Supernatural: Shadow

Sam and Dean are drawn to Chicago by the 'locked room' murder of two disparate people, a waitress and a banker.

Visting the bar where the waitress worked, Sam runs into hot hitchhiker Meg (Nicki Aycox from the excellent episode Scarecrow) and is immediately suspicious - in his line of work there is no such thing as coincidence!

Dean figures out that the murders are being carried out by a certain kind of savage, invisible, shadow demon that is somehow being controlled by someone and Sam, following Meg to her 'secret base' discovers that 'someone' is Meg!

When the brothers realise that both murder victims came from their home town of Lawrence, Kansas, they connect Meg and her black magic with the demon who killed their mother (and Sam's girlfriend) and call in their dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) for assistance.

Shadow features the long-awaited, touching Winchester family reunion, but when the shadow demons attack, they come to the difficult conclusion that they are safer if they part company again.

This is the first Supernatural story that doesn't feel like a self-contained story that happens to have elements of a larger plot woven through it; Shadow feels like part of an on-going serial.

The whole episode, which has an air of The Dresden Files about it, is part of the major storyline about the Winchester's hunt for their mother's killer and, as several previous episodes has, foreshadows the bad times to come.

Meg is a wonderfully sexy and evil villainess and I'm glad she somehow recovered from her pavement dive out of her loft lair and returned to taunt the boys some more.

I wish her wicked side had been concealed from the Winchesters for a bit longer, although I realise she was laying a trap for them and it was only because Sam was possibly letting 'little Sammy' do his thinking that they blundered into it.

With only six episodes left this season, we're obviously gearing up for the final showdown between the great demonic Big Bad and the Winchester family.