Every episode starts off with a monster attack … but this week, the monster is Sam! A year earlier, in Bristol, Rhode Island, Sam worked a case with his grandfather Samuel. He shot someone or something, which made Samuel look a bit uncomfortable.

As they were leaving town, though, they got pulled over by a deputy … who soulless-Sam beat senseless when he tried to arrest them, because Sam was suspiciously covered in blood.

“You think there may be calmer ways we could have done all of that?” Samuel asked.

“Do we care?” Sam replied, reminding us all why soulless-Sam was not a fun guy to hang out with.

Back in the present, Sam gets a text message with coordinates … to Bristol, Rhode Island, where three women have disappeared in the last week, having “vanished into thin air.” They don’t recognize the number and calling back gets no answer. Dean is suspicious of the strange text, but Sam points out there’s still a case to investigate, so off they go.

Driving into Bristol, Sam has some flashes of memory from his case there with Samuel. In a bar, a woman recognizes “Agent Roarke” from when he visited before. “You’re back because it started again, right? The disappearances?” she asks. Sam asks the woman and her husband to let him know if they have any leads. As the woman walks away, she touches Sam’s shoulder … and he flashes on some hot bathroom sex with the woman.

Sam investigates and finds that last year 5 guys went missing, so clearly he and Samuel didn’t put the case in the ground. Dean objects, because hunters aren’t supposed to work the same town more than once. “One of Dad’s rules,” Dean says, “you never use the same crapper twice.”

“Everyone uses the same crapper twice,” Sam replies.

“Not us,” snaps Dean. “You know what I mean.”

Sam lays on the heavy guilt trip, implying that anyone who dies in this town is because of them. Dean relents, but as he investigates he finds that one of the victims was another woman who Sam was apparently intimate with during his last case.

The deputy recognizes Sam (you know, from beating him senseless by the side of the road a year earlier) and arrests him. While in jail, though, he is confronted by the wife of the previous sheriff, Roy. Apparently Sam had confessed that he was a hunter to the sheriff a year earlier, just before the sheriff disappeared.  She trusts Sam, busting him out of jail so that he can find out what happened to Roy.

Flash onto the woman from the bar, who is something of a box wine fan. She’s out of box wine, though, so heads into her basement … only to be tripped by strange hands on the stairway. A shadow falls over her when she reaches the base of the stairs and she screams. It doesn’t take Dean long to figure out that the common factor in the missing women is that they seem to all have had sex with Sam.

Sam goes to Roy’s widow and asks to begin going through the case files from the year before. Sam has some flashbacks, including a memory (triggered by some spider webs left at the scenes of the disappearances) that Samuel had thought the monster they were tracking as a mysterious ancient Greek monster called an Arachne. Dean is not thrilled that Sam is picking at his memory scabs, potentially unleashing the memories of his hellish torments (which would, of course, destroy him). Unfortunately, now that Sam has a soul, he can’t very well ignore the fact these things seem to be happening because of him.

Dean understands that much, at least, and begins helping Sam go through the evidence to trigger his memories. It turns out that the year before, Sam had the bright idea to use Roy as unwitting bait to catch the Arachne. The plan worked, but Roy got infected by a spider bite. Rather than listening to Samuel’s advice to get them to the hospital, Sam decided to put all five of the victims out of their misery.

It didn’t work on Roy, though. The Arachne wasn’t feeding on the men, it was breeding, turning them into other Arachne’s. Sam’s attempt to “set them free” failed, because bullets and fire don’t work on Arachne. (Decapitation, however, does. Bye, bye, Roy.)

Sam finally realizes that it was probably a mistake to investigate his missing year … and then collapses in a seizure, overcome with memories of his time in hell.

Now that is what I call a cliffhanger.

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• Episode 6.11 – “Appointment in Samarra”
• Episode 6.10 – “Caged Heat”
• Episode 6.9 – “Clap Your Hands If You Believe”
• Episode 6.8 – “All Dogs Go to Heaven”
• Episode 6.7 – “Family Matters”
• Episode 6.6 – “You Can’t Handle the Truth”
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• Episode 6.4 – “Weekend at Bobby’s”
• Episode 6.3 – “The Third Man”
• Episode 6.2 – “Two and a Half Men”
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• Supernatural Season 1
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