From MadCap's Couch - "Supernatural: Hell House"

So you're saying, if I do this, I get pie?

Oh, goody! Another ghost episode! Because we haven't had nearly enough of those in this season.

And that's just four of them.

Okay, so I tell a lie. . .which you already know if you've either seen this episode before or if you read my review last week where I said there was an original idea at work here. There is.

It just takes the form of a ghost.

So we have our opening. A bunch of teenagers break into a haunted house. Sadly, because they don't have the prerequisite talking dog with them, it's not a Scooby-Doo episode and they find a dead body hung up from the ceiling in the basement.

Sam and Dean, for this episode, are engaged in a prank war - something that was a fixture in their youth. Oddly enough, it's something that informs us about our childhood, but that I don't think is either seen or mentioned again. Either way, after waking up with a toothbrush in his mouth to Blue Oyster Cult's "Fire of Unknown Origin", Sam reveals the details of the hunt to Dean: some kids found a dead body, but it was suddenly gone afterward. The cops think that the kids are yanking their chain. Sam, however, thinks differently, and they go to the small East Texas town to figure it out.

I don't know about you, but when I was a teenager, there was no place in town I wanted to hang out at more than the. . .uh. . .the local diner?

. . .what?

Anyway, by Sam's logic, they go to the local diner and have a montage of bits and pieces of interviews with some of the local teens - some who look like they've been teenagers for about ten years or so. They all seem to be telling variations on the same story, but the details are different. The walls are a different color once, or the dead girl's hair is a different color, things of that nature. In any case, Sam and Dean eventually get pointed to Craig at the record store, who originally told them about the House.

I could have sworn we've seen this restaurant before...

Craig tells the intrepid young reporters the story behind the house: a man named Mordecai Murdock lived in the house with his six daughters during the Great Depression. In a drought, he attacked and killed his daughters before killing himself. He now haunts the house and strings up any girls that end up there. Pretty standard vengeance spirit fare.

Craig mentions that he didn't believe in it before he saw it himself, having heard of it from his friend Dan, but now. . .he believes, something that gets Sam's attention.

The boys head out to the house, but find the EMF detector isn't accurate due to there being power lines right over it. They find some strange symbols on the walls. One in particular gets Dean's attention, though he can't quite remember where from: the symbol of an inverted sickle of some kind. Sam notes that the paint is pretty fresh - this is new. They're about to chalk it up to just kids playing pranks, seeing as there's no evidence of ghost activity and none of the symbols seem to match (Sam notes that one of them comes from San Francisco in the 1960's - so why would it be in a 1930's farmhouse?), but then there's a noise offscreen. . .

. . .and we find Harry Spangler and Ed Zeddmore.

Professional.

Paranormal.

Investigators.

. . .with business cards.

Needless to say, Sam and Dean are not impressed with either them or their website. Less so when the two call them amateurs and begin to. . .what do you call it when someone's explaining something someone already knows?

. . .being an asshole? Let's go with that. Being an asshole.

So anyway, the Winchesters leave the two assholes and go to the public library. Sam has discovered in a scene transition that there was a Murdock who lived in that farm house in the 1930's, but both the first name of him and the gender and number of his children was wrong - he had two boys, not six girls. Plus, there's no record of him having killed anyone. Dean checked with the cops in the same time, and the various descriptions of the dead girl do not match any known missing persons.

Diarrhea: Where will you be when it hits? 

Dean plans to find a bar, some beers, and leave this legend to the locals. . .and Samba music blasts out of the Impala when he cranks it up, much to Sam's amusement.

Sam makes the first retaliation.

That night, three more teenagers enter the house. . .well, one does, on a dare. I wasn't aware that "truth or dare" was a game that was still played by late high school/college aged people, but perhaps I'm just that far away from the pulse of the human condition in 2006.

Anyway, bespectacled girl enters the house to retrieve a jar from Mordecai's cellar rather than telling her friends to shove a pineapple up their asses, because stupid. There are some chicken feet strung up in the foreground as she turns to go into the basement. . .where she's hung up by Mordecai. She's dead. The next morning, her body is found by the cops, who have ruled it a suicide. That night, the cops are swarming the place to keep anyone else from getting in.

Luckily, Sam and Dean get some help to avoid the cops. . .in the form of leaving Ed and Harry out to dry.

If only that was the last we'd ever see of them.

The boys get into the basement where, after a rat jump scare, they find Mordecai. . .who is apparently immune to rock salt, much to Sam and Dean's distress. As they fight it and try to escape, Ed and Harry have managed to dodge the cops. . .somehow. . .and are skulking about.

They even mention that they did lose the cops. . .though I'm not really sure how.

Thankfully, they witness Sam and Dean fighting the ghost and then are immediately captured and arrested by the cops.

Putting their heads together, Sam and Dean try to work out what they know: namely that, while ghosts are incredibly strict, Mordecai's entire set up keeps changing. A post comes in on Ed and Harry's website about how Mordecai was a Satanist who chopped up his victims with an axe and things finally start falling into place. . .at least for Dean, who finally recognizes the symbol of the scythe that was bugging him earlier.

One trip to the record store later and we see it, on the album cover of a Blue Oyster cult album - it's their logo. They question Craig, who reveals that he set up everything with his cousin to make the house look haunted. It was all an elaborate prank.

"Don't Fear the Reaper" was a few episodes ago, guys. . .

An elaborate prank that has spread by word of mouth and got really, really bad. Harry and Ed hosting the story on their website did not help matters.

After a commercial break, Dean putting itching powder in Sam's clothes, Sam has worked out a theory: it's a tulpa, a thought form. Basically put - Mordecai exists because people believe in him. . .and a Tibetan spirit sigil painted on one of the walls. This also explains why the legend keeps changing, people who look at it think about different things and add to the legend. It also means that destroy the symbol is useless: once the tulpa is made, it takes on a life of it's own.

Dean and Sam head to Harry and Ed's camper. . .and finding out that Buffy apparently exists as a show in the fictional universe of Supernatural.

. . .which, by extention, means that Angel exists and that it'll probably be awkward when we remember that Fred and Darla showed up a few episodes into this season.

. . .and that Spike and Cordelia will show up later as well.

. . .also Mayor Richard Wilkins, Tara,  Vi, and. . .y'know what? There's a lot of crossover. It's weird, okay? It's weird.

Anyway, Sam and Dean want the dorks to shut down their website. They say no. Sam and Dean manage to outfox them by planning they have information on Mordecai - namely that you can kill his ghost with a .45 with loaded iron rounds.

At a restaurant, they see the story has been posted up on the site. Sam says now that they just have to wait for the story to spread. . .and Dean finds that Sam has glued his beer bottle to his hand.

That night, Sam and Dean distract the cops with one of those folksy singing bass on a wall things (well, fisherman, but never mind) and get into the farmhouse to find. . .Ed and Harry already there. As is Mordecai, who is not frightened of or seemingly even affected by the iron rounds. Apparently, Ed and Harry did post the story up on their website. . .and then their server crashed.

Joy.

Dean being Dean decides that the best solution is to make like the Talking Heads and burning down the house. It gives Sam a moment to wonder: out of all the things that he and Dean hunt, how many of them exist just because people believed in them?

Afterward, Harry and Ed are apparently heading off to Hollywood - a producer saw their website and wants to option a movie. After they leave, Sam reveals that it was he who called them. . .and Dean that he put some dead fish in their backseat. The brothers call a truce on their prank war. . .at least for the next hundred miles.

I don't have a joke here, I just think
the makeup job was pretty good here.

Hell House is a pretty good one and done. I know I've said it before and will again, but a lot of Supernatural's first season is these kind of episodes and it really plays to the show's strengths. We get an interesting cross section of Sam and Dean's relationship outside of their family trauma or hunting (though most would say they're one and the same) with their little prank war.

We also have Harry and Ed. . .who I have to admit aren't as bad in this episode. If they were meant to be anything more than one-note characters for this episode, though, I saw no indication of it. They're both irritating pricks who are way too sure of themselves and if they'd never showed up again, they'd be instantly forgettable.

Yes, I know about the Slenderman episode in Season 8. It's too little too late.

The idea of the tulpa, as I said before, is interesting and it's kind of a shame that it's never utilized again. Only ever referenced. Although, I suppose, they did get all the mileage out of the idea that they really could without elevating the stakes to insane levels like going to alternate universes or the like.

. . .what? They do that in the later seasons?

. . .oh, dear.

Anyway, next time, we take a look back into the childhood of the boys, particularly Dean. When the Winchesters come up against something that sucks the life out of children, Dean has to remember a certain encounter he had with such a creature before. Something Wicked this way comes. . .

Supernatural is the property of Warner Brothers and the CW.

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