Up To The Platform of Surrender
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is even and especially true of stories that are being told within stories, like the arc that Singer has begun with Season 8 that is leading towards the final culmination of the series at the end of what they hope will be Season 10.
At the beginning of the story, you establish who your main characters are, what matters to them, what they want, and what will stand in the way of that. While that might seem silly for two men we’ve been following for seven years now, it’s surprisingly necessary. After all, it’s been a long road since student housing at Stanford, and if the Apocalypse doesn’t change a man, how about Heaven, Hell, and even a dose of Purgatory?
I’ve talked in other meta about how they’ve been introducing us, maybe for the first time in the history of the series, to Dean Winchester. What matters to him, we have been told, are, in this order: His brother, his angel, saving the world, his friends, Crowley’s head on a stick, and - making its first appearance on the list at all but still some seven billion entries down and just below Justin Bieber - himself. In 8.14 we were told what he wants in the end (blaze of glory while closing Hell), and the rules of his essential conflict as a character for this story were established: Sam, his most important thing, does not want him to have said blaze of glory, but there is no Plan B yet, so we will be watching to see that develop and whether he gets what he wants now or the later Plan B or something else.
Likewise, Castiel, who is definitely the third part of the central trio and the most developed character still on the show other than the brothers, has been re-established and given his own desired outcome (to atone his sins while maintaining his free will and bond with Dean and Sam) and obstacles (Naomi and whatever she’s part of).
But what about Sam? Like Dean, he’s had to be re-established almost completely from scratch, because although it’s shocking when you think about it, we’ve never really met Sam Winchester. We met the boy who grew up chafing against his father and brother’s tight control, ran away from home, and was reeling from the brutal murder of his almost-fiancee. We met Azazel’s puppet trying to figure out if he was even human. We met the desperate brother trying to become hard enough, fast enough to save Dean and failing, and the demon-blood junkie after that, then the guilt-ridden ex-addict trying to set things right. In season 6, he lost his soul, in season 7, his mind.
He doesn’t know who he is, and neither do we. So he gets stripped down to bare walls, and we figure it out with him. Much has been made of the fact that he doesn’t go after Dean, but frankly, I think that’s silly. ”Go after Dean.” That makes it sound so simple. It’s not like he’s in the County lockup. Dean - IF Crowley is telling the truth and he even survived the explosion - is God knows where, though with a little logic, it would be easy enough to realize that was in Purgatory. That place that the King of Hell, a Seraph, every monster Alpha on the planet, and an archangel took a year of the dirtiest dealings we’ve ever seen just to find. Aside from the fact that if he’d just kept plugging on like “Mystery Spot” (which he does remember and hey, there was a lesson there), we’d still not have a character at the beginning of this story, but refusing to leave the end of the last one.
On top of an interesting childhood, Sam has been through a staggering amount of completely untreated trauma for seven years plus hell-time, has no allies left, no family, is still on very shaky new ground with his own sanity and sense of reality, and for the first time in his entire nearly 30 years he is truly alone with no one - not Dean, John, Bobby, professors, Brady, Jess, Ruby, Samuel, Lucifer, Cas, ANYONE - telling him what to do. How, in any rational, compassionate universe, could he be expected to do anything other than what he did: go into shutdown?
It’s a miracle he was functional enough to get a motel.
And then he finds Amelia. She’s just like him; a zombie, an empty, lonely shell that was once a person who thought they were going to get a normal life. They are both utterly directionless, desperately in need of a framework they can use to start rebuilding something on, and “you like dogs” is just barely a step up from the first line of an overplayed Avril Lavigne song. Can it be any more obvious indeed.
What comes next isn’t real. They both know it, and the show goes to a lot of effort to make sure that we don’t miss that, because if we did think it was real, this man we’re meeting almost from scratch would be a tremendous asshole if he could walk away from it, which he must for us to have the show. It’s shot in odd light, half focus, told mostly in flashback, with non-existent chemistry, distant performances, confused timeline, unreliable narrative, and stilted dialogue. We aren’t supposed to ship it. We’re supposed to squirm. She doesn’t even get her own name: she’s another man’s wife and a childhood fling that his brother killed; both symbols of could-have-been domesticity. They tell themselves and each other that it’s love because they want it to be, but MIA and as good as dead isn’t Real Dead, and they are soon yanked away from the easy rote of the fantasy that everything’s ok in opposite directions by the return of what they were pretending they’d never lost, and now they have to deal with having it back.
But in the mean time, we’ve learned a lot about this Sam Winchester guy, and though much of it is things we thought we knew, his past has been harrowing enough that we needed to see that they were real traits and not fire-forged exceptions.
He’s compassionate, responsible, but still has a strong need for guidance. He doesn’t respond to or feel the need for macho posturing (though he’s also finally taken possession of his own size and no longer slouches or slumps or carries himself like a gawky teenager, something they’ve reinforced with the haircut and perpetual stubble that make him look THIRTY and make the idea of “baby brother” just laughable). He finds comfort in order and routine. He liked having something to take care of. Although he only loved the idea of loving Amelia, he loved it because a wife and home is still what he wants and he has moved on enough from Jess to have it. He is brilliant, scholarly, and fits well into the upper middle class, but he’s lost all elitism about manual labor and has become pretty good with his hands. He has a good sense of humor, especially about himself, but he’s fairly quiet and kind of an introvert. He’s a bit of a nerd, but not at all a geek. He is a fantastic Hunter and can handle himself in a fight, but his heart is no longer in it - if it ever really was - and he’s just making it through to endgame, though he’s still excited by and in love with the wonder of the world they get to see. He loves his brother tremendously, unconditionally, and dearly wants to see him happy, but does not defer to him and seeks to be equals now that they are both men.
They introduce us to this man, and then they take away the fantasy brace that let him find his feet after being wounded…and replace it with the road that we now know will be his: the Men of Letters. It could not be a better fit for this character we’ve finally come to know, but he wouldn’t have been ready for it half a season ago. And now we not only have Sam, but we know what he wants (basically, what Henry had minus the last-second demon intervention) and what’s going to stand in the way (closing the gates of Hell and convincing Dean not to sacrifice himself).
We may see Amelia again. In fact, we probably will, but it will only be to reinforce for those who didn’t get it the first time that she is not Sam’s Great Love, his Girl Back Home, she was his crutch and he hers and now they both need to move forward. He’s his own man, not her playmate or hiding place any more than he’s Dean’s little Sammy any more. And that’s ok on both counts.
The stage is set. We know our players, we know what they want, we know why they will have to struggle to get it. And the real story has only just begun.
