Eve’s up to no good in the town of Grant’s Pass, Oregon, by being unusually charming to a college student (named, as we shortly learn, Edward Bright). She runs her hand across his cheek, which cannot be a good thing. He wonders away from the bar she enters. Eve kisses another boy, then walks through and begins touching people. The whole place goes insane with a monstrous, vampiric feeding frenzy, as she sits and calmly watches.

Dean is making bullets filled with Phoenix ashes, but isn’t sure it’s going to work. The ashes certainly aren’t burning him. In fact, it’s all a bit of an exercise in futility without a location, so they summon Cas to try to get a bead on Eve. He has no information, but Sam has the idea of trying to track down an empathic monster to see if they can get Eve’s location from one of them.

Castiel is able to track down a cult favorite: Amber Benson, from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer fame. (For those who weren’t avid Buffy fans, Benson played Tara, the lesbian love interest of Willow. Her season 6 death at the hands of a misogynistic nerd nearly triggered the destruction of the world at Willow’s hands. Tara also had the best song in the classic “Once More, With Feeling” musical episode of Buffy, also from Season 6. If you have not seen it, Season 6 of Buffy is some of the best television ever made.)

Fortunately for fanboys like me, Benson also played the non-killing vampire Lenore, who was introduced briefly in Season 2 of Supernatural.

She directs them to Grant’s Pass, but begs to be killed. She’s fed and she can’t keep Eve’s voice out of her head. Eve knows they’re coming now. She can’t resist the urges. Sam tries to talk her out of it, saying they can work through it, but Castiel is focused more on expedience, so he incinerates her with angelic light.

When in Grant’s Pass, Castiel finds himself unable to teleport or use any of his powers. Using Sam’s iPad, Billy is (in between grumbling about the lack of buttons) able to track down a CDC report that a local doctor reported some strange kind of infection in town. They track down patient zero, Edward Bright, only to find his corpse hidden at the doctor’s office.

Except that when they look at his home, he isn’t dead. No, instead, there’s about a half dozen Edward Bright corpses, and one who’s dying. He’s some other guy, though, who has apparently been infected to transform into Edward, but appears to be sick from the infection.

Definitely one of the weirdest, and most useless, of monsters ever created.

Still, the remaining Bright-clone directs them to the bar, where they find a slew of corpses. These don’t look like Edward Bright, but they do have vampire fangs and wraith spikes. Bobby’s never seen anything like it and Dean is freaked out that Eve is now making hybrids. On the plus side, he gets to name them: Jefferson Starships, “because they’re horrible and hard to kill.”

The name sticks, especially as they discover that the local cops are jefferson starships. They capture the sheriff and discover the missing sons of the doctor who originally reported the virus to the CDC. (The starships show up when viewed over video feeds.) Sam and Dean decide to return the boys to their last remaining relative, an uncle, but Castiel objects, chiding them for the choice:

Castiel: Millions of lives are at stake here, not just two. Just stay focused.

Dean: What, are you kidding?

Castiel: There’s a greater purpose here.

Dean: You know, I’m getting sick and tired of the greater purposes. I think what I’d like to do right now is save a couple of kids, if you don’t mind. We’ll catch up.

While they’re gone, Bobby points out that Castiel really didn’t have a choice. “You don’t let Sam and Dean Winchester do squat, they do what they gotta. You know that.” Cas and Bobby  torture the sheriff to get the information. Castiel asks for 5 minutes alone with him and is finally able to get the location (and a pair of bloody hands), which is a bit impressive given that he supposedly doesn’t have his angelic powers.

I’m really hoping that Cas doesn’t turn out to be the bad guy, but I definitely get the impression that’s where this whole runaway train is heading. I half expect that this episode (or possibly the season) will end with Castiel somehow absorbing Eve’s power, so he can command the monsters as part of his army.

Anyway, it turns out that Eve’s been hanging out at the diner all day. Since they’re not sure who she is, Dean comes up with the plan:

Dean: Well, there’s one way to draw her out. Me and Sam will go in. Look, if we don’t get a shot off, you two better.

Bobby: That is the plan?

Dean: Yeah, pretty much.

Bobby: Well, at least it ain’t complicated.

Sam uses his smartphone’s video function to check for jefferson starships (Who knew they had an app for that?), discovering that everyone in the diner is one of them. Eve is the waitress, it turns out, and she wants to chat with Sam and Dean.

Here Eve lays out her view on things: She had to come back, because her children, including firstborn, are being murdered by Crowley. (Isn’t Crowley dead, though? Apparently not! And it was Castiel who torched his bones. Was this a scam? Jeesh, this is a deep con.) According to Eve, it isn’t about Purgatory, it’s about the souls. She’s not playing nice anymore, so has been beta-testing new monsters, finally having achieved the perfect one. “I eventually got it right. Quiet. Smart. Inconspicuous. It can spread through a whole town in under a day. and the best part, you’ve been with it the whole time. You were the final test. I had to see if it could slip past hunters undetected, of course.”

The monster is young Ryan, the younger boy that Dean and Sam rescued earlier. He has now bitten his older brother, also transforming him into a jefferson starship, and now they’re taking down their uncle.

Well, that certainly sucks.

But Eve has an offer. If the Winchesters can find Crowley and turn him over to Eve, she’ll let them live. They really don’t have a back-up plan, because she’s captured Castiel & Bobby.

Dean refuses to work for her, though. “Bite me,” he says.

And she does.

Then she has a horrible allergic reaction, as she burns up from the inside. Dean had downed a bunch of phoenix ash with a whiskey chaser, so when Eve bit him she consumed poison. She dies and Castiel, now plugged back into his angelic mojo, blasts the place with angelic light, taking out all the starships.

He then heals Dean’s bite. “I think she turned me into a starship,” Dean says, but the healing seems to take care of that, too.

They go after the child-monster Ryan, only to find that he and his brother are already dead, apparently having been taken out by demons. They tell Castiel that Eve claimed Crowley was still alive, so he teleports away to investigate it.

Bobby and Sam, however, are suspicious. As Bobby says, “How did Crowley get away. It’s not like Cas to make mistakes like that, unless he meant to.”

The episode leaves it alone with little ambiguity, though. Castiel is in the diner with all the monster corposes, and Crowley shows up. “Really, Cas, this is getting ridiculous. How many times am I going to have to clean up your messes?”

With three episodes left this season, there are still a lot of dangling questions. The next episode claims that it will provide some more detail on how the war in heaven broke out and why Castiel and Raphael became enemies, no doubt providing the set-up for the season cliffhanger (a good ending,  since the show’s been renewed for season 7).

The nice thing about this season is that it doesn’t appear they’re making Castiel an outright bad guy, but rather that he’s become so blinded by his own ideals that he’s willing to make disastrously amoral choices, like altering history and working with Crowley, plus who knows what else. Castiel’s always been stuck in a world of moral ambiguities, so I’m fine with this, but turning him into an outright villain would have been cheating, in my mind.

My personal hope is that Castiel and Sam/Dean remain at odds for a while, but Castiel isn’t so far gone that he’s willing to actual try to kill them (and vice versa). That’ll make for a far more interesting season 7, as they try to thwart each other without actually getting each other killed.

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