Childhood urban legends bite people in the ass. Sam and Dean meet the cutest little Anti-Christ to ever grace the screen. Castiel gets turned into an action figure. Supernatural fails to make any Good Omens references, despite the entire plot being indebted to it.

Babysitters have the worst luck on television. Take Amber in this week’s episode of Supernatural. She’s stuck watching a snot-nosed little brat named Jimmy, and she only exists to die a singularly unpleasant death that serves no purpose but to draw the attention of the brothers Winchester to this little town in the middle o’ nowhere. Sucks to be her, especially when it’s revealed she scratched her own brains out.

But never mind the poor unlamented babysitter; her employers certainly don’t. They sit on the very couch the discovered her (self) mutilated body as Sam questions them. I often wonder why Sam and Dean are never subjected to the constant skepticism Mulder encountered as an actual fictional FBI agent when he asked weird questions. While the snot-nosed little brat’s parents answer questions about cold spots, Dean wanders off to interrogate the little darling. Jimmy, it turns out, is feeling guilty about something. So Dean plays Bad Cop a bit and scares the kid into revealing that he put itching powder on Amber’s hairbrush. Sam scoffs at the notion that itching powder would cause her to scratch her brains out. Personally, I feel that it just goes to show that she should have known better than to start brushing her hair from the scalp down.

Before the boys can debate this too much, Sam’s phone goes off. It seems the coroner has been nice enough to give them a courtesy call to let them know there’s been another unusual death: random electrocution. Handily, it seems to have taken place in a hospital, but that’s of no comfort to the poor guilt-wrecked old geezer who reveals the cause of death: a joy buzzer.

The boys go back to the house they’re currently squatting in. Dean immediately suits up like some weird mutant cross between Doctor Horrible and Captain Hammer and zaps a ham with the joy buzzer, all in the name of SCIENCE! Or, you know, dinner. In just a matter of seconds, the ham is looking just a tad overdone. Sam is appalled. Dean, less picky, immediately digs in. The boys agree that the next step is to check out the town joke shop.

Sam and Dean interrogate the shop owner, who has some issues over the lack of business. Dean goes all Bad Cop again, and the sight of him very seriously saying, “So you’re taking revenge- with THIS!” and holding up the joy buzzer is a prime example of why I love this show, even when it sucks. The shop owner doesn’t see the humor, because Dean demonstrates to great effect the seriousness of the joybuzzer by savagely melting a plastic chicken in front of the hapless shopkeeper. The shopkeeper nearly has a heart attack. Sam shrewdly deducts that someone so fainthearted is not likely to be the culprit. Surely, they are the greatest detectives the world has ever seen.

Elsewhere in town, a little girl is unconvinced of the wisdom of trusting the tooth fairy, so she sneaks her lost tooth under her father’s pillow. As a consequence, when the evil biker fairy dentist shows up, the Dad’s the one to get all of his teeth yanked out. The boys find this all a tad suspicious, especially in conjunction with the kids who got ulcers from mixing pop-rocks and soda and the guy whose face “froze that way.” The boys quickly catch on to the fact that these are all the sorts of urban legends that kids believe. Sam does some research and discovers that all of these suspicious events took place within a three mile radius of a farmhouse. They go to check it out, although Dean needs a minute to shave his palm. Yes, they really went there. It’s saved from being as cringe worthy as it might have been by the total lack of shame it’s delivered with.

At the farmhouse, they disregard the car in the driveway, and knock only once before attempting to pick the lock. They should have waited a bit longer, for about a half second after they do, they discover a cute kid named Jesse, who is completely unimpressed by their FBI act. Dean quickly picks up on the fact that this kid believes in every urban legend with which the townspeople have been afflicted, and in a stroke of genius, convinces the kid that joy buzzers are harmless. This allows him to both test his theory and pull the greatest prank one sibling has ever pulled on another in the history of television- for no sooner has he done so than he wheels around and tags his brother with the buzzer. Sam is less than impressed, but I can say beyond a doubt that I’d have given anything to have elicited a similar reaction from my little sister back when I snuck a rubber python into her bed.

Sam and Dean wander off, and Sam looks into the kid’s background. He’s a pretty normal boy for all intents and purposes, and the most interesting thing about him was that he was adopted. The fact that the records were sealed doesn’t faze Sam at all; he’s also discovered the birth-mother’s name and address.

It turns out that she’s living the life of a paranoid recluse, and for good reason. When she first meets the boys, she immediately assumes they are demons and throws salt at them. Having ascertained that they aren’t, she spills her story: she was possessed with a demon, who then forced her to give birth to a demonic baby. The pain of labor apparently gave her the means to resist the demon; she exorcised the demon by eating a bunch of salt, and then immediately put the baby up for adoption.

Unsure what to do with this information, the boys apparently give Castiel a call. Castiel meets them at their room, and ominously declaims about how the boy is actually an anti-christ a.k.a. a ‘chambion’ (the offspring of succubi/incubi , for those who want to know,) and that they need to kill him ASAP, because he’s so powerful that he can rewrite reality, and could wipe out the angels with just one word. The boys are a bit hesistant to comply, so the angel decides to do it himself. But he can’t, and gets turned into an action figure for his troubles.

Sam and Dean run to the kid’s…or maybe Castiel’s….rescue, though they changed clothes first. Dean tries to spin the whole antichrist deal into something nice for the kid, telling him he’s a superhero and they are there to take him off to train to save the world….just like in the x-men!

In the meantime, the paranoid birth-mom was apparently not paranoid enough, because no sooner than she leaves her house than she gets jumped by the same demon as before. The demon’s been watching, hoping to find the kid. Apparently the demon was not smart enough to possess someone with access to the adoption records. Anyway, she busts in just in time to ruin Dean’s x-men spiel. She goes on about how everyone has been lying to him, and doesn’t he want to be evil? Well, apparently he doesn’t. I don’t really blame him, her thoughts about how to win kids over involve crushing childhood fantasies by telling them that Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy aren’t real. So Jesse tells the demon to sit down and shut up, and asks Sam to tell it like it is.

Sam doesn’t go with Dean’s “fight evil, be a hero, impress girls” view of the world, and instead talks about the importance of accepting the fact you’re a freak and will only get your loved ones killed, and also about deciding not to live up to your evil destiny. Yeah. There may have been a little projecting there. Even so, the demon had no chance against Sam’s patented Face of Sincerity, so the kid tells the demon to get lost. Dean, happy to no longer be pinned to a wall, is mightly impressed. He’s all for dragging Jesse off to Bobby’s (I’m sure Bobby’d be thrilled) to be trained to fight evil. Jesse is less than thrilled at this prospect, and wants to drag his family along, but the boys explain that this is a good way to get them murdered by demons. So Jesse goes upstairs to say goodbye to his still-angel-mojo’d parents, and decides to run off to Australia instead. Castiel appears and lets Sam and Dean know that the kid undid all the damage (but for the deaths). The episode ends with the guys feeling depressed about, you know, ruining some poor kid’s childhood, and me depressed that there’ll never be a spin-off featuring Bobby, kickass demon hunter, and Jesse, the cutest little anti-christ ever: Together, They Fight Crime.

All in all, this episode was like a good episode of Heroes (anyone remember those?): Fun, but filled with plot holes and other problems. For example:

  1. I’m forced to wonder why the offspring of a human and any random demon is so uberly powerful. Maybe they’re drawing inspiration from stories of Merlin.
  2. Which leads me to my second point: if it’s so easy to create an all-powerful half-demon, why haven’t they made a bunch of them?
  3. Why are the demons so stupid as to not look up the adoption records themselves? Why is the birth mother so stupid as not to have better researched anti-possession measures?
  4. After explaining why Jesse is dangerous, especially if he’s scared or angry, why does he try to kill him by attacking him in full view with a big honkin’ knife?

Feel free to disagree or add more examples in the comments.

N.B. With the winter hiatus coming up, I thought I’d ask if anyone had any suggestions for other shows to review and/or recap.