oh dear lord.
Sam and Amelia
OH THIS. I love it. Amelia is so fantastic - ONLY THE BEST FOR MY BABY - and becomes more of an enigma every time we see her. There’s a lot more to her story than she was willing to share with Sam - understandably, of course. People suffer losses. It is horrible. But people don’t up and leave their entire support network, just run, after a loss, unless they were already on the very fringes. They don’t see compassion as “judgment” unless they’re feeling awfully guilty about something; they aren't incapable of telling compassion apart from pity unless they've experienced very little of it in their lives. Girlfriend has a shame complex a mile wide.
As we knew it would, this puts the scenes where we met her in a whole new light. She flips out on Sam because she's going to judge him FIRST and then that will mean she is judgment-proofed TAG YOU'RE IT NO BACKSIES. And I think she was projecting in a way? "You should have STOPPED that thing that happened out of the blue from..happening!" And then she's embarrassed about having gone off, and so she builds on the way he admittedly is kinda sketch to decide that she's justified in pushing him off. Which, IDK, will probably be the excuse for the whiny asshat outliers to indulge their misogyny on her, but I think it's a forceful, believable picture of someone who's hurting and too stubborn about hiding it to be any good at dealing with it. (There may or may not have been some uncomfortable self-recognition Chez Poco during this episode.)
But even her aggravation with him is more emotional involvement than she’s had with anyone for a while, and so once she starts she doesn’t know how to stop. They get to chatting because she left the door open (you know, ‘cause he’s so scary). She threw him out, but she had two glasses on the table when she came back - she was expecting him, or even just hoping he’d show. “It's been a long time since I let myself go like that” was a little..uncomfortable? for me and I don’t know if the line was OTT or if it was exactly right for the abrasive intimacy we see as the scene unfolds. Ugh, my heart hurts for both of them there. And as much as there is that we know Sam isn’t saying, there’s a lot she didn’t spill, either - because she doesn’t say things were good, she said they’d felt like they were together forever, and people with roots like that don’t just up and enlist on a whim unless something else is seriously awry.
Amelia looks harsh to us when she throws him out, but she doesn’t know anything! She spilled her heart to Sam and, while he didn’t respond unkindly, he didn’t offer up anything in return. Sex always requires coping with vulnerability on some level. We do the best we can to manage it - with birth control, or marriage, or safe words, or chocolate and flowers, or anonymity, or whatever - but it’s always a consideration. And Amelia experienced that, and admitted she experienced it, and kept talking, and Sam froze up. He’s not good on the spot. He wasn’t trying to shut her out, but he did. He has to take some time alone and figures out how to talk to her.
My picture of Amelia is pretty close to how I usually think about Sam, and so it's kind of strange and fun to wath him have to deal with someone with as little in the way of coping mechanisms and social graces as he has. (Sam's my boy and all, but Miss Congeniality he is not.) In some ways, his isolation and massive baggage made things easier for him to deal with. He’s used to hiding a lot very easily, with whoppers like “I can’t imagine going through exactly what I am going through at this very moment.” He’s so used to weird entanglements with emotionally volatile people that he clicks right into SOP of trying not to step on any landmines when she throws him out the next day.
Odds and ends
- • This is the first time the show’s acknowledged the Civil War, that I can remember. Also, possibly not a coincidence that the picture of the maybe-known soldier looked like Lucifer?
- • I liked the…directing, I guess? I almost want to say cinematography, because the visuals were so good. It could’ve easily gotten cheesy, but I liked the sequence that showed the penny being passed around. I think the scenes with Amelia were niftily handled, where they started out with the milky, foggy flashback lens, but as Sam and Amelia become more open and real with each other, the lighting feels bright and natural. Even the previouslies were really well handled.
- • Like Bobby before him, Garth is cute and all, but doesn’t really pop to me, or justify his elevated importance among the recurring characters, for a handful of reasons, not least of which being ugh, demographics. Yeah, yeah, he’s quirky!and!adorable! and killed the Tooth Fairy and deals with his own feelings and the feelings of others in an extremely awkward way.
- • Ghost with an Oedipus complex!
And now for the temper tantrum portion of the evening:
Sam and Dean
#gpoy
THE BITCHING WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES! When the episode opens, Dean has been giving Sam the silent treatment since Sam had the NERVE to show up intending to rescue him from the mission he lied about having gone on to save a vampire. After however many hours/days of expecting Sam to wordlessly serve him soda, he turns around and bites Sam’s head off for sulking.
Sam was, clearly, starting to hit back before the confrontation at the end. I love that he didn’t wait for shit to go down before he brought up Amy. Sam put that right on the table as soon as Dean engaged with him at all, and takes Dean’s attempt to defend his double standard as escalation of hostilities. Sam’s petty and pessimistic about the case - well, if Dean doesn’t care about the gates of hell or even icing monsters, then dammit, neither does Sam. He knows they always make things worse, and he’s not going to engage in pretense to the contrary any more (“if they never touched this guy, this wouldn’t be happening.”)That passive-aggressive little smirk he gives before he abandons Dean to research with Garth cracked me up.
Pffft, Garth. You and Dean are talking but nobody’s listening. I saw this line in the promos and it got my hackles up, because it sounded like my old BFF false equivalence. Dean, throughout this season, has been determinedly not listening to Sam, and equally harshly not telling Sam anything. All he says to Sam is the same old abuse. If anything, Sam has listened to Dean too well. He listened throughout S3, when Dean bitched and moaned every step of the way about his attempt to break the crossroads deal; he listened throughout S5 when Dean berated him for breaking into Hell accidentally - imagine what Dean would’ve said to someone who had done that on purpose! Like, say, when Cas broke into Purgatory, and Dean extended a warm, forgiving - oh. What Sam hasn’t been letting himself understand, though, is that it’s not at all about what he does. It’s about how Dean is using Sam as the target for all of his (completely justifiable) resentment of his life, and whatever Sam does, Dean will find a reason to hate Sam for it.
Does, or even thinks. You never wanted this life. Blamed me for dragging you back into it. Clause A: true, but let’s unpack this a little: Dean feels betrayed by Sam’s FEELINGS. That is to say, Sam being an autonomous entity which does not want and feel the same things as Dean is not just a disappointment, but an act constituting a conscious refusal to meet the baseline expectations of a relationship or transaction. And B: no, he doesn’t, but you know what, there’s a pretty good argument that this time around he should be. For all the gates of hell case sounded so important in the season premiere, Dean’s been dragging his feet on it since then just to show that he can and Sam will stick around. Feelings aren’t volitional, and I’m not entirely sure that an isolated emotional response to a particular situation can even be morally good or bad in the absence of action. But there’s no denying that it can have a critical quotient of fug.
And that’s why Dean still has a bug up his ass about Soulless and his lack of feeling. What Soulless was up to had to be “all kinds of crazy,” right? No, actually, he was hunting, he just wasn’t unhappy about it, and he wasn’t doing it with and for Dean. Sam not telling Dean about his soullessness would arguably have been a betrayal, if Sam had known about it, which Dean knows Sam did not. Again, feelings aren’t rational, but the fact that Dean is angry about something that happened to Sam - something Sam was turned into without his consent - shows us that he’s extremely uneasy that Sam is capable of independence.
All of that is the lead-up to my favorite Dean line in the history of Dean lines: I never once betrayed you! I never left you to die! Oh, really? Let’s go to tape, dick.
1. When the Levee Breaks
BOBBY: I'm sorry. I can't bite my tongue any longer. We're killing him. Keeping him locked up down there. This cold-turkey thing isn't working. If-if he doesn't get what he needs, soon, Sam's not gonna last much longer.
DEAN: No. I'm not giving him demon blood. I won't do it.
BOBBY: And if he dies?
DEAN: Then at least he dies human!
And that’s enough right there. Not only is Dean flat-out lying about having never left Sam to die, but he continues to betray Sam’s trust by his failure to come clean about having known the risk of the forced detox.
2. Exile on Main/The Third Man
The closest analogy, to Dean’s aborted unsuccessful attempt to get Sam out of the Cage, doesn’t earn Dean any points. Dean had a lot more information to go on than Sam did. Not just that he knew where Sam was, either. He knows of one and only one way to get someone out of hell, and that’s Cas. Except:
SAM: Dean calls once, and now it's [ imitating Castiel ] "Hello"?!
CASTIEL: Yes.
The Third Man is Dean’s first attempted contact with Cas since Swan Song. So, he wanted Sam back badly enough to hit up the library, but not badly enough to ever try to ask Cas for help.
Of course, no harm no foul. Even if he’d tried, by the time Dean could’ve gotten through to Cas, Sam would already have been raised. And, you could argue, not getting Sam out is not a betrayal, because Sam asked Dean not to try. But that’s kind of trying to have it both ways? Dean says he tried, which goes against what he knew Sam wanted; he didn’t try all that hard, falling below the standard he’s setting for Sam now.
(And while we’re here, let’s define that standard, shall we? Just like Dean knows what it takes to get someone out of hell, he knows what it takes to get anything out of Purgatory. Remember, all it took from Castiel the patron angel of badass was making a deal with Crowley and strategically scheduling his deification around the appropriate eclipse, which kicked off the chain of events which led to Dean landing in Purgatory? That was “all” Sam was supposed to “try” and do. When you hold someone to a standard that impossible, it is because you want them doing nothing but chasing shadows, miserable and failing.)
Again, feelings aren’t rational. Dean was burned-out and grieving and conflicted after Sam went into the cage, and I don’t hold it against him. But the way he’s holding a much more difficult situation against Sam now is not a reasonable reaction to something Sam did wrong. It’s him using Sam as a punching bag.
3. Appointment in Samarra
DEATH Dean, Dean, Dean. What do you think the soul is? Some pie you can slice? The soul can be bludgeoned, tortured, but never broken. Not even by me.
DEAN Well, there's got to be something.
DEATH Maybe. Can't erase Sam's hell, but I can...put it behind a wall, if you will.
DEAN A "wall."
DEATH In his mind --a dam to hold back the tide. Nasty, those memories. You don't want to know what they'll do to him. Believe me.
DEAN Okay, uh, a wall. Sounds good.
TESSA But it's not permanent.
DEATH She's right. Nothing lasts forever. Well, I do, but...
DEAN Okay, so that's the choice -- Sam with no soul, or Sam with some drywall that if or when it collapses, he's...Done?
DEATH Yes.
DEAN Do it.
This wouldn’t necessarily have been a betrayal if he had tried to have it when Sam did want his soul back, but he holds off until after Sam decided what he wanted. (And none of that “Soulless wasn’t Sam” crap. I’m talking about Dean’s state of mind, and Dean refers to “Sam with no soul” ie, Sam.) This decision creates a vulnerability which will be a direct cause of #4.
4. The Man Who Knew Too Much
CASTIEL: Enough! I don't care what you think. I've tried to make you understand. You won't listen. So let me make this simple. Please, go home and let me stop Raphael. I won't ask again.
DEAN: Well, good, 'cause I think you already know the answer.
CASTIEL (shakes his head) I wish it hadn't come to this. Well rest assured, when this is all over, I will save Sam, but only if you stand down.
DEAN: Save Sam from what?
CAS: *breaks Sam’s wall*
DEAN: *remains belligerent*
SAM: *is comatose*
(all transcripts adapted from the SuperWiki)
Now, it’s generally pretty sound strategy to refuse to negotiate with terrorists, and I’m not saying otherwise. But Dean doesn’t think “I’m a good brother because I only ever screwed him over for an exceptionally compelling reason,” he thinks “I’m a better brother than he is because I never screwed him over, ever.” Big difference.
That is, off the top of my head, four instances in which Dean abandoned Sam and/or betrayed Sam’s trust, severely endangering Sam’s life. I am not saying “therefore this proves Dean is HORRIBLE, the WORST BROTHER EVER, and everyone should HATE HIM for not sufficiently protecting darling little Sammy.” What I am saying is that this episode gave us Dean’s uninhibited perspective on his relationship with Sam, exposing at least one fundamental untruth.
#gpoDean
This is not about Purgatory. This is not about Amelia. This is a long-standing pattern. He is lying to himself for understandable reasons, some of which are very sympathetic and some of which are not. It’s not just the extent to which their lives suck, although that’s certainly exacerbated the problem. It’s that Dean, for all his determined antitheism in those first couple of seasons, is at heart a just-worlder. He believes that if there’s suffering, it’s someone’s fault, directly. If it’s not a question of someone having brought it on themselves, which it usually is (this tendency shows up as early as the episode introducing the crossroads demon) then it’s got to be someone else’s FAULT. And Sam is the only person he has left, so Dean turns all that anger and blame on Sam.
And Sam decides he isn’t going to do it anymore. Maybe can’t, maybe won’t, it doesn’t matter, because nobody should have to live like that. You’ve been kicking me ever since you got back, but that’s over. So move on or I will.
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