Recap of Ash vs. Evil Dead
Season 2, Episode 8:
Ashy Slashy
- Ash: See, my friends here thought I couldn't get you and the book in the same room. Whoopsie, looks like my plan worked.
Ruby, Kelly and Pablo track Ash down thanks to the pet tracker in his pocket and come to an abandoned asylum he's being held at, armed to the teeth. Pablo shares his suspicions with Kelly that it's dangerous to be near him since he's the Necronomicon, but she tells him they'll be okay, to which Ruby says they shouldn't underestimate Baal.
Emery along with Linda confronts Baal disguised as Dr. Peacock, asking him to fulfill his part of the deal to protect Linda and Lacey, but the demon doesn't intend on keeping his word, and Linda storms off. The Ghost Beaters find the sheriff who claims that Baal is the only one responsible and that he was mind controlled. Pablo finds Lacey, who turns out to be a Deadite, making Pablo defend himself with a staple gun. She then kills an EMT who has arrived at the scene, and Kelly attempts to shoot her, but Emery knocks the gun out of her hands, letting the Deadite escape.
The sheriff goes after his daughter alone, and she pretends to be human, but Kelly isn't fooled, telling him to get out of her way. Emery believes he can save Lacey, but Kelly says it's too late. Lacey uses Thomas's naivete to rip his head off and tosses it at Kelly, escaping again. She ambushes the girl again, trying to strangle her with a rubber hose, but Kelly uses the hose and bind her and riddles her with bullets.
Linda looks for Lacey and hears someone laughing before slipping on blood and finding her husband's head. Ash starts walking in the hallways, scraping the walls with his chainsaw, and Pablo decides to follow the sounds, finding Ruby instead. He tells her the amulet is losing its power, and they find a body of a dead EMT killed by Baal. Kelly enters the room where her doppelganger was kept in Ash's mind and finds a junkie woman, asking her about Ash, but gets no definite answer. She goes into another room and finds the Ashy Slashy puppet, but as she tries to leave, the door closes and locks itself, and the puppet comes to life and attaches itself to her hand, biting her. Linda stumbles upon the junkie who screams "Ashy Slashy's got Kelly now!" and runs away. Kelly overpowers Ashy Slashy and gets him off her hand, but it transforms and grows sharp teeth, biting her again. She still gets the upper hand and blows the puppet's head off.
Pablo and Ruby find Ash who tries to attack them and run away, but he gets them and pours gasoline on the floor, lighting it with the chainsaw. Another game of cat-and-mouse begins, and Linda finds Kelly, hitting each other to make sure that neither of them are Baal. She's desperately looking for Lacey, and Kelly lies to her that once they stop the demon, she'll help her find her daughter. Ruby tells Pablo he has to go and face Baal alone and she'll distract Ash, but a dead body startles them and allows Ash to find them. He grabs Pablo and drags him away. Linda makes Kelly tell her the truth and says she's strong enough to handle it, reassuring her that she's going to the end. They find Pablo suspended in chains who tells them to leave, and Ash shows up and tells he'll kill them. Linda tries to plead to him, but he's unrelenting, telling that he has to destroy his delusion. Baal appears behind the woman and disarms them. He then tells Ash to kill Pablo, but he cuts the chains and turns on the demon, telling that his plan was to get Baal and the Necronomicon, i.e. Pablo, in the same room, just like he said a few hours before. Baal takes his true form, and Pablo starts the ritual. The demon resists, but Ruby enters the room and pins him down with Pablo's amulet. The ritual continues, and Pablo banishes Baal back to Hell, making his physical body explodes, but he gets cut in half with the demon's talon and dies.
Tropes:
- Banishing Ritual: Pablo performs a ritual on Baal that destroys his physical form and sends him back to Hell.
- Brutal Honesty: Ruby without any sugarcoating tells Pablo that even if the ritual goes perfectly, there is a good chance he will die.
- Deadpan Snarker: When Linda refuses to talk to Thomas, Baal quips, "Looks like someone's sleeping on the couch tonight."
- Determinator: Even after being pelted with sharp glass and cut in half, Pablo still finishes the ritual before dying.
- Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: After killing an EMT by driving his radio through his forehead, Deadite Lace quips at her father:Deadite Lacey: Look, Daddy! A unicorn! Magic is real!
- Eye Scream: Pablo shoots Deadite Lacey in the eye with a stapler.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Just before being banished to Hell, Baal cuts Pablo horizontally in two with his talon.
- Happy Place: Ruby tells Pablo to think about the best things he's going to do, and he tells her about his idea of owning a Honduran food truck where he also fixes electronics, called "Pablito's Fish and Chips"... as in "computer chips".Pablo: Do you get it?Ruby: No, that's awful.
- Holy Burns Evil: Ruby manages to use Pablo's amulet to hurt Baal and keep him in one place in order for the ritual to succeed.
- Off with His Head!: Deadite Lacey rips off her father's head along with the spine with her bare hands.
- Perverse Puppet: Ashy Slashy actually does perverse actions to Kelly once it attaches to her hand.
- Pretend to Be Brainwashed: Ash reveals that he was actually pretending to be brainwashed by Baal to make him drop his guard and get him in the same room as Pablo.
- Trauma Conga Line: Linda loses both her daughter and husband in the same night.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Subverted. Ash did tell everyone his plan before being kidnapped, but everybody just shrugged it off as a stupid idea.
