and when your fingers find her, she drowns you in her body
More on "What Is and What Should Never Be"
I keep seeing people say that the fact that it was all a dream negates the choice Dean makes at the end, and um, no. I disagree.
Dean makes his choice at John's grave. The fact that he chooses to hunt the djinn when he still thinks it's all real and doesn't know what consequences that will have (will it return everything to its natural order, and all those people will still be saved? given his, "Tell mom I love her" *sniff* to Sam, I think he probably thinks it will), that's the important moment.
I didn't mind the parade of persuasion, mostly because all of Dean's interaction with Mary made me cry, but I think we're meant to see that as evidence of how much he wants to lay down the burden - it's repeated a number of times in the episode - Mary and Sam (and Carmen, too, I think) both tell him to "get some rest" - how hard it is for him, even though he's already made the choice, to have to follow through and actually do it.
The graveside scene is Dean's Gethsemane, which makes me very, very afraid for him in the finale (DO NOT SPOIL ME!), because he's accepted the cup, and he's going to have to drink it dry. I mean, obviously, they're not going to kill him off for good, but I would not be surprised to see him sacrifice himself and be really actually dead (at least for a little while).
I also think the fact that dream!Sam repeats Dean's own (probably never articulated before) complaints back to him - "Why do *we* have to do this? Haven't we done enough?" - worked because even though I bet Sam said that stuff (or stuff of a similar ilk) a lot when they were growing up, that's not what Sam would say now, and it was a reminder that this was not his Sam, and that staying - dying - would leave Sam unprotected, and leave his promise to save Sam unfulfilled. Which I think was pretty effective, and possibly I'm reading more into that than is there, but it worked for me.
I also feel like there's something I'm not quite grasping yet about the fact that in essence, Dean's choice to live requires him to kill his dream-self - to plunge a knife dipped in the blood of a sacrificial lamb into his own guts.
I think Dean has always wanted things - the shapeshifter in "Skin" tells us that - but I think they've always been either very obvious - he wants his family together, he wants to keep Sam safe - or very, very repressed - he wants to mow the lawn and have a respectable girlfriend (who saves lives!) who puts up with his bullshit anyway, and family dinners (even if he has to sneak out afterwards for a burger) - but he cannot conceive of himself as having worth if he's not saving people/hunting things. And he has, in essence, had to kill that part of himself.
It's not that I don't think Dean loves his life - or he did before things with the demon got serious and John died - or that I think he was faking the whole time early in season one. I think he does love saving people and hunting, but I think in order to make the loss of everything else easier, he's had to build up this mythic version of it, rewriting his own history into legend - he has to see himself as this loner (or, you know, loner with geeky brother sidekick) who rides in, saves the day, gets to fuck the pretty girl, and then rides away again, self-mythologizing in order to make up for everything he's lost.
I'm not explaining this well, but it makes sense in my head.
And then the ending, where Sam is so gentle with him, and so reassuring, reiterating that yes, he loves him and is glad they're together, and that it's worth it - it has to be, and I think Sam needs to believe that, or the weight of what he's lost, of what he thinks he could become, will crush him.
I have other inchoate thoughts about how even Dean's wish fulfillment is about Sam's happiness (and how he does not, apparently, contribute to it except by his absence, in the fantasy world - Sam flinching away from Dean's touch killed me), and of course, how choosing the fake happiness over the real Sam's safety would never happen in a million years, and also, how it seems like Dean didn't say much of anything at all about his own place in that life when he was telling Sam about it - he says "Mom and Jess and you [Sam]" but nothing about himself or Carmen, that we see, after the heartbreaking moment of learning he pulled her face off a beer ad.
And I LOVE netninny's point that when Dean has a random fantasy about a hot beer ad chick, she's apparently not just a random beer ad chick with a string bikini - she's a smart, strong professional woman who *saves people*. It's also harks back to his recollection of Starla in "Tall Tales" as 'a classy chick, a grad student.'
Oh, also, completely unrelated to that, except not quite, I LOVE how PRISSY dream!Sam is. I mean, regular Sam is kind of a priss, too, but oh my god, dream!Sam is SO PRISSY it makes me laugh. And how awful his hair and clothes are when he's not in the suit. God, Jess, how could you let him dress like that?
I know the next two weeks are going to kill me. I am already bracing myself in anticipation.
And your daily reminder that if you spoil me for the next two episodes, I will beat you with a shovel.
Oh! and if you're interested in reading the story I wrote that I rushed to finish after I read the spoilers for "What Is and What Should Never Be," it's here:
Give Me a Leonard Cohen Afterworld
Sam wakes up one morning, and it's as if he's living the life he'd always dreamed of having. There's just one small problem.
***
Man, did you see that ninth inning last night? (and can you tell I was watching the Mets when I named the ghost in my last story? *snicker*) That was some home run Easley hit. And then David Wright. And then that play at third he made. *hearts*
***
Ugh. I just got handed a whole deck of powerpoint slides to edit. Sigh.
***
I keep seeing people say that the fact that it was all a dream negates the choice Dean makes at the end, and um, no. I disagree.
Dean makes his choice at John's grave. The fact that he chooses to hunt the djinn when he still thinks it's all real and doesn't know what consequences that will have (will it return everything to its natural order, and all those people will still be saved? given his, "Tell mom I love her" *sniff* to Sam, I think he probably thinks it will), that's the important moment.
I didn't mind the parade of persuasion, mostly because all of Dean's interaction with Mary made me cry, but I think we're meant to see that as evidence of how much he wants to lay down the burden - it's repeated a number of times in the episode - Mary and Sam (and Carmen, too, I think) both tell him to "get some rest" - how hard it is for him, even though he's already made the choice, to have to follow through and actually do it.
The graveside scene is Dean's Gethsemane, which makes me very, very afraid for him in the finale (DO NOT SPOIL ME!), because he's accepted the cup, and he's going to have to drink it dry. I mean, obviously, they're not going to kill him off for good, but I would not be surprised to see him sacrifice himself and be really actually dead (at least for a little while).
I also think the fact that dream!Sam repeats Dean's own (probably never articulated before) complaints back to him - "Why do *we* have to do this? Haven't we done enough?" - worked because even though I bet Sam said that stuff (or stuff of a similar ilk) a lot when they were growing up, that's not what Sam would say now, and it was a reminder that this was not his Sam, and that staying - dying - would leave Sam unprotected, and leave his promise to save Sam unfulfilled. Which I think was pretty effective, and possibly I'm reading more into that than is there, but it worked for me.
I also feel like there's something I'm not quite grasping yet about the fact that in essence, Dean's choice to live requires him to kill his dream-self - to plunge a knife dipped in the blood of a sacrificial lamb into his own guts.
I think Dean has always wanted things - the shapeshifter in "Skin" tells us that - but I think they've always been either very obvious - he wants his family together, he wants to keep Sam safe - or very, very repressed - he wants to mow the lawn and have a respectable girlfriend (who saves lives!) who puts up with his bullshit anyway, and family dinners (even if he has to sneak out afterwards for a burger) - but he cannot conceive of himself as having worth if he's not saving people/hunting things. And he has, in essence, had to kill that part of himself.
It's not that I don't think Dean loves his life - or he did before things with the demon got serious and John died - or that I think he was faking the whole time early in season one. I think he does love saving people and hunting, but I think in order to make the loss of everything else easier, he's had to build up this mythic version of it, rewriting his own history into legend - he has to see himself as this loner (or, you know, loner with geeky brother sidekick) who rides in, saves the day, gets to fuck the pretty girl, and then rides away again, self-mythologizing in order to make up for everything he's lost.
I'm not explaining this well, but it makes sense in my head.
And then the ending, where Sam is so gentle with him, and so reassuring, reiterating that yes, he loves him and is glad they're together, and that it's worth it - it has to be, and I think Sam needs to believe that, or the weight of what he's lost, of what he thinks he could become, will crush him.
I have other inchoate thoughts about how even Dean's wish fulfillment is about Sam's happiness (and how he does not, apparently, contribute to it except by his absence, in the fantasy world - Sam flinching away from Dean's touch killed me), and of course, how choosing the fake happiness over the real Sam's safety would never happen in a million years, and also, how it seems like Dean didn't say much of anything at all about his own place in that life when he was telling Sam about it - he says "Mom and Jess and you [Sam]" but nothing about himself or Carmen, that we see, after the heartbreaking moment of learning he pulled her face off a beer ad.
And I LOVE netninny's point that when Dean has a random fantasy about a hot beer ad chick, she's apparently not just a random beer ad chick with a string bikini - she's a smart, strong professional woman who *saves people*. It's also harks back to his recollection of Starla in "Tall Tales" as 'a classy chick, a grad student.'
Oh, also, completely unrelated to that, except not quite, I LOVE how PRISSY dream!Sam is. I mean, regular Sam is kind of a priss, too, but oh my god, dream!Sam is SO PRISSY it makes me laugh. And how awful his hair and clothes are when he's not in the suit. God, Jess, how could you let him dress like that?
I know the next two weeks are going to kill me. I am already bracing myself in anticipation.
And your daily reminder that if you spoil me for the next two episodes, I will beat you with a shovel.
Oh! and if you're interested in reading the story I wrote that I rushed to finish after I read the spoilers for "What Is and What Should Never Be," it's here:
Give Me a Leonard Cohen Afterworld
Sam wakes up one morning, and it's as if he's living the life he'd always dreamed of having. There's just one small problem.
***
Man, did you see that ninth inning last night? (and can you tell I was watching the Mets when I named the ghost in my last story? *snicker*) That was some home run Easley hit. And then David Wright. And then that play at third he made. *hearts*
***
Ugh. I just got handed a whole deck of powerpoint slides to edit. Sigh.
***