sometimes it's not easy to see things for what they are.
BOOM, motherfuckers.
When we meet up with the guys, they’re at a 50’s drive-in - less Leave It to Beaver, and more Cold War.
I love long-running shows because they get the opportunity to address things that bother me. In this case, the Dean Is Always Right sub-heading of SPN protagonist privilege. Dean’s got good instincts. (Dean is the archetypal ESFJ, gone terribly wrong.) He can read people. But this isn’t just because he’s the GWM who knows what to do, it’s a discrete character trait. His problem is that he chooses not to acknowledge that these impressions are, while correct, highly situational. Benny helped ME for a year in Purgatory (where he faced no temptation and needed me desperately) and therefore HE is a Good Guy NO TAKEBACKS, and he can’t IMAGINE anyone doesn’t agree, with his expectation that Sam side with “the Benny YOU know.” We’ve moved past the “I tell you what to think” of Heartache, straight on into “I assume you only think what I think.”
Similarly, Dean’s all stuck on Martin’s cray, because HE made his impression about Martin at the beginning of a case (and because Martin’s telling him something he doesn’t want to hear). But let’s pick that apart - Martin knew he was struggling, and, being quite possibly the sanest hunter we’ve ever met, checked himself in to a place he could get some help. Unfortunately he was exposed there, for months or years, to a wraith that was free to mess with his mind at will. It’s not SO UTTERLY BIZARRE that Martin is a functional hunter. Martin only trips over his words and goes off on tangents when Dean brings up his stay in the psych ward - classic stereotype vulnerability. Indeed, as much as I don’t like what he did to Elizabeth (though I will point out that using people as bait is something the Winchesters have been doing since S1), he wasn’t wrong about Benny.
Which I think Dean knew on some level, given how insistently he picked that fight by refusing to acknowledge their doubts. “Benny is innocent.” Why not say, “if Benny’s story is true, we have to deal with Desmond, so let’s work together and check it out.” Dean might be afraid of the inevitable conflict over Benny, but he handled it in the worst way possible. He wants people to defer to him or pay the consequences.
I did at least spend the episode hoping Benny was hunting a murdering vampire rather than being one. But he comes off looking more suspicious to me at the end of this episode than he did before. We don’t have any kind of proof Desmond committed the other murders. We know that there was another vampire in town and that Dean and Benny killed him. And Benny doesn’t much like the idea of eating his relatives. We also know: that he could easily have incapacitated a single middle-aged hunter who was just getting his sea legs back. He could have insisted Martin let Elizabeth go before laying his head down on the counter. Should have done so, in fact, if he really thought Martin was unstable enough to kill her. Instead, he ripped Martin apart right in front of her. For all we know, he set Desmond up and succeeded. Regardless, under the Amy Pond Principle - wherein extenuating circumstances like protecting family don’t keep a monster from getting the ax - Benny should be Public Enemy #1 now, right?
Let’s unpack that stunt with the phone numbers for a second, because it's the most important thing in the episode. This wasn’t something Dean did in the heat of the moment, on this case, worried about Benny, though it would be inexcusable enough if he had. He didn’t have a chance to get his hands on Sam’s phone between the time they meet with Martin and the time they go on their separate hunts. This was something he took it upon himself to do, just because. In changing Sam’s number to a number he controlled, Dean ensured not only that he’d have a tool to jerk Sam around in a moment of crisis, but that Sam could not call Amelia even if he wanted to. If he called her, he would assume she was screening his call. This is both a short-term isolation tactic, in severing Sam’s point of contact with his only other Person, but it’s also a play to chip away at Sam’s feelings of inadequacy - you’re lucky I love you, because nobody else can. It’s not the dire threat he was making in S4 - if I didn’t know you I would want to hunt you, and so would other hunters - but we don’t have the distance of fantasy and metaphor anymore. This is straight-up real world abusive behavior. (“Every relationship I’ve ever had has gone to crap at some point.” And what do all of those relationships have in common?! ETERNAL MYSTERIES!) This is some DON'T WALK, RUN shit, and the narrative knows it.
Sam’s on a hair-trigger. He’s been keeping a lid on all his unhappiness over the situation, because he felt guilty about Dean’s abandonment issues and compassionate toward Dean’s loss of Castiel. But with Cas back - and you can bet Sam has figured out Dean’s hypocrisy over the abandonment of Cas - Dean has just doubled down on the awful, and Sam has a hell of a lot less reason to try to stifle his reaction to it. Having to run interference between Dean and the rest of the world would be stressful even if Dean weren’t making it as difficult as possible. Abandoning Martin was a dick move, I’m not saying it wasn’t. Sam was responsible for bringing Martin into the case and for driving him out to hunt Benny. Obviously he should have at least dropped Martin off near town. But I kind of don’t mind, because he had to do something awful at some point to keep him from total blameless woobie status. Frankly, my only issue with Sam's behavior toward Dean this episode was being dumb enough to leave the keys to the Impala once they'd cuffed him. I don’t want Sam to be perfect. I want him to be Sam, damaged and defensive and stable until he’s not.
That’s particularly true given the heartbreaking picture we get of him in the flashback b-plot. MAYBE I’M GOING TO HELL FOR SAYING [I want to make this work]. This is what Sam thinks of himself: that he is so rotten and undeserving, that maybe he deserves everything that has happened to him for the horrible crime of wanting to be with someone he loves. Of course he can’t fight for her, even before Don’s guilt trip - because he is a terrible person just for wanting something someone else wants. Because he thinks so little of himself that he credits her entirely for saving him, and can't even conceive that he saved her too. Sam’s a lot of things, but selfish? I WILL FIGHT YOU.
Did anyone else catch the guest star credit for Paul Campbell?! DON IS BILLY KEIKEYA! MINDFRAK! I actually didn’t recognize him, because Billy never made my skin crawl with mind games mastery, and I really don’t think it’s my bias toward Sam’s happiness that makes me think Don is kind of an asshole. Presumably some bad shit went down for him, and so it’d be understandable if he were merely ungracious, but this was not a picture of someone trying to keep it together and failing. He begins and ends the conversation by claiming the upper hand. “I ain’t here to fight” implies that Sam would be scared of him (lol); paying for Sam’s next round at the end of it implies that Sam “needs” a drink because he is about to be screwed. And then look how he framed Amelia’s relationship with Sam: I can’t blame either of you for what happened. This. Wrong. Sam tries to comment, Don cuts over him rudely and positions himself as the one of the two of them who cares about Amelia’s best interests. At no point does Don acknowledge the legitimacy of Amelia’s relationship with Sam. Because from his POV, her finding happiness while he was presumed dead is a sordid betrayal, for which Don will magnanimously forgive them because he cannot fathom that he might not actually get his way.
Sam’s susceptibility to that play is not particularly surprising.
Even then, that last scene at the Kermit house deserves a bit of context: that’s not when Sam actually left Amelia. We saw him leave her from their bedroom in the middle of the night; we know they were together as late as his birthday in May. If that had been an ultimatum, we would have found him in the cabin at the beginning of the season. Which would have been manipulative and gross, but since we know it wasn’t like that, honestly? “I can’t sit here and watch you choose between me and him, so I’m going to take off for a while” is a perfectly reasonable boundary to draw, and is not mutually exclusive with “take all the time you need.” He should’ve handled it better, story of their whole relationship and also Sam’s life, but respecting! someone’s! decisions! doesn’t mean sacrificing what little mental well-being you have by sitting around holding their hand while they make those decisions.
I do think Sam was missing all kinds of signals, and in trying to refrain from pressuring her, he overcorrected and didn’t ask her how she was feeling. The way she just assumed Don threatened Sam, when she didn’t even want Don to go find him. The way she’s never talked about how she felt about Don himself. What she’s said is: it felt like they had been together forever, that she was a little at sea when she learned he was dead, that she hasn’t been happy in “a really long time.” And then it’s all, should try to make it work. The right thing. If anything, she was leaning toward figuring out a way to choose Sam. Now, that means she wasn’t being quite straight with him either, of course, but I don’t blame her. There’s all kinds of guilt and shame issues that get in the way of trying to talk about unhealthy relationships. The reason they understand each other intuitively is the reason they can’t communicate directly.
Anyway, he just kills me. LOOK AT THIS FACE we cut out on:
baby.
It's just all so big, and he's hurting so badly, and the last thing he wanted to do was drop a crisis on her head - because it will hurt her, and because it will make his awful life so real for him, all over again. All this speculation about how Amelia wasn't real? I don't think the narrative was leading us toward that being true. I think Sam never quite believed she was real, never quite trusted that he could have safety and provide security; I think after the decades of exponentially intensifying psychological abuse, Sam doesn't trust his own mind. Not about this. Not about something good. But he's clung to the memories all this time, because whatever he did have during that year, it was better than the presence of Lucifer and the absence of Dean, and he's hanging on tooth and nail to that feeling of comfort because it's better than dealing with how things are now. That's why he didn't find out about Dean's trick with the phones by trying to call her. Because he just could not give up his dream world, and to do that, he had to keep as much space between then and now as possible.
And now he's going to know, whether he likes it or not.
TL;DR: I don't need them to be good. I want them to be real. This? Delivered.