To bed with you: hospitalizations in SPN redux
In the course of looking up an older post I came across what I wrote last year about hospitalizations in SPN. I realized there had been an important change in S5, namely that Sam has finally been a patient. But I think Sam Interrupted ends up revealing a more audience-directed reason for the pattern.( Read more... )
Sam's lack of hospitalization could be seen as the parallel to Dean's lack of possession, which I speculated was occurring because it hit each character's strength
Nice observation. I agree, and I'd like to expand on that thought. I think, too, that in S1/S2 Sam was so much under the care of big brother Dean (the headaches, the nightmares, the "save me or kill me" angst/begging) that hospitalizing Sam and showing it'll-all-be-okay-I-gotcha!Dean at his bedside wouldn't have been a great departure from what had already been established: Dean takes care of vulnerable!Sam. Sure it would've notched up the hurt!Sam vibe, but from a storytelling perspective, no new characterization/revelations would've been made. And economy doesn't really jive with such redundancies.
On the other hand, showing Dean be vulnerable in S1/S2 was new. Case in point "Faith". That was a seminal episode at that point in the series. It was the first time we really saw Dean hurt for a prolonged period of time. It was the first time we saw Sam step up and demonstrate to what lengths he'd go to in order to save Dean even through questionable means. I think the reason that episode is a fan favorite is exactly because we saw new aspects of both boys that episode.
The same point can be made for Sam in S1/S2. Showing Dean being demonic would have been interesting, but it wouldn't have had the same dramatic effect it did when bleeding-heart-college-boy!Sam became a killing-maniacal-laugh machine. Possessed Sam allowed SPN to show Sam being not!Sam that wouldn't have been possible any other way based on his characterization those seasons.
So, to sum up, I think that those choices were partially influenced by the dramatic nature of SPN's storytelling. It allowed us to see new parts of Sam and Dean, moving their character development along.
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I agree, it would have been more of the same in the first case and a form of "dream sequence" Sam in the second. In fact, I'd argue we got some of that in S5 with Dean in The End, though I felt that the portrayal wasn't so difficult to believe. Also, although not exactly "possessed" we saw the same with Dean in Yellow Fever, an episode a lot of people hated (though I'd argue the writing as much as the concept accounted for that). And then, of course, we saw a different Dean in TL as well. So while strictly speaking Dean has never been possessed, the same storytelling device has indeed been used on him.
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