6.16 ... And Then There Were None: She Has A Message For You (Part 1, Episode Summary only)
6.16 … And Then There Were None: She Has A Message For You
Eve makes new monsters,
Planning to cage human food;
Hunters' families die.
Episode Summary
A cannery trucker from Sandusky, Ohio filling his diesel tank at a truck stop at night was surprised by a barefoot young woman - the same girl we saw sacrificed to become the Mother of All in Like A Virgin - approaching him and asking for a ride. She introduced herself as Eve, and when he asked how far she wanted to go, she kissed him aggressively, saying she'd go however far he wanted. A moral Christian man, he pushed her off, advising that what she really wanted and needed was faith in God. She answered that God had abandoned his children, saying they hadn't even noticed that their apocalypse had come and gone. She asked if she could tell him a secret, and when he hesitantly agreed, seized his head and clamped her mouth over his ear while he screamed in pain. Later that night, he walked into the room where his wife slept. When she woke, her happiness at seeing him was transformed into terror as he raised a hammer and smashed her skull.
At the desk in his study, talking with the Winchesters, Bobby circled a line of week-long monster-related incidents - vampires, werewolves, shifters, ghouls, and wraiths - on a map marching down I-80 to the city of Sandusky, where a trucker had bashed in his family's heads. Masquerading as federal agents, the three hunters interviewed the distraught trucker, who said he didn't remember anything but driving his regular route and then waking up in his truck at the cannery with no memory of how he'd gotten there. He said when he called home in confusion and got no answer, he went to his house to discover his wife and children dead. He mentioned that he'd given a young woman a ride from the truck stop, and said she must have taken off.
Perplexed by a situation that sounded more like demonic or ghost possession than a monster thing, the hunters reviewed the truck stop camera footage at the police station, seeing the young woman from behind approaching the truck and its driver. As she walked back around to the passenger side, however, the camera caught a view of her face, which flickered into something monstrous and distorted that none of them had seen before. Bobby guessed that all the monster activity might be related to the Mother of All, and Dean wondered what they would do if that were true, since they had no idea how to kill her. Around them, the police station erupted into activity when a new report came in that a worker had gone postal in the cannery, opening fire on his co-workers with a hunting rifle. Bobby went with the cops to scope out the situation, telling the brothers to finish up at the station. Sam advanced the camera footage, seeing the monster woman exiting and walking away from the truck mere moments after having climbed inside it.
At the cannery, Bobby discovered hunter Rufus Turner, also posing as an FBI agent, already on the scene and investigating the case, in which a man killed six co-workers before being killed by police. Rufus proposed teaming up and working the case together, like old times, and Bobby hesitantly agreed. Back at the coroner's office, they examined the body of the shooter, and Bobby spotted some thick, dark goo in the man's ear. Rufus sniffed the goo-stained swab, immediately concluding the substance wasn't ectoplasm, but unable to determine what it was. Realizing the two attackers had the cannery in common, they decided to search the place that night, and met Dean and Sam on the pier beside the plant, much to the brothers' delight.
Inside the dark, closed plant, they made their way from the cannery floor up to the offices. Spotting a flashlight moving beyond a set of double doors, Dean and Sam moved into protective guard positions, surprised when the door opened to reveal Gwen Campbell. When Samuel appeared in the room beyond her, immediately pulling his gun, Dean burst into the room with his own gun drawn, intending to kill Samuel as he'd promised during Caged Heat. Sam stopped him, begging him to wait, and when Rufus observed they all seemed to know each other, Dean said Samuel was their grandfather. With Dean too angry to think, Bobby told Sam to take him for a walk, and Dean submitted with poor grace. Outside the room, Dean reminded Sam that Sam couldn't remember what Samuel had done to them, and Sam responded that Samuel might know something, saying he wasn't telling Dean not to kill him, but just not to do it right then. Still seething but under control, Dean stalked off alone down the hall, and Sam went back into the room where Samuel was observing snidely that Bobby must be the guy who was pretending to be the Winchesters' father. Reacting to Sam, Samuel noted he seemed different, and Sam said he'd gotten his soul back. The way he said it, Samuel realized Sam didn't remember the time he'd spent soulless.
Rufus asked Samuel what he was hunting, and Samuel announced they were after a creature from Purgatory who called herself Eve, but whom other monsters called Mother. He said she'd been on Earth about 10,000 years ago and every freak that walked the planet could be traced back to her. Bobby asked him how he knew that, and Samuel, disparagingly calling Bobby a kid, boasted that Bobby didn't know half the things he did, and hadn't even known about the Campbells until recently. Bobby answered that he knew Samuel would throw his own kin to hungry ghouls and figured that was enough. Gwen, surprised and disturbed, asked Samuel what he'd done, and Samuel snapped that Dean had lied. Bobby encouraged her to ask Dean, and observing that was a good idea, she headed out of the room after him. Finding him alone in the hall, she asked if it was true that Samuel had tried to kill him, and he confirmed it. Gwen, clearly appalled, said she hadn't known, and Dean said he knew that, but there was something else he had to tell her - and then he raised his gun and shot her point-blank in the chest. Hearing the shot, all the hunters ran out to find Gwen collapsed on the floor and Dean gone. As Sam went in search of Dean and Samuel looked on, Rufus and Bobby tried to save her, but she died. Sam returned, unsuccessful in his search, and the hunters split up in two teams to find Dean, Sam and Bobby first locking the doors to keep anyone from leaving while Rufus and Samuel deposited Gwen's body in a cold storage room. Before they split up, Sam warned Samuel that they had to find Dean alive, or Sam would kill Samuel himself.
Bobby and Sam stuck together in the hunt, while Rufus and Samuel, operating more loosely and not familiar with working as a team, separated during their search. Striking out, Sam eventually pulled out his cellphone and hit his speed-dial - D for Dean - and Rufus, hearing Dean's cellphone ringing behind him, spun to discover Dean standing unsteadily beside a pillar, gun in hand. Rufus demanded he drop the gun and Dean refused as Samuel burst in to join the standoff, quickly followed by Bobby and Sam. Dean said he didn't know what had happened, that he'd woken up on the floor in time to see a big worm crawl out of his ear and into a nearby vent. Samuel said he'd killed Gwen, and Dean, shocked, said the last thing he remembered was talking to her in the hall. He reiterated what he'd said about a worm crawling out of his ear, referencing Star Trek by calling it a Khan-worm on steroids. Bobby told him to check his ear, and while Dean looked at him as if he were crazy, Rufus proceeded to stick a finger in Dean's ear and pronounce him goo-positive, like the corpse of the shooter, indicating the worm either had been in him or possibly still was. Contemplating a parasitic monster that could take over people's bodies and make them do things, all the hunters realized that was something new they didn't know how to fight. Bobby grabbed a sack and advocated all of them disarming to prevent them from blowing each others' heads off while they tried to figure out a plan, observing they couldn't tell who might be the worm's host at the moment. With some hesitation, especially on Samuel's part, they all put their guns in the sack, and Bobby and Rufus secured it with a padlock in a employee locker. They retreated to an employee staff room to think, and Bobby and Rufus both pulled out their phones to call other hunters and learn if anyone had any information on a monster like this one. After they'd been in the room for a while with no success, Samuel got up only to find Sam blocking his path. Saying he needed to go to the bathroom, he walked past, but Dean and Sam followed him.
Alone in the room, Rufus and Bobby compared notes on their lack of success. Increasingly antsy, Bobby finally advocated just grabbing the thing and trying to figure it out on the fly, going in guns blazing, and Rufus chillingly asked if he meant like Omaha. Clearly uncomfortable, Bobby responded with anger, telling Rufus that bringing up Omaha was just low.
Dean and Sam stopped Samuel on his way out of the bathroom, with Dean asking how Samuel could sleep at night after what he did to them. Samuel claimed to understand how Dean felt, but refused to apologize for what he'd done. When Sam chimed in on his betrayal of the brothers, Samuel responded that Sam wasn't in a position to criticize, because he'd done a lot worse. Sam asked to be told what he'd done, but Dean immediately intervened to get between Sam and the threat of his memories, warning Samuel that as soon as the hunt was over, Dean would kill him. Samuel started to say they'd see about that, reaching into his pocket, but Dean glimpsed dark goo oozing out of his ear and grabbed his wrist as he pulled a small hideout pistol from his pocket, causing the shot to go wild. Samuel pulled free and fled with the brothers in pursuit, and when Rufus and Bobby ran out of the room in response to the shot, Dean called that it was Samuel, and the two older hunters went after the stash of guns.
The brothers arrived shortly after, having lost Samuel in the maze of cannery equipment. They all armed up and went after Samuel together, with Dean in the lead. As they walked, Sam suddenly grabbed Dean and yanked him backward, and when everyone reacted, pointed his flashlight down at a tripwire across their path, leading to an improvised antipersonnel bomb consisting of a gas can rigged with glass jars of nails for shrapnel. They proceeded forward with even more care, with a little more distance between them and Sam in the lead, and suddenly all the power went out and a heavy door slid shut between Sam and the others, cutting him off from them. Unable to get the door open again, Sam shouted that he would go around, and Dean led the others in search of a way to reconnect with him.
Alone, Sam came up behind Samuel, and ordered him to turn and keep his hands in sight. Samuel slowly started to advance on him, talking all the while, teasing him with the promise of telling him what he'd done on his summer vacation and maintaining Sam wouldn't shoot him because he'd gotten his soul back and wouldn't hurt his family. Sam warned him to stop and to put down his gun, but Samuel pushed slowly and steadily forward, still talking - and Sam shot him in the head. Dean, Bobby, and Rufus ran up, relieved to find Sam okay, but upon seeing Samuel dead on the ground, they had to wonder if he was still himself. Sam carefully put down his gun as ordered, saying it was in Samuel, but he couldn't say whether anything had crawled out of Samuel's ear after he'd fallen. To be safe, Rufus handcuffed him with a plastic zip strip, and they took Samuel's body back to the break room. Swabbing his ears didn't produce any of the telltale goo, and Sam was sickened to think Samuel might not have been hosting the monster when Sam killed him. Learning that Bobby had a cranial saw in the trunk of his car, Rufus advocated opening Samuel's skull to look for the worm. Determined that none of them be left alone, so all of them would constantly be on the lookout for a worm infiltration, Rufus and Bobby went to get tools from Bobby's car and see about restoring power and lights to the cannery, while Sam watched Samuel and Dean watched Sam.
Seeing Sam plainly troubled about possibly having killed a man, not a monster, Dean tried to assure him he'd done the right thing, but also chose to keep the cuffs on until after they'd autopsied Samuel. Sam understood Dean's intent, but said that even though what little he could remember about Samuel wasn't good, and even though he knew about Samuel betraying them to Crowley from what Dean had told him, he couldn't help but wonder what their Mom would say. Dean offered that he believed she'd have said that just because you're blood doesn't mean you're family; that you have to earn that.
The lights and power came up just before Rufus and Bobby walked in with the bag of tools, and Bobby, observing they were about to crack open the boys' grandfather's skull, told the brothers to take a breather and leave the room. Reluctant, the brothers stepped out, looking back through the glass tops of the double doors before walking a little way down the hall to wait. In the room, discovering that Bobby's cranial saw sported bare wires sticking through a lot of missing insulation, Rufus teased him about dumpster-diving for equipment while Bobby shrugged that it still worked. As Rufus plugged in the saw and set up the equipment, Bobby tried awkwardly to return to the subject of Omaha, despite Rufus saying dismissively they'd already had that conversation. Bobby insisted on continuing, saying he'd never said he was sorry, and he humbly apologized for having caused the loss of a woman Rufus had loved. Refusing to listen and losing all pretense of good humor, Rufus cut him off cold, saying Bobby could talk all he wanted, but Rufus would never forgive him, and he warned Bobby to change the subject.
Rufus applied the saw to Samuel's forehead, but to their shock, the man's eyes opened and he swung off the table, throwing both Rufus and Bobby backward. Smashing a table, he shoved a table leg through the handles of the double doors to bar them even as the brothers ran toward the fight. Turning back to the older hunters, he slammed Rufus into the bank of lockers hard enough to knock him out. As Dean freed Sam's wrists and the brothers assaulted the barred doors, Bobby and Samuel grappled, with Samuel lurching up backward against the pillar where the cranial saw was plugged into the wall. Hitting the exposed wires, Samuel was electrocuted, and the shock flung Bobby away from him to land stunned against another pillar. As the boys watched Samuel's body jerking from the electrical charge, they saw gooey liquid oozing from his nose and ears, and then a worm skittered out of his ear and swiftly down his body, out of sight on the ground. The brothers smashed through the doors and ran to check Rufus and Bobby, both of whom woke up a little disoriented. Not knowing where the worm had gone, they all checked their ears, coming up goo-less, but Dean thought the thing might have figured out how not to leave a trail. Bobby observed they knew what tickled it now - it clearly hadn't liked the electrical charge - and Sam stripped the insulation from another cord to create a tester. Dean volunteered to be shocked first, and then Sam shocked himself before Dean could take the cord away from him. Dean approached Rufus, who demurred at first, saying he had a pacemaker - news that came as a surprise to Bobby - but he accepted being shocked and came through it just fine. Taking the cord from Dean, Rufus turned to Bobby, who said the thing wasn't in him so he could just go ahead - but Bobby kept backing away from the wire. When Rufus challenged him as the monster, Bobby stabbed him in the heart with the dagger he'd been hiding behind his back. Sam caught Rufus and lowered him to the floor, and Dean moved to block the doors to prevent Bobby's escape. Sam feinted against the dagger and grabbed Bobby, and Dean knocked him unconscious.
Worm-possessed Bobby woke duct-taped to a chair, and Dean touched the exposed wire to the back of his neck, bringing goo oozing from Bobby's nose, warning that they'd sealed off the room so the worm couldn't escape. Speaking in a voice totally unlike Bobby's, the worm said it was comfortable where it was, and taunted them with being unable to kill it without also killing someone they loved. The worm volunteered it had nothing to hide and had actually been waiting for them to ask it questions. It said they didn't have a name for it yet, because it was new, something cooked up specially by Eve. It described Eve as the mother of all monsters and the end of all humans, saying by the time she was done there would be more creatures than humans, and humans would be kept in pens with their young served up like veal. The worm said it hadn't been created to mess with a couple of cannery workers, but had simply used them to lead the hunters to it, because it had a message for them from Eve: she was back, she was pissed, and they were all going to die; it would be nothing but pain for them from here on in. Angry, Dean's response was to hold the wire to Bobby's neck again, shocking him to the point where Sam protested and more goo trickled from his nose and ears. The worm in Bobby gloated that they couldn't kill it without killing Bobby too, and Dean said they would just have to do what Bobby would want. In perfect if reluctant accord, Sam wrapped duct tape over Bobby's mouth and ears and part of his nostrils, leaving him room to breathe but not enough room to allow the worm to escape. Telling Bobby to hang on, Dean applied the wire again, and held it in place this time until Sam had to turn away, unable to watch, and black goo streamed out of Bobby's nose and ears. When Dean removed the wire, Bobby simply slumped. Sam pried the tape away from his face, realizing Bobby wasn't breathing, and the worm, well cooked, oozed out of Bobby's ear to flop dead on the floor.
The brothers stood at the foot of a grave in a Jewish cemetery, joined after a moment by Bobby. When Dean said he hadn't taken Rufus for a religious man, Bobby reminisced about him definitely not keeping kosher, but using the “can't work on the Sabbath” card whenever he could to get out of burying a body. As they all remembered Rufus, Bobby volunteered that in the beginning, he'd just been a job: Rufus was the hunter who turned up to help when Bobby's wife had been possessed. He saved Bobby's life, exorcised the demon, and then proceeded to save Bobby from being locked up for murder. He told the brothers that he and Rufus had teamed up and worked together for years just like the Winchesters. When Sam asked what had happened o separate them, Bobby said it was Omaha, and his fault, and Rufus had never been able to let it go. Dean said Rufus had been wrong, and when Bobby objected that Dean didn't even know what he'd done, Dean said it didn't matter. He said in the end, they'd been family, and their lives were too short to be wasted in hand-wringing over mistakes. He told Bobby and Sam that when his guts got ripped out, they should know they were all good, blanket apologies all around for whatever shit any of them had pulled. Sam hesitantly offered that some of them had pulled a lot of shit, but Dean held steadfast, saying it was a clean slate. After a moment, Sam agreed. Bobby pulled a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue out of a bag and poured some on the grave. As the brothers turned and left, Bobby drank a toast to Rufus from the bottle, his eyes thoughtful and sad.
Continue to Part 2: Commentary and Meta Analysis, and Production Notes
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Sorry this took so long to post: real life really got in the way! The next couple of weeks will also be busy, but the worst of it should be out of the way in time for the next new episode!