It’s a complicated equation that goes like
external influence, causing violence/uncontrollable behaviour, broken by a close friend with unstated but romantic interest on the side of the controlled one, who is not a blood family member, unrequited in interest, just a friend/colleague, or actually an enemy. If it’s a blood family member/otherwise non-blood but obvious paternal/maternal tie instead it becomes a swan song parallel.
That’s a lot to hold in your head but it’s really important to track how it all works and the patterns established around it. 1x22 set up the Swan Song parallel which Sam had failed in 1x10 when he was affected with the anger ghost affliction and it was all a progress from there to get him to the Swan Song moment where he manages not to kill Dean, as John had done in 1x22 when possessed with Azazel. I strongly doubt the actual plot was plotted, but the themes were clear that this was the long-term arc and the show skates around it from season 1 right through.
In season 7, Bobby is the last victim of a Swan Song parallel before Carver era, and in 7x23 he is beating the crap out of Sam against the side of a vehicle when he sees his own reflection in the van window and realises what he’s doing and pulls himself back from the vengeful brink and is allowed to move on.
In 11x14, Cas manages to stop Lucifer from exploding Sam all over the Bunker, but then, curiously, hands back control in order to save Dean, showing a weird distinction in confrontation types. Casifer never attacks Dean in the same way, and their confrontation is staged utterly differently.
In Dabb era, where things are more kaleidoscopic in parallel nature, Mary also gets a fairly standard one of these in 12x03 which is a much later loop back to the original, and the conclusion of 13x23 is Lucifer failing it vs Jack and his OWN NATURE, which had been the attacking force in 5x22 after all, and it’s a Dabb era level subversion which hands Jack over to his true family (via all the challenging them to kill each other that Lucifer did which took the whole parallel out of his hands in a way and abstracted it into theirs) and reveals that Lucifer is abusive and unredeemable to Jack and I would HOPE now with every member of the blood and non-blood family successfully indoctrinated into it we don’t need any more of these direct Swan Song parallels.
So why are the crypt scene parallels different and stand out from this pattern? In Carver era there’s a strong side branch of these stories of supernatural control and begging people to stop with a very specific nature which fits this formula from above, where romance is involved in the main parallels, or absence of romance. There are multiple instances where family connections fail to break it, and comments like “I know you’re in there” and other dialogue from the Crypt Scene in 8x17 are thrown around, before and after that moment, where the pass and fail rate is directly connected to whether there is a romantic connection or not. This starts early on in season 8, from Dean being rage-possessed by the spectre and not stopping for Sam, to Charlie being the means Gilda breaks control from the spellbook, through to season 11 where the Soul Eater refuses to let Sam’s “i know you’re in there” stop it when it attacks him as Dean. Other scenes are staged in the same way with other elements, from the 8x16 set up with the Prometheus and Artemis parallel the episode before the crypt scene, through to the fantastically convoluted method of Mick being the one torn with a mental control he couldn’t break and Sam protecting Eileen while trying to talk Mick out of it, or Ishim taunting Dean that banishing him would kill Cas after he was the one who violently attacked Cas with visual framing almost identical to the direction of 10x22 in some respects and getting Dean to back off from that to protect Cas. All with parallels to his own relationship - romantically coded - with Lily.
And then there’s Thomas J Wright, who directed, yep, 12x10, and 10x22 and 8x17 and 11x21 which had its own odd twist on it, and a bunch of other episodes with suspiciously similar framing and attacks. 10x22 stands out because it has the exact same framing as an attack by a controlled Jensen-acted character against a romantically connected character in Dark Angel, which he ALSO directed. 10x22 also by their own admission had a fight scene they changed, with Misha, Jensen and TJW all agreeing to frame it differently, with Cas refusing to fight back, and the stabbing the book while straddling Cas thing clearly came from TJW’s own personal notebook of favourite confrontation ideas given he’d filmed such a similar one early in his career. He’s also added little bits of unscripted storytelling via the direction in his episodes which continue to build up this idea, such as the Amara touching Cas’s heart to contact Dean silent suggestion, and we don’t know if the back and forth in the scenes where they save Lucifer (and by that we mean Cas) later in that episode but again the dialogue between Amara and Dean weirdly parallels what’s going on there as if they broke a connection. 9x23 also directed by him includes the side by side of Cas smashing the angel tablet and Dean falling to the floor with a huge thunderclap after Metatron has stabbed him, perhaps highlighting the irony that Cas did the thing to save Dean seconds after Dean was stabbed, but also “breaking the connection” between the angel tablet, a source of powerful supernatural magic, and Metatron, who was causing violence against Dean, who was not fully in control of himself and about to lose what control he had left as he died and became a demon powered completely by his id, a reverse crypt scene where the reverse was not so much who was a participant but the effects of a failure. Of course the angel tablet was the fought-over artefact in 8x17. And in 9x22, the previous episode, Cas might not have been controlled, but Hannah, dressed like Naomi and sounding an awful lot like her too, challenged Cas between an us and them with killing Dean in the centre of it, to which he said “I can’t.”
We knew the real reverse crypt scene was coming pretty much immediately in season 9 after Dean got the Mark and we were worrying he’d be controlled by it and become violent and maybe attack Cas, who was paired with him by the Colette parallel. In the end Cas asked Dean to stop, as per Colette, and we got the reverse crypt scene where Dean attacked Cas while under the control of the Mark, and only stopped himself killing Cas at the last moment before walking away. Of course, we also knew it was going to happen like that because in 10x13 a trenchcoat-wearing wife pleaded her raging vengeful ghost husband to stop hurting people (while he was about to kill Dean), and her words were enough to let the husband pass on into peace.
Now Dean’s controlled again, but it’s by Michael, which means we could get a lot of different variations. Dean’s never had this sort of mytharc possession in a way that mirrors Sam being possessed by Lucifer, so a Swan Song flip between them is now a card on the table. But a reverse crypt scene style encounter between Michael and Cas might too. They could look very superficially similar, and Michael could also attack Mary, Bobby and now Jack, who are all inducted into the family via takes on this. The interesting difference is going to be in how it’s told and maybe just even who is directing what encounters, what parallels are offered and what language is used, down to whether it’s repeating things phrased one word or the other difference between conversation from 8x17 or 5x22 or other variations of these 2 thematic trees… If it fits Swan Song parallels it’s about family, but the crypt scene style parallels are the ones written with romantic language, and only used in scenarios where romance is implied, or to show it fails when romance isn’t present, even in encounters between characters for whom a Swan Song parallel would work perfectly.
(Funnily enough, in 12x22, it’s Toni, the Naomi parallel, who puts Mary and Dean under, after manipulating Mary, but Dean’s speech to her mirrors ones to John in season 2, and a father/daughter mirror in 3x05, but it’s Ketch who wakes them both up and breaks Toni’s control :P)
