RECAP

Neil is talking to his friend Angela Mason, who is recovering from a break up with her boyfriend Matt. They’re interrupted when Matt shows up and Neil tries to turn him away. Matt barges in but Angela has slipped out the back. She’s driving down the street when Matt calls to apologize. Distracted, she goes off the road and is killed.

Sam and Dean go to visit their mom’s head stone on Sam’s insistence, but Dean refuses to go directly there. While Sam leaves John’s dog tags at his mother’s headstone, Dean notices a grave belonging to Angela with everything dead around it in a perfect circle. Sam doesn’t think much of it, but Dean thinks it indicates unholy ground and insists they go to visit Angela’s father. They offer their condolences and notice a book in ancient Greek. Dean still thinks something is going on although Sam thinks Dean is overcompensating for their dead mother. Dean goes out to get a drink… alone.

Matt is watching a video of him and Angela when the plants nearby spontaneously wither. He stops the tape and sees a reflection on the screen–he turns to face it and something kills him.

Dean breaks into Angela’s house and finds her roommate Lindsey inside. Dean introduces himself as a friend of the family sent to get Angela’s stuff and he gets Lindsey to talk about Angela. Lindsey reveals that Matt apparently killed himself the previous night, and claimed he had seen Angela several times since her funeral. He checks in at Matt’s house and finds the dead plants, then updates Sam, who accepts something might be happening. Dean has stolen Angela’s diary and finds out the name of her friend Neil.

Sam and Dean go to visit Neil, passing themselves off as grief councilors. Neil claims Matt was responsible for Angela’s death, was having an affair with another woman, and killed himself out of guilt. Dean suggests they burn the bones and they go dig up the body, but find the coffin empty. At his house, Neil goes down to the cellar and finds Angela waiting for him. She kisses him.

In the coffin, the Winchesters find a board with Greek symbols on it. They go to Dr. Mason’s house and ask him to identify the symbols, and he says they’re used for necromancy–speaking with the dead and even raising them. Dean suspect Angela’s father is involved but Sam points out he has living plants. They leave and Sam believes Dean is still overreacting over their family deaths.

Neil wants to talk to Angela about Matt but she’d rather be with him, and claims she’s been there the entire time before embracing him. Sam and Dean can’t find a specific way to eliminate the walking dead but Dean suspects Neil, based on Angela’s diary and the fact he’s Dr. Mason’s TA. They go to Neil’s house and down to the cellar where they find the ventilation shaft she’s escaping through. Dean figures out that Matt was having an affair with Lindsey and they head for her house.

Lindsey hears a noise on her door and opens it… and Angela grabs her from behind. Lindsey breaks free and Angela tries to stab her with a pair of scissors, but Lindsey knocks her down, where she falls on the scissors. Angela is still “alive” and tries to kill Lindsey, but Dean and Sam arrive in time to shoot her, driving her off. They head for Neil’s while trying to figure out what might stop her. Sam suggests nailing Angela into her coffin back at the cemetery. They tell Neil what happened and after some initial denials, he lies about where Angela is. Dean insists Neil come with them to perform a ritual at the ceremony, but he refuses, and Dean warns that Neil should make sure not to make Angela dead. After they leave for the cemetery, Neil goes down to the basement and confronts Angela, who wants him to help her kill Sam and Dean at the cemetery. Neil agrees and goes outside to get the car, but Angela is waiting for him and thinks he was going to leave her. She kills him in a fit of fury, then goes to the cemetery where Sam and Dean are performing their (fake) ritual.

Sam and Dean check out the woods around the cemetery where Angela approaches Sam and tries to gain his sympathy. He shoots her, which doesn’t do much good, and she chases him back to her grave. Dean drives her off and shoots her enough to knock her back into the coffin. He stakes her down and “kills” her for good.

The brothers rebury Angela for good and Dean still doesn’t want to see their mother’s headstone. They drive off but once out of town, Dean pulls over and apologizes for how he’s been acting, and admits that he shouldn’t have come back from the dead, that it wasn’t natural, and somehow it led to John’s death at the hands of the demon. There’s nothing Sam can say to answer that.

GUEST STARS

Tamara Feldman (Angela Mason)

Christopher Jacot (Neil)

Jared Keeso (Matt Harrison)

Leela Savasta (Lindsey)

Serge Houde (Dr. Mason)

IMAGE GALLERY

Episode Stills

Episode Screen Captures

TRAILER/CLIPS

Trailer

MUSIC

“Sad Girl” by Supergrass

QUOTES

Dean: We can’t just waste it with a head shot?
Sam: Dude, you’ve been watching way too many Romero flicks.
Dean: So you’re telling me there’s no lore on how to smoke ’em?
Sam: No, Dean, I’m telling you there’s too much! I mean there’s a hundred different legends on the walking dead but they all have different methods for killing them. Some say setting them on fire, one said… where is it? Right here: feeding their hearts to wild dogs–that’s my personal favorite!

Sam: So, what do you want to do?
Dean: Keep digging, talk to more of her friends.
Sam: You get any names?
Dean: You kidding me? I have her “bestest friend in the whole wide world.” (throws Sam the diary)

Dean: I never should have come back, Sam. It wasn’t natural and now look what’s come of it. I was dead and I should have stayed dead. So tell me, what could you possibly say to make that all right…

Dean: (repeated line) What’s dead should stay dead.

(after reburying Angela)
Sam: Rest in peace.
Dean: Yeah, for good this time, okay?

Sam: I think she broke my hand.
Dean: You’re just too fragile. We’ll get it looked at later.

Sam: Did we have to use me as bait?
Dean: I figured you were more her type. She had pretty crappy taste in guys.

Dean: I’ve heard of people doing some pretty desperate things to get laid but you take the cake.

Neil: You’re crazy.
Dean: Your girlfriend’s past her expiration date and we’re crazy?

Dean: Damn, that dead chick can run.

Sam: You think Angela’s going after somebody?
Dean: Nah, I think she went out to rent Beaches.
Sam: Look, smartass, she might kill someone.

Sam: Silver bullets?
Dean: Enough to make her rattle like a change purse.

Dean: Neil, it’s your grief counselors. We’ve come to hug.

Dean: It takes two to… you know, have hardcore sex.

TRIVIA

• Trivia: When Sam deposits his father’s dog tags at his mother’s tombstone it can be read in them:
  “Winchester
  John
  306-00-3594
  Type – AB
  Non Religious”
• The same shot of the Impala driving at night was used in the previous episode. The footage was just flipped over for this episode.
• The zombie’s tackle of Sam at the end, and the subsequent banter between the brothers was written in to explain the cast Sam will be wearing in the near future. Jared Padalecki fell during a stunt on set and broke his wrist. He went a couple of weeks without a cast before the writers could work it into the show.
• This episode was alternately titled “Afterlife.”

ALLUSIONS

• Title
  Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things was the title of a 1972 zombie movie in which a group of actors lead by their director, Alan, performs a black magic ritual on a island graveyard and causes the dead to rise and kill them all.
• Dean: Naw, she went out to rent Beaches.
  Beaches (1988 movie) staring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, who have a lifelong friendship which is depicted in various stages including their love for the same man.
• Dean: My name’s Alan, Alan Stanwick.
  Referencing the movie “Fletch”. Dean presents himself to Lindsey as Alan Stanwyck: this is the name of a character in the movie “Fletch”. In this movie Chevy Chase is an ace reporter who is able to create “instant aliases” as Dean and Sam do.
• Dean: What you brought back isn’t even your daughter anymore. These things are vicious, they’re violent, they’re so nasty they rot the ground around them. I mean come on, haven’t you seen Pet Sematary?
  Referencing the 1989 Stephen King movie Pet Sematary, which was from the 1983 Stephen King book Pet Sematary. In the movie and the book, if something (pet or human) was buried in the Pet Sematary they would come back to life as an evil zombie. Jud Crandall warns the father, Louis Creed early on in the movie and the book that what comes back is not human anymore.
• Dean: It’s got unrequited “Duckie” love written all over it.
  This is a reference to the movie Pretty in Pink. In the movie Jon Cryer plays Duckie, who spends the whole movie pining over his best friend played by Molly Ringwald.

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