Con SuiteThe Reactor

Ash vs. Evil Dead – Episode 209

By NCDS

We begin the episode with the appropriate strains of ‘I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight’, as last week we left on the sad note of Pablo being killed. This week we are reminded of his death by the fact that Ash is drunk in the Delta doing donuts with Pablo’s dead body (with his legs duct-taped upside-down to his torso, so that his feet are next to his ears) strapped in next to him.  Ash is finally realizing the toll of being the hero; the loss of Pablo seems to have affected him more than the other deaths that have occurred around him. As Kelly and Ruby sit on the steps watching Ash do donuts, Ruby genuinely looks upset at the loss of Pablo, and it seems that mortality might be giving her a more human side.  Kelly is unable to see this though, as she is processing her grief through anger.  

In Ash’s drunken/drugged babble he says something the Necronomicon likes. Ash states that he just wishes that he could go back in time and fix it.  The Necronomicon speaks to Ash through the body of Pablo (or maybe just through Ash’s drug-induced hallucinations) asking him when he would go back in time. Ash answers that he would travel to the time before he picked up the “stupid book at the cabin.”  The book encourages him and the incantation to go back in time appears on Pablo’s body.  Ash stops the car, he has the gang jump in, and demands that Ruby begin reading the incantation.  Ruby refuses, which leads Ash to drive as fast as he can down the main street towards a building where a drunken bum is sitting, threatening to kill them all.  Ruby begins to read and the portal opens up (Delta speeds toward 88 mph in a Back-to-the-Future nod?)

ash-209-newsletter-gifThey are brought back to 1982, to a time before young Ash goes to the cabin or reads from the book.  Ash has no regard for the potential problems time travel could cause.  He wants to go off, see his dad, and bet on a few professional sports games for which he already knows the outcome.  Ruby isn’t going to allow this.  Kelly is getting a grasp on the situation and while she is not happy with the current state of affairs, seems ready to go along.  

The bum they almost killed before they timed traveled happens to be a nice sober man in 1982; unfortunately for him, he saw the Delta travel through time.  When he approaches the Delta to comprehend what just happened, Ash hands him a bottle of alcohol, telling him, “That will help you forget you just saw a car travel through a time portal from the future.”   The man expresses that he can’t drink, due to family history, but Ash assures him to have ‘just one drink’ and his life will still be the same. As Ash and the gang drive away, the man begins to chug the bottle.

When Ash, Kelly and Ruby make it to the cabin, they safely put Pablo in the trunk of the Delta with a note explaining what’s going on.

Don’t Panic! It’s 1982, we’re in the cabin. If youre (sic)  reading this, you’re not dead.

P.S. You were dead.

Ash is excited for his plan, however, Kelly isn’t her usual ‘let’s go kick ass’ self.  It seems she has some resentment towards Ash for Pablo’s death.  If this plan doesn’t work, the gang is going to have a lot of emotions to deal with.  Ruby interrupts, stating that Ash’s plan to kill Baal worked and before she can finish saying that the current plan will work too, an evil presence is felt.  Ash seems to have forgotten that before he read from the book, the professor was at the cabin with the book. He should have known this, because when he arrived at the cabin in Evil Dead his group of friends found the reel-to-reel tape recorder and played recordings of the professor reading the passage that released the Kandarian Demon.  The Kandarian Demon is manifesting in the woods, and it races toward Ash, causing him to be split up from Ruby and Kelly as they begin running through the trees.

Ash finds himself back at cabin where he has temporarily tricked the evil into backing off by holding himself up on the ceiling. On the other hand, there is a definite sense that the evil is herding Ash toward the cabin, and the feeling that this might just be a setup.   

Ash calls the cabin his ‘evil mistress in the woods’ and declares this to be their ‘last tango’ as he begins to search for the book.  Unable to remember where to find it, he turns to look at the cellar door when he steps on a rusty nail. After a few jumps of pain, he tells the cellar he is checking it last.

Meanwhile, Kelly and Ruby are in the woods looking for Ash.  Kelly is expressing her anger towards Ash, calling him a hero who always messes things up.  Ruby calls Ash’s methods effective, however Kelly corrects her, saying it’s called dumb luck.  

Back at the cabin, it seems the nail Ash stepped on wasn’t a normal rusty nail after all.  In a moment of terrible deja vu, his leg is turning black and he almost cuts it off with his chainsaw before he decides there is another way.  Treating it like a snake bite, Ash stabs it with scissors and tries to suck out the venom.  While sucking the black goo out of the wound, The Evil forces its way down Ash’s throat.  The battle begins as the evil inside of him throws Ash around the cabin’s kitchen. Ash grabs everything he can to ‘spice up its life’, as he turns on the stove.  He grabs cinnamon, which of course is impossible to swallow, he moves to Tabasco, and just then he hears the kettle pot on the stove whistling, and he pours boiling hot water down his throat and all over his face.  This works, and he is able to vomit out a creepy rat-like creature with human eyes on both its head and torso.  The rat-thing curses at Ash and he responds by smashing it with a frying pan.

The noise has made someone in the cellar call out for help.  Ash chugs a beer and gears up to go into the cellar.  As he walks down, the cellar door slams shut, not that he shouldn’t have expected this. In the back of the cellar, he finds the professor’s wife Henrietta, who has been chained to the wall.  She begs to be released, saying that her husband found the book of the dead and turned evil.  Ash begins to beat her to bring out the deadite in her.  But he is forced to hide when he is interrupted as the professor comes back with a student assistant named Tanya.  

The professor is creepy, and as Tanya is expressing how she lives all alone (in fact, she doesn’t even live with a cat because it ran away) he is unpacking his bag, which just so happens to contain the the Kandarian Dagger and the Necronomicon.  He asks Tanya to help him down in the cellar When Tanya walks in, she sees Henrietta chained and she back steps into a bear claw trap.   As Ash is watching from his hiding place, Tanya screams in horror while the the professor begins to tell his story. The professor pushes the bear trap 2560x1440more tightly around the suffering Tanya’s leg and speaks of finding the Necronomicon, while Ash begins to believe Henrietta and unlocks her.  But as usual, it seems Ash should have waited for the ending of the story, as the professor explains that his wife became possessed and he wants to transfer the demon into Tanya.  Henrietta turns into her deadite form and begins to throw Ash and the professor around.

Back out in the woods, Ruby can feel that the book has been opened, and when she and Kelly turn around they find that a tree has come to life.  The branches are grabbing them and throwing them around, in a scene reminiscent of Cheryl’s tree rape from the original Evil Dead film.  The women’s battle with the tree is not looking good until Kelly realizes they need to stab him in the eye and Ruby does just that, killing the demonic tree.

Meanwhile, Ash is trying to help Tanya out of the bear trap and is explaining to her that he is a hero from the future who is there to save the world from evil, again.  While Ash is trying to help, her Henrietta is growing into one nasty demonite (our lovely possessed Henrietta demonite has turned into the version from Evil Dead II and is being played by Ted Raimi, who also played this same role in Evil Dead II).  Ash sends Tanya to chase after the Professor, to prevent him from taking the book while he battles Henrietta.  Ash takes his chainsaw to Henrietta, but it runs out of gas, leaving Ash running for the exit.  Before Tanya can get out of the cellar, the professor locks her and Ash below, with his demon wife who so kindly threatens to hurt them really badly.  

Will Ash and the Gang be able to change the future, or is the future really a result of Ash going back in time? Will Ash meet Ruby as a younger version of herself? Tune in next week… or back in 1982, as the case may be… to find out!

Do you watch Ash vs. Evil Dead? Join the conversation on FoCC!