Well, I was completely on board with “Like a Virgin” until about minute 48 and then everything went really, really dark, really, really quick. Looks like we’re in for another round of a Lilith-like big bad.
We begin with a soulful Sammy lying in repose in the panic room at Casa Singer while Dean, Castiel, and Bobby debate whether he’ll wake up and in what condition he’ll be if and when he does. Castiel is fairly certain Sammy won’t, so Dean and Bobby retreat upstairs for a drink and chat a bit about the scene that opened the episode—a couple taking a header in a small plane after the girl sees something large and winged outside the plane.
While they discuss whether a case is at hand, Sam quietly enters and a startled Dean isn’t sure what’s about to happen. He hesitates nervously and then Sam hugs him. Cut to Sam eating at Bobby’s table and the last thing he recalls is the pit dive at the end of last season. Bobby starts to interject something about the last year, but Dean slows him down. Bobby tells him later that hiding things will only bite them in the ass, and Dean’s OK with that as long as he can enjoy “old” Sam now.
The boys take off on the investigation, which has come together around a string of virginal disappearances, and Dean is a proud papa bear as sensitive Sam resurfaces. They interview a girl who escaped her encounter with the winged beast, so Dean throws it out there that maybe she wasn’t so pure and that turns out to be true. They piece together virgin sacrifices and winged creatures and come up with dragons (cue jokes about Middle Earth and Hobbits), so at Bobby’s suggestion, Dean goes to see a medieval studies professor (who’s also sort of Bobby’s ex-girlfriend) because she happens to have a dragon-blood-forged sword in her basement. Dean has to break it from a stone a la Arthur, but instead opts for C4, and that ends about as well as you think it will. He takes what’s left of the sword back to Sam and they look for the city’s caves (a.k.a sewers) and find the group of missing girls, humanoid demons with wings, a cache of gold jewelry, and a creepy journal written on human skin. The sword sends the dragon creatures packing but doesn’t kill them.
Bobby sets about translating the journal and finds that it’s about a gathering storm for the purgatory mission with a leader named “Mother”. While the boys break that down, at about minute 48, we cut to a black van of screaming girls and the creepy winged guys. They pluck one girl from the group, carry her screaming into a cave and stand her above a very deep and scary pit. They recite a little Latin and then chuck her in and she screams all the way down. Flames belch back up, followed by the still-perfectly-intact girl who’s now inhabited by something and she’s ready to get the party started. Yikes.
I was very happy to see Sam intact and docile and not raging at Dean, although I’d guess we’ll get to that. Poor guileless Castiel – Sam realizes he needs more information about his time away, so he baits Castiel into a housecall spilling of the beans about what really went down over the last year and then handles the truth surprisingly well. It was awesome that Sam asked Dean about his promise to make a life with Lisa and Ben, so that’ll be quite the sucker punch when he finds out his role in the break up. I liked, too, that Bobby was BAD IDEA about the whole nonchalant thing Dean was trying to do; I’d love for hot teacher Kim Johnston-Ulrich to come back again and play with Bobby in person.
This was a fairly ease-us-back-in second half season premiere, and I’d guess it’ll be the last breather that viewers and the boys get for a while. Hang onto something.
Photo Courtesy of The CW