spn 8.09
So! I imagine there's a lot of Sam vs. Dean going around in fandom right now, or so I hear. Somehow I have managed to avoid all of it on my various social media outlets.
If I could sum up SPN in a pithy phrase, it would be "Everyone's an Asshole and Everything Hurts" so I'm always a little confused about fandom's reaction to the show when the characters are at odds. There's something really pared down about Sam and Dean's conflicts this season I am enjoying.
So! I was feeling a little underwhelmed by this episode as an episode last night while enjoying the discrete events and the characterizations, so I'm going to rewatch and post my incoherent thoughts...
I really, really hope I'm being fair to both Sam and Dean in this post! I'm trying to articulate what I'm seeing without getting into any false equivalencies, but I empathize a whooole bunch with both of them this season in ways that sometimes are confusing because I'm empathizing with them really strongly AT THE SAME TIME when they're COMPLETELY AT ODDS. lolol spn.
Also I'm not gonna respond to Sam vs. Dean comments, btw, or comments about how the show is screwing over one or the other character. Not interested.
CLASSIC ROCK long contented sigh.
I have shallow feelings when it comes to Benny. The actor is a bit like JDM to me in that I prefer his edgier scenes to when he's emoting and sympathetic. I like that Benny-the-character is sympathetic, don't get me wrong. I just find the Benny who looms and might bite you really hot. I also have shallow feelings about the lovely diner set. As well as undying love for the curvy teal arrow sign in the first scene with Sam and Dean, for the Lost in the 50's Drive-In.
Dean tries sooo hard to be reasonable and fair after he finds out that Sam put a hunter on Benny. Of course, he also knows he has the Amelia Gambit to use if it comes to it. I have to say, I really enjoy the calculation that implies, which isn't something typical of Dean -- he's usually more the guy who reacts to things more immediately rather than making contingency plans. It's a giant dick move that I completely understand (dude only knows he woke up chained to a radiator, his brother gone to hunt his friend after Dean gave evidence that Benny's innocent) but I think it says something about the Dean who's come back from Purgatory. How he's harder, he's apparently more proactive and calculating, I like it. Dean's usually more of a lash-out-in-the-moment kind of guy. Dean doesn't really make plans often, is all I'm saying, and so this is new.
Allll the simmering resentments behind everything in this episode, from Sam putting a hunter on Benny in the first place, to Dean trying to explain why he trusts Benny by falling back onto his own relationship baggage ("he has never let me down") and jamming his finger into a sore spot from "Southern Comfort" with Sam.
"You're too close to this" -- simultaneously true, not coming from a 100% objective place for Sam, and suuuuch a callback to the Amy situation. As much as parts of fandom argued that Sam totally (and too easily) forgave or agreed with Dean killing Amy last season, I don't think he did, and I think that's part of his reaction to Benny. Sam's always been the guy who gives the monsters the benefit of the doubt, and Sam's the guy who (rightly) pointed out to Dean at the beginning of this season that people are gonna die with or without them hunting monsters, so I think while a whoooole lot of his reaction to Benny has to do with everything Dean said in "Southern Comfort" and with Dean (from Sam's perspective) keeping secrets from him about Benny and Purgatory, I feel like maybe there are traces of unresolved feelings about Amy here too. That the situations aren't parallel (Benny wasn't killing anyone and then only did to save his granddaughter's life when Martin was actively threatening it; Amy killed people she saw as lowlifes in order to save her son but those people weren't actively threatening her son's life) isn't as important as the fact that he asked Dean to trust him on Amy and Dean didn't, went behind Sam's back, and lied about it. But also maybe a bit with the fact that Sam *did* realize he was too close to the Amy situation to make an unbiased call, and feels Dean's in the same boat here. So Sam's suspicion of Benny has very little to do with Benny being a monster and everything to do with a whole shitton of issues between himself and Dean.
Everyone's an Asshole and Everything Hurts. The best thing about SPN is that every character has perfectly understandable and sympathetic reasons for doing what they're doing.
Even Martin! Though I think the episode could have been a bit stronger if we knew a bit more about why Martin ended up in the hospital in the first place -- hunting has obviously damaged him, and its enough to make his actions in the episode make sense especially after Sam ditches him, but I kinda wanted to get a little more insight into what made Martin tick in the first place.
The chain of events that lead up to Dean using Amelia against Sam, and Martin going after Elizabeth, are so intimately tied to every unresolved piece of baggage between Sam and Dean that their respective choices make total sense for them as characters and yet are sooo fucked up. Things had come to a point where they might have gone either way -- Sam was still trying to listen to Dean enough to leash Martin and let Dean approach Benny alone, Dean was still trying to explain why he believed Benny deserved the benefit of the doubt, and then the pivotal scene where those resentments boil out despite, I think, Dean's best efforts. I don't think he intended to lean on that sore spot about not trusting Sam when he set out to defend Benny, but he felt cornered and outnumbered and his friend's life was on the line, and those are his honest feelings right now -- that of all his relationships, Benny's been the one to not let him down. Sam abandoned him to Purgatory, Cas abandoned him to Purgatory, Benny was the one he put his back against. That's not to say his feelings are particularly fair.
"Are we just going on trust here?"
There's a quote from Judith Herman on cPTSD that I think fits here, to get at Dean's mindset regarding Sam and Benny. It's a bit long, so bear with me:
In every encounter, basic trust is in question. To [the traumatized person] ... there are only a limited number of roles: one can be a perpetrator, a passive witness, an ally, or a rescuer. Every new or old relationship is approached with the implicit question : Which side are you on? The victim’s greatest contempt is often reserved, not for the perpetrator, but for the passive bystander. …
The survivor oscillates between intense attachment and terrified withdrawal. She approaches all relationships as though questions of life and death are at stake. She may cling desperately to a person whom she perceives as a rescuer, flee suddenly from a person she suspects to be a perpetrator or accomplice, show great loyalty and devotion to a person she perceives as an ally, and heap wrath and scorn on a person who appears to be a complacent bystander. The roles she assigns to others may change suddenly, as the result of small lapses or disappointments, for no internal representation of another person is any longer secure.
Dean might talk about Purgatory as something pure, but the level of anger he's carrying towards Sam for not doing anything to get him out -- in the terms of this quote, Sam's the complacent bystander to something that fucked Dean up. Benny's an ally. Benny's the fellow soldier who's been where Sam hasn't been, who had Dean's back. Sam's now not just a civilian and so outside of that bond that Dean feels with Benny, but Dean can't articulate that bond without pairing it with the resentment he feels about Sam sitting back and doing nothing while Dean was trapped in a warzone for a year. Like I said, none of this is fair to Sam, but I think it's pretty accurate to the landscape inside Dean's head. Cas is a special case, I think, because he was in Purgatory too even if he disappeared at first, and so doesn't quite fall into the same category as Sam in Dean's mindset.
Pair this with the history of betrayals by loved ones Dean's never quite resolved -- Sam & Ruby in season 4, Cas & Crowley in season 6. He loves them, they're his family, but he can't process his own feelings about what happened, so he ends up shoving them aside in order to stay in the relationships. The problem is, those feelings don't go away. They turn into something ugly and impossible to keep swallowing down, and they boil up in ways that aren't fair to the people who inspired them. There's a lot of reasons why Dean operates this way, which would probably take a whole other post to explore, but I really love how much of this underpins this episode and drives the action.
Trying to find a way to reach Sam about why Benny deserves to be trusted, Dean makes a comment about Benny being the only one who hasn't let Dean down, Sam reacts to it because Sam's human, and any chance that this episode could have gone another way evaporates. Maybe, if Dean hadn't made that comment, if "Southern Comfort" hadn't happened to be in the background of that comment, Sam wouldn't have left Dean chained to a radiator when Martin went wildcard and knocked him out. Now, I'm not trying to say Sam made a great choice there, just a human one. Just as Dean's comment, his resentment, comes from a really human place.
A bit about the flashbacks: I think what we've seen of Sam and Amelia's story in the past couple episodes makes some of the earlier scenes this season even more emotionally complex than they already were -- we find out that Sam wasn't pulled away from Amelia by Dean's return at all, but that he'd left of his own accord, to give Amelia and Don a chance, despite the fact that Amelia (and Don) asked him to let Amelia have a little time to make her own decision about her relationships. Sam's resentment about hunting has been understandable and lovely and interesting to me and this makes it even more complex.
I totally empathize with where he's coming from -- hunting got everyone he loved killed, and Dean comes back and just expects Sam to jump right back into it, enthusiastically, with the implication that leaving hunting means abandoning Dean and with a heavy dose of John's guilt trips about the people who will die without the Winchester Family Business. But at the same time, and with the caveat that it's really hard to navigate the kind of guilt trip Dean was laying on him earlier in the season, Sam's made the decision to hunt with Dean of his own free will. He could make the choice not to.
He's trying to do what he thinks is the right thing while not wanting to get involved in this destructive lifestyle that has taken everything from him, and he's caught. I think Sam's human, and so it came out in a kind of simmering passive-aggressiveness that I've really enjoyed. Less present in recent episodes -- he's been more outright aggressive and straightforward since "Southern Comfort" about what he thinks, and less resentful of hunting itself at the same time -- but some of the early episodes had some great snippy asides and eyerolls. What I like about this is that I've been there, and it's really really super hard not to be passive aggressive in the face of the kinds of pressures and stress Sam's been under. It's really hard to do something you don't want to do because you think you're supposed to, or because you're not ready to do the alternative and just confront someone you would be better off confronting, no matter how difficult -- and Dean, for his own reasons, has been really difficult this season. Throw in Sam's fear that Dean will die on him again, which is one reason I think he's agreed to join back up with the hunting against his best instincts. Add the fact that (unless we see more in flashbacks from Sam) Sam was aimless when he left Amelia's -- all he knew is that he wasn't with her anymore and didn't want to hunt when Dean showed up, alive -- and Sam's been in quite the tailspin this season, emotionally. Augh Sam.
Anyway, that was a really long winded way of saying that I really love the emotional dynamics that the show has set up between Sam and Dean. They're both really human. They're both sitting on unresolved shit that's getting in the way of communicating, they're both pulling some dick moves that are compounded by their inability to really communicate. A year of nonstop combat with monsters who want to eat you isn't something a dude comes back from not a raging asshole sometimes, and one thing I think SPN has always done well is show that the fallout of trauma is often a lot of rage, as well as an inability to easily talk about what happened, which compounds things. Sam and Dean exhibit this in different ways at different times, and it's very much in contrast to the h/c model of PTSD that fandom tends to be more used to. Fucked up people aren't always fun to be around. Doesn't mean it's their fault they're fucked up, or that they're even all that aware they're being giant assholes, or that everyone they're interacting with are blameless. I think this is what I was trying to get at in my last post about Dean and how he was treating Sam re: hunting, but didn't articulate very well.
"Guys like us, we don't get a home. We don't get family."
I love the progression this represents in the theme of Dean Is a Monster. Just go with me a moment -- since season 6 (well before season 6 really, but 6 was where it got explicit) Dean's spoken of himself as a monster who doesn't get to have a life with good, normal people like Lisa and Ben. His identification with monsters went up a notch when he killed Amy in season 7, but also evolved -- here he's not really drawing a line between monsters and people when he tells Amy But people... They are who they are. No matter how hard you try, you are what you are. You will kill again. He was already erasing the differences between monsters and people there; now he's underlining it. Guys like us.
Does he include Sam in that category? Benny says "You've got Sam." I think Dean does put Sam into the category of people who don't get family, given his comments about Sam's year off, and how they reflect Dean's baggage about how his experience with Lisa ended. I think his feelings about Sam-as-his-family are really ambiguous right now, though, for all the reasons I got into above.
And speaking of chains of actions and consequences -- Sam ditching Martin in the woods when he gets the (false) message from Amelia. Sam comes across as panicked there, and with everything that's happened with everyone Sam cares about, that makes sense. But he also runs off in Martin's car and leaves the dude he called into the case in a lurch, in a situation where from Martin's perspective he's left alone against a vamp who's killing people. So Martin's choice to go after Elizabeth again makes sense. Of course Martin's not going to listen to Dean about Benny after that. Of course he's going to do what it takes to bring down a monster.
And Benny -- did Benny have another choice? I think he probably did. I think he killed Martin arguably in self-defense and in defense of his family, but did he have to rip out his throat? He could have easily overpowered Martin and killed him via other means, but he did it personal. Do I blame him? Not particularly. Was it a choice that's going to have consequences? Yep.
Maybe, maybe, Sam would come around on Benny if Benny had killed Martin with Martin's own knife, given Elizabeth's testimony. But even with Elizabeth as witness, Benny killed a hunter monster-style. And after Dean's little stunt with the cell phone...
And now I'm wondering if Dean expected Sam to stay with Amelia, in the short scene before Elizabeth calls him, when he's singing along with the radio in the Impala. Oh man, the way he touches Elizabeth, his face as he walks into the diner. His lack of surprise at what he finds.
SAAAM your face when you realize who sent the distress text. And Dean knowing exactly what he was doing when he answered that particular phone.
I think the reason I love the conflict this season is because it's so divorced of the pressures of The Apocalypse. They really don't have that excuse to explain away their behavior. They don't have the deadline of the seals or Lucifer over their heads, just the weight of all their baggage and pain. IT'S BEAUTIFUL, OKAY. :D:D :D
AUGH OKAY. I went into this episode kinda meh. I think most of that was due to expectations formed by previous hiatus eps of EPICCCCCNESSSS which wasn't what this episode was meant to do. AND NOW I REALLY LOVE IT.
If I could sum up SPN in a pithy phrase, it would be "Everyone's an Asshole and Everything Hurts" so I'm always a little confused about fandom's reaction to the show when the characters are at odds. There's something really pared down about Sam and Dean's conflicts this season I am enjoying.
So! I was feeling a little underwhelmed by this episode as an episode last night while enjoying the discrete events and the characterizations, so I'm going to rewatch and post my incoherent thoughts...
I really, really hope I'm being fair to both Sam and Dean in this post! I'm trying to articulate what I'm seeing without getting into any false equivalencies, but I empathize a whooole bunch with both of them this season in ways that sometimes are confusing because I'm empathizing with them really strongly AT THE SAME TIME when they're COMPLETELY AT ODDS. lolol spn.
Also I'm not gonna respond to Sam vs. Dean comments, btw, or comments about how the show is screwing over one or the other character. Not interested.
CLASSIC ROCK long contented sigh.
I have shallow feelings when it comes to Benny. The actor is a bit like JDM to me in that I prefer his edgier scenes to when he's emoting and sympathetic. I like that Benny-the-character is sympathetic, don't get me wrong. I just find the Benny who looms and might bite you really hot. I also have shallow feelings about the lovely diner set. As well as undying love for the curvy teal arrow sign in the first scene with Sam and Dean, for the Lost in the 50's Drive-In.
Dean tries sooo hard to be reasonable and fair after he finds out that Sam put a hunter on Benny. Of course, he also knows he has the Amelia Gambit to use if it comes to it. I have to say, I really enjoy the calculation that implies, which isn't something typical of Dean -- he's usually more the guy who reacts to things more immediately rather than making contingency plans. It's a giant dick move that I completely understand (dude only knows he woke up chained to a radiator, his brother gone to hunt his friend after Dean gave evidence that Benny's innocent) but I think it says something about the Dean who's come back from Purgatory. How he's harder, he's apparently more proactive and calculating, I like it. Dean's usually more of a lash-out-in-the-moment kind of guy. Dean doesn't really make plans often, is all I'm saying, and so this is new.
Allll the simmering resentments behind everything in this episode, from Sam putting a hunter on Benny in the first place, to Dean trying to explain why he trusts Benny by falling back onto his own relationship baggage ("he has never let me down") and jamming his finger into a sore spot from "Southern Comfort" with Sam.
"You're too close to this" -- simultaneously true, not coming from a 100% objective place for Sam, and suuuuch a callback to the Amy situation. As much as parts of fandom argued that Sam totally (and too easily) forgave or agreed with Dean killing Amy last season, I don't think he did, and I think that's part of his reaction to Benny. Sam's always been the guy who gives the monsters the benefit of the doubt, and Sam's the guy who (rightly) pointed out to Dean at the beginning of this season that people are gonna die with or without them hunting monsters, so I think while a whoooole lot of his reaction to Benny has to do with everything Dean said in "Southern Comfort" and with Dean (from Sam's perspective) keeping secrets from him about Benny and Purgatory, I feel like maybe there are traces of unresolved feelings about Amy here too. That the situations aren't parallel (Benny wasn't killing anyone and then only did to save his granddaughter's life when Martin was actively threatening it; Amy killed people she saw as lowlifes in order to save her son but those people weren't actively threatening her son's life) isn't as important as the fact that he asked Dean to trust him on Amy and Dean didn't, went behind Sam's back, and lied about it. But also maybe a bit with the fact that Sam *did* realize he was too close to the Amy situation to make an unbiased call, and feels Dean's in the same boat here. So Sam's suspicion of Benny has very little to do with Benny being a monster and everything to do with a whole shitton of issues between himself and Dean.
Everyone's an Asshole and Everything Hurts. The best thing about SPN is that every character has perfectly understandable and sympathetic reasons for doing what they're doing.
Even Martin! Though I think the episode could have been a bit stronger if we knew a bit more about why Martin ended up in the hospital in the first place -- hunting has obviously damaged him, and its enough to make his actions in the episode make sense especially after Sam ditches him, but I kinda wanted to get a little more insight into what made Martin tick in the first place.
The chain of events that lead up to Dean using Amelia against Sam, and Martin going after Elizabeth, are so intimately tied to every unresolved piece of baggage between Sam and Dean that their respective choices make total sense for them as characters and yet are sooo fucked up. Things had come to a point where they might have gone either way -- Sam was still trying to listen to Dean enough to leash Martin and let Dean approach Benny alone, Dean was still trying to explain why he believed Benny deserved the benefit of the doubt, and then the pivotal scene where those resentments boil out despite, I think, Dean's best efforts. I don't think he intended to lean on that sore spot about not trusting Sam when he set out to defend Benny, but he felt cornered and outnumbered and his friend's life was on the line, and those are his honest feelings right now -- that of all his relationships, Benny's been the one to not let him down. Sam abandoned him to Purgatory, Cas abandoned him to Purgatory, Benny was the one he put his back against. That's not to say his feelings are particularly fair.
"Are we just going on trust here?"
There's a quote from Judith Herman on cPTSD that I think fits here, to get at Dean's mindset regarding Sam and Benny. It's a bit long, so bear with me:
In every encounter, basic trust is in question. To [the traumatized person] ... there are only a limited number of roles: one can be a perpetrator, a passive witness, an ally, or a rescuer. Every new or old relationship is approached with the implicit question : Which side are you on? The victim’s greatest contempt is often reserved, not for the perpetrator, but for the passive bystander. …
The survivor oscillates between intense attachment and terrified withdrawal. She approaches all relationships as though questions of life and death are at stake. She may cling desperately to a person whom she perceives as a rescuer, flee suddenly from a person she suspects to be a perpetrator or accomplice, show great loyalty and devotion to a person she perceives as an ally, and heap wrath and scorn on a person who appears to be a complacent bystander. The roles she assigns to others may change suddenly, as the result of small lapses or disappointments, for no internal representation of another person is any longer secure.
Dean might talk about Purgatory as something pure, but the level of anger he's carrying towards Sam for not doing anything to get him out -- in the terms of this quote, Sam's the complacent bystander to something that fucked Dean up. Benny's an ally. Benny's the fellow soldier who's been where Sam hasn't been, who had Dean's back. Sam's now not just a civilian and so outside of that bond that Dean feels with Benny, but Dean can't articulate that bond without pairing it with the resentment he feels about Sam sitting back and doing nothing while Dean was trapped in a warzone for a year. Like I said, none of this is fair to Sam, but I think it's pretty accurate to the landscape inside Dean's head. Cas is a special case, I think, because he was in Purgatory too even if he disappeared at first, and so doesn't quite fall into the same category as Sam in Dean's mindset.
Pair this with the history of betrayals by loved ones Dean's never quite resolved -- Sam & Ruby in season 4, Cas & Crowley in season 6. He loves them, they're his family, but he can't process his own feelings about what happened, so he ends up shoving them aside in order to stay in the relationships. The problem is, those feelings don't go away. They turn into something ugly and impossible to keep swallowing down, and they boil up in ways that aren't fair to the people who inspired them. There's a lot of reasons why Dean operates this way, which would probably take a whole other post to explore, but I really love how much of this underpins this episode and drives the action.
Trying to find a way to reach Sam about why Benny deserves to be trusted, Dean makes a comment about Benny being the only one who hasn't let Dean down, Sam reacts to it because Sam's human, and any chance that this episode could have gone another way evaporates. Maybe, if Dean hadn't made that comment, if "Southern Comfort" hadn't happened to be in the background of that comment, Sam wouldn't have left Dean chained to a radiator when Martin went wildcard and knocked him out. Now, I'm not trying to say Sam made a great choice there, just a human one. Just as Dean's comment, his resentment, comes from a really human place.
A bit about the flashbacks: I think what we've seen of Sam and Amelia's story in the past couple episodes makes some of the earlier scenes this season even more emotionally complex than they already were -- we find out that Sam wasn't pulled away from Amelia by Dean's return at all, but that he'd left of his own accord, to give Amelia and Don a chance, despite the fact that Amelia (and Don) asked him to let Amelia have a little time to make her own decision about her relationships. Sam's resentment about hunting has been understandable and lovely and interesting to me and this makes it even more complex.
I totally empathize with where he's coming from -- hunting got everyone he loved killed, and Dean comes back and just expects Sam to jump right back into it, enthusiastically, with the implication that leaving hunting means abandoning Dean and with a heavy dose of John's guilt trips about the people who will die without the Winchester Family Business. But at the same time, and with the caveat that it's really hard to navigate the kind of guilt trip Dean was laying on him earlier in the season, Sam's made the decision to hunt with Dean of his own free will. He could make the choice not to.
He's trying to do what he thinks is the right thing while not wanting to get involved in this destructive lifestyle that has taken everything from him, and he's caught. I think Sam's human, and so it came out in a kind of simmering passive-aggressiveness that I've really enjoyed. Less present in recent episodes -- he's been more outright aggressive and straightforward since "Southern Comfort" about what he thinks, and less resentful of hunting itself at the same time -- but some of the early episodes had some great snippy asides and eyerolls. What I like about this is that I've been there, and it's really really super hard not to be passive aggressive in the face of the kinds of pressures and stress Sam's been under. It's really hard to do something you don't want to do because you think you're supposed to, or because you're not ready to do the alternative and just confront someone you would be better off confronting, no matter how difficult -- and Dean, for his own reasons, has been really difficult this season. Throw in Sam's fear that Dean will die on him again, which is one reason I think he's agreed to join back up with the hunting against his best instincts. Add the fact that (unless we see more in flashbacks from Sam) Sam was aimless when he left Amelia's -- all he knew is that he wasn't with her anymore and didn't want to hunt when Dean showed up, alive -- and Sam's been in quite the tailspin this season, emotionally. Augh Sam.
Anyway, that was a really long winded way of saying that I really love the emotional dynamics that the show has set up between Sam and Dean. They're both really human. They're both sitting on unresolved shit that's getting in the way of communicating, they're both pulling some dick moves that are compounded by their inability to really communicate. A year of nonstop combat with monsters who want to eat you isn't something a dude comes back from not a raging asshole sometimes, and one thing I think SPN has always done well is show that the fallout of trauma is often a lot of rage, as well as an inability to easily talk about what happened, which compounds things. Sam and Dean exhibit this in different ways at different times, and it's very much in contrast to the h/c model of PTSD that fandom tends to be more used to. Fucked up people aren't always fun to be around. Doesn't mean it's their fault they're fucked up, or that they're even all that aware they're being giant assholes, or that everyone they're interacting with are blameless. I think this is what I was trying to get at in my last post about Dean and how he was treating Sam re: hunting, but didn't articulate very well.
"Guys like us, we don't get a home. We don't get family."
I love the progression this represents in the theme of Dean Is a Monster. Just go with me a moment -- since season 6 (well before season 6 really, but 6 was where it got explicit) Dean's spoken of himself as a monster who doesn't get to have a life with good, normal people like Lisa and Ben. His identification with monsters went up a notch when he killed Amy in season 7, but also evolved -- here he's not really drawing a line between monsters and people when he tells Amy But people... They are who they are. No matter how hard you try, you are what you are. You will kill again. He was already erasing the differences between monsters and people there; now he's underlining it. Guys like us.
Does he include Sam in that category? Benny says "You've got Sam." I think Dean does put Sam into the category of people who don't get family, given his comments about Sam's year off, and how they reflect Dean's baggage about how his experience with Lisa ended. I think his feelings about Sam-as-his-family are really ambiguous right now, though, for all the reasons I got into above.
And speaking of chains of actions and consequences -- Sam ditching Martin in the woods when he gets the (false) message from Amelia. Sam comes across as panicked there, and with everything that's happened with everyone Sam cares about, that makes sense. But he also runs off in Martin's car and leaves the dude he called into the case in a lurch, in a situation where from Martin's perspective he's left alone against a vamp who's killing people. So Martin's choice to go after Elizabeth again makes sense. Of course Martin's not going to listen to Dean about Benny after that. Of course he's going to do what it takes to bring down a monster.
And Benny -- did Benny have another choice? I think he probably did. I think he killed Martin arguably in self-defense and in defense of his family, but did he have to rip out his throat? He could have easily overpowered Martin and killed him via other means, but he did it personal. Do I blame him? Not particularly. Was it a choice that's going to have consequences? Yep.
Maybe, maybe, Sam would come around on Benny if Benny had killed Martin with Martin's own knife, given Elizabeth's testimony. But even with Elizabeth as witness, Benny killed a hunter monster-style. And after Dean's little stunt with the cell phone...
And now I'm wondering if Dean expected Sam to stay with Amelia, in the short scene before Elizabeth calls him, when he's singing along with the radio in the Impala. Oh man, the way he touches Elizabeth, his face as he walks into the diner. His lack of surprise at what he finds.
SAAAM your face when you realize who sent the distress text. And Dean knowing exactly what he was doing when he answered that particular phone.
I think the reason I love the conflict this season is because it's so divorced of the pressures of The Apocalypse. They really don't have that excuse to explain away their behavior. They don't have the deadline of the seals or Lucifer over their heads, just the weight of all their baggage and pain. IT'S BEAUTIFUL, OKAY. :D:D :D
AUGH OKAY. I went into this episode kinda meh. I think most of that was due to expectations formed by previous hiatus eps of EPICCCCCNESSSS which wasn't what this episode was meant to do. AND NOW I REALLY LOVE IT.