SPN 9x11 - First Born
So this episode. It had a lot of stuff I really wanted to see and more than a few things I wouldn’t have thought to want but am really happy about anyway, but it still left me weirdly unsettled in some ways? And I’m not sure if it’s the kind of unsettled I want to be because it is on the right trajectory of this whole fucked up story, or if something sat badly because of technical or philosophical issues. I think the season’s earned enough credit that I can say it’s at least largely the first thing, but I’m not sure, so.
I have wanted Sam and Cas to interact for a very, very long time, but I’ve never really had a satisfactory picture of how that would have played out. This wonderfully prickly, bufferless, imperfect interaction totally did the trick.
It is so twisted and entertaining that Cas’ reasoning for why Sam should trust him is “hey, I’ve lied to you plenty, and you had no idea!” But it kinda works, though not in the way Cas intended, because it shows Sam that Cas really doesn’t know how to manage him. ie, Cas has a really hard time trying to talk Sam off the ledge at the end there. What had the best chance of getting through to Sam wasn’t to try to ~logic Sam out of a self-destructive but understandable reaction, but to point out that Sam wasn’t just hurting himself like he wanted to, he was dragging Cas into something Cas didn’t want.
I got the idea that Sam’s eagerness to jump into the ritual was less “I WILL AVENGE KEVIN!!” and more the totally valid “OH MY GOD GET IT OUT OF ME.” And that’s about a lot of things: the value Sam places on literal humanity, his fear of having his autonomy impinged upon, his massive survivor’s guilt. But I also think it was that sad belief that he has to justify his anger or his hurt - if he wanted to live badly enough not to close the gates, then why is he pissed about being saved by Gadreel? And (this is the #1 thing I would want directly addressed which means it will obviously never happen) he doesn’t acknowledge that months and months of being manipulated is different from the initial choice, he simply accepts Dean’s framework that this was the ONLY way to do the WHOLE thing. As if “I want to live and not get roofied” is just asking too much. So he tries to EARN the right to be pissed by disdaining any and all benefits from the whole thing, and throw himself back into the comfortable penance-by-pain. Only Cas discourages it rather than encourages it, and so he ends up in a much better place by the end of the episode.
I know Sam bearhugging Cas at the end there was mostly about the fandom’s fixation on hugs (I’m an old-fashioned girl and prefer a good daggering any day of the week, but to each her own, say I) but it was still really poignant. Sam and Cas tend not to speak up with their thoughts and needs, but they’re big on doing, and so a physical show of affection makes sense from both of them.
My problem was: I get that it does make sense that Cas is still clinging to his idealized picture of Dean? I can’t quarrel with it from a characterization perspective, but my reaction was still ARGH CAS BACK HIM UP FOR FIVE SECONDS CHRIST.
Sam’s real and painful dedication to finding Gadreel is a sharp contrast to Dean’s eagerness to put it all out of mind. He leaps on the chance to be around Crowley because it’s easy to feel superior to the King of Hell, and throws himself into the search for Abbadon because she doesn’t remind him of his own shortcomings. Which I think is a very human and understandable reaction, but still something to keep in mind when we start hearing about how Dean is bound by the shackles of his endless regret.
Dean’s instincts are on the fritz (or in Doylist terms, our impression of Dean as someone with unerringly good judgment is being deconstructed). He got played by Gadreel, and then he got played by Crowley, making the exact same mistake about Crowley as Gadreel himself did last week. Crowley admits he is a self-preservationist, therefore he must be a coward, and therefore anything that takes nerve is not something he’s doing. And so Crowley could lay it on so hilariously thick (the sign of the cross, looool) and Dean doesn’t notice because that’s the role he has Crowley slotted into, rightly or wrongly. For all we know, Cain was playing him too.
I don’t see any reason to think Cain’s whole story was a fabrication, but I don’t think we should take anything at face value without corroboration, either. Everyone knows the main thrust of that story, that Cain killed Abel and became demon. This is the twist, though: the biblical story is that God loved Abel best, and Cain killed Abel to be God’s favorite, but the story from the horse’s mouth is that Lucifer wanted Abel first, and Cain killed Abel and became Lucifer’s favorite.
This whole I just ~loved him too much to let him crash off that pedestal by maybe making a decision I don’t like/wouldn’t get to make~ story gets fishier every time we hear it. If this were happening on any other show, with any character other than Dean or a Dean-surrogate, we’d be crying bullshit at the idea that people turn on their own brothers for purity and honor because they just love too much and don’t value themselves enough. Michael, Cain, Dean: all vainly (in every sense of the word) grasping around for some righteous justification for their sick fratricidal desires. (Because remember: TWICE now, Dean would have killed Sam, if not for Cas.) *I* am a good brother, but I know I am a first-rate asshole to you, therefore YOU are clearly the problem and must be destroyed. I'm not prepared to argue that's the only issue for any of those three characters, but I'm fairly confident it's a big one or even the biggest one.
And oh, speaking of the archangels, between the lines of Cain’s narration of his own story, I suspect we really heard the story of yet another one of Lucifer’s chumps. Maybe Lucifer didn’t want Abel, maybe he was just playing out his issues with Michael who turned on him for his ~impurity, and Cain was the one he wanted to corrupt all along.
I said not two days ago that the season has pulled zero punches on its deconstruction of Dean, and alas, I spoke too soon, because that’s the source of what very little I didn’t love about this episode. I think it pulled some punches. Overtly drawing a line from Dean to the biblical Cain is a death blow to Dean’s self-construct, and having Cain slobber out Dean’s exact backdoor-brag rationalizations about how he just ~cared too much about being his brother’s keeper (IKR LOL BUT I HAVE A POINT HERE BEAR WITH ME) should’ve been the ultimate salt’n’burn. And then Dean consciously, freely choosing to take on the mark of Cain because he wants to play with Crowley and get Abbadon puts lie to all his rationalizations in the early/middle seasons of the show, that Sam wanted to be a demon, that Sam was arrogant and power-hungry and Dean’s anger at him was objectively morally justified. BULLSHIT. He was pissed at Sam for having the nerve to let himself get exploited at six months old, which I know most of us have probably known for a long time but it’s nice to have confirmation. Like. If you had told me a year and a half ago when I was catching up with the fandom if the show was going to go this far, evoking these mythological associations, in tearing down Dean’s self-construct, I would have been like SHUT UP GET OUT. (I actually probably would have a lot less antipathy toward him in that case, but we’ll never know now.) But then there was lots of DEAN YOU JUST HATE YOURSELF TOO MUCH, CAS AND SAM ARE THE BIGGER SCREW-UPS, blah blah blah. Which, obviously neither Crowley nor Cas is a particularly reliable narrator, and I get the spoonful of sugar thing, but it still stuck in my craw.
Anyway, I gleefully reveled in all the slams on John. Rustic obsessive, hahahaha.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/326500.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
I have wanted Sam and Cas to interact for a very, very long time, but I’ve never really had a satisfactory picture of how that would have played out. This wonderfully prickly, bufferless, imperfect interaction totally did the trick.
It is so twisted and entertaining that Cas’ reasoning for why Sam should trust him is “hey, I’ve lied to you plenty, and you had no idea!” But it kinda works, though not in the way Cas intended, because it shows Sam that Cas really doesn’t know how to manage him. ie, Cas has a really hard time trying to talk Sam off the ledge at the end there. What had the best chance of getting through to Sam wasn’t to try to ~logic Sam out of a self-destructive but understandable reaction, but to point out that Sam wasn’t just hurting himself like he wanted to, he was dragging Cas into something Cas didn’t want.
I got the idea that Sam’s eagerness to jump into the ritual was less “I WILL AVENGE KEVIN!!” and more the totally valid “OH MY GOD GET IT OUT OF ME.” And that’s about a lot of things: the value Sam places on literal humanity, his fear of having his autonomy impinged upon, his massive survivor’s guilt. But I also think it was that sad belief that he has to justify his anger or his hurt - if he wanted to live badly enough not to close the gates, then why is he pissed about being saved by Gadreel? And (this is the #1 thing I would want directly addressed which means it will obviously never happen) he doesn’t acknowledge that months and months of being manipulated is different from the initial choice, he simply accepts Dean’s framework that this was the ONLY way to do the WHOLE thing. As if “I want to live and not get roofied” is just asking too much. So he tries to EARN the right to be pissed by disdaining any and all benefits from the whole thing, and throw himself back into the comfortable penance-by-pain. Only Cas discourages it rather than encourages it, and so he ends up in a much better place by the end of the episode.
I know Sam bearhugging Cas at the end there was mostly about the fandom’s fixation on hugs (I’m an old-fashioned girl and prefer a good daggering any day of the week, but to each her own, say I) but it was still really poignant. Sam and Cas tend not to speak up with their thoughts and needs, but they’re big on doing, and so a physical show of affection makes sense from both of them.
My problem was: I get that it does make sense that Cas is still clinging to his idealized picture of Dean? I can’t quarrel with it from a characterization perspective, but my reaction was still ARGH CAS BACK HIM UP FOR FIVE SECONDS CHRIST.
Sam’s real and painful dedication to finding Gadreel is a sharp contrast to Dean’s eagerness to put it all out of mind. He leaps on the chance to be around Crowley because it’s easy to feel superior to the King of Hell, and throws himself into the search for Abbadon because she doesn’t remind him of his own shortcomings. Which I think is a very human and understandable reaction, but still something to keep in mind when we start hearing about how Dean is bound by the shackles of his endless regret.
Dean’s instincts are on the fritz (or in Doylist terms, our impression of Dean as someone with unerringly good judgment is being deconstructed). He got played by Gadreel, and then he got played by Crowley, making the exact same mistake about Crowley as Gadreel himself did last week. Crowley admits he is a self-preservationist, therefore he must be a coward, and therefore anything that takes nerve is not something he’s doing. And so Crowley could lay it on so hilariously thick (the sign of the cross, looool) and Dean doesn’t notice because that’s the role he has Crowley slotted into, rightly or wrongly. For all we know, Cain was playing him too.
I don’t see any reason to think Cain’s whole story was a fabrication, but I don’t think we should take anything at face value without corroboration, either. Everyone knows the main thrust of that story, that Cain killed Abel and became demon. This is the twist, though: the biblical story is that God loved Abel best, and Cain killed Abel to be God’s favorite, but the story from the horse’s mouth is that Lucifer wanted Abel first, and Cain killed Abel and became Lucifer’s favorite.
This whole I just ~loved him too much to let him crash off that pedestal by maybe making a decision I don’t like/wouldn’t get to make~ story gets fishier every time we hear it. If this were happening on any other show, with any character other than Dean or a Dean-surrogate, we’d be crying bullshit at the idea that people turn on their own brothers for purity and honor because they just love too much and don’t value themselves enough. Michael, Cain, Dean: all vainly (in every sense of the word) grasping around for some righteous justification for their sick fratricidal desires. (Because remember: TWICE now, Dean would have killed Sam, if not for Cas.) *I* am a good brother, but I know I am a first-rate asshole to you, therefore YOU are clearly the problem and must be destroyed. I'm not prepared to argue that's the only issue for any of those three characters, but I'm fairly confident it's a big one or even the biggest one.
And oh, speaking of the archangels, between the lines of Cain’s narration of his own story, I suspect we really heard the story of yet another one of Lucifer’s chumps. Maybe Lucifer didn’t want Abel, maybe he was just playing out his issues with Michael who turned on him for his ~impurity, and Cain was the one he wanted to corrupt all along.
I said not two days ago that the season has pulled zero punches on its deconstruction of Dean, and alas, I spoke too soon, because that’s the source of what very little I didn’t love about this episode. I think it pulled some punches. Overtly drawing a line from Dean to the biblical Cain is a death blow to Dean’s self-construct, and having Cain slobber out Dean’s exact backdoor-brag rationalizations about how he just ~cared too much about being his brother’s keeper (IKR LOL BUT I HAVE A POINT HERE BEAR WITH ME) should’ve been the ultimate salt’n’burn. And then Dean consciously, freely choosing to take on the mark of Cain because he wants to play with Crowley and get Abbadon puts lie to all his rationalizations in the early/middle seasons of the show, that Sam wanted to be a demon, that Sam was arrogant and power-hungry and Dean’s anger at him was objectively morally justified. BULLSHIT. He was pissed at Sam for having the nerve to let himself get exploited at six months old, which I know most of us have probably known for a long time but it’s nice to have confirmation. Like. If you had told me a year and a half ago when I was catching up with the fandom if the show was going to go this far, evoking these mythological associations, in tearing down Dean’s self-construct, I would have been like SHUT UP GET OUT. (I actually probably would have a lot less antipathy toward him in that case, but we’ll never know now.) But then there was lots of DEAN YOU JUST HATE YOURSELF TOO MUCH, CAS AND SAM ARE THE BIGGER SCREW-UPS, blah blah blah. Which, obviously neither Crowley nor Cas is a particularly reliable narrator, and I get the spoonful of sugar thing, but it still stuck in my craw.
Anyway, I gleefully reveled in all the slams on John. Rustic obsessive, hahahaha.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/326500.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.