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| "Sam, why are we making this computer play tic-tac-toe?" |
Night fever, night fever
We know how to do it!
Nightshifter starts with, say it with me now, a recap that reminds us of the events in St. Louis back in Season 1 and the reminder of those events in The Usual Suspects.
We suddenly begin in media res at a bank in Milwaukee, where someone has taken hostages within a bank and has been there for three hours. A figure emerges from the bank, helping someone out...it's Dean, looking frenzied and panicky at the camera.
A day ago, Dean is flirting with a jeweler while Sam talks to another jeweler, who speaks about an employee of his who cleaned out the store, killed a security guard who caught her, and then dropped a hair dryer into the bathtub with herself. A thing that is so very much unlike her.
As Sam and Dean head off to another interrogation, Sam gets Dean up to speed on another death that occurred the month before at a bank, again with the same M.O. - a long-time employee suddenly deciding to rob the place blind before going home and taking their own life.
They come to the house of Ronald Reznick, a man who has gone full conspiracy theory nut and has picked up the same pattern that Sam and Dean have about these robbery-suicides. However, his solution? It's a shapeshifting android.
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| Listen to those SuperWhoLock fans cry! |
Regardless, Ronald dubs this the "mandroid" and even shows Sam and Dean the security tape copy he made from the bank and shows them "the laser eyes", or rather the retinal flare that shapeshifters show when caught up on camera. Ronald resolves to hunt this thing down if the law won't. Sam tries to talk him out of it, preserving the Masquerade, but Ronald is having nothing to do with it and tells them to get out.
Sam later justifies this by saying that Ronald, like most people, really isn't ready to deal with the supernatural world. With the tapes in their custody, they confirm that it is a shapeshifter and Dean uses a map (with their knowledge of shapeshifters) to work out the path the shifter is taking and figures out where they're going to go next.
Posing as maintenance men, the pair spend what seems like hours looking through camera footage until...they find a man with retinal flare. Unfortunately, another problem comes up...Ronald Reznick, who is putting a chain and lock on the doors to the bank and heads in with a rifle, firing off warning shots and telling everyone to get on the floor. Dean's attempt to talk him down don't work and soon Sam and Dean are on the floor with the rest of the people in the bank.
Ronald has another person frisk them, finding a silver knife in Dean's shoe and disposing of it via the deposit box.
Dean eventually offers himself up as a hostage, appealing to Ronald's nutjob side to get him to assist them in hunting "the mandroid".
Ronald and Dean lock everyone, including Sam, inside the Vault. Sam gets an eye rolling moment as one of the other hostages claims that Dean is "brave". In the bank manager's office, Dean and Ronald find a skin pile, meaning the shifter has already changed form. Dean has to give Ronald a crash course in shapeshifters, even taking the silver letter opener from the bank manager's desk.
Outside, the Milwaukee police have cowboyed up, even bringing out a SWAT team. News vans are out and the entire thing is looking like a media circus.
Ronald has a moment of "I was right" and being overjoyed at the thought that he's not going crazy just a the police cut the power. In the vault, a woman seems to be panic-flirting with Sam and he's having none of it. Dean and Ronald let Sam out of the Vault. Dean hands Sam another silver letter opener and tells him to manage Ronald, which Sam takes offense to. Dean manages to convince him for the sake of finishing the hunt.
Dean goes off looking for the shifter and finds a dead body in the ceiling - the man helping the security guard. Back at the Vault, the security guard starts having a heart attack (or does he?) and Sam gets a paramedic called in. Dean returns and informs Sam, Sam taking the security guard and heading to get the man help while Dean squares off with the shifter. In the chaos, Ronald gets taken out by a sniper. Sam tells Dean to go after the guard - he's getting the shifter. Dean passes by Ron's body, saying a few words to him before taking his gun and going to help the security guard.
It's actually a very sweet moment on the whole.
We get the episode opener with Dean helping the security guard out to the paramedics and SWAT officers...and someone informs the police that they're taking over the situation. Who, you may ask? Well, we'll see soon enough...
Sam finds the skin, the shifter has changed again, and he informs Dean of this development.
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| Smile! You're on Candid Camera! |
The FBI have arrived, and heading them up is Agent Victor Henriksen, who tells the Milwaukee PD that there's a monster in that bank and they just don't know it yet.
Dean locks the people back in the Vault, assuring them that this is all going to be over soon. Then the phone rings and Dean picks it up, talking with Henriksen...who knows him. Apparently, Henriksen has apparently been on Sam and Dean's case for weeks now to bring them in. Henriksen gives Dean one hour to surrender himself and Sam unarmed or they come in fully automatic.
He then tells the police after hanging up that they'll be going in in five minutes. The cops protest, saying that it'd be crazy to do that since they only released one hostage. Henriksen, though, is a bit of a knight errant as we'll see.
Back in the back, Sam goes looking for shapeshifters again and finds a dead woman - the last one Dean spoke to - in a closet. It seems the woman in the Vault is indeed the shifter, and Sam and Dean draw her out show her the body...and she promptly faints in shock. Twist! The "dead" body is actually the shifter, playing possum. Dean tells Sam to get the woman out of here while he squares off with the shifter, it managing to hit him and escape. The SWAT have busted in, Dean having to use his stealth skills to avoid them.
They corner Sam, who manages to take them out.
In a boiler room, Dean goes in for round three against the shifter, who begins molting as they fight. Regardless, Dean manages to impale them with a silver letter opener and call it a day. But it appears Dean is caught, as someone is shining a flashlight on him...one from the SWAT team.
The SWAT team finds the bodies and starts cataloging, but find no sign of Sam or Dean. As "Renegade" by Styx plays, we see two of the members of the SWAT team head through a parking garage to a familiar '67 Chevy Impala. Getting in, they remove the helmets...revealing the Winchesters have made an escape...but, as Dean puts it, "we are so screwed".
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| Oh, Dean...you got no idea. |
However, as it's the end of the episode, they drive off to another day.
Nightshifter is an episode not all that dissimilar to Skin, which is intentional. The real monkey wrench this time comes from the addition of Agent Henrikson, who will be a thorn in Sam and Dean's side for a while to come. The addition of Ronald makes another character like Ava that would have been interesting as an addition to the show, kind of an outside influence and viewpoint character for us to see things in a new light from. Alas, given his mental state, that wasn't likely to pass.
Not that any hunters we've seen thus far are paragons of uber-sanity.
Again, if I want to go for anything to criticize, I think the game of "who is the shapeshifter?" goes on a little too long, though I applaud the fake out at the end...even if it was the shifter trusting Sam and Dean to do exactly the thing that they did and not using the opportunity to shift into someone else at the time that Sam and Dean went to get the other woman from the Vault.
Then again, we were getting near the end of the episode. It's nice when the monster is kind enough to hurry up and die when we get near the end of the episode.
Next time, Sam and Dean square off against...an angel? Several people are murdering others and telling them that an angel told them to do it. But are they right? Find out next week, as we journey into the Houses of the Holy!
Be there!
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