'Supernatural' Season 8, Episode 12: 'As Time Goes By' Recap

In Normal, Illinois, 1958, Henry Winchester says goodbye to his son, John Winchester, promising to see him in the morning.

In town, Henry visits a “Gentlemen’s Club”, sporting the crest of the Aquarian Star, for his final initiation. Inside, he runs into his friend Josie, who is summoned inside for her initiation.

Lots of screaming comes from the room, as an Elder tries to exorcise the demon Abaddon, who has been possessing Josie the whole time.

Henry is trusted with a box, and told not to let Abaddon get it. He runs and hides in a room, and mixes various items and recites a spell. He vanishes, and tumbles out of the closet in 2013 into Sam and Dean’s motel room.

He demands to see John Winchester. The brothers question who he is and where he came from, but he refuses to answer. The brothers attempt to restrain him, but he tricks them and escapes, leaving them handcuffed to a chair.

He stumbles outside into the world, and after some initial shock, he realizes it is 2013.

He tries to steal the Impala, but the brothers stop him. They bring him back into their room, and run him through the usual tests: holy water, silver. He still refuses to reveal why he’s there, or how he got there. Dean isn’t too pleased.

“Some asshat pops out of my closet, asking about my dad, smashes up my ride… why am I not getting violent, again?”

Their touching moment is disrupted as Abaddon appears out of the same closet, hot on Henry’s trail.

She requests that he give her what she wants, and, in return, she’ll kill him and the brothers quickly. He refuses, and she takes down Sam and Dean. Henry tries to reason with Josie, feeling she must still be inside Abaddon somewhere.

As Henry distracts her, Dean sneaks up and stabs her with Ruby’s Knife, the usual sure way to dispatch a demon. She cries out in pain, but she survives intact, only getting angrier.

The brothers and Henry flee, causing the motel manager to run after them, thinking they were skipping on paying.

Abaddon somehow takes control of the motel manager, and reads his thoughts, learning everything he knew about the Winchesters, including their license plate number. And then she kills him.

Outside of town, the brothers question Henry once again. He tells them he’s from 1958.

“Seriously? Dudes time traveling through motel closets, that’s what we’ve come to?”

Henry demands to see John, but Dean reveals that John is dead. Saddened, Henry tells them that he is John’s father.

In a diner, Dean expresses his doubt about the guy’s story, but Sam tells him it must be true.

“Dude, that’s our grandfather.”

Dean tells Sam how much John hated his father, since he abandoned him when he was a kid. Sam wonders if he didn’t actually abandon him, but got stuck (or worse) while time traveling.

They bring him food, and he introduces himself formally.

“Well, this has been touching. How ‘bout we figure out how to clean up your mess, huh?”

Henry tells them that Abaddon must be stopped. Dean asks why his knife didn’t kill her, but Henry doesn’t understand the special properties of the knife.

“Demons can’t be killed by run-of-the-mill cutlery. At the very least, you’d need an ancient demon-killing knife of the Kurds.”

Dean reveals that’s exactly what he has.

Sam asks if the portal is still open. If they can’t stop Abaddon, they might be able to just send her back.

Henry says it was a blood sigil, and he had to tap into the power of his soul to get it to work. He’d need several rare items, and at least a week to recharge before attempting it again. He’s surprised they don’t know that, since they are supposed to be Men of Letters.

“I’m a little rusty on my boy bands… Men of what?”

John Winchester was supposed to teach them the ways of the Men of Letters, but instead taught them to be Hunters. Henry is pretty upset, since hunters are “apes”. They were legacies.

The brothers drive Henry back to Normal, Illinois, and he finds the Men of Letters are gone, their meeting room replaced with a comic shop.

Dean presses to learn more about them, but Henry won’t tell them because they are Hunters. Sam reminds him that they are still John Winchester’s sons, so he tells them.

“We’re preceptors, beholders, chroniclers of all that which man does not understand. We share our findings with a few trusted Hunters, the very elite. They do the rest.”

“So you’re like Yodas to our Jedis.”

Sam asks why no one’s ever heard of Men of Letters, if they were such a huge deal.

Henry concludes it must have been Abaddon. Sam asks why, and he says it must be for the box he was given, but he doesn’t know what it is. He says Abaddon attacked them on the night of his final initiation, when all the secrets would have been revealed.

“Let me get this straight… You travelled through time to protect something that does you don’t know what from a demon you know nothing about?”

Henry doesn’t believe that they’re all gone, and that there must be another Elder out there somewhere who would know what to do with the box.

Sam searches for some of the names, and finds an article about how all the Elders died in a fire that night in the past. Including an Albert Magnus.

Henry has them go to his grave, and reveals Albertus Magnus was one of the greatest alchemists of the Middle Ages… But “Albert Magnus” was the name they would use when going incognito. He believes the name was planted in the article, in case a Man of Letters ever read it. Someone wanted him to go to the grave.

Sam notices that the crest of the Aquarian Star is on all of the tombstones, except for Larry Ganem’s.

Henry checks the tombstone and sees the Haitian symbol for speaking to the dead engraved in it. That was the message they wanted him to find.

“You boys ever exhume a body?”

Back in the comic shop, Abaddon arrives and uses her demon mind-reading ability to see what the Winchesters were looking for. She dispatches of the worker.

The Winchesters dig up the grave, but find the body of Cpt. Thomas J. Carey III inside. Henry doesn’t recognize the name, but Dean points out that Larry must have wanted him to see it, and maybe he took the man’s name as a cover. They have research to do.

In a motel room, Dean finds the records of a 127-year-old Tom Carey living in Kansas. Dean suggests the sleep before heading to Kansas in the morning, but Sam finds some information about Abaddon in John’s journal. Turns out Abaddon is a Knight of Hell.

“What does that even mean?”

“Knights of Hell are hand-picked by Lucifer himself. They are of the first-fallen, first-born demons. Legend has it that archangels had killed all of them, which, as we have witnessed, is not the case.”

They conclude she must be the last of her kind.

Henry asks to see John’s journal, and finds that it is the journal he bought. He assumes that he must not survive his time travelling. He regrets not being there for John, but says that he was a legacy and had a duty to the Men of Letters. Dean says his duty should have been to his family.

Henry reads through John’s journal, seeing all the information John had to learn himself the hard way. Feeling guilty, he leaves Sam and Dean a note saying he was going to fix everything and heads out.

Henry finds a new-age spiritual shop and tries to find the items he needs, but the shop clerk tells him she doesn’t carry that kind of stuff. He gets angry, pointing out she’s lying, and she draws a gun. He distracts her, and then manages to knock her out with some chamomile and a chant, hoping to steal what he needed.

Sam and Dean find that Henry stole an angel feather from them. They think to look for shops nearby that would sell the rest of the items Henry needs, but they are distracted by the police radio reporting a murder at the comic shop. It was Abaddon. Dean says he’ll go find Henry, and tells Sam to go find Larry and figure out how to kill Abaddon.

Sam arrives in Kansas, asking Larry if he could fill in the details from that night long ago. He says Abaddon was a hired gun, and she killed them all easily. But she never got what she came for: the box.

Sam tells him that Abaddon was there now looking for the box, and he needed to know all about it.

“In the box is the key to every object, scroll, spell, ever collected; a thousand years under one roof. It is the Supernatural mother lode.”

Dean finds Henry in the comic shop, reciting the spell to send him back. He stops him. Henry is upset that he let John down, and that he needed to go back and give him the life he deserved.

He plans to stop Abaddon by going back to an hour before she kills everyone and prepare for her arrival. Dean points out that if he goes back and changes things, he and Sam might cease to exist. Henry says it will be for the best, even saying it will prevent the Apocalypse that Sam and Dean had to stop.

Larry tells Sam there’s no way to stop Abaddon, but he can prevent her from getting the key, by sealing it away forever. He gives him a set of coordinates he must follow.

“It is the safest place on earth, warded against any evil ever created. It is impervious to any entry… except the key.”

Sam worries that all that knowledge will be locked away forever, but Larry says it’s the price they must pay.

Larry asks if Sam had the key, but sensing something was wrong, he tells him his brother has it. As he gets up to leave, Larry’s wife attacks, being possessed by Abaddon the whole time. She kills Larry.

Abaddon uses Sam’s phone to call Dean and work out a trade: Henry and the key for Sam’s life.

Henry says he can still fix it, and begins to recite the spell, but Dean stops him by force.

When Henry comes to, he’s in Dean’s car heading to the place Abaddon said to meet.

They make the trade with Abaddon, but she double-crosses them. She locks them in, and stabs Henry in the stomach. However, that’s what Dean and Henry planned on. Henry draws a gun and shoots her in the head, which seems to upset her. She goes for the box, and finds it’s a fake.

She tries to get the information out of the dying Henry, but notices she’s stuck inside her body. The bullet Henry shot her with was carved with a Devil’s Trap, which prevents her from escaping.

She boasts that she’s still alive, but Dean beheads her and explains that she’s trapped inside her body now, so they will cut her up into little pieces and bury them in cement.

“You might not be dead, but you’ll wish you were.”

Henry congratulates them as he slowly dies.

“I’m sorry I judged you two so harshly for being hunters. I should have known better. You’re also Winchesters, and as long as we’re alive, there’s always hope. I didn’t know my son as a man, but having met you two, I know I would have been proud of him.”

He passes, while holding the Winchester brothers’ hands. Sam realizes he still has the box and the key.

They fashion a makeshift grave marker for Henry and say their farewells.

“I get it now. What Cupid said about heaven busting ass to get Mom and Dad together. The Winchesters and the Campbells; the brains and the brawn.”

“I’m glad you see it. All I see in our family tree is a whole lot of dead.”

Dean shares the picture of Henry and John that he found. Sam wonders if it would have made a difference if John had Henry when he was growing up.

Dean asks Sam if he thinks the place containing the supernatural mother lode is still standing, and Sam says they’ll have to find out.