‘Supernatural’ Recap — Episode 8.04, “Bitten.”

And now for something completely different—this most recent episode of Supernatural hardly featured the Winchesters, instead opting to take a more “Cloverfield” approach, with the vast majority of the footage shot by the actors, using hand-held cameras, and turning it into something that the fandom had actually explicitly asking for recently—an episode from the monster’s point of view.

It starts out bloody. Really bloody. The Winchesters break into a house and find a room with two gruesomely dead bodies in it, obviously way late to whatever had gone

down there. They, however, find a laptop with a note that says “play me,” and the audience and the brothers dive into the episode together…

If you tried to tune in at this point in the episode—or, the good majority of it, actually–you might have thought you were watching the wrong show. It focuses on a group of three college kids; Michael, Brian, and Kate, since they’re the ones filming it and all, and we first see how Kate meets the two boys, bonding in a coffee shop over their love of filming and, of course, falling for the tall blonde one (Michael) and leaving Brian visibly jealous.

But, life goes on. Kate talks about how she wants a future in law, Brian wants to work for big-time film people, and Michael wants a big boat. They go to class and talk about Lord of the Flies (a high school level book that they’re being taught in college for some reason…).

That is, until they come across a crime scene, with a dead body and all, and America’s favorite not-actually-FBI-agents show up to investigate, and the kids get them on tape (without being shut down, somehow). Sounds something like an animal attack, and that’s all they hear about until the next night, when they spot our ‘agents’ snooting around campus again. Of course the kids have to make a “workplace romance” comment about them because Supernatural is ridiculously hyper-aware of itself.

But we don’t get to see much of them, because Michael and Brian end up pissing off a jock and getting chased into the woods around campus. Which turns out to be a bad, bad idea, because examining Michael’s footage, he seems to get attacked by some sort of wild animal. Brian drags him back to their house (jeez, these kids must be swimming in money), but when they examine the bite under his bloody clothing, it seems to have completely healed. So, no harm done.

Until they find out Michael has super strength. Of course, being college kids, they mess around with it and don’t seem altogether worried, with Brain insisting that his friend is a superhero and…asking to help him get bit so he’ll get powers. Michael smartly refuses, since they have no idea what’s actually happening, but Brian of course gets pissed about it.

Fortunately enough Brian seems to be keeping civil, and their feud is all but forgotten when lo and behold, the FBI dudes show up at their door. They ask Brian a few questions, though he refuses to acknowledge that he knows what’s going on with the weird stuff in the neighborhood. And, as the ‘agents’ walk away, they ramble off something about a Mayan god. So now Michael thinks he’s a god, though that may just have been the weed talking.

Then, he transforms during the night, growing fangs and claws…though he doesn’t hurt anyone in the house, just empties out the fridge before leaving for more food and getting cornered by some jocks with a camera. That is, until he runs into the forest, gets chased, and ends up attacking one of them, creating another crime scene (with a missing heart, as the Winchesters find out) and coming home covered in blood.

Kate and Brian are of course freaked out, but Kate argues self-defense. Brian argues and gets beat down by Michael, further…complicating things.

Kate tracks after Sam and Dean in hopes of getting more information, which Michael isn’t too happy about, but goes on with their plan anyways, and they sneak into a cafe to see what the agents are getting into, because all federal agents discuss their top secret cases in the middle of public restaurants.

Well, Sam and Dean do, at least, and the kids hear what the audience was probably thinking from the start. They’ve got a werewolf on their hands—a sort of special werewolf, but a werewolf nonetheless. Cue everyone freaking out—but Brian at least freaking out productively, spotting something in his video and then going out into the woods to find it. It’s the pin that their professor had, that we saw in the beginning of the episode.

So, naturally, he puts a camera up in his professor’s office and goes to confront him about it. Or, more like, asks him to turn him, but also gets some background information.

The professor had been resisting eating human hearts until just recently, and being afraid of getting caught, he’d turned Michael so he might turn violent and get blamed for the crime. Though it didn’t work, as we see in the rest of Brian’s footage—the Winchesters showed up and took care of the guy.

But Brian had got a bite out of him before that.

Michael, of course, is pissed, and Brian goes all alpha wolf over Kate, so there’s a little bit of a rough and tumble. And by that, I mean Michael gets stabbed with the silver knife Brian had on him. He doesn’t seem repentant about it at all, and turns Kate.

Who then murders him and rips him to shreds.

She leaves a video message for the Winchesters, and it turns out she’s the one who had made the movie we’ve been watching this whole time. She promises not to hurt anyone, and just asks for the brothers to not come after her.

Dean, in a show of compassion that it didn’t seem like it had in him after the turns his character took in seasons 6 and 7, decides to let Kate go.

I love the smell of character development in the evenings.

Tune into the next episode of Supernatural on the CW on Halloween at 9/8c!