From MadCap's Couch - "Supernatural: Hunted"

Sammy once caught a fish this big!

Do I lie, people? I say thee nay!

Hunted begins with yet another recap, again focusing on the Psychic Kids arc as we've established before, basically getting us up to speed on the fact that the Psychic Kids exist, Sam wants to look for them, and Yellow Eyes has a plan for them. Also, John knows about Yellow Eyes' plan...whatever it may be.

After the recap, a man name Scott is in his therapist's office having a session. Scott mentions that he's able to electrocute things if he chooses to when he touches them after having used this ability on the neighbor's cat unintentionally. He offers his disbelieving therapist, Dr. Wexler, a handshake to prove it. However, Dr. Wexler evades with another question, asking him why he'd want to kill the neighbor's cat.

Scott claims that he doesn't, but that the Yellow Eyed Man wants him to...and that he wants him to do much, much more than that.

Upon leaving his therapy session, Scott is stabbed to death by a mostly unseen assailant with a knife.

Finally, we return to where Sam and Dean were last time as Dean reveals what John had said to him before dying back in In My Time of Dying. John told him to watch out for Sammy, take care of him. If it came down to it, Dean might have to save Sam and, if he couldn't, he would have to kill Sam.

Needless to say, Sam doesn't take this well. At all. Shouting at Dean like the complete ass that he is and not even considering how Dean feels about this. Dean doesn't snap at him, though, instead trying to restate what he did at the end of the last episode, namely that they should just lay low for a while.

Sam, naturally, doesn't take to that. He sneaks off in the middle of the night, stealing a car and heading out on his own. He ends up at an address and investigates a dilapidated house...and gets blown up by a grenade!

However, this turns out to be a dream being had by someone else...a woman who awakens with a start and is comforted by her boyfriend, who she insists should just go back to sleep. She, however, looks very distressed indeed.

This is Ava, though we won't find that out until much later.

"Does looking at guns make you wanna have sex?"
"I'm seventeen. Looking at linoleum makes me want to have sex." 

In the waking world, Sam arrives at the Roadhouse and speaks to Ellen. Ellen tries to figure out what's going on between Dean and Sam, but Sam deflects and we get some background information about Jo - namely that she isn't at the Roadhouse. We get a bit of resolution from the ending of No Exit, where Ellen tells Sam that she doesn't blame him and Dean about what happened to Jo in that episode and doesn't blame John for what happened to her husband. She forgave John a while ago, but John seemingly never forgave himself.

Sam has Ash do a national search based on Sam's profile and finds four results - those being Sam, Andy, Max, and someone named Scott...who was murdered a month ago, as we saw at the cold open of the episode. Sam decides to take the lead about Scott in Ohio. Ellen insists she has to let Dean know where he is, but Sam manages to talk her out of it...for now.

In Indiana, Sam talks to Scott's father, finding out that Scott started getting the usual signs of one of the Psychic Kids about a year ago just like Sam and the others. Checking Scott's room, he finds some pill bottles prescribed by Dr. Wexler as well as a collage in Scott's closet - a bunch of pairs of yellow eyes glued all over the inside wall.

At the motel, the woman from earlier gets jumped by Sam and she insists that he's in danger. Afterward, Ava introduces and explains herself. She started having headaches and didn't think much of it, but about a month ago she started having incredibly vivid dreams. She saw Scott die in her dream and then saw the news story about his death and knew that something wasn't right.

To her surprise, Sam believes her. Also, we learn that Ava's mother didn't die in a house fire - she lives in Palm Beach, giving us a second confirmation along with Andy's parents that the Psychic Kids do not fall under the same pattern of having a parent die in a house fire.

She's got Bette Davis eyes...

Dean gets on the phone to Ellen, Ellen seemingly about to do what Sam asked her and then turning the tables and telling Dean exactly where he is.

Sam and Ava talk in detail about the psychic kids and their connection to one another. Ava is not having any of this and is a hair's breath from walking away from it all, though Sam manages to reel her back in with a desire to learn the truth.

Thus, Ava gets a mini therapy session with Dr. Wexler to give Sam time to steal Scott's confidential psych records. They listen in on the recording of Wexler's session with Scott.

Dean arrives at the motel where Sam has been staying at and comes to the wrong conclusion when he sees Ava.

Scott in the recording talks about how the Yellow Eyed Demon spoke to him about a coming war and how everything was about to change forever, something which creeps Ava out to no end...and then the glass door of the motel shatters as GORDON FUCKING WALKER has apparently decided to take a sniper rifle to the problem, the problem being Sam's and Ava's heads.

Dean gets on the roof and expresses his strong feelings of dislike before Gordon manages to knock him out with a rifle butt.

. . .do you think Gordon might be a little pissed off about being tied to that chair?

Sam does some CSI on the scene and tries to call up Dean, and the two brothers exchange a coded message - Dean is able to inform Sam that someone has a gun on him and that he needs help. Dean has given the address (the same one from Ava's vision), though, and so Sam decides to cowboy up in spite of the danger.

Dean tries to talk to Gordon about this, thinking that this is a little overkill for what they did to him back in Bloodlust. Gordon says it isn't about that. He is a hunter, and Sam is fair game...

Ava tries to insist to Sam that she can help, given that Sam is walking right into her vision. Sam insists that Ava get to safety instead, though he does promise to call her when everything is settled up.

Gordon tells Dean he was performing an exorcism on a demon and he learned about a coming war, Gordon torturing the demon in question until he squeezed more information out of it (at the cost of the host). He knows about the psychic kids, particularly Sam. Gordon also confirms that he killed Scott before Scott could kill anyone other than his neighbor's cat.

So Gordon sits and waits, with his rifle at the ready. He's smart enough to know that Sam and Dean probably had an exchange about the danger in code. Gordon smugly tells Dean that Sam is likely to use the back door, which means he'll hit the trip wire and then...boom as in Ava's vision.

As they wait, Dean attempts to talk Gordon down. We touch on a little bit more on the morality of hunting that we discussed in Bloodlust. Gordon attempts to bring up the "killing baby Hitler" argument to justify killing the Psychic Kids pre-emptively, saying that even if Sam isn't a killer that he will be one day...and that is reason enough.

Gordon twists the knife by mocking Dean's connection to his father, saying that Dean clearly isn't half the man John was.

Sam does indeed scope out the place as in Ava's vision. He goes to pick the lock and enters...and an explosion is triggered. Dean, muffled, cries out in protest...but Gordon isn't convinced, not until the second explosion, which goes off a few seconds later. When he goes to investigate, Gordon finds...debris strewn all about the ground, but no sign of a body, at least not until Sam has a gun to his head. Apparently, Sam took off his shoes to throw Gordon off.

"You have to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"

The two engage in a fight, Sam pulls off a hell of a fight, even to the point of putting Gordon at the point of his own rifle. Gordon encourages him to do it, telling "Sammy" to do it and show Dean the killer he really is.

Sam knocks him out with the butt of the rifle and proclaims "It's Sam."

Bad. ASS!

Sam gets Dean out of the chair and Dean plans to go and kill Gordon. However, Sam insists that Gordon is taken care of. They leave, and Gordon comes out of the house firing off rounds at the brothers. It's then that the cops come along and surround him. It seems that Sam put in an anonymous call to the police about a dangerous suspect. Oopsie...

The cops find the cache of weapons in Gordon's car and it's clear that he's going away for a long time. I'm sure he'll nevvvvver bother Sam and Dean again.

Afterward, Dean berates Ellen on the phone about Gordon having found out - a bit of dialogue implying that he'd learned about Sam from someone at the Roadhouse. Ellen refutes him, proclaiming her loyalty, and saying that she or Jo or Ash wouldn't have said anything to anyone. She thinks some hunters go a hold of the information and were able to work out the pieces on their own. Regardless of how it happened, it happened, and Ellen can't control the hunters.

Sam calls Ava, leaving a message for her on her phone. Dean tells Sam that if he ever runs off like this again, he'll kill him and it's clear the tone is a good bit lighter than earlier with the boys are on much better terms. At the end, it's decided that they can't run from this and while Sam insists that Dean can't protect him from this...Dean says he can try.

Also, a "jerk" "bitch" moment.

Sam calls Ava again, still not getting an answer. He thinks something is up and so he and Dean head to Ava's home in Peoria. They find Ava's fiancé a bloody mess in his own bed, sulfur on the window sill, and Ava's engagement ring left abandoned...

They're too late.

"The safety word is 'bugaloo'!"

Hunted is, again, laying hard into Supernatural's serialized nature by furthering the Psychic Kids plot with a new factor brought in, namely not only Gordon but any of the hunters that he potentially spoke to who now know the truth about Sam, which is just another thing to add to the laundry list of things that makes their job all the harder.

A neat addition to the episode is Ava, played by veteran horror actress Katherine Isabelle, who some of you might remember from the Ginger Snaps series of films. Ava is a reasonable gal expected to believe a lot of unreasonable things and while she doesn't learn the entire truth behind everything, she manages to take what she does learn better than most. It would have been interesting to see her as a recurring character, sort of a counterbalance to the complete and utter insanity that is the lives of Sam and Dean and maybe an interesting outside perspective.

Alas, that didn't happen.

No, what happened to Ava in the end was much, much worse...but we'll get to that later on this season.

Hunted does pretty well for what it is, giving us some division between Sam and Dean and something for them to overcome to get back on better terms. Season 2 is actually pretty strong as far as individual episodes go, I'm having a hard time trying to find fault with them.

Will that be the case with the next episode, Playthings?

Be there and find out!