SPN 9x16 - Blade Runners
IMO the most interesting thing about the episode was Crowley providing a flash point for a lot of issues. Distancing from demons generally is SOP, and I can certainly understand Sam wanting to fall back on that. But it’s also that both of them have some weirdness about Crowley?
With Dean, it goes back to the beginning of the season when Dean didn’t kill Crowley, and he said it was for his little mascot Sammy and then Sam disagreed so it was all for ~information, but I think it was pretty much that Dean plain didn’t want to kill Crowley. He’s bonded with Crowley, he thinks Crowley is amusing and useful, he just didn’t want to do it. And in isolation, that’s fine; it’s another tiny crack in his kill-‘em-all wall. HOWEVER. It is also yet another instance of Dean deciding who lives or dies based on His Gut. No rules, no consideration of consequences, no input from anyone else. That works out well for Crowley, but it is extremely unfair to and unsafe for Sam. Dean has told Sam that Sam isn’t human, he’s stripped Sam’s literal humanity from him, and now he’s shrugging off even that rule that at least tells Sam when to duck and cover. Sam pushing Dean to take a position, to at least explain why Crowley gets to live after they get the blade, is eminently reasonable from a personal safety POV.
Not that I think it’s just about personal safety vis-à-vis Dean. Crowley is a big threat to Sam’s self-protection project of the season. Crowley, after all, has possessed him, and I don’t think it’s an accident that we got a reminder of how quickly Crowley can get a whole lot of information from being in a person’s head. I would not want to be around him either after that. But there’s also the fact that Crowley has quite a bit of Sam in him, psychologically and literally. That humanity that Crowley can’t or won’t let go of since the Trials? It’s Sam’s. It started with Sam’s blood, with the way Sam got him to admit he was desperate to be loved. Nasty, pathetic, untrustworthy Crowley is a walking, incessantly talking reminder of what Sam didn’t do when he backed away from the Trials. And it’s probably a little uncomfortable to continue being pissed at the way in which he was cured against his will when faced with a demon he tried to “cure” against its will. I think he has every right to, there are plenty of material distinctions there, but feelings are not necessarily rational. (That may not be the only way he’s identifying? The honeymoon suite, the blood dealer who sold him out - Crowley’s plight may have been uncomfortably familiar to Sam.) Overall, I think Sam’s ability to at least take a step back from consuming himself with “I should be dead” and focus on “why the hell isn’t *he* dead” is a promising sign concerning Sam’s mental health. But it’s a little bit painful, a little bit ugly, and if this is where he stops rather than where he starts it’ll be very bad indeed.
Likewise, Crowley’s crush on Sam isn’t just an amusing, endearing little gag anymore. I mean, it is those things, but it’s also something a little harder to swallow. The Winchesters, and particularly Sam, did force ~feelings on him while holding him in contempt, and while that’s awfully light from a cosmic justice perspective, it’s still hurtful from a Crowley-as-subject perspective. Crowley has less of a bond with Dean, and he’s rightfully confident that he knows how to play Dean, but Sam really does pose a threat to Crowley, on top of Crowley being as emotionally vulnerable to Sam as he’s capable of being. “Moose” and “Not Moose” are Crowley’s points of contact with the human world, even though “Not Moose” is the one who calls him constantly. The reasons that Crowley wants Sam’s affection are the same reasons Sam is slamming the door in his face. And as much as I do think it’s good for Sam that he can do that…..AWWWW, CROWLEY LOVES SAM, which IMO is the #1 best way to humanize a murderous hell-beast 10/10 well done.
(BUT ACTUALLY I JUST LOVE THIS? How we’ve spent all this time like, Sam needs backup, Sam needs a friend, and here he gets Crowley the glassy-eyed superfan giving him all the affection and validation that he wanted so badly out of Cas a few weeks ago. AWWWWWW. But also sick and kind of exploitative and will do him no favors. But also AWWWWWWW.)
So there’s all that, just from which characters were in the episode and their varying degrees of hostility toward each other. But the actual substance of the episode was quite enjoyable too. The Mark of Cain stuff was pretty blatant, which I really enjoyed. In tracking down one of the men who left him his legacy, Dean ends up trapped in a place with no exit, surrounded by the power sources he covets and objectified as one of them, and only saves himself by running the risk of being controlled by that power.
And what a cool, unsettling moment that was when Dean had the blade in his hand and realized that he might not be able to control it, and in a way that was not what he expected. It’d be one thing if he had gone after Crowley and not realized it because oh, the blade makes you hate demons or adversaries or threats or whatever. And instead he kept looking at Sam, holding this weapon that was created specifically to perpetrate fratricide.
Unsettling in a different way is how Sam handled that - without showing worry, or fear, or even much surprise. Part of it’s that Sam tends to keep his cool, and he’s especially invested in keeping all of Dean’s issues at a distance right now, but I also think on some level he might hae known to expect something. When they talk about the larger conflict, it is carefully, precisely, about the Blade, the Mark, about the concrete immediate reality of Abaddon and Crowley, but in the first shot in the bunker, we see that Sam is privately researching Cain and Abel.
I don’t think there’s a better way to explain the qualitative difference between how Sam and Dean relate to each other than to compare the scene at the end of the episode with the issue of Gadreel throughout the first half of the season. Dean kept talking Sam out of reality because Sam might get pissed at Dean because of something Dean did to him; Sam has to talk Dean back to reality because Dean might freaking kill Sam because of something Dean did to himself.
And this has been so well set up all season.
CHEF LEO: Well, I didn’t mean to kill anyone - at first. But if people got in my way, they became collateral damage. Guess you eat enough predators, you start to become one. You are what you eat, right? [laughs]
DEAN: Do you really think the power you hold over other people’s lives can make up for what you lack in your own?
DEAN: Who the hell knows? He was all jacked up on juice, you know? He was possessed by - by something he couldn’t control. It was… [long pause] It was a - a matter of time before it completely took over. You can’t reason with crazy, right?
(x)
NOT PICTURED: winging it.
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