The CW Source

I hated this episode, I don't understand why people want this rather then the plot of the season, I rather prefer the plot of the angels and demons, I find it interesting. But everybody has their own tastes. I didn't like how it was just some feral kid rather then something actually Supernatural.

I loved "family remains" It was really scary, especially as a guy just got arrested for keeping his kids prisoner! The scariest three bits for me where seeing that girl eat the live rat, the hand licking bit by the bed and lastly at the end, seeing that girls cold eyes staring right at you! What really annoys me about supernatural is that i cant see missed episodes online! Help!

I liked this episode much better than the Heaven/Hell matchup that has been going on. When both sides commit murder to get what they want, there is no difference between the "good" guys and the "bad" guys except for the team uniforms.
Leave the theology to the religious types. I want vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, and the occasional demon!

"I rolled my eyes right on with him when Dean started whining and wallowing again."

Dean has talked about Hell 3 times, as of Family Remains. In Wishful Thinking, he all he said was he didn't want to tell Sam about it. No wallowing or whining.

In fact Samfans whined about how mean he was for not revealing all his innermost feelings to Sam no matter how much it pained him because apparently it's Sam's right to know everything about Dean(despite the fact that Sam's allowed to keep things to himself as much as he wants).

The second time Dean talked about it was in Heaven and Hell. It's quite clear from the Impala scene at the beginning of Family Remains that Dean hadn't said a word about since what he told Sam in Heaven and Hell. So he has not been forcing poor little Sammy to listen to the terrors of what happened to him.

I mean hey it was so much worse for Sam to spend 4 months up here where if he'd want to he could have found companionship in friends like Bobby than for Dean to have been TORTURED for 30 years and finally broken. Yeah no time for sympathy for Dean at all for the 4 or 5 minutes of screentime spread out of over 3 episodes he dares take up with the his feelings about that.

Sam got time in Metamorphosis to expound upon his feelings both about when Dean was gone and why he decided to use his powers AND he got about 10 minutes of flashbacks in I Know What You Did. But hey can't let Dean have his 5 minutes.

Tell me how does that constitute wallowing and whining? He's been doing the opposite of wallowing and whining. Dean's not asking anyone to feel sorry for him, in fact he sees himself as the victimizer of others.

But I guess it was fine all those times Sam whined and wallowed about his powers and how he was going to become something he wasn't and how Dean had to kill him.

Oh but wait we don't know anything about Sam, he never got any focus on his issues in all the three previous seasons? Yeah right. Try another one.

I am writing this review just about 36 hours before the premiere of Criss Angel is a Douche Bag (still makes me laugh), but I wanted to take time and think about this episode. I knew from the moment we saw "NOW" that it wouldn't be the greatest episode ever, and I understand that. When the episode title, slides and everything else came online, there was a promise about this episode being one of the creepiest yet made, and that stood. That doll head? The dog?? The licking??!!! Yeah... it was creepy...
I do think the episode was lacking of Sam lines. I am not trying to pick up a fight here about the boys' air time, but I just think that Sam could have been more... there. Trying to talk with the family, instead of just standing there reading a random journal... I just feel like Sam is more than just disconnected lately, and that worries me. I just can't wait for an episode where he'll be more into it.
The end scene made me mad at first. Why did it have to be at the end of the episode, on the side of the road, and Dean talking all the time, again? I know that the whole episode was to bring us at this point, to tell us that Dean enjoyed torturing souls and all... but a different kind of scene would have hit me more. Don't get me wrong, tears were flowing down my cheeks like a river at the end of H&H, but this time it didn't get to me. Maybe in another scene or something less repetitive I would have joined in on the waterworks. Sorry!

Overall, I give this episode an 8 out of 10. It's hard doing this especially after a long wait during Christmas (when you tell your relatives that all you want for Christmas is the new Supernatural episodes, there's something going on...). But I say it's over now, the best episodes are yet to come!!! I'm just so excited that I got my show back and that I have something to look forward to every Thursday now!

Now bring on that Douche Bag! hahaha! (It's still funny....)

Subject matter was foul, but the episode was very well-made ...script, not so much...literate wall-dwelling children as exhibit A.

However, disagree strongly with your take on Dean's lack of caring in last scene - at the end of Heaven and Hell, he said that he wished he could not feel any more - feelings supressed rather than lacking? Trying to save his sanity...and although Sam lacked lines in the episode thought he was really good.

The writers need to find a way to move both Sam and Dean's storylines forward. Sam has basically become background scenery, being sent off to the attic and standing around reading while Dean does everything from bond with the family to fighting the MOTW and saving the little boy. Once again the story is used only to lead up to another dashboard confessional. Dean has every right to be traumatized, but can we move his storyline forward instead of tacking his angst once again onto the last scene. And I have a really innovative idea, how about we give Sam some lines to actually console his brother rather than expect us to gather what he is thinking from his facial expressions? This season is quickly losing me.

overall, i think its season 4's weakest episode, but then again I wasn't expecting a huge episode on supernatural's return from the hiatus (e.g., like the ghostfacers episode in season 3).

and sarah, sam did not roll his eyes when dean was talking about hell! he was just rolling them when dean told him that he was worse than the girl in the walls. and yeah, in a way, i'd get a little frustrated and possibly roll my eyes at dean for thinking of himself worse than any monster.

and the kids' writing? come on, 'go' and 'too late' are sooo not difficult to write. the gun locker? its not hard to pop open a trunk, especially if it was made before the 1990's.

i think you are just being too critical on the little things rather than the bigger flaws.

wasn't the greatest story told by supernatural writers, but who can blame them? they've written excellent stories for 71 episodes and if an episode falls a little short above the really highly set bar, i'll be okay with it.
and a part of the episode that i did like is the creepiness it brought back (uuuugh that part when she killed the rat and ate it! i'm surprised she survived for so long! rats carry sooo many diseases xP). i mean, supernatural has always been creepy etc, but with the angels/demons war occupying most of the time, its nice to see a little deviation from the central plot.

all in all i'm not disappointed because honestly i didn't really have high expectations for it, although i am anticipating supernatural's strong comeback soon.

keep up the awesome work kripke and co

especially jensen and jared, your acting is flawless!!

ok... i agree this wasnt the best of the season but it was still better then most TV! but mostly i disagree with your take on Sam rolling his eyes. I think it had more to do with Dean talking trash about Dean then hell... he had just finishing saying he was worse then the abused kids. This isnt the first time Dean has thought the worse of himself and Sam just doesnt understand (at least thats what i think) and i dont take the "i liked it" as black/white either. being relied that someone else is being tortured isnt the same as picking it as your favourite pasttime! At the end of the day i'm just glad the show is back ...been too long:)

As boring as this one was it was tons better than IKWYDLS and H&H!

My biggest disappointments of the season still stand. They seem to have by-passed the first 30 years that Dean suffered in hell and made it all about the last 10 when he became a torturer. Just so Dean could have more reasons to loathe himself. I was really hoping for some great PTSD scenes (Dean shouldn't be able to function right now) not more self esteem issues!

You add that with a cold & callous Sam who threw Hell in Dean's face as levity in MM, out of cruelness in IKWYDLS and made a thoughtless and careless comment in this one. Combined with a Sam who replaced his brother with the Demon who cheered his desent into hell a week after his death. Not to mention Sam won't own his own choices nor take responsiblity for them. He just whines about the 1% of demon blood in his body (nevermind the 99% of God given Winchester blood) and blames everyone else. He expects Dean to share with him about hell despite his own insensitivity and when Dean does he has nothing helpful to say. I used to scoff at the viewers who wanted Dean to talk to Castiel about his hell experience and not Sam. But they were right. Sam doesn't have the right to know.

Anyway the writers haven't done either character any favors and this ep was no exception.

I really liked the overall episode but had some problems. There is just too much "I suffered in hell pity me" from Dean and too little Sam in general. Every time Dean brings up hell, i role my eyes along with Sam. It's too much. I need more Sam-going-evil plotline and less Dean-is-whining-about-hell. The whole demon blood plotline was like dropped from thin air. BRING IT BACK!

I'm not one of the fans who complain about the show, normally. Usually, I'm the type to say, "If you don't like it, stop watching," because it's only television. It's not life or death.

I'm not going to complain about the lack of Sam time, either.

My biggest problem with this episode was, surprisingly, how little Carver knows about Dean. It's not surprising that he's not able to capture Dean, because he's new to the show. It's only surprising, to me, because two of my favorite episodes were written by him. But this one fell completely flat. I've never disliked an episode so much, and to have waited all those weeks and end up with this garbage was pretty disappointing.

I'm sorry, but the Dean Winchester that was portrayed in this episode is not the Dean Winchester we've all come to know and love. I expect a lot of changes, of course, because he's been through Hell and back, literally. But to be expected to believe that he'd tell Sam something like that with so little emotion, and to think that Sam wouldn't have much more than a ridiculous look on his face as a response is...well. It was all completely out of character, and just surprised me.

Carver mentioned in an interview that he'd never given horror a try, and I have to say that in regards to that, he did excellently. This episode was creepy and disturbing, and if I didn't watch the show more for Sam and Dean and less for the scary bits, I'd have thoroughly enjoyed it. He did beautifully for his first try at this kind of genre.

But he got the boys all wrong. Or, at least, I hope he got them wrong, because if this is how they're going to be portrayed from now on, I'm pretty sure I'm going to lose complete interest in the show, sadly.

This was a really creepy, twisty ep. My only gripe is that we have two sub-human kids who live in the walls, eat rat tartar, play ball, yet know how to write. That seemed kind of peculiar to me.

We have a family who leaves one place of tragedy to move to another, and what do they get?--more tragedy! I hope the brother/uncle doesn't decide to haunt them. Dean and Sam should have suggested they salt and burn his corpse.

I found all the running around, searching for Danny and the dog (poor doggy!) very exciting. When the girl thought the dog was licking her hand and it turned out one of the creatures (the boy, I assume) was doing it, I wanted to scream right along with her. When the dog came trailing into the room, I just lost it!

The revelation of the "kitchen" in the walls, with the dead animals scattered everywhere, was pretty disgusting. Even grosser was the girl taking a bite out of a wriggling rat in front of Danny, who will need therapy for years to come. I wonder--were the brother and sister twins, or did the poor gal who killed herself have to give birth twice as a result of Daddy's incestuous intentions? This wasn't even a suggestion of incest, folks, this was the real thing!

I made the mistake of reading one other review in which people are saying that Dean's character has been officially assassinated with his telling Sam he liked torturing souls in hell. I doubt that's true. I think he convinced himself he enjoyed it because it was the only way he could get through it. The man was tortured for 30 years and a torturer for 10, a 3-1 ratio. Knowing how sensitive Dean is to the suffering of others, I sincerely doubt he liked flaying souls brought to the rack. To keep his sanity, however, he tricked his mind into believing he was having fun. I will NEVER believe he really enjoyed doing it.

We had the beginning scene in the Impala, where Sam, awaking in the back seat, chided Dean for working the two of them to exhaustion, while Dean sidestepped discussing what he had told his brother before the break. The ending brought Dean confessing, without tears, that he had enjoyed torturing others down in hell, a revelation that clearly shocked Sam.

This wasn't the best of SUPERNATURAL, but I thought it a tense, scary episode with a likable family (who, it turned out, had lost their eldest son the previous year and moved to this farm house for a new beginning), surprises (TWO nutty siblings, no supernatural creatures and a terrible revelation from Dean), and the realization that, as Dean once said (paraphrasing), "Demons, I get. People are crazy."

Love, Robin

While this was not one of my favorite episodes either, I'm sick of reading people's complaints about a show I truly love. This may be part of the reason Eric Kripke sometimes has a problem with the fans. He can't please everyone, and when people don't get exactly what they want, they bitch and moan about it. I say if you trust him to bring you the show you love, then deal with the times when you don't. You are entitled to your opinion, but I hate when people try to ruin something for others.

Yes, Sam hasn't been given the stories this year. Maybe that's because his story lines were about all we experienced seasons one and two. I like that this season deals with Dean's soul, and though I would like Sam to have more to do, I wouldn't trade it for the chance to see Dean get to become a fuller character and tell us stories we've never heard.

And maybe when Sam was rolling his eyes in this episode it wasn't because he didn't want to hear Dean talk about Hell again. After all, he was the one who begged him to talk to him. Maybe he was rolling his eyes at the fact that Dean is always making himself out to be a bad guy. It did happen after Dean said he was worse than the kids. Sam's whole life he's heard Dean's low opinion of himself and he's never been able to convince him otherwise. That could cause some weariness.

Also, for the people who wrote this episode's recap, I don't really appreciate you giving a biased summary of the episode. You are of course entitled to your opinion too, but when you give your negative opinion in a journalistic format, you discourage other people from taking joy out of it. You also need to check your spelling and grammar.

I'm no longer going to read these CW Source things or the comments because there's little point or enjoyment.

After re-watching this episode today, my initial low opinion didn't really change; the only part I truly enjoyed was Sam sleeping in the back seat of the Impala at the start and getting to see that little glimpse into their daily lives/routine. This show is too often guilty of being WAY too heavy-handed in its use of contrived plots in standalone episodes in order to beat the viewer over the head with whichever existentialist/moral/spiritual crisis one or both of the brothers might be undergoing at the time. I think we fans are smart enough to figure these things out, sigh, without having to have feral children and hapless families act as the lame filter through which Dean's angst and spiritual turmoil must be filtered. And what about Sam: as the season has progressed, he's become little more than a giant cardboard cut-out, conveniently propped up near Dean ( complete with a patented expression of grave stoicism planted on his face) for the main purpose of serving as a sounding board for Dean's dark night of the soul. I admit I wanted MORE signs early on of Dean suffering some form of PTSD from his ordeal in Hell; but why can't the writers give us that without cutting Sam's amount of screen time in comparison? I don't care WHAT the overarching mytharc is at the moment; I still say it isn't IMPOSSIBLE to write the show for BOTH brothers within the context of any given episode. Geez, I've always loved this show mainly for the element of the BROTHERS, TOGETHER, not just for one brother's arc monopolizing episode after episode while the other receives short shrift or is made to stand around like wallpaper. And don't even get me started on the very amateurish plot holes in this ep; if those feral, incestuous kids were so wild and animalistic, how the heck did they learn to read and write and comprehend enough to know how to unload all the weapons from the Impala, etc? Grr, I abhor sloppy writing!!

I liked this episode. It wasn't up to the high standard as some of the other episodes this season but it was still good. I liked the fact they had a "just hunting" episode instead of the the whole angel/demon storyline. It was good to not have that mentioned much this episode (not that I don't like the storyline but its good to just have a simple episode every now and then that isn't "to be continued"). Some the parts of this episode were stupid eg. the psycho brother coming out of nowhere but it was still super creepy and had a couple of funny lines. I'm looking forward to next week.

I miss Sam period.

I rolled my eyes right on with him when Dean started whining and wallowing again.

He's rapidly becoming an unsympathetic character with his emo ness.

I think why Benders worked and this didn't was because in Benders 1) Sam was in danger (and since he's one of the two main characters, it made it a LOT more interesting than just some random kid we just met) and 2) there wasn't any other motivation behind it- it was just Sam was in danger and Dean had to save him. There was no 'this is how I felt in Hell and now I need to make up for it'. It was just a cool story.

I loved Benders, but I felt this episode was really lacking.

This was by far the WORST episode ever of Supernatural - and normally I am a big fan of the show. Ok it was super creepy and really scared me... but the story? A man having two kids with his daughter and hiding them in the house...

THIS is an actual and terrible story that really happened in Amstetten! This is nothing to make a big tv show story - this is something that happened to real people and something that marks these people forever!
I am Austrian and I don't know what upset me more - the storyline itself or the lame joke about that this actually happened! After this whole story came out I met soo many people who used this as a nice joke like "do all Austrians live in cellars?"
This is nothing to make fun or just "nice" evening entertainment!

Kripke is generally great and his ideas are fantastic, but this was too much! I feel sooo sorry for what happened there and therefore it is even worse that an American TV show uses it to have a story for one more episode...

And then to take this tragic and horrible thing just to show how pooooor Dean is - cause he was in hell and tortured all these soules...

Sorry - just too much! Hope the next one is better!

The ep is at the bottom of my list for the season, but I still liked it. "Questions" aren't "holes." The boys had absolutely no way of knowing what the dad had done to the kids after they were born. They could have spent a decade or more living in the house with him, and could have learned to talk and read and write. Maybe they got too difficult to dominate, and he locked them in the basement crawl spaces, dropping food down the dumbwaiter but eventually boarding it up, which would have been the catalyst for them coming out and killing him. Climbing in the walls would make them strong.

Again, not the best episode, but they can't all be, and it was better than most horror movies in terms of storyline and logic.

"felt a lot like another great season 1 episode!(Benders)"

Which is exactly why I didn't like it that much - the boys were hunting humans in both episodes! And yeah, both "The Benders" and "Family Remains" are two of the creepiest SPN episodes ever IMO, but the show is NOT about hunting psycho, wierd, barely-human beings.
I get that hunters end up coming around cases like this (how many times have we heard the boys saying "We've looked into less than this"), but that doesn't mean they should be the Creature Of The Week!

And besides, were we really supposed to draw a comparison between Dean's time in hell and those two super creepy/super gross siblings?
And BTW - the older brother coming out of nowhere was a bit random.

And the whole family drama? Not compelling! "We're not okay... but we're together!" Like, seriously?? You'll need a shrink for the rest of your life, how the hell can you be so calm???

Overral, I think this was the season's weakest episode.

I dunno. I was sooo happy to see the boys back and for the storyline to be MotW, not all 'angel-demon-oh-noes'! Don't get me wrong, I like the arc the season is taking, but it was nice to see the boys do a real, regular job again. So I was thrilled when it looked like it was going to be a great ghost story!

But the 'real people' thing again...give us the ghosts! What's wrong with a great, scary ghost story again! Or creature, something that can cross salt lines! Let us learn more about the creatures the boys fight! The moment I really headdesked was "She's got a brother!" *sigh*

Also...poor dog! And Danny must be the most well-adjusted kid in the world to PLAY BALL with the scary girl in his closet!

I loved seeing the boys again, but C'MON! It's called 'SUPERNATURAL' for a reason!

No idea why you didn't like the episode? It was a a great creepy episode! Similiar to Metamorphosis. It had some great creepy moments, a super creepy non-ghost girl and felt a lot like another great season 1 episode!(Benders)