Episode Details

Supernatural Season 8, Episode 19, Taxi Driver recap 🚕 A Reaper cab ride to Purgatory, a jailbreak from Hell, and an episode that should have been titled “We Told You So,” on Denim-wrapped Nightmares, a Supernatural rewatch podcast.

Kevin has cracked the second trial: rescue an innocent soul from Hell and deliver it to Heaven. Getting in requires a smuggler, and getting out requires a whole lot of luck. When a Reaper named Ajay admits he escorted Bobby Singer downstairs, Sam knows exactly whose soul he’s going after. Meanwhile, Kevin is terrified on that grungy houseboat, and still nobody mentions the bunker.

Episode Highlights:

• Kevin’s houseboat nightmare: Crowley takes a lot more than a finger this time
• Kevin begs to relocate, and the bunker still never comes up
• A devil’s trap that covers the entire crossroads, the same spot where Jensen, Jared, and crew filmed their famous Harlem Shake video
• Ajay, a cutie-patootie Reaper taxi driver who works for the low, low price of one favor
• Purgatory is “Hell-adjacent,” and Jared Padalecki gives his classic just-landed pose
• The world’s easiest monster gauntlet: one fight and one very conveniently placed weapon
• Hell looks like a castle dungeon, and Sam marks the way out with his watch
• Bobby’s deepest secrets: a Mall of America pedicure and a soft spot for Tori Spelling
• Dean brings Kevin a burger, then has the nerve to protest when Kevin takes the pie
• Naomi introduces herself to Dean, and Dean calls in a favor that left Berly sobbing

Two of the hosts’ long-running predictions finally pay off, and they have earned their victory lap. Berly loved the Purgatory color grade and wishes the show had done a whole episode there. Both wanted way more of Ajay (Assaf Cohen). A few things felt too easy, though, and Berly suspects someone was helping behind the scenes. Naomi is finally moving forward as a character, even if her motives are still murky, and seeing Jim Beaver again was a gift. The gore: Kevin’s hallucination, plus a whole lot of fake blood in Hell’s cells.

In the lore segment, Berly revisits the Purgatory lore from Caged Heat, tracing Purgatory as a place. Historian Jacques Le Goff dates the idea to Paris intellectuals and Cistercian monks around 1170. Medieval accounts placed an entrance in a cave at St. Patrick’s Purgatory, on Station Island in Lough Derg, Ireland. (Crowley, you could have just Googled it.) Dante’s Purgatorio made it a mountain island with seven terraces, one for each deadly sin, and the Garden of Eden at the top. Then in 1999, Pope John Paul II clarified that it’s a condition, not a place at all.

“I already said goodbye to you once, Sam. Didn’t seem to take. No reason to think I won’t see you again somewhere down the road. But if they give me a rocking chair up there, I’m raising hell.” – Bobby

Your turn, hunters: Did the second trial feel too easy to you? And how many episodes did it take you to start yelling “move Kevin into the bunker”? Tell us in the Spotify comments, leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts (it’s how new hunters find us), or send us fan mail. Bonus points for fandom fun facts we missed.

Sources:

• https://supernatural.fandom.com/wiki/Taxi_Driver
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purgatory

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