SPN--Season 4 Rewatch

[borgmama1of5]

Rewatch of Supernatural 2022

Season 4

General Observations-I remembered this season as the one where Sam and Dean’s relationship falls apart because they don’t communicate, and started this rewatch looking for the signs. Interestingly, it felt different than I remembered it.

Comments

[fanspired]

> There are 600 possible seals-only 66 need to be broken to free Lucifer

[borgmama1of5]

They make a point of showing Dean taking off the amulet

I completely missed that!

...Dean keeps going on about: you chose a demon over your own brother while Sam never really defends himself, never says "well, you trusted the angels over me".

It would be hard to object to trusting angels, though, given the theological lens Sam would be looking through...demons, on the other hand, are automatically presumed evil.

Season 4 is a metaphorical study of an increasingly fractured psyche...There's a strong adultery trope running through the whole season.

Okay, here's what I want to know: do you think these were conscious ideas of the writers/Kripke or is it what fans who really analyze the psychology deeply find? Or is it simply that any heroic fiction lends itself to this kind of dissection? Because the ideas you posit make sense when I read them, but I never would have seen them on my own, I am simply responding on an emotional level.

PS I am LOVING our exchanges!!!

[fanspired]

> It would be hard to object to trusting angels, though, given the theological lens Sam would be looking through

[borgmama1of5]

...it's too close, too intense; unhealthy, un-natural. It's both their strength and their weakness but, specifically, it's their fatal flaw that ultimately leads each of them to their own personal hell.

Is this perhaps what makes SPN so compelling--the in-each-other's-back-pockets relationship that seems like it would be the most wonderful thing to have--a soulmate--while watching how that connection in all its appeal is destructive for both parties?

[fanspired]

Not to mention everyone who gets close to them.

The soulmate myth, along with the hero myth, are so deeply woven into our cultural heritage - going back millennia - that the themes are embedded in our collective unconscious. That's why they have such a powerful hold on our imagination. And why so many fans refused to see the destructive potential in those myths that Kripke was trying to expose. Supernatural was never supposed to have a happy ending.

[fanspired]

> (Season 4 is a metaphorical study of an increasingly fractured psyche...) Or is it simply that any heroic fiction lends itself to this kind of dissection

[borgmama1of5]

The central hero of LoTR is actually Sam.

I have always felt Sam didn't get enough credit for how he got Frodo though his ordeal. And thinking about it, Sam got a reward similar to Dean's--the world was saved, and Sam got to go live his happy, normal life, but his soulmate moved on...though at least Frodo got to go to a better place which would have made it a lot easier for Sam to get on with his own life.

[fanspired]

Swan Song is such a perfectly twisted and subverted parallel to the ending of LoTR, I suspect Kripke had it consciously in mind. Dean even mentions Mount Doom after they acquire the first ring at the end of Good God Y'all.