Dean, Lisa and Ben move house following the djinn attack in the premiere episode, though Dean still can’t let his guard down and tries to keep them from leaving the house. The tension carries over into his relationship with Lisa and Ben, even going so far as to yell at Ben for getting into the trunk of the Impala. Lisa, to her credit, tries to work with Dean and wants to know if there’s something out there that she should be worried about and the best way they can still live a semi-normal life.

Sam is working on a case involving a murdered couple and their missing baby; he finds out that there’s one more family (all who use the same security system) with a baby still unaccounted for and goes to investigate. He finds the couple dead in the living room and runs into the murderer, who he manages to cut with a silver knife and sees the skin react before the murderer can get away. There’s still something in the house, however and the next thing we see is Sam calling Dean in the car. After managing to get Dean to meet him, Sam shows Dean what he’s found in the victims’ house – their baby. Whatever had killed the baby’s parents is after the child as well.

Before Dean heads off with Sam, he returns to tell Lisa what’s going and how to handle a gun, just in case. The boys stop by a grocery store to stock up on baby supplies since the arsenal in Sam’s trunk wouldn’t really cut it. By the time they reach the check out lane, the baby won’t stop crying and an elderly woman approaches them and picks up the baby, who instantly calms down. When she offers to change the baby for them, Dean gets suspicious and catches sight of the woman in the security camera screen – the woman is actually a shapeshifter. They manage to get the baby away from her and flee the grocery store.

While Dean takes care of the baby – who they named Bobby John, Sam notes Dean’s fatherly abilities which Dean attributes to having to raise Ben over the past year. Sam also points out that what Dean has been doing – moving house and not letting them out of the place – is exactly what their father did. After finding out that one of the fathers is still alive, Sam goes to investigate and discovers that his wife had been unfaithful, even though she swore it had been him (he was out of town). Little Bobby John starts crying while Dean is taking a nap and when he looks in the crib, he finds a mess of blood and tissue, and that the baby has gone from a white child to a black child (the same one on the box of diapers near its crib). The shifter, in the guise of a police officer, tries to take his child back before Sam walks in and kills him.

Sam decides that it’s best to take the baby to the Campbells, despite Dean’s hesitation. He refuses to hand the child over to the Campbells because he doesn’t trust them. Just then, the shifter shows up disguised as Samuel Campbell and attacks the group, killing one of the cousins. Dean and Sam were able to take the baby down to the panic room and overhear the fight. Sam goes to help, but the shifter (who now looks like Sam) rips the door off its hinges and attacks Sam before going onto Dean. The shifter takes the baby from Dean and leaves him unconscious on the floor as he makes his escape.

My baby's back

When Dean comes to, he asks Sam and their grandfather what the thing was that attacked them because it was a lot stronger than the shifters they had encountered. They assume it must be the Alpha who was attacking these families to reclaim the children he had with the women. The boys leave and Samuel makes a call to someone who wants this Alpha shifter found and brought to him.
Back at Lisa’s home, Lisa tells Dean that he needs to go because she knows that he’ll never be able to give up hunting or Sam, now that he’s back in the picture. She tells him that he can always come back when he needs to, just to come back safely. The final scene is Dean taking the tarp off of the Impala with a grin.

This episode was a lot like Season One episodes with the boys working together and dealing with a monster of the week. There were a good number of angst-free, funny scenes with the old Sam/Dean banter that I’ve missed. It also had one of my favorite things to read in fanfic – the boys with babies – so I was all kinds of happy watching it. I loved watching Dean with the baby, being a little awkward at first, then fatherly and protective. The funniest scene had to be when he rubs a little Scotch on the baby’s gums to quiet it down and says “It’s good, isn’t it?”.

Excuse me, my ovaries have died of the cute.

More than the adorable Three Men and a Baby-esque scenes (side note: a favorite movie of mine from when I was a kid), was the completely fantastic last scene of Dean with the Impala. That scene literally had me jumping up and down for joy. My baby is definitely back!

Also, I have really come to like Lisa. When she was first introduced in Season Three, I was pretty ambivalent about her, then felt weird about Dean returning to her later in Season Five after almost no mention of her between those seasons. This season, they’ve really given her character depth and maturity. She isn’t a wilting flower nor is she angry with Dean for doing what he does – she accepts him and clearly tries to work with him to keep herself and her son safe. The fact that she told Dean to leave made me, and a lot of my fandom friends, very happy because she knows that Dean won’t ever be able to settle into a white picket fence-style life.

There is still something not quite right with Sam, however. It’s hard to put my finger on what exactly it is – it might be Lucifer’s influence from letting him take over, something might have been broken in him while he was in Hell, or as one of my friends suggested, might be the influence of the Campbells. Dean calls him out on wanting to bring the baby to the Campbells, claiming that he only wanted to use the baby as bait to lure the Alpha shifter in. The Sam we all know and love would never do that, so there’s something going on with him. I’m interested to see what Sera Gamble and the writers have planned for this because it seems like there will be a big reveal down the line. What I said last week about wanting to give the Campbells the benefit of the doubt, I’d like to take back. Their behavior in this episode really rubbed me the wrong way. There’s something almost demonic in their mannerisms and the way they talk – very predatory and dark. This doesn’t seem like “oh well, they’re just hunters and they’re all unable to function normally because they’re damaged” like I’d previously thought. Dean clearly sensed this too and refused to hand over the shifter child to them. Samuel’s phone conversation after the boys leave also raised a red flag for me – who was he talking to? what do they want with an Alpha shifter?

Next week, Castiel returns!

“Two and a Half Men” is available on iTunes now.