SPN 2x14, the Uncanny Valley, not!Sam and other natterings
For those who are new to me, or choosy about what they read in the way of episode reviews, here's a guide to me on this episode:
♥ Sam
♥ Dean
♥ episode
♥ Jared
♥ Jensen
♥ Metallicar
thinky but squee-friendly
Like most of my friends, I heart this episode so much it hurts. Jared and Jensen both, as tjournal put it knocked it outta the park and offa the planet. Anyone who has had doubts about Jared's ability to carry the increasingly challenging range of Sam's emotions as his options (seem to - for more about that, see mine and Kassie's meta posts on Sunday) narrow, ought, now, to be reassured.
Sam's violent scenes with Jo and Dean were so well acted as to be emotionally painful. As estrella30 says, I could go a long time without seeing Sam hit Dean like that again. And by long time, I mean forever. It's one thing for the boys to fight each other. But to see Sam hitting a man when he's down, especially if that man is Dean, is just plain uncomfortable. Likewise to see Sam treating a woman as bait and a sex object, especially one he knows and has some quasi-familial obligations toward, is disturbing to the nth.
In some ways, it was almost as painful for me to watch Sam admitting to Dean he didn't think he was in control, and acting all cocky but nervous with Bobby. Or sitting on the bed nearly catatonic about the blood. Like the more obvious menthols and 40 of malt liqour, these are signs that this is not Sam.
The other day, toxictattoo referred to the book Uncanny Valley. The rough gist of the book's thesis (wikipedia how I love and loathe thee) is that things which are human-like but not human may cause an uncanny negative reaction in humans. There's scientific evidence about this one both pro and con, dealing with such things as robots and corpses and animals and anime, but it does seem to be the case at least colloquially that: 1) 'human' traits in things that are distinctly non-human, ie robotic robots or whales, provoke sympathy; 2) nonhuman traits in things that are distinctly human provoke vague, unidentifiable-source distress.
Sam's a good example of this with his fear of clowns. Human, but the painted faces and odd behavior that doesn't fit known patterns. Or think of zombies - we have one in Supernatural, and her would-be boyfriend gets somewhat creeped because she both is and isn't the girl he'd known. Or dolls, because dolls are creepy, yo. The more human they look, the more they disturb me. Not everyone feels the same way, but, I think Barbie dolls are hysterical and human hair dolls are omgmeep.
I think Sam-but-not-Sam struck Dean and me and Nan and others in much the same way. just_katarin IMed me after the episode and said "OMG evil!Sam is hot and he should be evil like every third episode!" and she was totally kidding from the perspective of the story, just reacting to how uber-hot Jared is when he's being a creepy badass. My response to her was serious off the charts, and I refer to the Uncanny Valley thesis for why. Yes, objectively, I look at evil!Sam and think omgHOT, same as I always sort of did with evil!Spike and Angelus. But unlike Spike and Angelus for whom their evil forms were default-normal, evil!Sam is not normal and registers with me emotionally as wrong.
So, while from a dramatic perspective I thought the episode was near brilliant, and from a yaye!pretty perspective I can swoon while looking at stills, I still find Sam-but-not-Sam deeply disturbing. Possibly it's my revulsion to the idea of not being in control of my own actions (despite my tendency to drink too much and be stupid, unless it hits me super-fast, I always stop drinking before I'd do anything I wouldn't normally or go directly to bed; I'm just not comfortable with that feeling of drunk between tipsy and plastered). Possibly it's my sense that Sam is deeply disturbed about not being in control of his own actions. Dramatically, there's the fear that someone won't realize it and hurt him - Jo didn't. Dean did.
Actually, while I'm nattering, this is something I've written about a lot in Supernatural fic. I have this trope in some of my fic that Sam wants a more affectionate, warmer Dean. That's a bit reductionist and when stated like that, I don't even agree with it, but whatever. Anyway. *g* In "Love in Disguise" and in "Fiddle of Gold Against Your Soul" Dean behaves in ways that are what my Sam thinks he wants, and while there is a deep-seated appeal to that, he ultimately just wants Dean. Or Dean AS Dean. I think we see this on the show in the first half of the season with Sam's anger, fear, and near-continuous probing at Dean. Dean is not being himself and Sam doesn't like it. It frightens him.
What I mostly want to say about this is: if your friends don't like evil!Sam or if they shudder when you in your perfectly sane soundness say "omfg Jared plays evil so hotass", it's possible they aren't giganto-freaks or big babies or over-protective Sam-girls or over-protective Dean girls worried about Sam's effect on Dean. It's possible they're having an "uncanny valley" reaction. Ie, while they can objectively say "yay, Jared!" and "great episode", they may be just as happy never to see Sam being not!Sam again.
If I don't react well to your "yay evil Sam!" squee, that's what's up with me. I get the need in the storyline and I'm even intellectually excited by the journey Sam has to take. If it weren't more my mad, mad love for these boys, I'd probably just read the episode summaries. :)
Okay, that said, I did love this episode for a thousand reasons. Most of which others have already hit. But! The high points for me are:
- "what, am I speaking Urdu?" - I know Urdu is one of the top 20 or so spoken languages, but it struck me as downright hilarious that a basically ethnicity-neutral shop clerk should choose Urdu as his language of incomprehensibility. There's one level on which this could be construed as racist - so, Urdu-speakers, if you found it so, let me know? - because the implication is that Urdu-speakers are completely alien to both the clerk and Dean. There's another on which it's simply true. They're right in the heart of middle America; being sufficiently immersed in Pakistani culture to speak Urdu is about as alien to their experiences as being from outer space would be. So in that way it struck me as apt. In still another, it cracked me up because seriously how many gas station clerks in middle America could even put the name Urdu to a language or would think of it first? *hands* I'm a dork, okay? The littlest things spark me.
ETA: kaseido tells me that this is likely a riff off the Simpsons, in which the shop clerks are Pakistani, and or the trope from big cities that 7-11 clerks all speak Urdu. That said, I'm no longer sure how I feel about it. Because then it's playing into a potentially racist stereotype...except for how the clerk obviously isn't Pakistani himself.
- "I would rather die"/"I'll save you if it's the last thing I'd do" - man, Christ-figure Dean is so tragic and so beautiful. He's such a gorgeous martyr. This, combined with what not!Meg says about him being worthless and Sam and Dad being better off without him and the fact she's testing him suggest a sacrifice path for Dean. He's already died twice. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see him dying a third to protect Sam. He'll be back, or not!dead, but it definitely seems to me that we're leading to a "lay down your life" place. It's a little on the nose, but then this show does tend to be. I'm hoping they'll invert it though, or it's just a motif to help us understand that though Dean has little faith in anything he can't see, he sort of is faith embodied.
- All of the stuff about Sam becoming who he is meant to be and etc, but I'm gonna write a separate post about this for Sunday. So, just to say, I thought Jared did it beautifully.
- "keep the demon from getting back up in you" - dude. FANFIC. Someone's probably writing right now a story in which Sam gets possessed by having buttsecks with someone who is possessed, aren't they? I don't read outside the OTP, but, man, that just made me giggle.
- "had a girl inside you for over a week"/"kinda naughty" - leaving aside the theological issues with whether or not demons have gender because Kassie, Julia and I have already beat that horse to death among others, this was just funny. Body-swap fic anyone? And you know Dean didn't let it rest there but went on for DAYS, and eventually Sam got bitchface-y and hauled out the theology, and Dean just kept right on going.
I loved so much about this episode, it seems ridiculous to pick those things out as high-points, because gah almost every moment had something to love. Overall, I loved the eyes in this episode. Everyone put so much into their eyes, it was really mirror-of-the-soul (Which is probably another reason why Sam didn't feel like Sam to me until the end; wasn't his 'soul' behind the eyes!).
Finally, it raised a couple of plot-arc questions/observations for me.
1) the tokens Bobby gave the boys. Dude. His face after they left was not a happy face. Am I alone in thinking these tokens are not what he says they are? Seriously, I'm thinking they are some kind of tracker charms, something that leaves a mystical signature that says the boys have been somewhere. Because, really. If Bobby and John were friends all that while, and there is a simple charm to keep you from being possessed, don't you think John would've worn the charm and made the boys wear the charms? Don't you think all the hunters would wear the charms? I just... between Bobby's face and the logic here, I'm worried things aren't as he would have the boys believe.
2) why did burning the brand release the demon? On one level, obviously, the point is that burning the brand disfigured it and unlocked the "lock" that held the demon in Sam despite the exorcism. But, since as we've seen so far, demons don't need the lock to borrow a body (Meg didn't have one or they wouldn't have been able to exorcise her), then why couldn't the demon hold Sam's body after the lock is destroyed? There's a symbolic parallel obviously to the broken Key of Solomon not containing the demon within the circle, but I'm wondering if this is in any way significant.
On the one hand, it could be that it's as simple as: something about the binding ritual makes it that the brand-lock is the means by which the body is held, rather than the regular means. It could be as simple as: it was more dramatic that way, or no one really gave it any thought. Or it could be more significant for later. I don't know. But I sort of wondered whether the exorcism had the demon boiling at Sam's skin like steam trying to escape and then opening the lock was like taking the lid off a pot. *shrugs and grins* See above about me being a dork.
ETA: We've had a lot of discussion of this in comments now. Seems likely that destroying the lock was not sufficient to release the demon but merely necessary, and either Notmeg was effectively exorcised and destroying the brand allowed that to take effect or that Notmeg fled to look for another body to possess rather than waiting around to be sent back to Hell.
3) Sam being possessed. This? Fascinates me. If, in fact, Sam can be controlled by what's inside him or turned into a killer, then how come not!Meg has to possess him to kill hunters? Or torture Dean? Why not just get Daddy to make Sam go bad? Okay, maybe it's as simple as what she told Dean. She wanted revenge against them (but why specifically Dean, since Sam was in on it, too; although I suppose making him play passenger to murder is torture for him, duh Allie). But we know demons lie, and this is the second time we've seen it specifically noted that the demons are testing one or another Winchester boy. In this case Dean to see if he'll kill Sam.
Why's that important to them? It might be the case that was also being tested at Croatoan. BUT, I'm kind of left wondering whether "the Winchester boy" who was immune to the demon-virus wasn't Sam, but Dean. It makes me wonder whether the Demon doesn't also have plans for Dean and need to know what Dean and Sam each will do when pushed or pitted against each other. It stands to reason that demons don't understand love or the filial bond (one of Meg's "kin" shot her with a bullet that could've ended the demon's existence forever - just to test it), so maybe they're trying to figure out just what it means in the practical sense to them and their war.
Ahem, sorry, off track. My point is, I think it's interesting that if Sam has this demon-bit inside him, he apparently isn't susceptible to "remote operation", and also that the Demon either will permit or cannot stop other demonic entities (including it's "offspring") possessing Sam.
Yes, well, I think that's quite enough out of me for today. I'm gonna be thinking more about free will versus determinism in the context of Sam, Dean, and the demon war, likely, on Sunday. Then again, I might decide to talk about Wincest, incest, and why I think there is so much of it in fandom right now.
Unrelated to this post, but tagging it on to avoid spamming you: if I'm scarce from IM, don't answer your email, or seem terse when we do talk for the next few days, it's not personal. I've spent the last month running around my various relationship contexts carrying one bucket to scoop shit as people lose theirs and another with water, sand, or baking soda to put out various fires as they arise. I'm exhausted, cranky, and really needing some time for me - to write, to read, to think, whatever. I'm not taking a powder or signing off lj and there's nothing wrong or melodramatic going on here. I ♥ you all. I'm just beat and need some Allie time.
♥ Sam
♥ Dean
♥ episode
♥ Jared
♥ Jensen
♥ Metallicar
thinky but squee-friendly
Like most of my friends, I heart this episode so much it hurts. Jared and Jensen both, as tjournal put it knocked it outta the park and offa the planet. Anyone who has had doubts about Jared's ability to carry the increasingly challenging range of Sam's emotions as his options (seem to - for more about that, see mine and Kassie's meta posts on Sunday) narrow, ought, now, to be reassured.
Sam's violent scenes with Jo and Dean were so well acted as to be emotionally painful. As estrella30 says, I could go a long time without seeing Sam hit Dean like that again. And by long time, I mean forever. It's one thing for the boys to fight each other. But to see Sam hitting a man when he's down, especially if that man is Dean, is just plain uncomfortable. Likewise to see Sam treating a woman as bait and a sex object, especially one he knows and has some quasi-familial obligations toward, is disturbing to the nth.
In some ways, it was almost as painful for me to watch Sam admitting to Dean he didn't think he was in control, and acting all cocky but nervous with Bobby. Or sitting on the bed nearly catatonic about the blood. Like the more obvious menthols and 40 of malt liqour, these are signs that this is not Sam.
The other day, toxictattoo referred to the book Uncanny Valley. The rough gist of the book's thesis (wikipedia how I love and loathe thee) is that things which are human-like but not human may cause an uncanny negative reaction in humans. There's scientific evidence about this one both pro and con, dealing with such things as robots and corpses and animals and anime, but it does seem to be the case at least colloquially that: 1) 'human' traits in things that are distinctly non-human, ie robotic robots or whales, provoke sympathy; 2) nonhuman traits in things that are distinctly human provoke vague, unidentifiable-source distress.
Sam's a good example of this with his fear of clowns. Human, but the painted faces and odd behavior that doesn't fit known patterns. Or think of zombies - we have one in Supernatural, and her would-be boyfriend gets somewhat creeped because she both is and isn't the girl he'd known. Or dolls, because dolls are creepy, yo. The more human they look, the more they disturb me. Not everyone feels the same way, but, I think Barbie dolls are hysterical and human hair dolls are omgmeep.
I think Sam-but-not-Sam struck Dean and me and Nan and others in much the same way. just_katarin IMed me after the episode and said "OMG evil!Sam is hot and he should be evil like every third episode!" and she was totally kidding from the perspective of the story, just reacting to how uber-hot Jared is when he's being a creepy badass. My response to her was serious off the charts, and I refer to the Uncanny Valley thesis for why. Yes, objectively, I look at evil!Sam and think omgHOT, same as I always sort of did with evil!Spike and Angelus. But unlike Spike and Angelus for whom their evil forms were default-normal, evil!Sam is not normal and registers with me emotionally as wrong.
So, while from a dramatic perspective I thought the episode was near brilliant, and from a yaye!pretty perspective I can swoon while looking at stills, I still find Sam-but-not-Sam deeply disturbing. Possibly it's my revulsion to the idea of not being in control of my own actions (despite my tendency to drink too much and be stupid, unless it hits me super-fast, I always stop drinking before I'd do anything I wouldn't normally or go directly to bed; I'm just not comfortable with that feeling of drunk between tipsy and plastered). Possibly it's my sense that Sam is deeply disturbed about not being in control of his own actions. Dramatically, there's the fear that someone won't realize it and hurt him - Jo didn't. Dean did.
Actually, while I'm nattering, this is something I've written about a lot in Supernatural fic. I have this trope in some of my fic that Sam wants a more affectionate, warmer Dean. That's a bit reductionist and when stated like that, I don't even agree with it, but whatever. Anyway. *g* In "Love in Disguise" and in "Fiddle of Gold Against Your Soul" Dean behaves in ways that are what my Sam thinks he wants, and while there is a deep-seated appeal to that, he ultimately just wants Dean. Or Dean AS Dean. I think we see this on the show in the first half of the season with Sam's anger, fear, and near-continuous probing at Dean. Dean is not being himself and Sam doesn't like it. It frightens him.
What I mostly want to say about this is: if your friends don't like evil!Sam or if they shudder when you in your perfectly sane soundness say "omfg Jared plays evil so hotass", it's possible they aren't giganto-freaks or big babies or over-protective Sam-girls or over-protective Dean girls worried about Sam's effect on Dean. It's possible they're having an "uncanny valley" reaction. Ie, while they can objectively say "yay, Jared!" and "great episode", they may be just as happy never to see Sam being not!Sam again.
If I don't react well to your "yay evil Sam!" squee, that's what's up with me. I get the need in the storyline and I'm even intellectually excited by the journey Sam has to take. If it weren't more my mad, mad love for these boys, I'd probably just read the episode summaries. :)
Okay, that said, I did love this episode for a thousand reasons. Most of which others have already hit. But! The high points for me are:
- "what, am I speaking Urdu?" - I know Urdu is one of the top 20 or so spoken languages, but it struck me as downright hilarious that a basically ethnicity-neutral shop clerk should choose Urdu as his language of incomprehensibility. There's one level on which this could be construed as racist - so, Urdu-speakers, if you found it so, let me know? - because the implication is that Urdu-speakers are completely alien to both the clerk and Dean. There's another on which it's simply true. They're right in the heart of middle America; being sufficiently immersed in Pakistani culture to speak Urdu is about as alien to their experiences as being from outer space would be. So in that way it struck me as apt. In still another, it cracked me up because seriously how many gas station clerks in middle America could even put the name Urdu to a language or would think of it first? *hands* I'm a dork, okay? The littlest things spark me.
ETA: kaseido tells me that this is likely a riff off the Simpsons, in which the shop clerks are Pakistani, and or the trope from big cities that 7-11 clerks all speak Urdu. That said, I'm no longer sure how I feel about it. Because then it's playing into a potentially racist stereotype...except for how the clerk obviously isn't Pakistani himself.
- "I would rather die"/"I'll save you if it's the last thing I'd do" - man, Christ-figure Dean is so tragic and so beautiful. He's such a gorgeous martyr. This, combined with what not!Meg says about him being worthless and Sam and Dad being better off without him and the fact she's testing him suggest a sacrifice path for Dean. He's already died twice. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see him dying a third to protect Sam. He'll be back, or not!dead, but it definitely seems to me that we're leading to a "lay down your life" place. It's a little on the nose, but then this show does tend to be. I'm hoping they'll invert it though, or it's just a motif to help us understand that though Dean has little faith in anything he can't see, he sort of is faith embodied.
- All of the stuff about Sam becoming who he is meant to be and etc, but I'm gonna write a separate post about this for Sunday. So, just to say, I thought Jared did it beautifully.
- "keep the demon from getting back up in you" - dude. FANFIC. Someone's probably writing right now a story in which Sam gets possessed by having buttsecks with someone who is possessed, aren't they? I don't read outside the OTP, but, man, that just made me giggle.
- "had a girl inside you for over a week"/"kinda naughty" - leaving aside the theological issues with whether or not demons have gender because Kassie, Julia and I have already beat that horse to death among others, this was just funny. Body-swap fic anyone? And you know Dean didn't let it rest there but went on for DAYS, and eventually Sam got bitchface-y and hauled out the theology, and Dean just kept right on going.
I loved so much about this episode, it seems ridiculous to pick those things out as high-points, because gah almost every moment had something to love. Overall, I loved the eyes in this episode. Everyone put so much into their eyes, it was really mirror-of-the-soul (Which is probably another reason why Sam didn't feel like Sam to me until the end; wasn't his 'soul' behind the eyes!).
Finally, it raised a couple of plot-arc questions/observations for me.
1) the tokens Bobby gave the boys. Dude. His face after they left was not a happy face. Am I alone in thinking these tokens are not what he says they are? Seriously, I'm thinking they are some kind of tracker charms, something that leaves a mystical signature that says the boys have been somewhere. Because, really. If Bobby and John were friends all that while, and there is a simple charm to keep you from being possessed, don't you think John would've worn the charm and made the boys wear the charms? Don't you think all the hunters would wear the charms? I just... between Bobby's face and the logic here, I'm worried things aren't as he would have the boys believe.
2) why did burning the brand release the demon? On one level, obviously, the point is that burning the brand disfigured it and unlocked the "lock" that held the demon in Sam despite the exorcism. But, since as we've seen so far, demons don't need the lock to borrow a body (Meg didn't have one or they wouldn't have been able to exorcise her), then why couldn't the demon hold Sam's body after the lock is destroyed? There's a symbolic parallel obviously to the broken Key of Solomon not containing the demon within the circle, but I'm wondering if this is in any way significant.
On the one hand, it could be that it's as simple as: something about the binding ritual makes it that the brand-lock is the means by which the body is held, rather than the regular means. It could be as simple as: it was more dramatic that way, or no one really gave it any thought. Or it could be more significant for later. I don't know. But I sort of wondered whether the exorcism had the demon boiling at Sam's skin like steam trying to escape and then opening the lock was like taking the lid off a pot. *shrugs and grins* See above about me being a dork.
ETA: We've had a lot of discussion of this in comments now. Seems likely that destroying the lock was not sufficient to release the demon but merely necessary, and either Notmeg was effectively exorcised and destroying the brand allowed that to take effect or that Notmeg fled to look for another body to possess rather than waiting around to be sent back to Hell.
3) Sam being possessed. This? Fascinates me. If, in fact, Sam can be controlled by what's inside him or turned into a killer, then how come not!Meg has to possess him to kill hunters? Or torture Dean? Why not just get Daddy to make Sam go bad? Okay, maybe it's as simple as what she told Dean. She wanted revenge against them (but why specifically Dean, since Sam was in on it, too; although I suppose making him play passenger to murder is torture for him, duh Allie). But we know demons lie, and this is the second time we've seen it specifically noted that the demons are testing one or another Winchester boy. In this case Dean to see if he'll kill Sam.
Why's that important to them? It might be the case that was also being tested at Croatoan. BUT, I'm kind of left wondering whether "the Winchester boy" who was immune to the demon-virus wasn't Sam, but Dean. It makes me wonder whether the Demon doesn't also have plans for Dean and need to know what Dean and Sam each will do when pushed or pitted against each other. It stands to reason that demons don't understand love or the filial bond (one of Meg's "kin" shot her with a bullet that could've ended the demon's existence forever - just to test it), so maybe they're trying to figure out just what it means in the practical sense to them and their war.
Ahem, sorry, off track. My point is, I think it's interesting that if Sam has this demon-bit inside him, he apparently isn't susceptible to "remote operation", and also that the Demon either will permit or cannot stop other demonic entities (including it's "offspring") possessing Sam.
Yes, well, I think that's quite enough out of me for today. I'm gonna be thinking more about free will versus determinism in the context of Sam, Dean, and the demon war, likely, on Sunday. Then again, I might decide to talk about Wincest, incest, and why I think there is so much of it in fandom right now.
Unrelated to this post, but tagging it on to avoid spamming you: if I'm scarce from IM, don't answer your email, or seem terse when we do talk for the next few days, it's not personal. I've spent the last month running around my various relationship contexts carrying one bucket to scoop shit as people lose theirs and another with water, sand, or baking soda to put out various fires as they arise. I'm exhausted, cranky, and really needing some time for me - to write, to read, to think, whatever. I'm not taking a powder or signing off lj and there's nothing wrong or melodramatic going on here. I ♥ you all. I'm just beat and need some Allie time.