Supernatural : “Family Remains” (recap)

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

A man is partaking of his dinner in front of the boob tube when the lights suddenly do that time-honored “bad entity in the houuuse” flickering thing. TV dinners are rarely the height of culinary enjoyment……never mind when one messed-up ghoul girl shows up and wants a piece. Only screw the Swanson’s Hungry Man Fried Chicken Special - Ghoul Girl wants a piece of him.

Sam awakens in the car and sees Dean trolling for gigs in the paper. Sam suggests that Dean attempting to bury himself in work in an effort to forget all that brimstone and hellfire business isn’t gonna cut it. But Dean has already picked up the scent of the story of the unfortunate man we encountered at the episode’s outset…….

The brothers find the house and begin to case the joint. There’s a hole in the wall that has been patched up haphazardly, the ghost detecting gadget is going beserk, and there’s a fugly doll’s head in the closet – HGTV is going to have its work cut out for it with any makeover attempts on this particular venue. Alas, these resale value red flags haven’t swayed one particularly intrepid family, who have just now pulled up with a moving van.

Sam and Dean make like official building inspectors and tell the new homeowners that the place is riddled with asbestos and thus is unsafe to occupy. They redirect the family to a local motel and assure them that they’ll be cleaning up the hazard. The family buys their baloney….sort of.

Speaking of messy clean ups: the former housekeeper of the abode in question is soon describing to Sam and Dean how she found the previous owner’s body in a highly advanced state of disassembly. Bleccccch. Plus, this fellow’s daughter Rebecca had met with the business end of a noose in the attic. Dean asks if she noticed anything odd in the house when she cleaned it. (But really, what could be odder than finding the disassembled owner all over the room? It’s all relative…..) The housekeeper indicates that she did hear rustling in the walls from time to time. Sam wants to know where the mother and daughter were buried. Ah, but they weren’t. They were cremated.

Meanwhile, the new homeowners who were temporarily put off by Sam and Dean have Uncle Ted, a contractor type, who is more than capable of shooting holes in that whole asbestos cover story. They’re a little curious about who Sam and Dean really were, but are soon occupied with more pressing matters…….like the fact that the son Danny is soon playing catch with an unseen entity, daughter Kate is seeing things, and the word “GO” is scrawled, maniac-style, on the walls. But slapdash crayon décor doesn’t really stand out as being noteworthy in a household with young ones, and despite Danny’s protestation that “the girl in the wall” is responsible, the grown-ups aren’t buying his apparent prepubescent bullcrap. Maybe this is what the Girl in the Wall meant when she told him she hates grown-ups………………

Then comes the “whole urban legend come to life” bit when Karen lies in bed and feels the dog licking her hand. Which she thinks is gross. Until the dog actually walks into the room after the fact. That’s grosser. She screams, and when her parents come running, she talks nonsense about being all but violated by the pervy Ghoul Girl. Sam and Dean are soon pounding on the door with dire warnings about ghosts. Cue the flickering lights, and then the dog whimpering in the dark really sells it. Outside, “TOO LATE” is scrawled on the side of the van (also in red, though it’s not looking much like crayon), and it’s a fairly accurate summary of their situation, for all of the tires on every operable vehicle have been slashed, and their weapons commandeered.

When Kate screams and proclaims that she’s spotted the ghost in the woods, Dean heads them back into the house. Here’s where he lays down a trusty salt circle and explains that he and his brother are professionals - just more of the ghost hunting kind and not so much of the house inspecting sort. Giving that they’ve already been caught in one lie, the family isn’t sure the ghost hunting angle sounds more plausible.

Sam whips out photos of Rebecca and asks the family if they recognize her. The kids at this point are well acquainted with this hand-licking, blood-scrawling, wall-dwelling menace, and they ID Rebecca as the same. Sam and Dean aren’t totally clear on how she can be haunting the house if she was cremated, but perhaps there’s something else that is binding her spirit here.

Uncle Ted figures that since Sam and Dean can’t tell asbestos from house dust, the family ought to take this whole salt circle hooey with a grain of….well, you know…..until the door starts to open and Ghoul Girl walks into the room. Dean tells everyone to get inside the salt circle and remain calm, because ghosts can’t penetrate a salt circle. Ghoul Girl penetrates the salt circle, so remaining calm seems a moot point. Dean tells the family to run – this time, they find his warnings plausible – as he goes mano a mano with the sassy specter. Sam enters and gets up in Ghoul Girl’s business with a flashlight, which causes her to flee.

Since ghosts aren’t able to cross a salt line, Sam and Dean rightly assume that maybe she’s just a regular human, albeit a poorly groomed one with anger management issues. What was with that whole suicide story, anyway? At this point, however, the family is willing to take Sam and Dean at their word, and they want to highlight it out of there. They’ll have to do it without son Danny, alas, because he’s nowhere to be found.

Sam stays behind to protect the rest of the family in the shed, while Dean and Ted go to look for Danny. As Danny had referred to the creepy kid as the Girl in the Walls, that seems as good a place as any to start looking. They open one up, see blood, and get a whiff of a most foul stench. As they begin to tour the inner bowels of the abode, they find secret rooms that have an interesting blood motif thing going on. Of course you know it’s only a matter of time before Rebecca pops out of nowhere and scares the bejesus out of everyone, including Ted, who would be screaming if not for the fact that he’s stabbed in the throat before he can make a sound.

Dean has to return to the family with the bad news about Uncle Ted. Mrs. Carter is worried sick about Danny, although her husband assures her he must be fine – murderous feral girl’s presence notwithstanding. After all, the girl did tell Danny it’s only the grown-ups who suck. At this point we learn that the Carter family lost their older son Andy in an accident, and had moved here for the proverbial “fresh start.”

Awkward, and about to become even more so…………

Rebecca’s diary, which Sam found in the attic, reveals that she was pregnant. So this Ghoul Girl is not Rebecca after all…….more like her daughter. Who would also prove to be her sister, ‘cause Rebecca’s baby daddy is her daddy, period. Feh! Ghost, schmost! Seems Ghoul Girl was just your average hand-licking, blood-scrawling, wall-dwelling, flesh and blood product of incest. Dean supposes that the secret room he stumbled across must have been where the father had kept her tucked away, and with any luck, that’s where they’ll find Danny yet.

Sure enough, Danny is bound and gagged in this very same spot. Ghoul Girl is not so uncivilized that she won’t offer her newfound guest some dinner. Raw live rats are the special du jour at Chez Crazy, and Ghoul Girl tears into the entrée with relish.

Dean, Sam and Mr. Carter are soon doing some makeshift demolition on the kitchen walls. Dean proceeds and Sam sends the dad for rope. As Danny isn’t finding the dinner menu so appetizing, his screams soon lead Dean to him. Dean cuts him free as Danny warns him that “he” is coming back. Uh…wait a minute……”he”??

Yup, misery loves company, and it seems Ghoul Girl has herself a brother – who immediately materializes. There’s some serious smackdown between Dean and this Johnny Come Lately as Danny highlights it out of there. Dean goes Dirty Harry on Eddie Munster and shoots him dead. But where’s sis?

Cut to the shed, where Kate and her mom are waiting. Ghoul Girl kicks in the wall and there’s a tussle, but not much of one, because it seems Mr. Carter has had just about enough of this whole inbred wall-dwelling psycho adventure, as the bloody knife in his hand soon proves.

The Impala’s soon back in business, and the Carters thank Sam and Dean for their housewarming efforts. The brothers move on, and Sam figures this is a great segue into trying to talk about pent-up feelings once more. Dean is feeling remorse for having killed those kids, feral or not, and in short order, he decides to finally open up about life in hell. He admits to Sam that while killing unwitting inbreds is one thing, he actually enjoyed torturing the souls that came his way Down There. This comes as news to Sam.

After Dean endured such epic and operatic tortures of Hell, this post-hiatus episode serves as a reminder that you don’t need demons to wreak hell on earth – double-dipping in the gene pool is more than sufficient.

While biding your time for next week’s intriguingly named episode, “Criss Angel is a Douchebag,” why not ogle those disarmingly handsome Winchester boys in action with this Supernatural slideshow, courtesy of Fancast?