Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 7.3 “Girl Next Door”
Supernatural’s usually a bit more episodic than it has been lately. It seems like the last dozen or so episodes, even spanning back into the final episodes of last season, have had full-blown cliffhangers instead of just the usual dangling plot threads.
In this case, the cliffhanger is Sam and Dean getting taken to a hospital that is now run by Leviathan-possessed people. Bobby shows up in an uncharacteristically-dapper suit to get a morphine-laden Dean and unconscious Sam out of the hospital. They narrowly escape in a stolen ambulance, chased by Leviathans … and then comes the title splash. It does take a bit of the bite out of the cliffhanger when you know it’s going to get un-hanged before the title splashes across the screen.
With that out of the way, we get on with the plot of the episode, which focuses on an episode from Sam’s youth and his budding romance with a young woman named Amy … a girl who shows up in the present day in the form of Firefly and Stargate: Atlantis alum Jewel Staite.
While Dean recovers from his broken leg, Sam gets wind of a series of murders. The “ice pick murderer” seems to mirror a case that he investigated when he was a kid, where some sort of monster rips the pituitary glands out of human brains, for nutritional purposes. The murders are all of lowlife scum, it seems. He steals the Impala and takes off to investigate case, but doesn’t tell either Dean or Bobby. The murders take place along major highways, meaning that Sam is able to predict where the next attack will happen.
Interspersed with his investigation are flashbacks to when he was looking into the similar case as a teenager in 1998. He met young Amy in the library, then rescued her from a couple of boys who were accosting her.
It turns out that Amy is a Kitsune. When Sam ran into her in 1998, she didn’t turn him in to her mother, but instead let him go free, even after discovering that he was a hunter. Now he returns the favor.
Unfortunately, Dean tracks him down … and knocks him out in one punch. He wants to know why Sam went off on his own, and Sam explains. He tells how the story ends, with Amy stabbing her mother in order to save Sam’s life. Dean says that now that she’s dropping bodies, they’ve got to drop her, “no matter how many merit badges she racked up as a kid.”
Sam stands firm, though, drawing an equivalence between him and Amy. They’re both freaks, but they can manage it. Dean doesn’t seem particularly happy about it, but he goes along with it. Or seems to, at least.
While Sam checks into a hotel, however, Dean makes a run for medicine and swings by the hotel that Amy is now staying in. He doesn’t buy that people can change.
“But people, they are who they are. No matter how hard you try, you are what you are. And you will kill again…. Trust me, I’m an expert. Maybe in a year, maybe in ten, but eventually the other shoe will drop. It always does.”
He then stabs her. As he leaves, though, he runs into young Jacob … say about 10 years old.
Dean: You have someone you can go to? [Jacob nods] You ever kill anyone? [Jacob shakes his head] Well, if you do, I’ll come back for you.
Jacob: The only person I’m going to kill is you.
Dean: Well, look me up in a few years … assuming I live that long.
Meanwhile, it looks like the Leviathans are hot on the trail of the Winchesters, having figured out how to track at least some of their fake credit cards. (That confrontation doesn’t look like it’s coming quite yet, though.)
Related Articles:
[…] resistant to the idea that these people can change … probably because his murder of Amy last episode was largely predicated on the idea that people can’t change. He volunteers to go investigate […]