SPN 9x13 - The Purge
I was all set to cringe over the case of the week but I actually didn’t so much mind it? No mean cracks about people’s weight - well, Dean tried to go there and got shut down. No gross victim-blaming of the stiffs or condescension toward the potential victims at the spa. ALSO HOW ADORABLE WAS YOGI SAM OMG. Since I mean, he clearly did know something about yoga classes. Like, do people really sit around and discuss what “downward-facing dog” is called in, yk, an applied-bendiness situation? lol, I hope Soulless went to hippie-dippie community yoga classes.
Sam, again, gives way more ground than was healthy for him to do, because he projects onto Dean and really thinks Dean wants to make things work. haha, bby, ur 2 qt. I do think this scene served to clarify something people have been crying about since last week.
SAM: If you want to be brothers…..those are my terms.
That’s not quite a “disowning,” which tends to imply permanence. It’s him saying Dean is going to have to work for it if he wants to be brothers, that he’s going to have to actually treat Sam like a brother and not a brain-damaged puppy. I think his refusal to lay out a series of benchmarks right away for that was wise, because he knows Dean would’ve set to finding ways around them or tried to bully him out of enforcing those boundaries or make him feel guilty for imposing them or whatever, and also because Sam hasn’t healed nearly enough from those things to know what would feel safe for him, and that’s okay. Dean has to start with acknowledging the things that really do have to go without saying, like DON’T ROOFIE ME. The point of the conversation was that Sam is setting terms, that he’s going to actually choose what expectations he has for Dean instead of constantly hopping to guess Dean’s ever-shifting goalposts.
Sam doesn’t get how deep Dean’s resistance to that goes. (For that matter, Dean doesn’t get how deep his resistance to that goes, because that would require he acknowledge what he’s doing and he stubbornly refuses to do that.) Watching the episode, I thought Sam actually made a medium-sized mistake putting himself out there, fussing over Dean’s sleep habits and ~precious feelings, but Sam was centered enough that he could stick to his guns and make another effort toward getting Dean to understand where he’s coming from.
Of course, Sam’s honesty is the last thing Dean wants to hear. IMO, it’s been a very long time since Dean has done or said anything fully sincere. His first priority when he says what he says and does what he does is to keep his grasp on his preferred familial structure - that is to say, to keep Sam around but down and himself feeling okay about it. And so when Sam says he’s “just being honest,” that really doesn’t register to Dean, not because Dean is ~hurting so badly~ - he’s not pining, he’s sulking - but because he projects and assumes that an interaction where he doesn’t get the upper hand is Sam aggressively fighting for dominance in the way he would, and so Sam being honest is really Sam lying to hurt him.
That plays out a few times in the case. The episode addressed Sam’s isolation, which I didn’t expect: we see Sam question why Dean is the one who goes to chat with the pretty witness, and Dean responds by putting him down and tries to equate his mean lie (Sam is good with witnesses) with Sam having bared his soul. Sam argues against killing Maritza (?), and Dean tries to blackmail Sam with her life, framing it as if she’ll die if Sam doesn’t agree to just pretend the whole Gadreel thing never happened. Dean’s co-opting of “business” was an inept attempt at throwing Sam’s words back in his face, but it was also his trying to gain the I’m-always-right high ground: my way is the rational way, the business way, I am always logically right even if sometimes I indulge you because I’m such a nice guy. So it was particularly nice that Sam didn’t let him off the hook.
As he loses his assurance that he can get away with ragging on Sam, he slips up and loses his ability to charm others. He’s gross at the first witness, the woman who put the blessing bag in with the first victim, and puts her on the spot about her taste in men, because the idea that someone would value a person over a body doesn’t occur to him. His brash claim of being an ass-kicker puts the spa owners off allowing him near any of the clients. Sam takes point on the case, hops to protect Dean after Dean eats the roofies, finds the monster and fights with it all alone; Dean swoops in and does the knife-swinging that makes him so happy and then tries to use that against Sam.
The first thing that floored me about the conversation at the end was the way it laid bare the endless hostage situation they euphemistically refer to as “the family business.” Dean thinks “I saved you so I OWN you,” and he tries to play that against Sam, though Sam has never pulled that on him when the positions were reversed. Again, it’s learned behavior. That’s a big part of how John was so successful at controlling them both - he put them constantly in life-or-death situations and they were so busy being grateful to be alive that they couldn’t actually live. Sam’s way of escaping this has been to devalue his own life, to not care about whether he lives or dies so at least whatever time he has can be on his own terms. That’s not healthy, and I doubt it’s forever, but it is an understandable response to the whole thing.
And Dean - backhandedly but still - admits it. When Sam asks the upside of his being alive, Dean doesn’t say “your life is valuable” he says “your presence in this relationship is valuable and your continued breathing is a means to that end.” Dean’s martyr complex is really not a martyr complex. Martyrdom requires the pain of self-abnegation; it is mutually exclusive with desire for or expectation of earthly reward. Dean does what he does because the risk-reward analysis pays off for him in the form of getting to control his relationship with Sam.
It was far from complete, of course. They haven’t dealt with the root causes of why Sam even was ready to die. He’s not ready to hold Dean accountable for his slide from sad-but-stable at the beginning of the season to a suicide attempt in the season finale, but Dean riding him all season was the precipitating factor. That’d be a hard conversation to have with someone who is willing to admit any culpability, which Dean isn’t; it’s asking too much for Sam to revisit that whole can of worms when he hasn’t worked it through himself. It also gives Dean way too much power, if Sam says “your opinion means more to me than my own life,” which is how Dean would hear it. And of course it’s not just the initial possession that’s a problem, but the months of gaslighting after. I’m not sure if we’re focusing on the flash points just for the moment or if they’re going to end up being the symbolic stand-in for the whole problem, though I’m hoping it’ll be spelled out eventually.
OH ALSO S8, finally proving the point that I suspected it was meant to do. I think people are right that we’re looking at a more comparable situation to Time Is on My Side, when Sam had means to save Dean from Hell but he respected Dean saying “no.” That said, I do think the Purgatory situation is a relevant comparison as well. According to everyone who put in an opinion about the situation - Sam, Dean, the bearded fucking peanut gallery who should’ve bit the dust for good years ago - Sam and Dean had an agreement that there were certain risks they wouldn’t take, certain situations in which they would react in an agreed-upon way, the equivalent of a DNR. Now, there were a lot of reasons for Sam to do what he did after S7 and I would defend him for acting on any or all of them. But one of those reasons was the choice to take Dean at his word.
And Dean - along with fandom - was pissed about that. Dean - for some reasons that are his fault and a lot that aren’t - believes that desperation, obsession, need are necessary elements of love, more than affection or respect or sincere care. The person who LOVES MORE is the person who is more willing to overtake, to intrude, to hurt, and therefore is the person who is in charge. If you love someone, so goes the Dean-logic, you’ll always decide that no means yes because a loving relationship is one where everyone involved is trying to play it cool and look less needy but doesn’t actually say anything of substance or intent.
But dependence is not actually love. If you have to have someone/thing (note the interchangeability) around in order to survive, you’ll do it whether you love or hate or couldn’t care less.
Sam’s ability to survive without Dean threw a lot of that into sharp relief. On the dominance-play level, if Sam can walk away and Dean can’t, then Sam happens to have more capital in the relationship than Dean does. Dean can’t quite tell himself he’s in charge anymore, and that’s why he worked so hard to degrade Sam’s autonomy last season. Abuse is not about love, it’s about power.
Moving to the ~deep abiding love, well, someone who CAN walk away but CHOOSES to stick around is demonstrating love, not self-interest. I don’t think it’s possible to say who subjectively loves who as much or more, and I think it’s counterproductive to try. But we can observe behavior, and Sam, who WANTS Dean in his life even after everything, is demonstrating loving behavior in a way that Dean, who NEEDS the relationship to work in an ego-affirming way, is not. Those are the two big excuses for Dean, the ~love and the ~codependency, and they’re falling right apart.
"OMG ARE YOU SAYING DEAN DOESN'T LOVE SAM??!?" I'm saying that whether or not he loves Sam, his behavior is inconsistent with someone who prioritizes love, and has been for some time. "OMG ARE YOU HATING ON PEOPLE WHO LOVE DEAN?!?!?" I'm saying I expect us to be honest about him and his behavior. "OMG UR SUCH A HATER!!!!" lol, k. All I am saying is that I am very confident that the show understands both who Dean is and who he wants to be.
[postscript: Okay I usually finish up and post before reading any other reactions at all but flipping through my dash I did see something MEGA-GROSS? That Sam is the one saying things to hurt Dean? Um, “DON’T ROOFIE ME BRO, I WOULDN’T DO IT TO YOU” is not a mean, hurtful thing? “You’re too pathetic to be in the presence of other human beings,” however, is? Don’t fucking LIE in order to look “balanced.” It’s not balanced. Dean hurt Sam, Sam is going above and beyond to try and find a place he can save this relationship, and Dean is being an asshole about it. The idea that Sam setting any boundaries at all is an intrinsic attack on Dean is a big part of why things have been abusive as they have for as long as they have.] This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/327853.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.