Supernatural S4E11: Family Remains

This show isn’t that great for a girl living alone. I woke up at 4:00 a.m. positive that some horrifying girl was going to sneak out of the closet and start licking my hand.

Anyway, as usual SN picks up not-at-all-where-it-left-off. Sam and Dean are exhausted, having taken job after job with no rest. Sam tries to convince Dean to slow down, but Dean is obviously still trying to make up for his time in hell / trying to get past the fact that the last girl he touched has exploded. They follow the trail to a house recently sold to a nice, normal family. But the house has a dark secret – last tenant brutally murdered, his wife died in childbirth, daughter hung herself 20 years later – you know, the usual.

The family ignores the boys’ warnings and moves into the house. The son is delighted to have an ET-esque moment throwing a baseball back and forth with something hiding in his closet. Meanwhile, the daughter lies in bed with the family dog, giggling as the dog licks her hand. But then the dog walks into the room, and she looks over to see “something” disappear into the closet. AHHHHHHHHHHH!



The Winchesters burst in to help the family escape, but the ghost has removed all of the weapons from the Impala. This confuses the boys, but they corral the family into a salt circle nonetheless. Sam investigates the attic while Dean stays with the fam. Suddenly, the girl (who looks much like the girl from “Bloody Mary” and The Ring) appears and trots on into the salt circle. Everyone screams and runs away, but the son disappears during the melee.

Dean takes the uncle to find the girl, while Sam takes the rest of the fam to a shed. Dean discovers a hole in the wall and slips down to find the family dog, murdered. Meanwhile, the girl appears out of nowhere and shoves a knife through Uncle’s throat. Back in the shack, Mom recounts all the horrible things that have happened to the family, including the death of their eldest son. It is kind of weird to spend so much time talking about the dead son when he has nothing to do with the episode. Usually in SN-verse, a family with a dead son would be haunted by the son, or something.

Regardless, Sam has been whiling away the hours reading the diary of the daughter who hung herself, and learns that GhostGirl is actually human. The man of the house (murdered in the opening) had relations with his own daughter (ew) and then locked the baby up to keep it a secret. I love this, when the “monsters” on this show are human. It provides a great moral counterpoint – this girl is, quite frankly, an inhuman monster. But, because she’s technically human, the Winchesters have a hard time justifying killing her.

Eventually, Dean finds the son, who – once the gag comes off – screams, “He’s coming back! Her brother!” Who then attacks our hero, and they fight in a flurry of limbs until Dean shoots the brother twice. At point blank range. In the heart. Have they killed a human before? I feel like in “The Benders” (S1E15) they just escaped.

Outside, IncestGirl is advancing on Mom and Daughter when suddenly Dad drags her outside and murders her via what closed captioning calls “slicing sounds.” In the end, Dean muses that he understands what drove the IncestSiblings. A lifetime of torture can do that to a person. And, in a twist I certainly did not expect, he admits that he enjoyed torturing souls in hell because it dulled his own pain. All this time I’ve been anxiously awaiting a brotherly showdown, it never once occurred to me that Dean could be the monster of the family.