5.22 Swan Song meta - Cost of Sacrifice
"“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).” Bible
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done" - Charles Dickens 'A Tale of Two Cities'
"The way you two keep sacrificing yourselves for each other? Nothing good comes out of it. Just blood and pain. ... Sometimes you just gotta let people go." Trickster 3.11
**********************************************************************
“No doubt -- endings are hard.” Chuck
Let me tell you, beginnings are also hard - especially beginning this meta for this episode.
It took days just to get over the whole ‘being sad’ about Sam and Dean - not too sure which one I was hurting more over, but most likely Dean, his ‘angst’ face really really hurts - and just the writing part took over a couple of days because I needed to sort out all the confusion in my head, let alone in my syntax.
5.22 Swan Song meta - Cost of Sacrifice
Each act of sacrifice begets the necessity of yet another sacrifice to neutralize or remedy the price of the previous.
Sacrifice is essentially all about the inability to accept, to bear the burden of living with what we do have, and when we sacrifice that which is for that which may be, or that which we believe should be, we only ever end up with what we never wanted or that which we wished we hadn’t wanted.
Because, in the end, what we sacrifice is never worth what we sacrificed.
Because the true coinage of sacrifice is always “blood and pain” and the nature of blood and pain is that even when we seek to insure that the blood spilt and pain inflicted belonged to the other, we must always include some of our own in the sacrifice.
Humanity has always recognized the value of blood sacrifice, from the thumping hearts torn from living bodies by the Ancient Incans to the bloodless symbolism hidden within the innocuous bread and wine of the Christian Eucharist. What we know, what we’ve always known is that blood represents power.
In Supernatural, blood refers to both the family bloodline as well as the more literal blood that is used within the stories to feed, to enhance the supernatural beings, not to mention the stories themselves since every story within Supernatural features and relies upon the spilling of blood in order to move the narrative. The spilt blood catches the attention of the Winchesters and each and every story is ‘greased’ by the blood that runs through it, like veins and arteries.
When Mary sacrificed Sam to the YED for John’s resurrection, she did not realize that she set in motion the chain of events that would lead her first born son into Hell and her second born son to become the vessel of Lucifer. She didn’t even realize that she was signing her own death warrant at the time of the deal even when both the YED and Dean warned her specifically to stay out of Sam’s nursery on the night of the fire. When faced with the prospect of being ‘desperate and alone’, she makes the exact same choice her first born son makes in ‘All hell breaks loose II’. She asks for John to be returned to life.
Mary’s choice was real beginning of the Supernatural story.
By giving YED permission to enter Sam’s nursery 10 years later, she had unknowingly allowed YED to alter Sam’s biology irrevocably by introducing demon-blood into the six month old baby’s mouth and then had inadvertently gotten herself killed when she forgot the YED’s advice to not interrupt him (not to mention Dean’s warning). Her death forced her family to lead the one lifestyle she never wanted for her children, as her obsessed husband ceaselessly and relentlessly pursued her killer.
Mary’s choice ended with her incidental sacrifice, being burned on the ceiling of Sam’s nursery as a result of her motherly instinct, and with the luxury of hindsight, we can now understand why she had to say ‘I’m sorry’ to Sam when the two finally met in 1.09. Regardless of what Mary’s choice was or might have been, what had been made abundantly clear by the narrative was that Sam and Dean Winchesters’ lives had always been manipulated by outside forces. From the Cupid arranged ‘perfect love’ between Mary and John, which created the impetus for John’s obsessive need to hunt for her killer, to the season 5 finale when Sam discovered that his entire life had been under the observation and manipulation of demons, the Winchesters have always been forced to make their ‘free’ choice to sacrifice themselves, encumbered by circumstances beyond their control.
As a result of her sacrifice, Mary gained a husband and two children that she loved. The price of her sacrifice was that she condemned her husband to a tortuous, lonely life and her two sons to unspeakable fates which could have resulted in the end of the world. Was it worth it?
The sequence of events that cascaded from Mary’s sacrifice of Sam for John, from John’s sacrifice for Dean followed by Dean’s sacrifice for Sam inexorably led to Sam’s decision to sacrifice himself to Lucifer and to his destiny, for the sake of the world and most especially for Dean. However, the reason for the sacrifice has been varied, as in Mary’s case it was her overwhelming love for John that allowed her to turn a blind eye to the consequences of her choice, a love which had been revealed by the show to have existed through the agency of a Cupid - in the same episode which also demonstrated the sheer efficacy of the bond so generated. Whereas, John chose to save Dean, not so much because he valued Dean’s life over his obsession with YED but because he believed that Dean could and would continue his battle with the YED.
In 2.01, John pleads with Sam that he “just don't want to fight anymore, okay?” just before turning back to Dean to leave him with his last words. And the very last words John left Dean was that he was to save Sam and that if he couldn’t, then that he might have to kill Sam. Hence creating a potential for reading John’s decision as not so much based on saving Dean but rather that by this stage, John had become tired of the unending futility of his battle and that he chose to take this opportunity to retire from the battle, the way he wanted to, swapping out his life (and soul) for his son. And this is the selfishness of John’s sacrifice that Dean rightly and increasing resented from season 3 onwards as his own sacrifice for Sam forced him to continually relieve and re-examine John’s motivation in choosing to save his life.
The main theme of Supernatural is family and in Supernatural the person who epitomizes the value of family more than any other is Dean. Through 5.14, Supernatural has implied that due to the interference by Cupid, it wasn’t possible for either Mary or John to place greater importance on the love and care for the family over the all consuming bond between the two lovers. And from the beginning of Supernatural, it has been emphasized over and over that Sam placed his importance on the individual rather than on the family. It has been Dean, of all the Winchesters who constantly and ceaselessly sought to reunite and keep united in the family unit, even when there were only Sam and himself. So it was unavoidable that when faced with the prospect of being left without a family at the end of ‘All Hell Breaks Loose part I’, that the first thing he did was to run to the Cross Roads Demon and offer everything that he had to get back the only thing that mattered to him. This wasn’t because Dean was selfish or needy, this was because Dean literally can not see himself without being a part of a family. Family is the central core of Dean’s identity and this is the reason that Sam sends Dean to Lisa and Ben in 5.22, because Sam understood that there was no such person as a Dean without a family.
Even Sam, the ultimate upholder of the individual rights chose his family when it came to the end.
Sam was willing to sacrifice his family or rather what he saw as stifling obligations to his family, in order to pursue his dream of a normal life. He wasn’t able to recognize or notice the pain that his choice inflicted on Dean because what Dean saw as his Raison d'être was for Sam, a suffocating cage that destroyed all his possibilities. Given that what Sam saw as liberation represented a still suppurating sore to Dean, their shared memories served to seed a minefield that separated Dean from Sam on the divide of Family versus Individual but it didn’t mean that Sam didn’t love his family or that family wasn’t important to Sam.
In fact, Sam has shown a singular ruthlessness in his determination to preserve his family or rather specifically Dean that goes over and beyond any sacrifice of Dean’s because Sam unlike Dean had always been more than willing to sacrifice those that he considered to be collateral damage if it meant saving his brother. Starting with the collateral damage incurred when taking Dean to Roy in ‘Faith’ and given his willingness to bleed a man to death in ‘Mystery Spot’, there is very little moral limitation on what (and who) Sam is willing to sacrifice for Dean, even to the extent of sacrificing their humanity in ‘Time is on my side’, had Dean agreed - which he didn’t. In 5.22, when faced with Michael wearing the body of their half brother Adam, there isn’t even a second of hesitation when Sam sweeps up the only other threat that would have been left to Dean, before throwing both of them into the other-dimensional vortex opened by the four rings of the Horsemen. It is intriguing to wonder whether Sam would have been able to make the same choice just as easily had the other vessel been Dean, which of course would have been the reason why Michael’s first choice had been Dean.
Sam’s entire raison d'être in season five was Dean, as much as Dean’s had been Sam for all of Dean’s life. By season five, Sam had lost his dreams of a normal life, he had lost everything and everyone except Dean, who had been taken from him so brutally by the Hell-hounds and returned through the grace of a capricious God and his agent, Castiel. Through his own actions, he then lost Dean again, this time not just in form but in spirit as distance grew between him and his brother and in season five, Sam finally sacrificed his selfishness and his need to be an individual so that he could aspire for regaining that which had once been his without question, the love and respect and regard of his brother. This was the truly significant sacrifice from Sam, not the grand gesture to save the world.
As Chuck said, “They chose family. And well, isn’t that kinda the whole point?”
Sidebar:
And this brings up the fascinatingly ambivalent ending to 5.22 when presumably through authorial intervention a la Chuck, Sam has been saved from Lucifer’s cage and brought back to earth - although the blacking out of the street light at his appearance suggested that this Sam might perhaps still contain the demon blood powers - to gaze on Dean and his readymade surrogate family. The expression on Sam’s face is complex and conflicted leading to such conjectures as maybe he’s contemplating yet another sacrifice, this time, to not announce his return to Dean so as to spare Dean from parting his ‘ideal’ family. Maybe, this time Sam was reconsidering trying out the Trickster’s advice to let people go. Although, given the continuation into season six, such a sacrifice would be unlikely to last beyond the season break and we would expect Sam to burst in on Dean, to complete the cycle from the season one opening episode when Dean came into Sam’s life at Stanford.
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done" - Charles Dickens 'A Tale of Two Cities'
"The way you two keep sacrificing yourselves for each other? Nothing good comes out of it. Just blood and pain. ... Sometimes you just gotta let people go." Trickster 3.11
**********************************************************************
“No doubt -- endings are hard.” Chuck
Let me tell you, beginnings are also hard - especially beginning this meta for this episode.
It took days just to get over the whole ‘being sad’ about Sam and Dean - not too sure which one I was hurting more over, but most likely Dean, his ‘angst’ face really really hurts - and just the writing part took over a couple of days because I needed to sort out all the confusion in my head, let alone in my syntax.
5.22 Swan Song meta - Cost of Sacrifice
Each act of sacrifice begets the necessity of yet another sacrifice to neutralize or remedy the price of the previous.
Sacrifice is essentially all about the inability to accept, to bear the burden of living with what we do have, and when we sacrifice that which is for that which may be, or that which we believe should be, we only ever end up with what we never wanted or that which we wished we hadn’t wanted.
Because, in the end, what we sacrifice is never worth what we sacrificed.
Because the true coinage of sacrifice is always “blood and pain” and the nature of blood and pain is that even when we seek to insure that the blood spilt and pain inflicted belonged to the other, we must always include some of our own in the sacrifice.
Humanity has always recognized the value of blood sacrifice, from the thumping hearts torn from living bodies by the Ancient Incans to the bloodless symbolism hidden within the innocuous bread and wine of the Christian Eucharist. What we know, what we’ve always known is that blood represents power.
In Supernatural, blood refers to both the family bloodline as well as the more literal blood that is used within the stories to feed, to enhance the supernatural beings, not to mention the stories themselves since every story within Supernatural features and relies upon the spilling of blood in order to move the narrative. The spilt blood catches the attention of the Winchesters and each and every story is ‘greased’ by the blood that runs through it, like veins and arteries.
When Mary sacrificed Sam to the YED for John’s resurrection, she did not realize that she set in motion the chain of events that would lead her first born son into Hell and her second born son to become the vessel of Lucifer. She didn’t even realize that she was signing her own death warrant at the time of the deal even when both the YED and Dean warned her specifically to stay out of Sam’s nursery on the night of the fire. When faced with the prospect of being ‘desperate and alone’, she makes the exact same choice her first born son makes in ‘All hell breaks loose II’. She asks for John to be returned to life.
Mary’s choice was real beginning of the Supernatural story.
By giving YED permission to enter Sam’s nursery 10 years later, she had unknowingly allowed YED to alter Sam’s biology irrevocably by introducing demon-blood into the six month old baby’s mouth and then had inadvertently gotten herself killed when she forgot the YED’s advice to not interrupt him (not to mention Dean’s warning). Her death forced her family to lead the one lifestyle she never wanted for her children, as her obsessed husband ceaselessly and relentlessly pursued her killer.
Mary’s choice ended with her incidental sacrifice, being burned on the ceiling of Sam’s nursery as a result of her motherly instinct, and with the luxury of hindsight, we can now understand why she had to say ‘I’m sorry’ to Sam when the two finally met in 1.09. Regardless of what Mary’s choice was or might have been, what had been made abundantly clear by the narrative was that Sam and Dean Winchesters’ lives had always been manipulated by outside forces. From the Cupid arranged ‘perfect love’ between Mary and John, which created the impetus for John’s obsessive need to hunt for her killer, to the season 5 finale when Sam discovered that his entire life had been under the observation and manipulation of demons, the Winchesters have always been forced to make their ‘free’ choice to sacrifice themselves, encumbered by circumstances beyond their control.
As a result of her sacrifice, Mary gained a husband and two children that she loved. The price of her sacrifice was that she condemned her husband to a tortuous, lonely life and her two sons to unspeakable fates which could have resulted in the end of the world. Was it worth it?
The sequence of events that cascaded from Mary’s sacrifice of Sam for John, from John’s sacrifice for Dean followed by Dean’s sacrifice for Sam inexorably led to Sam’s decision to sacrifice himself to Lucifer and to his destiny, for the sake of the world and most especially for Dean. However, the reason for the sacrifice has been varied, as in Mary’s case it was her overwhelming love for John that allowed her to turn a blind eye to the consequences of her choice, a love which had been revealed by the show to have existed through the agency of a Cupid - in the same episode which also demonstrated the sheer efficacy of the bond so generated. Whereas, John chose to save Dean, not so much because he valued Dean’s life over his obsession with YED but because he believed that Dean could and would continue his battle with the YED.
In 2.01, John pleads with Sam that he “just don't want to fight anymore, okay?” just before turning back to Dean to leave him with his last words. And the very last words John left Dean was that he was to save Sam and that if he couldn’t, then that he might have to kill Sam. Hence creating a potential for reading John’s decision as not so much based on saving Dean but rather that by this stage, John had become tired of the unending futility of his battle and that he chose to take this opportunity to retire from the battle, the way he wanted to, swapping out his life (and soul) for his son. And this is the selfishness of John’s sacrifice that Dean rightly and increasing resented from season 3 onwards as his own sacrifice for Sam forced him to continually relieve and re-examine John’s motivation in choosing to save his life.
The main theme of Supernatural is family and in Supernatural the person who epitomizes the value of family more than any other is Dean. Through 5.14, Supernatural has implied that due to the interference by Cupid, it wasn’t possible for either Mary or John to place greater importance on the love and care for the family over the all consuming bond between the two lovers. And from the beginning of Supernatural, it has been emphasized over and over that Sam placed his importance on the individual rather than on the family. It has been Dean, of all the Winchesters who constantly and ceaselessly sought to reunite and keep united in the family unit, even when there were only Sam and himself. So it was unavoidable that when faced with the prospect of being left without a family at the end of ‘All Hell Breaks Loose part I’, that the first thing he did was to run to the Cross Roads Demon and offer everything that he had to get back the only thing that mattered to him. This wasn’t because Dean was selfish or needy, this was because Dean literally can not see himself without being a part of a family. Family is the central core of Dean’s identity and this is the reason that Sam sends Dean to Lisa and Ben in 5.22, because Sam understood that there was no such person as a Dean without a family.
Even Sam, the ultimate upholder of the individual rights chose his family when it came to the end.
Sam was willing to sacrifice his family or rather what he saw as stifling obligations to his family, in order to pursue his dream of a normal life. He wasn’t able to recognize or notice the pain that his choice inflicted on Dean because what Dean saw as his Raison d'être was for Sam, a suffocating cage that destroyed all his possibilities. Given that what Sam saw as liberation represented a still suppurating sore to Dean, their shared memories served to seed a minefield that separated Dean from Sam on the divide of Family versus Individual but it didn’t mean that Sam didn’t love his family or that family wasn’t important to Sam.
In fact, Sam has shown a singular ruthlessness in his determination to preserve his family or rather specifically Dean that goes over and beyond any sacrifice of Dean’s because Sam unlike Dean had always been more than willing to sacrifice those that he considered to be collateral damage if it meant saving his brother. Starting with the collateral damage incurred when taking Dean to Roy in ‘Faith’ and given his willingness to bleed a man to death in ‘Mystery Spot’, there is very little moral limitation on what (and who) Sam is willing to sacrifice for Dean, even to the extent of sacrificing their humanity in ‘Time is on my side’, had Dean agreed - which he didn’t. In 5.22, when faced with Michael wearing the body of their half brother Adam, there isn’t even a second of hesitation when Sam sweeps up the only other threat that would have been left to Dean, before throwing both of them into the other-dimensional vortex opened by the four rings of the Horsemen. It is intriguing to wonder whether Sam would have been able to make the same choice just as easily had the other vessel been Dean, which of course would have been the reason why Michael’s first choice had been Dean.
Sam’s entire raison d'être in season five was Dean, as much as Dean’s had been Sam for all of Dean’s life. By season five, Sam had lost his dreams of a normal life, he had lost everything and everyone except Dean, who had been taken from him so brutally by the Hell-hounds and returned through the grace of a capricious God and his agent, Castiel. Through his own actions, he then lost Dean again, this time not just in form but in spirit as distance grew between him and his brother and in season five, Sam finally sacrificed his selfishness and his need to be an individual so that he could aspire for regaining that which had once been his without question, the love and respect and regard of his brother. This was the truly significant sacrifice from Sam, not the grand gesture to save the world.
As Chuck said, “They chose family. And well, isn’t that kinda the whole point?”
Sidebar:
And this brings up the fascinatingly ambivalent ending to 5.22 when presumably through authorial intervention a la Chuck, Sam has been saved from Lucifer’s cage and brought back to earth - although the blacking out of the street light at his appearance suggested that this Sam might perhaps still contain the demon blood powers - to gaze on Dean and his readymade surrogate family. The expression on Sam’s face is complex and conflicted leading to such conjectures as maybe he’s contemplating yet another sacrifice, this time, to not announce his return to Dean so as to spare Dean from parting his ‘ideal’ family. Maybe, this time Sam was reconsidering trying out the Trickster’s advice to let people go. Although, given the continuation into season six, such a sacrifice would be unlikely to last beyond the season break and we would expect Sam to burst in on Dean, to complete the cycle from the season one opening episode when Dean came into Sam’s life at Stanford.