Previously: Sam and Dean’s childhood home was haunted, and they had lots of feelings about their parents.
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Asylum
Sara: After some previouslies, we start at the Roosevelt Asylum in Rockford, Illinois, which sounds like exactly the place I never want to be. (The asylum part, not the Illinois part.) The creepy cameraman shows some anonymous hands (A?!) cutting through a chain on the door and sneaking in.
Cut to outside, and two cops are pulling up outside of the asylum. One of the cops says that they can’t seem to keep kids out of this place and the other cop asks what it is. Exposity Cop is like, “Oh, I forgot you’re new in town and don’t know the plot of this episode, so let me fill you and the viewers in real quick about the legend of this asylum.” Supposedly the asylum is haunted with the ghosts of the patients, and if you spend the night, they’ll drive you insane. That’s cool and all, but I’m pretty sure the majority of what’s happening in that place (if it’s anything like my small Louisiana town) is lots of pot smoking and sex.
Kirsti: WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU VOLUNTARILY GO INTO A HAUNTED, ABANDONED ASYLUM??? There’s an old asylum not far from my house that’s been turned into luxury apartments. It’s a gorgeous building, but you could not pay me to live there, because BAD JUJU YO.
Sara: Oh, I’m with you, girl. But I do remember teenagers being crazy about the haunted places out in the middle of giant fields. IDIOTS.
The cops enter the asylum, flashlights up, announcing that cops are there. They hear some glass breaking and see the cut chain and head in further. Exposity Cop seems kind of impressed that some teenagers brought bolt cutters with them. Go big or go home, I guess. The cops split up, because they must know how much I love my THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS tag here on Supernatural.
Exposity Cop finds the kids sitting around in an empty room and tells them it’s time to go, while New In Town Cop’s flashlight goes off which always signifies that you are about to be dead. This is why I invest in lots of batteries. (K: When you’ve been around the Supernatural-verse as long as I have, you know that batteries won’t help.) A door near him creaks open, and we cut to outside where the stupid teenagers are driving off and Exposity Cop is trying to get a hold of New In Town Cop over the walkie. He turns around and suddenly New In Town Cop is right behind him, looking all creepy and shit. The villains in Supernatural all have this particular look on their faces, and it’s pretty obvious. I’m pretty sure I could be a demon hunter, too, if all the demons make that same guilty face.
The cops get back in the car, and New In Town cop rubs his finger across his nose… to smell it? IDK. I only mentioned it because it was really fucking weird.
K: To deal with the trickle of blood that comes out of his nose. Which clearly wasn’t particularly obvious…
Sara: New In Town Cop comes home from work and starts emptying his pockets on his dresser, as his wife sits in bed and asks if he’s still mad at her. When he doesn’t respond (because he’s being mega creepy), she asks why he’s not talking to her because she said she was soory (spot the Canadian!) about before. You should always make up with family members before leaving the house. You never know when they’re going to leave and get possessed and that will be the last conversation you had, y’know?
New In Town Cop quickly picks his gun off the dresser, turns around, and we cut to an outside shot as he shoots twice. Well. Aw. That was kind of sad.
The Hardy Boys and the Case of the Missing Daddy. Dean and Sam are making calls and digging through The Filofax of Shadows for clues as to where Daddy Winchester is hiding. Sam worries aloud that he might be dead, but Dean gets very defensive at that and says he’s wrong.
Just then, Dean gets a text message from an unavailable number with coordinates, presumably from the negligent parent they were just discussing. This whole plot better pay off, y’all, because right now, it’s super dumb that he can text them and leave voicemails and shit but can’t, like, let them know he’s alive and stuff.
K: I just assumed it was a text from A. But yeah, John Winchester is the asshole parent to end all asshole parents.
Sara: The boys look the coordinates up, and it’s for Rockford, Illinois. After about ten seconds of Interneting, Dean finds the news article about the cop who came home from work, killed his wife, and then shot himself. The article also says that he had just been at the Roosevelt Asylum, because the journalist wanted to make this investigation a little easier for the boys. Dean recognizes the name of the asylum because there was an article about it in the Filofax of Shadows. The article mentioned two other deaths that happened there a long time ago.
Sam is not all about this plan once he realizes that Daddy Winchester is sending them on a job. He’s not exactly super trusting of the man who has been a terrible neglectful father for the entirety of this show (K: LEGIT), but Dean is asking no questions. If Dad wants them there, he’ll go, no questions asked. Just another example of how different these boys are, and how vulnerable Dean really is. There’s obviously nothing more important to him than family, which is probably making all of our lady parts pretty happy.
Bar of Sadness. Exposity Cop is drinking his sorrows away when Dean shows up to pretend to be a badgery journalist from the Chicago Tribune, asking rude questions about Exposity’s former partner. Exposity doesn’t want to talk about it and tries to tell Dean this, but Dean keeps pushing until Sam walks up and shoves him, yelling that he needs to learn to show a little respect. Dean sulks off and their Good Cop, Bad Cop routine worked perfectly because Exposity agrees to having a drink with Sam.
Cut to outside the bar a little while later, when Sam meets back up with Dean . After Dean complains about Sam shoving him a little harder than necessary and Sam claims “method acting,” Sam shares what he found out: New In Town Cop was a great guy, a good cop, and had a mostly happy marriage where they were considering having children. Dean asks if the cop shared anything about the asylum, and Sam confirms that he did. Instead of getting all exposity on us, we cut to a scene of the boys sneaking into the Roosevelt Asylum in the dawn light.
K: And we all get to play a game of “Remember how Jensen Ackles was a cheerleader in high school?”, which explains why he can do an insane flip over the top of the fence. I had to climb a fence like that once to get onto the pitch for a field hockey game in high school. It took me 10 minutes and I got a 3 inch long gash down the back of my thigh…
Sara: Oh my god, you have just made my life with this news about Jensen Ackles being a cheerleader in high school. That is amazing.
Anyways, Sam says that the cops found the kids in the South Wing, and Dean consults his script dad’s journal to let us know that the South Wing is specifically mentioned in the article Daddy Winchester had. Apparently, three teenagers broke into the South Wing, but only one survived. The survivor claims that his friend went crazy inside and started lighting up the place. The boys wonder why there was only this one case where someone died inside, but then they realize that the South Wing has been chained closed for years (until the teenagers brought their handy bolt cutters). They suppose the chains are there to keep people out…. or, let’s say it all together now, to keep something in. We all knew that line was coming, right? Cheesetastic!
Dean picks on Sam and calls him Haley Joel, saying he should let him know if he sees any dead people. “But seriously,” he says, “ghosts are attracted to that whole ESP thing you’ve got going on.” Sam insists that it isn’t ESP, it’s just weird vibes and quickly changes the subject to what the ghost reader is telling him. Dean replies that there’s no activity yet, and changes the subject back to who’s the hottest psychic: Patricia Arquette, Jennifer Love Hewitt, or Sam. This conversation is so great.
K: Seriously. I love Dean so much. And the whole conversation is such an older sibling thing to do.
Sara: Also, I think we can all agree on who the hottest psychic is, amiright?
The boys make it to a creepy room with lots of medical instruments, and it’s icky. “Electro shock, lobotomies, they did some twisted stuff to these people.” The boys wonder if the ghosts of the patients are haunting people or if it’s like an Amityville Horror situation. I have to admit that I’ve never seen that movie, because, as I’ve admitted before, I am the biggest chicken shit you will ever meet. This TV show is basically my threshold for scary things. (K: Right there with you.)
Sam wants to talk about the elephant in the room, not knowing wtf is going on with Daddy Winchester. Uh, yeah, show, I’d really like to know, too. Dean thinks they should just do what their dad wants without questioning it, but Sam is smarter than that and thinks it’s dumb. He’s worried that Daddy Winchester might even be in trouble and need help. THIS IS WHY YOU DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE AND LIE TO YOUR KIDS, ASSHOLE. Dean says that he gave them an order. “So we gotta always follow Dad’s orders?” “Of course we do.” Sam gives Dean a look like, Come on, man, you know that’s dumb. But Dean is pretty set in his feelings on the subject and goes back to investigating.
K: I stop to have a lot of feels because Dean was raised to be a good little soldier who just followed orders without thinking.
Sara: Dean walks two paces to the right and finds a handy little clue left by the prop department right out in the open. The chief of staff was Sanford Ellicott, M.D., so they have their first lead.
Sam makes an appointment with Dr. James Ellicott, the son of Sanford Ellicott. He brings up Dr. Ellicott’s father and the “incidents” in the South Wing not so subtly, claiming he’s a history buff. Dr. Ellicott is obviously not in the mood to talk about his father, so he asks Sam how he is. Sam replies that he’s great; he just went on a road trip with his brother, where they met a lot of interesting people and did a lot of interesting things. He interrupts to ask again about what exactly happened in the South Wing, and Dr. Ellicott says that if he’s a history buff, he knows all about the riots that happened in the South Wing. LOL. I just love the way this show delivers information.
Dr. Ellicott wants Sam to cut the bullshit (a la Oprah to Lindsay Lohan), because he’s avoiding the subject. If Sam shares his feelings about his brother and their road trip, the doctor will give him the information about the riot. Sam sits back and considers it.
K: Too bad the boys won’t be in town for longer than this one episode, because they both need therapy like whoa.
Sara: We cut to outside the offices where Dean is waiting when Sam comes out. He asks what Sam was doing in there for so long, and he replies that has just getting information about the asylum. According to Dr. Ellicott, the Roosevelt Asylum used to house the super crazies, the psychotics and the criminally insane. One night, they all rioted, attacking the staff and each other. There were a lot of deaths on both sides, and it was pretty gory. Some of the bodies weren’t even discovered, including the body of Dr. Daddy Ellicott, which means the patients probably stuffed his body somewhere hidden. The boys decide to check out the hospital again later that night because they are much, much braver than me.
Little Asylum of Horrors. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, are sneaking around in the asylum late at night. They find the torture room and describe it as “creepy, yet terrifying”. The girl says they were supposed to be going to a movie and this is a shit version of a date. HEAR, HEAR. (K: YUP.) They find a creepy, terrifying door to a different room and Gavin tells his girlfriend to just wait there. Yeah, no. I’d rather go in the creepy room with you than wait in the equally as creepy room by myself. Duh.
Gavin is looking around the pitch black room when his flashlight goes out, DUN DUN DUN. He turns around and sees his girlfriend in the shadows. She comes up and starts making out with him, and they’re both really feeling it when his girlfriend’s voice calls out from back in the other room AND I HAVE A MOTHER FUCKING HEART ATTACK OMG. I AM DYING. DEAD. I think this is the creepiest thing that has happened so far on the show. Yick.
K: Making out with the ghost of a psycho is pretty far up there as far as trauma goes. Maybe the Winchesters can point Gavin in the direction of Ellicott Jr. the therapist.
Sara: After the Not Commercial Break, Dean and Sam have made it to the asylum and are searching for spirits. The plan is to find the hidden bodies (or bones?) and burn them. As they’re walking down the hall, the creepy cameraman shows us a shadow running past behind them and then a terrifying shot of a ghosty mental patient writhing on the floor under a cot.
Sam is walking around the rooms with a flashlight and video camera to see if he can candid camera any ghosts, when he hears a noise. He turns to look in that direction and when he turns around, we see a shot of a mental patient with something stuck in her eye in the camera view. WTF. Dean shotgun salts the ghost, and she disappears. As they continue through the asylum, Sam wonders why the spirit didn’t try to hurt him. Dean DGAF because a spirit’s a spirit.
The boys see a figure huddled in the corner and sneak up on it only to find Gavin’s girlfriend, Katherine, hiding. She tells them that she heard Gavin scream and saw some creepy shit and hid. They tell her to go outside and wait, but she insists that she needs to make sure Gavin is okay. Hm. She didn’t seem all that inclined to make sure he was safe a few minutes ago. Then again, I’d probably feel safer with two hot boys beside me, too. They wander around the asylum some more, and Dean asks Katherine if she’s seen horror movies before.
Back with Dean and Katherine, the light goes out so Dean pulls out a lighter. Katherine tells him he’s hurting her arm, and he’s like, “Huh?” which causes both of them to realize that SOMEONE ELSE IS HOLDING HER ARM THAT ISN’T DEAN AND OMFG THIS EPISODE IS GOING TO KILL ME. LEGIT TRAUMA. (K: I KNEW that episode of Doctor Who from last season – the one with Dougray Scott – reminded me of something!) She’s dragged into another room with a solid door, and the door slams and locks behind her.
Katherine is beating on the door from the inside, as Dean tries to pry it open with a crowbar from the outside. There are shadowy shapes behind her, and I’m trying really hard not to have a heart attack right now, y’all. She turns around and sees a fucked up looking spirit right over her shoulder. Sam runs up in time to yell at Katherine that she needs to face the spirit because it doesn’t want to hurt her and this is the only way. Both Katherine and Dean are like LOL to this theory, but she doesn’t have many other choices, so she does it.
It’s quiet inside the room now, and the boys all stand outside, probably hoping that she’s just making out with the spirit and not getting killed by it. Those frisky crazy spirits! The door swings open, and Katherine walks out slowly and creepily, telling them that the spirit whispered “137” in her ear. Well that’s not very romantic. The boys assume the spirit is talking about a Room 137 and Dean sends Sam off with the teenagers to take them back outside. On the way out, Katherine asks how you get into this line of business anyways, and Sam responds that he had a crappy guidance counselor. Hee.
K: Crappy parent is more like it, but sure, Sam, blame it on the guidance counsellor.
Sara: They make it to the exit, but all the doors and locked and sealed now, so they’re stuck. Gavin is all about GTFO of there, and some might say he’s being a baby, but let’s remember that he just accidentally made out with a dead chick, so. Sam doesn’t think it’s the mental patients keeping them locked in the asylum, but something else. How the hell did he come to that conclusion? Are we getting the same information, or is his ESP super powerful?
K: Oh, look, It’s our old friend, contrivance!!
Sara: Back in the deepest pits of the asylum, Dean is flipping through some notebooks with creepy drawings and crazy handwriting. Apparently the notebook belonged to Dr. Ellicott. Back in the other part of the asylum, Sam gets a call from Dean asking him to meet him in the basement. Before he leaves, he asks if either of them can handle a shotgun. Gavin laughs and says no they can’t, but Katherine interrupts him, like, “Uh, my dad hunts. Fuck yeah, I can shoot a shotgun.” It’s about time we have a badass girl in these parts.
Sam opens the heavy door the boiler room downstairs and heads inside to see if he can find Dean. It would be really convenient if there was a door stopper nearby, with the ways these doors are always flying closed. (K: SRSLY.) His flashlight goes out as he’s looking around, and another door squeaks open, which is the surest way to get me to head in the complete opposite direction.
As he checks out a corner of the room that is sealed off with those hospital curtains, he hears a noise and turns around to run into a VERY CREEPY DEAD DOCTOR GUY. Dr. Dead grabs his face and says not to worry, that he’ll fix him right up. There’s some electric something happening where his hands are touching his face, and yep, I think I’d take the dead girl who wants to make out with me over this.
After the Not Commercial Break, Katherine tells Gavin that if they make it out alive, they are so breaking up. I love her. (K: Me too. Although I’m not sure ANYONE would stay with a guy who dragged them to a haunted asylum and locked in a room with a ghost…) They hear a noise, and Katherine shoots through the doorway only to be yelled at by Dean who was coming to check on Sam. The kids tell him that Sam left a while ago to meet him in the basement, and Dean immediately realizes that there’s an impersonator about. AGAIN? (K: ALWAYS.) He tells the kids to watch out for themselves… and for him, before leaving to find Sam.
As Dean is walking around yelling out for Sam, he almost runs right into him, and he’s got that creepy face on, the one that I always notice and the reason I would be such a good Supernatural Detective. Dean fills him in on the fake call, but Sam already knows about it. Dean has also figured out that the fake call came from the spirit of Dr. Ellicott, who was a piece of shit person. He performed all kinds of terrible experiments on the patients. The doctor was working on a medication that caused extreme rage, hoping that if the patients got all of their rage out, it would make them better. That…. is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. The patients raged out, obviously, and rioted.
K: Right, because turning mental patients into The Incredible Hulk is an AWESOME plan and absolutely nothing would ever go wrong.
Sara: Dean thinks that the spirit of Dr. Ellicott is what’s making the people who are possessed really ragey, like the teenager who went crazy and New In Town cop. Dean tells Sam he has an idea of where the body is, so they need to find it and burn it. The doctor had a creepy room downstairs where he would perform the experiments, and he has a feeling the patients would have dragged him down and done a little experiment performing of their own. Possessed!Sam does not look happy. Sam tries to tell Dean that he looked everywhere already and didn’t find a hidden room.
K: Too bad if your sinuses are easily effected by pressure changes!
Sara: Sam points the shotgun at Dean and tells him that he’s tired of always taking orders from him. Dean snarks that the gun is full of rock salt, so it’s not like he’s going to kill him.
After the Not Commercial Break, Sam stands over Dean and Dean tells him that they just have to find the doctor’s body and burn it, and all of this can be over and Sam can be himself again. Sam says that he is himself, he’s just being honest for once. He’s angry that they’re still searching for their dad, when he obviously doesn’t give a shit about them (fair) and he’s different than Dean because he has a mind of his own and doesn’t just take orders. Well, he kind of does just take orders from Dean, though.
Dean says that if he wants to really kill him, he’ll have to use a real gun instead of the stupid salt gun. He hands Sam the pistol and asks him if he really hates him that much, if he could really kill him. That is one hell of a bluff, Dean.
K: And this is why I hate the “Dean’s the dumb jock” thing that floats around the fandom. Because that is one *hell* of a plan to come up with on the fly.
Sara: As Dean is walking around looking for the body, he finds a cabinet with hair sticking out of it. When he opens it, he finds the doctor’s body stuffed inside. Yuck. You’d think that smell would be pretty… pungent. (K: I think he’s basically mummified, which tends to not come with stinkiness.) He starts pouring lighter fluid on the body, but is interrupted when Dr. Ellicott’s ghost grabs his face and starts doing his electro magnet shit. Luckily, Dean reaches his bag and pulls out his lighter in time to throw it on the body. The spirit crumbles to the floor, and Dean looks grossed out.
Sam wakes up and Dean asks if he’s going to try to kill him. “No.” “Good. Because that would be awkward.”
Outside of the asylum, the boys send the teenagers off to finish their traumatized lives. After they drive off, Sam apologizes for what happened in there and Dean says it’s no big deal. Sam still seems like he wants to discuss it, but Dean isn’t in the mood for sharing and caring right now.
Back at the Motel of the Week, the boys are asleep in their beds when Dean’s phone won’t stop ringing. Sam picks it up, sits up abruptly and says, “Dad?”
Hey, is this the first episode that doesn’t end with the boys getting in a car and driving away to rock music? (K: Technically they didn’t at the end of the pilot, but that doesn’t really count because PILOT.) I LOVE this episode. Love. It scared the shit out of me, and I might have cried out a few times, but man, this was a fun one. There wasn’t quite as much silliness in this one, but it was so creepy that it made up for it. I also really like how the show finds ways to make the boys talk about their issues with the supernatural plot. It’s a fun way to keep them from looking too ooey gooey feeeeeelings all the time. I’m so glad I got this creepy episode.
K: You think this one was creepy? Just wait until next time…
Next time: Daddy Winchester is back, but we’ll probably still hate him. Find out in S01 E11, Scarecrow.
I'm a 30-something with three kids who spends an embarrassing amount of time watching teen television dramas. There's a whole lot of Internet out there, and I plan on reading all of it before I die.
I'm a 30-something librarian and I still live with my parents because I'm super broke. Leader of Team Heartless Cow. I have an inexplicable love for 90s television, eat too much chocolate, and read more than is good for me.
