Previously on Ash Vs. Evil Dead: Ash (Bruce Campbell) attended Candy’s (Katrina Hobbs) funeral to support Brandy (Arielle Carver-O’Neill). Candy’s corpse reanimated and Ash had to re-behead it, to everyone’s dismay. Ruby (Lucy Lawless) revealed herself to Ash. Ash filled in Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo), Pablo (Ray Santiago), and Dalton (Linsday Farris) about the Ruby/Prevett situation. Pablo had another vision of the Masked Woman (Hannah Tasker-Poland), who says he must find the Kandarian dagger and listen to his Brujo. The Ghostbeaters and Dalton headed back to the cabin site to find the dagger, where Dalton was overtaken by the Evil Dead. Pablo rammed Dalton with a truck and then disappeared. Ruby went to Brock’s (Lee Majors) grave and reanimated him; he headed to Ash’s and met Brandy, who believes he really survived having his head smashed in by the Delta 88. Ash showed up, fought with Brock, and gored him with the chainsaw, soaking Brandy in his blood. Bloody Brandy stormed out.
Recap
Ash dismembers Brock’s body, saying that Ruby couldn’t fool him. Brock reappears as a ghost, then solidifies (but he’s still a ghost). Ash tells Ghost Brock about Brandy. “Damn, you miss so much when you’re dead!” Ghost Brock exclaims, then says he’s going to show Ash what he meant to tell him right before Brock died. Ash remarks that it cost $300 to pound out the fender of the Delta 88 where it crushed Brock’s head, and Ghost Brock says Ash is a cheapskate because his funeral cost less. Ash sheepishly says, “That’s not true…ish,” God, I love their relationship!
Kelly shows up at the house to tell Ash about Pablo, but Ash is already gone. Brandy, however, comes back, still covered in her grandfather’s blood. She relates what she saw to Kelly. “Makes high school seem a lot less awful, amirite?” Kelly tries to joke. Kelly defends Ash, “the perverted drunk with racist tendencies,” because he has his moments. She tells Brandy that evil killed her parents, too. As they are about to leave in the truck, a motorcycle heads right at them and a body flies through the windshield. Bloody opening credits!
It’s Deadite Pablo, who attacks and bites Kelly’s calf, causing her to drop the dagger. “All Out Of Love” by Air Supply plays on the radio as Kelly and Brandy try to escape. The truck stalls. Pablo torments them after Kelly grabs the dagger. She and Brandy run and hide inside Ash’s trailer, with Pablo mounting an all-out assault.
Ghost Brock brings Ash to a snowy day in Brock’s past at the hardware store. It’s 2012 around Christmastime. Ghost Brock phases through the front door; Ash bonks right into it; I laugh like a lunatic. Ghost Brock references It’s A Wonderful Life, but I don’t think Brock will get a pair of wings after this is over. In the memory Ghost Brock is showing Ash, a man in a leather trench coat (Will Wallace) comes in to ask Brock about his son. We find out that Ash’s middle name is Joanna; again, I laugh like a lunatic. The man tells Brock about Ash’s prophesy; he also wears a “KOS” ring and has the lost pages of the Necronomicon. Brock won’t tell him where Ash is because Ash has gone through enough. Brock kicks the man in the junk and the man falls down the stairs into the cellar, possibly dead.
Back at the trailer, Brandy thinks Ash is probably on a beer run. Kelly won’t kill Pablo; she wants to help him. Brandy curses Ash again, and Kelly gives her a “come to Jesus” talk about Ash, revealing also that Prevett is a demon. Kelly’s wound starts hurting badly, but she continues to defend Ash.
In the memory, Brock boards up the cellar. Ghost Brock brought Ash to this moment because he wanted Ash to see that he was being a good father and trying to protect Ash, despite their differences. Present-day Ash goes into the cellar, but the man’s body is gone. Ash doesn’t trust the scene and puts on the chainsaw. Ghost Brock chides Ash that he’s scared, but Ash retorts, “I’ve had a little experience with dead bodies in cellars, dad!” The lights, which didn’t work at first, come on and things in the cellar move a little. Ash finds the man’s skeleton—the man tried to survive on Brock’s Spam rations, poor bastard. The man also wrote a lot of words and symbols on the cellar wall, and Ash finds the lost pages of the Necronomicon.
The show cross-cuts between somewhere else, where the Necronomicon flies open right as Ruby shows up to see it, and the cellar. Ash thinks maybe Pablo can decipher the lost pages, then studies the symbol on the wall and sees Rachel (Ellie Gall) inside it, begging for help. The book bubbles up with blood. Tentacles come out of the wall and grab Ash. Ghost Brock can’t help because he’s incorporeal. The tentacles mess with Ash and bind him to the ceiling. He uses the chainsaw to escape, landing with a hard THUD on the floor. Ghost Brock, realizing his time is up, mentions that he used to go bowling with the real Prevett. Before he disappears, he tells Ash, “And son, you’re gonna be a great father.” Ash responds, “You really mean that?” “No,” Ghost Brock says as he fades out, laughing softly.
Ruby sees Kaya (Chelsie Preston Crayford) in the pages of the book where the blood had bubbled up. Kaya tells Ruby that the Knights of Sumeria are still around; the two briefly discuss the Dark Ones. Kaya says she needs to be freed; Ruby will free her when she finds a suitable host, Ruby notes. Uh oh. Watch your back, Brandy! Back in the trailer, it sounds like Pablo has gotten inside, but he’s not in the trailer—the lower half of his face is coming out of Kelly’s leg wound. Yuck!
Ruby goes back to the cabin site and finds Deadite Dalton with the branch still sticking out of his chest. She casts a spell on him to turn him back to normal briefly so she can talk to him. Ruby thought she killed all the “delusional morons,” but Dalton says there are plenty KOS out there. He says they can send her back to Hell. “For the record, Hell is not my turf,” Ruby says, then twists the branch and pulls it out. Dalton’s wound spews blood; Ruby says she’ll wait for evil to take him again and then get her info, but while she’s distracted talking like a Bond villain, Dalton pulls out a gun and blows his own head off. I told you he wasn’t going to last long in Ash’s world!
Ash arrives at Prevett’s home and calls out for Ruby. Prevett’s house is big and spooky-looking, filled with lots of rooms and ancient décor—a perfect haunted house for Ruby, really. Ash sees a picture of the real Ms. Prevett in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank, then hears singing upstairs. He goes to investigate and finds a room locked from the outside. The door opens on a set of stairs Ash uses to access the attic. Inside, he finds Natalie (Samantha Young) and Ruby’s demon spawn. Ash thinks it’s just a kid sucking his thumb, but Natalie, horrified, says, “Not his thumb.” Nope, it’s a finger. The two use hand signals to develop a plan so Ash can set Natalie loose, but it still wakes the spawn, who’s a toddler now.
Natalie keeps singing to keep the child calm. However, it doesn’t work; the child shows up, his maw gaping and toothy. He screams loudly. “What’s Norway for ‘Up shit’s creek?’” Ash cries. End credits as Joe Tex’s “You Said A Bad Word” plays!
Review
Writer Nicki Paluga’s script has so many awesome moments of Ash and Brock interaction that I didn’t want this episode to end. Campbell and Majors have an easy blend of camaraderie and competition, and they are a joy to watch acting together, as I’m sure I’ve said before (and will say again if we get more Brock in the show). The two pros seem like they’re really related.
Daniel Nettheim keeps the action throbbing along (like Kelly’s wound, ha!), and he makes excellent use of the space of Prevett’s house to make it seem both unconquerably large yet claustrophobically small. I’m looking forward to what Ruby’s house of horrors has to show us next episode.
This is also one of the funniest eps in a while, from the “Three Stooges”-esque Ash vs. Wall Tentacle fight, to Ash walking right into a door after Ghost Brock passes through it. Such a great script from Paluga—I loved every moment. “All Out Of Love” playing as Pablo attacks Kelly was also funny if a little too on the nose, but “You Said a Bad Word” made up for it by being both sexy and menacing in the context of the show (sample lyric: “Cuz good little girls don’t talk like that”).
As for Dalton’s exit: I’m kind of sad that he won’t be around to keep taking a knee for Ash, but Dalton was kind of a cipher anyway (no fault of Farris—he did what he could with the character). I said when Dalton first showed up that his type of personality usually doesn’t last long in Ash’s world, and I was right. I would have liked him around a little longer, though, just so his noble sacrifice would mean more, but them’s the breaks in Ash-land.
Anyway, now that Ash has met Ruby’s spawn, will he realize where the child came from, or will he shoot its horrifyingly tooth-filled face off first and ask questions never? Will poor Natalie ever be freed? And how will Kelly and Brandy fend off a crazed Pablo, especially as half his face is already embedded in Kelly’s leg? Stay tuned, fellow AVED watchers!
This week in Ash (and other) one-liners (plus other stuff I liked):
Kelly: “Pablo is dick deep in trouble.” Kelly was wonderfully vulgar this episode.
The “J” in “Ashley J. Williams” stands for “Joanna.” Hahahaha! Brock was sticking it to Ash from day one!
“Did I mention I hate cellars?”
Ghost Brock’s last word to Ash was hilarious. I hope he can come back in a future ep just to give his son heaping loads of grief. Also, Ash’s reaction to Ghost Brock’s rather lascivious memory that “Sasquatch” was Ruby had me rolling.
When Ash sees the kid sucking a hitchhiker’s finger: “Ok, that’s a choking hazard!”
Linda B. Watch: Linda B. is not mentioned. Yes, I am running this joke straight into the ground!
All photos courtesy of Starz.
