7.03
SUPER-FUCKING-NATURAL, folks.
For the first time in a long time, I have FEELINGS about it. And when I say 'feelings,' I mean very, very specifically, feelings about DEAN.
Now, anyone who's seen me flail about SPN for more than five minutes should know that I am a Sam girl all the fucking way. Sam has been my prime interest pretty much from the start, and Sam is what kept me watching seasons 4 and 5. I love Dean, too, don't get me wrong, but at the end of the day, I will always care more about Sam. Needless to say, this episode was A DREAM COME TRUE, but Sam's not really what stuck with me this time. For me, this episode was ALL ABOUT DEAN.
I think I need to start with a lot of little Hell exposition.
I feel slightly bad for my unequal reaction to both boys' time in Hell, i.e. I didn't really give a shit about Dean's and cared a lot about Sam's. I think this is partly because of the way the show handled it--Dean's Hell angst came at a time when I didn't really give a shit about the show in general, and on top of that, I think it was a bad, bad choice to make Dean go from complete amnesia to remembering all of it. I think Jensen did the best he could with that bit of writing, but I just didn't buy it, and thus didn't really care how it developed or how it got resolved. It seemed to me to be dealt with only in the little few-minute-long boys-sitting-on-the-Impala tags at the end of episodes (which are another story altogether--don't even get me started) and never given any real emotional weight.
The other part is a lot more complicated, and not completely separate from why I'm a Sam girl. Dean's character has gotten much, much weaker as the show's gone on, and not just because he's changed. Change is natural, and I'm glad he has. But he's changed in ways that I can't track, or understand, or explain. I remember the Dean who would "shoot himself in the face" if he ever had to live a normal life, who loved saving people and hunting things and living on the road, who loved his life and loved his brother and would do anything to preserve that, going as far as making that goddamn deal.
So even at this point, at the end of season goddamn two, Dean is pretty much up shit's creek. He's given up his entire life in a vain attempt to keep the life he's had, even though, at some level, he knew that life was now impossible. His brother's a psychic demon king with a newly-shady moral compass, they've just been plunged into a war that no hunter has ever been prepared for and this--THIS--is when Dean starts to slip.
Circumstances change. Ruby comes in with The Knife. And yes, it deserves some capitalization because it CHANGES EVERYTHING. Somewhere along the way in season three, the boys' lives become more about hunting things and much, much less about saving people. They do an admirable job in continuing to angst about the people they're forced to kill, and the people they ~couldn't save, but I remember thinking that even in season three it seemed much more like the writers trying to remind us that the Winchesters save people than the Winchesters actually caring about saving people.
Sam's plunge off of the moral high horse in season 4 is much more believable, as Dean's now in Hell and we've known since Mystery Spot that Sam Wouldn't Do Well without Dean. Sam's change in season four is traceable--he's got a vendetta against Lilith, he's got trust and drug issues with Dean and Ruby; his actions, while maybe not excusable, are at least accounted for.
Dean, on the other hand, never comes to terms with the MASSIVE HYPOCRISY that is his use of the knife coupled with his black and white, good and evil philosophy. Dean kills more people with the knife than I can count, and he doesn't care about any of them. I've had this screencap
from Sam, Interrupted just sort of sitting on my computer for a while now, because I think it speaks volumes about Dean's complete apathy towards demon hosts. Here he is, about to kill a 17 year old girl in front of her best friend just to kill the demon who's possessing her. What happens ten seconds later? They exorcise it, and save the host. What does Meg say to him in the Witness epiosode, something about "50 words of Latin just a little sooner and she'd still have been alive"? Yet exorcism doesn't even cross the boys' minds anymore, and Dean doesn't think twice about the trail of bodies they leave in their wake. This has only gotten more pronounced as the show's evolved and worse things than demons start to appear.
To bring this all back to the Hell issue, to be honest I never really noticed that this massive slip in Dean's conscience comes, for the most part, after his time in Hell. I'm not saying that we can wrap up this hypocrisy in a nice little package and attribute it to Hell, because even after Hell, Dean still angsts about killing people when it suits him, but new-found callousness in Hell could very much could be a factor. In spite of this, though, the fact that Dean had to torture people in Hell, and that that was what he was most tore up about, never stirred any sort of emotion in me because Dean had been headed that way for a while and, at least with regards to demon hosts, didn't seem all that repentant when he got out.
After season four, it was like his time in Hell never happened--there was minimal angst, he still killed people indiscriminately and only felt bad about it when it was convenient for him, and his complete about-face with regards to wanting a "normal life" seemed artificial, to say the least.
TL;DR: Dean's time in Hell and the consequences of it for his character never made any sense to me.
But there is more wrong here than the boys' respective time in Hell. I mentioned their good and evil philosophy earlier, and that is what matters here.
This episode pretty much blew me away because holy crap, Sam, you have had a thing for monsters since THE BEGINNING. (And I've always had a thing for Sam's thing for monsters). But even regardless of how early it started, there has always been a very fundamental difference in Sam's and Dean's view of and sympathy for what they hunt. While it's easier to side with Sam on this one, I get Dean's point of view, too. I get it a lot, and I've never even thought of it as something to fault him for because he was raised to believe it and for the first 30 or so years of his life that belief held true. Even now it gets him through the day in a world where he has to make some impossible decisions and where, if he questions himself even for a second, shit's gonna spin out of control (as has been proved time and time again as he and Sam get into various situations on the show).
So do I blame Dean for killing Amy? No, I don't. Do I like it? No, not really, but for completely different reasons.
First of all, if he was going kill Amy because he knows she'll kill again and saving those potential future victims is his only motive (it's the only one he offers, after all), why let her kid go? Dean knows that the kid will kill people, and according to him a monster is a monster, so why not? He's had this issue before, with the baby shapeshifter in Two and Half Men. So what? They're kids and not responsible for their actions? They haven't had time to make a choice about their lives? They never chose to be monsters in the first place? Bullshit. Because Amy made a choice not to kill people and was responsibly not doing so, and she didn't have any more choice in the matter as to what she was than did her kid. (I'm not sure why, having disliked what she was born as, she would've even had a kid in the first place, but that's a separate issue).
It's just...if Dean's going to have a black and white moral code, he better as fuck stick with it. And he DOESN'T. NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT. I could grant him going against his moral code for Sam, as Sam has always been the wild card in Dean's life, but he does this in spite of the fact that Sam asked him not to, which tells me that this should be the one issue Dean Does Not Waver on, but is in fact the one he can't keep straight.
And all of this brings me back to why I think Dean's character has gotten weak: Because none of this adds up.
Yes, I'm guilty of hithero ignoring Castiel. But Cas is perhaps the most pivotal thing of all, because Cas is the one supernatural being Dean has ever empathized with, and he let Dean down. He did the inhumane thing and betrayed Dean's trust and basically proved to Dean everything Dean's been telling himself about supernatual beings for his entire life. AND YET. Dean is emotionally destroyed when he loses Castiel. Their relationship should just steel Dean's resolve, but instead throws him deeper into that moral grey area he pretends doesn't exist. Again, some serious character flaws.
BUT. MOTHERFUCKING BUT.
This episode makes sense of Dean's character for the first time in pretty much the last five seasons. Everything I've just said clicks into place beautifully now, in light of the revelation that Dean?
DEAN'S GOING CRAZY.
It's really just that simple. Dean's never made sense to me because he doesn't make sense to himself. And it's not Sam's just-out-of-Hell crazy, or hunters' general paranoid-trust-issues crazy, but full-blown CRAZYPANTS. FOR YEARS NOW.
Dean's spent his entire life putting other people's needs before his own and pretending so much that everything's okay that he genuinely doesn't realize how not okay he actually is. Of course, he knows he has issues, even for one of the best hunters alive, even for Michael's rejected vessel. He knows his life is fucked up and that there are things he doesn't think about because he wouldn't be able to hold it together if he did.
But he has no idea just how fucking far gone he really is. He's trying to make sense of things and have at least one aspect of his life in line (that being that monsters are bad and that he kills him) but even that is completely fucked up and there's nothing he can do about any of it and he's losing himself more and more the more he tries, and the more he cares the more he's forced to go against what he believes or wants.
Just...Dean, my God.
And maybe this should have been super obvious, and maybe this isn't a surprise to anyone, but it just hit me this episode and now I am all *grabby face* and woobie with regards to Dean and I HAVE FEELINGS FOR HIM AGAIN. LIKE WOAH.
OH GOD, I'M TURNING INTO A DEAN GIRL, AREN'T I?
I had a lot of other feelings about this episode, too, but...well, DEAN. Having written this, there is a lot more I could say about him, too, apparently. Hmm.
For the first time in a long time, I have FEELINGS about it. And when I say 'feelings,' I mean very, very specifically, feelings about DEAN.
Now, anyone who's seen me flail about SPN for more than five minutes should know that I am a Sam girl all the fucking way. Sam has been my prime interest pretty much from the start, and Sam is what kept me watching seasons 4 and 5. I love Dean, too, don't get me wrong, but at the end of the day, I will always care more about Sam. Needless to say, this episode was A DREAM COME TRUE, but Sam's not really what stuck with me this time. For me, this episode was ALL ABOUT DEAN.
I think I need to start with a lot of little Hell exposition.
I feel slightly bad for my unequal reaction to both boys' time in Hell, i.e. I didn't really give a shit about Dean's and cared a lot about Sam's. I think this is partly because of the way the show handled it--Dean's Hell angst came at a time when I didn't really give a shit about the show in general, and on top of that, I think it was a bad, bad choice to make Dean go from complete amnesia to remembering all of it. I think Jensen did the best he could with that bit of writing, but I just didn't buy it, and thus didn't really care how it developed or how it got resolved. It seemed to me to be dealt with only in the little few-minute-long boys-sitting-on-the-Impala tags at the end of episodes (which are another story altogether--don't even get me started) and never given any real emotional weight.
The other part is a lot more complicated, and not completely separate from why I'm a Sam girl. Dean's character has gotten much, much weaker as the show's gone on, and not just because he's changed. Change is natural, and I'm glad he has. But he's changed in ways that I can't track, or understand, or explain. I remember the Dean who would "shoot himself in the face" if he ever had to live a normal life, who loved saving people and hunting things and living on the road, who loved his life and loved his brother and would do anything to preserve that, going as far as making that goddamn deal.
So even at this point, at the end of season goddamn two, Dean is pretty much up shit's creek. He's given up his entire life in a vain attempt to keep the life he's had, even though, at some level, he knew that life was now impossible. His brother's a psychic demon king with a newly-shady moral compass, they've just been plunged into a war that no hunter has ever been prepared for and this--THIS--is when Dean starts to slip.
Circumstances change. Ruby comes in with The Knife. And yes, it deserves some capitalization because it CHANGES EVERYTHING. Somewhere along the way in season three, the boys' lives become more about hunting things and much, much less about saving people. They do an admirable job in continuing to angst about the people they're forced to kill, and the people they ~couldn't save, but I remember thinking that even in season three it seemed much more like the writers trying to remind us that the Winchesters save people than the Winchesters actually caring about saving people.
Sam's plunge off of the moral high horse in season 4 is much more believable, as Dean's now in Hell and we've known since Mystery Spot that Sam Wouldn't Do Well without Dean. Sam's change in season four is traceable--he's got a vendetta against Lilith, he's got trust and drug issues with Dean and Ruby; his actions, while maybe not excusable, are at least accounted for.
Dean, on the other hand, never comes to terms with the MASSIVE HYPOCRISY that is his use of the knife coupled with his black and white, good and evil philosophy. Dean kills more people with the knife than I can count, and he doesn't care about any of them. I've had this screencap
from Sam, Interrupted just sort of sitting on my computer for a while now, because I think it speaks volumes about Dean's complete apathy towards demon hosts. Here he is, about to kill a 17 year old girl in front of her best friend just to kill the demon who's possessing her. What happens ten seconds later? They exorcise it, and save the host. What does Meg say to him in the Witness epiosode, something about "50 words of Latin just a little sooner and she'd still have been alive"? Yet exorcism doesn't even cross the boys' minds anymore, and Dean doesn't think twice about the trail of bodies they leave in their wake. This has only gotten more pronounced as the show's evolved and worse things than demons start to appear.
To bring this all back to the Hell issue, to be honest I never really noticed that this massive slip in Dean's conscience comes, for the most part, after his time in Hell. I'm not saying that we can wrap up this hypocrisy in a nice little package and attribute it to Hell, because even after Hell, Dean still angsts about killing people when it suits him, but new-found callousness in Hell could very much could be a factor. In spite of this, though, the fact that Dean had to torture people in Hell, and that that was what he was most tore up about, never stirred any sort of emotion in me because Dean had been headed that way for a while and, at least with regards to demon hosts, didn't seem all that repentant when he got out.
After season four, it was like his time in Hell never happened--there was minimal angst, he still killed people indiscriminately and only felt bad about it when it was convenient for him, and his complete about-face with regards to wanting a "normal life" seemed artificial, to say the least.
TL;DR: Dean's time in Hell and the consequences of it for his character never made any sense to me.
But there is more wrong here than the boys' respective time in Hell. I mentioned their good and evil philosophy earlier, and that is what matters here.
This episode pretty much blew me away because holy crap, Sam, you have had a thing for monsters since THE BEGINNING. (And I've always had a thing for Sam's thing for monsters). But even regardless of how early it started, there has always been a very fundamental difference in Sam's and Dean's view of and sympathy for what they hunt. While it's easier to side with Sam on this one, I get Dean's point of view, too. I get it a lot, and I've never even thought of it as something to fault him for because he was raised to believe it and for the first 30 or so years of his life that belief held true. Even now it gets him through the day in a world where he has to make some impossible decisions and where, if he questions himself even for a second, shit's gonna spin out of control (as has been proved time and time again as he and Sam get into various situations on the show).
So do I blame Dean for killing Amy? No, I don't. Do I like it? No, not really, but for completely different reasons.
First of all, if he was going kill Amy because he knows she'll kill again and saving those potential future victims is his only motive (it's the only one he offers, after all), why let her kid go? Dean knows that the kid will kill people, and according to him a monster is a monster, so why not? He's had this issue before, with the baby shapeshifter in Two and Half Men. So what? They're kids and not responsible for their actions? They haven't had time to make a choice about their lives? They never chose to be monsters in the first place? Bullshit. Because Amy made a choice not to kill people and was responsibly not doing so, and she didn't have any more choice in the matter as to what she was than did her kid. (I'm not sure why, having disliked what she was born as, she would've even had a kid in the first place, but that's a separate issue).
It's just...if Dean's going to have a black and white moral code, he better as fuck stick with it. And he DOESN'T. NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT. I could grant him going against his moral code for Sam, as Sam has always been the wild card in Dean's life, but he does this in spite of the fact that Sam asked him not to, which tells me that this should be the one issue Dean Does Not Waver on, but is in fact the one he can't keep straight.
And all of this brings me back to why I think Dean's character has gotten weak: Because none of this adds up.
Yes, I'm guilty of hithero ignoring Castiel. But Cas is perhaps the most pivotal thing of all, because Cas is the one supernatural being Dean has ever empathized with, and he let Dean down. He did the inhumane thing and betrayed Dean's trust and basically proved to Dean everything Dean's been telling himself about supernatual beings for his entire life. AND YET. Dean is emotionally destroyed when he loses Castiel. Their relationship should just steel Dean's resolve, but instead throws him deeper into that moral grey area he pretends doesn't exist. Again, some serious character flaws.
BUT. MOTHERFUCKING BUT.
This episode makes sense of Dean's character for the first time in pretty much the last five seasons. Everything I've just said clicks into place beautifully now, in light of the revelation that Dean?
DEAN'S GOING CRAZY.
It's really just that simple. Dean's never made sense to me because he doesn't make sense to himself. And it's not Sam's just-out-of-Hell crazy, or hunters' general paranoid-trust-issues crazy, but full-blown CRAZYPANTS. FOR YEARS NOW.
Dean's spent his entire life putting other people's needs before his own and pretending so much that everything's okay that he genuinely doesn't realize how not okay he actually is. Of course, he knows he has issues, even for one of the best hunters alive, even for Michael's rejected vessel. He knows his life is fucked up and that there are things he doesn't think about because he wouldn't be able to hold it together if he did.
But he has no idea just how fucking far gone he really is. He's trying to make sense of things and have at least one aspect of his life in line (that being that monsters are bad and that he kills him) but even that is completely fucked up and there's nothing he can do about any of it and he's losing himself more and more the more he tries, and the more he cares the more he's forced to go against what he believes or wants.
Just...Dean, my God.
And maybe this should have been super obvious, and maybe this isn't a surprise to anyone, but it just hit me this episode and now I am all *grabby face* and woobie with regards to Dean and I HAVE FEELINGS FOR HIM AGAIN. LIKE WOAH.
OH GOD, I'M TURNING INTO A DEAN GIRL, AREN'T I?
I had a lot of other feelings about this episode, too, but...well, DEAN. Having written this, there is a lot more I could say about him, too, apparently. Hmm.