Time Is On My Side

Time Is On My Side is the 15th episode of Season 3. It premiered on May 8th, 2008.

Summary
As time runs out for Dean, Sam convinces him to head to Erie, Pennsylvania to investigate a possible zombie case.

Instead, they discover Doc Benton, a real-life doctor who (in 1816) abandoned his medical practice to follow his obsession with finding the key to eternal life by drugging people and stealing their vital organs.

Meanwhile, Bobby finds out where Bela is hiding, and Dean heads out to confront her, leaving Sam behind to deal with the good doctor. Dean and Bela battle it out for the last time, and Dean leaves Bela in a desperate, and possibly fatal, position.

Recap
The episode starts with a young man being abducted late at night and forced into the trunk of a car. He staggers into a hospital later with his liver removed.

Elsewhere, Dean is torturing a demon with holy water as Sam stands nearby. Dean asks the demon if he's ready to talk yet, but the he claims to know nothing. Dean declares that he'll ask one last time: "WHO HOLDS MY CONTRACT?" The demon's attitude suddenly becomes much more sinister and he responds to Dean's question with a rude comment about his mother. Dean demands a name, or else, but the demon hisses back that the only thing he's scared of is the demon holding Dean's ticket. Dean swallows hard and exchanges looks with Sam, who starts to administer an exorcism. Dean taunts the demon as he starts to writhe, but both he and Sam pause when the demon dares them to send him back to Hell, because he'll be waiting for Dean when he gets there, "with a few pals that are dying for a nice little meet and greet with Dean Winchester." Sam asks if he should continue; frustrated Dean tells him to "send him some place he can't hurt anyone else."

Later, Sam and Dean are looking for leads when Sam comes across a newspaper article detailing the incident involving the young man without a liver. He finds out that the bloody fingerprints found on his dead body were those of a man who died in 1981. They suspect zombies, but when they arrive at the hospital in Erie, PA, they find that the man's liver was removed surgically. They talk to another patient who woke up with one of his kidneys removed. Sam finds out that one of the victims was sewn up using silk threads, while maggots were used to prevent infection. John Winchester's journal tells the story of a 19th-century surgeon called Doc Benton who found a way to live forever by replacing organs the moment they stopped working. Even though John had cut out the Doc's heart, it seems Doc Benton has survived and is again abducting healthy young people to stay immortal.

Meanwhile, Bobby calls Dean and lets him know that Bela was spotted in Canaan, VT, and that Rufus Turner, a retired hunter, was the one who informed him. Dean wants to leave for Vermont but Sam is adamant on staying in Erie. Sam then reveals his whole purpose for coming to Erie was trying to find a way for Dean to live forever so he won't ever have to die and go to hell. After an argument during which Dean makes it clear that he believes the Colt is their only means of retrieving Dean's contract, Dean leaves and Sam heads for the woods to find Doc Benton. In an isolated cabin, Sam acquires the doctor's lab book. Later, he finds not only the dead body of the jogger who had his heart removed, but also a young woman missing a chunk of skin on her arm who is still alive. Sam manages to escape together with the young woman, running over Doc Benton with his rental jeep.

Dean, in the meantime, finds Rufus and bribes him with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue for the location of Bela. Rufus tells him the hotel Bela is staying at and presents Dean with Bela's criminal record. Dean then confronts Bela at the hotel. She tells him the Colt is gone and is on a plane with her buyer. He prepares to shoot her and tells her that he knows that when she was 14, she had the brake lines cut on her parents' car, an action that resulted in them being killed. Bela flashes back to when she was 14 and remembers when her father used to come into her room and close the door (hinting that he was abusing her). Before Dean pulls the trigger, he makes a discovery: Bela has Devil's Shoestring placed above her door, indicating that she too is trying to keep out the devil. After Dean leaves without hurting her, Bela calls someone and lets them know that Dean was in her room and she knows where the brothers are, because she lifted the receipt from the Erie Hotel from Dean's pocket.

Dean calls Sam from the road. Sam tells him what happened and that he has the Doc's journal. From that journal he learned that only science, and not magic, is responsible for the Doc's immortality. Doc then abducts Sam using chloroform. Sam wakes up tied down to a table at the Doc's cabin with Doc Benton standing over him, trying to remove his eyes. Dean shoots the doctor before he can operate. Doc Benton goes after Dean and Dean stabs him using a knife dipped in chloroform to knock him out. They strap Doc Benton to his own table. The Doc comes to and tries to bargain with them, telling the brothers that he is their only hope to get Dean out of his deal. Dean doesn't want to live his life the way Doc Benton does and Sam and Dean decide to bury Doc Benton alive, chained in an old refrigerator.

At the hotel, Bela enters the Winchester's room and shoots at the beds, only to find that the brothers are already gone and have placed blow-up dolls in their beds to fool Bela. The phone rings and it's Dean. He tells her that he knew that she stole the receipt from his pocket and that the twig above her door was Devil's Shoestring, used to keep the hellhounds at bay. He concluded that she had also made a deal with a demon and the demon killed her parents for her. Bela reveals that she used the Colt to bargain with the demon that holds her contract but it wasn't enough. The demon wanted her to kill Sam too. Dean then states that they could have helped her, if she had only been honest with them. She reveals that Lilith holds her contract and Dean's as well, and that Lilith is the one who wants Sam dead. When he asks her why she is telling him all that, she replies that she wants them to kill Lilith first. It ends with Dean hanging up on Bela and the clock strikes midnight. At the same moment hellhounds can be heard howling nearby.

Featured Supernatural Beings

 * Demon (only in the first couple of minutes)
 * Doc Benton
 * Crossroad Demon (in Bela's flashbacks)
 * Hellhounds (only heard and mentioned)

Trivia

 * When Dean replies to Sam about the fingerprints on the body not being the victims, he says "Great, my man Dave Caruso'll be stoked to hear it.", he is referring of course to David Caruso who plays Horatio Caine in CSI:Miami.
 * The actor who played Doc Benton's first victim in this episode, Kavan Smith, also played Cuthbert Sinclair in Season 9's "Blade Runners."
 * Fun Fact: You may remember Billy Drago, the actor who portrays Doc Benton, from Charmed. He played Barbas, the Demon of Fear.
 * Dean references the Walking Dead in this episode