From MadCap's Couch - Supernatural: "Yellow Fever"

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"It was either this or more Wincest fanfics, so..."

..no, really, I promise. It's not problematic. It refers to someone being "yellow" as in being fearful or a coward, not the slang term for... y'know what? It's not important. It's just unfortunately implications due to the origin of the supernatural creature in question this time around.

...anyway, let's get on with it.

Yellow Fever picks up with a recap of basically the entire end of Season 3 with Dean's demon deal and him going to hell and also mentioning Sam's struggling with his demon blood. Basically everything we've seen up to this point. No new information... and then we cut to a city street at night, a suited Dean is running from the loud barking of hounds that seem to be right on his heels. Tripping into a homeless man's shopping cart, Dean attempts to warn him... and a hairbow-wearing Yorkie trots into view.

We return to Rock Ridge, Colorado 43 hours earlier, Sam and Dean come into town to investigate the death of a man named Frank O'Brien. He dropped dead of a heart attack, which is odd for a man who is a marathon runner like Frank was. They have the coroner perform an autopsy and we get some comedy as Dean has to hold the man's surprisingly healthy heart and Sam gets "spleen juice" all over him. They find some scratches on the back of his hand and his wrist, including a mark where a wedding ring seems to have been.

He didn't have the heart...

The boys pop over to the office of one Sheriff Britton, a friend of Frank's. They question him, the Sheriff's men having been the one who had found him, but he holds that he was a good man, no enemies. However, he was getting very jumpy before he died. Wouldn't answer his phone and seemed to be scared by... everything. Notably, during this exchange, the Sheriff makes liberal use of a bottle of hand sanitizer.

The boys don't believe that it was just a heart attack and start working down the list of possible culprits. On the way back to the Impala, Dean notes some teenagers near it and decides to walk around them, much to Sam's confusion.

The boys speak to Frank's neighbor, who has a bunch of snakes for comedy purposes. In terms of plot, they learn that Frank was scared of everything... and that he was a massive dick beforehand. Apparently a bully in high school who "got better" after he died. The neighbor mentioned that Frank was indeed married, his wife died twenty years ago and he was broken up about it.

Dean gets progressively jumpier as he looks through info about Frank's wife - she went missing for two weeks and then was found in a hotel, suicide. Frank has a clean alibi (working at the time) and Sam was unable to find any signs of sulfur or EMF at Frank's old place. Sam suddenly notes that Dean is driving the actual speed limit, which seems... odd. When the EMF detector starts going off around Dean, they are pretty sure that something is up.

The next day, Dean is jamming out to Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" as Sam brings back donuts to jump scare him. Dean has developed scratches on his arm similar to those on Frank. In talking with Bobby, Sam has learned that Dean has contracted "ghost sickness", which means essentially that Dean is going to get progressively more anxious and scared until his heart gives out and he dies. The ghost sickness can transfer between people, which it seems Frank being the first one and he spread it to the other two victims. 

Why did it have an effect on Dean? Well, Sam and Bobby have worked out that all of the victims... were dicks, or at least people who used fear as a weapon.

Back in the motel, Dean attempts to focus on research and begins hallucinating hardcore. Sam ran some research and finds that O'Brien's wife was cremated, so it's unlikely if not impossible that she's a ghost. With no clues to run with, Dean comes up with one... literally, vomiting a wood chip into the motel sink. This brings the boys to a lumber mill which they begin to investigate. This is the episode where, if you haven't seen the show before, it's the one clip of Jensen Ackles screaming for half of the series' runtime after a cat jumps out of a locker comes from that I'm sure you've seen all over the internet.

...so Dean screams for half of the series' runtime after a cat jumps out of a locker. As you do.

The boys poke around in the mill, finding Frank's wedding ring on the floor and eventually going in deeper to find the troublesome cat and a big, beefy ghost named Luther with an interest in arts and crafts... particularly those involving Frank's wife. When the boys take a pit of the art, the lumber mill reactivates and Luther appears standing Blair Witch-style in the corner. Sam takes Luther out with a rock salt blast while Dean bolts and downs whiskey like it's going out of style.

"...he's right behind me, isn't he?"

The boys get Luther's case file and learn that the case of death for him was "physical trauma", but the deputy - being so young - is unable to elaborate and the sheriff is out of the office, or so it is until the boys leave. The sheriff, it seems, has become even more paranoid and shut-in. He's using steel wool to scratch his skin and is loading a six-shooter while his own reflection whispers paranoid delusions at him.

The pair had to a retirement home to meet with Luther's living brother. He says Luther did not die of "physical trauma", but instead was murdered. They called him a monster, but the man was really a gentle soul and the "kindest man [he] ever knew". When shown the picture of O'Brien's wife, Jessie, he fingers Frank as Luthor's killer. Luthor, it seemed, was really sweet on Jessie and Frank took everything the wrong way when Jessie went missing. Luthor paid the price, getting dragged out of the lumber mill at gun point, a chain wrapped around his neck, and dragged by a car down the road up and down until he was dead.

Frank never got arrested thanks to his friendship with the Sheriff and others, the other victims, who helped cover it up.

Luther's brother used to hate him for it, but he doesn't anymore. Life is too short to hold things like that. He understands that it's just fear and fear does terrible, terrible things to people as it spreads.

Now, they know where Dean's symptoms are coming from - the scratches being road rash and the wood chips being... well, wood chips. When learning that they can't possibly find all the parts of Luther along that road to burn, Dean has a mental breakdown and walks away from hunting and the apocalypse and everything... and this basically catches us up to where we were 43 hours later as Dean gets chased off by that adorable Yorkie.

Sam returns to find Dean in full panic mode and his entire attitude starts to take a hard shift left, much to Dean's shock and increasing panic. To top it all off, Sam's eyes turn a familiar demonic yellow as he throws Dean into a wall and begins to strangle him... only to have Dean snap out of it at the last minute, Sam with no yellow eyes or menacing demeanor.

The next day, Bobby arrives with a potential solution - a treatise on spirits from the Edo period of Japan. The ghost, a Burubru, that infects people with ghost sickness. The plan? To scare the ghost to death by replicating the method that it died. Even Bobby says it's a terrible plan, but they have less than two hours left before Dean is toast. Sam heads in to try and smoke Luthor out.

"WHERE THE F#$% ARE MY CHEETOS, DEAN?!?!"

In the motel, Dean hears the braying of the hell hounds and hallucinates them scraping at the door... until the Sheriff pops in, gun in hand, and in sickly rage. The two brawl, eventually Dean managing to knock the Sheriff away. The man dies of a heart attack soon after.

At the mill, Luther isn't showing up and Sam decides to take the most logical approach - make him angry by ripping up his art of Jessie. The mill starts coming alive and Luthor snatches Sam up.

We have a sickening heartbeat rhythm in the background as Dean scratches at his skin, eventually finding a motel Bible by the floor and picking it up... only to have a creepy little blonde girl cheerfully welcoming him back to Hell. While he declares she's not real, Lilith insists that it doesn't matter. He's still going to die and he'll go back to what he did in Hell... four months is like forty years, after all.

Yeah, hold on to that metric, it comes up a lot.

As Sam and Bobby work on taking down Luther, Lilith chants "Ba-Boom! Ba-Boom! Ba-Boom!" in time with Dean's rapidly increasing heartbeat in a way... and disappears at the last second as Luther is pulled by a chain attached to Bobby's car and evaporates into dust. Dean gasps, catching his breath as the sickness is gone - markings and all.

For the wrap up, the boys and Bobby share a brew as Dean gives them props on hauling Luther with a chain to re-kill him. They tease him about his breakdown earlier before Bobby leaves. Sam asks Dean what he saw running up near the end of the time, Dean noticing Sam's eyes - just for a second - turning demonic yellow. Perturbed, Dean deflects in an obvious manner, insisting that it was nothing he couldn't handle... and we end on that lie.

Well, not exactly.

We end on a blooper of Jensen Ackles lip-syncing the first verse of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger". Then we end.

Yellow Fever is an okay episode. We're slipping back into darker fare now, having had a breath for fresh air with Monster Movie last week. This one is a straight ghost story. You have Luthor, who is a nice person who is misunderstood as a monster and thus became a monster due to the actions of others around him. Gee, I wonder if that sounds like anyone we know?

Sam is sus...

All kidding aside, not a bad episode. It is interesting to see Dean's insecurities put on display as well as his bits of anxiety-ridden self-examination as the ghost sickness starts breaking him down more and more as well as his desperation at grabbing for the Bible when he believes he's going to Hell once again. That does bring up the question of if he would go back to Hell if he died, but we get that answered next season, so table it for now.

Other than the revelation that Bobby can read and speak fluent Japanese (which, if I'm not mistaken, he never does again on the show), there really isn't much else to say. A run of the mill ghost story with a pinch of levity and a vague sprinkling of foreshadowing and you have Yellow Fever. We'll be taking a week off from these reviews but when we do return... it will be the month of October. Horror Month 2023 will have begun! We will return to the story of Sam and Dean Winchester and their efforts to stop the apocalypse soon enough. Before that, however... well, we'll be following the adventures of a short, behatted man from Gallifrey and his companion from Perivale as they land at a naval base during World War II to answer an ancient call... and deal with a terrible curse.

Let the chains of Fenric shatter...

Be there!