Sam and Dean are reunited and it feels so….well, they are working on it. The Winchester brothers take a detour from the impending Apocalypse and their search for the Colt so they can stop in Canton, Ohio and investigate a head-on collision in a parked car. But this is no ordinary car.
Under the names of Agents Bonham and Copeland, the boys meet Sheriff Carnegie, who is a real Scully when it comes to the supernatural. The victim, Cal Hawkins, had a friend with him at the time of his murder. Since no one else was around, he locks the man up for somehow slamming Cal through the windshield of a parked car. After interviewing the friend, Dean discovers there just may be a Little Bastard to blame.
Film buffs must have reacted like I did when that Porsche 550 Spyder with the number 130 first showed up on screen. This sexy car is the stuff of legends, as Dean tells Sam about the curse of the car that James Dean crashed and died way too young in. It actually was said to have crushed a mechanic as well as caused the death of other unfortunate car enthusiasts before disappearing in the 1970’s. This fact makes Dean nervous as he crawls under it to get an engine number for verification. He survives though, and Sam discovers that the car is a fake.
Meanwhile, Civil War buff William Hill gets his head blown off by a psychotic Abe Lincoln. Seeing the man’s blood splatter across the Emancipation Proclamation was probably an image show creator Eric Kripke delighted in putting on the screen.
On a tip from Hill’s maid, Consuela, Sam and Dean go on a tour of the Canton Wax Museum. We have seen in the past that it is not always a nearby grave that brings vengeful ghosts out, but sometimes it is a possession of the previously living, because it may have some DNA residue on it, like the stovepipe hat that the wax figure of Lincoln is wearing. The curator, who wants to make wax museums hip again, tells Sam and Dean that some of the wax figures have some of those old possessions, like James Dean’s keychain and Mahatmas Gandhi’s bifocals. When Dean calls Gandhi a smurf, we learn that Sam has a lot of respect for Gandhi. I bet you all can see where this is going.
The subplot of this episode surfaces a bit here, when we see Sam overhear Dean telling Bobby over the phone how Sam has been kill-crazy and “we know whose fault that is.” Sam confronts Dean about it, and feels a bit betrayed because he thought they were getting a fresh start. Dean is still not ready to trust Sam after what he saw Sam become in the future. He stubbornly tells his brother that “this is about as fresh as it gets.” Well, you see your brother as a demon blood addict one day and then the next as Lucifer himself, you tend to have a few trust issues.
Sam and Dean break into the wax museum at night to burn the possessions. The show steps up the creep factor when we see the wax figures shrouded in darkness. Sam attempts to stare down Lincoln’s wax figure, when all of a sudden Gandhi is all over him like a spider monkey hopped up on Mountain Dew. And since Sam wasn’t “a fan of someone cool, as Dean says, the ghost is dispatched easily by burning the bifocals. Dean then takes a moment to laugh at his brother for being beaten up by Gandhi. As a guy myself, I always have a good laugh when the brothers have a guys-will-be-guys-moment like that one.
Even though Sam is still suspicious the next day, Dean insists the case is closed and that it was time to blow town. Sam starts getting whined up – excuse me, I meant to say wound up – about always getting the little brother treatment when the Sheriff calls. It seems that a local girl has been kidnapped by none other than Paris Hilton.
Sam, apparently on a really far-fetched hunch, decides that this is a good time to go rooting around the innards of both of the victims. Don’t ask me why, but Exposition Boy must have felt the need to do more than look like a hurt puppy and get wailed on by fruitarians in this episode. He finds seeds in both of the stomachs and discovers, by the miracle of the Internet, that the seeds come from a Balkan forest that had been chopped down. Oh, also supposedly the forest had been guarded by the pagan god Leshi, who used to drain his worshippers’ blood and stuff their stomachs with seeds. The Internet also said that Leshi could be killed only by an iron axe. Please don’t ask me what websites Sam surfs to for information. I want to stay far away from them.
The boys return to the museum and go into a wing being renovated to look like, well, a Balkan forest! They find the missing girl tied to a tree but get jumped by Paris the Heiress, who throws Sam against a tree and uses Dean’s face as a boxing bag. Before stomping Dean with a high heel, she says, “Awesome!” I was expecting her to say “That’s hot”, weren’t you?
Sam and Dean wake up and find themselves tied to trees just like the kidnapped girl. Paris, or technically Leshi, is either sharpening her nails with a knife or vice versa. Either way, things are about to get ugly. They get her monologueing while struggling with their binds. She obliges by lecturing them, and I guess us, about how humanity sucks because instead of worshipping gods, we now worship celebrities with spray tans and small dogs. I guess this was supposed to be a moment where she is making fun of herself, but I never thought Paris’ tan was spray-on, did you?
Anyway, Dean laughs at her because she doesn’t have any power over him in the form of Paris. In fact, he says he’s never even seen House of Wax. When she goes for his father’s possession, the steel axe, Dean breaks free and does his best to hit her fist with his face again. Sam does a better job of it, because when he breaks free (Leshi has never spent any time on boats I guess), he grabs the steel axe and decapitates her with several swings of the axe. If that proves anything, it’s that Paris has a really thick neck. Then we get the great payoff to the joke from earlier, where Sam can now heckle Dean for getting beaten up by Paris Hilton.
And you know what? It’s good that the boys had some laughs together. This allows them to reconcile at the end of the episode. So what if they may become the vessels of good and evil? So what if they might end up killing each other because of it? Sam says that it’s time “we stop wringing our hands over it. We need to grab onto whatever is in front of us, kick its ass and go down fighting.” Dean needs to loosen the leash and let Sam take the wheel right now. Dean agrees, and when he hands Sam the keys to the Impala, he grants Sam his other request, that they are now on the same level. Now let’s hope they can stop fighting each other and take down Lucifer.
