the least bit comfortable about it.  They’re soon hustling away from a burning building and hitting the road.  On their way out of town, however, they’re pulled over by an upset deputy who is dealing with a missing sheriff and suspects these two “federal agents” may know something about it.  When he insists they come back to the station with him, Sam beats the holy crap out of him, leaving him unconscious in the middle of the road.  “You think there are maybe calmer ways we could’ve done all that?” Samuel chides.  “Do we care?” Sam responds.

Present day finds resouled Sam catching up his celebrity news when he gets a mysterious text message containing some unknown coordinates.  No one answers when he calls back to the unfamiliar number, but a little research reveals the coordinates are for Bristol, Rhode Island, where three girls have recently gone missing.  Dean hears all kinds of alarms in this situation, but Sam thinks the disappearances are worth checking into.  And they aren’t even in town yet when things start getting “squirrely.”  Just driving past the welcome billboard on the edge of town kicks off a load of flashes in Sam’s head of the last time he was here.  Needless to say, “Where Memories Are Made” is an apt motto, and Sam quietly freaks out.  While failing spectacularly at keeping it from Dean, I might add.  They go over the details of the case while dining at Captain Bob’s Buccaneer, a gloriously cheesy pirate-themed restaurant.  They even have the restrooms labeled as “The Poop Deck.”  And while Dean pays a visit to the head, Sam tries to figure out why all these brunettes were targeted, as hair color seems to be the only common denominator.  Seconds later, however, he’s scrambling to keep up a cover he doesn’t remember when another local brunette stops by the table to warmly greet “Agent Roark.”  Dean returns just as she’s asking about “the big bald guy” and makes “we should be going” noises, prompting the brunette to move along.  As she passes, she lays a hand on Sam’s shoulder, causing another memory to rush back; that of banging her in a public restroom last year.  No wonder her husband was watching her so suspiciously.  “What was that?” Dean wonders.  “She just cougar-eyed you.”  Sam’s theory, that he and Samuel worked a case here, is confirmed when Dean tosses a Polaroid on the table from the Captain’s Sea Challenge bulletin board–showing Sam and Samuel in the background of the shot.

The Puppy Dog Eyes of Intense Sincerity and I Can't Remember Crap About Last Year. Nearly infallible.

Dean immediately wants to get the heck out of Dodge, since they don’t have any idea what happened on Sam’s last visit, or what the fallout might be, but Sam is of a mind to finish his unfinished business, whatever it was, especially since there are still Rhode Islanders vanishing.  “Sam, there is a reason hunters don’t hit the same town over again.  Because we have a habit of leaving messes behind,” Dean argues.  “One of Dad’s rules,” he continues, “you never use the same crapper twice.”  “Dad also said, you finish what you start,” Sam counters.  Eventually, he sways Dean, albeit very reluctantly.  So, Dean heads out to interview friends and families of the missing girls while Sam swings by the police station.  Dean quickly learns that Sam interviewed one of the missing girls last year while investigating the missing men…and so much more.  Her roommate describes the “tone and nature of their conversations” as “…loud, and…athletic.”  Heh. Soulless Sam really took advantage of that whole no inhibitions thing.  Meanwhile, Sam doesn’t even get across the police station parking lot before he’s stopped and cuffed by the very deputy he now recalls beating to a pulp.  And the guy is still pissed.  So, Sam finds himself in a cell, with his amnesia story utterly dismissed.  Hours later, he gets a visit from a distraught woman, who it turns out is the wife of the missing Sheriff Dobbs, Brenna.  She, too, has had a year to stew, the difference being that a year ago, Sam and Samuel told her and her husband who they really were.  The Puppy Dog Eyes of Intense Sincerity and I Can’t Remember Crap About Last Year eventually sway her into helping him.  As she works at the station, she’s snagged the keys and lets him out so he can go figure out what really happened.

Elsewhere in Bristol, Chick Soulless Sam Banged #1 goes down to her basement for another box of wine, only to be snatched by some unseen creature.  Now holed up as a fugitive–again–in the rundown abandoned house they’re squatting in(ever notice these places always include a full complement of mangy furniture?), Sam is jumpy enough to nearly shoot Dean when he returns, and is somewhat vexed to learn he had yet another “exercise partner” he doesn’t remember.  Dean on the other hand?  “I gotta say, man, you really got around.  Soulless or not, I’m actually kind of impressed.”  The report of CSSB #1 comes across the police scanner just then, and Dean heads out again, ordering Sam to stay put.  Which lasts all of five seconds.  And apparently CSSB #1’s husband, Don, gives Dean quite an earful, because he’s soon connected the dots:  all the missing women are Chicks Soulless Sam Banged.  The mysterious text and the victims are all a trap for Sam.  But instead of answering Dean’s warning calls, Sam is off breaking into the police station and then Brenna Dobbs’ house to find the case files on the first batch of disappearances.  And while Brenna is upstairs collecting the box of files, Sam has another flashback, to a previous visit to this living room; during which his soulless self claimed family slows you down, rather horrifying his current self.  Oh, but the horror has just begun.

For one picture and a bit of cobweb in an evidence bag are enough to recall he and Samuel had been hunting an arachne, another of those recently immigrated creatures thought long extinct.  Sensing he’s on the verge of a total recall moment–and knowing it could damage that wall in his head–he asks to borrow the files.  Better to possibly fall apart in the privacy of the abandoned house, with Dean present.  As he departs, he finally gets Dean’s message, at the same time he’s noticing a large, thick web drifting along the edge of Brenna’s porch in the cold winter breeze.  It’s all very spooky, and in true horror movie fashion, just when you expect the monster to jump up out of the dark and snatch Our Hero, an innocent hand on his shoulder scares the crap out of him.  Except that Sam is much more prepared than the usual movie protagonist, and spins to train his gun on Dean in a split second.  “I almost shot you–again!” he complains.  Heh.  Dean can be really sneaky sometimes.  Back at their ramshackle abode, Dean summarizes.  “So, we know that this is a monster with opposable thumbs and unlimited text messaging, and we know that it wants to kill you specifically, does that about cover it?”  And when Sam reveals he remembered some of the case, Dean is ready to bail immediately to avoid more wall-scratching on Sam’s part.  But Sammy is back in full force now.  “Look, I’m starting to think that I might’ve done some bad stuff here, Dean.  And so I don’t care if it’s dangerous, I have to set things right.  ’Cause I got a friggin’ soul now, and it won’t let me just walk away.”  Aww, Sammy.  Dean appears to be thinking he should be careful what he wishes for.  This is the Sam he wanted back, but now he’s recalling how Sam’s moral stances drove him nuts on occasion.  Still, he’s not about to leave without his brother, and reluctantly agrees to help Sam dredge up the pertinent details from behind the wall in his head.

And boy, do they come back.  With all the case files, evidence, maps, etc., spread out before him, the whole thing floods back into Sam’s consciousness.  Once they had figured out they were hunting an arachne, Sam and Samuel set a trap at a local park, using the trusting and recently enlightened Sheriff Roy Dobbs as bait.  Sure enough, he’s snatched by the creature.  Plan A had been to catch the thing as it went after Roy; Plan B is to follow the GPS on Roy’s phone back to the lair.  “My God, son, you’re about as cold as they come, you know that?” Grandpa comments.  You ain’t seen the half of it yet, Gramps.  Sam’s plan leads them to an old over-grown dock-side office that night, and the place is covered in webs.  Wherein they find all the missing men, well cocooned and half-dead, including Roy.  The arachne attacks, injures Sam, tosses Samuel across the room after he empties his handgun into her, then loses her head to Sam’s machete.  “Well, I guess decapitation works.”  Which leaves them with helping her victims.  Samuel wants to rush them to the nearest hospital, but Sam declares them “dead mean walking”, with the arachne poison coursing through their veins.  His solution?  Put them out of their misery.  And here we see just how stone-cold Sam was without his soul–we find Sam calmly shooting the arachne’s victims in the head, and Grandpa doesn’t look the least bit comfortable about it.  After that, he just as calmly orders the burning of the building to disguise the bodies.  Needless to say, this is all way past horrifying for current day Sam.

Brenna, meanwhile, is shocked to see her dead husband walk in the back door.  And while he’s looking pretty good for a guy who took a bullet to the head, he’s not gonna win any beauty contests.  When Sam calls, she asks if he can stop by in her best I’m-trying-to-remain-calm-but-my-presumed-dead-husband-just-turned-up-again-and-he’s-Spiderman voice.  It’s still snowing when the guys pull up and step cautiously into the Dobbs’ cavernous garden shed, machetes drawn.  Soon enough, Arachne Roy has Sam and Dean webbed up against a couple support beams.  Since his beef is with Sam, he doesn’t pay much attention to Dean, who spies a shard of broken glass within reach and starts discreetly sawing at the webs with it.  Roy’s Evil Monologue reveals the arachne Sam killed had turned them, not fed on them, and he did the same with the girls who disappeared the past couple of weeks, all to get Sam back in town so he could exact his revenge.  Only he hasn’t decided whether to kill Sam or turn him as well.  While he’s debating that, Dean breaks free, rushes him, and gets tossed around.  Brenna grabs a dropped machete to cut Sam free, and he in return decapitates her husband to save Dean.  In another instance of be careful what you wish for, Brenna now knows what happened to Roy, and that Sam killed him, twice.  When he gives her a ride home, she can’t even bear to look at him, slamming the door in his face as he tries to apologize.  Sometimes even the wins feel like losses.

As they pack up to leave town, Sam admits Dean was right about this case, and they never should have come to Bristol.  Dean tries to bright side things, but Sam wonders out loud what else he did elsewhere…at least he starts to.  In the middle of his sentence he suddenly crashes to the floor in a major seizure.  As Dean rushes to his side he goes still, and in a nice parallel to the cliffhanger in “No Rest for the Wicked” that ended Season Three, the camera dives into Sam’s open, unseeing eye, through rings of fire, into his earliest memory of Hell, when the flames first burned away his clothes and skin and left him screaming.  Okay, I know some have issues with the special effects for this, but you have to admit Jared does sell the pain and agony.  And that’s what sticks with me–this is Sam’s personal Hell, and it’s only just beginning.

Part 3 of Round 1 is now open for voting!  This is a somewhat more challenging division.

Here we go with the next round of voting in Round 1 of the tournament!

Here we go, folks, the annual March Madness Tournament of Episodes!  This one is pretty easy, but beware, the choices will get harder!

Next week, on CSI: New Jersey...either that or Jared and Jensen are auditioning for a remake of Barney Miller.

Hmm.  Well, that was an episode.  I must admit, I’m a bit of a Pollyanna.  I’m not one to say mean and nasty things.  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’ll find a positive slant to anything.  Fender bender?  At least I’m not hurt.  Home sick?  At least I don’t have to go out in bad weather.  This episode?  Boy, Sam’s hair looked really nice in that last scene.  See?  

The plot is this:  Sam and Dean investigate a series of mysterious deaths that seem to be ghost-related, but the ghost in question is defying all the ghostly rules.  The ghost, it turns out, is of a young woman who accidentally died the previous year due to a prank that backfired.  A painfully shy seamstress, Rose was targeted by a few co-workers who decided to invent a secret admirer for her, then surprise her with a mannequin sitting at a romantic dinner before they jumped out to reveal their joke.  When she turned to leave, understandably upset, one of the guys tried to grab her, she lost her balance and cracked her head open on a coffee table.  A year later, she’s back, a vengeful spirit killing off those involved.  What puzzles the Winchesters is how she’s able to move from town to town to find these guys, especially after Sam locates her dumped body and salts and burns the corpse.  Ghosts aren’t supposed to  be capable of that much traveling.  Turns out she donated a kidney to her sister when they were teenagers, and that’s the bit that’s keeping her around; and providing the means to go anywhere.  This proves a bit of a dilemma for the guys, as they can’t just rip the organ out of the sister’s side.  The debate is settled, though, when Rose possesses the Impala and chases Dean until he leads her to crash into a storefront; resulting in a shard of the plate glass window embedding itself in the sister’s abdomen, killing her.  Last attachment destroyed, ghost problem solved.  No back alley kidney replacement or hoodoo necessary.

At the same time, Dean is having to deal with being bushwacked by Ben into coming home.  At Sam’s urging, he rushes back to Cicero, Indiana, only to find Lisa is moving on, which prompted Ben to call in reinforcements.  There is much heartfelt discussion between Dean and Lisa and Dean and Ben.  Poor kid, Dean’s the only father figure he’s ever had; I don’t blame him for trying to hang onto that.  And like any kid dealing with a parental unit breaking up, he resents the new guy.  But Dean ends up leaving again, permanently this time, although Ben has given him something to think about.

I love this show, and by no means do I expect it to be perfect.  I can suspend a lot of disbelief.  I mean, come on, it’s a show about guys who hunt monsters.  But.  This one didn’t quite live up to its potential.  Ways it fell short:

• These factory workers are in their twenties and thirties, and they’re playing a practical joke that would’ve gotten them sent to the principal’s office in junior high.  On a woman they barely know.  They are grown men–guys who have no criminal records and live squeaky clean lives as “good guys”–who should have learned respect and civility, (not to mention boundaries) toward their co-workers long ago.  One offers the excuse to Sam that “you know how it is when you get a bunch of guys together.”  Maybe that would have flown if they were fourteen.  As it is, if Rose had lived, she should have filed a harassment complaint against them with human resources, particularly the guy who grabbed her.

• I felt for Rose, I really did.  She had a very insular and lonely life.  But why would she go to an unfamiliar address, alone, at night, to meet a man she was totally in the dark about?  In this day and age, that’s just stupid.

• The second batch of killer mannequins were quite eerie, until we saw them moving.

• I like Lisa, I really do.  But basically accusing Dean of abandoning them, then turning up whenever she’s getting over him, and demanding to know what he wants from them…is a very weird reaction when she was the one who sent him away and admits she kept trying to get a hold of him after sending him away.  Not to mention the only reason he turned up on her doorstep this time was because he was duped into thinking she was in trouble.

Ways it kept me watching:

• Dean’s consistent reaction to Sam dropping dead on him continues.  He yells “Sammy!” There are tears in his voice.  He appears about to fall apart.  And every time, it pulls at my heartstrings.

• Dean’s protectiveness of Sam has grated at times(just ask Sam) but this time it’s well-deserved.  Sam still wants to atone for his currently unremembered transgressions, and we saw where that got him.  Even Sam has to reluctantly admit that Dean is right about this.

• The recovery of their brotherly relationship since Sam got his soul back.  All Dean’s trust issues are gone; Sam’s past well-meaning but demon-powered trangressions forgiven.  They’re older and wiser, but still Sam and Dean.

• For instance, Sam insisting Dean go to Indiana and deal with the Lisa situation when Ben calls saying something is wrong with his mom.

• The creepy anatomy dummy in the science lab that kills the first victim.  Very subtle, very raise-the-hairs-on-the-back-of-my-neck; the slow movement of the eyes, the swinging empty hook, the little noises.

• The echo of Robo!Sam in Sam trying to keep the third target alive.  Sam’s always been a good hunter.  Robo!Sam magnified that ability, but just because he has his soul back doesn’t mean Sam can’t be efficient, blunt, and effective during a hunt.  And because he’s no longer Robo!Sam–who would’ve used the guy for bait and counted him as collateral damage–he cares about saving him.  Even though the guy is a dick.

• Dean and Ben’s utterly straightforward, honest discussion.  They gave each other a lot to think about, in terms of defining family and choosing paths.

• The little details, like Dean’s cell phone wallpaper: a shot of a woodsy photo-mural on a motel room wall, with Dean’s feet in the bottom of the picture because he snapped it while lying on the bed.  Or all the everyday people looking like everyday people.

Memorable lines:

• Dean:  So, what, we’ve got a bunch of killer dolls?  Like Chucky?  I mean, come on, that’s just…friggin’ creepy.

• Sam:  That was a ghost, trying to kill you for being a dick.  You’re lucky you were the most suspicious interview of all time.

• Ben:  You’re a liar, Dean.  You say family’s so important, but what do you call people who care for you, who love you, even when you’re a dick?  You know you’re walking out on your family, right?

• Dean:  She possesses sex dolls, this is not a sex doll.  You leave my baby alone, she’s got nothing to do with this!

• Sam:  Look, we keep our heads down, keep swinging; we’ll lose some, hopefully we’ll win more.  And, for what it’s worth…I got your back.

So, it had its issues, but it had its good points, as well.  It certainly gave us an intriguing twist the guys had never dealt with before, and had no clue how to handle.  Sometimes those unresolved moral dilemmas are frustrating to watch and leave things on a bit of a down note, but they do give insight into characters and bring a bit of realism into the fiction.

And Sam’s hair looked fantastic there at the end.

So, I figure if we time it right, we can tunnel out of this motel and make it back to Bobby's before anyone realizes we aren't really Pierre and Francois Chevalier.

We’ve all been waiting for it.  And waiting, and waiting…and then waiting an extra week due to a last minute network decision.  But this is it: the hiatus finally ended, and Sam gets his soul back.  Now to get to the juicy stuff.  And Oh My Chuck, is that Aerosmith playing over “The Road So Far?”  It is!  They had to scrimp and save for five and a half years, but they finally managed to afford an Aerosmith song.  Awesome.  As the strains of “Back in the Saddle” fade, we see a frightened woman in a small plane flying through an electrical storm.  Yeah, that looks like a fun date.  Not.  Poor Penny here is freaking out, despite the reassurances of Stan the pilot boyfriend, especially once she sees something large and inexplicable flap by her window.  Stan continues to be reassuring…right up until the second something breaks the windshield and snatches him out of the plane.  Which then starts a nosedive, Penny screaming all the way.  Now that we’ve got that out of the way…

…it’s back to Bobby’s, where Castiel has finished his checkup on Sam’s soul.  It’s there all right, but he’s not happy with Dean for going against his advice.  “Let me tell you what his soul felt like when I touched it,” he growls.  “Like it had been skinned alive, Dean.  If you wanted to kill your brother you should’ve done it outright.”  Oooh.  Methinks that “profound bond” is switching allegiances.  Once he’s fluttered off in a huff, Dean goes back upstairs, Sam weighing heavy on his mind.  Bobby takes a crack at a he’ll-be-okay speech, but the possibility of a job is the only thing that can distract them.  And the case Bobby’s just starting is the missing couple from the opener.  Before they get far discussing it, though, there’s a whisper from the doorway.  “Dean?”  It’s Sam, awake and astonished, but obviously grateful to be alive.  Before Dean can even ask how he is, he pulls his big brother into an emotional bear hug, the hug thousands of fans have been waiting for since the Season Five finale.  He holds onto Dean, eyes closed, ever so thankful for the reunion, since he swan-dived into Hell thinking he‘d never see his brother again, and I think I have something in my eye.  Bobby’s next, and gets a hug you can hear; Sam literally knocking the air out of him.  Sam pulls back, confused, though, because he recalls Lucifer snapping Bobby’s neck.  Not that he’s unhappy about Bobby being alive–in fact, he’s equally surprised and thrilled to hear Castiel is fine, too.  “Are you okay?” Dean wonders, confused that Sam doesn’t seem to remember the past eighteen months.  “Actually, I’m starving,” Sam replies.  Awww.  It warms my heart to know Sammy’s all caught up on his sleep now and for the first time ever is showing an appetite.

The hug heard round the world.

Boy, does he show an appetite.  Like we’ve never seen before, he’s chowing down on sandwiches and chips, and I think Bobby better make a run to the grocery store.  In between bites he reveals the last thing he remembers before waking up in the panic room was falling into the pit.  Bobby’s about to throw out some recent details, but Dean cuts him off.  “How long was I gone?” Sam wonders.  “About a year and a half,” Dean fudges.  A shocked Sam, assuming Dean means he was in Hell all that time, does a fantastic double-take before rattling off all the questions suddenly popping into his head.  And he’s none to happy to hear Dean worked with Death to get him back.  But Dean insists the entire deal is over, despite Bobby’s snarky comment about everything being “all neat and clean.”  Sam, being the smart guy he is, notices that something is a little off(not to mention the stinkeye Bobby is giving Dean), but doesn’t press the issue.

Some time later that day, Dean brings Bobby a beer out in the yard, so he can marvel at Sam’s recovery while the curmudgeonly Mr. Singer works on a car.  Understandably, he’s extra-curmudgeonly, considering the previous incarnation of Sam “went all Menendez” on him ten days earlier.  So, that means Sam slept for a week and a half after his soul was re-installed.  Considering he hasn’t slept in a year and a half, I’d say that’s a pretty efficient catch up time.  I’ve wondered how much time he’d need.  Anyway, Bobby’s gonna need some time to reconcile his Sams.  Still, it doesn’t keep him from being the voice of caution about keeping the truth from the younger Winchester.  While Dean is ready to send Death a fruit basket and not tempt fate by possibly stressing Sam’s inner wall with the truth, Bobby warns that it will come out eventually.  “One way or another; someone will tell him or he’ll figure it out on his own–he’s not dumb.  He should hear it from us.”  And Bobby’s right, Sam’s not dumb.  When he wakes up a day or two later and steps out into the yard to see Dean and Bobby loading up the Impala for a case, only to have Bobby bail when he wants in on the job, he knows something is up.  I’ve gotta say, it’s so good to see this Sam again.  He looks rested and energetic and there’s an openness in his eyes we haven’t seen in a long time.  Gone is the down-to-business, vaguely veiled survivalist conniving how to get the job done most efficiently.  He even carries himself differently; he’s relaxed and flowing in his movements, not tactical and on alert.  And he smiles a hell of a lot more.  Hi Sam; we’ve missed you.

On the road to Portland, Oregon, Sam digs up some info on additional missing girls, but with no further leads, he turns to genially chiding Dean for not keeping his promise to live a normal life.  Considering Dean’s current state, it’s an easy assumption to make, and he’s surprised when Dean reveals he did spend a year doing the normal thing.  And Dean is content to leave Sam thinking he and Lisa broke up for perfectly mundane and normal reasons.  Not because, say, his brother let him get turned into a vampire and he unintentionally attacked her kid while he was said creature.  At Penny’s sister’s door, Sam turns on the puppy dog eyes and the sympathetic Federal Agent routine, much to Dean’s delight.  After talking their way in, they learn Penny was far from the adventurous type; and considering her pink-on-pink bedroom decorated with teddy bears and frills, it’s not surprising.  It does, however, give Dean an opportunity to lift her diary.  And reading it has given him a theory:  the girls who vanished were all virgins.  The other two girls “baked cookies for the Lord” but Sam is skeptical about Penny.  “I’ve decided; I’m going to give Stan my most precious gift,” Dean recites from the diary as proof.  “Wow, that sounded really creepy coming out of your mouth,” Sam squicks.

Elsewhere in town, outside St. Mary’s Center for Catholic Studies, another girl splits from her friends on her way home, only to be chased down by some mysterious creature from the sky.  Which, of course, brings the Winchesters to visit her in her hospital room the following day.  Again with the Kinder And Gentler Investigators bit, they get her to describe her attacker, which looked rather like a giant bat.  Fortunately for her, it didn’t snatch her, although it did snatch her gold purity ring and leave her with a series of nasty cuts on her back.  Dean, being so talented at “reading people”(see Bad Day At Black Rock), quickly spots why she wasn’t taken–she’s not a virgin.  Back at the motel, Sam’s online research keeps leading him to the same unbelievable result:  dragons.  Preying on virgins fits the dragon profile, as does gold theft, but even Bobby says the things aren’t real(although the Loch Ness monster is), so they’re stumped.  Next, he turns to Dad’s journal, while Dean kind of looks up stuff on the laptop, but he’s really watching Sam like a hawk.  And mentally scrambling to lie convincingly when Sam asks, “Hey, did we hunt a skin walker lately?”  A drawing in the journal is giving him the strangest sense of déjà vu.  Uh oh.  Luckily for Dean, Bobby calls back at this moment with the name of someone who might have some answers about dragons, a Dr. Visyak of Medieval Studies at San Francisco University.  And so he’s off to San Fran, leaving Sam to sort out where a dragon might hole up in the greater Portland area.

Meanwhile, in some dank, dark underground lair, Penny and the other missing girls are locked in a cage, and are soon joined by another young virgin, who is tossed in by a burly man in black with the ability to weld metal with his bare hands.  Ah, these dragons don’t breathe fire, but they do have high heat at their disposal.  Down in San Francisco, Dean arrives at Dr. Visyak’s abode, and discovers the comely professor and Bobby have a history.  Which causes Dean to develop this deer-in-the-headlights look as he tries to decide if he really wants to hear that history.  The history he’s here for concerns dragons; and that confuses the professor, as they’ve been assumed extinct for seven hundred years.  The key bit of info he’s after is this–to kill a dragon, you need a blade forged with dragon’s blood.  Fortunately, she just happens to have one in her well-appointed basement.  Complete with large stone security device/worthiness tester.  Thus giving us a taste of Jensen Ackles’ comedy skills.  For as Dean confidently braces one foot on the stone and reaches for the pommel, heroic music swells, and he pulls at the sword.  Then changes his grip and tries again.  Then latches on with both hands and tries again.  Then strains so much his hands slip and he falls on his face.  The music screeches to a halt.  Heh.  He tries again, planting both feet on the stone, gripping the pommel with both hands again, and pulling with all his strength, until his face starts turning purple.  “Son of a bitch, that’s really on there,” he gasps as he staggers away.  Heh heh.

Back in Portland, Sam is hitting a dead end, and calls Bobby.  Who has to visibly steel himself when he sees the caller ID.  He’s brusque and not completely covering it as they reason out that the lack of caves in the area leaves the sewers as the probable location for a dragon lair.  And Sam calls him on it, concerned for his well-being.  When he goes on to ask about the year he doesn’t remember, Bobby is quick to assure him it was nothing out of the ordinary and hang up.  My, but that man is torn.  He wants to avoid the guy who nearly killed him, but he knows this Sam is confused and wants information; he wants to tell Sam everything, but knows it may damage him.  Left hanging, Sam falls back on praying to Castiel, the only friend he has yet to talk to.  Almost immediately, the angel appears, looking to be near tears, he’s so happy to see Sam alive.  Quite the contrast to the distant, distracted guy who was too busy to answer Winchester pleas earlier in the season.  See, I knew that “profound bond” was shifting from Dean to Sam.  He even moves in to hug Sam, who instantly plops his butt back in his chair.  “Look, I would hug you, but…” he stammers apologetically.  “…that would be awkward,” a slightly hurt Castiel finishes.  Aww.  What’s the etiquette for angel hugs?  I think Castiel really needs one.  To cover that awkwardness and get on with why he called, Sam comments vaguely on the past year, claiming Bobby told him everything.  Castiel expresses his surprise at Sam’s survival, then asks how it feels to have his soul back.  This bit of info, and the implications, knocks Sam for a huge loop.  But he forges on, asking Castiel to fill in the “hazy details.”  Not being in on Dean’s plan to protect Sam from the truth, the clueless, hugless angel clears things up for him.

In Dr. Visyak’s basement, despite her trepidations, Dean has implemented Plan B, which consists of strategically placed plastic explosives.  It works, a little too well.  Not only is the stone cracked open, but the sword is now half as long as it once was.  From the look on Dr. Visyak’s face, I’d say Dean’s going on her shit list, right next to Bobby Singer.  And when he shows it to Sam, Sam is skeptical.  Still, it’s all they’ve got, so it’s off to the Portland sewer system.  Sam pauses, wondering if and how he should bring up what he so recently learned about his missing year, then decides against it for now.  After hours of wandering, they stumble across a pile of gold jewelry, and then a decidedly suspicious altar.  That’s when they catch the echoes of the captured girls yelling for help.  But just as they start prying the cage open, the dragon returns, throwing Sam across the room and going up against Dean and his dragon’s blood sword.  Of course, it gets knocked away, just out of reach.  Suddenly Sam attacks with his crowbar, giving Dean time to stretch for the sword.  Which he can’t get, because he’s just as suddenly attacked by a second dragon.  Sam’s having issues as well, as his opponent has grabbed the crowbar and is heating it up, forcing him to drop it.  But a well-placed kick gives him a few seconds to dive for the sword; having longer arms, he can snatch it up, slash at one dragon, and stab the other in the back.  Dragon #1 weighs his options and wings it out of there ASAP.

Having saved the girls and slain a dragon, they head back to Bobby’s, where Dean is happily fondling the pile of gold stuff he picked up.  “Why don’t you cut to the chase and just roll in it?” Sam jokes.  All jokes aside, Sam has come out to the workbench to apologize for all the stuff he did without a soul.  Ticked off at Castiel for spilling the beans, Dean explains the Great Wall of Sam, and why he didn’t tell Sam this stuff himself.  Protective Big Brother Mode engaged.  And Sam understands, but feels the need to atone.  “I kinda feel like I got slipped the worst mickey of all time, and I woke up to find that I had burnt the whole city down.  And you can say it wasn’t me, but, I’m the one with the Zippo in my pocket.”  He’s humble and matter-of-fact, and not wallowing in angst; he just wants to fix things.  It’ll have to wait a bit, though, because Bobby wants to show them what he’s figured out about a book they picked up from the dragon’s altar.  It’s an ancient text made of human skin, giving the guys major creeps, and as near as Bobby can figure, it’s an instruction manual for opening Purgatory and raising something called the Mother of All.  And the page with the pertinent steps has been ripped out by the dragon.  Who is, at that very moment, in a deep, dark cave, reciting the page aloud and throwing a virgin into the chasm leading to Purgatory’s front door.  She rises back up from the deep shortly thereafter, limbs like embers, as host to a new being we can most likely safely assume is the Mother of All.  Now this raises some interesting questions–was Crowley seeking out Purgatory to take over as he claimed, or to keep the door shut?  Did he want to raise the Mother of All, or keep her in place?  Did he view her as a threat, competition, or a possible partner in Hell?

The Dream Team....OF DEATH!!!

I’ve missed Sam.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been very intrigued–and very entertained the past couple of episodes–by soulless Sam.  But I recently caught a rerun of  “Lazarus Rising” on TNT, and it reminded me how much I miss original recipe Sam.  The guy who wept over the loss of his brother, clung to him in relief when he came back(in a manly way, of course), and grinned gleefully at Pamela Barnes’ innuendos.  I’ve missed the bitchfaces and eye rolls and surprise and determination, and all those other emotions that regularly play out in his expressions.  We’ve had glimpses this season, but they’ve all been Soulless Sam playing the guy he used to be.

Dean, as we know, has also been missing original Sam, which this time around brings him to a shady doctor’s office above a Chinese grocery store.  Still looking for a way to retrieve Sam’s soul, he’s come to an underground physician who specializes in patching up hunters with the desperate notion of contacting Death for assistance.  This doc(played by none other than Freddy Kruger, er, Robert Englund), it turns out, also specializes in making people dead for three minutes at a time.  Under the influence of the good doctor’s potion–read: dead–Dean is greeted by a very annoyed Tessa, not Death.  When Death does pop up a few seconds later, Dean’s plan to deal with him is immediately shot to hell.  If you want your ring back…sorry, already know where it is.  Bring back Sam and Adam from Lucifer’s cage…sorry, I’ll only do one, you pick.  Hack off the damaged part of Sam’s soul…sorry, doesn’t work that way, how about a wall instead?  Okay, let’s go that route…oh, I never said I would do this.  Death, will however, fetch Sam’s soul if Dean can last a day in his shoes.  Dean has to wear Death’s ring and do his job for 24 hours.

Understandably, Sam is skeptical of this plan.  “It’s my life, it’s my soul.  And it sure as hell isn’t your head that’s gonna explode when this whole scheme of yours goes sideways!”  Bobby’s none to thrilled, either, when he hears Dean’s part in all this.  Claiming a need for space to “wrap his head around this,” Sam goes for a stroll in the junkyard, but he’s actually on his way to dig up Death’s ring so Dean can’t implement his crazy idea.  But Dean already has the thing, and promises Sam nothing will go wrong.  Ah, the supreme confidence of the older brother.  Sam gives in, professing his trust.  Ah, the supreme sneakiness of the younger brother.  So, Sam and Bobby head back inside to wait out Dean’s day as Death.  And keep a wary eye on each other.  Except that while Dean is getting a run-down of the rules from Tessa, Sam has gone off to an abandoned factory somewhere in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to have his own little otherworldly chat.  You see, he’s summoned Balthazar to ask for advice on how to keep his soul evicted.  “My brother found a way to put it back in me.  I don’t want it.”  “No, you don’t.  Because Michael and Luci are hate-banging it, as we speak.”  But he’s surprisingly willing to help, free of charge.  Having Sam in his debt and screwing over Dean being the main selling points.  The key to the soul-repelling spell, however, is patricide.  Tricky to do, when John’s been gone since the beginning of Season Two.  There is a loophole, though:  “You need the blood of your father, but your father needn’t be blood.”  Uh oh.

Elsewhere, Dean’s first kill is a convenience store robber pointing a gun at the owner’s kid, only to get a bullet in the chest from the owner’s own gun.  That’s easy peasy, considering the guy deserved it in Dean’s book.  The next one’s little more challenging, since he has to try explaining  the “what does it mean” to an out-of-shape guy who dropped of a heart attack while chowing down on pizza.  “Everything is dust in the wind,” is what he comes up with.  “That’s it?  A Kansas song?”  the guy asks in disbelief.  Heh.  His third assignment is a tough one: a twelve-year-old girl with a heart condition and a single father.  In his usual “screw Destiny” manner, Dean flat out refuses to kill her.  So instead of going into surgery, the doctor is explaining to the dad that her heart has miraculously healed.  Father and daughter are happy, Nurse Jolene gets off work early, and Tessa is pissed at Dean.  Back at Bobby’s place, Sam and Bobby are drinking and playing poker, Sam carefully eyeing the pipe wrench on the counter.  When Bobby gets up to fetch a couple more longnecks from the fridge, Sam makes his move.  But while the wrench is still on the upswing, Bobby grabs the pipe he’s stashed in the fridge and wallops Sam backwards across his kitchen.  Man, he really is prepared for anything, isn’t he?  “I may have been born at night, boy, but it wasn’t last night.”  Unfortunately, Sam isn’t quite as unconscious as he thought, and when he turns back a moment later with a rope in hand, Sam is gone.  After a quick loop of the first floor, Bobby locks himself in the kitchen closet, the door of which Sam is soon chopping through with an axe.  “I gotta do this, Bobby.  I’m sorry.  You shouldn’t have cornered yourself.”  “I didn’t,” the old man retorts, and pulls a lever, releasing the trap door Sam is unknowingly standing on.  Guess he installed that after the zombie attack last year.  Unceremoniously dumped into the basement, Sam clambers up the basement steps despite his badly gashed leg, only to come up against another of Bobby’s modifications:  a reinforced steel core door with titanium kick plates.  So much for getting out that way.  Stuck for the moment, he honestly answers Bobby’s queries from the other side of the door, admitting he doesn’t want his soul back, and he’s found this spell.  He doesn’t want to kill Bobby, but he’s trying to survive.  “Dean doesn’t care about me, he just cares about his little brother, Sammy, burning in Hell.  He’ll kill me to get that other guy back.”  Bobby does his best to be, well, reassuring isn’t really the right word; understanding, I guess, the basement goes suspiciously quiet.  A cautious investigation reveals that Sam retreated to the panic room and managed to escape via the ventilation shaft in the ceiling.

Back at the hospital, Dean is seeing the consequences of not following the natural order.  The nurse who got to go home early was in a car accident she wouldn’t have been in otherwise, and he has to kill her long before she was due to die.  Then, he gets to watch the woman’s distraught husband fall apart and throw himself into a bottle before getting behind the wheel.  Determined to save this guy, Dean transports into his car, but since playing Death means he’s invisible, his pleas to stop are unheard.  In fact, the poor guy stomps on the gas, ready to end it all.  Faced with no other choice, Dean yanks off the ring, freaks out the guy by suddenly becoming visible, and turns the wheel hard to the right, sending them crashing into a parked car rather than a moving bus.  Having lost the bet and finally getting the point about the natural order of things, he goes back to the hospital to take the little girl’s life, before anyone else is impacted.  He then zaps back to South Dakota to discover Sam has finally captured Bobby, tied him up in the basement, and has a huge knife ready to plunge into the older man’s heart.  One punch knocks Sam out cold, better than a pipe in the fridge.  When Sam comes to, he’s cuffed to the cot in the panic room, with Dean peering in at him through the grate.  There’s a brief yet heart-breaking silent exchange here, which I interpreted thusly:  Dean is agonizing over how to keep Sam under control, Sam recognizes this anguish, and also that Dean is wondering if he might not have to kill him.  Unable to face this option himself, Dean goes upstairs…

…to find Death at Bobby’s kitchen table, offering him hot dogs and beer.  “Wrecking the natural order’s not quite such fun when you have to mop up the mess, is it?” Death scolds.  Heh.  So cool, so calm, so unassuming-looking, yet he can intimidate the Hell out of Dean Winchester like nothing else can, shooting holes in Dean’s macho front all the while.  Satisfied the Dean’s learned his lesson about messing with the natural order, he rises, announcing he’s off to retrieve Sam’s soul after all.  Because while Sam and Dean are “an affront to the balance of the universe” and “cause disruption on a global scale”, he wants them to keep digging to learn about souls.  “You’ll understand when you need to,” he finishes, then disappears.  Dean then scrambles back downstairs and throws open the panic room door just as Death arrives with Sam’s soul in his satchel.  Panicked, a desperate Sam is scooting as far off the cot away from the guy as his cuffs will let him.  With a warning for Sam to not scratch at the wall that will go up in his mind, Death pulls out the glowing orb.  “Please, don’t do this,” Sam begs Dean.  “You don’t know.  You don’t know what’ll happen to me!  Dean, please!”  But despite his desperate objections, his soul is reattached, quite painfully, judging by the amount of screaming he’s doing as the screen goes black.  I feel bad for the poor guy.  Sure, he was stepping over into psychopathic behavior, but soulless Sam turned out to be funny and scary and really quite interesting in his drastically different view of the world, just trying to survive.  It’ll be fascinating to see how a re-souled Sam will deal with who he was and what he did as RoboSam.