- A hunter named Travis points Sam and Dean towards a meat eating creature called a Rugaru. Complicating matters is the fact that Travis's target is a normal suburban dad in the earlier process of changing and he hasn't killed anyone yet.
- After Castiel's revelation, Dean fears and soon sees confirmation, by consorting with demon Ruby, that Sam gained extraordinary powers as one of the children fed with demonic blood meant to help start the Apocalypse. Still they respond together to old friendly Missouri hunter Travis's call for help in Carthage. There so far model family man Jack Montgomery is about to transform into a man-eating 'rougarou'. Sam argues he may still resist the urge, with Dean sees as another sign of turning evil.—KGF Vissers
- Previously on "Supernatural" The angel Castiel sent Dean back to 1973, where he hung out with the teenage versions of his folks, met his maternal grandparents, and discovered his mother, Mary, was a smokin' babe who didn't pull her punches. He also found out that the Yellow-Eyed Demon began sowing the seeds of his evil plan way back then, as well as murdering granny and grandpappy -- and Young John, leading Mary to make a deal, the deal that led to Sam becoming the psychic (possibly) bad seed that he is today, in order to save her lover.
THEN!
Well, pretty much everything you just read, with the addition of scenes of Sam using his freaky ESP, and Castiel telling Dean that the angels know what the Yellow-Eyed Demon did to Sam, they just don't know why. He also left Dean with a hint that Sam is up to some very bad things, and if Dean didn't put a halt to it, they would.
NOW!
Sam and Ruby stand over a shifty looking dude tied to a chair. "Where's Lilith?" Sam asks him, and as his eyes flash black, the man invites Sam to kiss his ass.
Sam has a confident glint in his eye and warns the guy to watch his step.
"Why? Because you're Sam Winchester, Mr. Big Hero? And yet here you are, slutting around with some demon. Real hero!" He taunts Sam for keeping the secret from Dean, bringing up his stay in Hell, and asks if Dean knows what he and Ruby "do in the dark." Sam's face quivers with anger and he stretches out his hand, shaking with effort as he makes the man vomit a stream of black smoke, which burns into the floor and disappears. He and Ruby smile at having sent another demon back into hell...and outside, an unseen Dean is angry at what he's just witnessed. Oh boy...it's on now!
Once the title card fades out, we see the man still tied to the chair, but he's slumped over unconscious.
"How did that feel?" Ruby asks, and Sam replies, "Good. No headaches." Ruby says that's good, and Sam checks the man's pulse -- he's alive, and coming around. Sam gets him out of his chair, just as Dean bursts into the room. "So...anything you want to tell me, Sam?" Dean seethes.
Sam moves to explain, but Dean lays into him before he can, starting with: Who's the chick? What is she doing here? He turns to her, and Ruby smiles.
"It's good to see you again," she says, and Dean's expression grows even angrier.
"Ruby?" he says. "Is that Ruby?" Sam gulps. Dean sneers, then punches Ruby in the gut. They struggle for a moment, then Sam breaks it up, sending Ruby to take the rescued man to the emergency room. Sam and Dean sit quietly for a moment, then Dean shoots a weary sideways glare at Sam and, ignoring his brother's pleas, leaves him there.
The next morning, Sam sits alone in the hotel room, reading, when Dean comes back in and starts packing. Sam asks what he's doing, and Dean snarks that Sam doesn't need him anymore, since he has Ruby. Sam starts to protest, but Dean cuts him off with a hard punch to the jaw. Once Sam recovers, he gasps, "Satisfied?" The answer is another punch in the face. "I guess not."
"Do you even know how far off the reservation you've gone?" Dean spits. "How far from normal, from human?"
"We're just exorcising demons," Sam explains.
"With your mind?!" Dean asks what else he can do, and Sam replies that he sends them back to Hell. Dean asks why he doesn't just use the knife, and Sam explains that the knife kills people -- his way, most of the possession victims survive. "I've saved more people in the last five months than we save in a year!" Sam says.
"Is that what Ruby wants you to think?" Dean asks. "Slippery slope, brother. Just wait and see. Because it's going to get darker, and darker, and God knows where it ends." (Actually...no, He doesn't. That's kind of the point. But back to the subject at hand...)
"I'm not going to let it go to far," Sam says, and Dean shatters a lamp against the wall.
"It's already gone too far, Sam," big brother tells him, adding, "If I didn't know you? I would want to hunt you. And so would other hunters."
Sam explains that while Dean was gone, he had to keep on fighting, and what he's doing works.
"Then tell me, if it's so terrific, then why did you lie about it to me? Why did an angel tell me to stop you?...You know what that means, Sam? That means that God doesn't want you doing this. So don't just stand there and tell me that everything's all good."
Sam's phone rings, breaking the tension. He answers...and it's Travis, another hunter. Travis calls them down to Carthage, Missouri, to find Jack Montgomery.
We, of course, meet Jack first, as he's tearing into his dinner. (The camera close-up on his mouth, mid-mastication, is gag-worthy.) Jack is horking down food with something beyond gusto (damn! you bet!) and his wife Michelle watches him, her expression uneasily dancing between fascination and disgust.
"Jack, are you stoned?" she asks, and he just says he's hungry and asks for dessert.
He also asks if he can have her steak, and she remarks that he's already had two. He grabs the beef off of her plate and says in a bewildered, apologetic tone, that he's just so hungry. She walks out of the room.
Later while Jack is brushing his teeth, he suddenly jerks and spasms. For a moment his backbone strains against his skin, as if to burst out of it, and he doubles over and holds onto the sink. Then, just as suddenly, it stops. Jack turns around to examine his back in the mirror, but it looks normal.
Meanwhile, the boys are on the road, and Dean is filling Sam in on his recent historical trip. Sam can't believe their mom was a hunter.
"How did she look?" Sam asks, "Was she happy?"
'Yeah, she was awesome," Dean says, "and funny and smart, and hopeful. Dad, too. Until of course..." Dean trails off, finishing with "Nothing." Sam frustratedly retraces the whole business, saying he can't believe that old Yellow Eyes killed their entire family, all to get into baby Sam's nursery to drip demon blood in his mouth? And. -- Dean's all, wait-whoa-whoa-whoa.
"Sam, I never said anything about demon blood. You knew about that?"
Sam admits that he's known about it for a full year. Yet another detail Sam has kept from Dean, who suddenly gets moody and clams up. The drive continues in silence.
Next evening at the Montgomery household, Jack asks what time dinner is. "I'm starving!" he says, staring into the fridge. His wife assures him that dinner's on the way. Little do they know that the Winchesters are camped outside, watching Jack through binoculars.
"You sure that's him?" Dean asks, and Sam replies yes, it is, this is the only Montgomery listed in town.
Sam relays Travis's directive to keep an eye out for anything weird. Dean looks again, and only sees a fit, middle-aged guy who probably works in an office somewhere.
"I've seen big weird. Little weird. Weird with crazy on top," he says. "But this guy...c'mon, this guy's boring."
While he's saying this, Jack sips a beer and stares at the fridge. He opens it again, and swipes a package of leftover fried chicken, devouring it -- bones and all. When that's done, he moves on to a tray of raw ground beef, slurping it down with a euphoric expression on his face, only stopping when his wife calls from the other room.
Sam, witnessing all of this from the car, remarks, "I'd say that qualifies as weird."
Dean and Sam go off to meet Travis, an old friend of the family. They man hug and exchange pleasantries, then get down to business.
"Boys, we got a Rugaru on our hands." Rotten teeth, wormy skin, the works. Dean is confused. This guy has a cell phone on his belt. And what is a Rugaru? It's a cannibalistic monster that starts out as human.
Travis explains that Jack is going to transform, "like a maggot turning a bull fly." While Travis is telling this story we see Jack walking through his kitchen as his wife, Michelle, cuts herself badly while chopping vegetables. She cries out, and grabs her finger to stop the bleeding.
Blood is dripping everywhere, and Jack's attention snaps to the cut. He gets a slightly maniacal look in his eye.
Travis explains that the metamorphosis starts with an insatiable hunger, at first for regular food."But then...the long pig."
Long pig? "He means for human flesh," Sam says. "And that is my word of the day!" Dean adds.
As Travis explains that the hunger grows in until the host can't fight it, "until they've got to take themselves a big juicy chomp," Jack stares at Michelle running her sliced, bloody wound under some water. "Then it happens," Travis says, in a voiceover. "They transform completely, and fast."
Michelle tells Jack she needs stitches. His response is to run out of the house, leaving her befuddled and a bit ticked off...but alive.
Back to Travis and the boys: One bite is all it takes, Travis stresses. Dean asks how he found Jack, since he's human right now. Travis explained that the Rugaru business runs in Jack's family. Dad was a very nice dentist before he turned, and Travis had to put him down in 1978. But the hunter had no idea that the dentist's wife was pregnant. She put Jack up for adoption, and by the time Travis found out, Jack was lost in the system.
Following storytime, we catch up with Jack sitting in a bar, guzzling beer with three empty peanut bowls in front of him, thinking hungrily about his wife's blood. He asks the bartender for another bowl of warm salty nuts, and sadly stares at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. But his dark reverie is interrupted when he hears a man aggressively hitting on a woman at the end of the bar, and she isn't interested. Jack interrupts him by calling him a douchebag and saying the woman doesn't want to talk to him.
"I'm sorry," the douchebag said, "I didn't hear you."
"I said, she doesn't want to talk to you, you fat...sweaty...delicious man chop." OK, he doesn't say that last part, but he might as well have. The jerk goes to punch Jack, but Jack catches his fist and crushes the man's wrist, exposing the bone. The douchebag howls in pain as Jack runs out of the bar.
After a commercial break, Dean is chatting with Travis about strategy -- turns out the most effective way to kill a Rugaru is to burn it. They're constructing makeshift flamethrowers as Sam returns from a trip to the library. He claims to have found some cases of people who never made the full transformation to Rugaru, who were able to keep it under control through sheer willpower and by eating steak tartare by the truckload.
"Good on you for the due diligence, Sam," Travis says patronizingly, adding that those are fairy tales. The only good Rugaru is a dead Rugaru -- they all take that bite.
Sam suggests talking to Jack to give him the heads up, so he can try to fight it, but Travis calls his idea ridiculous, likening Jack's situation to trying to stop a starving man, someone who hasn't eaten for days, from tearing into a Porterhouse. Travis tells Sam, in so many words, that the world is now Jack's Black Angus."You think he can stop himself because he's nice?
"I don't know," Sam replies."But we're not going to kill him unless he does something to get killed for." Travis seems confused, but Dean and the rest of us can tell that Sam isn't talking about Jack the Friendly Rugaru any more. Sam storms out of the room, and Travis asks what his problem is.
"Don't get me started," Dean huffs.
Back at the Montgomery household, it's morning, and Michelle is pouring herself a cup of tea. Jack comes in and apologizes to his honey for running out the house. She's angry, remarking that she had to drive herself to the hospital. He explains that at the sight of her blood he got dizzy and bailed.
She says that blood's never bothered him before, and he says "I've changed." He apologizes, eyeing her hungrily, but she jokes that sorry doesn't get him off the hook. He starts kissing her neck, as she says, "Think diamonds. Think Kobe-sized!" He smashes his lips against her mouth, then lifts her onto the kitchen counter...and his passion turns into ravenous pawing. He mauls her, slamming her head against the wall cabinets. "Jack, stop it!" she screams, pushing him off of her.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" she asks. He whispers, "I don't know" -- and dashes off again.
Dean and Sam are driving over to the Montgomery place, and Dean says he's fine with diplomacy, but wonders if Sam is going to be able to pull the trigger if need be...you know, if they have to burn the guy alive. Dean firmly believes that he's going to turn, because they always turn. Sam thinks he might be able to fight it off.
"This is what I mean, Sam. You sure your emotions aren't getting the best of you here?" Dean insinuates that Sam might relate too much to Jack having something in his blood he can't control, and Sam orders Dean to pull over so they can have it out.
And the yelling kicks in. Sam says the reason he didn't tell Dean about what he was doing was because he knew he'd react this way, and Dean says he's not sure if Sam knows the difference between right and wrong.
But then Sam lays it out for him. "I've got demon blood in me Dean! This disease pumping through my veins, and I can't ever rip it out or scrub it clean! I'm a whole new level of freak!" But, Sam adds, at least he figures he can take demonic lemons and make good guy lemonade -- you know, help people.
Dean agrees to let it be for the moment and have their chat with Jack.
When they get there, Jack is watering his garden. Sam and Dean stroll up and let on that they know that something's happening to Jack, that his hunger has increased and he can feel his bones moving under his skin. We handily skip most of the conversation where the guys share Jack's family history with him and pop back in at the end, when Jack is trying to wrap his head (and his lips) around the concept of being a Rugaru. Jack claims to refuse to believe it, but Dean tells him to cut it out. They know he's hungry, and that he's only going to get hungrier...until he goes for, what?
Dean's new favorite term: "Long pig. A little Man-burger Helper? That crossed your mind already?" Jack denies it. Sam tells him that he has to fight it.
"You feed once, and it's all over," Sam says. "We're going to have to stop you."
"Stop me?...My dad...did somebody stop him?"
Sam pauses for a moment before saying, "Yes." Jack explodes with anger and kicks them off of his property, despite Sam's assurances that his wife and everyone he loves is in danger.
"Good talk," Dean deadpans.
Later, Jack is sitting on a street bench, listening to a phone message from his wife pleading for him to come home. Jack hangs up, looking distressed. Then he sees a woman alone in her apartment. Jack all but drools as she goes to close her curtains and undress. He walks over to the building and starts climbing the fire escape. Fortunately Sam and Dean are running surveillance nearby, and leap from the Impala with their makeshift flamethrowers at the ready.
Jack puts his face against the woman's window and stares at her through her thin curtains as she walks around in nothing but her bra and panties, which is what single women with sheer curtains love to do. Jack's pupils dilate and the whites of his eyes go horribly bloodshot as he begins to pant...but he stops himself and backs off, just as Sam and Dean burst through her front door.. The woman screams in fright as Dean yells, "We're here to save you...I guess!" Only...Jack's not there. Indeed, the only frights in that apartment are the two idiots who just invaded her place.
"I'm calling the police!" she screams. "We should go," Dean blurts, and they skedaddle.
Jack heads home, happy to have fought back his hunger, and calls out to his wife. He hears her muffled cries, and heads into the living room to find her gagged and tied to a chair. Before he can process this, Travis sneaks up from behind and puts a cloth over Jack's mouth, chloroforming him.
Jack comes to and discovers that his hands have been cuffed to a pillar and behind his back. He sees Travis and, presuming that this is a plain old home invasion, tells Travis to take whatever he wants. "I'm sorry about this, Jack," Travis says. "This isn't the way that I wanted it to go." Travis explains that he hunted his dad before, and he wanted to make darn sure that he didn't have to do it again. Jack begs the hunter to let his wife go, because she has nothing to do with this.
On the contrary, Travis counters. She is a part of it. Travis commands Michelle to tell Jack what she told the hunter when he first got there.
Apparently Michelle said,"Don't hurt me...because I'm pregnant." Uh-oh.
Travis explains that he won't be alive to hunt down Jack's kid, so he'd better just take care of business now. He starts pouring gasoline all around them. Jack struggles to the point that his Rugaru strength kicks in and he breaks the cuffs. He tackles Travis and takes a chomp out of his neck, savoring the taste of stubbly flesh as the Hunter's jugular turns into a geyser. Jack takes another deep chomp, and his face goes pale and veiny. Then he heads over to a terrified Michelle. Though he moves as if to bite her, he frees her instead. Michelle leaps out of her chair and tells her husband to stay away from her, booking to the front door. She beats cheeks to her car and drives off, presumably straight to her local Planned Parenthood.
Jack stares after her for a moment, then turns his attention back to the dead hunter's body. He pants hungrily, and leans in for a snicker-snack.
By the time Dean and Sam arrive on the scene Travis's body is gone, and the only calling card left behind is a wide, bloody trail on the carpet ending at a pile of guts, the treasure at the end of a red rainbow. As the guys are coming to grips with the fact that Travis has been reduced to a rare meal, Jack sneaks up behind Sam and knocks him out. Lot of that going on tonight.
Sam awakens in a closet, and Jack has locked him in. He calls out to Dean, and Jack answers with rage-filled accusations at first, but ultimately tells him that Dean is still alive -- he slumped over on the dining room table, his head resting in a pool of blood. Jack slurps up a taste and whines, "I'm so hungry."
Sam tries to talk him down from the closet as Jack accuses Sam, Dean and Travis of making him into a monster. Sam finds a hanger and, while he tries to talk Jack into resisting his urges, picks the lock.
"It doesn't matter what you are," Sam tells Jack. "It only matters what you do." Jack struggles to fight his hunger, but nearly gives in as Dean wakes up -- and Sam breaks out of the closet in the nick of time, training his flamethrower on the transformed Jack. Jack, now a full Rugaru, looks at Sam sadly for a moment, then lunges for him just as Sam pulls the trigger, completely immolating the formerly mild-mannered suburban husband. Dean watches Jack burn, and notices the grim determination on Sam's face.
As they're driving off, Dean apologizes to Sam for being so hard on him. "It's just that, your psychic thing, it really scares the crap out of me--"
"If it's all the same, I'd really rather not talk about it," Sam interrupts. He says that he can't make Dean understand, because the blood isn't in him.
"Anyway," Sam concludes, "it doesn't matter. Using these powers...is playing with fire. I'm done with them. I'm done with everything."
Dean thanks him, and Sam replies, "Don't thank me, I'm not doing it for you. Not for the angels, or for anybody. This is my choice."
The boys avoid looking at each other, preferring to glower in silence at the open road unfurling before them.
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