"Confinement" dragged a little in the middle when everyone was arguing and Kelly kept stepping in with the gun and saying "Shut the f*** up!" but on the upswing was that his episode brought everyone together for the first time and got them on the same page. I know that Baal's main tactic is to make everyone turn on one another, but it just didn't make for a great second act here. With everyone's in one place, for what was more or less a "bottle episode," Ash could stop being the town pariah and step forward as the outlandish demon-slaying hero that he is. Not only did "Dumb White Guy" Chet and Tommy return, but Linda popped back into the mix as well. With Tommy being a sniveling twit, it was kind of easy to see that the show would maneuver Ash and Linda toward each other (she IS named Linda after all), but they still had Baal work a bit of magic on Tommy so that he was even more of a weasel. You know, just in case Ash's own homegrown powers of persuasion weren't enough.
There was plenty of action in at the end of this one, with Ash doing battle with the skinless "lady cop" (a boomstick blast and some nasty chainsaw action did the trick), but for the most part this episode involved pulling the entire ensemble together while the show introduced its first official non-Necronomicon villain.
Again, I wasn't overly impressed with Baal, but I am still intrigued about what the book is currently doing to poor Pablo. Currently, it's painfully carving inscriptions and incantations on his stomach in an attempt to...help stop Baal? I guess the real question here is: Why did tossing the book back bring forth Baal and what is Baal's actual connection to the book?
