Note: There will be spoilers below!
Recap
After leaving his new friends behind, Ash walks through the woods alone towards the cabin where it all started. Suiting up with his chainsaw and shotgun, he utters, “Honey, I’m home.” Walking by the grave where he buried his girlfriend, he hears her voice and continues toward the cabin. He hears something behind and spins around with the shotgun out. It’s Amanda. She’s alone and says she, Pablo, and Kelly split up to look for him. He tries explaining why he left them. He doesn’t want them to die. Everyone that goes to the cabin dies.
Ash and Amanda enter the cabin. He tries making jokes about the last time he was there. When Amanda sees a mounted stag head on the wall and it falls, she recalls her partner getting impaled on one and later turning into a Deadite. Ash tells her the place plays with your bad memories. Taking the Necronomicon out, Ash explains about his vision of burying the book there. Amanda notices the trap door to the cellar. She’s eager to explore down below and Ash starts recalling what happened before.
Ash goes out to turn on the generator. Amanda stares at the the Necronomicon sitting on a table. The table leg breaks and the book falls to the floor. On the other side of the wall, Ash’s severed hand crawls along and appears to be growing.
Pablo and Kelly are lost in the woods. It’s getting dark. They arrive back at the car and realize they’re walking in circles. They come across a trio of hikers. They agree to take Pablo and Kelly to the cabin. They decide to continue walking after coming close to where they saw the cabin.
Ash starts up the generator and is compelled to go to the work shed where he chopped off his possessed girlfriend’s head years ago. Linda’s skull is still in the vice where he left it. The door suddenly shuts behind him and the doorknob breaks off. Ash pounds on the door and his Linda’s head has flesh and hair and is talking to Ash. She sad about being left there alone for so long. He tries prying open the door with a crowbar.
Inside the cabin, Amanda hears something back in the main room. The tape recorder that the Professor used to record himself translating the Necronomicon is running at a very slow speed. She starts to look around the rest of the place and makes her way to a back room. She finds one of the Professor’s notebooks with sketches and notes about the Necronomicon. Ash comes in suddenly and suggests they just leave. He’s done it before. Why should he have all the responsibility over the book? He wants to leave with her and just start all over. He admits he doesn’t have much going on for himself but before everything happened, he had a future. He wants to try to find that guy again. He gets closer to her and kisses him. As he caresses her face, she notices his hand is kind of rotted. She realizes it looks like the hand that Ruby had.
“Maybe I grew another hand or maybe the hand grew another me. What’s the difference?”
He’s doesn’t take her rejection too well and starts chasing her. Evil Ash starts beating on Amanda. She manages to grab a cleaver in the sink and chops off his hand again. Then she chops it into more pieces. Evil Ash claims he’s free now and apologizes to her. He says the good thing is he still has his other hand…to finish the job. Grabbing the cleaver, he buries it in her neck. She tries get away and goes into the other room. She falls back and impales herself on the stag antlers.
Ash is getting attacked in the shed by blades and a bear trap. His new hand is torn off.
Evil Ash tells Amanda they knew who she was when they first saw her—that she’d help Ash. Evil Ash leaves and Ash comes in to find Amanda bleeding and dying. He apologizes and says it’s all his fault. It’ll be better where she’s going. Amanda is dead. Ash turns and sees Evil Ash. He laughs and runs off. Just then, Pablo and Kelly burst in and see Ash standing over Amanda’s body. They ask if she turned into a Deadite and if he killed her. He says it was him but not him. He tries explaining and goes looking for the evil him. Evil Ash catches him from behind and the two start fighting.
Thoughts
Things got pretty crazy here. We've known Ash would eventually make it to the cabin and it was almost hard to believe he made it there before the season finale. It's just a cabin but as the show's progressed, it's felt like it started growing into a bigger deal. It felt very tense at the cabin when he arrived even though it was daylight.
They did a really great job recreating everything. It was a little weird seeing in the daylight. The lighting was a little off and made it feel like too much of a set. Once it started getting darker and we got to see the inside, it felt like Ash was truly back. I couldn't help wondering if we were being tricked at each turn. When Amanda first arrived, it seemed too coincidental and I thought she was just something the cabin was throwing at Ash to trick him. It ended up being the other way around.
What was up with those hikers? They just seemed really weird. It was almost the stereotypical teenage characters in horror movies that end up dying. I figured they'd get killed for sure and turn into Deadites. There's still the next episode and they were seen in the clip for next week.
Pablo and Kelly didn't have too big of a role. But that's because Amanda played a bigger part as this was sadly her exit. You have to admit the show surprised us and did the crazy thing of killing off one of the main characters. She was starting to really serve a purpose in the show now that she was no longer simply used to chase after Ash. I'll admit the idea of Amanda and Ash hooking up seemed weird but why not? We would hope Ash could get a little happiness and it seemed more likely that she'd just be something that would remain out of reach. Their banter was starting to grow on me. But this is Ash vs Evil Dead. There really isn't room for fun or happiness, right?
It was a shocking episode. In this show there's always deaths and surprises but they managed to catch me off guard. Getting to see the cabin recreated for the show was fantastic. They put in an incredible amount of detail capturing the cabin from the movies and also made it look like it aged with the time that has past. The show has been starting to look like things were getting a little too happy for Ash and we're reminded that shouldn't be the case when the Evil Dead are around. The episode truly ends on a cliffhanger and you know it's going to cause all sorts of problems at the beginning of the next episode. The worst thing about all this is the season is almost over.