“Supernatural” Recap: “The Fire Thief Fights Back”

So… this week’s episode, while nowhere near as bad as last week’s *shudders*, was just another bit of filler. Except for that last part. The Last part *shudders (but of a different kind)*

Now, since we have established that…. We open with a driver drinking and driving on a dark road leading to Great Falls, Mt.

The driver runs into a poor schmuck walking along side of the road. He gets down to check, but the guy is pretty dead. Scared, the driver runs off, making it an open-and-shut hit and run.

Well… that’s it. Go home. The case is closed. Or is it?

By next morning, the dead guy is still D-E-A-D, and even has an eagle munching on his liver (important later), when a Montana State Trooper finds the half-frozen body. He checks for the vitals – nil – and goes back to call the dispatch to retrieve the body, when the man in question thaws, gets up and walks away.

The trooper follows the footprints to the edge of the woods, but the “zombie” is gone.

Well… okay, not that closed.

Meanwhile, at MOL-HQ, Sam gets a drink of water when he notices something in his mouth. He spits the water back into the glass and it comes out bloody. Then he spits more blood into the wash basin. He hurriedly flushes it off…

I don’t like where this is going. I really really don’t.

Dean comes and asks him about it, and Sam is all “I’m fine. Dinner?”

I don’t like this. Sam is dying… and he is lying to Dean about it.

Dean appears unconvinced, but lets it go. Instead, he inquires about Kevin and Cas, but they’ve got zip on either front. So, Sam shows him the news article about a “zombie” in Montana to kill boredom in the meantime.

Since, it’s as good as it’s gonna get, the boys up there baggage and roll…

The trooper who found the man seems convinced that they are dealing with a rogue Zombie (with a capital Z).

The Winchesters try to talk sense into him, when suddenly the trooper pings a coroner’s report from Livingston, about a man mauled to death by a bear. The trooper IDs him as the same man that walked away.

Now there is nothing stopping the man from believing it’s a Zombie Apocalypse Breakout, and he is more than ready to go Ash Williams on them, but the FBI agents somehow manage to convince him to sit tight and run interference. If it goes the Dawn of the Dead way, he will be the first person they call. The trooper acquiesces, but not without a suggestion, “aim for the head.”

Livingston, Mt. The boys find their John Doe dead as a doornail. Not surprisingly, there was no ID on the body and his fingerprints are zip… and, as Dean checks discreetly, is not a zombie or a vampire. Sam looks over the body to find his liver eaten by a bird or something.

The boys leave the room, with the body still on the OT, and start running a gamut of possible normal explanations, when the man’s wounds suddenly heal. He sits up in semi-panic, then makes a run for it.

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you see it, he’s not fast enough and soon finds himself pinned on the stretcher under Dean, while Sam quickly closes the blinds.

It’s not like that! Get your heads out of the gutter, people!!

Anyways… the man has no idea who or what he is, he just knows that he dies a lot and is tired of it all and just wants it to end. When quizzed further, he informs them that he has been dying once a day for as long as he can remember.

Well, Sam and Dean can sympathize with that. No, seriously.

Unfortunately, since there are no more crazy Archangels giving people their just desserts, the boys haul the poor bastard back to their motel room for a series of tests.

After the FBI sanctioned standard tests – y’know silver knife, holy water – the man Shane tells them that while he has been dying everyday for as long he can remember, his memory only goes back a few years.

“So what, you have amnesia?” Dean asks disbelievingly.

Ignoring the obvious quip, the man further elaborates his story. He tells them that his name isn’t Shane. He was given the name, because they had to call him something. Furthermore, he was rescued from an avalanche in Europe a few years back. He doesn’t remember anything before that.

And when he found out about his condition, he ran away and started living like a hermit nomad. That is… until the hit-and-run brought him back on the radar.

Shane excuses himself and the Winchesters once again rack their brains over the problem and come to the conclusion, that maybe for once they’ve ensnared a victim, probably of some odd curse…

Or maybe he managed to piss off some crazy deity.

Later that night, Shane is sleeping when a regular Lara Croft enters the room.

She almost lovingly caresses his face, but when he says he doesn’t know her – or rather doesn’t remember her – she goes all ninja assassin on him.

Shane fights like Jason Bourne giving as good as he gets, and just she is about to overpower him, Sir Dean the Bow-legged Knight in Leather Jacket™ swoops in with his loyal sidekick, Sam the Sasquatch™. But she mojo-throws him and Sam around.

Finally, Shane does manage to overpower her, but instead of ganking her with her own knife, he tries to interrogate her, only to get a cryptic “Now? I’m your worst enemy” before she vanishes along with her knife.

Now that the immediate threat is over, Dean is pretty impressed with their victim’s Kung-Fu skills. The man of course has no idea how he did it, and in the midst of talking suddenly suffers from a heart attack… and dies.

The next day, the hunters are still raking their brains out about their problem. “So…” Sam wonders “what do we know of that has Jason Bourne fighting skills, dies a lot and has history with violent women?”

“You?” Dean deadpans.

Just then there’s a knock on the door. Dean opens the door to find a harried woman and young boy standing outside.

The woman, Hayley, is looking for Shane – or rather, she came to collect Shane’s corpse – and was told that the FBI agents were the last ones to see it. And the child with her is their son, Oliver.

The woman tells them she found Shane when, mountain climbing somewhere in Europe, she and her friends got caught in an avalanche. They more or less dragged each other downhill, and at first she dismissed his dying, as falling deeply unconscious due to shock or trauma.

But when they finally came back home, they realized it was something more and decided to spend the night together… and he had a heart attack while doing it. Awk-ward.

Anyways… She called 911 and he was declared Dead on Arrival. She was called to ID him, but by the time she reached the morgue, he had popped back up. Alive. She freaked out and ran… and rest as they say is history.

She tells them that she hired an investigator to look for him, but his trail ran cold… until the “zombie” article in the paper ran his mug-shot, and she came to find him.

“So what made you look again?” Sam asks, but before she can answer, Shane comes out. The family reunion is teary-eyed, but uneventful.

Damn! That look of longing of Dean’s face as he watches over that happy family has my heart breaking in all the right ways.

Eventually, after a few google searches and lucky intuitive but educated guesses, Sam determines that Shane is a Titan (“more like a proto-God”) – Prometheus ­to be precise – who was cursed by Zeus to have his liver munched on by an eagle – if I ‘member my lore correctly, it was Zeus’ personal pet, I think – and relive death everyday, for stealing the Flames of Olympia for humankind.

And the best he can tell about Xena wannabe’s identity is that she’s Artemis, the Hunter Goddess and Zeus’ daughter, the only one known to carry around weapons that can kill immortals.

“Well… we’ve never battled a God curse before,” Dean muses. “Hope we can break it.”

Shane takes the news about himself relatively calmly, though his first instinct is to run as far away from his family as possible.

By the time Sam and Dean convince him otherwise, Hayley comes in carrying a bleeding… and dying…Oliver inside. It seems the kid has inherited his father’s legacy.

Oh, Hell!

Since they have no other choice, the brothers haul the family back to MOL-HQ.

Hayley informs that the curse activated when the kid turned seven – the age when ancient Greeks attained adulthood.

Convincing Hayley about the lore takes a while… Her boyfriend/baby-daddy is a Greek God who’s cursed to die everyday by Zeus… Zeus!… and has Zeus’ assassin/ daughter out for his blood.

By the time she wraps her head around that info, Dean lays out their next course of action. “Usually, we summon the bastard, work him over till he gives in and/or gank him and hope the curse dies with him.”

Ah, when you put it like that…

The hunters raid the MOL library, until Dean has a breakthrough, “Dragon penis.” Or rather, an ancient hunter Dracopoulos who tangled with Zeus back in the day… and MOL translated his journals.

I can’t believe how proud Dean is flaunting his “legacy”. He’s like child come Christmas morning.

Anyways… Dracopoulos trapped Zeus and tried to find a way to kill him, with the wood of a tree struck by lightening. And to summon Zeus they need a bone of a worshipper and frozen energy-by-Zeus’-hand.

The tree can’t be that hard to find and the pagan Greek google link shows the address of the nearest cemetery for the bone. The ditch, however, is Fulgurite – frozen energy by Zeus’ hand – or rather the bolt of lightning frozen in time, the same thing that they needed to summon Death last season.

So while Sam and Shane take care of the lesser ingredients, Dean volunteers himself and Hayley for B&E to get fulgurite.

Of course, his brilliant plan to Ocean’s Eleven fulgurite is shot down when Hayley points out that fulgurite is freely available in crystal stores all over, because new age people use it to make cheap jewelry.

Okay… I’m officially taking a break to laugh maniacally at the look Dean’s face.

Sam and Shane have a “Why are doing this? – Because it’s the right thing to do, after all that’s what you did” conversation that has no bearing on anything whatsoever.

In the car, on the way, Dean and Hayley have a similar conversation, with Dean reassuring her that he and Sam have dealt with a lot more on a lot less and come out on top. “You gotta remember, he’s not your friend. It’s about getting him to do what’s right.”

Summoning Zeus is simple enough. When Zeus realizes he is trapped and asks them to free him. Dean lays down the barter: lift the curse and we’ll let you go.

Zeus doesn’t care for bartering and tries to bait Prometheus, but he doesn’t rise to it. So, he agrees to free the curse if they let him go first. Dean won’t budge from his stance and Zeus isn’t exactly known for his compromising nature…

Until Zeus tries a different tact and goads Hayley into freeing him with promises of breaking the curse by appealing to a desperate mother’s heart. And the poor woman, not realizing how much of bastards the Gods can be if their egos are hurt, complies.

Zeus steps out of the broken trap and mojo-blasts his kidnappers, then turns to Hayley and the kid.

Sam and Dean stealthily try to attack Zeus but Artemis rushes in and pins them to the wall.

Zeus nice-talks Hayley about the child’s death. “Did Prometheus experience the death? Did he hurt?”

Poor Hayley, in the hopes that it will help her case, pleads “yes” on both counts. Unfortunately, it’s exactly what Zeus wants – for Prometheus to hurt.

When he turns on the kid even Artemis is uneasy, but Zeus orders her to dispose of the hunters.

Sam the Brainy Winchester tries to trash talk their way out of the problem. “Do you know who that is? That’s Artemis, our Goddess. The Goddess of Hunters. She is the one we pray to for courage when hunting the Gordoc or the Minotaur, but she’s not worship-worthy having lost a step an all…”

Angered Artemis pins to a wall, and starts protesting her stature among her followers… punishing them for disobeying her. Dean is incredulous, but Sam finally found a way to get under her skin.

He changes the tactics by theorizing loudly that Artemis is actually in love with Prometheus, which is why she never killed him before. After all, how difficult could it be for the Goddess of Hunters to track down an amnesiac man in the middle of Montana. But when he pinged on the news and couldn’t remember her, she had no choice but to try and finish the job.

It’s a touch and go, so Sam ups the ante by claiming that Prometheus is also in love with her, “he told us, you know.”

Artemis holds out, but ultimately “she’s just a girl, standing in front of a boy asking him to love her”.

Meanwhile, Zeus is beating the shit outta Prometheus. After more or less, sending Prometheus into traumatic shock, he turns on the kid…

When suddenly Artemis bursts in with her bow and arrow and threatens her dad to step down.

Of course, it does not go down well with Zeus, because Prometheus essentially thwarted his plans of World Domination, back in the day, when he gave fire to humans.

The negotiation/hostage situation does not go as planned, and Artemis shoots at her father, who pulls Prometheus in front of him as a human shield.

The damage is done and Prometheus is a dead man, but when Zeus gloats at him about it, Prometheus pushes the arrow further in to his body, until it comes out the other and stabs Zeus… effectively killing him.

Artemis is the first one to recover. She rushes to her father’s side and after confirming the death takes her weapon and dad’s body and leaves, ending the curse… but leaving Prometheus’ human body for his partner and son.

Life comes in full circle for Prometheus, when he finally lies to rest in the bed of fire, as the Winchesters salt and burn his corpse.

Hayley leaves with her curse-free son and the Winchesters leave for the MOL-HQ.

And now… The Last Part.

In the Impala on the way, Sam tries talking to Dean about his problem, and how he thinks he’s not going to come out as unscathed as he thought.

But Dean is having none of it – either ignoring or plain deflecting his concerns. After all, Sam promised him to live a long life full of prostrate exams and colonoscopies, and there’s no way Dean’s going to let him welch on that deal. “If you die, it’s gonna be because of something normal…”

“A heart attack?” Sam softly retorts… and that’s that. Sam lets go of the topic.

Back at MOL-HQ, Dean comes to his room, and thumps down on his bed… and prays to Castiel. “Listen, you know I’m not the type to pray, coz in my book it’s similar to beggin’. But it’s Sam so…”

Then Jensen Ackles displays some exquisite acting skills (yeah yeah I know), as Dean tows the fine line between begging and praying for Castiel to come through just once… once!… for Sam.

“He’s covering up pretty good, but I know he’s hurt. And this was supposed to be on me. So, for all we’ve been through, you keep a look out for my little brother, okay?”

And the way he looks around dejectedly for any signs… can someone’s heart break any more?

God! I hate that Naomi… I hate the guy who wrote that Last Part… I hate Carver and Edlund and everyone else for making me feel this way… and I hate myself for hating them for me feel this way…

—-

So… Prometheus and Greek mythos. And it seems now they have Artemis in their corner. Y’know, in the past few weeks it has started seemingly the boys are slowly but diligently building another family for themselves – Garth, Kevin, Charlie, The Witch and his familiar, now Artemis… I wonder if it’s gonna play when it comes to taking on Naomi.

Whaddya think? Tell us in the comments.

And since we have Cas and Meg next week, watch for out Part 3 of our Babysitter and Pizza Man franchise.