13x01 + 14x01 [insp.]

13.01 / 13.23

I never opened myself this way

Supernatural 13x01, “Lost and Found,” and 13x02, “The Rising Sun.”

Hello friends, I’m baaaaaaaaack.

It’s been a while, but I think I remember how to do this thang.

Let’s see, what to start with? The love song that opens the season? The spectacular casting of Alexander Calvert as Jack? The grey make-up they’ve splattered on Jensen Ackles to make him look a decade older? The statement of thematic intent we get in the third scene?

So many options, so many choices.

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I’m no leader. I never was. (9x23) So what are you? Some kind of superhero? (13x01)

I’m no leader. I never was. (9x23) So what are you? Some kind of superhero? (13x01)

Occasionally I still come across Dean-critical posts which make me think that the OP and I are actually watching the same show, we’re just drawing different conclusions from it. For instance when the concept of Dean being judge, jury and executioner is being criticised. Because I agree that a) the show often assigns Dean said roles and that b) as a mere mortal Dean can’t fill them out very well. 

When Cas tells Dean at the end of Swan Song that he got the world he wanted (let’s ignore for the moment whether that statement is actually true), I can’t help but shudder, because there’s something deeply horrifying and unsatisfactory about the idea of Dean single-handedly deciding the fate of the universe. I’m pretty sure Dean would be the first to agree with me there, considering how he has repeatedly stated that he’s not a role model and that he’s not better than anyone else.

What usually gets ignored in this context, though, is that Dean doesn’t just assume these roles - no, he gets pushed into them again and again, by John, by Cas, by Chuck and, most often, by Sam. Instead of approaching Sam directly and telling him “listen, son, there’s something evil inside you and you’ve got to watch out you don’t give in to it”, John places all responsibility for Sam’s future development on Dean’s shoulders. Likewise, instead of telling Sam directly to stop using his powers, Cas commands Dean to stop him. Unsurprisingly, in both cases Sam’s anger as well as fandom criticism focuses on Dean alone, while neither Sam nor fandom ever consider that Dean shouldn’t have been placed in this situation in the first place.

Similarly, “Dean should have been more understanding” or “if only Dean had been more supportive” are used as key arguments in critical discourse about Sam’s actions, while Sam’s tendency to outsource his conscience to Dean remains unadressed. In Lucifer Rising, Kripke presents the fake voicemail from Dean Sam listens to as the motivation for Sam to go through with murdering Cindy. We are left with the feeling that if only Sam had heard what Dean really said, everything could have been different. And that, precisely, is the problem. (In terms of ethics, not of storytelling. Sometimes I feel like fandom has a tendency to conflate these two.) I don’t think any judge in the world would be particularly impressed with a murderer defending himself with the argument, “My brother called me a monster, so I thought I might as well start acting like a monster and kill people.” 

So when we consider Sam and Dean’s argument at the end of the latest episode, we should note that presenting it as though Sam owes his life to Dean is deeply problematic. Of course Dean shouldn’t be the one to make the call who lives or dies. But at the same time we shouldn’t forget that the idea that Sam’s salvation (and by proxy Jack’s) lies with Dean is just as objectionable - that has never been Dean’s call either and Dabb/Sam/fandom once again pushing this concept strikes me as a serious ethical problem.

I absolutely agree with this. It’s an old issue that resurfaces every now and then in fandom debate, but I guess that it just gets shelved until a frustrated Dean fan brings it up again.

I am not sure whether Dabb (meaning with him the team that is crafting the story) is guilty of this, or is simply putting the issue on the table for it to be addressed and eventually subverted. Dean’s too-big responsibilities were framed as negative since the beginning after all - an element of the horror story being told. Dean attempts to save Sam and gets the shit beaten out of him at the end of season 4; then in season 5 Dean saves the world by getting the shit beaten out of him. It’s never glamorous or heroic in a triumphal sense - it’s heroic in a sad, horrifying sense. In fact Dean is always trying to reach to people influenced by the supernatural with various degrees of agency and gets beaten up - he’s not the hero of an adventure story, he’s the hero of a psychological horror story. And that’s how his role as the most important person in the universe is framed as. In 11x23 he saves the universe without sacrificing anything for a change (if we don’t count the mass of souls he metaphorically gets stuck up his ass, unpleasantly - but this is a whole topic for another day) but he doesn’t beat the enemy, he acts as an emotional counselor. People who glamorize Dean’s sacrifices, Dean’s responsibilities, the burden of Sam’s upbringing first and salvation later - they’re missing the fact that Dean’s story is a horror story. Of course no hero likes the burden that gets dumped on them, in any kind of story (“name one hero that was happy” goes the saying) but there is a specific quality of horror to Dean’s burden.

Carver started deconstructing the things that were apparently ‘glamorized’ before, and showed them for what they were: horror elements. Many people have written many words about the deconstruction of the codependency during the Carver era, but we could call Carver’s operation a sort of unveiling, from a certain point of view. I was thinking about 5x16 before, how it’s basically a masterclass of Dean-Sam conflict, how deeply sad and horrific the heaven part is, yet there are people who deny it and find different interpretations for it (that it was Zachariah manipulating what they saw, for instance: an interpretation that tries to empty the episode, and the show in general, of a large chunk of complexity). I am kinda digressing, sorry if my thoughts are kinda scattered, it’s hard for me to keep up with them sometimes. Let me know if there’s something that needs clarifying.

Anyway, I think that the show is actually starting to textually address (or paving the way for a textual addressing) Dean’s discomfort with the responsibility for everything being dumped on his shoulders (I suppose in order to subvert the trend at the very end?), by John (“that wasn’t fair” speech in 12x22), by Chuck (his prayer in 13x01, “he skipped out, leaving guys like us to clean up his messes, life Lucifer” in 13x02), now, more or less implicitly, by Sam in regards to Jack (“I didn’t sign up for that” in 13x03).

Of course nothing is final (several people have pointed out that his speech to Mary almost gets to the point but then he still blames himself for not being able to do the job perfectly and does not mention the horrific things that happened to him - that’s right, that scene was supposed to be a step, not a resolution). But I think we’re moving in that direction. Dean’s “no fucks left to give” attitude he’s been developing is something new - okay, he still has a few fucks still left, but he’s losing them, and he’s angry and frustrated and he’s starting to say it out loud (not a coincidence it started when he was a demon).

Basically I think the show is aware of the issue and actually it’s a specific narrative emotional arc they’ve been writing. I don’t know if the fandom as a whole will ever see it, but I think the best approach to the fandom is to accept that there will always be people who see things… differently ¯\_ツ_/¯

Dean was shoehorned into the helpmeet/little mother role as a child, and he’s never been allowed to leave it for long. Instead the load just keeps getting heavier, right up to God himself dumping the whole damn planet on Dean right before God fucked off to have margaritas with his sister.

Sam got to be/was made to be the kid in that family, and as a result, Sam’s grown up to be a fairly standard American man. Which is to say, it’s not just his conscience that’s been outsourced, but also much of the emotional labor and mental load that goes into keeping his life running. Then when Dean, who’s been stuck with the responsibility for it all, acts with authority, a share of the audience calls him controlling. As noted above, Dean gets blamed for Sam’s actions - in much the same way that in real life people blame the mother when a grown man does wrong. 

In current events, the conflict is not really being generated by the boys’ mismatched grief phases. (Sam bargaining while Dean rolls around in despair.) It’s coming from Sam’s belief that he’s entitled to Dean’s wholehearted support in the new, emotional-labor intensive project Sam took on without consulting Dean. 

Sam sincerely cannot see the problem with him volunteering Dean to raise yet another child.

Sam sincerely doesn’t get that trying to cajole Dean out of ‘no’ might be just plain wrong, and also cruel.

And Dean… Dean’s being tactically foolish about Jack. But Dean’s treatment of Sam, imo, shows restraint and maturity. Dean’s not saying ‘pick a hemisphere.’ Dean’s saying, ‘you want to drive, use your own damn car.’

x

Just in case you forgot the big theme of the show…

Bonus: the grand return of the word freak

I keep swearing to myself I’m going to write a proper meta on grief, and once again I’m just going to vomit on someone else’s post.

Both Winchesters are hurting something fierce right now, but Sam is so deep in shock.  Disasociative is the exact right word; I’ve grumbled about this before, but when you’re dealing with traumatic loss (instead of loss that you know is coming), the first stage is shock.  You’re in denial that the damage has happened and how bad it is

Sam does not deal with grief.

I’m going to go bitter Sam girl here for a moment, but this is a huge thing for Sam; he wasn’t told about Mary, about how she died, until sometime after he turned 8.  There’s this massive chunk of his childhood where he had this traumatic loss dangling over his head and he didn’t know what to mourn, let alone have a healthy model for how.  Even after he was told about Mary (sometime after the events in 3x08), talking about her was taboo in the family up to Pilot.  22 years of ‘you don’t talk about what we’ve lost’ with zero healthy examples of how to grieve.

Couple decades pass, he loses Jess, and he pulls a John.  We get to see him mourning in his dreams; in reality, he goes through so many grief markers (depression, insomnia, suicidal impulses), and at some point he must ‘let go’ (*sideyes Provenance*), but he actively pours all his energy into finding YED and pursuing his revenge.  He pushes himself to self destruction and it takes almost losing his family to get him to refocus and pull out of that spiral.

He loses John, he just kind of accepts it and rolls it into the ‘reasons to hunt the demon;’ up until he has to deal with John wanting him dead, and all the alcoholic tendencies and self destruction that came with it.  He loses Dean and he fucking loses his mind, because he has no idea how to process it; looking both at 3x11 and the s3-4 gap, Sam goes mechanical: disasociative is the right word.  He doesn’t process Ruby’s loss at all (hi, sorry, he trusted and emotionally bonded with her, the fact that she betrayed and abused him doesn’t change that loss, it just makes it different); they lose Cas in s7, he doesn’t process, they lose Bobby and they both stare at a wall for three weeks and then Sam starts looking for what needs to be done.

He loses Dean and Cas at the end of s7, he doesn’t have any reason to believe they’re alive when the explosion killed a Leviathan (ya know, the thing that’s harder to kill than even angels) and he disassociates again, and walks away from the life and finds something that makes him feel like he isn’t hurting anyone.

Same with Kevin; he feels guilty over his part in Kevin’s death, but we don’t see him mourning.  He loses Dean again to Metatron, he focuses on getting his brother back (not mourning, doing what he thinks needs to be done).  Same with Charlie; he mourns at the grave, as much as he can, and then he focuses on what needs to be done.  Same even with fucking Eileen; he gets one moment to mourn, and then he focuses on the case.

How he’s dealing with losing EVERYONE like this is not well adjusted, and (much to my eternal anguish, let the boy mourn damnit), it’s not ooc.  He doesn’t process 90% of the losses they experience and let himself feel, because there’s always another fire to put out, there’s always something that needs to be done.  You’re absolutely right that he doesn’t have enough energy to do what they normally do after a loss.

And it’s worse with losing Mary again, because he’s never known how to process that.  Losing Cas is hard, because Cas is family, but Sam has never gotten over losing Mary and he doesn’t know how to do it now.  This is his oldest trauma and it’s become so tied into Jess and all the reasons he’s in the hunting life (want to reduce me to Sam tears, just look at the downward arc from Pilot to 1x21, because Sam goes from being numb and not getting why John and Dean are hung up on Mary being missing to not being able to let go of Mary either).  (Whereas Dean got to actually process the trauma of Mary’s loss at a handful of points, and s12 was him processing the aftermath).

We can see Sam has feelings about Cas being gone; it’s there in the silences and the flinches, the way his face drops for a second.  But Sam has never, never ever ever had success with bringing people back from the dead.

People come back for Dean.  They’re raised or deals are made or Death makes exceptions, God intervenes, they reappear as ghosts, whatever it is, it’s always around Dean.  (Bobby.  Kevin.  John.  Sam.  Cas.  Dean himself with the Mark.  Sam’s soul.  Mary.)  Sam tries, but unless you’re counting Mystery Spot (I’m not), he doesn’t have great luck bringing people back from the dead.  If Dean’s given up on doing the impossible, the one thing he can do is try to save someone who might still be alive.

Saving people is Sam’s #1 marker for “I’m not evil.”  He’s got this horrible mental calculus in the earlier seasons of “the more people I save, the more that maybe I’m worth saving.”

And maybe if Jack can save Mary, he’s not evil either.

Edit: that doesn’t make Sam’s actions towards Jack or Dean pure or harmless or anything like that.  But there’s a reason behind them.

after everything we survived together…

I’ve seen a lot of people outraged by others comparing Dean to John since last night’s episode (this is mostly on twitter but I wanted to make a post here because reasons). So I get it if you love Dean and hate John you’d be upset to see people comparing the two of them, but it doesn’t mean the people doing it hate Dean.

Like, even in the PR they said this season is dealing with Nature vs Nurture, and of course, we all thought that meant when it came to dealing with parenting Jack, and we were right! BUT that is not all. It’s apparent to me now that they will be exploring that theme with Dean and Sam as well.

Jack is the epitome of nature vs nurture, his father is evil, but his mother was good and he chose Cas as a surrogate father, who is also good, and Jack himself so far seems like a pure little bean who just gets scared and hurts people sometimes (not so pure obviously, but the INTENT is not to harm so that is good!) Dean was raised by John, who a lot of us see as… pretty evil himself, though if we’re being nice we’ll say, neglectful at best. Dean and Sam were raised in a negative environment, they turned out pretty okay human beings, BUT the question becomes how do they parent?

Dean is IN the role of John at the start of the series. He lost the love of his life and now he has to parent a child that he resents and blames for that death. There’s really no getting around that comparison. But beyond that, he has introduced that idea of “if you go dark i’ll have to kill you” which is what John told Dean about Sam before he died. Dean is gutted, he’s had a lot of loss. None of that is an excuse for walking in on a guy who is obviously distraught and STABBING HIMSELF and saying that he will kill him if he doesn’t behave, basically. He has REASONS for being upset and very very powerful ones, but they are no more just than how John treated Dean when growing up. Jack did not have control over his powers, he did not know what he was doing, just trying to survive. He’s not /innocent/ exactly, but he’s also not deserving of what Dean is putting on him. 

Anyway, my point is, Jack can be good despite his nature, and Dean can choose to be good by not going down the same path that John went down despite the situations being so similar (we know how he parented Sam, but this is a different set of circumstances). BUT before they can come to that, both Jack AND Dean are going to do some shitty things. Doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons for those shitty things, especially when you can see INTO Dean’s feelings, as he is our protagonist. It’s understandable that we feel for Dean and feel the need to justify his actions.

But comparing Dean to John is not being done out of nowhere, there is substance behind it, and the parallels are there PURPOSELY. This is the subtext of these first two episodes. And we know they deal with some stuff in the family counseling episode too, so… idk i’m just seeing a lot of defensiveness about Dean being compared to John and it’s just like… we are literally SUPPOSED to be doing that narratively.

13x01 Trench Coat

One of the most interesting characters from the season 13 premiere is the angel, Miriam, that calls Dean ‘Becky.’  When we are first introduced to her she is very easy to overlook as just a drunk girl. Many people have noted how human like she had to act to pull this off. And yes during this first meeting with Dean she is an angel. That is why she is wearing the typical angel steal grey. The next time we see her is when she shows up at the police station. She is wearing a different outfit. The way she is positioned between the two angels, that had been seen looking for Jack at the lake house, tells us that she is their leader.

She decided to change clothes between meeting Dean and going to the police station. Now she is wearing a light weight tan sweater instead of the grey jacket she had on earlier. The reason she changed clothes is because she is anticipating a confrontation with Dean and she wanted to hurt Dean as much as possible.  She needed to change her clothes to do that. 

Someone asked me a while ago if Castiel’s new outfit was something pretending to be Cas and asked me why I thought it wasn’t some sort of Castiel cosplay. I  said that because of how well it is put together and how smart the whole outfit looks, clearly means a lot of thought went into it. I didn’t think that if something was pretending to be Cas that they would get such a nice ensemble. Miram is cosplaying as Cas here to hurt Dean more. Her jacket resembles a trench coat in many ways. It has the length, the collar is made to resemble the wide lapels of a trench, it has a belt, and it even has a piece of fabric across the back resembling a rain flap. But it’s very thin and flimsy. It’s just a costume. 

I find it very interesting that she took off the usual grey that the angels wear to don this sweater. We only see her with the rest of the angels once. She has to separate herself from heaven to play this Castiel like role. An angel in a leadership position that expresses a lot of human emotions. She is basically a negative version of Cas.

Castiel representing hope is  going to be a theme this season. Especially when it comes to Dean’s hope. The fact that Dean went through with burning Cas’s body is a sign of just how hopeless Dean is. A major part of Dean losing hope is because of this angel, Miriam. She purposely gives Dean hope when she tells him that Jack can do “almost anything”. Then she quickly squashes that hope by telling Dean that “Castiel, he’s dead. All the way dead, because of you.” This very closely mirrors what Hestor tells Dean in 7x21 with “ The very touch of you corrupts.” Neither of these angels truly cared about Cas. They just want to set most of Castiel’s stuff on fire. 

Every time another angel such as Metatron or Lucifer tries to dress up as  Cas it’s always a perversion of what Castiel represents. This interaction with Miriam is a perversion of how Cas represents hope for Dean. She is here to give Dean despair the opposite of hope.  

Miriam is an unusual name for an angel. That’s because it’s not an angel name at all. It’s the name of a prophetess from the Bible who foretold the birth of Moses. I think that it is possible that Miriam’s name was chosen because this angel that is trying to be the opposite of Cas could be foreshadowing. Foreshadowing that we could soon meet Cas’s opposite. This supports a theory that I have been telling to anyone who will listen. That there will be a confrontation in the empty between two opposite sides of Cas’s personality id!Cas and super ego!Cas.

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