- Sunday turned Edgar into a frog, in retribution for his drunken verbal and physical assault. The Hunters managed, just barely, to change him back before the midnight deadline that would have made it permanent—a princess had to kiss the frog, and Lucy was apparently good enough.
- Dan missed the adventure. Lucy talked to him beforehand, and she told everyone he said he had the flu.
- Charlie and Rico—well, Charlie—tried to help. But in the end, the Hunters didn’t need their assistance. And Charlie and Rico really, really don’t like Sunday for some reason.
- Lucy still managed to avoid having the inevitable fight with her cheating boyfriend, Brian, or her roommate, Vanessa, with whom Brian is sleeping.
“Green”
As it turns out, Dan didn’t have the flu. He was sick—but mainly, he was just pissed at Dean. But two days have passed, and he’s feeling a lot better. He’s received an insurance check for the van that was “stolen” (filled with combustibles and driven into a vampire den: “You’re No Fun Anymore”) and replaced it…and who should he find inspecting its shiny goodness but Charlie and Rico. They do their Dino and Luigi bit a little again (“It’s a nice van you’ve got here.” “Stop that!”), but quickly get down to their purpose. They give Dan a heavily abridged version of the frog incident, pumping up Sunday’s malevolence and the benefit of their assistance, and again give their directive to get away from her. Apparently, this isn’t the first time Sunday’s turned someone who angered her into an animal of some kind—birds, snakes, fish, whatever comes to mind...and apparently, she did it once to Rico.
CHARLIE: “She turned him into a newt!”
DAN: “A newt?”
RICO: “Yeah!” [pause] “I got better.”
Fortunately, the two brothers make a quick exit. As they’re leaving, Lucy calls Dan to plan another group meeting that night at the bar. Dan agrees to be there.
Meanwhile, Dean is settled into his new apartment. (He was sleeping on Lucy’s couch; now he’s moved out to the closest available apartment: two doors down from her.) He decides to head for the batting cages to work on his swing, and on the way out he runs into Lucy. She’s waiting for the elevator and listening to her iPod—“Simon and Garfunkel,” she says; “some of the gloomiest music ever recorded.”
When Dean returns, he’s joined in the elevator by a tall, athletic guy he’s never seen before. The man’s phone rings, to the tune of Jay-Z’s “Dirt off Your Shoulder.” When the elevator reaches Dean’s floor, Lucy is once again outside waiting for it, and Dean learns the identity of his fellow passenger—it’s Brian, Lucy’s boyfriend. She’s stunned to see him here, as she hasn’t seen him in weeks.
BRIAN: “I came to see my girlfriend.”
LUCY: “You mean me?”
BRIAN: “Who else would I mean?”
LUCY: “I don’t know. How many girlfriends do you have in this building?”
Dean pushes past them, sensing the long-built-up argument coming and wanting no part of it. But once in his apartment, he realizes he needs food—Lucy’s given him permission to raid her fridge whenever he needs to. So he heads to her apartment where, indeed, she and Brian have started their fight.
BRIAN: “If you want to accuse me of something, don’t sit there inferring [sic] it, just do it. Don’t beat around the bush with your passive-aggressive—
LUCY: “Are you sleeping with Vanessa?”
BRIAN: “…I didn’t think you were actually going to do it.”
Dean makes his food and soon draws the ire of Brian, who demands to know who this strange man is, who’s entering her apartment without knocking and eating her food without asking. Brian, apparently a ginormous hypocrite, accuses Lucy of cheating on him with Dean. (“I wish,” Dean thinks but does not say.) Lucy throws Brian out of the apartment, and she and Dean prepare to leave.
At the bar, the band is back together again and united for a single purpose: teasing Edgar as much as possible for his frog adventure. (The jokes are fast and furious, but my favorite is probably Willem asking him, with solemnity: “So: was it easy being green?”) Once that passes—well, at least, slows down—they discuss their next move. Taking out Detective Panam is suggested, but there is uneasiness at the idea of taking down a cop, even a crooked one working for the vampires. But both Willem and Lucy have the same idea: pile up lots of guns. Willem suggests waiting for the gun show happening in a few weeks; Lucy suggests getting them right now. From where? “The only people I know of,” she says, “who have those kinds of weapons…are drug dealers.” All eyes turn to Dan.
Dan calls a few people, contacts leading to other contacts, and eventually gets a weapons dealer named Jack on the phone. Jack tells him he has the kind of stuff they need, and gives them complicated directions to get to his house—it involves parking one’s vehicle in one place and walking through a darkened field for about half a mile. The gang stops to pick up a large chunk of the money Sunday gave them and heads off.
As they trudge through said field, the Hunters spot a group of shambling zombies in a nearby drainage ditch. The walking corpses are quickly and mercilessly dispatched. The journey continues.
(I break in here to assure you that the scene with the zombies, while it probably seemed as such at the time, was not mere pointless filler. It actually is important, just not until a later episode. We now return to our recap, already in progress.)
They arrive at their destination: a large barn. Inside they meet Jack, a man in his sixties who sports long green hair. He shows off his large collection of weapons, and the Hunters make many, many purchases. Jack also reveals that forcing them to walk through that field was merely a test, to make sure they were serious. He gives Dan directions on how to get to the front of his house, so they don’t have to carry hundreds of pounds of guns half a mile back to their van. (Of course, they can just throw them all into Dean’s magical bag, but Jack doesn’t know that.)
Once Dan returns with the van, the Hunters start loading up the gear. They give Jack the money and he’s in the middle of telling them what a wise choice they made coming to him when a group of angry Crips shows up. Jack assures the Hunters that he sold them quality merchandise, and the Crips are probably just angry that he also sold a large amount of weapons to their rivals. And sure enough, another few carloads of gangsters pull up, and the gangs start shooting at each other.
Jack runs, and the Crips start chasing him down and shooting, too. The Hunters get caught in the middle, and Dan almost gets his head blown off. He returns fire.
In the shootout, the Hunters take out three of the gang members, Edgar gets a minor gunshot wound in this chest, and Dean—pushing Willem out of the way—takes a very minor wound in the right arm. With Jack gone, Dean throws all the ammo he can find into the bag, and the Hunters jump into the van and speed toward the hospital. On the way there, Edgar calls his not-yet-ex-wife and tells her that he’s been shot.
Once there, Dean and Edgar are treated. Lucy is beside herself with guilt—this was her idea, so she thinks she’s responsible. Everyone else seems to find the entire situation amusing, but she’s stricken with remorse. She leaves, saying, “If anyone thinks of an idea that won’t get one of us shot, you know where to find me.”
Which leads to our very first end-of-House-episode Musical Montage, set to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York.” (The gloomiest music imaginable.) Dean tries Lucy out of her guilt, to no avail. Dan and Willem head to get some food, stopping on the way in the hospital gift shop to buy something for Edgar (if you don’t already know it’s a frog of some kind, shame on you). And Edgar has an angry confrontation with his wife, regarding her upcoming marriage to his brother. “What can he give you that I can’t?” She starts to answer, but he cuts her off. “What? Fidelity? Honesty? Sobriety? Security? Stability?” “I was going to say ‘love.’ But your stuff is good, too.”
Storyteller’s notes: As I said before, all of the stuff with the guns was meant to take place last week, with the frog episode this week. Without the frog backstory, the episode would have been much darker. But I think it turned out just fine this way.
This week’s episode: “Gimme Shelter.”
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