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This was a pretty neat episode for a number of reasons: Jared got to play evil, spiking beer with holy water and the Meg demon came full circle.

The episode opens with a frantic Dean trying to track Sam who has gone AWOL; when Dean catches up with him in a dingy motel room Sam is a bloody, Bon Jovi loving mess with no memory of the previous week. There are Memento echoes as the brothers track their way back to the body, only to discover that it is a fellow hunter who has been murdered and the CCTV evidence points to Sam. Did he do it? Has he snapped and gone over to the dark side, or has he been possessed? Will Dean carry out the promise he made to his father? Sam pushes Dean just a little too far into killing him and I started to wonder if this was another test, like Croatoan. Even though you could see that Dean had accepted that Sam had blood on his hands he could not bring himself to kill his little brother. Dean pays a high price for that brotherly love because by the end of the episode he had been beaten up, pistol whipped and shot - lovely.

Sam’s behaviour escalates. He knocks Dean out and takes off to torment and torture Jo (who is now working in some dive bar nursing her unrequited love for Dean). Dean does a low tech CSI trace and is soon hot on the heels of the errant Sam. The turning point slash penny dropping moment is when we see that Sam has a symbol branded on his forearm and fans of the genre (and those who have studied Robert Langdon) know that symbols are never meaningless! Dean turns up just in the nick of time, dowses Sam with holy water causing his brother to do a so-so impersonation of a sauna. They fight, the demon confirms it was a test but is now taking off in his clever disguise (or “meat puppet” if you will) to bump off hunters and next on the list is Bobby (the trucker come scholar who helped the boys with Meg at the end of season one).

The final act is in Bobby’s house where evil Sam has been caught and they are trying to exorcise the Meg demon from him. Except demons on Supernatural are AP demons, they have been in the accelerated program in hell and have learnt a trick or two (the brand is actually a binding lock). Fearless viewers do not worry there is more fighting, Bobby comes to the rescue with a hot poker and before you can say Jiminy Cricket the boys are driving off into the sunset.