The killer in me : Sam in Croatoan.
“What if I should discover that that very enemy himself is within me, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved - what then?”
Carl Jung
It starts with a vision; it ends with a secret.
Sam has a vision in which Deans shoots a man. “It's not in me!” the man insists, as he pleads for his life. “He’s not him, not anymore,” Dean says. Bang. Bang. Bang. Dean kills him.
No wonder Sam freaks out.
A demonic virus, undetectable until it is too late, is infecting people and filling them with a deadly rage. This is a manifestation of what Sam has feared - that he carries something inside himself, something connected to the Demon, which may turn him into a murderer.
Sam’s visions have been disturbing to him since Jessica’s death, but it was only in “Nightmare” when Sam and Dean meet Max, that they started to suspect a connection between the Yellow-Eyed Demon (YED) and Sam’s abilities. More than that, they found out that Max had used his abilities to kill. Sam now had an added fear, which he expressed to Dean: “Aren’t you worried, man, aren’t you worried that I could turn into Max or something?”
The YED confirmed that it had plans for Sam “and all the children like (him)” in “Devil’s Trap”. This is all Sam knows, although it is revealed in “In My Time of Dying” that John certainly knows more.
Sam’s encounter with Andy (and his evil twin Ansem) in “Simon Said” further heightened his fear about his abilities. Dean articulated this when Andy psychically forced him to reveal his feelings:
“… (Sam) thinks you're a murderer, and he's afraid that he's going to become one himself, because you're all part of something that's terrible. And I hope to hell that he's wrong, but I'm starting to get a little scared that he might be right.”
For Sam the evidence has been adding up, that the children with abilities, which the YED is interested in, all become evil killers.
The vision at the beginning of this episode of Dean and Duane Tanner, would have resonated deeply with Sam. He is worried his abilities may mean Dean no longer sees him as the brother he loves (“He’s not him, not anymore”). He is scared of not knowing what is inside him (“It's not in me!”), how it may change him, and whether he will become a murderer. Both Max and Ansem died violently and Sam must wonder whether this may be his fate, and whether Dean may be put in a position where he has to kill him, ironically foreshadowing the revelation of John’s secret and that it will be Sam who makes Dean promise to do so.
These fears are affecting Sam more and more. We see evidence of this when Sam chooses not to shoot Jake Tanner, after the boys stop him and his father from attacking Beverley Tanner. This is not about whether Sam thinks Jake should be shot; it’s about whether Sam thinks he should kill.
This is later supported when it is obvious that Beverley Tanner is infected. Sam thinks the right thing to do is kill her, and doesn’t hesitate in confirming this for Dean. But he doesn’t do it himself - that falls to Dean.
So, why then does Sam get angry when Dean wants to kill Duane Tanner? Firstly, they don’t have irrefutable proof that Duane is infected. Sam must be thinking back to how this played out in his vision and how it made him feel. Sam sees himself in Duane; Sam too may have something unknown inside him. It may not be conscious, but Sam is thinking that at some point he could be in Duane’s situation.
The other reason Sam gets angry with Dean is because he is projecting his own anxieties onto Dean. Projection is a defense strategy that we often use when we have thoughts or feelings we are uncomfortable with, when there are aspects of ourselves we dislike or when we can’t handle something.
Projection works because it lets us give some expression to strong feelings, without us having to recognize and deal with them as our own. We have seen Dean do it when he gets angry at Dr. Mason (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) or Evan Hudson (“Crossroad Blues”). He is enraged at what he thinks they have done (raised the dead, made a demonic bargain for someone’s life) because he can’t cope with his own anger at his father for doing those very things - bringing Dean back from the dead by making a deal with a demon. Dean hates that he is angry at John, but he can’t admit it to himself, or express it. He can’t let himself be angry at his beloved father, so he gets angry at people who do similar things.
Sam has reacted strongly to Dean’s expressions of anger and violence since John’s death because he cares about Dean’s emotional state and how he is coping. However, I think Sam’s reactions to Dean’s anger are partly a projection of his anxiety over his own anger and where it may lead.
In “Croatoan,” when he is trying to stop Dean from killing Duane, he says:
“You might kill an innocent man, and you don't even care! You don't act like yourself anymore, Dean. Hell, you know what? You're acting like one of those things out there.”
This is exactly what Sam fears for himself, that he will become a demon-tainted murderer “like those things out there,” that he might become someone who kills without feeling. This fear traps Sam and keeps him from acting. He doesn’t physically try to stop Dean, because if he tries to stop Dean he will have to be violent against him, which is exactly what he fears.
I think Sam’s fear of his own potential for violence is deep-seated. In “Simon Said” Sam explains, “Right circumstances, everyone's capable of murder. Everyone.” It struck me that maybe Sam has always feared that his own capacity for anger. He fears what is inside him, but this started before any knowledge of his powers, or a demon taint.
We know that Sam left for Stanford because he had different priorities to John and Dean (valuing soccer over bow hunting for example) and that he had a lot of conflict with his father. However, I think there was more about their lifestyle, about hunting, that drove him away.
In “Phantom Traveler,” Dean asks Sam if he is still finding it hard to sleep because of Jess’ death. Sam replies: “It’s not just her, it’s everything. I just forgot, you know, this job. Man, it gets to you.”
We know that anger was integral to hunting in the Winchester family. Dean describes it in “Bloodlust”: “…the way he raised us, to hate those things.” But Dean has worked out a way of dealing with the desire for revenge instilled by his father, with the anger. Soon after reuniting with Sam, Dean explains how he copes:
“…all that anger, you can’t keep it burning over the long haul, it’s gonna kill you. You gotta have patience, man…I mean I figure our family so screwed to hell; maybe we can help some others. Makes things a little more bearable. I’ll tell you what else helps. Killing as many evil sons of bitches as I possibly can.”
(“Wendigo”)
In the Winchester family, violence was integral to the job, and it spilled over into dealing with life. They coped with fear through violence. That’s why when Sam was nine and scared of the thing in the closet, John gave him a gun, and why Dean copes with his fear still by sleeping with a machete under his pillow.
Dean told Gordon that he saw hunting as vocation, that he “embraced the life” when he was sixteen. Perhaps because Sam didn’t have the motivation of having lost someone he loved (being too young to remember Mary), without the sense of purpose Dean found in it, Sam only saw hunting as about anger and violence. As a teenager, maybe he feared not knowing where the line between right and wrong was, or being able to control himself, or stop from killing indiscriminately.
The id is all our primal instincts and drives - to fuck, fight and eat. It is not reasonable; it wants what it wants now and without limits. The ego, what we present to the world, is a manifestation of our id, with the extreme parts repressed and controlled. I think Sam has always been afraid of being unable to control his id, particularly his rage, and that is part of what drove him away from a life of hunting. Away, from the daily violence of that life, he may have found his own anger less overwhelming and easier to contain.
The role of the super-ego is to control the urges, such as aggression, of the id. Freud saw the super-ego as an internalization of the father figure. However, if your father figure is someone obsessed with killing and filled with anger (hello John Winchester), is it any wonder Sam may have had a fear that his id would be unregulated?
Since Sam has rejoined Dean, he has lagged behind in the kill count. Up to this point in Season Two, Dean has been violent on eight occasions - shooting (wendigo, shapeshifter, striga, demon boy, infected Mr. and Mrs. Tanner, Nurse Pamela), electrocution (rawhead) and beheading (vampire). The only “bloody kill” Sam has under his belt is the rakshasa - and that was invisible and behind him and threatening Dean. Also, Sam has been the one to hold Dean back from violence against Roy Le Grange, Max Miller and Lenore.
I am not suggesting Sam has some ethical objection to killing things. He has vanquished many supernatural things and he is no pacifist - he’s shot crossbows at vampires and bullets at zombies.
Conversely, I don’t think that Sam has more rage than the average person; it is his fear of his anger that is the point. His anger is potent because it has always been focused on the two most important people in his life - Dean and his father. We’ve seen it evident in his relationship, past and present, with John. Most dramatically we saw the level of Sam’s potential for rage when he shoots Dean - not once but twice- in “Asylum”.
Sam’s anxiety about his connection to the YED is bringing these fears to the surface and compounding them. In “Bloodlust” Sam expresses a different view about the family business when Dean says, “If it's supernatural, we kill it, end of story and Sam retorts with, “No, Dean, that is not our job. Our job is hunting evil.” Sam is seeking to better define and put boundaries around the violence in their lives, and of course in himself.
Sam takes this further in “Croatoan” when he says to Dean, “It's supposed to be tough, Dean. We’re supposed to struggle with this, that's the whole point. ” We haven’t heard this from Sam before. He is positing that one of the aims of hunting is moral struggle - searching for a reason for hunting beyond the killing. “Saving people, hunting things” works as a mission statement for Dean, but at this point it is not resonating for Sam. He needs hunting to be about more than just killing, because he needs to be more than just a killer.
This uncontrollable rage, this id-monster, which he fears, is Sam’s shadow self. The shadow self is the dark side of our psyche where those things we don’t wish to acknowledge about ourselves reside. Interestingly, the shadow self is often referred to as the dark brother or evil twin.
The process of self-actualisation, of truly becoming one’s self, involves first acknowledging and then integrating the shadow into our consciousness. It is the journey we follow Luke Skywalker on in Star Wars. On Dagobah, as part of a vision quest, Luke confronts Darth Vader, only to have his own face revealed beneath Vader’s mask. This confrontation with his shadow, the part of him that is like Darth Vader, allows Luke to start to acknowledge and integrate his shadow self and ultimately resist the dark side of the Force.
Back to “Croatoan”, where Sam’s fears are made manifest in the heartbreaking scene when he is infected and Dean hesitates in taking his hand. Sam’s anxiety about Dean seeing him as “other,” of rejecting him, for a moment must seem to be coming true.
Sam is then faced with living out a version of his original vision. He may have something in him; Dean may have to kill him. But Sam is willing to take responsibility for doing that, and is enraged that Dean is willing to sacrifice himself. What Sam still fails to understand about his brother, is that not only will Dean die for him; he doesn’t want to live without him.
To say Sam has had a tough eighteen months is an understatement. He’s seen his lover murdered, his father die and many other horrors. Sam’s grief at the end of “Everybody Loves a Clown” is intense and overwhelming and it’s his own history of anger at John that makes his grief even harder to deal with:
“About me and dad. I'm sorry that the last time I was with him I tried to pick a fight. I'm sorry that I spent most of my life angry at him. I mean, for all I know he died thinking that I hate him. So you're right. What I'm doing right now, it's too little. It's too late. I miss him, man. And I feel guilty as hell. And I'm not all right. Not at all. But neither are you. That much I know.”
Since then Sam has had no-one to talk to. Dean has been supportive, but I don’t think his stoicism, his “game face,” is what Sam has needed. While Dean sees his job as keeping Sam safe, Sam too looks after Dean. Whatever he is feeling - this grief, these fears of what he may be - Sam has continued to focus on tending to Dean’s emotional needs. In response, Dean has opened up to Sam and expressed his feeling through words and tears.
This episode ends with Sam again expressing concern for Dean’s emotional well-being. With Sam’s encouragement, Dean does something huge - he accepts Sam’s offer to share his pain, his burden, even though it means breaking his promise to John.
What Dean will reveal to Sam (tune in next episode) is Sam’s equivalent of Luke’s Dagobah moment if you will. Sam will be confronted with his shadow, with the reality that there is something inside him so dark that his own father thought he might have to be killed.
This is what lifts Supernatural from a show about a couple of guys hunting spooks to something that connects with us on a more universal level - we all struggle to deal with the demons within us. Sam’s struggle is the same as ours, even if some of the demons he faces are more literal.
Sam is only twenty-three years old. He has experienced more traumatic events than most people would in a lifetime, he is awash with grief, and anger and fear, and yet he is not only coping but holding his big brother’s body and soul together. His greatest challenge may lie within him, but so does his greatest strength. Whatever is revealed about Sam and his connection to the YED, I have no doubt that the extraordinary Sam Winchester will be equal to the challenges ahead.