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You, thinking that Mom is gone and that Cas is gone and that Jack can’t be saved…
Dean, after everything we’ve gone through, we just lost people we love, people who have been in our lives for a long time, everything’s upside down, I get it. But we’ve been down before, I mean rock bottom.
And we find a way. We fix it, because that’s what we do.
And Jack wants to do the right thing. He’s scared to death of who he is, and he’s scared of you.
Anyone else got the tiny feeling that Dean didn’t really believe in what Sam said? He even put on his black mourning jacket just in time for this conversation… and he just didn’t react, at all. Before, when they talked about Jack - that he could do. He had a few snide remarks about that. But as soon as Sam talks about Mom and Cas (note that Sam talks about his Mom first, naturally, and for him this is “just” another thing that they’ve been through, not the loss of everything) Dean shuts down completely (like, his mouth visibly clicks) and just… sits there, letting the speech wash over him.
The knocking from Donatello was very convenient there, just saying. Because Dean certainly had nothing to reply to this… how could he, when he’s sure that there’s nothing to save and he’s just done with everything?
Yeah Dean did not agree with Sam here bc no they have not been on rock bottom before this.. Before they have had allies and some support left.. This time ALL of their close ones, all the people they LOVE are gone…
Oh, Dean does not believe he can find a way out of rock bottom this time. At all.
He knows rock bottom. There was always a miracle that got him out of it. He was in hell. Cas saved him. He lost everything because of the Leviathan (whom the Shedim are clearly parallels to, so we’re supposed to make the connection). Cas came back.
In season 7, he thought that Bobby was gone and Cas was gone and Sam couldn’t be saved from the illness of his mind. One thing kept him afloat - Bobby staying around as a ghost - and allowed him to find Cas again. Cas fixed Sam’s mind but that’s not the only thing he fixed - he fixed Dean, period. All of him. He was broken in a way that nothing could fix but the main reason he’d been broken in the first place. He had experienced losses before, never what he experienced after Cas died in 7x01. Bobby’s presence was the only thing that prevented him from ending it all, and then when Bobby died it was only the hope he was still around that made him function. And then he found Cas, and he started healing.
This time he believes the miracle won’t happen. Maybe he has a sliver of hope that it might happen again but he’s terrified that the miracle won’t happen.
He knows what happens to him when he reaches this kind of low. He knows what’s in store for him if the miracle doesn’t come. “We find a way” Sam says, but Dean knows that when he was so low, it wasn’t them who found a way out. They didn’t fix anything - they were saved. Dean was saved. By Cas.
If Cas doesn’t come back, no one’s gonna save Dean. Dean knows that.
Do you think we'll see Dean and Jody discuss Cas? Does Jody even know Cas exists? They told her s8 angels exits and she was claire but still i thibk textually they never mentioned his name around her? Im guessing they are gonna discuss Deans feeling about Mary since Jody knew her but Cas?
I don’t know, which I know I say to like basically all questions about speculation but this one is something I don’t really have a clue about and I’m not even sitting on my thumbs pretending not to have an opinion because I’d rather not say anything on the record until I know I’m right or not… I really, genuinely, to the best of my ability to sound it all out and guess from the available information, don’t know :P
It depends how they handle Cas being gone overall, whether Dean’s openly, loudly mourning him all the time every episode constantly, which is a detail where I’d only be able to offer you a confident speculation on the eve of this episode anyway after seeing the first 2. If Dean goes stoic and jaw-twitchy but quiet about it then probably not but that’s just like… super obvious and short term.
In the mean time, please assume the tin foil hat position you’d take to listen to a conversation that sounds like this:
There’s quite a lot to pack in with meeting Patience, and getting our guys some good face to face time with Jody for any emotional support they need to sponge off her. Sam doesn’t seem to be around so he may be off with Jack, but if he wasn’t, he’d probably want to learn how to be a mom to him from Jody, for all we know :P Thematically it might sort of be that way anyhow - if Patience doesn’t come in direct contact with Sam it seems ridiculously unlikely she’s not going to be thematically connected to him and therefore Jack through an extremely easy join the dots between 13x03 and 1x09. (Sam already kinda went one round with this sort of thing in 12x04 so in a way he’s got his booster shot of dealing with it directly so it can just be storytelling mirrors for him :P)
Certainly Jody is more connected to Mary symbolically and in general the Wayward Sisters stuff has been more about parenting and those dynamics recently, with 11x12 looking at how Jody copes and teasing us with hindsight for Mary’s return with Dean talking to her about wishing his mom had been around, and in 12x06 and 12x22 she and Mary sort of bounce off each other as moms directly in a continuation of that - in 12x16 she’s not around except on the other end of phonecalls but Dean’s carrying on parenting Claire as a hunter a lil bit.
Of all of those, 11x12 was the only one to make a nod to Cas with Claire holding grumpy cat in one of her scenes, but the show has decided to treat him a lot as just the inciting incident to get her onto the road hunting by dragging her into the life, while Dean does the thing he does around feisty wayward teenagers, and probably was mostly responsible for switching Claire’s amateur detective attempt onto a hunting thing in 10x20. I don’t want to make Claire cringe but I think she thought he was actually kinda cool and inspired her or something, because she had not had any interest in the supernatural side of things before that episode…
Despite all her connections to Cas I think Dean sort of birthed hunter!Claire, so the story sort of wanders that direction and leaves Cas behind because he’s more like Azazel in Claire’s story than anything, even if a very sad soft squishy Azazel who gave her a stuffed toy for her birthday :P Still they played it like her forgiving and hugging Cas was about the same as Dean finally getting to shoot Azazel, in both case freeing them to go do their job with the angsty backstory resolved…
In any case, I think Cas is probably an emergency contact Jody has for Claire-related stuff, although whether they told her to or not, she’d probably always call Sam and Dean first because she knows and understands them (and has met them), and I think the story is asking us to believe that with this symbolism of Claire getting past what Cas did to her family, she’s in a new stage of life he’s not a part of in the same way even if she does cling onto grumpy cat, and Cas is still family to people who consider Jody as family, who she considers family. Sort of shunting him from awkward dad no. 3 of 4 as per 10x20′s recap and symbolism to a weird uncle or something. (Although if Jody has mom symbolism to both Claire and Dean, that makes them siblings and Cas her brother in law… this found family stuff is really difficult :P)
So there’s all that shaping my expectations - Claire’s not in the episode and she’s our connection between Cas and Jody. Previous episodes have made it clear that Sam and Dean really hate calling even beloved friends with their shit and don’t tell Jody alarmingly huge things like that Mary came back from death. She’s been offering a shoulder to Dean personally while he’s been going through all his stuff, and in 9x08 I think Sam did open up to Jody more than Dean even when they were all in the same room, never mind in that and 7x12 they got split up from Dean and actually bonded (And I think this is also a quote from Kim Rhodes but also just something fairly obvious, that because Sam was the one connected to her more in her intro episode and ended up shooting her zombie son for her, they’ve always had a closer emotional bond via shared trauma).
I don’t think it’s showing that Sam and Jody aren’t as close now to have her switch focus to Dean but that Jody is determined to get Dean to open up to her *too*. In 12x06 they have really different attitudes about her when Sam makes the comment about Dean’s “animated Japanese erotica” which show how they’ve grown in different directions with Jody. So I think Sam’s closeness to her is fairly accepted fact and now Dean’s the tough nut to crack for her :P Anyway she’s made the offer two or three times now that she’s there to talk if Dean in particular needs her (definitely 10x08 and 12x06… Can’t remember if she said as much in 11x12 although they did also have an actual personal conversation in that episode, so one point to Jody there). I think 12x06 made it clear there’s still an owed conversation of greater than that opening up and spilling the beans on what’s making him emo right now, so there’s that.
And Cas and Mary have been connected all through season 12, in their arcs, in the subtext, in basically everything, and Dean textually named that in 12x22 that in the start of the season he’d “got Cas back, got Mom back” and in 12x23 of course he loses both, again, in a highly inter-connected way, and so again they’re going to be parallel lines to him, though again I think showing how he feels differently about one and the other and hopefully we get to unpack what those individual losses mean by the way of having both at once (and Crowley, who often in these cases is included to put a finger on the scale :P).
One of the things confusing me right now is of last night’s behind the scenes set peeking which revealed a Turducken Slammer relaunch from the ever-hopeful Biggerson’s, which is not letting frequent murder and mayhem and dodgy meat recalls on its premises stop it from trying. Even if it’s as overall irrelevant to the story in the sense of being mentioned or actually explored as the Mystery Spot sign in 12x01, it’s still telling us something and making connections. I mean yeah it can just be worldbuilding continuity but it’s always picked for a reason and they know what all these signs mean and how to connect them, which is why we have the beer language for example.
And Jody is pretty deeply connected to season 7 and Dean’s arc. And this connection was obliquely referenced in 12x06 in that moment I already mentioned, where Sam outs Dean’s porn habits to Jody. It was a nod from Yockey that he’d watched past Jody episodes because in every way it was a season 12 style rehash of Sam’s “strictly into Dick” comment, which was from a Jody episode. And… look, maybe this is the best way to explain how I felt the season 12 references were kind of out of this world in their scope and intelligence :P
For starters, that comment was not just a run of the mill Dick joke, that was a Robbie level Dick joke, which collected up a hilarious character thing for Sam (his fucked up moment when he should have made the barb, his determination to hang onto the Best Zinger Of His Life until Dean next gave him an opportunity and bless Sam’s cotton socks he delivered it like a pro :P) and Dean’s spiralling obsession with Dick as a Dick or Anime thing. Dean’s anime-watching was from 7x01, when he was waiting for Godstiel to blow up the planet in despair, and was at just about the lowest point we’ve ever seen him. In 7x02 Bobby gives him the “You just lost your best friend” pep talk, which is a role of comforting parental figure Dean then went and lost that season when Bobby died. And in the end of 7x02 Dean reveals how Not Fine he is to Bobby’s answerphone, which is important that it’s never commented on again but I think affects how Bobby treats him and in the subtext of 7x09 you have to know all that happened.
In 7x09 Bobby’s on his farewell tour of comforting advice to his adopted sons, in the last great set of retconning episodes to embed him permanently into their backstory as having always been there for them, to make it hurt juuust that much more than it already does. Towards the end of the episode he has another talk with Dean that mirrors advice Dean will get from Frank and Ness in 7x11 and 7x12, and *that* is opened up by Dean getting drugged by the turducken slammer and going on about how he doesn’t care about how he doesn’t care, and that he feels great for the first time since Cas and the black goo. Like, wow, his depression and hurt and betrayal didn’t go anywhere just because he said he was fine, who knew :P
And that’s the backstory to Dean’s obsession over killing Dick, who has taken everything from him by this point in season 7, told through the medium of anime and sandwiches and somehow always ending up about Cas and Dean’s feelings for him. The anime was an attempt to not care and not think about it that the slammer actually inflicted on Dean, and was used to get Dean to tell us how he really felt. By 7x12 it’s a joke for Sam to make implying Dean’s into lowercase dick, with one of those false binaries the show loves making. And like in season 13 Dean’s lost a love interest and a parental figure, and now things are really blurry about which one hurts more in this short run of episodes before they both reappear in the narrative and make it confusing. 7x11 makes the hurt most about Bobby. 7x12 subtextually tells us rather a lot about Cas, especially by making a Bobby figure to contrast in the background with the lady in the shop who literally calls Dean an idjit at some point, I think, or some other Bobby-ism, to make it clear that Ness is definitely not standing in for that and all those Cas parallels are probably where it’s at while Dean fangirls over him :P
And nope I’m not even done unpacking the Yockey Robbie Edlund turducken because of course JODY is all tied up in this completely. She’s incidentally in 7x02 as a useful local beloved character who can get menaced by Dr Sexy and let them know there’s leviathan nearby, and so she’s pretty embedded in the early Leviathan worldbuilding. Of course Edlund being Edlund, while the lil girl leviathan is channel surfing for ideas, there’s a Biggerson’s advert, I think the same one that plays in 7x03 or 7x22 about their pie salad bar (it’s like a salad bar, but pie!) and in the end she lands on wanting to be a Dr Sexy when she grows up.
(Stop me when you think this might somehow subtextually be about Dean :P)
The Dr Sexy leviathan has an amusingly childlike view on being a surgeon as a result of forming its opinions on that job while being a little girl, and apparently not listening to the memories of the poor guy it ate except to get a frightening knowledge of anatomy. It very much acts the part of being a doctor on TV who can just wheel patients off to perform unnecessary surgery, as per the malpractice of our favourite sexy doctor on TV - and there’s a thing to contemplate about “I’m not a doctor, I just play one one TV” but that’s digressing :P But it goes and menaces Jody and Bobby goes and saves her, and Robbie brings her back 2 more times in season 7, once in 7x06 to thank Bobby for saving her, and to link them romantically so she can even more handily take over the parental role by being romantically linked to their adopted father, which is just a sort of easy association to help. And in 7x12 of course she’s just there and helping and mourning Bobby a lil bit with Sam (since Dean was the one in the focus for mourning Bobby in 7x11), drinking his dubiously won scotch from 11x16 (… Rufus didn’t have to let him have that one, Bobby WAS insisting it was a ghost :P I think he just wanted Bobby to have a win after seeing how down he was.) But that IS a Jody episode so it would have been on Yockey’s list for homework for 12x06 and it contained the anime/Dick thing.
And, if he’d watched the deleted scene, at the end of the episode Dean makes it clear that he’s not sitting alone in the dark watching anime, he is strictly into Dick, and goes and reads an article on Dick “erecting” a tower.
(I hope it is clear how much I love the Dick references in season 7 by now and I’m not sorry, they started it :P)
So yeah. Jody is already intrinsically linked into a ridiculous chunk of the Dean/Cas subtext from season 7, the absolute wild nonsense that Edlund and Robbie were messing around with with pie and turducken and Dr Sexy and anime and Dick, to create the absolutely most ridiculous, like… no one part of it on its own in isolation doesn’t make you cry laughing, bit of storytelling (that, of course, added up into a full picture, just makes you cry a lot in earnest for poor Dean right then).
To me this is the picture of Dean mourning Cas in season 7, and the unique elements to season 7 are the anime (already referenced in season 12 just as an aside and I don’t think as anything more than a witty reference to past canon except that Dean was “kinda bummed” about Cas being gone (and don’t worry, I’m getting to Berens :P)) and the turducken, and Jody as one of the key characters wandering through all this picking up the emotional baton from Bobby, which she has been attempting to use on them ever since season 9, when they got back in contact with her after neglecting her all of season 8.
(And, oh gosh, I stared out the window to try and collect my thoughts for the next paragraph and washed up on thinking about Sam going and crashing out on Jody over the Dean in Purgatory period instead of hitting a dog and ending up with Amelia, like Dean with Lisa except by the time Dean gets back Sam’s probably been whipped into shape and is wandering around Sioux Falls in a deputy uniform…)
Anyway yeah, to go back to 13x03 finally… If the Turducken sign isn’t portentous of anything, I’m still seeing the Gas n Sip sign, in the maroon colours rather than blue one, but still, in a Berens episode. And if you can’t get mourning Cas in season 7 via Jody and a turducken related things to stick, you can totally shortcut through the fairly simple steps of Berens + Gas n Sip = 9x06 and assume whatever personal feelings stuff Dean and Jody talk about, this is a great way to cram Cas into the background via the enormous glowing yellow sun that has come to represent him. (And, of course, it was Berens who had the “morning, Sunshine” line for us in 12x03.)
So I think the set stuff and character stuff all have some fairly good slap to the back of the head things for Dean to maybe open up to Jody or at the very least for whatever he says to her to be heavily subtextually about Cas even if Jody asks about Mary. Because Dean’s wearing weirdly Cas-coded clothes, and Jody is wearing the family unity red n blue plaid colours. The maroon Gas n Sip seems to be more about family and even Wayward Sisters, since it was prominently used behind Claire in 12x16 and maroon has been a lot about family because of the infamous red hoodie that Kevin, Charlie and Cas all wore, and that Mary was put in maroon within an episode of getting back (and Chuck tried to cash in on it in 11x21 to make himself look harmless and cute and relatable in the same hoodie). But even in 12x16 having the Gas n Sip sun looking over Claire, with her connections to Cas, made it seem like he was watching over her too. The colours change the meaning in some ways but the overall message is the same. I think in 13x03 we have to remember it’s also going to be about the Wayward Sisters so whether Jody and Dean are having a personal conversation or not, the sun might be about Cas but the overall thing might be a more neutral family building thing for the main arc stuff. If it was a blue Gas n Sip I’d immediately think it was all about Cas and oozing tragic subtext *everywhere* and completely unavoidably.
(it might also just be that they’re maroon because Biggerson’s are and maybe there’s some sort of corporate alliance of Gas n Sips connected to Biggerson’s, because, after all, Dick Roman ended up owning both franchises and by 7x23 you can see that both are involved in his masterplan, which is part of why I love so much Cas is then intimately connected to both later while still in a gloomy penance mood about the whole thing and everything he’s ever done since…)
… So to actually answer your question, I can see some really really convoluted reasons in the history of the show that if Dean and Jody have their big important “seriously how are you” talk in this exact location while hanging out and hugging in front of all these signs, that they might either not mention Cas at all because he’s not a part of the openly stated story going on between Dean and Jody and all this family stuff and Wayward Sisters and everything absorbed into the entire chunk of the show about parental relationships, of which Jody has been a part since 7x06 thanks to Robbie. Or it’s a part of the emotional backstory to Dean losing Cas which Edlund kicked into high gear in 7x02 while dibsing all the important Dean and Bobby conversations which shine a light on Dean’s loss and Cas, also dragging Jody into a ridiculous web of Dr Sexy and stuff that Robbie and then much much later Yockey were playing around with.
I think from watching 2.21 and 2.22, it was determined that the wagon wheels had something to do with cycles. I may be remembering the conversation wrong. Someone’s probably already got a pile of meta on this anyway.
Well, if it’s cycles, it’s certainly apt. Them bringing back a staple of a time of grieving to another time of grieving is totally within their methods. Especially considering the operating strategy of s12.
I think season 13 will continue the ‘season 6 reversal’ thing (…) Fatherhood. (I hope I’m not getting repetitive but hey, you’re going to hear me talk about this stuff until October and beyond, sorry - not sorry.)
Let me quote: “how do you do that and not turn into dad?” (it was about Lisa and Ben, now apply it to the situation right now - John became what he became after the love of his life was killed, sounds like something that has recently happened to someone we know?) And of course the line about not wanting to become like John - “You tell yourself you’re not gonna be something, you know? But my dad was exactly like this. All the time. It’s scaring the hell out of me”…
Anyway, I’ve made this digression to get to the fact that if season 13 continues the season 6 retelling, then I can see themes being “not becoming like your father” (I mean, obviously Jack’s entire story is going to be about that), and, well, something we’ve been talking about since the previous hiatus when we were speculating about s12 being a s6 retelling: that Sam’s “wall” is going to come down. This time, of course, not Death’s magical wall in his mind, but the mechanisms he’s put up to cope with the traumas of his childhood - basically the “non-supernatural” equivalent of that wall: when it comes down, it hurts, but it’s the only way for your self to become whole.
I was talking today about Dean being a character where contradictions coexist, but now that I’m thinking about it, Sam is a fragmented character. I mean, no wonder people write wildly different metas about Dean and fight over interpretations of him (they’re all correct, and that’s the point), and have trouble “understanding” Sam, 6x22 was the “extreme” version of how his self actually works: he needs to learn how to put the sides of himself together. Not to sound repetitive, but I can’t really see any other possible scenario for Sam but embracing magical powers in himself…
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I love all of this :D
So, my 2 pence on this because I am very interested in this concept…
We have all been talking about Dean grieving in season 13 and how this might play out, there’s been lots of discussing sobbing (unlikely), going full on into hunting / coping mode, being catatonic for a while, going through the 5 stages of grief… I was also just thinking today about the way he went mute as a kid after the trauma of losing Mary, a reminder from season 1, I mean there are lots of potential ways that this could go down.
Personally so far my wishlist/personal speculation is that he will be very much John-esque in terms of potentially being mute / catatonic for a while in the first episode, needing to be snapped out of it by Sam (I’m remembering 12x19 when Sam had to shout twice to get Dean’s attention when he was pinning Cas against the wall in an emotional spin out) then yes, going pretty much MoC hunter-esque, just needing to kill SOMETHING (as a reminder of purgatory and searching for Cas, his MoC descent and more recently his conversation with Sam after Eileen died…).
Going full John is a really interesting idea… especially after in theory he has just reconciled this side of him or at least had the catalyst to doing so in 12x22, perhaps it is done and this won’t happen and we will see Dean coping in a more Dean way, the full Dean with his facade down and a new, full and real version of Dean but on the other hand perhaps this 12x22 catalyst plus the catalyst as you say, of Dean losing Cas as a parallel to John losing Mary, will actually bring this totally to the forefront, making him enter full John mode in order for it to be TOTALLY destroyed in the end.
It also puts Sam into a new role as Dean’s brother but also puts Sam into Dean’s role towards John when they were kids. It would help Sam understand perhaps what Dean went through when John went the way he did due to Mary…
Anyway yeah, I love this idea as a concept and am interested in other people’s ideas :)
To be honest I wasn’t thinking of a scenario where Dean went ‘full John’ - after all, what did John do after Mary died? Alcoholism, obsessive research on the supernatural+hunting, abusing Dean his kids? We have seen him deal with the aftermath of Swan Song and then of Cas’ death in 7x01 - I think it wouldn’t really make sense to have him just react in the same way after he’s actively tried to deal with his alcoholism problem during the Mark of Cain arc (not saying he’s solved the problem or anything, but he has acknowledged and faced the problem, and we can’t just act like it didn’t happen); obsessive hunting as a coping mechanism has also been… you know, done. The dude has experienced loss so many times, we’ve seen his coping mechanisms over and over. And he’s grown in self-awareness across the years, there has been some change.
You know, while we’re speaking of Dean mourning - there has been a recent instance where Dean thought Cas was presumably dead or at least lost forever, although the text doesn’t openly address it and it’s subtle and you have to squint a little to see it. When Dean is a demon, he does not know Cas is alive and free. As far as he knows, he’s either locked in heaven prison forever or, heck, Metatron has killed him too, why wouldn’t he kill Cas after killing Dean… Ever tried reading demon Dean under the lens of mourning? Compared him to other moments where Dean is mourning? Thought of Crowley - in that moment, for Dean - as some mixture of Gordon and Lisa? (I feel a little bad writing that sentence but hey, think about it.) Compared the nihilism of demon Dean with Dean’s nihilism in s7, when he explicitly says the the world wants to die and nothing matters? It’s like it’s the same and yet nothing like it at the same time.
We’ve seen all the flavors of Dean mourning, and now, a Dean that has been through the MoC, Amara, 11x23, Mary, I don’t expect him to mourn in the same ways. Not that suddenly he’s become the poster child for healthy loss-processing, maybe we might see a moment where things get very ugly, but I expect something that we can put beside the other moments of the show and point out similarities and differences. Am I making sense?
I don’t expect him to be ‘MoC-like’, not really - sure, probably Dabb is planning on making s12-s13-s14 a triad growth-decay-transformation like we were expecting s8-s9-s10 to be before Carver was given a bunch more seasons to work on (okay, one, but it felt like more lol). I mean, given how s12 has gone and how Dean and Sam have gone through some ‘growth’ it would make sense for s13 to be a phase of ‘decay’ but repeating the movement of Carver’s s9 and s10 would be lazy and make no sense. And no one wants to see Dean go through the same stuff anyway, especially not after Carver was given crap for making the decay last too long. I mean, I expect some kind of subversion of that kind of movement (is movement the right word? Dynamic? Wait, am I using the word movement because my mind is subconsciously supplying Hegel to me? Jeez, that’s true and I’m weird).
Anyway, back on track - it would make sense to have Dean ‘become John’ initially and then subvert the thing completely, but I don’t think it’s going to be about John’s coping mechanisms (there’s a whole show of Dean’s relationship with John’s coping mechanisms, we don’t need this Cas’ death to address that) but rather the “being a shell” part of it, I guess. But how to make it in a way that is coherent with the course of character development? Because in season 7 Dean became a “shell” after Cas’ death - Jeffrey in Repo Man uses that very word, Berens didn’t use that word in 12x22 just because! I mean:
It kills you… that people keep getting hurt… and you just can’t stop it. Or I should say… it’s killed you, shouldn’t I? […] Hey. I was there. I was depressed, Dean, because he was gone. I was a wreck, an emotional shell, a drunk. I was suicidal.
You left us. Alone. ‘Cause Dad was just a shell. His perfect wife? Gone.
(Forever crying about the perfection of 7x15. Edlund, man.)
What would be the point of repeating season 7? I expect something that is similar, sure (Berens knew what was going to happen when he wrote 12x22, after all - he enforced a parallel between Dean and Cas and John and Mary!), but different. Because, well, first of all because this death of Cas’ doesn’t come like a bolt out of the blue for Dean like Mary’s death came for John. He’s gone through that stuff before, in all the flavors possible. And he’s grown is spectacular ways. It seems that everyone and their dog hated season 10 but it was so rich and intense. Dean fought so much against an adversary that was too strong for him but he didn’t give up. He decided that he didn’t want to die! Yes, he was willing to have Death kill him in the finale but the thing is that he didn’t want to! He tried to work on his destructive coping mechanisms! He acknowledged that he wanted to experience new and good things! Sure, with Cas dead those possible good things are taken away from him but that doesn’t change the fact that Dean has gone through a long and deep journey by the end of which he could just say the things he’s said in 12x22 and 12x23…
So yeah, there is a Dean losing Cas = John losing Mary parallel, but it needs to be different than season 7 somehow, because seasons 7-12 have happened in the meanwhile, especially s10 (with his companion-resolution 11).
Yeah, this was a long time coming. I’ve been waiting for this since 12.09. Not because I dislike Mary, but because s12 is a deconstructive beastie and Mary is a mirror for Cas. Dean has to tell her off at some point because that’s part of her purpose as a mirror.
S12 also addresses the core elements of what drove the show to begin with and Mary was the core of all of those elements. Deconstructing her is the biggest check mark on the list. It’s a step in proving there is a better way, and a step in conveying to the Winchesters that there was never a “simpler time” It was all an illusion and if they want to continue, they have to address all the things they’ve been preaching.
S12 is also basically an entire season of the Break Into 3 sequence of a movie. (The start of the 3rd act) It’s the part of the movie where the journey loops back to “the real world” and all the elements from the first act get turned around and addressed with new knowledge. This is the “find a better way” sequence. The arc where the main characters find a new answer to old questions and make the decision to apply it. And once again, they’ve framed the entire season around the purpose of the arc: “Find a Better Way’ in a somewhat literal sense. They did this with Dark Night of the Soul as well…S11: “Darkness Before the Dawn” literally.
Excellent, the adherence of the story to Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet continues…
You know, I’m curious how much of the scripts in this season are written by the writer of the episode and how much by Dabb even when it’s not technically Dabb’s script - echoing dialogue from 6x20 is a very Dabb thing to do. (Think of Bloodlines and the “where were you” dialogue.)
I wondered about that line of dialogue when it first appeared in the promo, since it didn’t seem to match up with what we’d been seeing on screen. I now think it’s reflecting Cas’ own mental and emotional state. Because the world isn’t doomed at the moment (for once!). The world is in better shape right now, after the recent defeat of Lucifer, than it’s been in a long time. Amara’s gone. As far as we know, there are no supernatural Big Bads wreaking havoc. Just the run of the mill monsters and ghost and demons, and they’re manageable. All things considered, the world’s doing pretty well.
Cas seemingly not being able to see that is just one more window into his depression.
Remember the way Dean got in season seven?
DEAN:
That's just great. This is stupid. Our quality of life is crap. We got Purgatory's least wanted everywhere, and we're on our third "The World's Screwed" issue in, what, three years? We've steered the bus away from the cliff twice already.
SAM:
Someone's got to do it.
DEAN:
What if the bus wants to go over the cliff?
SAM:
You think the world wants to end?
DEAN:
I think that if we didn't take its belt and all its pens away each year that, yeah, the whole enchilada woulda offed itself already.
…
BOBBY:
I want to talk about your new party line… "The world's a suicide case. We save it, it just steals more pills"?
DEAN:
Bobby, I'm here, okay? I'm on the case. What's the problem?
BOBBY:
I've seen a lot of hunters live and die. You're starting to talk like one of the dead ones, Dean.
DEAN:
No, I'm talking the way a person talks when they've had it, when they can't figure out why they used to think all this mattered.
Dean was projecting his own depression onto the entire world. I’m wondering if Cas is doing the same thing. It wouldn’t be the first time his storyline has echoed Dean’s.
As if we needed another reason to be concerned about him...
It’s a roller coaster ride, tbh. My first thoughts were the in-the-moment canon implications of essentially “killing Death” again…
The second I saw it I was like HOLY SHIT WTF?! And then there was Cas standing there, and everyone is like O_O
But, Cas’s little speech there, and the fact that Billie had been the one being left in the universe who held this threat over Sam and Dean, the Permanently Dead Forever threat… well, that’s sort of off the table again…
But hooboy is this gonna be bad for Cas. Hopefully not as cosmically unbalancing as unleashing the Leviathans, but it seems like the kind of thing that’s gonna reverberate…
I mean, I love his reasons, and I love that he would do anything for the Winchesters. But yipes.
Then my second thoughts were of the ohno why the fuck did you kill the awesome badass woc character that we all collectively adore?! And I’m torn.
Between the necessity borne of the incredibly close parallels they’re drawing between s6 and s12, and also between Dean’s past actions (killing Death to spare his brother and the memory of his mother) and Castiel’s current actions (killing Death to spare Dean and his brother and mother)…
(and other parallels I’ll think through more coherently later, because there was a LOT of weight behind Cas’s choice there…)
But still… badass fantastic WoC character that’s pretty much beloved by everyone… even when she was threatening our boys, we still loved her…
But still… the parallels they just cemented… They are really doing this, the whole s6 redux thing… and it needed to happen… and I can see that because it lines up perfectly in the tangle of red string I’ve got pinned all over the wall…
“ohno why the fuck did you kill the awesome badass woc character that we all collectively adore?!”
Yeah, I agree :/
Given a choice between Mary and Billie, I admit I’m glad that we still have Mary, but... there didn’t have to be a choice at all.
Also, to me, it felt... it felt like Bucklemming managing to screw up a death they didn’t even write. Heh. Sam and Dean being caught at the end of the previous episode was so contrived. Therefore, their needing to escape felt contrived. Billie dying for it felt contrived. I’d prefer it if she weren’t dead at all, but at least give her a death in service of a better storyline, show!
ymmv.
I’ll be interested to see what the consequences are, anyway.
They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes
Supernatural 12x06, “Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox.”
Let me tell you a story. This is a story about two best friends and one of them dies. He dies without a family of his own. He dies because of hunting. He dies because of an obsession with hunting one particular monster. It’s so predictable.
Yeah, Bucky and Asa, such great buddies. Such a shame.
No wait! That’s not the story! It turns out all of that is wrong, apart from one of the friends dying. That bit is true.
It’s really a story about two best friends, and one of them dies. But before he does he ends up with two kids – surprise! It’s about a demon who wreaks havoc, possessing someone the friends trust. It’s about a friend dying by his best friend’s hand, and the aftermath of that wrecks him.
No… wait. Wrong story. That’s Bobby and Rufus. Oops. Got mixed up there.
It’s a story about two best friends and one of them dies; but no, he doesn’t die like that after all. One of the friends has an angel blade. One is enemies with a demon who is maybe a bit fonder of him than the demon should be. One of the friends has a mother who hates hunting. Everyone knows about them – there’s gossip. It’s legendary.
Wait. Wait. Whose story is that? Are we still talking about Asa and Bucky? It sounds familiar somehow. Are you sure?
It’s definitely a story about two best friends. And one of them dies at the hands of the other.
No, no, no. That’s Castiel and Balthazar. Shit, this is confusing.
Look, it’s definitely a story about two best friends…. and one of them dies, and the other one is wrecked as a result.
That’s how it goes. That’s how it always goes. Right?
Obligatory mention that as of next episode, it’ll have been exactly six seasons since the last time Dean claimed to “not swing that way”—the last time he said anything of the kind was in 6x05 when he told the vampire that he didn’t “play for [his] team.” We’re coming up to 12x05 now. Six seasons. Half the show. (Technically more than half, if we go by the number of episodes instead of the number of seasons, since s3 was cut short by the writers’ strike.)
He’s been avoiding making that claim for longer than he spent claiming it in the first place
wouldn’t it be a nice time for him to start saying the opposite
Mr Ketch as the expression of toxic masculinity, summing the negative traits of John Winchester, Gordon Walker and all the other male characters in the show that were expressions of that kind of mentality*
Dean Winchester as the expression of a balanced ratio of masculinity and femininity (see the Prince male+female symbols in the motel), in fact literally the force who reconciled the male and female primordial principles in 11x23!
Mr Ketch’s bike as a symbol of phallic power and masculine individuality (Dean appreciates the bike aesthetically *cough*lol he likes dick*cough* but he still prefers family cars–his car, the carriage of the Peterson family he helped the dad and son repair just like he’s always done with the Impala)
Dean’s Baby as a symbol of parenthood and care (even visually a “womb” for Dean and Sam, the place that has been their home after their home with their mother was gone, and so on) - in fact, the Impala is also a symbol for a balance of masculinity and femininity, is a “muscle car” but also “baby”, so we can say it’s a symbol for “male motherhood/female fatherhood”, which describe Dean, the boy who acted as a mother and also a female-coded character (“Dean becomes a woman”) who has experienced fatherhood**
Mr Ketch as a figure reminiscent of all the figures that Dean was terrified to be like - John, Alastair - thus an expression of what Dean doesn’t want to be, the darkness he fears he has inside of him, what he rejects when he sees as glimpse of them inside of him - the “drill sergeant” father***, the torturer, etc.
Mr Ketch as a dark mirror for Dean
*I know it’s kind of a “we don’t talk about this” thing in the fandom, but Magda’s death in a bathroom by a Nazi-like douchebag was a parallel to Charlie’s death, in fact Magda was suggested to be queer (her connection to Olivia was even underlined by a literal rainbow) or at least heavily coded as queer, as her story was easily readable as a metaphor for being a queer kid in a Christian fundamentalist family. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr Ketch had other traits in common with Eldon Styne, who was an allegory for rape culture. In fact, the British Men of Letters so far might be read as an allegory for rape culture.****
**I’ll say it again, there is an “opposite-retelling” of season 6 and part of season 7 here, if you read everything as a mirror for something in these seasons, chance is you are right
***Again his experience with fatherhood with Ben
****In fact, the British Men of Letters so far have been coded as violently homophobic, so here you have another contrast between the British Men of Letters and Dean.
Toxic masculinity and homophobia vs Dean’s lovingness and queerness.
And next episode is about the literal Nazis - also present in an episode where Dean had a “gay thing” and in an episode where Dean was in a submarine with sailors et cetera, plus associated to the Stynes who murdered a gay woman, and now paralleled to the British MoL who have just murdered a possibly gay or otherwise queer girl.
Nazi-fascist ideologies, with a strong focus on homophobia, vs Dean.
Which is the show in a nutshell, if you think about it, but now - in a very delicate moment in US history - the show has decided to drop any subtlety it might have left.
rosie-berber
All of this. The season that finally focuses on human monstrosity? Yes please, yes please.
Also worth saying that “American Nightmare” had very serious Season 2 vibes. Made me revisit all the feels of the mirrors between Sam’s psychic powers and Dean’s sexuality developed in those early seasons.
Yes! The supernatural forces were always allegories for human issues (especially connected to sexuality: possession and rape, Amara and compulsory heterosexuality…) but now it seems that they’re going to be less “allegorical” and more “direct”, so to speak.
(I’m not sure I’m using the word allegory correctly, I don’t thing I ever really got the differences between metaphor, allegory, symbol etc etc sorry I’m not friends with semiotics&co).
Actually, there is a project in my to-do list to argue that Sam’s relationship with the supernatural is paralleled to Dean’s relationship with sexuality throughout the entire show :D but yes, season 2 went big on that.
After John died, Sam started freaking out about his demon powers; Dean reacted to John’s death by saying ‘fuck it tho’ and flirting with all the hot guys
rosie-berber
I am always perplexed when folks don’t seem to get the sexual undertones of the show. I mean, a pretty central part of the show’s mythology concerns vessels: literally having another being in one’s body.
But yes, I think in each season, one could read Sam and Dean’s struggles running parallel. The demon blood running through Sam’s veins as something he comes to terms with seems to me to be a pretty clear parallel to Dean confronting his identity, sexual and otherwise, in the wake of his father’s death in season 2. But there are other big ones too. Sam having to deal with the trauma of remembering hell vs. Dean failing to cope with the trauma of losing Cas in season 7, for one.
My to-do list project has to do with mirrors and sinks as recurring imagery throughout the show. Because I think that imagery links up again with Sam facing the supernatural and Dean facing … himself.
This show will be the end of me and I’m perfectly okay with that.
I think that’s definitely in the cards and revisiting Dean’s tentacle porn is a marker. Dabb certainly isn’t the only one that might want to throw a mulligan on the season.
An apocalyptic event has just happened, with wildly different outcomes
Dean reunited with a woman from his past, but his actual mother and not a stand-in for Dean’s nostalgia for apple-pie family
Sam captured, but now freed by the family working together amicably and not a shady deal between Crowley and Cas
Lucifer being a problem, but outside and not inside
A Campbell resurrected, but the “right one” so to speak
Crowley and Cas working together, but clearly on different grounds
And these are just the things we know. (Am I forgetting something?)
I expect Cas to finally give the middle fingers to the angels and make the circumstances different himself, if you get what I mean. Among other things (not last a Destiel get-together instead of the Destiel breakup, but not just that).
Yeah, give me the retelling of season 6 with opposite dynamics.
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