A group of miners go down in the elevator to a shaft where they start swinging picks — a process I thought was long outdated.  Quickly, they punch a hole into a cavern which is giving off a stench.

Sadly, it is a salt mine so there is no methane “dealt it / smelt” it reference to be made.

They find bones on the ground inside, but that is nothing compared to the parasitic phallic worms dangling from the ceiling which zing themselves at the men, and burrow inside them.

At a diner in town, Howie (Neil Patrick Harris) runs in to tell his sister Sheila that they have found a dinosaur in the mine.  Like all rural mining towns, this one has a beautiful paleo-biologist.  Howie is a little slow, so his sister Sheila thinks maybe the miners are pulling his Doogie.  However, she puts on her paleo-biologist hat and goes down into the mine.

She identifies the bones as a stegosaurus.  The mine foreman gives her 2 hours to clear out the bones.  While moving the bones from the mine to the lab (i.e. her kitchen), one of the infected miners, Jake, gets rough hitting on Sheila, Howie tries to intercede and gets punched in the face.  When some other miners show up, Jake backs off.

At the diner, Jake tries the same thing with cute waitress Charlotte.  She also resists his advances, but he grabs her head and shoots a snot-rocket parasite from his nose into her ear.  After few seconds of pain, she gives Jake a big amorous smile and they start making out on the counter.

There is an unintended laugh as one of his miner buddies sees what Jake did, grabs a dude in the diner and similarly launches a snot-rocket at him.  The editing makes it look like he did so in order to get some man-lovin’ of his own.  Mostly it just turned into a free-for-all at the diner — and not in the good way.

Back at Sheila’s house, she is examining the bones while Howie is examining a slug. Sheila seems to find it amusing that Howie is pouring salt on a slug, which is even worse than pulling the wings off flies.  Sheila sends him to the diner to pick-up dinner, but he hears a din before they dine — there is passes chaos in the streets.

While he’s gone, another infectee, Evan, breaks in and launches a parasite at Sheila. When Howie gets back, Evan tries to infect him too.  Apparently Doogie’s brain is not up to the parasite’s standards, so it crawls back out of his nostril disappointed.  He decides to try to salt trick on the slug-like parasite — this time, I approve — but this time, it brings the parasite back to life.  So maybe I was too quick on that whole “approval” thing.  At least when Howie places it in the sunlight, it bursts into flames.

When his infected sister is abusive to him that night, he ties her to a tree with a garden hose. His theory is that the parasites will die when the sun comes up.  Sure enough, when the sun comes up the next morning, Sheila is in pain until the parasite rockets out of her nose and bursts into flames, fortunately in that order.  How the sunlight affected it inside her skull is not explained.

Trying to figure out where the infected people might be gathered, Sheila asks Howie what happened to the parasite that rejected him.  He tells her that he poured salt on it, and that brought it back to life.  To the salt mines, they go.

Fortunately, despite being a little slow, Howie’s late father taught him how to wire up dynamite.  He explodes the mine entrances while the zombies were out for the evening.  When they are caught outside in the sunlight, the parasites start exiting as quickly as possible — not just through ears and noses, but right through the skin on the neck and face.

An OK episode really brought to life by a great performance by NPH.  And his hot paleo-biologist sister.