so gimme the beat, boys, and free my soul
Supernatural season premiere post, and first SPN post for new f-listers! Hi new people!
I'm assuming we all did due diligence before adding and therefore nobody's going to need the smelling salts if they see my opinionated writing style or emphatic Sam partisanship? I don't really mind if you don't share it but, you know. Be cool. (Apparently this is a thing? I don't get it either, but some people juggle geese.)
So WOW THIS GOT OUT OF HAND even by my standards. The first half of this is really a Sam-relationship analysis that's been bubbling in my head for a while, but only the beginning and end of it really touch on developments in this episode. The second part is my take on the episode itself.
Non-spoilery nutshell for anyone who's not sure about re-committing: the episode is rigorously fair about showing both Winchesters' perspectives. It does an excellent job structurally, setting up the real-time arc and doing a strong job with three sets of flashbacks, and the myth-arc looks as if it can be cleanly executed. There's no victories on the show's Lady Issues, but there's minimal active fail, all SPN things considered. (edit: okay, it looks from reviews I'm reading now like I missed a scene? Don't expect improvement on this, I guess.)
Okay, Miss Amelia, I was all prepared to like you, and you have thanked me by being one conniving lady. WELL-PLAYED. I admit I winced a little bit, but now I think I really like that flash of characterization. Already, Amelia isn’t a fine layer of quirky!and!sassy! laid over a deep, placid well of inexplicable acceptance. That guilt trip she pulled on Sam was plain nasty. I liked it.
And so, clearly, did Sam, and I think that’s an excellent bit of character continuity. [For purposes of this discussion, I’m going to mostly lay aside standard concerns about fridging, and objectification, and defining female characters by their heterosexual romantic relationships. BLAH BLAH YOU WIN AT FEMINISM VERY SATISFYING I AM SURE.] Sam’s got a Type. Madison, Bela, Ruby, Kara, Annie, all the nice ladies from Unforgiven - the “pretty lithe light-skinned brunette” physical appearance is visual shorthand. They are all older than he is (in Ruby’s case, much older); they have careers and pasts and are very deliberately not planning for a future with him, and usually they are not looking to the future at all. They’re all outspoken, with strong personalities; some of them are downright mean. Ruby laid down the foundation for their relationship not by showing up in a body he’d be attracted to, but by busting his chops throughout the most painful year of his life up until that point. Bela freaking SHOT HIM and he’s still all PANTS FEELINGS EVERYWHERE! Amelia’s vicious little jibes fit right in with that pattern, but on a smaller, human, livable scale.
If Sam weren’t, you know, Sam, he’d come across as someone who’s looking for a partner with a serious advantage over him. But he is Sam, and being Sam, what he’s doing is looking to stack the deck as far against himself as possible, because there is just no way to make things even in the realm of “fair.” He knows and is capable of things that are….he’s just so damn big. This effort to make himself as unthreatening as possible, except in the extenuating circumstance that Shit Is Extremely Real Right Goddamn Now, is in everything Sam does - we all laugh at the shirts and the hair and the puppy eyes, myself included, but it’s a (probably entirely unconscious) effort to soften his features, to break up all those powerful lines, to make you notice his demeanor rather than his stature. I’m younger than you; you’re the expert here; look at me, I can barely dress myself in the morning. Don’t worry about me. Which sounds kind of sinister and dishonest, but it’s the most considerate thing he can do - he can hardly make himself smaller, physically or otherwise.
It’s not all entirely noble. Sam’s used to being taken care of, so he prefers people who seem like they can or should be able to steer. He isn’t good at letting someone in enough to do it, so he gravitates toward people who are both blunt and insightful. And the idea of an imminent relationship expiration date appeals to him, because then nobody has to leave or die on anyone else. But mostly, I think it’s an instinctive aversion to the idea that he could make someone stay, even unconsciously.
So Jess is an interesting case, in that we got our first impression of the character with an outlier from his pattern. From the outside, Jess and Sam were peers, meaning that from his perspective, Sam (and only Sam) knew that things were wildly unfair between them. Jess fusses over him, and brags about him, and drags him out to parties and tells him not to drink too much. She dresses up as a nurse - that is to say, pretends to be a caretaker. Her being blonde like Mary is just about the least Oedipal thing about that whole relationship. He didn’t even meet her - demon Brady set them up, because he had cast her as the perfect sacrificial Mommy substitute. I think Sam loved Jess, as best as you can when you’re 22 and terrified of yourself, but I don’t think she was what he wanted, so much as, she fit into the life he thought he was supposed to want.
All of which does come back around to Amelia, and Sam’s line that he had something that he’s never had before. I don’t think he was discounting that relationship with Jess, so much as, he’s acknowledging that he’s never before had a shot at a life he might want with a person he’s inclined to want. Sam needs that meanness at the beginning, to start off in this new weird normalcy. Because it’s not like with Jess, where he “fooled” her into thinking he was normal for Stanford - that is to say, a stand-up sociable high achiever - and then had to spend the next year or so knowing that he was hiding. That was a reaction to his family life, where he felt like the only one who didn’t know what the fuck he did so wrong to deserve John’s abuse. Even if he didn’t tell Amelia about the demons, he knows she met him at a not-great moment and still accepted him. She pushes that poor fucked-up guy to take in a stray dog, and is fucked-up enough that she takes in a stray Sammy herself.
My whole point here, is that this storyline has a lot of promise.
Sam points out, I think more than once, that he was all alone for the first time. And I think that’s a true statement which he (wisely) considered as being the best possible way to smooth Dean’s pique as much as possible, but which means a lot more than Dean picks up on. The grief over having lost everyone would certainly be enough to mess with anyone. But he’s also talking about a directionlessness he’s never experienced before. He was happiest when he was alone on his way to Stanford, but knew where he was headed. Ruby stopped him from suicide by cop less by distracting him with sex and more by giving him someone to go after. He latches onto the damn dog the way he does…partly because he hit a dog and that’s sad, but also because all he needs is a light breeze to send him flying off. It was something to worry about; something to do.
“Alone” also means something else for Sam, because all of his relationships ever, with the exception of Jess, have been so toxic. John and Ruby messed with his head figuratively; Dean and then Cas scrambled his brains much more directly; then he spent months with Hallucifer crawling around in his mind. EVIL BEES EVERY DAMN WHERE HE TURNS. When Sam’s not alone, he has to fight tooth and nail just to know what’s real. Everyone else being gone so suddenly just slams the brakes on all that mental energy. He doesn’t know how not to be playing defense on a level that he’s never even had the perspective to understand. I think the adrenaline from dicking with Dick one last time dissipated, and a pile of emotional baggage that’s been building at least since he said yes to Lucifer crashed down on his head.
Poor baby. I’m so glad he got out, at least for a little while, and I’m so glad he understands why he had to do it, and I am more glad than anything that he has proven to himself that he can. He’ll never be stuck again in the way he has these past five or six years.
I don’t really have a problem on a meta-level with having had Kevin try to contact Sam. It’s not that it’s not a credible level of dickishness for Dean to keep trying to guilt trip Sam over Sam having the nerve to be less miserable, but I understand wanting to dial down on that, and I love that Sam seems to have healed enough that he managed to resist as much of it as he did. But on a plot level, there’s something about it that doesn’t quite pass the smell test? IIRC, those first few calls were from in Crowley’s warehouse. I don’t see how Kevin got his hands on a cell phone while he was in Crowley’s custody - after all, nobody knows the value of tools quite like a former punk-ass crossroads demon. Laying that aside, what’s the King of Hell doing keeping his prisoners in this dimension? This episode was so meticulous overall, I’m not sure I buy that Crowley of all characters was carrying that heavy an idiot ball.
So Dean. It’s still complicated. If he were a real person, I’d say I would never trust him again; probably the best way to say the same about a character is that I’ll never give him the benefit of the doubt again. Still, I want to make an effort to at least appreciate the character, because I like a challenge am all mature and shit. This spirit of generosity was sapped a full eleven minutes into the season when he (a) actually laughed out loud at the idea of Sam having the life Sam has always made clear that he wanted to have and then (b) threw a temper tantrum at the knowledge that Sam did not waste his life in yet another hopeless suicide mission. He latched onto the Kevin thing not because he could’ve cared less about the poor kid (he had to be arm-twisted into actually helping find Kevin) but because it was the only thing that got to Sam even a little; because he was miserable and wants to punish someone, and Sam is his punching bag.
It must be so tough to be saddled with someone who just can’t do anything right! Sam should know that when people spend two or three decades saying they want something, it’s actually the opposite of what they want you to do! He should know that all the tail in the world is exclusively reserved for Dean even if Dean isn’t even in the world. He should know that he only gets to eat if he’s willing to work it off under an onslaught of hostility. Sam should know that using freaky mind-powers to dick with demons is only wrong when HE does it; it’s awesome from Kevin. And that whole ripping the world open thing that pissed Dean off so much the first time around, it’s such a betrayal that he didn’t destroy himself trying to do that again.
Maybe if I was coming from a more reasonable place about Sam I’d be interested in how Dean’s resentment of Sam, as much as he has no right to act it out like this, comes from some very sympathetic old wounds, and some very sympathetic personal flaws. But, you know, I’m not? And even if I were, I like to think that I would not mistake that for an excuse for the way he takes it, and everything else that pisses him off, out on Sam’s ass. That was my diplomatic way of saying I love discussion generally but do not fuck with me on this.
In the interests of clarity, I think Dean’s MAN PAIN was handled as well by the writing and acting as it could possibly be. We see most of the episode from his perspective, so we know what he’s going through, but his lashing out at Sam is so laser-focused, and not at all like Dean in a temper, and exactly what he’s always been like. His behavior is explained, not excused.
There’s a slightly more charitable interpretation of Dean’s ragging on Sam, which is that he feels (fairly or unfairly) like he abandoned Cas in Purgatory. His evasion on Castiel’s death is suspicious - things got hairy, purgatory changes you, Cas didn’t make it. I’m not saying it was justified, of course, but it would make sense and be marginally less awful if he's supposed to be projecting guilt over having "left" Cas.
I found myself, against my expectations, very interested in Benny and in that whole relationship. I don’t think Dean’s ever made a friend before? He developed that weird homoerotic profound bond with Cas after Cas, with the heavenly host behind him, forced his way into Dean’s life and made it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere. Everyone else has either been a part of the whole Winchester emotional Mexican standoff, or a girl he sleeps with to distract himself from his impulse to connect with her, or sometimes a random kid to relate to for a few minutes at a time.
The Benny story is a small reflection of the really interesting story of Dean’s embrace of Purgatory, in how it’s “pure.” Right or wrong in moral and emotional terms, Dean is a lot closer to accuracy with this than he knows: “purgatory” refers to a place purification happens. I think Purgatory will end up being a lot about a kind of independence for Dean that he’s never let himself conceive. He’s always very in love with the idea of CHOOSING HIS CHOICES, and simultaneously buried as deeply as he can be in patterns that limit those choices until they’re no such thing. I certainly think he has Cas watching over him in Purgatory, but he has this input/output thing that makes sense to him. He can focus on the basic necessities of his own survival, without stopping to worry about justifying it; there’s nobody around for him to fuss about his own place in relation to them. And I think that’s why he’s able to make the alliance with Benny. Partnerships require some level of equal footing. In the case of Purgatory that’s a low level, but it’s still something very different from his insistently hierarchical earthly existence. The ideal arc for Dean this season would be for him to acknowledge that he fought for himself out there, and he liked it, and there is nothing wrong with that.
The thread uniting the three stories is this: that we’re leaving behind the idea of being saved. Dean could get out of Purgatory because God left an escape hatch for humans; he had to make all of the decisions which would allow him to take it. Kevin could get away from Crowley because he could read God’s how-to wiki on smiting your way out of shit; he had to read it and execute the plan himself.
This is a different, and much more nuanced and cohesive, take on the destiny/free will question that was presented back in S4/5. It’s no longer a question of a preordained plan God claims to have, which you can either follow through on unquestioningly or, if He permits, dig your heels in and refuse. The S8 premiere suggests not that God has made a plan, but that God has provided a way, laying a path for you to take or not as both chance and choice allow. Without getting into the philosophical angle of it, I think that’s a smart, sustainable storytelling choice. It’s not an enormous mythological reset button - this can’t suddenly become a godless universe - but it does give as good an explanation as any for whatever varying degrees of divine influence serve the story best. (I am fine with a deity that goes ding when there’s stuff.)
ANYWAY, if you made it through all that, WELL DONE, YOU.
This gif is irrelevant. I just think it's adorable.
I'm assuming we all did due diligence before adding and therefore nobody's going to need the smelling salts if they see my opinionated writing style or emphatic Sam partisanship? I don't really mind if you don't share it but, you know. Be cool. (Apparently this is a thing? I don't get it either, but some people juggle geese.)
So WOW THIS GOT OUT OF HAND even by my standards. The first half of this is really a Sam-relationship analysis that's been bubbling in my head for a while, but only the beginning and end of it really touch on developments in this episode. The second part is my take on the episode itself.
Non-spoilery nutshell for anyone who's not sure about re-committing: the episode is rigorously fair about showing both Winchesters' perspectives. It does an excellent job structurally, setting up the real-time arc and doing a strong job with three sets of flashbacks, and the myth-arc looks as if it can be cleanly executed. There's no victories on the show's Lady Issues, but there's minimal active fail, all SPN things considered. (edit: okay, it looks from reviews I'm reading now like I missed a scene? Don't expect improvement on this, I guess.)
Okay, Miss Amelia, I was all prepared to like you, and you have thanked me by being one conniving lady. WELL-PLAYED. I admit I winced a little bit, but now I think I really like that flash of characterization. Already, Amelia isn’t a fine layer of quirky!and!sassy! laid over a deep, placid well of inexplicable acceptance. That guilt trip she pulled on Sam was plain nasty. I liked it.
And so, clearly, did Sam, and I think that’s an excellent bit of character continuity. [For purposes of this discussion, I’m going to mostly lay aside standard concerns about fridging, and objectification, and defining female characters by their heterosexual romantic relationships. BLAH BLAH YOU WIN AT FEMINISM VERY SATISFYING I AM SURE.] Sam’s got a Type. Madison, Bela, Ruby, Kara, Annie, all the nice ladies from Unforgiven - the “pretty lithe light-skinned brunette” physical appearance is visual shorthand. They are all older than he is (in Ruby’s case, much older); they have careers and pasts and are very deliberately not planning for a future with him, and usually they are not looking to the future at all. They’re all outspoken, with strong personalities; some of them are downright mean. Ruby laid down the foundation for their relationship not by showing up in a body he’d be attracted to, but by busting his chops throughout the most painful year of his life up until that point. Bela freaking SHOT HIM and he’s still all PANTS FEELINGS EVERYWHERE! Amelia’s vicious little jibes fit right in with that pattern, but on a smaller, human, livable scale.
If Sam weren’t, you know, Sam, he’d come across as someone who’s looking for a partner with a serious advantage over him. But he is Sam, and being Sam, what he’s doing is looking to stack the deck as far against himself as possible, because there is just no way to make things even in the realm of “fair.” He knows and is capable of things that are….he’s just so damn big. This effort to make himself as unthreatening as possible, except in the extenuating circumstance that Shit Is Extremely Real Right Goddamn Now, is in everything Sam does - we all laugh at the shirts and the hair and the puppy eyes, myself included, but it’s a (probably entirely unconscious) effort to soften his features, to break up all those powerful lines, to make you notice his demeanor rather than his stature. I’m younger than you; you’re the expert here; look at me, I can barely dress myself in the morning. Don’t worry about me. Which sounds kind of sinister and dishonest, but it’s the most considerate thing he can do - he can hardly make himself smaller, physically or otherwise.
It’s not all entirely noble. Sam’s used to being taken care of, so he prefers people who seem like they can or should be able to steer. He isn’t good at letting someone in enough to do it, so he gravitates toward people who are both blunt and insightful. And the idea of an imminent relationship expiration date appeals to him, because then nobody has to leave or die on anyone else. But mostly, I think it’s an instinctive aversion to the idea that he could make someone stay, even unconsciously.
So Jess is an interesting case, in that we got our first impression of the character with an outlier from his pattern. From the outside, Jess and Sam were peers, meaning that from his perspective, Sam (and only Sam) knew that things were wildly unfair between them. Jess fusses over him, and brags about him, and drags him out to parties and tells him not to drink too much. She dresses up as a nurse - that is to say, pretends to be a caretaker. Her being blonde like Mary is just about the least Oedipal thing about that whole relationship. He didn’t even meet her - demon Brady set them up, because he had cast her as the perfect sacrificial Mommy substitute. I think Sam loved Jess, as best as you can when you’re 22 and terrified of yourself, but I don’t think she was what he wanted, so much as, she fit into the life he thought he was supposed to want.
All of which does come back around to Amelia, and Sam’s line that he had something that he’s never had before. I don’t think he was discounting that relationship with Jess, so much as, he’s acknowledging that he’s never before had a shot at a life he might want with a person he’s inclined to want. Sam needs that meanness at the beginning, to start off in this new weird normalcy. Because it’s not like with Jess, where he “fooled” her into thinking he was normal for Stanford - that is to say, a stand-up sociable high achiever - and then had to spend the next year or so knowing that he was hiding. That was a reaction to his family life, where he felt like the only one who didn’t know what the fuck he did so wrong to deserve John’s abuse. Even if he didn’t tell Amelia about the demons, he knows she met him at a not-great moment and still accepted him. She pushes that poor fucked-up guy to take in a stray dog, and is fucked-up enough that she takes in a stray Sammy herself.
My whole point here, is that this storyline has a lot of promise.
Sam points out, I think more than once, that he was all alone for the first time. And I think that’s a true statement which he (wisely) considered as being the best possible way to smooth Dean’s pique as much as possible, but which means a lot more than Dean picks up on. The grief over having lost everyone would certainly be enough to mess with anyone. But he’s also talking about a directionlessness he’s never experienced before. He was happiest when he was alone on his way to Stanford, but knew where he was headed. Ruby stopped him from suicide by cop less by distracting him with sex and more by giving him someone to go after. He latches onto the damn dog the way he does…partly because he hit a dog and that’s sad, but also because all he needs is a light breeze to send him flying off. It was something to worry about; something to do.
“Alone” also means something else for Sam, because all of his relationships ever, with the exception of Jess, have been so toxic. John and Ruby messed with his head figuratively; Dean and then Cas scrambled his brains much more directly; then he spent months with Hallucifer crawling around in his mind. EVIL BEES EVERY DAMN WHERE HE TURNS. When Sam’s not alone, he has to fight tooth and nail just to know what’s real. Everyone else being gone so suddenly just slams the brakes on all that mental energy. He doesn’t know how not to be playing defense on a level that he’s never even had the perspective to understand. I think the adrenaline from dicking with Dick one last time dissipated, and a pile of emotional baggage that’s been building at least since he said yes to Lucifer crashed down on his head.
Poor baby. I’m so glad he got out, at least for a little while, and I’m so glad he understands why he had to do it, and I am more glad than anything that he has proven to himself that he can. He’ll never be stuck again in the way he has these past five or six years.
I don’t really have a problem on a meta-level with having had Kevin try to contact Sam. It’s not that it’s not a credible level of dickishness for Dean to keep trying to guilt trip Sam over Sam having the nerve to be less miserable, but I understand wanting to dial down on that, and I love that Sam seems to have healed enough that he managed to resist as much of it as he did. But on a plot level, there’s something about it that doesn’t quite pass the smell test? IIRC, those first few calls were from in Crowley’s warehouse. I don’t see how Kevin got his hands on a cell phone while he was in Crowley’s custody - after all, nobody knows the value of tools quite like a former punk-ass crossroads demon. Laying that aside, what’s the King of Hell doing keeping his prisoners in this dimension? This episode was so meticulous overall, I’m not sure I buy that Crowley of all characters was carrying that heavy an idiot ball.
So Dean. It’s still complicated. If he were a real person, I’d say I would never trust him again; probably the best way to say the same about a character is that I’ll never give him the benefit of the doubt again. Still, I want to make an effort to at least appreciate the character, because I like a challenge am all mature and shit. This spirit of generosity was sapped a full eleven minutes into the season when he (a) actually laughed out loud at the idea of Sam having the life Sam has always made clear that he wanted to have and then (b) threw a temper tantrum at the knowledge that Sam did not waste his life in yet another hopeless suicide mission. He latched onto the Kevin thing not because he could’ve cared less about the poor kid (he had to be arm-twisted into actually helping find Kevin) but because it was the only thing that got to Sam even a little; because he was miserable and wants to punish someone, and Sam is his punching bag.
It must be so tough to be saddled with someone who just can’t do anything right! Sam should know that when people spend two or three decades saying they want something, it’s actually the opposite of what they want you to do! He should know that all the tail in the world is exclusively reserved for Dean even if Dean isn’t even in the world. He should know that he only gets to eat if he’s willing to work it off under an onslaught of hostility. Sam should know that using freaky mind-powers to dick with demons is only wrong when HE does it; it’s awesome from Kevin. And that whole ripping the world open thing that pissed Dean off so much the first time around, it’s such a betrayal that he didn’t destroy himself trying to do that again.
Maybe if I was coming from a more reasonable place about Sam I’d be interested in how Dean’s resentment of Sam, as much as he has no right to act it out like this, comes from some very sympathetic old wounds, and some very sympathetic personal flaws. But, you know, I’m not? And even if I were, I like to think that I would not mistake that for an excuse for the way he takes it, and everything else that pisses him off, out on Sam’s ass. That was my diplomatic way of saying I love discussion generally but do not fuck with me on this.
In the interests of clarity, I think Dean’s MAN PAIN was handled as well by the writing and acting as it could possibly be. We see most of the episode from his perspective, so we know what he’s going through, but his lashing out at Sam is so laser-focused, and not at all like Dean in a temper, and exactly what he’s always been like. His behavior is explained, not excused.
There’s a slightly more charitable interpretation of Dean’s ragging on Sam, which is that he feels (fairly or unfairly) like he abandoned Cas in Purgatory. His evasion on Castiel’s death is suspicious - things got hairy, purgatory changes you, Cas didn’t make it. I’m not saying it was justified, of course, but it would make sense and be marginally less awful if he's supposed to be projecting guilt over having "left" Cas.
I found myself, against my expectations, very interested in Benny and in that whole relationship. I don’t think Dean’s ever made a friend before? He developed that weird homoerotic profound bond with Cas after Cas, with the heavenly host behind him, forced his way into Dean’s life and made it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere. Everyone else has either been a part of the whole Winchester emotional Mexican standoff, or a girl he sleeps with to distract himself from his impulse to connect with her, or sometimes a random kid to relate to for a few minutes at a time.
The Benny story is a small reflection of the really interesting story of Dean’s embrace of Purgatory, in how it’s “pure.” Right or wrong in moral and emotional terms, Dean is a lot closer to accuracy with this than he knows: “purgatory” refers to a place purification happens. I think Purgatory will end up being a lot about a kind of independence for Dean that he’s never let himself conceive. He’s always very in love with the idea of CHOOSING HIS CHOICES, and simultaneously buried as deeply as he can be in patterns that limit those choices until they’re no such thing. I certainly think he has Cas watching over him in Purgatory, but he has this input/output thing that makes sense to him. He can focus on the basic necessities of his own survival, without stopping to worry about justifying it; there’s nobody around for him to fuss about his own place in relation to them. And I think that’s why he’s able to make the alliance with Benny. Partnerships require some level of equal footing. In the case of Purgatory that’s a low level, but it’s still something very different from his insistently hierarchical earthly existence. The ideal arc for Dean this season would be for him to acknowledge that he fought for himself out there, and he liked it, and there is nothing wrong with that.
The thread uniting the three stories is this: that we’re leaving behind the idea of being saved. Dean could get out of Purgatory because God left an escape hatch for humans; he had to make all of the decisions which would allow him to take it. Kevin could get away from Crowley because he could read God’s how-to wiki on smiting your way out of shit; he had to read it and execute the plan himself.
This is a different, and much more nuanced and cohesive, take on the destiny/free will question that was presented back in S4/5. It’s no longer a question of a preordained plan God claims to have, which you can either follow through on unquestioningly or, if He permits, dig your heels in and refuse. The S8 premiere suggests not that God has made a plan, but that God has provided a way, laying a path for you to take or not as both chance and choice allow. Without getting into the philosophical angle of it, I think that’s a smart, sustainable storytelling choice. It’s not an enormous mythological reset button - this can’t suddenly become a godless universe - but it does give as good an explanation as any for whatever varying degrees of divine influence serve the story best. (I am fine with a deity that goes ding when there’s stuff.)
ANYWAY, if you made it through all that, WELL DONE, YOU.
This gif is irrelevant. I just think it's adorable.