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Edvard's Supernatural Rewatch and Review: 1x16 Shadow

In my analysis of this episode, I will discuss Dean’s understated intelligence, the hunting life as a metaphor for trauma, a silly altar, Kripke’s bad treatment of his female characters, and Sam being a pissy bish.

Supernatural’s sixteenth offering is an outing directed by Kim Manners and written by Eric Kripke. It is rated 8.5/10 on IMDb based on over 5,300 votes. It is an important plot episode as we discover that the conflict between John and the Yellow-Eyed Demon is heating up and could have very lethal consequences for the Winchesters. The actual writing for this episode is spotty and does not do a good job of presenting the characters as the writer wants us to view them: Sam is supposed to be Mr Smart University Man who is good with research and good at hunting, whereas Dean is supposed to be the air-headed, womanising himbo kind of man Kripke seems to resent for some reason. What the writing does, however, is show us Sam being mostly useless but earns his keep on occasion, whereas Dean is the true mvp (‘most valued player’) of the episode.

Unfortunately for the aforementioned plot, the show takes a three-episode break from the overall story for the space of episodes 1x17-1x19. This thin spreading of plot is one of the things I disliked about the show when I first watched it almost 14 years ago, and it would still be an issue if I still watched Supernatural for the story. Which I do not: I watch it for Dean.

Whilst we are on the subject of Dean – which we were not – I want to address a problem I have with both Kripke’s writing of him AND the general fandom’s perception of him: his sexual exploits. I will discuss the latter first: The Show tells us time and time again that Dean engages in much coitus with a plethora of womenfolk. I repeat, The Show tells us this, but television is a visual media and one of the basic precepts of visual media is ‘show, don’t tell’. The Show can tell us whatever it pleases about Dean’s adventures in copulation, but what it tells us is not in keeping with what it shows us.

How many women has Dean actually been shown with in the show so far? Only one: Cassie, a woman he was ‘in love’ with a few years previously. Certainly he has been flirty with women, e.g Jess in 1x01 Pilot, Haley in 1x02 Wendigo, Amy Acker in 1x03 Dead in the Water, Layla in 1x12 Faith, but nothing actually happened with any of them. He was in the (men’s) toilets for a long time in 1x15 The Benders, but other than that, the next time I can assume he had sex with anybody is 2x18 Hollywood Blues when he did the horizontal tango with the actress in the caravan. After that, the twins (at least one of whom was presumably female) in 3x01 The Magnificent Seven, the barmaid in 4x05 Monster Movie, Anna in 4x10 Heaven and Hell, Lisa in the time he spent with her between the end of 5x22 Swan Song and roughly 6x05 Live free or Twi-Hard, and then maybe one woman every two years until series 12, whereafter… nothing. Not a single woman.

This does not mesh well with what we are supposed to believe. Of course we do not see all of the boys’ lives, but we do not see nearly enough of Dean’s sexual interactions with women (or men) to have any actual reason to think he is as promiscuous as we are told. Yes he is flirty, but there is very good reason to believe he had to learn to be flirty as a child in order to keep Sam fed when John was away. It could simply be that his flirty nature is one of the roles he steps into in order to help him get through different situations: he knows how to flirt with women, and can be comfortable when he adopts that persona. How often he actually goes through with that is another matter altogether, and what he actually thinks and feels about sex is up for debate. My thoughts are that he does not like it quite as much as he says he does, but perhaps puts on the act because John, Sam, and others expect or demand it of him. I refuse to discuss toxic masculinity, but John and Sam’s expectations and demands of Dean because he is a man are undoubtedly poisonous.

Kripke, however, wants us to believe Dean is a himbo, a man-slut, a f*ck-boy, and a man-shaped hormone. Why else would he put lines such as ‘do you mind doing a bit of thinking with your upstairs brain?’ into his self-insert Sam’s mouth and not have Dean answer back if he did not want us to think Dean is an air-headed scarlet woman? More on this later when I discuss Kripke and Sam both sounding like women who hate men.

I will return to the very beginning of the episode: the cold open was generally effective and successful with lovely cinematography, use of shadows, and atmospheric sound design. Meredith WAS a bit of an idiot walking down creepy alleys in the middle of the night by herself with earphones in. It was also rather weird how quickly her panic abated as soon as she locked the door and set the alarm in her flat. Paula R Stiles wasted no time in her review pointing out that Meredith should have turned all the lights in her flat on and kept them on all night if she were that scared, but instead she blithely toddles over to her answering machine and listens to her messages. Conveniently, the messages fall silent as soon as we see Meredith’s heart getting ripped out. Funny, that.

Actually, let’s backtrack a moment. I said we see Meredith’s heart getting ripped out. This as only half-true: since Meredith is not a man, we do not see violence enacted on her, we just see the shadow.

Exit Meredith and enter Dean and Sam on a street in downtown Vancouver Chicago. There are a few things I like about the following scene: number one is the adorable security alarm company boiler suit, as much as Dean hates it and having to pay for it. Dean makes it very clear the outfits are expensive and the money comes out of his hard-earnt money. Later in the show, such costumes are infrequent and the boys opt instead for simply posing as FBI agents most of time. More’s the pity, because my dopamine level shot through the roof seeing Dean playing dress up.

I also enjoyed the sassy landlady, short though her role was. But the most noteworthy part of the scene for me was Dean spotting the symbol in the blood on the carpet. Other than revealing that Dean is a closeted Evanescence fan, it showed both his impressive working knowledge of occult insignia and his ability to link things together and spot patterns. People both within and outwith the show are keen to call Dean stupid, but he is anything but. He is not educated, but he is highly intelligent and knows a lot about the world he and Sam are in which Sam does not. His ability to spot patterns is also another bit of evidence for Dean having Asperger’s.

Bear this in mind as I jump forwards to a little later in the episode when Dean finds the meaning of the symbol and tells Sam about it over the phone, only to be met with Sam’s surprise that Dean knows how to research. ‘Name the last book you read,’ is Mr Me Smart University Man’s response, delivered with a superior, arrogant grin on his face. Sam’s concept of intelligence seems to be reading books and academic success, and a person who does not read books cannot be intelligent.

Quite apart from the fact that history, science, and craft magazines exist which are exceedingly educational, academic success does not guarantee intelligence: it guarantees specialisation and expertise in one area. Dean has this without academic success: how many times over the course of the show does he rebuild the car after an accident? How much knowledge of the occult does he have which we only get to see fleeting glimpses of? And how much lore and mythology does he know by heart whilst Sam has to ferret through books and websites. Is there a single pop culture reference he does not get? And he does read: it is canonically acknowledged that he likes Kurt Vonnegut. He also seems the type to be a fan of Cormac Macarthy and Stephen King, but back to the point: shut your gob, Sam.

The misplaced arrogance is especially glaring and grating in this episode because Sam does not actually do much at all for the first two thirds of the episode. Kripke wants us to believe Sam is awesome and cool, but he does nothing useful in Meredith’s flat while Dean spots the pattern in the blood. Dean does the research while Sam sits in a car. Drop it, Sam.

And did I mention Dean’s home-made EMF reader? The one Sam mocked him for making in 1x04?

It would be remiss of me to ignore the fact Dean had a dig at Sam with his ‘drama dork’ comment at the beginning, but that actually came off as a sibling joke. A little puerile and immature, but not mean-spirited, unlike Sam’s two jibes at Dean in this episode. Even the difference in their reactions says a lot: Sam is utterly unperturbed by Dean’s joke, whereas Sam’s ‘Do you mind thinking with your upstairs brain?’ wiped the smile off Dean’s face and had him rushing to explain himself like a child fearing punishment.

Whilst on the subject – please bear with me, Dear Reader, I am almost done with my Sam-bashing – I would like you to cast your mind back a few minutes to the beginning of this analysis: Sam’s pissy comment about Dean’s sex drive sounded like exactly the kind of thing a woman who hates men would say. There was absolutely nothing about Dean’s behaviour in the scene suggesting he was only thinking about sex. Sam’s comment was an unnecessary escalation meant to shame. You might be wondering ‘how did you get that from one sentence?’ If so, please go and look at what I wrote about Sam’s pissy, controlling behaviour in 1x13-1x15 for some context, or take a look at the offence and resignation of Dean’s face in this episode after Sam says ‘Name the last book you read’.

Paula R Stiles and I are in complete agreement about Sam’s view of Dean: he is an embarrassment, an interruption in his life, an idiot, and a burden. This has been true since 1x01, and it will remain true until the end of the show.

By the way, apropos the bar scene: do we know which bartender’s number Dean got? We see him talking to a barmaid, but their conversation did not seem like they had got far enough to exchange numbers, and Dean left her as soon as he saw Sam enter the pub. Curious... Meg’s Chad Michael Murray line also seemed to interest Dean while Sam was clueless. The camera also cut away to Dean’s face for some reason. Curious...

As for ‘Dad’s friend Caleb’, Dean already has his number on his phone, so who is the Caleb whose number is written in the notebook under the information about the daevas? Curiouser and curiouser.

Mentioning Chad Michael Murray brings me to the next big point of this analysis: Meg. I have to admit I did not like Meg much at all when I first met her 14 years ago, and to this day this first incarnation of Meg simply does not do anything for me. A mix of the writing and acting choices make her feel like a Bad Ass BitchTM and it does not tickle my frusset pouch. She sounds arrogant and annoying. No wonder Sam liked her. The second incarnation of Meg is more to my liking.

‘Dude, cover your mouth!’ What an incredibly rude way to talk to a stranger who was clearly clearing his throat, not coughing. Note also that Sam does not speak up for Dean at any point during this exchange (like he did not call Missouri out for being a mega bish), nor offer a real apology for the things he said. Sam is the show’s POV at this point, and it stands to reason that what Meg said is supposed to be the viewer’s takeaway from the exchange. We are supposed to think Dean treats Sam badly in spite of what the show shows us. Sam’s lame ‘He means well’ only serves to underscore the fact Sam thinks Dean treats him badly, and he does nothing to challenge Meg’s views on their dynamic.

That being said, I noticed that Kripke wrote the only recurring female character so far as a mega bitch and I did not like it for several reasons. The first reason is that is sucks to bring in a character who differs from the main two only to write her as a mega bitch, as if we would not notice the only woman is being written as a bitch. The second reason is that nobody in their right mind would ever say the things she said to Dean at first meeting unless they was an extremely good reason to do so. This made her feel unrealistic and hard to take seriously.

The third reason was Dean’s face after the bitching and his words outside the pub afterwards. He was perfectly justified in being upset by what Sam said about him, but Sam just brushes it aside so he does not have to deal with it. Rather than ‘I made a mistake, I shouldn’t have said what I said, and I’m sorry for bitching about you to strangers again’, he gives non-committal platitudes and lame reassurances that are as flimsy as something which is very flimsy. ‘Yes, yes, sorry, whatever, it’s not important, now let’s change the subject.’

In addition to the bitching, there is the fact that Sam was angry at Dean for telling Cassie about the hunting life in 1x13 Route 666, yet what Sam did was much worse and far stupider. He knew at that point that he was in danger and there would be ‘people’ following him, but he still could not help himself having a bitch about his idiot brother to the first person who would listen. Dean knew Cassie for a few weeks, but Sam knew Meg for all of a few hours before he starting spilling his secrets.

And the show wants us to think Dean is the stupid one.

One thing I did appreciate about Meg was the minimum amount of pontificating and snarky Bad Ass Bitch dialogue in the loft at the end. She did talk, but she was still doing stuff, even if the creepy rapey vibes of sitting in Sam and Dean’s laps while they were tied up was creepy and rapey. She is also serving somebody else and following somebody else’s orders, a fun-house mirror version of Dean.

The loft confused me for a long time, but before discussing that: Sam wants Dean to think Dean is stupid, and Sam clearly thinks he is smart. But please note, Dear Reader, that Sam followed Meg into the big scary building after a suspected murderer alone. That would have been the time to call Dean for back-up, but nope: Sam decides the prudent course of action is to climb up a lift shaft all by himself. Were you dropped on your head as a child, Sam?

Anyway, the thing which confused me about the loft was: why? Why did Meg have the altar in the loft rather than her home? It took until this evening when I was washing my hair and thinking of my analysis that I realise a few things: her flat was a small space with people above and below who would hear any loud noises going on there. That could cause problems for her plan, since she cannot have her daevas ripping people apart without the neighbours hearing. It would also be hard to lure Dean and Sam into a trap if she were not seen doing anything untoward such as entering a creepy building.

The black altar, by the way, looked like no effort had been put into it, and was taken directly from an emo-rock music video. Not that there is anything wrong with emo music: I am quite partial to a bit of My Chemical Romance on occasion. But you have to admit the altar looked cheesy.

Before continuing, I want to briefly outline something a friend recently explained to me: the hunting life as a metaphor for trauma, particularly generational trauma. People only enter the hunting life after a traumatic event such as the death of a friend or family member, or are raised into it by these same people. Normal people cannot see the world of monsters and demons, i.e. the life of a traumatised person, and when they get a glimpse of it, they run as fast as they can in the opposite direction. Normal people simply cannot handle it. The only people who can are those who have suffered the trauma of losing somebody, but most are doomed to die young and bloody.

Hunters are the only ones who can fight the monsters, but the more they fight, the greater the risk of getting hurt and the higher the likelihood of taking severe damage and dying. This works as a metaphor for facing trauma: if we ignore it, it might not get to us. Perhaps. We might even be able to live for decades with only infrequent encounters with monsters/trauma. Then again, we might not. Ignoring the problem is no guarantee of safety once we know the problem exists.

Even if we try to ignore the monsters/trauma, we might not ever even be able to fit back in with the normal people again. We know the other world is there, and that the normal world is simply a facade. It is always there trying to pull us back in, sometimes subtly, sometimes with a shepherd’s crook.

Dean was traumatised by the loss of his mother at the age of four, and after that John piled trauma upon trauma on him. ‘Hunting’ is the only life Dean knows, and the only place he believes he could ever fit. The normal world is a foreign place to him and his behaviour is too alien for normal people to understand. The world of monsters and hunters terrifies normal people, and they are quick to reject hunters and their ilk because they are too scary, just like the behaviour of traumatised people is often scary, uncomfortable, and difficult for people who do not understand. Even other hunters struggle to get Dean because each hunter’s experience is individual.

Sam was too young to be effected directly by Mary’s death in the way Dean was, but it drew him into the hunters’ world all the same. However, he was shielded from the brunt of the trauma in a way Dean simply was not: Dean was exposed to all the horror, whereas Sam was kept in the dark. John’s neglect had a serious negative impact on him, but it was mostly second hand. Dean was the buffer between Sam and the horrors of the hunters’ life, which is one reason why he was able to rebel and leave for university: he believed there was a way out, and he took it.

With this in mind, a discussion of the scene in the hotel room before Dean and Sam go to the loft is in order. The trauma of Jess’s death drew him back into hunting, but he still believes there will be an end to it one day and that he will be able to return to his old life. He believes that killing Azazel will be the end of his hunting life, i.e. that the worst of his grief will be over. Dean, however, believes it will never be over because he knows nothing else than hunting and has never been allowed to be anything else.

‘Dude, what’s your problem?’ - I forget that Dean’s mask is so well fitted that other people struggle to see past it, or even that it’s a mask at all. I honestly cannot be angry at Sam for not seeing this because he just does not understand why Dean is so upset, no matter how clear it is to me.

On the other hand, I do not understand how Sam can think it would be okay to abandon Dean. Dean is not Sam’s responsibility, true, but human relationships are not founded on only doing things because they are responsibilities. We do things because we want to help the people we care about, not because it is our duty to do so. Although perhaps this is more evidence to prove that Sam does not really care about Dean unless he is losing him.

I think this scene also shows that – in spite of fandom consensus – Sam is really not very good at all with reading other people’s emotions motivations or emotions. Given Dean’s emotional state when Sam announced his intent to leave him, the only reason Dean could have asked the question ‘Why do you think I cam to get you at Stanford, huh?’ is because he wanted to underline the fact he went to get Sam because he wanted Sam’s help, and he wanted to be with Sam again (Winc*sties, leave it!) and get his family back together. That is blindingly obvious to me, but I have had to learn to read people’s motivations and to actively interpret and understand them. Sam, apparently, is clueless here, whereas Dean is much more in tune with his thoughts and feelings. I have touched on this before, so constant readers should know this.

That said, the reason for Sam joining Dean was not to find John, or even to help Dean. It was to get his revenge on Jess’s killer. He did choose to join Dean, but only due to a lack of better options. Nobody else he knew could help him. However, one of the reasons Sam’s relationship with Dean is so strained is that he associates Dean very strongly with John. In fact, rather than seeing Dean as an individual with his own thoughts, feelings, and ideas, he regards him as simply an extension of John’s will. Sam finally managed to escape John, but is now forced to ally himself with Dean, whom he resents through no fault of Dean’s own.

Dean’s presence reminds him of John and the disastrous experience of growing up with John. I have said before that Dean bore the brunt of John’s abuse and Sam seems blissfully unaware of the majority of what his elder brother suffered, yet Sam clearly has his own issues that make it hard for him to be around his family. He wants to separate himself from John in order to heal and move on: the corollary of that is he wants to cut Dean out of his life because of his association with John. From Sam’s perspective, this is understandable, whether he knows this is what he is doing or not.

Dean knows much better than Sam that their life as a family was far from perfect, but he has nothing else. John made family the core of Dean’s identity, and he is utterly lost and hollow without it. Sam, however, sees Dean’s invitation as a trap. It would cut him off from the life he wants to live and doom him to a life like Dean’s. This is perfectly understandable, but Sam comes off as callous and patronising. He says things he thinks Dean wants to hear in order to take the edge off his words, but the actual substance of what he says sounds like ‘I have my own life to lead, sorry.’

The result, though, is that he comes off as callous and patronising. He says things he thinks Dean wants to hear in order to take the edge off his words, but the actual substance of what he says sounds like ‘I have my own life to lead, sorry.’

So what is Dean supposed to do? He has no life to ever go back to, and is instead doomed to be John’s tool for the rest of John’s life. Screw him, though, am I right? Let’s just abandon the traumatised man to deal with his trauma in an environment which makes it impossible to recover from trauma.

Paula R. Stiles’s thoughts run parallel to mine here, and I quote: ‘Dean gets upset. He wants his family together again and since he has no life outside of hunting, can’t conceive of it all ending. Sam rather coldly tells him that he has no intention of hunting forever and wants a “normal life”, of which Dean can’t really be a part (since, it’s implied, but not said, that Dean is not normal and deserves to be abandoned to his fate, much like the MOTWs he hunts). O the irony.

And this comes after Dean left John yet another unanswered voice mail. I know he claims to hate chick flick moments, but Dean needs a hug, a mug of hot chocolate, and a tartan blanket here.

And yes, it is time for that part of my analysis again: Jensen’s acting, Dear Reader! Dear Reader, Jensen’s acting!

Sam: ..things will never be the way they were before. Dean: Could be.

The subtlety, his facial expression, his nervous smiles-which-are-not-smiles, the tears in his eyes. Dean here knows he has no possible argument to make to convince Sam. He knows Sam does not really care about him nor want to spend any more time with him than necessary. 'Could be...'

Dean's rejection sensitive dysphoria is on full display in this scene, and this moment here shows the heart of his abandonment anxiety: he believes he is worthless and unlovable. And his final look after Sam says Dean will have to let him go his own way: at first it looked like anger, but after I took a second I saw somebody straining to keep as much of himself hidden and controlled as possible.

I feel exactly what he is feeling, and I cannot begin to understand how people miss this stuff. If only, if only he could have been cast as the lead in a show with better writers and a better budget.

Apropos John, when Dean told Meg that John would not walk into her trap, one’s mind is drawn back to when Dean was dying in 1x12 Faith and John did not come to see him or save him, nor even return his phone calls. One is also reminded of 1x09 Home when John did not answer Dean’s call about the ghost in the house Mary died in. The underlying implication here is perhaps that Dean believes John will not try to save him. Remember that when rewatching 1x12 Faith.

After the daevas yeet Meg out of the window (and there will be consequences for that), Dean and Sam return to their room to find Daddy Winchester lurking in the dark. How exactly he managed to find them is not explained: episode 2x07 The Usual Suspects informs us Dean and Sam have a practice whereby when separated they look for the first hotel in the directory and always take a certain room. Whether this is a code of conduct Dean and Sam have been following ever since in order to allow John to locate them if need be I do not know. At this point, I would not put it past John to have known exactly where Dean and Sam have been for a very long time, and to even have been in the vicinity many times, but has refused to let them see him, or even know he is near. Shady, shady behaviour.

As for the reunion scene itself, it clearly shows where we are supposed to focus our interest. Dean and John’s reunion is distant, shallow, unemotional, in spite of Dean willingly embracing John instead of drop-kicking him out the window as he deserves. They hug, but little dialogue of any variety passes between them, nor anything of substance. I see a beaten little boy hugging the dad who beats him hoping it will never happen again if he can just be better, but The show does nothing with this. It is glazed over.

Instead, it is Sam who gets the apology, the catharsis, and the heartfelt reunion. Given it is the first time Sam and John have properly spoken for years, it is also the first time in a significant length of time Dean and John have seen each other for the best part of a year, if not more at this point. Sam might believe Dean is John’s favourite, but how he can persist in this false belief is quite beyond me: Sam is clearly the favourite son. Dean loves (and hates) John, but I do not think John loves Dean: he is simply a useful tool to be taken for granted.

This reminds me of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Sam is the son who left and squandered all his money on wine and women, only to be welcomed back by his father who orders for celebrations to be held. The faithful son, however, who had laboured in his father’s fields all day, every day for years without such parties is understandably aggrieved by this, but his complaint is dismissed by his father: All that is mine is yours, etc. The parable tells us the father has treated the faithful son well, but the story is from the father’s perspective. Who knows how he actually treated his faithful son? Forget moral messages. The faithful son had every right to be pissed off after all the years of work he had put in, only for his wayward brother to be given the red carpet treatment.

Sam is the prodigal son, and Dean the faithful son. I cannot wait for John’s comeuppance, but at the same time Dean’s reaction was completely in character. Most of the wounds John inflicted on Dean’s psyche are yet to be revealed, and will continue to exact their toll over the next 311 episodes of the show, but knowing what I know, I both sympathise with Dean’s relief to see John again, and want Dean to be free of John forever. That is the only way he can be free of the man John wanted him to be, and free to be the Dean he wants to be.

While John hugged Prodigal Sam, Dean stood in the background watching. The camera even does a focus pull so that Dean is in focus and Sam and John are blurred. Dean has something like a smile on his face, happy to see his brother and father together again, but almost wistful, sad.

Luckily, the huggy pukefest is swiftly broken as the daevas yeet John into the kitchenette and proceed to eviscerate him. A quick cut away to outside the building reveals Meg alive and well, controlling the daevas with her amulet, then the camera is back on John. I was disappointed I did not get to see John torn apart. Note they focus on him, not all three: Dean is knocked around a little but Sam is ignored.

In spite of his quick thinking in using the flare (where exactly he learnt that light would cause them to dissipate is never revealed. Gary Stu Sam to the rescue!), Sam does the silly television thing where he tells the audience what he is going to do before he does it. This breaks my suspension of disbelief because it gives the daevas a moment to react and stop Sam doing whatever it is he is going to do. I think exactly the same every time a character sneaks up behind a monster or bad person and says something to get his/her attention rather than just shooting/stabbing him/her in the back before s/he realises what hit him/her.

The episode ends with John leaving Dean and Sam at dean’s insistence – ‘to protect him’ because John is in danger as long as he is around his sons. He is also in danger by himself, and surely three of them together would be better able to hide and fight off enemies, but whatever. Eric Kripke logic, I suppose. Why on Earth John was there in the first place if he knew his presence puts his sons in danger is beyond my ken, but I am quite sure Kripke thought it would be dramatic and cool. The man has some good ideas, but his execution is poor.

While on the subject of Kripke, earlier I discussed his bad treatment of women, but he also treats men badly in his shows. Women are fridged in one way or another too often (although in fairness hatred from female fans does not help), but almost all violence is against men. This is also true of his current project The Boys. To be honest, I got sick and tired of the show about half way through series two, and only kept watching for Jensen and Soldier Boy. What soured me against the show was the excessively graphic violence against almost exclusively men, with at least two instances of on-screen sexualised violence against men ending in graphic, bloody, painful death.

The violence, blood, and guts itself did not bother me, so let me put it this way: women complain about women being nude on screen more than men, but we see much, much more of men’s blood and gory inside bits than women’s. Women complain that female nudity objectifies them, but by the same logic the ubiquitous nature of violence directed almost exclusively at men deadens people to violence against men. The show is supposed to be liberal and progressive, but it seems rather regressive in its squeamishness to depict violence against women – especially not if a man is the perpetrator – and its treatment of men as cannon fodder.

It is also regressive in its treatment of gay/bi men. The first 15 minutes of The Boys 3x01 introduce two of perhaps three gay/bi men who have been acknowledged as gay/bi on the show, only for them to engage in weird, drug-fuelled sex and for one of them to die a horrible, bloody, sex-related on-screen death. Well done, Kripke, very well done. That is a perfect example of Bury Your Gays. “Look, we have gay sex on our show, aren’t we liberal, progressive, and inclusive! Psyche, now they’re dead. Screw you, gays.” I was supposed to laugh, I presume. I sighed, rolled my eyes, and wished I were watching Dark Angel instead.

Wait, Dark Angel – in spite of its good qualities – has the occasional noxious undertone of violence-against-men-is-funny-when-women-do-it-because-girl-power-or-something. Such violence includes Max hitting Alec across the head because she was in a bad mood, slamming Alec’s fingers in a locker door for no particular reason, and a kick to the genitals because Alec used a milquetoast slur, the only appropriate response to which was physical violence. ...and possible permanent damage. And possible infertility. Possible severe bleeding. Serious stomach pains… but all of this is funny, remember, because haha men’s genitals. She laughed as Alec was led past, clearly in too much pain to walk under his own steam, then she laughed and got told how she was a ‘rocking, awesome chick’. I swear by Allah’s beard, sometimes I just...

Anyway, that essay is available right here.

Returning to The Boys,the show has gay/bi women and it touched briefly on bi erasure, but this feels like a cover for shitty treatment of gay/bi men. Kripke also regretted not being able to include the Homelander raping Soldier Boy plot from the source material, because – and I paraphrase – it would have been funny to see the two fuck.

While Kripke's a Fan of the Homelander/Soldier Boy Sex Scene in the Comics, It Won't Work Here: "I love that scene and it's hilarious, but for a dozen reasons, all of which will be revealed when you see the season, it ultimately just didn't track. We talked about it. It conflicted with a lot of the other things we were trying to build with Soldier Boy. So, unfortunately, that one had to go," Kripke explained. "I would love to see Soldier Boy and Homelander f***ing, but it can't happen in this show, unfortunately, for reasons everyone understands."

Source: (x)

You read that right: Kripke described Homelander raping Soldier Boy as ‘fucking’, and he thought it was hilarious. And this guy is going to try using Soldier Boy to preach to me about how masculinity is toxic. For some reasons I am reminded of a badly-translated Biblical metaphor about motes of dust and planks in eyes. Bismillah, spare me...

And I just swore in one of my analyses. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound: shit bugger fanny bum fart.

This is supposed to be high-quality, intelligent television, but it is just spectacle and shock covering up an above-average-but-not-fantastic story and plot. Excessive gore and swearing does not make a show good: it just means the show has excessive gore and swearing. While I am very happy for Jensen to finally be on something bigger than Supernatural, I think this is beneath him. Soldier Boy is my favourite homophobic douche in the whole wide world, but Jensen deserves better. Lord of the Rings better.

On that note, I come to the end of my analysis of 1x16 Shadow. It was never a favourite episode and it feels as though something is missing. It is unsatisfying to have a mytharc episode in between so many monster of the week episodes because the build up to it has been non-existent and it will be a while yet before it has any real relevance to the plot again. It is certainly no bad episode, but I just do not care much for it, in spite of the purple plaid Dean was wearing.

That about does it for this time. Next time will be 1x17 Hell House, so look out for that. I bet you won’t.

Thank you to @emotionalsupportbees for the metaphor of hunting as trauma =)

#edvard's supernatural rewatch #spn rewatch #spn meta #spn 1x16 #supernatural #1x16 shadow #dean #sam winchester #bi!dean #Aspie!Dean #john f*cking winchester

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Edvard's Supernatural Rewatch & Review: 1x17 Hell House

This episode is the closest series 1 gets to a comedic episode, but it stops way short of ones such as 4x04 Monster Movie or 5x08 Changing Channels. Far from being a bad episode, it is still long from being one of my favourites. Based on its score of 8.2/10 from 5,400 ratings on IMDb, it seems to be regarded as a good episode, but not brilliant. It raises some interesting questions about the nature of monsters and the supernatural in general in the show, but like 1x16 Shadow it does not quite grab my interest.

One of the problems with the traditional monster of the week (MOTW) format is the inconsistency in narrative flow and structure. In episode 1x16 Shadow, Dean and Sam finally had the long-awaited reunion with John, which almost ended in disaster for the boys (although I have little pity or sympathy for John). To keep John safe, Dean agreed they should remain separated to prevent demons exploiting the brothers to get to John.

This episode had no mention of Meg and only a passing mention of John, and so feels disconnected from the preceding and following episodes. For the most part, 1x17 Hell House could have happened almost anywhere in these first 22 episodes without changing the narrative. The result of this on my viewing experience is that none of the suspense or narrative momentum built up in 1x16 Shadow carries over to this episode, and is thereby lost. If something is to happen at the end of this narrative arc that builds on that momentum, it will fall flat unless something happens first to rebuild the suspense and drive.

Dean and Sam taking action to protect themselves against daevas (the shadow demons from 1x16 Shadow) would have helped prevent that problem because Sam cannot always make a Herculean leap of logic and deus ex them with a flare. Ed and Harry could have caught the brothers on camera and posted it onto the internet, causing the brothers to demand/themselves remove the footage to keep their location hidden (remember the Dean-is-wanted-by-the-police subplot? The Show clearly does not). They could have guessed Meg survived her re-enactment of the Defenestration of Prague based on the daevas still attacking John, and taken precautions to ward themselves. This could have all happened without taking any time away from the tulpa plot.

Having said that, the characters’ behaviour in this episode shows some development that could not have occurred before. Dean and Sam’s pranks on each other are puerile, and occasionally border on assault (super-gluing somebody’s hand to something means skin will have to be torn off) but show an easing of the tension building between them since the pilot. Sam did very little to irk me in this episode, and it made a change to see him not acting like Dean was an embarrassment and a burden.

That said, I did not care all that much about the pranks, but Sam’s anger at Dean was way over the top. It was not irritation, but suppressed rage at having a spoon in his mouth while he slept and then getting woken up by Blue Öyster Cult’s Fire of Unknown Origin (which Dean sang along to in-tune. Clearly he fakes his bad singing later in the series…)

Dean lets us know that he once put hair-removal cream in Sam’s shampoo which is indeed a douche move (What’s that, me criticising Dean? Yep, it happens on occasion, and it will happen again in this episode), but Dean’s pranks in this episode are tame. I have had the unpleasant experience of spending a whole school day with itching powder in my clothes. It felt like fibreglass and my neck and back were raw red afterwards, so I am not well disposed to itching powder, but a bullied child being bullied by bullies is not the same as a brother’s fiendish jape. Shop-bought itching powder is likely made from dried roses or similar harmless botanical matter: throwing your clothes into the wash and having a quick shower will solve that problem in a jiffy, annoying as it may be. Irritating yet harmless.

But do you remember the superglue I mentioned earlier? Itching powder was a douche move, but Sam getting Dean’s hand superglued to a bottle of beer is double-douche with a side of c*nt. Dean’s prank was highly unlikely to do any damage, but superglue is a whole different matter. That was unprovoked escalation. I am probably supposed to see this as humour, but whatever, Show. Get some better jokes.

It also left me wondering how and when? Did Sam do it when Dean went to the toilet? Was Dean in the toilets for an hour again?

What I did take away from it was that Dean was trying to have fun with Sam. He knew Sam would prank him back, and was likely inviting it. It was really quite sweet of him.

Onwards to the actual episode. The cold open is reminiscent of several others in the showas it involves stupid teenagers going into a place they should not be going into or doing something they should not be doing which involves ghosts or monsters. This is far from original or interesting, as teenagers being stupid is the basis of umpteen horror films, but what is interesting about it is the introduction of the unreliable and shifting nature of urban legends (and legends in general). ‘My cousin heard it from X’ is just vague enough that it could possibly be true and not completely made up, but at the same time it is difficult to believe. This way, the story teeters on the borders of being realistic, as the best tall tales do.

The mutable nature of such stories is also demonstrated soon after the title card as Dean and Sam canvas the youths to find out what happened. The details of what they saw in Mordechai’s basement are different, with descriptions of the hanged girl ranging from red-haired to brunette, to stone cold dead to still twitching etc. This is precisely how stories like this change with retelling: exact details vary, but general details remain largely the same, until eventually they too change.

An example which comes to mind is that of Ganymede from Greek mythology. The generalities remain the same: he was a beautiful (blond) Illian/Trojan youth in what is now western Turkey. Zeus saw him one day, and was so enamoured of his youthful beauty that he sent an eagle to sweep him up to Mount Olympus to become his immortal cupbearer and eventually his lover. At least, that is the version I prefer, for other versions exist where it is Zeus himself who transforms into an eagle, swoops down on Ganymede, then proceeds to rape him before kidnapping him to Mount Olympus to become the gods’ servant and Zeus’s catamite.

The general details there remain the same: the most beautiful of mortals captivates the Father of the Gods, and is taken to Mount Olympus to become cupbearer for Zeus. The details themselves change, but the general narrative remains the same. The version involving no rape and a loving relationship is my version of choice, and one detail which I find especially beautiful is that Hera could not stand her husband’s male lover being prettier than her and grew jealous and resentful. As a result, Zeus set Ganymede in the sky as the constellation of Aquarius, the Cupbearer, where his beauty would always be unmarred until the end of time.

‘Gay love pierces through the veil of death’ eat your heart out.

Speaking of beautiful mortals, Dean once again shows his scepticism by being dismissive of Sam’s ‘case’. The kids reported seeing a hanged body, but there were no traces of any body in the basement. Sam also found the case on a website of dubious repute. Dean might believe a lot of things, but he is not gullible.

He agrees to check the case out, however, after Sam’s strange bit of whining about needing a case after they ‘let dad take off’. Sam, my buddy, my man, my guy: I was there last episode, I saw what happened. John had to leave in order to keep you and Dean safe. You – which judging by your whiny tone means ‘Dean’ in this instance – did not let Dad take off. John told you he was leaving, and you two agreed to it. I will let you off for this one, though, because this is the only episode of the show Trey Calloway wrote and he probably was not paying all that much attention.

This being Trey Calloway’s only writing credit on the show could also be the explanation for why the Dean-is-a-wanted-murderer plot is forgotten. Dean actually goes into the police station to find out whether there are any missing people who fit the description of the hanged girl when he knows he is in serious trouble with the law (because, if you remember, the rich girl in 1x06 Skin let him take the fall, and Sam laughed at him for it). The only way I can think of to explain this within the story is that the police in the Superverse (see, told you I would be calling it that) do not communicate much at all with police in other states, and do not co-ordinate their efforts to catch wanted killers.

I must stop here a second and draw the reader’s attention to Dean’s made-up word ‘persqueeter’: ‘Yeah, most of those websites wouldn’t know a ghost if it bit ‘em in the persqueeter.’ This is a word Trey Calloway made up, and dictionaries refer to this episode of the show when defining it. So, naturally, I am going to steal it and make it part of my lexicon. Try stopping me.

There were no missing persons who matched the girl’s description, and Dean concludes that the story was made up, and that something else is happening. He concludes Ed and Harry concocted it, which is a reasonable conclusion to draw given the evidence, but it does go beyond the evidence.

Ed and Harry’s introduction – which I realise I have skipped over – was amusing, and set up their characters quite well. They are utterly arrogant, smug, and dangerously ignorant. The supernatural is a game to them, but it is a game they do not understand the rules of. Paula R. Stiles was quite right to state that this case could well have been Ed and Harry’s last if Dean and Sam had not chanced upon them. Not only are they utterly clueless, but they were also stoned on the job and unaware that the power lines (to an abandoned house? O.K., show) were giving off enough electromagnetism to interfere with the EMF readers.

Given the fact that they reference Buffy later in the episode (“WWBD? What would Buffy do?” “I don’t know, she’s so much stronger than I am.”) I think it is safe to say the writers and producers were very much aware of Warren, Jonathan and Tucker’s brother in Buffy.These three characters embody the worst stereotypes of socially inept, geeky young men who end up involved with forces way beyond their skills with lethal consequences.

What I find interesting is that in spite of their differences, Dean has more than a little bit in common with men like Ed and Harry. Dean also loves cult films, old cartoons and ‘nerdy’ television shows, but he has had to force that side of him into dormancy because he is not in an environment which tolerates those aspects of himself. Episodes such as 13x17 Scoobynatural or14x04 Mint Condition show this part of Dean very clearly. 14x04 in particular displays how easily Dean gets on with a man who is clearly both a huge nerd and some kind of neurodivergent (autistic, perhaps). The Dean we see at first is not ‘fake’, but it is not the whole of him: he does like classic rock and cars, but he also likes cartoons, bad horror films, and nerdy memorabilia, though he does sneer at Ed and Harry for displaying this so openly and letting themselves be defined by it. Case in point: ‘oh look, action figures in their original packaging’.

I said earlier that I would criticise Dean again in this episode, and here it is: as annoying and arrogant as Ed and Harry are, they are very probably some kind of neurodivergent. This is my reading of the show, and the fact that they are on the margins of society and young men who clearly cannot mask to fit in with ‘normal’ society is evidence enough for me to suspect autism or ADHD. Mocking them for being irritating is one thing, but mocking autistic men for having ‘action figures in the original packaging’?

I have about sixty Funko Pops altogether (about ten of which are different versions of Dean), a few dozen Pokémon (from all generations, thank you very much), a handful of Digimon, a few monsters from Monster Hunter, and 009 gauge models of Skarloey and Rheneas from Thomas the Tank Engine. I am very aware that is risible to some people. I understand that to them it gives the impression of a stunted adult, a person who never grew up, or somebody with a Peter Pan complex who deserves to be made fun of.

I work an adult job, do all my own invoicing, pay my taxes, file my complicated tax returns, pay national insurance and my rent. I do all my own cooking, shopping, and cleaning. I speak and understand more languages than the majority of native English speakers, and I even teach Finnish in Swedish. I provide a vital service for people hoping to integrate into Finnish society, so if I want to have my electric trains and various models of my dearest beloved blorbo Dean, I bloody well will.

Anyway Dean, my heart, my love, my life: do shut up.

To be fair to him, he was probably mocking them on purpose because they were annoying, but jokes like that come across as neurotypical writers mocking neurodivergent people for being neurodivergent.

The first episode of Supernatural I watched was 3x13 Ghostfacers, the second episode with Ed and Harry in it. It is a shame they were not in the show more than the handful of episodes they got.

Before moving on from the Hell Hounds for a moment, Jensen Ackles and Travis Wester (Harry) appeared together almost a decade before this episode on the short-lived comedy series Mr Rhodes (1996-97), appearing in almost all the same episodes.

Returning to the hell house in question, it is time to discuss the tulpa a little. The word and the symbol may well be from Tibet, but we are not told where the tulpa itself comes from. This is irrelevant to story, however, as the point is that the tulpa comes from who ever believes in it. The monks Sam talks about focused on the symbol and brought a golem to life, but it is never stated that the symbol itself is necessary for summoning a tulpa. It could function simply as an amplifier.

For those who might have forgotten, the tulpa is a monster brought to life by people believing in it. The reason the teenagers’ accounts did not match each other’s, and the reason Mordechai’s mode of operation and even his appearance changed throughout the show is because each person saw what they believed they would see.

This leaves the viewer with the question: how much of the stuff Dean and Sam have encountered and will encounter exists because of stories and legends people have told? We have already seen something similar with the Scandiwegian god in 1x11 Scarecrow, an idea taken straight from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods where gods only exist because people believe in them. There are even different versions of the same god in that world, because people in different places and times believe in slightly different versions of their gods. Is the human imagination in the Superverse enough to bring all of these creatures into existence given enough time, people, and enough stories?

It is an interesting thought, but the show’s answer ultimately seems to be that most of the monsters exist apart from human imagination. In spite of its Christian/Abrahamic veneer, the mythology of the show – angels, demons, the dualism of God and the Darkness – is very Zoroastrian with touches of cosmic horror. The fact remains that monsters in this world stem mostly from God, Eve, and the Devil.

While on the subject of symbols, one of the first things I noticed was that the symbols of the walls and floor were all mismatched. Some were squarish whilst others looked like cursive letters, such as the tulpa symbols. That alone suggested to me that something fishy was going on, so I was a little surprised neither Dean nor Sam – Dean especially – picked up on that instantly. Sure Sam noticed the sulphur symbol which first appeared in the 1960s, but the fact that there were fresh candles on the mantelpiece should have tipped them off to the fact that somebody had recently been there doing stuff they should not have been doing.

Apropos Sam recognising the sulphur sign from the 1960s, it amused me when Dean said ‘That’s why you never get laid’. Dean, my heart, my love, my life, you recognised the Evanescence logo in blood splatters at the beginning of the previous episode. Stones, glass houses… Although thinking of the previous episode, Sam wasted no time in trying to make Dean feel like an idiot, so have at him, Dean: mock Sam’s lack of sexual allure.

That is most of the important topics for this episode. Some small observations I had were that the girl who actually got hanged and killed in the basement died very fast, or at least she was unconscious exceedingly quick. It is possible to hang a person in such a way that the rope cuts off blood supply to the brain, inducing unconsciousness within ten to fifteen seconds and causing the body to die within about four minutes, but she was out in much less than ten seconds. I am glad I did not have to watch somebody slowly choking to death because Heaven knows that is a trauma I do not need to revisit while watching my stories, but it stretched my suspension of disbelief.

Something else I found strange was Sam setting Dean’s car radio to mariachi music. When exactly did he do that? Did Dean leave the car unlocked when he went into the police station? Unlikely. So when did Sam have the opportunity to mess with the dials? The logistics do not make sense to me.

One last thing before I finish is a comment on General American English pronunciation. A development in both American and Canadian English is the pronunciation of t between vowels as d. Huge areas of North America have also shifted original o to æ or a (Standard British ’God’ vs General American ’Gaad’), and the vowel sound in words like ’caught’ has changed from o: like in ’horse’ to a: like in standard British English ’car’. This is possibly due to the influence of Irish English in America, but that is besides the point.

Americans have that one joke where they imitate Dick van Dyke’s attempt at a dead accent – ‘bo’ul o wo’a’ or ‘Bri’ish’ – and think they are hilarious, but they seem completely unaware that a) the glottal stop is all over their accents and b) ‘badul a waadurr’ and ’Briddish’ are just as innovative and divergent from the written norm as dead Cockney accents or the Multicultural London English they seem to think represents how 65 million people speak.

Anyway, the point of that was so that you can understand why I never understood what Dean meant when he said ’rod iron bullets’. What is rod iron, and how is it different than normal iron? Does it have to come from a rod, and why? I am confused.

Then I had a brainwave and realised he was saying ’wrought iron’. The ou has become an a: sound which my brain interpreted as o, and the t at the end is between two vowels, that being the ou and the i, i.e. ’wraad iron’. I am still not entirely sure why the bullets need to be made of wrought iron rather than any other kind of iron is beyond me, but at least it makes a little bit more sense now.

Interestingly, he pronounces his au sounds differently. His wrought has an a: in it where Standard British English would have an o: (like the sound in ’door’, ’law’, and ’more’), but his pronunciation of haunt is almost exactly the same as it would be in British English (and Australian and New Zealand English) with the same o: sound. I wonder whether the presence of n influences the pronunciation of the preceding vowel, but that really is more linguistics than I expect the majority of people reading this can stomach.

After some very sharp thinking from Dean, the hell house burns down with the tulpa inside: if there is no house, Dean reasoned, there can be no house to haunt. The house is essentially the tulpa, not Mordechai. It is the Overlook Hotel in this story, and as in The Shining (book, not film), the house burns down and that is the end. Well done, Dean.

A relatively short review this time, padded out somewhat with a tiny bit of Greek mythology and linguistics because I simply did not have much to say. This was a light episode with not much going on and not much to talk about. Not bad, but not great either. The next episode, however, will be quite a bit different, as we get given our first real glimpse at exactly what Dean and Sam – Dean especially – had to endure with John as their father, and the show presents one hell of a metaphor for the soul-sucking, child-killing figure of John Winchester. I am sure I will have much more to say on that.

#edvard's supernatural rewatch #spn rewatch #supernatural #spn meta #spn #spn 1x17 #1x17 hell house #ghostfacers #dean winchester #sam winchester

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x12 Nightshifter

Episode 2x12 Nightshifter is Ben Edlund’s second screenplay for Supernatural, and similarly to 2x05 Simon Said it is not a stand-out episode, at least in my opinion. It is one of the fan-favourites, but it generally leaves me cool: 1x06 Skin had a better shapeshifter, and it has only been a handful of episodes since Dean and Sam’s last run-in with the police in 2x07 The Usual Suspects. It is one I considered skipping, but after deciding not to I saw that there are some aspects of it which I do enjoy.

The main thing which stood out about this episode was the rapport Dean and Ron had. Ron is presented as a loon and conspiracy theorist whom people dismiss. The police called him a ‘post-traumatic case’ and Sam talked to him like he is an idiot. He is a bit of an idiot, but not because of his conviction that ‘mandroids’ exist or his wall covered in maps and pictures. We are probably supposed to think he is off his rocker, but given the context of the show taking place in a world where the supernatural (pun intended) is very much alive and hunters such as Dean, Sam, and John do exactly what Ron did in order to find and kill monsters, Ron ends up looking like he is on the right track but is lacking one of two vital bits of information. If someone were to see John’s maps in 1x01 Pilot or 1x21 Salvation without knowing that monsters exist, s/he would think him a madman. Dean himself points this out to Sam after meeting Ron.

Dean and Sam visit Ron while investigating a string of apparent thefts and suicides. Ron was a security guard at a jewellery shop which was robbed by one of his colleagues named Juan. Ron copied the security tapes before the police took the originals as evidence, and based on his seeing Juan’s eyes flash in the videos, he eventually concluded Juan was not Juan but a mandroid. Whilst sitting across from Ron in their FBI get-up, Dean and Sam’s reactions to him are quite different. For all that he claims to think there is something wrong with him, and all the times later in the show he will call himself a freak and such, Sam gives the impression of being a completely normal, average, typical guy listening to somebody whom he regards as several different kinds of deficient. His entire bearing is unsympathetic and cold.

Dean on the other hand seems almost perfectly at ease with Ron, and is capable of meeting him on his own wavelength. This is far from the only time Dean will show a kinship with people others deem ‘crazy’, 1x10 Asylum being a particularly striking example. Sam seems like a neurotypical person impatiently listening to an autistic guy talk about his hyperfixation, whereas Dean is the other autistic guy who gets it.

This is why what you show is more important than what you tell. You can tell me Sam is a ‘freak’ as much as you want, but if I see something which says the opposite, I am going to trust what I see.

Anyway, Sam decided unilaterally to essentially tell Ron he was crazy and that he was just trying to avoid accepting that his friend robbed a band and killed somebody. Dean looked completely taken aback by this, apparently convinced Sam would induct Ron into the hunters’ life. Why Sam thought it unnecessary to consult Dean in the hallway for a minute or two before telling Ron anything is beyond me, but it ended up being a very bad idea.

Sam’s idea ended up getting people killed, but this time the blame cannot be placed at his feet. Unlike all the times he refused to pull the bloody trigger, he could not have known that Ron would lock himself in the bank with a rifle and a load of hostages. I wrote earlier that Ron is a bit of an idiot, and the reason for that is his complete obliviousness regarding the consequences of his choices. He took a bank hostage with a rifle, failed to ensure that nobody contacted the outside world, and was surprised to learn that the police had shown up with SWAT teams. On top of that, he was told to stay out of the light, but what did he do? Stood in the light long enough for a sniper to ventilate him. He also sounded utterly clueless when speaking to the police on the phone. That is all his responsibility, and given his incompetence, his death was no great surprise.

That being said, it could perhaps have been avoided had Ron been furnished with a bit of knowledge about the truth behind the ‘mandroids’ before things escalated like they did. Ron’s actions were those of a desperate man driven into a corner. Had Sam done what Dean clearly wanted to do, they could perhaps have worked with Ron, or told them the truth about why they were there and what they were hunting.

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The hunting life is an apt metaphor for living with any kind of serious trauma, mental illness, or neurodiversity. Hunters are inducted into the life either through a horrific event (personal trauma) or through being raised in the life by parents and carers (generational trauma), and those not inducted into the life cannot see what is hiding at the periphery. They also cannot see the hunters fighting ‘demons’ and ‘monsters’ every day of their lives, and would say they are crazy if the hunters told them what they were dealing with.

Ron had been introduced to the hunting life through witnessing a shifter in the shape of his friend rob his bank, beat him up, then apparently die by suicide afterwards. Dean wanted to extend Ron a hand of understanding and support, but Sam decided it best to keep Ron in the dark in order to keep him safe. If Ron knew about monsters etc, he would just go after them, or so Sam concluded. This might seem like wisdom were it not for the fact that monsters find people regardless of whether they know about them or not. How many people in this show have been victimised by the supernatural out of the blue through no fault of their own?

Sam’s decision is akin to telling somebody who been through a traumatic event that their flashbacks and triggers are not actual problems at all, that it is all in their head and they should ignore it, because actually understanding, acknowledging, and facing the monsters in your mind might be dangerous. Never mind the fact that forewarned is forearmed and that the monsters are there anyway. Sam really should have learnt by now that decisions he makes end up getting people hurt and killed, but Dean could and should have gainsaid him right then and there.

This seems to be a trait of Dean’s which is likely related to his tendency to abase himself and apologise for Sam’s mistakes in order to keep Sam with him. Dean does not likeactualarguments with Sam and generally avoids them if he can. He snarks and takes occasional potshots, but he generally tries to avoid head-on conflict with Sam. I wonder whether this is a trait of Jensen’s which the writers started writing into Dean’s character, since Jensen is also conflict-averse.

Returning to Ron, his hijacking of the bank is like a traumatised, mistreated person finally snapping and doing something irrevocably moronic out of anger, hopelessness, and even fear. “You don’t believe me,” he says. “Nobody believes me. How could they?” When looked at like this, Ron’s reaction to learning he is not crazy is completely understandable: he had spent weeks being told he was insane and had ended up thinking that about himself. He believed he was the problem, even while simultaneously being able to see the evidence that led to his conclusions right in front of him. Relief was his response when he finally learnt the truth. He had finally been given proof that he was not crazy, that his grasp on reality was not faulty, and that everybody else had been wrong to dismiss him. After having spent years being sneered at, mocked, and called delusional by a certain section of the Supernatural fandom, every single time Jensen and Misha say something at conventions which as good as confirms I and millions of others were right to see the subtext, I feel relieved.

Note once again that it is Dean who manages to get through to Ron in the bank. Dean is very compliant with Ron’s demands, but does not humbly submit. Rather he takes advantage of the situation to build what little rapport with him he can, then win him over by saying ‘I believe you. You’re not crazy. There really is something inside this bank.’

While Dean is busy saving the day, the purported main protagonist of this show Sam is useless. This is of course not a problem in itself, but given it is so often Dean doing the dirty work and getting beaten up while Sam gets to swoop in at the end and save the day with minimal effort, it emphasises Sam’s weakness. It is funny, then, that Sam’s response to Ron is to try shouting at him when Ron has the rifle pointed at him. Was this in the script or was it Jared’s acting choice? Either way, it emphasised Sam’s powerless in that situation. He did exactly the same in 8x06 Southern Comfort when civilwar!Dean pointed his pistol at Sam. Maybe it was a fear response.

And yes, I did notice Dean’s smug told you so look at Sam when Ron said ‘You SHUT UP! I ain’t talkin to you, I don’t like you!’ That line filled me with a warm, giddy, tingling sensation. It was almost physical, like when Sam got flung across the room in 1x09 Home. After Sam’s behaviour for the last few episodes and Kripke’s refusal to allow him face the consequences of his douchebaggery (including in this very episode), that was the least of what Sam deserved. I also noticed Sam give Dean a weird look when the guy frisking Dean found a silver blade tucked into his boot, as if it is a bad idea to be armed when investigating the bank they know a shapeshifter is targeting. What even is Sam? Why do he? And how?

Returning to Ron, It is hard for me to say Ron did not deserve understanding or sympathy after holding a bank up with a rifle because he did not intend to kill anybody and he had been driven into that state of desperation by people’s dismissal of him, including Sam. Maybe my thirty one years of experience as a neurodivergent homosexual have made it too easy for me to associate with the outsiders and rejects because somebody has to. I suppose he is a bit of a warning to people both with and without similar experiences.

Anyway, he died about halfway through the episode. The entire situation of the bank being locked down and surrounded by police and snipers was his responsibility, and there really was no way he was going free afterwards unless it was with Dean and Sam. I still do not want to say he got what he deserved, because he was just a misguided fool with no understanding of what he was getting himself into. Still, he died a stupid death which could have been avoided had he been more conscientious about staying out of the light. He seemed to die quickly, and it was touching to see Dean insist on commiserating with and paying what respects he could to Ron’s dead body before taking his dropped rifle.

Dean was right to say Ron did a good job tracking the shapeshifter. If he had been able to enter the hunting life, he might have been a good working partner for Ash in tracking monsters and coördinating hunts. I wonder also whether Dean’s seeming affinity for Ron is based in seeing a kinship of a sort: both are ‘weirdos’ on the fringes of society fighting things nobody else even knows about or wants to acknowledge. Dean certainly seemed affected by Ron’s death, but then again Dean blames himself for every single person he is unable to save.

After just over 2,000 words and almost five pages of discussing Ron and Dean, it is time for something I really did not like in this episode: the police and the FBI. By Loki’s fuzzy navel, I do not care about law enforcement in a show like Supernatural. I like The X-Files and Hannibal, and the few occasions the police were involved in Buffy and Angel were effective, in part because it was so sparing. But if the premise of a show is a conflict on the margins of society between monsters and humans, there is very little suspense or interest in being wanted by the FBI. The show is not going to end with the brothers being locked in prison to live out their days, or being sentenced to execution in Texas, so why should I care? An ending like that would be almost as risible and insulting as a vampire wearing a clown mask impaling Dean on a conveniently placed iron spike in a barn in the final episode of the show. Can you even imagine anything that stupid happening? The only thing which would make it even stupider would be if one of the vampires from 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood came back and the audience was expected to remember who she is.

Henriksen is presented as a serious threat and challenge to Dean and Sam, as well as a ruthless commander of his forces and a total douche to the local policemen. The fact he knows a lot about Dean and Sam’s past as well as John’s is supposed unsettle the viewer, as it does Dean. However, even one year after this episode was aired, the storyline was completely redundant. Henriksen appears in perhaps one or two episodes after this, and then 3x12 Jus in Bello happens. Goodbye, Henriksen.

The effect of this is to further frustrate me: this banal intrusion in my supernatural show demands my attention and insists on itself, but ultimately leads absolutely nowhere. The heavy-handed music cue and Dean’s repeated statement ‘We are so screwed’ after he and Sam escape in SWAT uniforms is also supposed to build suspense, which would be fine if this were The X-Files. The episode set up a cat-and-mouse conflict between Dean and Henriksen which got abandoned, probably because Kripke is a big fan of introducing plots and then dropping them.

youtube

It was also a bad idea for Henriksen to tell Dean over the phone that he has one hour to hand himself over, and then to tell his men they are going into the bank in five minutes. That is a good way to get a lot of people killed.

As for the shifter, its counterpart in 1x06 Skin was a Dean mirror, made obvious by the fact it spent a large section of the episode masquerading as Dean. The shifter in that episode was used to explore middle-class, white-skinned American suburbia’s fears and anxieties surrounding poor, working-class men and heterosexuals’ (especially women’s) fears of bisexual men. The shifter in this episode does not transform into Dean or anybody Dean-adjacent, but does spend a lot of the time as women and minority men. The link between this shifter and Dean is much more tenuous than in 1x06 Skin, and to be honest far less interesting. No Hannibal-references here, unfortunately.

Paula R. Stiles’s suggestion is that maybe it reflects or exaggerates prejudices Dean has or could have towards said groups, but I do not really think it is that deep for once. Dean was raised in a homosocial environment with little opportunity for social interaction with women and girls. He is shown throughout the show to be charming enough to make women swoon, but he does not really socialise with women much. Even when he was in the god-awful, anhedonic forced performance of a relationship with Lisa in series six, he did not really seem to have anything particularly real or deep with her. There was also his neighbour who had been buying him drinks for a year, so… Dean generally treats women the same as men, but he seems more emotionally distant from women. Taken to an extreme, this could become misogyny, but what relevance does that have to bank robberies and jewellery heists? I have no idea.

Perhaps it could be interpreted as a metaphor for middle-class white-skinned Americans’ possible discomfort and apprehension of minority men who rob their banks and jewellery shops, then kill their women, but I do not care nearly enough about this episode to bother going into more depth on that subject. It ain’t that deep.

While talking to the policeman, Henriksen essentially called Dean a monster and a bigger threat to the hostages than anything else in the bank. I am not of the same opinion, but Dean does show some behaviour in this episode which is cause for concern. Let me take the scenic route before telling you what that is.

Soon after Ron takes everybody hostage, he gets most of them to hole up in the bank’s vault whilst following Dean’s advice and keeping him at hand. One of the people in the vault is a young woman named Sherri whose fawning fan-girling of Dean – ‘he is so brave – sounds exactly like me in these analyses.

The events of the episode lead Dean to eventually find Sherri’s dead body on the floor in the office (wearing only a nightie, or whatever that item of women’s clothing is called) with her throat cut. He and Sam take what they assume to be shifter!Sherri out of the vault and into the office, where she sees her dead body, screams, and faints. Dean wasted no time in preparing to stab her with the silver letter opener, and would have done so had Sam not stayed Dean’s hand and worked out that the dead body was actually the shifter pretending.

The concerning behaviour here was the ease with which Dean was about to murder a person. He justifiably thought her a shapeshifter and most people would have come to the same conclusion Dean did. Some people say Sam is the brains of the operation, but I disagree. Dean is just sometimes quicker to action and quicker to make decisions which is sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. Remember, Sam’s indecisiveness and hesitation keeps preventing him from firing the bloody gun. This time, however, Sam being slower to action worked to their advantage and prevented Dean killing an actual innocent. Dean is not a monster, but seeing how easy it would have been for him to stab something which looked like a normal human is a clear indication that he could one day become a monster.

Like I said ages ago, Dean really should have been the Big Bad at some point. Not Dean possessed by an angel, or Dean turned into a demon, just Dean. Regular, normal Dean as an antagonist.

Sam was mostly annoying when he did anything in this episode. He did prevent Dean becoming an actual murderer (The Loquacious Terminator from 1x22 Devil’s Trap does not count, he was possessed by a demon at the time and left little recourse. Beverley in 2x09 Croatoan is debatable since she was very likely still infected. Sherri would have been a murder, though). Other than saving Dean from becoming an actual murderer, Sam was unnecessarily shouty, aggressive, and pissy throughout.

As this analysis comes to a close, it is time to discuss another issue, that being Sam. Yes, Dear Reader, I am going to bitch about Sam. I have already discussed his unwise unilateral decision to keep Ron in the dark, but immediately after that Dean starts giving him a hard time, then rather quickly becomes agreeable and compliant to a point where I thought ‘That is not what Dean would say in that situation’. Sam claimed it better to be kept in the dark and be safe than know about monsters and get killed, but that is utter horse crap because the shifter kills people in this episode who presumably knew nothing about monsters, as has been happening since 1x01 Pilot. Dean knows this, but rather than saying so, agreed it probably for the best that Ron not be told the truth.

One good thing about this episode is that Sam’s choices are shown to have negative consequences and characters make sure he knows it. Dean gets irritated with Sam for making him go into the bank without weapons (though why did Dean comply? He took the colt with him in 1x22 Devil’s Trap), and Ron makes it very clearly that he does not like Sam.

If there had been more of this on the show, and if Sam had learnt from his bad behaviour, I might have been able to like him at some point, but such is alas not the case.

And the last thing before I finish: I do not it when the cold open shows us an exciting, tense, dramatic scene, and then goes back in time 24 hours or something. It makes the actual episode feel slow and less interesting.

Thus endeth this analysis. Next is another script by Sera Gamble which is seen as a spiritual successor to 1x12 Faith by many, but which falls far short of that in my estimation.

And did I forget to mention Dean’s we little outfit?

#edvard's supernatural guide #supernatural #spn meta #meta analysis #spn 2x12 #spn 2x12 nightshifter #s02e12 #2x12 nightshifter #dean winchester #victor henriksen #sam winchester #spn rewatch #Youtube

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destielshippingnews · 2 years

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Deancrits, Don’t @ Me: Toxic Masculinity, Insecurity, and Hostility towards Men

Anybody reading my tumblr blog might have noticed that underneath my profile picture it says ‘Deancrits don’t @ me’. For those who do not know, a ‘Deancrit’ is a person who is excessively critical of Dean. I am aware that some might be under the impression that I have this in my description because I cannot tolerate criticism of my waifu Dean. The truth is that ‘Dean-critical’ people in my limited experience thereof regard him as an embodiment of toxic masculinity, among other things. Their criticism of him and his behaviour largely appears to be based on the premise that every single thing Dean does wrong (which is everything he does) is because he is abusive and ‘toxic masculinity’ incarnate.

The ‘analyst’ I discuss below claimed that the writers of Supernatural gave Dean every misogynistic red-flag imaginable and Dean fans choose to ignore this because we want to copulate with Dean. My eyebrows disappeared into my fringe upon reading this, because there were red flags all over the writer’s ‘analyses’. The fact that Dean torturing Meg, an antagonist, villain, and demon who (as far as Dean knew at that point) had killed his father, is used as evidence of ‘Dean treating women badly’ is telling of a deep insecurity regarding men.

To be frank, the people making claims like this give the strong impression of never having had a single good relationship with a man in their entire lives, or indeed a decent, deep conversation with a man. Men who act like 'typical' men are therefore alien, strange, and even scary to them. They appear to assume that everything a ‘typical’ man does is motivated by narcissism and a desire to dominate, exploit, and abuse women and other men. This is likely a defence mechanism aimed at keeping oneself safe from 'the unknown'. It could even be a fear that a friendship or romantic relationship with a man who acts like a ‘typical’ man would lead to an erosion or surrender of their own illusion of independence, self-sufficiency, and strength. Perhaps the idea of being in a friendship or relationship of any kind with a man who is strong-willed, confident, charming, and not subordinate to his partner's demands is frightening to many people.

How else other than insecurity to explain this reaction to a young man who does not act in a way easily understood by a teenage sociology student? Who is apparently quite adept at getting sex with women (and men) when he wants it? Who does not apologise for enjoying sex? Who does not treat women like delicate flowers in need of his penis to solve all their problems?

On the one hand, this is an understandable reaction to something you do not understand, but on the other hand it is exactly the same kind of thinking which leads to extreme racist and xenophobic ideologies: they’re not like us, they don’t think like us, they want to harm us, they control the banks, they take our women...

As with such extreme ideologies, the starting point appears to be a hostility towards men – or perhaps men who act like ‘typical’ men, because they often like Nice Guy Sam who ‘Respects Women’. The analysis I have seen is based on the premise that everything a man does can be interpreted on the basis of his being a creepy, toxic, abusive man who wants to prove how manly he is. This is not helped by various cast and crew members who have called Dean a ‘throwback to an older masculinity’.

Quite apart from that, their analysis is also embarrassingly shallow. I must stifle a giggle at their claim Dean is stupid when their own analyses reveal a certain level of – forgive me my hypocrisy – surface-level, typically masculine, what-you-see-is-what-you-get thinking. The irony of this is that Dean’s shallow facade is so successful that it has them utterly fooled. They see exactly the version of Dean he (and Eric Kripke) wants them to see, and either miss or utterly dismiss the version hiding underneath.

This is simply stupid, and if it were anything else I would roll my eyes and go about my day. But a combination of the blatant hostility to men, the inability or unwillingness to see past the facade a man has put up, and the glee with which they assign malintent to his every action because he has a penis bothers me just a little too much for me to disengage.

Toxic masculinity – Nope, I’m still not interested in talking about it

Before anybody hops onto their keyboard to educate me, I am aware of what ‘toxic masculinity’ means. It refers to patterns of behaviour in men caused by a desire to be seen as a ‘real man’ in society. This pattern of behaviour includes proving one’s heterosexuality by having lots of sex with women, seeking physical dominance over other men, eschewing ‘feminine’ things such as eating vegetables, ‘bottling up’ one’s feelings, homophobia, etc etc etc. This behaviour does not, however, come from masculinity and is not a natural state of affairs for most men, but rather it is a result of men and women’s poisonous demands and expectations of men.

The reason a lot of men feel forced to live up to these toxic demands is that a man must fulfil certain criteria in order to have any worth in society. A man who does not have any worth in society is fair game for anybody to mock, deride, humiliate, and dispose of. Men have no inherent value: this must be earnt by living up to certain standards. Speaking as a neurodivergent homosexual man who was never good at sports, I am very aware of this.

The root of homophobia against men is not misogyny (though it can be dressed up to appear as such), but rather heterosexuals’ belief that a man who does not take on the man’s role and sacrifice his time, energy, and resources to provide for women and children is of no worth to anybody. A man who enjoys sex and intimacy with other men is seen as antithetical to this, especially if he is seen as The BottomTM. A man like this is a waste of resources and a burden on society, especially The BottomTM. This leads to ostracisation, isolation, and a complete loss of status and respect.

In order to avoid being seen as a waste, many if not most men try their hardest to live up to the poisonous demands placed on them. This has serious negative impacts on their mental and physical health. The biggest reason I find the terminology of ‘toxic masculinity’ objectionable is that it misplaces the responsibility for these negative impacts and results in victim-blaming.

I have written several times in my analyses of Supernatural about the men I have lost to suicide, e.g. 1x11 Scarecrow. I have also discussed some of my own experiences of suicidal ideations and I have discussed Dean’s at length, such as in 1x12 Faith and 1x18 Something Wicked.

I have skirted around the fact that I still live with recurrent suicidal ideations, but anybody paying attention might have worked that out. One of the biggest killers among young men like me is suicide. I have had the misfortune of seeing discussions on this topic coming to the conclusion that these men died the way they did because of toxic masculinity: they chose to bottle up their feelings and not deal with their problems because they wanted to be manly men.

Other than being extremely gauche, this does not speak at all to my experience, or to the experiences of the cis, trans, gay, bi, and straight men I know. People arguing we just ‘want to be manly men’ either completely disregard or are ignorant of the fact that when men speak about their issues, nobody listens. I have discussed this in my analyses several times: when men are struggling nobody offers help because the second a man has to ask for help he no longer deserves it. If he were worth his weight in salt, he would not need to burden others with problems and issues. That would be showing weakness, and nobody – men, women, and all variations thereupon – has any time for men who show weakness. They lose all respect for us.

‘Toxic masculinity’ was indeed a term invented by men for men, but people who are not men, have no experience of being men, but who still want to tell us what our problems are, appropriated it. Regardless of their intent, the use of the word and concept ‘toxic masculinity’ has the result of telling men that an inherent part of us is toxic, and that our problems are entirely our own fault.

This is victim-blaming. A few years ago, it would have incensed, enraged, and infuriated me to blame somebody’s suicide on himself, but nowadays I do not have the energy for it. I am too burnt out. Until we can have a discussion about men’s mental health and men’s suicide from men’s perspective with no overarching ideology, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in engaging anybody in a discussion of ‘toxic masculinity’. If people want to use the phrase I suggested above, i.e. ‘men and women’s poisonous expectations and demands of men’, then I will consider whether it is worth my energy.

I am too old for myopic insanity

I should not have done it. If I had ignored it, I could have spent today playing Animal Crossing and reading one of my favourite books. Perhaps I am just a masochist.

Just as I was closing up my computer last night, I stumbled across a Dean-critical tumblr blog. This was not the first one I had seen, the last one being at the beginning of the year when a charming blogger gave me the delightful moniker of ‘a turd living in Dean’s butt’ because I wrote about how his bad behaviour was usually caused by either being in an unsupportive environment, or a product of his abusive upbringing.

The same blogger also tried to argue Dean was a complete liar about everything because he said that he often apologises to Sam and does not mean it. This makes sense, of course, because we should always take every single thing a character in a television show says at face value. This is especially when he is trying to lighten the mood when god and his son are having their first face-to-face conversation in millennia.

In case you missed it, that last part was sarcasm.

Returning to last night, so enticed was I by the claim that Dean was ‘shaming Sam for arguing with John’ in 2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown that I simply had to read on. I will leave out the blogger’s name for her privacy, and because I do not fancy the idea of an army of tumblrinas trying to dog-pile me.

Needless to say, the blogger is a Samgirl. The blog in question is dedicated to every single thing the blogger believes Dean did wrong in each and every episode. Dean does do bad things (usually because the writers refused to let him grown and develop) such as the whole Gadriel story, killing Death, stopping Sam’s trials to close Heaven and Hell, etc, but the blog in question does not focus on these. Sure they are mentioned, but the motivation behind the catalogue of misdeeds is obvious hostility. Hostility towards a character is no skin off my back, and I have certainly not been kind to Sam. However, I hope I have made it clear that my dislike of Sam is not because I have wilfully interpreted every single thing he has done in the worst possible way out of ill-will towards him, but I do not need to retype my analyses.

Let us take a look. Here is the stinker which broke me:

2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown

#1: still hasn't told sam their father's last words, even though they were literally about sam.

time tag: 5:15

#2: was unreasonably rude to ellen, the woman who literally owns the bar he just broke into.

time tag: 11:20

#3: is angry that sam is hunting just because that's what "dad would have wanted". shames sam for fighting with their father in the past and implies that sam isn't being honest with himself, and isn't dealing properly with john's death. yet....sam is only acting this way because he doesn't know what his father's last words were. if only there was someone that did know and could tell him? huh wonder who that could be..

time tag: 30:30

#4: sam bares his soul to dean, crying and everything, and dean stands there saying nothing with this exact face 🤨.

Does this count as valid analysis on the internet? Far be it from me to take a mediocre television show seriously, but is it acceptable to just throw out a paragraph’s worth of surface-level analysis devoid of context and insight? Have I been going about things wrong for the last 20 months that I have been making notes and writing analyses on this show? The blog’s other posts also show a similar lack of context or depth regarding Dean. One second of thought regarding each of these points, for example, is all it takes to dismiss them.

1- John’s last words to Dean were that he might have to kill Sam. He cannot be expected to tell Sam that straight-away. Using this as ammunition suggests the blogger believes one character should exist to serve another entirely, and that he cannot have internal conflicts or problems of his own. I have made no bones about my dislike of Sam, but I have given him far more leniency than this for much worse behaviour.

2- Dean was indeed prickly, but he had endured the same incessant pestering from Sam for the last week or so. Ellen’s daughter had also just held a gun to his back and punched him in the face. Dean was not the most congenial person to Ellen when she tried to comfort him about John, but he was newly bereaved and nursing a headache. This was perfectly understandable, though admittedly a little rude. Why is this being held against him? Search me.

3- Sam’s ‘grief’ and his dedication to ‘doing what John wanted’ seemed disingenuous and performative. Dean was absolutely correct that Sam only ever argued with John when he was alive. Their last conversation was an argument. For Sam to then act as though John’s death is some kind of grand life-changing experience which has fundamentally changed him for the better and set him on his course is gauche. Sam is too florid, too much like a greetings card, and he refuses to leave Dean be with his own grief.

Their argument in the road did not come out of nowhere, nor did Dean start it. Sam initiates all the arguments in this episode, and the following one, and the one after that, and he does so because Dean is not grieving how Sam wants him to.

Of course this ground Dean’s gears. Sam mocked Dean for obeying John, and now Sam is doing just that.

To be fair to Sam, he might have felt a need to see his own grief reflected in Dean for some validation and support. However, neither brother can justifiably be expected to be a stalwart for the other directly after John’s death. I also have no idea what the unnamed blogger was thinking with the insistence that Sam’s problems were caused by not knowing what John’s last words were. That is completely made up.

4- Dean was struggling to hold himself together. He let Sam speak without interruption, but had his own grief to deal with. They are allowed to be messy here, especially Dean who has been tasked with killing Sam. That the blogger was unable to see this says more about the blogger than Dean’s behaviour.

All of those thoughts went through my mind in less time than it took to read the thing. Whatever you, Dear Reader, may think of this, I see it as weak reasoning, poor rationale and hostility towards… something.

Equal-opportunities violence and some not-quite-non-sequiturs

Instead of laughing and going to bed like a reasonable human, I clicked on a few more posts, and I did not have to look far at all to get a very good idea of what this ‘something’ was. I will spare my readers comments on every single ‘criticism’ ranging from ‘Dean is a paedophile’ (no, you did not misread that: no, no evidence was given) to ‘Dean has never wiped his arse’ (what is that based on? Have you seen how clean and well-kept Dean is? Or did the writer mean Dean always uses a bidet?) to ‘Dean was moping because his mum didn’t hold his hand 24/7’ because me losing a few thousand brain cells is punishment enough. Instead, straight to the point:

In my experience, Deancrits are not interacting with the character they actually see on the screen. They have an idea of a Terrible ManTM in their mind, and whenever Dean does anything, they analyse it based on what said Terrible Man’s motivations and reasons for doing something might be. In other words: ‘The Terrible Man I have in my head calls women bitches because he thinks women are less than men and are only good for lying down and spreading their legs. Dean called that woman a bitch, therefore he thinks women are less than men and are only good for lying down and spreading their legs. This means Dean is a Terrible Man’ And so on and so forth.

An ‘analysis’ of episode 1x16 Shadow, for example, chastised Dean for ‘lying to women’ to get sex, as if it is not totally reasonable for a demon hunter to lie about his profession when interacting with ‘normal’ people he finds attractive. People assume I am neurotypical when they meet me because I am good at masking: should I make sure to tell them I am not ‘normal’ before we engage in coitus? Would it be sexual assault if I do not? After all, many would not agree to doing the horizontal tango with me if they knew I am neurodivergent. Many men would be less interested in having sex with some women if they did not have make-up on. Is that sex under false pretences? You tell me.

An ‘analysis’ of episode 10x22 The Prisoner, Dean is referred to as ‘abusive’ and a ‘republican’. This is utterly hilarious since party politics never once comes up in the show, and Dean’s friendship with and compassion for gays such as Charlie, Corbett, and Max, his relationship with a black-passing mixed-race woman (Cassie), his brief partnership with Gordon, his sympathy for prisoners, and his canonical distaste for Confederates is at complete odds with the implied ‘racist middle-class homophobic white man’ the extremely left-wing analyst clearly wants us to think he is when using the word ‘republican’.

The ‘analyst’ also makes it clear she thinks Dean’s treatment of women in general is misogynistic, that he objectifies them, and has no respect for them. All of this is based on the fact that Dean acts like a masculine man and does not comport himself in a way easily understood by a mainstream audience. Such behaviour sets alarm bells off in the minds of people who learnt all about men in sociology last week and have never actually had a real-life conversation with a man on his own terms about what being a man is like.

Some will complete dismiss what I have to say about this because I have no experience of being a woman, but there is nothing I can do about that. But if you will, here is what I have to say: Dean is not ‘violently misogynistic’ and he does not hate women. He treats women the same as he treats men. If some women have a problem with the way he treats women but are fine with how he treats men, they might want to have a serious think about what treatment they think is acceptable for men, and why they think that.

Dean indeed calls female antagonists bitches and skanks. The same analyst also speculated that if the show were on HBO, Dean would call women ‘the c word’, by which she meant ‘cunt’ but was apparently too American to say it. The intended implication here is that Dean uses gendered insults against women, and therefore is a misogynist. But while he indeed does call female and female-bodied antagonists bitches, he also calls male and male-bodied antagonists dicks, yet for some reason nobody is hurling accusations of misandry or ‘internalised androphobia’ at him.

He enjoys sex with women, but makes no lasting bonds with them because a) there is no place in his demon hunting life for them and b) he does not know how to do ‘normal’ relationships. The disaster with Lisa and Ben showed that clearly. His intimate relationships with women in the show mostly revolve around casual sex: how this implies hatred or mistreatment of women is beyond me. If that is misogyny, then the gay and bisexual men whom I have had casual sex with me are misandrists.

Arguments like this reveal quite a bit of insecurity. Nobody a person copulates with is entitled to more than the sex they agreed upon. Dean does not owe anybody anything just because he engaged in coitus with them. What is the problem with him enjoying casual sex? This is perfectly understandable and does not need to be justified. But if he believes women are only there for men to have sex with or to be a wife for him, why does he not jump on Jo at the first opportunity? Why does he never once make a snide remark about Charlie being gay or ‘needing to meet the right man’? Why is he much more comfortable around Jody and Donna than he is around Sam when there is no sexual chemistry between them at all?

As for ‘violently’ misogynistic, Dean treats women the same as he treats men. He is occasionally violent to women, but not because they are women, and he is violent to men much more often. He beats, tortures, and kills more than one demon possessing a male body, for example, so his treatment of Meg in 1x22 Devil’s Trap is no different. Him punching her does not stand out at all in the context of all the men and women he (and Sam) have killed. Does he ever make a woman the victim of violence because she is a woman? Not that I remember. So where, prithee, is the violent misogyny?

But returning to the point, the analyst also dismisses counter arguments to her claims as ‘confirmation bias’. I was stunned by the lack of self-awareness and at that point went to sleep.

I did not come into this show believing Dean was ‘righteous’ and I have not ignored evidence to the contrary. One of the reasons I quit in 2008 was his gay jokes. He reminded me of the boys who bullied me. It was only with my rewatch of 2x01 In My Time of Dying and onwards in 2015 that I started seeing the man behind Dean’s mask. I might be a fanboy, but I am not a blind fanboy.

Conclusion

Returning to the issue which began this piece, the discussion of toxic masculinity is not by men, about men, or for men. The people leading these discussions are not discussing real men, real men’s experiences, or real men’s issues, but rather they are discussing an abstract idea of what they believe a man is:

- ‘The Terrible Man in my head talks about his problems because he believes he is more important than the women around him. Therefore, a real man talking about his problems is just trying to take time and attention away from women.’

- ‘The Terrible Man in my head believes crying is ‘gay’, so a man not crying means he thinks showing emotion is gay’.

This is bovine effluent. This is the attitude Deancrits appear to have towards Dean, and it is the same attitude I see in discussions of toxic masculinity: everything which can be interpreted negatively will be interpreted negatively.

This is why I (usually) steer well clear of Dean criticism, discussions of his ‘hypermasculinity’, and ‘toxic masculinity’. Some people think he is a monster because they only see what is on the surface and do not care to learn more or look beyond the facade. Their analysis is superficial, shallow, and as vapid as the misogynistic himbo they think Dean is. Their understanding of him is as 2D and false as Sam’s is, and this is why I do not engage with Deancrits or Dean negativity.

This is not to say I do not have my own criticisms of Dean. I do, but they are based on things he does or does not do. They are not, however, based in hostility, but this will have to wait until another time, because after wasting 4,200 words on a Deancrit, I need my usual four hours every now and again.

#edvard's supernatural guide #spn meta #dean winchester #deancrits be nuts #deancrits dni #spn rewatch #spn #supernatural #toxic masculinity

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destielshippingnews · 1 year

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x14 Born under a Bad Sign

Born under a Bad Sign is an average episode. It does nothing fantastic but nothing abysmal either, and the only response I can really summon is to shrug my shoulders and wait for the next episode. This far into series two, I want more of an overall plot but the show is not giving it. It did not bother me so much when I watched the episodes normally without taking a week to write an analysis of each one, but it has begun to plot. Characters spinning their wheels is fine by me, and one negative aspect of the trend towards series being shorter the lack of character moments and fun filler episodes. That said, it has been quite a while since any plot has happened, and it will not be until 2x21 All Hell Breaks Loose Part I that more plot happens. Luckily, Tricia Helfer will be visiting us for 2x16 Roadkill, Ben Edlund will be giving us 2x18 Hollywood Blues, and Jensen is once again going to blow my metaphorical socks off in 2x20 What is and What Should Never Be.

This episode is forgettable. An important character makes an appearance, but this has no bearing on the plot whatsoever and she does not turn up again until 5x10 Abandon All Hope. Sam killing people turns out to have nothing at all to do with Azazel’s taint (stop it!), so it was as good as pointless. The plot of the episode also raises a few questions which are (unless I have forgotten something) never answered. Why was Meg trying to push Dean to kill Sam if Sam is supposed to be Meg’s boss’s favourite? Paula R. Stiles mentioned something about Meg feeling betrayed by Azazel and no longer caring about his plans, but if that is the case, I do not know where this comes from. Did Azazel put Meg on the rack in Hell as punishment for failing?

The only good things to come out of this episode are Dean punching Sam at the end and Jo making her exit for the next two and a half years. Sorry Sam stans and Jo fans, but I am still only here for Dean. It will be another twenty four episodes until another character turns up whom I especially care about, so buckle up. At least Bela will keep us entertained in the interim.

The episode starts with Dean phoning Ellen beneath a road bridge. Sam has been missing for a while and nobody has heard from him. Eventually, Dean gets a call from Sam, and Dean rushes to meet him in a motel. The editing in this cold open is effective at creating anxiety, urgency, and distress with its quick jump cuts and pacing, and Jensen does a top-notch job of conveying Dean’s desperation and worry. He finds Sam in a motel room with somebody else’s blood on his clothes and no memory of the last few days.

One thing which the episode never makes explicit is whether or not Sam appears for anything other than the last scene and a bit. Meg is possessing him the entire time, but demons are shown in other episodes of the show to allow the host consciousness control now and again when convenient. Either Meg was in complete control of Sam’s body the whole time, or she took over at certain points when she wanted to. Paula R. Stiles is of the opinion Meg was calling the shots all episode, but I have not decided either way. Demons do not usually seem that good at mimicking their host, but weirder things have happened.

Sam fears he has killed somebody, but Dean is adamant that there must be another explanation. Even when the trail of clues leads them to the scene of a hunter’s murder and the brothers see video footage of Sam slitting a hunter’s throat, Dean tries his hardest to absolve Sam of blame and find another possible answer. A shapeshifter, for example, would be a reasonable explanation if it were not for the fact the Sam in the video footage did not have the eye flare shapeshifters have.

Readers might be wondering why I have not called Dean out for his hesitance to see what is right in front of him when I waste no time in calling Sam out for not pulling the bloody trigger. My answer is that when Dean thinks there is another explanation, there usually is, such as 2x13 Houses of the Holy when Sam rushed to conclude angels were behind everything while Dean’s skepticism is ultimately proven correct. Dean is Velma or Scully in this situation, and once again is proven right in the end: it was not Sam who killed the hunter, but Meg in Sam’s body.

Sam (or Meg pretending to be Sam, whichever you prefer: art is about interpretation after all) concludes without hesitation that he is responsible, and that what is happening to him is what John warned Dean about. If it is indeed Meg pretending to be Sam while he and Dean deal with the immediate shock of seeing the video footage, she does such a good job that she is almost indistinguishable from Sam. She portrays the depressive aspect of his manic depression irreproachably as s/he goes into depressive scum-of-the-Earth mode. He is convinced he is evil and there is no hope for him, entirely absorbed in his own mire whilst Dean wastes no time activating protective parentalised brother mode and destroys all evidence they were they. All evidence, including smashing the desktop computer’s tower and stamping it to smithereens, whereupon they leave.

On the subject of the hunter’s house, why would the electrics for the alarm be on the outside? That is just asking for trouble. It is not even the electrics to the entire house, as the desktop computer works no problem. I do not understand the logic.

Next follows a scene where either Meg or Sam tries to get Dean to kill him. If this is Meg in control, it is cruel, and it is even more so if it is Sam in control. In case you missed it, in 2x11 Playthings Sam got Dean to promise he would kill him if he turned into a monster. My response to that was that if Sam would rather die than become a monster, he should pull the trigger himself rather than offloading the burden onto his already burdened brother. That response is still valid. Dean of course refused to kill Sam (2x09 Croatoan showed Dean will not kill an innocent unless necessary) and earnt getting clocked with a pistol for it.

By this point in the show, Dean should have severe brain damage after the number of times he has been rendered consciousless by head trauma, but amazingly he is completely unscathed upon awakening some hours later. The motel manager is as much a knave as the guy working in the petrol station was, but this time Dean does not get the five-finger discount on some food for his trouble. Instead, he uses the man’s computer and internet to track the GPS on Sam’s phone by way of lying to the police about his diabetic son Sam who absconded to a Justin Timberlake concert without his insulin.

Sam is in Duluth, Minnesota, or rather Meg in Sam’s body is. It is unquestionably Meg in complete control now. She goes to see Jo, gets creepy, tries raping her, then knocks her unconscious, ties her up, and uses her as bait for Dean, to which I ask: why? If Meg wanted Dean dead and tortured, why not take advantage of the fact he was unconscious and transport him to a shack in the middle of nowhere? What does Jo have to do with anything, and why was the journey to Minnesota necessary? So silly.

Further to the subject of Jo, she was completely useless at the beginning of the series, and she was reduced to a helpless damsel in this one (by a female writer, no less). Not only that, but her inner bitch came roaring to the fore when Dean showed discomfort as she dug the bullet out of his arm. It has been twelve years since her last appearance on the show, and there are still people who ‘wanted Dean to end up with Jo’. Why? She was an annoying try-hard whom the writers tried to make look tough by having Dean treat her with cotton gloves (remember: he did not punch back in 2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown -_- ) and acting like the worst stereotype of an ‘empowered women’.

The only real positive thing Jo does in this episode is patch Dean up after Meg!Sam shoots him and he falls into the water. It is lucky that Dean has such a sturdy mobile phone which survived being in Lake Superior for a few minutes. It was also lucky that Dean actually still had a ringtone for Jo to hear, rather than having his phone on silent or vibrate like mine has been since about 2005. Other than that, Dean and Jo work out that Meg!Sam (who has not yet been revealed to be Meg) is hunting local hunters. The nearest hunter Dean knows is in South Dakota, and he decides that is where Sam is going. Strange that South Dakota is the nearest hunter Dean knows, but at this point in the show he and Sam have not met many hunters. Dean takes his leave of Jo, who finally seems to realise Dean is not interested in dancing the vertical tango with her.

The hunter in South Dakota is Bobby. Sam turns up at his door, but Bobby is not fooled (did the episode specify Dean rang him? It must have done) and gives Sam a beer spiked with holy water. The holy water renders Sam impotent long enough for Bobby to knock him out and tie him to a chair in a devil’s trap. Dean roughs Sam up a bit, and tries to exorcise the demon in him, but the exorcism does not work. Meg has a counter spell (later shown to be the mark on Sam’s arm). After the exorcism fails, Meg recites some Latin which breaks the devil’s trap and sets her loose.

Based on what she says, it is likely Meg was tortured in Hell after Dean sent her back there in 1x22 Devil's Trap, but why Azazel’s second-in-command would be tortured is never explained. Whatever the reason, she wants revenge against Dean as she blamed him specifically for her exorcism. She seems to have completely dismissed the fact Bobby and Sam were there, too, which is interesting considering Sam is supposed to be the protagonist and Dean the sidekick, but whatever. Meg proceeds to beat Dean up and ram her fingers into the wound on his shoulder. Bobby, however, does some quick thinking and burns the mark on Sam’s arm, thereby disabling the magic keeping Meg from being exorcised from Sam’s body.

Other than that, there is nothing to say except another female writer made another joke about male victims of sexual violence and assault. People talk about the show having a problem with misogyny because of the ratio of *significant* female characters to significant male characters who die or are written off, but it was female fans who hated Jo, Bela, and Ruby, and Eugenie Ross-Lemming was one of those responsible for killing off Charlie. It seems like the woman-hating is mostly coming from other women.

Now it is female writers making fun of sexual violence against men (metaphorical or otherwise). Raelle Tucker did it in 2x10 Hunted when she gave Dean the line about Gordon and men being raped in prison showers, and Cathryn Humphris did something similar in this episode. Yes, Sam ‘spent a week with a girl inside him’, but demonic possession in the show is presented as violation akin to sexual violence and abuse. Given a character was almost raped in this episode and Loki/Gabriel will repeatedly rape a man by proxy in the next episode, some more awareness would not have gone amiss.

Overall a dull episode this week which I struggled to squeeze much out of at all. This is probably the shortest analysis I have done for this show so far, second only to 2x07 The Usual Suspects (also written by Cathryn Humphris), but I cannot summon the will to care for 2x14. Later in the series, I will be critical of Jared’s acting abilities ( or rather his decision to stop acting in this show altogether in favour of ‘reading the script and going home’), but at least this early in the show he cared at least a little and displayed what he can do when he cares and tries.

#edvard's supernatural guide #spn meta #spn rewatch #s02e14 #spn 2x14 #2x14 born under a bad sign #dean winchester #sam winchester #jo harvelle #meg masters

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide 2x03 Bloodlust

2x03 Bloodlust is the second episode in what some people have called the ‘Dark Dean Arc’, i.e. the three episodes following John’s death. Dean deals with his bereavement and the burden John placed on him in a self-destructive and sometimes frightening manner. I referred to episodes 2x03 and 2x04 in my previous review, saying that it was not until these two episodes that the severity of Dean’s distress and loss is visible. While I do not think that his behaviour itself is quite as worrisome and bad as some make it out to be, it is definitely indicative of a seriously troubled mind and an ailing spirit.

As for Sam, Sera Gamble shows she really is a Samgirl. She is very keen to present him as the morally upstanding counterpart to Dean’s brutish barbarity, the saint to Dean’s sinner, the Brain to Dean’s Pinky. This heavy bias was less apparent in series 1 when she wrote with Raelle Tucker on 1x12 Faith and 1x21 Salvation, but without her writing partner nothing holds her back. The reverse is true of Raelle Tucker’s solo work, as 2x20 What Is and What Should Never Be shows, but she does not take Sam to such an extreme as Sera Gamble does. She also does not seem to dislike Sam, which cannot be said of Gamble and Dean, but that is a story for another time.

First things first: look at his wee little outfit! (And look at him check that guy out.)

On to the episode, and this one is about vampires, the creatures who were supposedly almost wiped out but have now appeared twice within a space of six episodes. I will have less to say on the subject of vampires in this episode than I did in my review of 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood because I have already said most of it, but one thing worth bearing in mind is that this episode aired about three years before the Twilight films were released. Perhaps Gamble and Tucker had read the books and were intrigued by the idea of ‘vegetarian’ vampires (this would make since given how much Gamble’s writing in e.g. 2x17 Heart resembles soap opera melodrama), but at the time of the episode’s release this was definitely unusual in the vampire genre, Louis in Interview with the Vampire notwithstanding.

Speaking of vampires, the cold open of the episode shows a woman (later revealed to be a vampire) running away from a dark figure in the woods at night, only to end up beheaded on screen just before title card. The viewer is supposed to identify with the woman, because she is a woman running scared and we have seen this same scene in umpteen horror films. We are of course supposed to empathise with her, and her death is supposed to shock us and show us that the monster is monstrous. It is interesting that the ‘monster’ in the show is actually a human, and the victim a monster. This is the first time the show has really introduced this idea that monsters can be victims and the hunters can be the bad guys. It is relevant because Sam is on the road to becoming a ‘monster’ and John has burdened Dean with becoming the one to hunt and kill him. Who, in that situation, would be the real monster and who the hero?

This episode does not provide absolute answers, but instead focuses on grey area and nuance. But more on that later. First, context for those who do not remember the episode:

Reports of what appears to be cattle mutilations and exsanguinations draw Dean and Sam to investigate a case in northern Montana. The sceptical sheriff acts a bit shifty and appears to wilfully misinterpret Dean and Sam’s intentions with the case. They said clearly that the cattle mutilations could possible be a Satanic ritual, but the sheriff misconstrues this as them thinking Satan did it. Having been on the internet as long as I have, I have grown exceedingly accustomed to interacting with people with the reading comprehension capabilities of a cauliflower, but this took the biscuit.

It turns out that the cattle killings actually WERE Dean and Sam’s kind of case, but the cause was vampires who did not drink human blood, subsisting instead by exsanguinating livestock. A hunter named Gordon is killing the vampires on principle of them being vampires, disregarding their rejection of human blood. Dean is drawn over to Gordon’s way of thinking due to several reasons, but is eventually forced to change his stance and fight Gordon when he sees how much lead vampire Lenore fights against her vampiric nature. Gordon loses the fight, the vampires escape, and the episode ends.

Note the name of the newspaper Dean and Sam claim to be reporters for: World Weekly News. This is an actual newspaper which is referred to on various occasions throughout the run of the show, and which has featured at least one faux-article on Dean and Sam. It will be referenced again in episode 2x15 Tall Tales, the episode where a young man is repeatedly raped and we are supposed to laugh at it because a) he is a man and b) he ‘deserved it’. Would we be invited to laugh at The Trickster conjuring an ‘alien’ to ‘probe’ a young woman who ‘deserved it’? I think not.

Note also that Dean is the ‘stupid’ brother in the sheriff’s office and cannot remember the name of the newspaper. Yes, this is most certainly a Sera Gamble episode. Give me strength...

How adorable was it, by the way, when fanzines and faux-articles still existed? I saw a Smallville magazine from 2004 for sale on eBay, and searched my soul for whether I was willing to pay £24 plus p+p for a two-page spread about Jason Teague… As for the question ‘Why did Jason Teague go so bad?’, the answer is ‘because the writers of Smallville make the writing of Supernatural look competent’.

And back to the show…

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Returning to the opening of the episode proper, what might be obvious to the viewer is how Dean’s mood is drastically different at the beginning of this episode than it was at the end of 2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown. A few weeks, perhaps a month or two, has clearly passed since Dean played whack-a-mole on the boot of his car. Now it is in perfect working order, and Dean’s mask appears to be very tightly on. He seems normal, chipper even, something which Sam feels it necessary to make a redundant conversation about. Is this what normal humans do? Constantly comment on people’s emotional state? I would feel like I am in a panopticon or something. Just let it go, Sam: not everything needs to be a conversation just because you constantly roll a Nat 0 on perception.

This scene is one of few scenes in the show where I can see both Jared AND Jensen acting, but the fault is not in their work, but rather the fact it is obvious the car is not actually moving at all. Instead, it is in front of giant but very convincing screens playing landscape scenes to look like the view from a speeding car. The car itself does not look like it is moving, however, so Dean’s hands on the wheel look strange and fake. Most people will not have noticed it, though, but I am cursed with knowledge.

Now that those who have forgotten have the necessary context, are up to speed, I can get onto the interesting part of the analysis. The main thematic takeaway from 2x03 Bloodlust is better understood as an informed viewer. Upon my first watch of this episode just after Christmas about 12-13 years ago, it did not stand out. I liked seeing Amber Benson on screen again but the story did nothing to interest me.

Knowing where the show is going makes a vital difference, though. Dean knows he might one day have to kill Sam because of Sam’s psychic powers, and is torn between two sides of himself – here manifested as Lenore and Gordon. Gordon is a weltanschauung of moral absolutes, whereas Lenore is nuance. Gordon is an extreme exaggeration of archetypal masculine traits – control, order and stasis. He is not interested in any shades of grey regarding monsters. They are not human, they are a danger, and so must be killed. In contrast, Lenore is a touch of the archetypal feminine – change and unpredictability. The vampires diverged from their inherent nature, electing to not be controlled by it so they can live in peace. This is analogous to the conflict in Dean; Sam could become a monster, and as a monster he will be a danger and must be killed. But can Sam overcome his nature and live in peace?

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To add further layers to this, Gordon the human is the one who behaves like a monster, whereas Lenore and Eli act positively human and sympathetic. As Glory is a representation of the monster Buffy fears she will have to become if she fully embraces her slayer calling, so too is Gordon a representation of the monster Dean will have to become to kill Sam. Contrasted with this is the mirror of Lenore who is a ‘monster’ fighting her hardest to be ‘good’, as Sam might if he becomes a ‘monster’. What this is telling the informed viewer is that, in this situation, Dean might become the true monster.

Dean’s ‘flirtation’ (here not intended with sexual implications) with Gordon is Dean walking the path of deadening himself to his love for Sam, thereby learning to numb himself and dehumanise his brother in order that he may one day be capable of killing him. Gordon is a reflection of a part of Dean, and Gordon clearly says of monsters “They’re not human”, the unspoken denouement thereto being “...they’re monsters, so it’s necessary and good to kill them.” Dean intended wholeheartedly to kill Lenore because she is not human, and therefore a monster.

Lenore is also polysemetic mirror of both Sam’s future and Dean’s hesitation. As Lenore does not want to give in to her monstrous tendencies and become the thing Dean wants to kill, Dean does not want to give into his own monstrous urges and become something he will hate. The struggle is overwhelmingly hard for both, but it is one both are determined to fight at the end.

And as for Evil!Dean… well, not for the last time, but three words come to mind. Such potential, Supernatural.

Having discussed ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ here, I did not intend to conclude anything as banal and trite as ‘the feminine defeated the destructive masculine’ because 1) I do not have time for that nonsense and 2) the exaggerated masculine archetype in Dean was intentionally overblown. It would need to be if a brother were forced to numb himself to future fratricide. The conclusion of the episode sees Dean fight Gordon, the monster he is afraid of becoming. The fight ends in Dean overcoming Gordon and tying him up, with Gordon defeated and silent.

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Dean’s apology afterwards accompanied by his acknowledgement of the nuance can be read with more nuance than simplistic gender politics. Rather, there is a hint that equilibrium is being restored within Dean; the archetypal masculine is very much alive and well in him, but it is no longer as overwrought and negatively exaggerated as it was.

That just about does it for abstract, metaphorical analysis for this episode, but plenty remains for me to discuss more generally. One of them is Dean and Gordon’s relationship. Last episode, I mentioned Paula R. Stiles’s comment that Dean befriends people who turn out to be monsters. In 2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown, it was the blind man who was the rakshasa, and in this episode it is Gordon.

Their bond was based on trauma-bonding and a mutual experience of enacting violence on monsters. Gordon shared the story of his sister being bitten by a vampire, with the twist being that he found and killed his sister (or it would be a twist if that were not Gunn’s story in Angel, and similar to the abduction of Mulder’s sister in The X-Files). Dean actually felt comfortable opening up to Gordon about John’s death and how much he was struggling. Dean said he could not talk to Sam about those things I said last episode. In addition to everything I said there, Dean also has to be the parentalised big brother figure who keeps it together for Sam’s benefit.

Dean’s recent bereavement was almost definitely a contributing factor in his alliance with Gordon. Gordon did not doubt himself or his morals, and he provided Dean with an illusion of surety and clarity. Dean needed this after losing his dad, especially considering the burden of killing Sam. For the last few weeks or months, Dean has been scared, angry, lonely, doubtful, and grieving without anybody to support or help him. Then along comes Gordon who deals in absolutes and certainties. This would of course be an attractive chance to feel in control for Dean, so it is completely natural he cleaved to Gordon in spite of Sam’s warnings.

Having said ’bond’, ’attractive’ and ’cleave to’, some readers might be under the impression I saw romantic and/or sexual subtext between Dean and Gordon. I did not. The only male characters I have really seen Dean have romantic and sexual subtext with are Castiel, Lee (15x07), and the guy at the beginning of 6x01 Exile on Main Street who had been buying Dean beers for the last year. I do not see anything more than a ’brotherhood’ between Dean and Benny, nothing sexual at all between Dean and Henriksen in their five minutes of shared screen-time, and nothing between Dean and Ketch. I have been on the internet long enough to have seen all these pairings, but only Dean/Cas and Dean/Lee seem valid to me. I am not the arbiter of whom Dean did or did not pork or get porked by, but I am a man attracted to men and I just do not see it. And Benny calls Dean ’brother’ far too often for their bond to be sexual.

Returning to Gordon providing Dean with a clear direction and course of action, Sam is right to note that perhaps Gordon is an ersatz father for Dean, though Sam is perhaps wrong to claim Gordon is nowhere near as good a hunter as John. As far as I can tell, John and Gordon are quite a bit alike: other hunters eschew them, they think in black and white, and they are dangerous to be around.

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Sam really should not have said anything about Dean and John in the car park scene, especially not when Dean was clearly so riled up by Sam’s pestering. The punch should not have happened, but given Sam’s incessant mithering and snapping in the previous episode, and his patronising, gauche attempt to psychoanalyse Dean in a motel car park, it is not surprising that Sam’s continued, whiney nagging ends with his face colliding with Dean’s fist at high velocity. ’You slap on this big fake smile but I can see right through it.” Well done, Mr Big Smart-Smart. At least you did not try the sanctimonious act again and claim Dean was insulting John’s memory to try to shame him about making a friend who is not Sam. Oh wait...

People who read my analysis of the previous episode might remember this quote:

[Sam] is a yapping chihuahua who has not learnt that yapping at a German Shepherd is a sure way to get a giant paw in your face.

And what do you know, the yappy dog finally got a paw in his face.

Whilst on this subject, it bears mentioning that Dean and Sam are adult brothers of roughly equal physical build, height, and strength. Neither has any (inherent) power over the other in their relationship, because being brothers is an equal relationship, at least in theory. I have laid into John due to the likelihood he used physical violence with poco!Dean, and held Dean hostage in a mentally, physically, and possibly sexually abusive father-son relationship. John had inherent power in that relationship, being the one in power over his son. He misused that power in many ways, and Dean’s lack of self-esteem, his self-destructive and suicidal tendencies etc are the natural result of this, as is his erstwhile obedience to John.

Some people critical of Dean like to claim that Dean is an abusive older brother, and I have referred to this line of criticism before. Evidence such criticism cites is the fact that Dean punches Sam on a few occasions in the show, and a tiny number of comments can be construed as implying Dean was a physically-abusive older brother to Sam. One such line appears in this episode shortly before said punch. In the pub after Dean beheads the vampire with the chainsaw, Sam gets all uppity and sanctimonious about decapitations not being his idea of a god time, then decides to leave Dean and Gordon alone while he returns to the hotel. As Sam makes his exit, Dean says “Sammy, remind me to beat that buzzkill out of you later, alright?”

This line has been taken to support interpretations that Dean is to Sam what John was to Dean. In their defence, this is something taken directly from the text, but that is the only defence I can offer them: one would have to think that characters always mean what they say and say what they mean in every single situation to think this supports such an interpretation. Yes, Dean says this, but does Sam act around Dean the way Dean acts around John? Does Sam act like Dean uses violence or the threat thereof to control Sam? Does Sam act like a battered husband around Dean?

Quite simply: no. In fact, as I have written many times, Sam is the narcissistic abuser and Dean is the co-dependent abused. ...Who occasionally punches when provoked. Dean’s punch was not part of a pattern of physically-abusive behaviour to control or terrorise Sam. It was just douchey behaviour from a pissed-off brother who appeared to expect Sam to punch him right back. To Dean’s credit, he looked ashamed of himself afterwards... which he should, see above RE: douchey behaviour. If Sam had punched him back, he would have deserved it.

Editor’s note: Remember Sam shooting Dean twice in 1x10 Asylum and never once apologising properly? I remember. Carry on, Dean. Additional editor's note: Dean did take on a huge part of the role of raising Sam, so their relationship is not simply two brothers. However, the show has shown us time and time again that Dean has no authority over Sam, and Sam does not treat Dean like an authority figure or a parent. It is notable that Sam did not punch Dean back here, even though he could have. I will have a bit more to say on this next episode, but I still think what I said a few lines ago: it was douchey, angry, riled-up brother behaviour.

To be fair to Sam, he WAS also trying to talk sense into Dean, and Dean needed somebody to do that, just not in the way Sam was going about it. ’Friendship’ with Gordon is easy for Dean because he is familiar as well as absolute: he shares many traits with John, but also with Dean. Dean is a ’good guy’, but he has an incredible propensity for violence and death and does not always do what a good guy’ should. He is heroic, but not a HeroTM. He is not a psychopath like Gordon, but he finds it easy to relate to people who are. Sam tried to be a counterbalance to this, but failed.

A quote from Paula Stiles:

Because they’re polar opposites, Sam and Gordon need a tie-breaker and that ostrich feather on Osiris’ scales is, naturally, Dean. Dean is the prize over which Sam and Gordon viciously fight to the death (that demon blood thing later on? Just a distraction). It would be easy to argue that’s because Dean’s so awesome and that’s…sort of…true. That is to say, both Sam and Gordon are loners and outcasts who have both only found one real connection (though Sam did have Jessica and Gordon did have his sister, once), that connection being the one hunter who’s even more of a freak than they are (and therefore, won’t reject them). But Dean, freak or not, can only have one BFF at this point in the series and so, Sam and Gordon have to duke it out.

But perhaps the bigger reason why this conflict, or triangle, or what-have-you is so effective is because Dean is the swing voter in Sam and Gordon’s moral war. Tolerance or intolerance? Relativism or absolutism? Dean waffles between the two, balancing on that knife’s bloody edge, which makes him the perfect target for campaigning from both sides. Who will win the war for his heart and soul (and isn’t it an irony that he ends up going his own way after all that?).

Gordon was absolutely lusting after Dean trying to win Dean over to his side of the force. First he encouraged Dean’s despair, then tried to separate him from Sam (”Doesn’t seem like your brother’s much like us.”) This is a tactic used by abusers who want to isolate their victim, and it is telling that Dean apparently is so vulnerable to such manipulation by people he identifies with or cares for. After all, he has known little else than being controlled by a man not too different than Gordon. This manipulation is so powerful that Sam’s (lamentably poor) attempts at getting through to Dean with the nuance of ’the vamps aren’t killing people’ falls on deaf ears, or perhaps deafened ears.

As for the other star of the episode whom I have barely mentioned, Lenore also played a critical role in getting through to Dean. Other than Dean’s abject disgust at Gordon’s treatment (torture) of her, apparently for his own amusement (or misogynistic vindication, as Paula R. Stiles suggests), her staunch refusal to give in sways Dean away from the dark side of the force to the ...well, not the light side, really. Dean is definitely a Sith, but he is far from evil (Remember: the Star Wars films are Jedi propaganda). To avoid paraphrasing or Heaven forbid plagiarising her work, I will take a snippet from Paula Stiles’s analysis again:

But I should note that, despite the pretty-brutal misogyny that Gordon brings to the table (the murder of his sister is clearly cast as a sort of honour killing) and the way he treats Lenore, it would be missing the point to see her as just a helpless victim or Damsel in Distress. Lenore has a stronger will than perhaps anyone in the episode. She is surrounded by angry men itching for a fight, but even though she could probably clean the floor with Gordon, Sam or Dean, she risks her life under extreme torture to stick to her principles. And it’s really this that saves the day. If she had not shown that kind of fortitude, neither Sam nor Dean would have thought twice about letting Gordon kill off her entire nest. Amber Benson does a good job of playing Lenore as a different kind of Hero who controls her own bloodlust and influences two out of the three hunters she encounters to control theirs. That’s pretty impressive.

Lenore is indeed light-years away from being weak, but the strength she embodies is the opposite of the masculine strength Dean embodies (and Gordon negatively exaggerates). Her greatest strength in this episode is not her physical strength, but her strength of will, endurance, and her determination to change things for the better, and her caring for the wellbeing of others. This is an archetypically feminine kind of strength: it is quiet, subtle, discreet, but no less powerful than archetypical masculine strength.

Another fictional character who embodies this feminine strength is Galadriel. She is an incredibly powerful sorceress and enchantress who shielded and guarded an elven realm with her magic for millennia, but her strength lies also in her ability to nurture life, in providing a sanctuary to rest and heal, her self-control, wisdom, perception, and insight, and her refusal to surrender to her demons. Dean’s masculine strength is a potent force, but so is Galadriel’s steadfast perseverance. In The Lord of the Rings films by Peter Jackson, Cate Blanchette did an incomparable job of portraying this: she exuded an aetheral presence which demanded attention and could silence a room with a single glance.

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Even in the disastrous The Hobbit trilogy, she has her moments of weakness but refuses to surrender. Without her presence at Dol Guldur, The White Council might not have managed to oust Sauron.

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She almost certainly knew how to defend herself with weapons, but she did all this without once picking up a phallic symbol or punching anybody. Funnily enough, only two elves have been able to best Sauron in a one-on-one duel, and both were elf-women: Galadriel and her mentor Melian's daughter Lúthien, both of them using sorcery in different forms. Lúthien even bested Sauron's master Morgoth with her magic song and stole one of the Silmarils from his crown. Her uncle High King Fingolfin who challenged Morgoth to a duel and wounded him seven times, including a wound in his foot which never healed and caused Morgoth to limp forever, the cost being Fingolfin's own life.

That people think there are no 'strong women' in Tolkien's work is utterly risible to me. Quite apart from Éowyn, females in Tolkien's work are incredibly powerful, just not necessarily in the same sword-and-shield way as men.

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Lenore lacks the powers of an enchantress and sorceress, yet she still did not have to lift a single finger to triumph over Gordon and save her nest. Considering this is a Supernatural episode and not Buffy, it is a pleasant surprise to have this amount of metaphor and interplay of different forces: masculine vs feminine, yin vs yang, light vs dark, absolution vs nuance, etc.

Which brings me on to a last few minor points of discussion. Lenore is the name of the dead wife in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven poem, and indeed another poem bearing the name Lenore. The poem is about a man driven to ’madness’ out of grief for the fact he will never see his dead wife again. The raven in question is a metaphor for this despair and hopelessness, perched upon the bust of St Pallas above the narrator’s chamber door where its shadow lay floating on the floor. The looming, heavy presence of despair after the death of a loved one will not go away, but rather wears away at the narrator’s sanity. Other than the alarming comparison of Dean grief with that of a man grieving his wife, the rest is a fitting parallel, especially as the narrator does not even believe he will see his lost Lenore in Heaven.

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Less pleasing was the claim at the end of the episode that ’Dad did the best he could’. I often think that the writers of this show are unaware of exactly what picture they painted of John in series one, or indeed over the entirety of the show. Other times I think they are aware of it and want to ret-con or fix their mistakes. Unfortunately, that ship has long since sailed, and no amount of apologism can fix it. I intend to watch The Winchesters when it comes out, but I have already written about Jensen’s apparent attempts to ameliorate the audience’s perception of John (Jensen, WHY?!). I do not intend to forget that just because The Winchesters wants me to like John. Whatever the reason for the ’Dad did the best he could’ line, I wish the writers had stopped trying to make us forget what we had seen with crap like this. John did not do the best he could, but I have gone over this in depth in this essay, so I will leave this for now.

Regarding Gordon for one last time, he said in this episode that Dean ’is a sadistic killer, just like me’, and Dean believes this is true of himself. It is not true, of course, but Dean believes it is because it is what he was groomed to be. The same episode tells us that Dean was killing werewolves with John at age 16 while Sam was safe in the car. 16 would be a very young age to be doing this, but at that age Dean had already been hunting with John for a few years, and had known how to fire a gun for about a decade.

On the subject of Sam, his ability to remember the way to Lenore’s nest based on the time elapsed, the direction the car went etc all while blind-folded was a little hilarious. I understand the show wants us to think Sam is Resourceful and Intelligent, but this stretched my belief a bit too far. The way he ’worked out’ that Gordon already knew the vampires were good was also quite the impressive logical saltation: according to Sam, Gordon killed his sister who had been turned in to a vampire, therefore Gordon knew the vampires were good. How Sam worked this out is anybody’s guess, because the show certainly did not tell me how.

The vampire named Eli is played by Ty Olson, the same actor who portrayed Benny in series 8.

Some people have tried to work out how this can be explained within the show, but Benny’s story before ending up in Purgatory does not match with Eli’s. Spatial-genetic multiplicity is the explanation I go with. As for Ty Olson, this is his second appearance on screen with Jensen, their first being in Dark Angel 2x11 The Berrisford Agenda.

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Now I miss Alec again.

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Moving on before this turns into a meeting of the Helsinki Chapter of the Jensen Fan-Boys society, one last thing before I finish this. Dean killing the vampire did not seem unduly violent to me. I have just re-watched 2x04 Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, which features Sam claiming Dean is ‘scary while hunting’, but if this is the case, the show has not done a good job of portraying this. The vampire Dean killed was trying his hardest to kill him, and the only thing Dean did which was not necessary to kill the vampire was punching it twice. I am aware I am supposed to be horrified that Dean killed the vampire with the chainsaw, but I am really not. Yes, it was gross, but the vampire had just tried to do the same to Gordon and would have done the same to Dean, so… what is the problem? Yes, he was a vegetarian vampire, but only Gordon knew that at the time. As far as Dean knew, the vampire was the same as the ones in 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood, and he used what tools he had at hand to get the job done. He did look deeply shaken by it, though.

Was the horrific part the fact that he looked at what he was doing while it was happening instead of looking away? I really do not know. Maybe I have watched too much Hannibal and The Walking Dead to be particularly bothered by that death, so I do not understand why Sam was so uppity about it.

Thus concludeth my analysis of 2x03 Bloodlust.

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destielshippingnews · 1 year

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x08 Crossroad Blues

Spoilers up to 15x18

Supernatural’s 30th episode is an important one in the lore of the show, introducing the ideas of hellhounds, demonic deals, and humans being dragged to hell. Moreover it reveals where John ended up after his own deal with Azazel in 2x01 In My Time of Dying: on a torturer’s rack in hell. Or rather, a crossroads demon tells Dean where it wants him to believe John is. The veracity of the demon’s claim is never substantiated, but more on that later.

After a handful of frankly pretty dull episodes, 2x08 Crossroad Blues stands out for a number of reasons. Other than the new story elements mentioned above, it tells a solid story which progresses the plot of series two, reveals more of the depths of Dean’s despair than the ‘Dark Dean Arc’ from 2x02 to 2x04, and it is based on American folklore rather than European myths and legends. Not only is it American folklore, but it is black Americans’ folklore. As discussed in 1x08 Bugs and 1x19 Provenance for example, there is nothing whatsoever inherently wrong, prejudiced, or discriminatory about a story focusing on characters from one demographic, but given the show is supposed to be American horror taking place in America in the early 21st century and based on American folklore, one often wonders why there is so little from First Nations peoples’ myths and legends, and why black American folklore is in absentia.

A lot of people would cite racism as the reason, but rather than active hateful racism, ignorance and an aversion to risk-taking seem satisfactory explanations to me. European fairy tales, folklore, legends, and myths are embedded in Anglophone cultures in a way that other ones simply are not. Executives do not like taking risks, and the writers did not have all the time in the world to research monsters and creatures from cultures foreign to them well enough to write about them in a way which would not offend people. They could not even research European lore properly: Loki is not Odin’s son, but rather his blood-brother: ‘samhain’ is pronounced ‘sowen’ and is a festival, not a demonic entity, and ‘vanir’ describes a Norse deity about as well as calling me European describes me. The cultural imperialism and Abrahamic chauvinism is on full display in 5x20 Hammer of the Gods, and this applies to European deities as well as African and Indian. The few occasions they ventured out into African, Indian, or Asian deities and creatures, they butchered them, and more often than not they butchered European ones, too.

Enough rambling: this episode includes actual American folklore from a marginalised demographic. Or rather, about a marginalised demographic: whether or not the real Robert Johnson performed a hoodoo ritual or what, the Mephisto-like deal could well be apocryphal additions from a European tradition. The real Robert Johnson made no claim to having made any deal or having performed a ritual to summon a devil and exchange his soul for musical talent:

"If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little 'fore 12 that night so you know you'll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself...A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want."

From 'Tommy Johnson' by David Evans (London: Studio Vista, 1971) . Quote from Luckymojo.com

People from a mainstream western Christian background will probably find practices such as hoodoo and voodoo ominous and sinister, but as an atheist with friends who are buddhist, ásatru, chaos witch, and whatever else, I can attest that most of it is no weirder than rituals practised in a church.

Think about it: believers convene in a sacred place before a deity’s altar, listen to a wise man recite some meaningful words, invoke the deity’s help, protection, guidance, and wisdom through formulaic chants (perhaps whilst holding the deity’s symbol or fetish), then partake of ritual food and drink. If one among them is ailing in body or spirit, the other believers will invoke divine forces through ritual to aid their fellow believer.

Anyway, the tale is that Robert Johnson suddenly gained extraordinary guitar-playing skills overnight after ‘selling his soul’ to a ‘devil’ at a crossroads in 1930. Eight years later, he dropped dead of unknown causes (explanations include Marfan syndrome and syphilis), whence come the stories of having sold his soul to Satan. Supernatural ran with this idea, and it became a cornerstone of the show’s own mythology for the next 14 years. According to the show, he made a deal with a crossroads demon in 1930 to become a talented musician in exchange for his soul, and the deal came due in 1938, whereupon he died muttering about ‘black dogs’.

People who have already watched the show will notice a few things strange about the cold open where Robert is supposedly killed by hellhounds: his deal came due in eight years, not the usual ten, and there was no apparent physical harm done to his body by canine claws and teeth. In fact, his death looks more like poisoning or a horrific seizure morphing into something else: even in this episode, hellhounds are shown to inflict physical violence on their prey. This raises the question of whether or not Robert in the show actually did make any kind of deal at all, whether the standard deal was for eight years in the 1930s, or whether the hellhounds worked differently back then. Curious also is the focus on the woman’s gold crucifix before Robert dies.

Whatever the case, similar deaths grab Dean and Sam’s attention whilst they are looking for more work in a café. As if to prove my earlier statement about butchering European lore, Sam uses Fenrir as an example of a hellhound or a ‘spectral spirit’, whereupon my palm collided with my brow in a gesture of exasperation: Fenris is more like a direwolf of divine proportions, and he is one of Loki’s children with Angrbodha. The coin-shith (Dogs of the Otherworld) from Scots Gaelic folklore, the Cŵn Annwn (Dogs of Antumnos/the Otherworld), or Kerberos/Cerberus would be a better example of hellhounds. Regardless, Dean’s comment that ‘[Fenrir] could hump the crap outta your left’ is hilarious because it is true, and definitely deserved a laugh.

What did not deserve a laugh was Dean not knowing what MySpace was, because that was clearly Sera Gamble insisting Dean is computer illiterate. The same man who at this point is a 27 year old in 2006 who has been researching demons on the internet for YEARS. My eyes hurt from rolling. Dean has no friends so has no real use for social media like Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, or whatever, but not knowing? I know what TikTok is and I have no interest in using the damn platform.

Speaking of laughs, Sam is in his usual Dean-is-a-stupid-embarrassment mode right at the beginning of the episode as he chastises Dean’s blasé attitude towards his own criminal record. You know, the criminal record Sam is responsible for after he had the shapeshifter’s murders pinned on Dean in 1x06 Skin, which Sam smirked at him for. That criminal record. If his ‘criminal record’ was ‘not funny’ because it ‘makes our job harder’, perhaps Sam could have prevented his friend scapegoating Dean in that episode. And as for Sam’s comment about ‘demonic pitbulls’: why pitbulls, Sam? What did pitbulls ever do to you? Bad dogs do not exist, just bad owners.

The report of an architect who apparently died by suicide after making comments about ‘black dogs’ leads Dean and the Hairy One to said engineer’s work partner, played by the same actor who played Dean’s childhood hero Gunnar (the Scandiwegian version of Günther) the wrestler about ten years later. Their discussion reveals that the dead architect (named Seán Boyd) suddenly became a master in his field ten years earlier, which leads Dean to enquire at the vets about reports of black dogs over the last few months. This in turn leads them to somebody named Silvia (or rather her neighbour) who claims to have reported black dogs before going missing. Like Seán, Silvia had become a master in her field a decade earlier and risen to become the youngest chief surgeon at her hospital. This happened shortly after she visited a place called Lloyd’s Bar, which really is more of a shack than a pub.

Outside the shack is a crossroads, and here Dean reveals that his passive knowledge of magic, witchcraft, and the otherworld is extensive: he recognises the yarrow plant (presumably unusual in Mississippi but hardly noteworthy in Finland) which is used in summoning, he knows the significance of crossroads, and knows without hesitating exactly where the box would be buried: right in the centre. Given John’s recent expiration, it is possible to conclude Dean may well have undergone recent research of his own into demonic deals to help him understand what happened, or even to try to summon a demon himself, as he wastes no time in doing later in the episode. As has been well-established at this point, Dean suffers both survivor’s guilt and suicidal ideations, first made clear in 1x12 Faith. Add to that the bereavement of his (abusive) father, and you have a perfect storm for Dean wanting to trade his soul for somebody else.

Dean’s willingness to do just this is made explicit at the end of the episode: Dean’s refusal to answer Sam’s question about whether or not Dean considered making a deal to save John was answer enough, and turning the music up confirmed it. I have seen more than one person call Dean a hypocrite for his attitudes to demonic deals and trading one’s life to save another, when he is so ‘willing’ to do it himself, and indeed does do so in 2x22 All Hell Breaks Loose Pat 2. However, criticism like this gives me flashbacks to that whole ‘Dean never wipes his arse’ and ‘Dean is a paedophile’ nonsense which apparently passes as analysis.

As with people wondering ‘how can John know about demons etc in The Winchesters when in Supernatural we’re told John didn’t know about that stuff until after Mary’s death’, I am stupified by the apparent lack of cognitive capabilities of some people. The slightest bit of understanding of the human condition mixed with a little empathy is all you need to know why Dean thinks and does what he does.

After John’s death, he is the one left behind to deal with the loss and knowledge of John’s sacrifice. After Sam’s death, Dean is the one bereaved by untimely death: his conditioning to be his brother’s keeper, to sacrifice himself for Sam’s well-being, and his suicidal ideations and survivor’s guilt make his decision in 2x22 completely understandable. It was the natural end result of his being groomed for almost three decades to look out for Sammy.

But Dean’s anger at others for making demonic deals – especially to resurrect or save loved ones – is not applied to himself in the same way because Dean does not classify himself in the same manner he does other people. Since 1x12 Faith, Dean has believed he deserves to be dead and that his being alive is a problem which needs redress. The gay teacher (whose heart Dean still has) and Layla died while Dean lived. Dean sees himself as the person who has been resurrected and left to live with the loss of other people (whom be believes to be inherently better than him): his life is worthless, so it means nothing to him to throw it away to save others. It is not even his to begin with. Paula R Stiles wrote something similar:

Others in the show get angry with Dean and call him a hypocrite for saying deal-making is bad, but Dean doesn’t see it that way. For one thing, he feels his deal was a very bad idea (even if he doesn’t regret the result). For another, he doesn’t count himself as highly as others, so he doesn’t see his trading his soul as such a terrible thing as it would be for a “normal” human. He feels that he would be dead, were it not for John’s deal, so he is only balancing the scales (an idea the Crossroad Demon fosters in “Crossroad Blues”).

Even as late as season six, Death’s assertion that he only created further chaos with his deal is puzzling to Dean. Why would his deal be so bad? How is he different from the little girl in “Appointment in Samarra“? Shouldn’t he be dead, too? Shouldn’t he be in Hell? How is that not rebalancing the scales? The fact that it’s not remains an issue that the show continues to dance around rather than address head-on. It is a central issue for Dean – what about him requires that he live while others die, go to Heaven while others are damned, prevail while others fall? That quality remains obscure to him and partly to us.

This is also not the last time Dean will have to lose somebody because of a demon deal. Pay attention to what Dean says while talking to Evan, and then think of Dean on the floor after Cas’s death in 15x18 The Truth.

This scene at the crossroads is intercut with Silvia (the doctor) hiding in a motel room and acting like somebody having serious withdrawal symptoms, and the scene ends with a hellhound breaking in through the window and presumably killing her. Given what happens to Dean in 3x16 No Rest for the Wicked, we can assume her death was savage and brutal. The same is presumably true of every person who makes a demonic deal, though it is never explicitly stated.

The fate of these people is also to be tortured ad infinitum unless they agree to become the torturer, and thereby become demons themselves. Ruby will reveal this to Dean in 3x09 Malleus Maleficarum. This is a significant departure from Abrahamic lore wherein demons have nothing to do with human souls being tortured. That said, the beliefs of many modern Christians and even the general public conception of what Christians believe has been profoundly influenced by John Milton’s Paradise Lost to such a degree that most people do not seem to know which is which. People know the story of Lucifer’s rebellion and fall from grace (which Supernatural will adopt into its lore), but how many people actually know that is not a biblical story? That is taken from Paradise Lost, but it has almost become an accepted part of many Christians’ cosmology.

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Discovering the box of sinister-sounding spell components in the middle of the crossroads leads Dean and Sam to investigate the bar, and takes them to a middle-aged black man named George. The scene introduces the idea of goofer dust to keep hellhounds at bay, an idea which will be completely abandoned until episode 8x14 Trial and Error, after which it will vanish completely from Supernatural. The goofer dust might have been useful some time during series three, but whatever, Show. You do you.

George is exhausted and waiting to die. He summoned the crossroads demon a decade earlier outside Lloyd’s Bar to make a trade for artistic talent, but he neglected to ask for fame (like the figure in Greek mythology who gained eternal life but not eternal youth, and was doomed to age and wither away forever). As such, George is poor, lonely, and unknown. He is about to go to Hell and has only himself to blame. A rational but unfair assessment, but he seems to believe he deserves nothing less, blaming himself as he does for the others in Lloyd’s Bar making deals of their own and damning themselves to Hell in the process. This being the case, he is tired of the guilt and wants to die.

One would almost think the writers planned this in advance, so much does George sound like Dean. Dean himself will utter similar sentiments in 2x09 Croatoan, but coming from Dean’s mouth they sound more suicidal than fatalistic. Dean’s callous attitude towards him at the start of their encounter ( [You’re in trouble] that you got yourself into.) is indeed harsh and insensitive to a man about to die, but even more so when considering how Dean almost definitely tells himself similar things: you deserve to die because you couldn’t save John, or Layla, or the gay teacher. They all died for you, but you don’t deserve it. Bear that in mind in series three.

Bear in mind also that George and Evan are John mirrors in this episode, especially Evan, and Dean’s anger at them is also anger at John. His judgementalism and aversion to helping them perhaps says a lot about his feelings towards John. Dean’s anger is little alleviated by learning Evan traded his soul to save his wife who was dying of terminal cancer, though Jensen’s facial expressions suggest understanding and empathy for Evan’s plight. He ‘I think you [saved her] for yourself so you wouldn’t have to live without her. Well guess what? She has to live without you, now.’

The episode also makes it clear that Dean would have seriously considered trading his soul for John, but I do not see any real conflict here: both of those things can exist in one person at the same time. We will just hurry past the fact the show has paralleled Dean and John with a romantic couple once again and skip to the scene with the crossroads demon.

But before that, note that Sam is reactive and rather passive in this episode. The demon in 1x04 Phantom Traveler said that Jess was in Hell, and here Sam is presented with an opportunity to bring her back, but if the notion even crossed his mind, he made no mention of it whatsoever. Given the chance, I cannot say I would reject the opportunity to switch places with a friend who died almost six years ago, but Sam’s possibly-pregnant-almost-fiancé died little over a year ago and he has apparently forgotten her.

In her discussion of this episode, Paula R. Stiles called Sam predictable and Dean the opposite. Her reasoning is that Sam follows a moral code placed on him by other people, whereas Dean mostly follows his own unpredictable moral code. Sam will do what other peoples’ moral code tell s him is the right thing to do, and if he has to bend or break the code, he will justify it by referring to the moral code, e.g. doing something for the greater good. Somebody in his position would predictably reject selling his soul to bring back the dead because ‘it’s wrong’, but Dean has his own sense of right and wrong. Of course at the beginning of the show he often followed John’s orders and codes, but John himself subjected Dean to two conflicting directives: ‘kill Sam if he goes dark’, and ‘look out for Sammy’. He has to work things out for himself here and has no outward code of conduct to guide him. Consequently, one can never tell what Dean is going to do, but one can tell that Dean is unpredictable. ...Or at least he was until the writers kept making him repeat storylines, but that is a discussion for another time.

The scene with the crossroads demon is a fitting example of how Dean does not do the predictable thing. He goes to trap the crossroads demon (or so he says) to get it to call the hounds off Evan, but whether or not this is all a means to an end is left to the viewer to decide. I do not believe Dean would have callously let Evan die regardless of how much he thought he deserved it, but as angry as Dean is at John, John is still one of the people Dean has been groomed into sacrificing himself for. After Dean’s first attempt at ensnaring the demon in a devil’s trap fails, it almost instantly switches from discussing Evan to discussing John.

Demons in the Superverse are generally stupid, including Crowley who started off intelligent, but the more besotted with Dean he became the longer he spent on the show, the dumber he got until eventually he was barely distinguishable from any other demon. However, they do talk and know things as the crossroads demon itself reveals when it first appears to Dean and recognises him and his name. Whether it guessed the ‘real’ reason for Dean’s summoning it, or was gifted with especial perception, it hit very close to the mark in offering Dean ten years with John in exchange for Dean’s soul.

As for the desperation to win Dean’s soul, he is one of the seals on Lucifer’s prison. ‘A righteous man shedding blood in Hell’ or something to that effect if the first in a series of events which must occur, and Lilith wants Dean to be that righteous man.

Why precisely it need be a Winchester rather than any other righteous man (remember ‘man’ used to mean exclusively ‘adult human’ or ‘human in general’, so it could have been a righteous woman or child) is a twofold issue: Lucifer and Michael need to have their apocalyptic showdown, and Dean and Sam are the vessels they need in order to have their battle. Angels have been manipulating the Winchesters’ and Campbells’ bloodlines for generations in order to bring Dean and Sam into being for their purposes. The angels know what has to happen, and are perfectly content to let the demons do what they are doing as long as it serves Michael’s purpose of bringing about Armageddon.

Perhaps the demon deals are Team Lucifer’s way of trying to find the righteous man to spill blood in Hell. This does of course swell the demons’ ranks, but the senior angels want the final battle between Heaven and Hell to apocalyptic: apocalypse means ‘the revelation’, as in the revelation of God, and they want God to come back. The more demons there are to kill, the more destruction the angels get to wreak.

The other issue is that God is writing this story to try to work through his own issues with his ‘sister’ Amara. God is driving these events, and the story is not about Dean and Sam at all, nor even Michael and Lucifer. It is about God and Amara, or Creation and Destruction, Order and Chaos, Light and Dark. Supernatural is not ‘about the brothers’, and it never was. It was therapy for a God. All Dean and Sam were was tools, ‘vessels’ for God to relive his past trauma to try to make them have a better ending. The entirety of series fifteen is the characters dealing with this truth and trying to break free of God’s control.

Apropos Lucifer, only Supernatural could take such a character as the source of all evil and strip him of all presence and threat to the point where he is a mere nuisance, irritation, and vexation. When one hears that Lucifer is going to be on a television show, one’s reaction should not be Not THAT guy again!

Returning to the crossroads demon in question, it is indeed stupid and allows itself to get caught instead of being extra cautious. ‘Once bitten, twice shy’ does not apply to demons in this show: they all have to be snarky bad-asses whose barks are bigger than their bites. After Dean had almost tricked it into being trapped in the car, it should have thought twice before following him under the water tower, but whatever. It was smart of Dean to feint the demon as he did.

It is never made clear whether or not the demon was telling the truth about John’s torture. He almost definitely was tortured, but was he still being tortured when the demon spoke to Dean? Later in the show, the viewer will find out that Dean was tortured for thirty years in Hell, after which his strength broke and he became the torturer for ten years. If the four Earth months Dean was dead equated to four decades in Hell, John has been in Hell for a similar length of time at this point in the show. Sure we are told that John held out for a century of torture, whereas weak little Dean broke after thirty years. We are told that, but we are never shown any evidence that this is the truth.

Unless I am mistaken, it was Alistair who told Dean this in 4x16 On the Head of a Pin, and he did so to hurt Dean. Either John did hold out for a century (unlikely), or he picked up the torturer’s blade the same as Dean and all the demons did. In fact, the demons’ attempts to trade Dean’s soul for John’s (presumably with Lilith’s approval) suggests John might indeed have been snapped early and revealed himself to not be the righteous man. Surely a man who withstood torture in Hell for a century would seem like a righteous man indeed, at which point Lilith et al should have doubled down on their efforts to get him to snap.

Alas, this is all speculation, and the show will never give us clarity on this. Dean, however, seems to completely believe the crossroad demon’s tale that John is still being tortured. During the scene itself we can be forgiven for believing he is pretending in order to lure her into a trap, but even after having watched it several times I am unsure as to how to interpret dean’s behaviour in the scene. Maybe that was the point of Jensen’s acting choices.

The demon eventually agrees to release Evan from his contract in exchange for its own freedom, and seals the deal by noisily pressing the opening of its vessel’s gastric tract against Dean’s without his consent. ‘I like to be warned before I’m violated with demon tongue’ is Dean’s response afterwards, which induces shudders when remembering all the other times Dean has made references to being ‘violated’, or indeed shown being violated as in 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood.

But as stated above, Dean’s refusal to answer Sam’s question about whether or not Dean seriously considered the trade is all the answer I need. The ‘Dark Dean Arc’ might be over, but ‘Dark Dean’ is just getting started.

#edvard's supernatural guide #spn 2x08 #s02e08 #spn meta #2x08 crossroad blues #crossroads demon #dean winchester #sam winchester #supernatural #dark dean #spn rewatch #spn #jensen ackles #castiel #team free will

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destielshippingnews · 1 year

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x13 Houses of the Holy

The thirty fifth episode of Supernatural is a spiritual successor to 1x12 Faith, and like that episode deals with religious belief and faith, particularly as it pertains to Christianity. The show is set in a country which is not only majority Christian, but which takes its Christianity extremely seriously. Britain is relatively close to America and Canada in terms of culture, but there are significant, fundamental differences on both sides of the Atlantic, and one of these is the attitude to religion. Please allow me what may seem like a slight side-track, I promise it is relevant.

There is a saying which goes something like ‘The president of America cannot be elected without God, and the Prime Minister of Britain cannot be elected with God’. What this means is that religion is generally not especially welcome in the upper echelons of administration and governance in Britain, whereas it is imperative in American governance. Americans seem to insist upon religion in every aspect of their lives, whereas the general attitude in Britain (and northern Europe, though Finland is surprisingly religious) is that it is something to be kept to yourself. Of course we have Jewish and Muslim enclaves where religion is omnipresent, and the islands of Lewis and Harris in the Scottish Outer Hebrides still insist on observing Sunday as a sabbath day, but mostly this is an exception to the rule.

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One of the reasons for this is that the church in Britain (excluding the Mormon church and Jehovah’s Witnesses) is by and large a state-run organisation. The Head of State in Britain is the head of the church (Church of England), and without getting into niceties of Catholics, Methodists, Anglicans, or Hillsong, it is generally seen as being a dull, dreary part of the establishment. There is no money to be made in the church business in Britain, because it is not a business. Vicars and priests are generally amicable, unthreatening, and jovial types. They generally do not have much official power or influence, and in my experience at least there is very little in the way of fire and brimstone. The church is largely seen as a harmless institution which is nice to have around but is not especially important in the majority of people’s lives. Many will say they believe in something, or that this can’t be all there is, but when questioned about belief in Jesus or the God of the Bible, they will not believe in them. Britain is de facto agnostic.

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This is a stark contrast to the American and Canadian experience where the population is de facto theist, in the main various varieties of Christian. They have religion shoved down their throat by way of televangelism, daily pledges to the flag and God, giant crucifixes by the roadside, and whatever else my wacky friends like to get up to over there. Whereas most people in Britain will not give a hoot if somebody is atheist, Americans and Canadians seem deeply unsettled by people who do not believe in a god. American Christians seem more comfortable with Hindus, Jews, and Muslims than they do with atheists because at least the ‘infidels’ believe in something. Atheists have no god, and thereby no morals. Strangely, they also think us edgelords, as if the only reason a person could have for not believing in the Christian god is trying to be edgy.

One reason for Christianity being more forceful in America and Canada is that it is not regulated as it is in Britain. Other than Hillsong, there is nothing like the rock concert experience of arena-sized churches with celebrity pastors and priests which seem so beloved of my Trans-Atlantic cousins. There are regular, humble chapels and churches across the pond, but because it can be run like a business, many exploit that opportunity for financial gain, whence dramatic fire-and-brimstone sermons in amphitheatre churches set up like a Céline Dion show. Sermons are shows and Christianity is a product to be sold.

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(I do have first-hand experience of Céline Dion concerts, by the way. And I will not apologise for loving that woman, not to you, not to anyone.)

Bringing this back to Supernatural, I commented in my analysis of 1x12 Faith that Dean’s views on good, evil, God, and the afterlife would not be noteworthy in a British television show. More noteworthy would be somebody taking religion or spirituality seriously, as Sam does in this episode. Because I have a good idea (though no first-hand experience) of what things are like in America and Canada, 2x13 Houses of the Holy missed the mark with me. It induced much eye-rolling as it was sometimes so painfully American in its parochial attitudes to religion.

Before getting into detail on that, a brief summary for those who might have forgotten: Dean and Sam investigate a case involving people who claim to have been visited by an angel who told them to kill certain people it deemed evildoers. Sam is convinced that it is an angel manipulating events, whereas Dean is the Scully in this situation, adamant that it is a ghost or something similar rather than an angel. Events and interviews lead Dean and Sam to a Catholic church and the eventual discovery that it was the recently-departed Father Gregory’s ghost telling the people to kill the evildoers, not an angel. This deflates Sam, who had been hoping for proof angels exist so he could hope for salvation for himself (because of his Azazel problems). Dean, however, who had been the sceptic all along, sees a man ghost!Gregory had marked out for death die in a freak accident and has what appears to be a religious conversion.

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Religious people in America do not apologise for their beliefs, so I will not apologise for my lack thereof, nor for pulling apart the religious or spiritual aspects of this episode. I am an atheist, by which I mean I do not believe a god, gods, or similar deity exists. There is no ideology, moral framework, or spiritual leader in atheism, any more than there is a moral framework or ideology behind not believing in Lugus, Thor, or Veles. Most people are atheists about most of the gods who have ever existed in religions: some of us just go one god further. I am also agnostic, whereby I mean I do not know whether god exists or does not. I cannot say whether God exists or does not, but I do not believe s/he does, and the more time passes, the better able scientific consensus is to explain how things came to be without needing to fill in the gaps of our knowledge with a deity.

Back to the episode: an undertone of a righteousness, a respectability, or a nobility to spiritual belief runs through this episode, and in spite of Britain’s de facto agnosticism, it is a sentiment I am well-acquainted with. This is most clear in the presentation of Sam’s ‘faith’ and his earnest confession to Dean that he does pray every day and has done so for a long time.

By that, I do not mean to say religious believers should be mocked for being religious. If religion helps people deal with being cursed to spend up to five decades in a malfunctioning, slowly-decaying meat suit while watching everybody and everything they love deteriorate under the inexorable grind of entropy, then do it. It if gives you peace, wonderful. I am not interested in taking that away. One of my oldest and dearest friends is an Evangelical Lutheran who I do not believe will ever apostatise into atheism, and I do not care. Two of my friends are heathens, mostly a mix of Buddhism and Ásatru, while yet another is a chaos witch. This does not mean anything to me and makes no difference whatsoever in my relationships with them. I think one of the reasons I enjoy being around my evangelical friend is that his belief seems to be an anchor keeping him stable, and that calm is infectious.

What I do take issue with is the claim that religious or spiritual belief is honourable in itself, perhaps even something to be aspired to, a sign of wisdom. As comforting as it is for people to have their belief, I see it as just a crutch. I take the person seriously, but the belief itself is nothing noble

The discussion of belief leads naturally onto another aspect of the episode which caused chagrin was the myopic nature of Sam’s insistence in angels accompanied by Dean’s claim he saw ‘God’s will’. This is related to another issue I have discussed elsewhere which is the show’s insistence of Abrahamic mythology being the underlying truth behind everything and the superior force in the Superverse. It is certainly colonial in tone, especially in episodes such as 5x19 Hammer of the Gods (another episode which proves Kripke read far too much Neil bloody Gaiman). I am gobsmacked that a show which began with American folklore, urban legends, and ghosts eventually went on a 12-year side-track involving Abrahamic angels, the Christian Heaven and Hell, and a version of the Christian God. Other people seem to love it, and Cas is probably my second favourite character in the show, but it tried my patience on many an occasion. Especially Lucifer: never would I have thought it possible to strip Satan of all presence and threat and leave me thinking ‘Oh, this guy again -_- ‘ every time he was on screen.

Returning to angels, the episode made it clear that we were to interpret angels in a Christian context, but what it did not make clear was why. It is understandable that the ex-prostitute and the drunk guy believed ghost!Gregory was a Christian angel, but that implies the viewer is supposed to also interpret the ‘angel’ as being related to Christianity and Jehovah. Even Dean’s ‘God’s will’ thing at the end reinforced this point, but I want to know why Dean and Sam who have encountered demons, monsters, deities, and other creatures from diverse religions and mythologies both extant and extinct would instantly jump to the conclusion that the Christian explanation is the right one. ‘Angels’ have equivalents in Norse ljósalfar (light-elves, a chief source of inspiration for Tolkien’s elves) for example, or the Irish aos sí (pronounced: uhs shee) and the Scots Gaelic sith (pronounced: shee). Benevolent creatures of light are not exclusive to Abrahamic mythology, and even they came from Zoroastrianism.

For ‘God’s will’ to be behind this is too much of a forced conclusion which felt utterly fake, convenient, and pandering to an American audience’s sentiments when Dean especially should know that no one mythology should be privileged over the other. And why should he be so deeply shaken by one freak accident? If it was ‘God’s will’ that speared the would-be-rapist with a metal pole, why was it not God’s will that he not try to rape the woman in the first place? Or, if God is so omnipotent, why could he not have simply killed him in his sleep, or not made him a rapist in the first place? It is logic like a rusty bucket to claim a bad person getting his comeuppance is God’s will when the same logic can be used to say it was God’s will the person did bad things to begin with. Where was God’ when the university students were locked in the basement, killed, then buried? Where was God when the paedo was doing paedo things? This is simply confirmation bias and I am not buying it. I can buy somebody like Dean being agnostic or deistic because believing religion and religious explanations are nonsense does not equate to atheism or a lack of spirituality. What I could not buy was Dean’s ready jump to ‘God’s will’ as the explanation.

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Dean, I love you to bits, but that was clearly Sera Gamble speaking, not you.

Moving on before the Bible Belt catches wind of me, one thing I did like about this episode was Jensen’s performance. He is religious, though precisely what kind of Christian and to what degree is really none of my business, but he occasionally wears a crucifix necklace and raised money for a Christian youth organisation in Texas when he appeared on Wheel of Fortune in 1998.

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He never seems to talk about it publicly, he does not seem to believe supernatural stuff actually exists, and it does not seem to have turned him into a middle class white-skinned American conservative, though I expect his religious belief is one of the reasons certain people insist he is a homophobe. The reason I brought this up is because his portrayal of Dean as a sceptic and agnostic/atheist for both this episode and 1x12 Faith felt completely accurate and believable. He did not comically exaggerate or straw man anything, which was laudable given the American context.

That said, a closer reading of the episode reveals that Dean’s scepticism is perhaps not as genuine as it might seem (another point of contention I have with the script). After Sam has his close encounter of the third kind in the church’s crypt, he and Dean have a conversation which leads to Dean discussing the fact Mary believed in angels and said ‘Angels are watching over you’ when she put him to bed. In fact, it was the last thing she said to him before she died. Dean therefore cannot believe in the existence of good because Mary did and it availed her nothing: the angels she claimed were watching over them did not save her or her children.

On the one hand, this can be read straight: Dean has only ever seen evil and as a result cannot see good. In my analysis of 1x12 Faith I discussed Interview with the Vampire and Louis’s younger brother Paul who claimed God was talking to him. Nobody believed him, but rather everybody including the priest believed the Devil was speaking to Paul, which indirectly lead to Paul’s untimely death. When we see evil everyday but so little good, it feels almost impossible to believe in good.

However, a reason for Dean’s agnosticism, atheism, or whatever it may be in this episode could also be understood as the patronising straw man so beloved of anti-atheists, that being we are atheists because we hate God due to personal tragedy and trauma. For a perfect example of this, see the Christian propaganda film God is Not Dead, wherein the man who played Hercules in the 1990s plays an atheist professor of philosophy who bullies his theist students. When eventually questioned by a student as to ‘Why do you hate God?’, his response is the cringe-inducing ‘Because he took everything from me!’ whereby he is alluding to the death of his wife and child in an accident.

But worry ye not, Dear Reader, for the tale indeed has a happy ending: the professor is run over at the end of the film, and as he lies dying on the tarmac while nobody thinks to call an ambulance, he professes the existence of God and converts to Christianity.

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Likewise, the presentation of Dean’s agnosticism and probable atheism is the result of his anger, bereavement, and a probable animosity towards forces of good for abandoning, failing, and betraying him and Mary. This is not presented unsympathetically or as a caricature: Dean has very good reason to be angry at the angels he will later learn exist, and anybody who has been through what he has would be hard-pressed to believe in good. However, Dean’s own words lead to the conclusion that part of his refusal to believe is that it would be too painful to believe that good exists, yet suffered him to endure everything he went through after and including Mary’s immolation.

Mary’s death for Dean is the equivalent of Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden: he can never go back to the paradise of somebody who loved him unconditionally. It is much easier to believe that it was all just chaotic evil which wrested him from that life into a life of abuse, violence, fear, and the certainty of dying young and bloody. Because if something good let that happen, Dean will have to face the ocean of seething, bubbling fury such a revelation might unleash.

As will be seen later in the show, Dean is scared of his anger. Far be it from me to psychoanalyse people, but this is likely a result of his lifelong abasement of his self and desires for other people, as well as his internalisation of his own disposability and inferiority. Other people have a right to be angry and to express it, but not Dean. He is not worthy to be angry at others: all he is worthy of being the object of other people’s ire. But it has to come out somehow and sometime… Which is why Dean should have been the main antagonist at some point. Not for the first time and not for the last time I have three words in mind: Such potential, Supernatural.

To bring this back to the point I was trying to make, there is the potential to interpret Dean’s claimed atheism or agnosticism as being like God is not Dead: that it is really merely anger at God for injustices experienced, or an unwillingness to believe in God in order to keep living in sin without consequences. Given Dean’s bullshit conversion at the end of the episodes after a freak accident, I think this might have been what the takeaway was supposed to be.

Allhamdulillah Dean’s conversion is very short-lived. Why does Sera Gamble make me cringe so hard? That reminds me, 2x17 Heart is fast approaching. Beam me up, Scotty…

After very nearly 3,000 words spent on that, it is time to change the topic of discussion slightly to the show’s in-world mythology. Ghost!Gregory was no angel, and unless I am very much mistaken there is no lore within Christian scripture claiming humans become angels upon death, though such beliefs have become widespread among Christians and western cultures in general. That said, ghost!Gregory was himself convinced God was speaking to him, which raises the question of whether or not an angel or even God was indeed communicating with him. Father Reynolds claims murdering is antithetical to God, so it could not possibly be God or an angel speaking to ghost!Gregory, but I think the Canaanites might have something to say on that count, due to God giving their land to the Israelites and permitting the Israelites to enact genocide upon them.

That aside, a lot of attention is drawn to Archangel Michael in this episode, and Paula R. Stiles even likened the metal pole which skewered the would-be rapist to Michael’s spear (read here). I doubt it, but to each his own. It is interesting to think that Michael would be circling Dean so closely this early in the show, and as Paula R. Stiles also pointed out, Dean is shot in such a way in the church that he appears powerful, otherworldly, and supernatural.

She almost made a comment on Michael having a flaming sword, implying the sword itself has power and by extension that Dean is somehow supernaturally powerful in some way. Unfortunately this never amounted to much in the show, with Dean’s supernatural influence being more passive than active. However, he is flaming like the Hindenburg, and nobody can convince me otherwise.

Moving on…

I have heretofore neglected to discuss Sam in much detail, in part because I am aware some readers may find my constant excoriation of Sam wearisome. It is hard for me to see him as much of a character when he is so blatantly Kripke’s self-insert Mary Sue. Whereas I can write reams of text on almost any aspect of Dean, Sam simply has not been allowed to be messy, wrong, or especially complicated hitherto, meaning there is precious little for me to sink my teeth into. This is no real fault of Jared’s, as his acting thus far has been passable and nothing he has done has yet made me think ‘That there is a man acting’. Neither though has be done anything of particular interest with his acting choices, though this is likely mostly down to the writing. One of the big issues with the writing for Sam in series two is that the viewer is supposed to believe Sam is falling under the influence of Azazel’s demonic taint (mind out of the gutters, ladies and gentlemen!), but nothing has happened yet to justify such a fear. Dean’s behaviour in 2x03 Bloodlust and 2x04 Children shouldn’t Play with Dead Things gave cause for concern, and 2x09 Croatoan could have been the turning point for Dean, but nothing comparable has happened to Sam yet, nor will it do for the rest of series 2. Consequently, I do not know why I should care about Sam thinking he is a freak and wanting to be saved when I have not seen any evidence – direct or otherwise – to seriously suggest he needs saving. If anything, Dean is the one on the way to becoming a monster, not Sam, and this is a major flaw in the writing. We are told one thing, but shown another whilst being expected to pay more attention to what we are told.

Accordingly, Sam’s insistence that angels be behind the murdered bad people does not have any of the gravitas it should. Sam wanted to believe in angels because if he believes in good, then he can believe that he can be saved from Azazel’s taint (see above RE: gutters), but what exactly does he need to be saved from? He has not murdered or come close to murdering anybody, he has not exhibited any strange powers other than premonitions and one instance of telekinesis, and his sanity and grasp on reality seem intact and sound. The only worrisome thing relating to him is his teenage immaturity and his parochialism. As a result, in this episode he comes off as more irritating and arch than desperate and despairing. He is weirdly offended and myopic when Dean will not believe in angels, and makes embarrassing leaps of logic to come to the conclusion that angels and only angels can possibly be behind the murders. He is so see-through I wonder how anybody can think he is the brains of the outfit. Surely somebody such as he should be aware of what the God of the Gaps is, and should instantly recognise that his own argumentation amounts to Angel of the Gaps.

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To be frank, he is almost as cringy as his performative bereavement and behaviour-policing in 2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown. If this is Kripke’s self-insert, my question is ‘why’? Given some of his cringe-inducing, eye-roll statements regarding Soldier Boy and ‘toxic masculinity’ on The Boys (a show where almost everybody who dies a horrible, on-screen death is a man; where men are victims of sexualised violence on-screen and the audience is supposed to laugh at it; and where episode 3x01 Payback began with a gay/bi man dying a graphic, bloody death in a way related explicitly to sex) I get serious I’m not like other boys, pick me vibes.

And I am not going to forgive him for getting Jensen to unironically use the term ‘toxic masculinity’, either. (For those of you who do not know why I object to the term ‘toxic masculinity’, please read my post Deancrits, Don't @ Me. Long story short: 'toxic masculinity' is the 2010s equivalent of 'female hysteria'.)

Given the fact that the writers of The Boys thought it appropriate to not only kill one of the only confirmed gay/bi men on the show in a way explicitly related to same-sex intercourse in an episode aired on the first day of Pride Month 2022, I think there is another kind of toxicity in the writers’ room of The Boys which needs to be addressed.

(The scene below involves a lot of blood and guts, so be warned.)

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Returning to the subject of Sam, I wonder where Sam from 2x07 The Usual Suspects has gone. Every other Sam is either pissy, whiny, self-centred, irritating, or a combination of all four and I do not like having to dislike a character like this constantly. Xander in Buffy definitely has his vexatious moments, but at least he has the excuse of being a stupid teenager for the first few series of the show. All Sam has is being forced into a situation not of his choosing and being forced to spend time with a brother whom he resents. That resentment came across loud and clear with him being pissy at Dean enjoying the vibrating beds. I have commented many a time on Sam not letting Dean have his fun, and while I may be projecting a bit (is not all interpretation influenced by projection?) I have made it clear it looks a lot like efforts at control through shame, disapproval, and anger. (Such tactics, by the way, were so beloved of John, as evidenced in 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood.) It would have been so easy for Sam to just let Dean have his fun on the bed, and to go to the vending machines if the sight of somebody enjoying himself had bothered him so much.

Speaking of exhaustion, I believe I have exhausted all I have to say on the subject of this episode. It tried to do something, but the writer’s bias was a bit too obvious and – dare I say? – American mainstream, a little bit like once you know Stephanie Meyer is Mormon, you can only view Twilight in a certain light. This is ironic, given Sera Gamble is a Jewish witch, but whatever. She also writes ‘Gothic erotica’, which should not surprise me given 2x17 Heart. I am not looking forward to watching and discussing that soap opera.

#edvard's supernatural guide #spn 2x13 #2x13 houses of the holy #s02e13 #spn meta #spn rewatch #supernatural #dean winchester #sam winchester #the boys #christianity #atheism #Youtube

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destielshippingnews · 2 years

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown

Supernatural’s twenty fourth episode is another one which I remembered dimly from my first watch between Christmas and New Year 2008. Dean and Sam walking along the road after ditching the car, the killer clown, and even Harvelle’s Roadhouse and the carnival were all familiar when I rejoined the show in 2015. What I did not remember, however, was how insufferable Sam is in this episode. I never cared at all for Sam even in 2008, but my indifference turned to hostility with this episode in 2015. It was only the second episode I watched as I got back into the show in London, but that was all it took for me to want to reach through the screen and slap Sam in the face with a fish. Things have only got worse in the seven years since, but beginnings are usually a prudent place to begin, ergo...

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2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown begins at a carnival in Medford, Wisconsin (the same state 1x03 Dead in the Water and 1x18 Something Wicked were set in, and just across the river from Stillwater, Minnesota, where Donna lives and works. People who care about Swedish literature might also recognise Stillwater from The Emigrants series). The cold open begins with a red balloon bursting in front of the camera, and then a few shots of performers and clowns. It was not until rewatching this episode last night that I realised the very obvious reference to Stephen Kings IT which features red balloons associated with a killer clown prominently.

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Of course, the ’clown’ in IT is not a clown at all, but an entity from the primordial chaos (The Prim) which existed before the universe who can adopt the disguise of a clown to lure in prey. Its true form is beyond our human capacity to perceive and understand, but its closest representative is a giant spider (almost definitely inspired by Ungoliantë and Shelob from Tolkien’s work). If we were to see its real form, we would be driven mad by it (in case you missed it, Stephen King is indeed a fan of Lovecraft. As was Tolkien, funnily enough). This is not especially relevant to this episode of Supernatural, but what is is the trauma It inflicted on the protagonists in the 1950s when they were children (I believe the years were changed in the recent remake with the Bill Skarsgård brother as Pennywise, but in the original novel from 1986 the adults are in the 1980s and the children in the 1950s).

The relevance I see IT having with this episode of Supernatural is both cosmetic but also thematic. Childhood trauma plays a significant role in IT, so much so that one of the adults dies by suicide rather than go back to Derry to face It. In the cold open of 2x02, a monster in clown form kills a child’s parents in front of her.

Not the most important or necessary reference to Stephen King we could have had, but let me repeat: a child sees her parents killed in front of her in the episode following John’s death in 2x01 In My Time of Dying. As if to drive this point home, the title card is immediately followed by John’s funeral pyre. As with the connection between Dean and Francis Dolarhyde/The Great Red Dragon I discussed in my analysis of 1x06 Skin, the show has made a connection between Dean, Sam, and the protagonists in IT who are dealing with fear and mental wounds left by experiences with monsters in childhood. I read the novel a decade ago when I could still read 1,400 pages in less than a month, but it still took me all this time to make the link.

The clown in this episode is not a clown at all, but rather a demon from India. Had Sam not told the viewer the rakshasa was Indian, I would have had no idea whatsoever because it had no Indian aesthetics at all. Even the man playing the rakshasa was white-skinned (though if American carnies are anything like their British and Irish peers, there is a chance a man looking like him had some Roma ancestry not too long ago). Episode 1x11 Scarecrow also suffered the same problem with its ’Scandinavian’ deity who had no Scandinavian aesthetics at all, but could instead have been anything from any mythos or any part of the world. Even though the townsfolk were supposed to be descendants of Scandinavian immigrants, there was not a single Dannebrog, Dalahäst, or Marius jumper to be seen. It really was to the episode’s detriment that the Indian vibes were conspicuous by their absence.

Also to the shows detriment was that it did not explore the nature of how the rakshasa lures in children in order to get to their parents. I eventually came to the conclusion that it must be enacting some variety of mind-control or subconscious suggestion on the children. When the girl is lying in bed, she is roused by a faint noise from outside which was barely audible. If we compare this to the girl in the cold open of 1x18 Something Wicked who filled her knickers with shepherd’s pie when she heard the shtriga outside at night, it appears more is going on than meets the eye. I had to come to this conclusion because no child is so stupid as to open the door to a homeless-looking clown at god knows what time of the night. Surely not.

Something Paula R. Stiles raises in her own analysis of this episode is the fact that Dean makes friends with the monster before he realises it is a monster. He will go on to do the same in 2x03 Bloodlust, and it must be alienating and deeply unsettling for him to befriend and form bonds with people who turn out to be monsters. What does that say about him? See above RE: Francis Dolarhyde.

My own view of that is Dean definitely has the potential to be a terrible person. A wish I had for the show was that Dean become the villain at some point, and by Dean I do not mean Dean posessed by an angel or Dean as a demon, but just normal Dean. People are not good because they are born good: they are good because they choose to be good. And vice versa. So what if Dean had chosen at some point to give in to the demons of his worse nature, perhaps in order to avoid dealing with his trauma and accepting that he was the victim of other people’s horrendous actions.

Dean is shown throughout the show having relationships of various kinds with monsters, demons, and ’bad’ people. This ’darkness’ is a part of him, and for years I hoped he would be allowed to release it and eventually be forced to fight against it. For those of you who have watched Buffy, this sounds a lot like Faith. Dean is both the Buffy and the Faith of Supernatural, but not for the first time and most definitely not for the last I am forced to sigh and say: Such potential, Supernatural. Such potential.

Also interesting is the fact that the rakshasa is very keen on not hitting Dean with its throwing knives, even when it has a clear shot. It also appears very keen on making sure Dean sees it gank Sam. Other than that, I have little to say about the rakshasa, but the way Dean and Sam worked together to kill it was believable and realistic. Neither of them was overpowered, but rather their coöperation in the funhouse saved the day. If their relationship were more like this, I would enjoy their brotherhood much more. They could and should have been the next Mulder and Scully (Dean was right, by the way: Sam is Scully, Dean is Mulder, though Sam could never even hold a candle to Scully).

Regarding Mulder and Scully, this episode brought to mind episode 2x20 Humbug of The X-Files, an episode directed by Kim Manners (producer and director of Supernatural) which centred on a murdered ’Alligator Man’ from a travelling circus. Like this episode of Supernatural, that episode features a final fight in a funhouse.

Perhaps more interesting is a comment made by the owner of the circus who says that his dad used to own a travelling freak show, until freak shows were made illegal and the ’freaks’ were sent to asylums. I cannot be the only person whose mind went to 1x10 Asylum and the ghosts of Dr Ellicot’s torture victims. American Horror Story – Freak Show also came to mind, as well as the fact that one or two characters seen in the freak show were also in American Horror Story – Asylum which was set a decade or two after Freak Show.

Moving swiftly on, this episode also introduced the Harvelles. I did not especially care about them when I first watched the show, nor upon rewatch in 2015 (or re-rewatch in 2015), and I have to unfortunately say I still do not care too much about them in 2022, even after watching the whole show four or five times. The biggest reason is the fact that they are not in prominent roles, and barely appear after episode 2x06 No Exit. Kripke has admitted on various occasions that he only included the Harvelles because the producers wanted the brothers to have a fixed location as a base of operations, a bit like the library in Buffy. He resented their presence on the show and could not think of anything to do with them.

This is a shame. At this point in the story, Dean and Sam are very familiar to the viewer, and other ancillary characters have been undeveloped and scarce. John is dead, Meg is exorcised, and Bobby is yet to become a recurring character. While Dean and Jensen’s acting can more than carry this show, having extra characters makes the world bigger and more vibrant, even if the characters in question are not especially important or heavily-featured.

Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation has very little plot relevance (at least in the episodes I have seen so far). She could be cut from the story and very little would change, but she provides wit and sage advice, a respite for the crew and audience from the main drama, and adds another voice to the story. Likewise, Lorne in Angel had very little to do with Angel Investigations for quite a while, but his presence livened up the show and made it all the richer.

My point is that the characters do not need to be essential to the plot to be included as more than a side-note. For example, Ash and Dean clearly bounce off each other in a way that begs to be explored more, and I would love to see more of Ellen. Jo is presented (unsuccessfully) as a potential love interest for Dean (as is Ash, but much more subtly), but her sisterly chemistry with the boys could be developed to great effect. If all we have is the essential plot and infrequent side notes, we have melody but no chords or embellishment.

Unfortunately, Jo was not written well as a potential love interest for Dean, and some of the female fans hated Jo with Dean. Even Jensen has referred to this in an oblique manner. At a Jus in Bello convention panel, somebody asked him whether he could see Dean settling down with somebody at any point. His response was that ’If there were ever a huntress... you would all kill her.’

One of the problems I have with Jo is that she is not introduced in a positive light. Rather, she reminds me too much of a character who is supposed to be a Bad Ass Bitch, but who is actually a douchenozzle.

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She clearly does not know how to use a gun properly as Dean points out, and because she has the barrel jammed into his back

Dean’s line ’Oh, please let that be a gun’ also raised question marks, especially given the show’s subtle hints that Dean was forced into something akin to prostitution, and the likelihood he was almost date-raped at one point when very much underage. It could have been simply a joke, but it makes one wonder what else Dean has had jammed into his back against his will.

I am so happy John is burning in Hell. Burn, motherfrakker, burn!

Of course, right after Dean disarms Jo, she punches him in the face, which is not surprising considering she made the assumption he was...what, an intruder? A murderer? A rapist? I have no idea, nobody ever says why Ellen and Jo were so suspicious. Dean and Sam hardly made a secret of their being in the Harvelles’ pub, nor were they acting shifty. Was this just more manufactured drama? Probably. Anyway, Jo smacks Dean in the face hard enough to hurt him, because a tiny slip of a girl can easily punch a tall man in the face hard enough to hurt and phase him like that. At least she can take a punch, though, showing the viewer that she actually is on an equal footing with the male characters around her. She punched Dean in the face, and he punched her right back.

Oh wait, no he did not. Why? What reason is there for Dean to not hit her back afterwards, especially considering she took the gun back (how?)? Is this a chivalrry thing? Is this because Jo’s a girl and boys cannot hit girls or something? Is that what this is? Because the only other reason I can think of is that the writer did not want Dean decking his potential love interest at first meeting? If he had done that, it would have reset her brain back to factory settings, but it would also have shown the viewer that not only can Jo punch like a man, she can also take a hit like a man and keep going, just like Meg.

But of course we cannot have women being treated as men’s equals on television. Sure we can have them disarming a 6”1’ squirrel whose life has revolved around fighting, but actually having them able to take a man’s punches would just be too too damn much. They are only girls after all, we cannot expect them to be able to take that kind of treatment.

So let us take a brief look at Big Sky.

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The two lead characters Jenny and Cassie are both women, and neither of them is ever treated as less competent or dangerous than the men around them. They definitely not male characters in women’s bodies, but they can absolutely fire a gun, take a punch, and put their lives in danger to save others. They never do anything stupid (unlike Jo in 2x06 No Exit), and I am completely behind them as characters. The show does sort of have a problem with almost all of the bad guys being men and almost all the victims being women. Beau’s (Jensen’s character’s) old-fashioned assumptions about women not knowing cars and Jenny getting uppity when he called her ’darlin’ was a little on-the-nose and unrealistic, but it was not too distracting.

Anyway, speaking of ’on-the-nose’, Jo offers no apology for assaulting Dean based on false assumptions, but rather proceeds to look smug as he sits with an ice pack pressed against his head. Was I supposed to laugh at the ice pack? Was I supposed to think ’haha, big muscly man got hit by a girl’? And was I also supposed to think that Jo was strong, capable, and dangerous?

If it is funny that she hit him, then it cannot be true that she is strong, otherwise what is there to laugh about? It cannot be funny that she hurt Dean, otherwise her strength is undermined.

This is one of the oxymorons and contradictions I was very aware of growing up with a penis. Girls are super and can do anything boys can do. They can do it better, in fact, because boys are stupid and you should throw rocks at them. The girl power of the 1990s was all about female chauvinism, as I discussed in my essay about Max kicking Alec in Dark Angel. But at the same time, boys should not hit girls because boys are stronger than girls, and only gays and wife-beaters hit girls. So are girls on an equal footing with boys? Or are they delicate little flowers to be shielded and protected from us? Make your choice and stick with it.

Having grown up with five sisters, one of whom set fire to the girls’ toilets at secondary school, one of whom managed to piss on the floor while sitting on the toilet, and one who sometimes did not flush the toilet after menstruating, I have no illusions about them being precious, delicate flowers.

Taking a step away from the lavotory for a moment, why was this Dean-bashing in the episode following John’s death? Jo hits Dean, the carnies have fun at Dean’s expense (with Sam letting them do it), Sam’s a douche. Tell me Dean is supposed to be the sidekick character without telling me he was supposed to be the sidekick character. About half the new characters in this episode specifically target Dean for ’jokes’ and jibes, whereas none of this is aimed at Sam. The more I write these analyses, the less I feel inclined to apologise for hyperfocusing on Dean and giving Sam short shrift: the show treated Dean like something it stepped in, and I want to redress the balance.

Jo also tries hitting on Dean (a completely tactless move given his dad has only just died), but it comes across more as a ’I am so hot and everybody wants to get in my knickers’ brag than ’Sorry I hit you in the face, would you like me to give you a massage to relieve your tension?’ She seems boastful, especially her claim that every hunter who comes through the door tries to get into her knickers with beer, pizza, and Led Zeppelin. I think I can see what the writer of this episode (and the writers in general) were trying to do with Jo, but it did not work. She seemed more like a try-hard and an amateur than a competent hunter-in-training who would be a romantic match for Dean. She is more like a sister, and even Dean realises this quite early on in this episode. He says ’wrong time, wrong place’, but his heart does not seem to be in any of his flirtations. This is most probably a mix of acting out of habit, being recently bereaved, and there being nothing between them.

Apropos Led Zeppelin, if Dean tried beer, pizza, and Zep with me, we would be upside-down and halfway to Happyland within five minutes.

Please note also, Dear Reader, that Ellen said John ’was like family once’. Whatever could that mean? Well, John has one confirmed illigitimate child named Adam: is Jo John’s daughter and Dean and Sam’s half-sister? Perhaps.

As for Ash, if you stop assuming Dean is straight unless proven 100% otherwise, the interactions between him and Ash are unmistakably flirty. They compliment each other (calling Ash a Skynyrd roadie is a big compliment from Dean), Dean gives him flirt-face, and there is even a wink involved. Ash makes a reference to ‘being all over it like Divine on dog dookie’, this being a reference to drag queen Divine who ate dog poo in the gay cult film Pink Flamingos. Why would he make this reference if he was not sure Dean would get it?

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Dean enters Harvelle’s Roadhouse and has both Jo and Ash wrapped around his finger in minutes. That kind of power should be illegal.

Moving on, John’s funeral pyre scene at the beginning of the episode shows how like chalk and cheese Dean and Sam are. Sam is more obvious with his bereavement, his tears flowing freely and his grief plain to see on his face (why did we have none of this after Jess died?). Dean, however, is stony, stoic silence. He will receive a lot of bother from Sam for this ’strong, silent’ act, but even knowing what John told him and where Dean goes in the next few episodes, neither brother’s reaction here seems out of the ordinary. Crying about your dad’s death is normal, as is not crying about it. Sam’s inability to understand other people’s grief does not negate that.

Apropos Sam’s inability to understand expressions of grief that are not obvious, this is the source of the conflict between him and Dean in this episode, and it is the thing which caused my detestation-induced tumescence to reach full-mast. Sam stans, gird your loins and come at me.

Dean reticence and Sam’s mainstream, easily-digested expression of grief contrast sharply. Sam is supposed to be the general viewer’s gateway into the Winchesters’ parallel world, and he is used as a tool by the writers to give information about Dean that Dean would not reveal of his own volition, e.g. that he loved Cassie in 1x13 Route 666.

This is all well and good from a Doyle (extra-textual) perspective, but from a Watson (from inside the story) perspective, Sam’s behaviour when trying to get Dean to talk about his feelings is controlling, manipulative and downright disrespectful. That it is also self-absorbed goes without saying. I understand John Shiban who wrote this episode wanted to draw attention to the fact Dean was not talking about his feelings, but what he accomplished is creating a character who behaves as though he wants to dictate how others should process their bereavement and grief.

According to Dean, Sam had been asking him repetitively whether or not he was alright to the point of pestering him. On the one hand, Sam was grieving too and likely needed to share it with Dean, but as far as we know, he did not do this. Had he sat down near Dean while Dean fixed the car and said something along the lines of ‘Can I just sit here, maybe talk sometimes if I need to? I don’t want to be alone’, things would have been very different. Had Dean’s response been a snarky comment (which it almost certainly would not have been if he could sense Sam was serious), then Sam would be justified in being pissy.

Perhaps this happened and the viewer never saw it, but what we did see was Sam not respecting that the person he was speaking to was an adult and had no obligation to behave in a way comfortable or convenient to Sam. Dean made it clear he did not want to talk, as is his prerogative. Had Sam backed down then, I would have less of a quarrel with him. He is, after all, very young to be burdened with bereavement, especially so soon after his possibly-pregnant girlfriend died, and he is permitted an ounce of stupidity. However, rather than giving his brother space, he (in true Sam fashion) escalated the situation by turning it into a shouting match. I was considering giving him some lenience, but in the blink of an eye he was a sanctimonious fishwife. I wanted to rip my ears off and ram them down his throat. Was this in the script or was it Jared’s acting choices? Either way, I want to speak to the manager.

Their first argument in the episode is understandable, and the conflict forgivable. They are both young and suffering an immense loss. Nobody in that situation is going to act rationally, sensibly, or indeed decently all the time. In times like that, the facade that life means something falls away, as do our pretences that anything we do matters, and we are left facing the indifference of the universe. It takes its toll to skirt that close to the void, so Sam’s irritating behaviour and Dean’s prickly but reasonable withdrawal are not to be held against them. Had Sam kept his mouth shut after Dean shut it for him at the beginning of the episode, I would not have much quarrel with Sam.

But not only did he refuse to let up, he once again escalated the situation halfway through the episode by outright demanding Dean process his loss in a way Sam believes is appropriate.

For those of you who have forgotten, this happens after Dean and Sam stake out the young family’s home and hilariously blast the rakshasa through the glass door with a rock salt round. They ditch the ‘soccer mom’ minivan in some trees somewhere and walk back to the Harvelles’ (which is apparently located in Nebraska, a whole two states away from Wisconsin). Whilst walking down a dirt road, Sam gets all misty eyed and cringey about ‘doing what Dad would have wanted’. Dean does not really respond to this, instead falling silent in what anybody with more empathy that a teaspoon could tell is a declaration that he does not want to talk about it.

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Sam, of course, being the small yappy-type dog he is, yips and yaps at Dean for this. ‘Don’t go all maudlin on me, man.’

I am not a violent man, but there is just something about Sam’s behaviour which brings the violence to the fore. My response to Sam’s ’maudlin’ comment involved a certain curse word which one is not allowed to say in Canada. He is a yapping chihuahua who has not learnt that yapping at a German Shepherd is a sure way to get a giant paw in your face. I wish Dean had decked Sam in the middle of the road and left him in the dirt for that. Dean’s dad just died and Sam has the audacity to call him ’maudlin’ when Dean is the one keeping himself in check and not bringing John up all the time.

Far be it from me to bring gendered behaviour into these analyses, but I think one of the big issues here is that Sam does not understand how men tend to deal with emotions. He is far from being alone in this, as contrary to popular belief, many experiences and behaviours exclusive or most common among men are not portrayed as the norm or the default. I have had to learn a lot about men and men’s psychology as an adult because I plainly did not have any exposure to it in childhood. I am cissexual, but this is something my trans friend and I share: we had to learn this for ourselves because nobody taught us it. Perhaps because I had to learn this like a second language, I can recognise a lot in Dean which is typical of men, or rather masculine people (because man =/= masculine and masculine =/=man).

Dean insists on multiple occasions in this episode that he is ‘okay’, and many people take this to be a clear lie, or a man repressing his emotions, or a man not being able to understand or process his emotions. What I hear him say, though, is ‘I’m coping’, and that is a very different thing. Of course he is not ‘alright’ if by ‘alright’ one means he is not suffering immensely after the loss of one of the most important people in his life. He is (or believes he is) managing to keep his head above water.

There is, however, an aspect of pretending to be ‘okay’ because he does not want people to pry. This is nothing unusual, but is normal behaviour for men. It is a truism that women do not want to have sex before they are ready, otherwise they feel cheapened; likewise men do not want to talk about our emotions before we are ready, otherwise we feel cheapened. Even when we do talk, most people are not listening anyway, and some are looking for things they can use as weapons against us. It takes a lot for a man to trust a person enough to talk openly to him or her (or whatever variation thereupon takes your fancy), and do let us not forget that Sam has given Dean little reason to believe he can be trusted with Dean’s vulnerability.

Not only has Sam been physically aggressive without provocation (1x08 Bugs), shot at him twice without ever offering real apology (1x10 Asylum), and belittled Dean’s bereavement at Mary’s death (1x11 Scarecrow), but he acts like an overgrown teenager. Worse, he attacked Dean after Dean refused to share his grief with Sam, a sure-fire sign that Sam does not have Dean’s best interests at heart or in mind, but rather wants something for himself. He is not able to offer Dean the surety, calmness, and reliability he would need in order to allow himself to be vulnerable and confide in his brother, any more than I would lean on my teenage nephew for emotional support whilst newly orphaned.

Something which sprang to mind when thinking of Dean’s bereavement was Men’s Sheds, an international organisation which arranges spaces for men (usually exclusively men).

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The point of this is to give mainly older and elderly men whose support network of friends and family is gone due to death, divorce, or whatever else a community of other men in similar positions a time and space to get together and work on DIY projects, fix cars, or just have a cup of tea and watch football with other men. It is usually specifically for men for the same reasons women have female-specific groups: straight, gay, bi, cis, and trans men can be more comfortable and communicate easier in single-sex company because they are around people who speak the same language as them and share the same experiences. Men’s Sheds are built around the idea that men talk shoulder to shoulder, not face to face. What this means is that men form bonds with other men by working on things with them, and eventually will start talking when sufficiently comfortable.

Crying is also something which comes harder to most men than it seems to for women. Our tear ducts are longer and wider, our tear glands smaller, and our bodies do not produce as much of the hormone which induces the crying reaction. The aforementioned trans friend was shocked at how much harder it was for him to cry once he had been on testosterone for a while. Trying to cry was like trying to defecate whilst constipated. I cry, but only once or twice a year, and when I do there are usually very few tears. Emotions have to be relieved elsewise.

Anger is one of the most common ways men relieve these emotions. People are scared of anger, particularly men’s anger, but anger is neither good nor bad: it just is. Anger is the body’s way of helping you focus and on finding a solution to a problem, using physical force if necessary. A solution to dealing with these negative emotions is finding something to focus energy on, such as gardening, building a model railway, fixing the roof, or fixing a car.

Fixing the car is exactly what Dean is doing as the episode proper begins. As he himself states:

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...You got any leads on where the demon is? Making heads or tails of any of Dad's research? Because I sure ain't. But you know, if we do finally find it - oh. No, wait, like you said. The Colt's gone. But I'm sure you've figured out another way to kill it. We've got nothing, Sam. Nothing, okay? So you know the only thing I can do? Is I can work on the car.

Doing something like this can make a person feel capable, needed, and strong enough to keep going. Jordan Peterson gives the example of a young man who lost his father; Jordan’s advice to the son was to be the strongest, most reliable person at his father’s funeral. In being a support for other people, the son felt needed and had something to focus on. This helped him more than any amount of crying or chick-flick moments, and this is – generally speaking – true of men. We do not really want to talk about our emotions for talking’s sake. We want to find ways to solve the problems our emotions are telling us we are having. Or, failing that, find a way to make us feel strong enough to shoulder our burden and carry on.

This accounts for part of the silent, stoic act Sam gets angry about. Dean does not want to fall apart under the weight of his grief: he wants to keep himself and his inner workings in check so he can either find a solution to his problems or find the strength to carry on. Add to this the fact Dean cannot rely on anybody to pick him back up if he falls apart – definitely not Sam – and it is reasonable and frankly admirable that Dean manages to screw his testicles on every morning and keep going at near full capacity. I will try to emulate his strength the day I have to carry my dad’s coffin to his grave.

Dean’s way of coping is a traditionally masculine way of managing difficult emotions: keep control and keep going. Being able to do this generally helps men many orders of magnitude more than talking, because it makes us feel strong. This is, however, officially pathologised in American psychiatric circles, and ideas of ‘toxic masculinity’ have been leaking out into the mainstream for years. If people spoke instead of ‘men and women’s poisonous expectations and demands of men’, then we would suddenly be on the same page. But I see nothing ‘poisonous’ or ‘toxic’ in Dean not falling apart and weeping like a helpless damsel who just needs the right man’s penis to solve all her problems. Rather, it is a different but equally valid way of doing things.

That said, everybody needs an environment in which talking, crying, and relying on others is possible, acceptable, and encouraged if needed and wanted. I speak from experience. Dean does not have this: he cannot rely on or trust Sam. It is all well and good saying ‘you need to talk’, but to whom can Dean talk to and trust to be able to cope with what he has to say?

Nobody.

In this very episode, Sam showed Dean clearly that he does not have his back when the carnies started making fun of him in front of Sam. I was supposed to laugh at this, but after Dean had just lost his father?!?! Frak you, Show. Frak you with something hard and sand-papery.

By the way, if you want funny, this is funny!

In my opinion, Dean’s method is much healthier than Sam’s manipulative grief-policing, at least in the short term. Sam displays no sympathy or understanding of Dean, and is clearly not in control of himself. He lacks control of himself to such a degree that he tries to control other people instead. Sometimes Sam appears to genuinely love and care for Dean, but too often he treats his older brother like an embarrassing irritation he wishes he could control.

That being said, Dean is clearly not okay, but nothing about his behaviour in this episodes is untoward or unusual for a man who has just come back from the dead and whose father has just died. We will have to wait until episode 2x03 Bloodlust and 2x04 Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things to see that there is more than ‘normal’ bereavement at play, and do let us not forget 2x09 Croatoan.

The episode ends with a scene where Sam almost apologises to Dean for being a rectal irrigation implement and admitting how much he is struggling with John’s death.

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Were it not for his douchey behaviour earlier in the episode, I might have been willing to give him a pass after this, but I still have his screechy fishwife act ringing in my ears. Perhaps I sound as though I am taking this personally, but I have been in a situation like Dean where I was ‘okay’ but somebody kept pestering me to talk in spite of my clearly not wanting to. Said person then got angry at me, shouted at me, and bitched about me in front of other people, all because s/he would not leave me be and could not accept not being in control of me. I recognise a lot of poisonous behaviour and attitudes in Sam which I have dealt with in my real life, and I am not here for them.

Something else I recognised was Sam’s attempt at control at the end. He said ‘I’m not okay’, which would have been all well and good, but he had to finish it with a ‘But neither are you. That much I know.’ Good for you, Captain Obvious, you are Big Smart. Unfortunately what you lack is empathy and wisdom. It is hard enough keeping oneself together and carrying on, but having other people see right through that, prying and poking, makes the whole ordeal a bigger challenge. Letting people maintain their illusion of structural integrity is sometimes the wise choice.

At the end of the episode, Dean watches Sam leave, then smashes the window of a nearby car with a hammer. Once that seal is broken, it is impossible to turn back the tide, and Dean inflicts serious damage on the car he has spent so long repairing. Why exactly he does this is uncertain, but a combination of grief and anger is obvious. The car is a lot of things to Dean: it is his prized possession, his home, and a representation of the burden John placed on him. Paula R. Stiles notes also that he focuses his attention on smashing the boot where all the hunting implements are kept, suggesting anger and a host of other emotions relating to being forced into the hunting life. She also mentioned that he stared after Sam before smashing his car up, but this could just have been him making sure his brother was out of sight and earshot.

The closing shot of the episode is of the blank death-stare Jensen is so good at doing. Forgive the cliché, but the best word I can summon to mind to describe his expression is ‘empty’: he has too many thoughts in his mind for any of them to be coherent. He has lost all hope, and the burden of becoming a fratricide when his identity has been formed around protecting and providing for others is tearing him apart. He is also likely aware as early as this that John traded his life and the colt for Dean, and Dean has already been living with survivor’s guilt since 1x12 Faith. He believes he should suffer for others, but others are suffering for him, and he believes he will have to kill those he wanted to protect. He cannot express any of this in words, not even conceptualise it. so all that remains is a blank, thousand-mile stare.

Dean’s structural integrity is compromised, and the centre cannot hold. Watch it unravel over the course of series two. But before you go and forget everything you just read, I have enough gifs remaining to share this:

Look at his wee little outfit!

#Youtube #edvard's supernatural guide #spn meta #spn rewatch #spn 2x02 #jo harvelle #dean winchester #supernatural #sam winchester #IT #stephen king #rakshasa #male psychology #s02e02 #2x02 everybody loves a clown #dean is bi #bi!dean

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destielshippingnews · 1 year

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x11 Playthings

Supernatural’s thirty first episode is an atmospheric Gothic affair which unfortunately suffers from quite a bit of stupidity from several characters and ends up being a mess at the end. In its defence, the rules of ghosts were not quite set in stone at the time this episode was written and aired, but in hindsight it stands out like a things which should not stand out in the history of Supernatural’s ghost stories.

To briefly summarise the episode, after apparently searching for Ava for a few weeks and finding nothing, Dean and Sam go to investigate some strange deaths at a hotel in Connecticut. The hotel is family-owned and appears to be in the country and fittingly looks like it could be located in any upper middle class village in England. The proprietor is a woman apparently in her late thirties who is selling the hotel and whose daughter has an imaginary friend named Maggie. The brothers investigate and find that the Grandmother Rose in the attic has been keeping the spirit of her dead sister Margaret at bay for decades using hoodoo learnt from her nanny, but after suffering a stroke she was unable to maintain the spells keeping Margaret away. Once she was free to return to the house, Margaret started killing people involved with buying the house or selling things in order to try keeping her family there. When that failed, she tried killing her great niece to have a playmate, but Grandmother Rose offered herself in exchange for her granddaughter. The episode ends with the family moving out of the hotel with the ghosts of Rose and Margaret playing together under the watchful eye of a gallery of porcelain dolls.

With that out of the way, I can get into the true root of the problems this episode has: Grandmother Rose.

The biggest problem with her character is the fact that she apparently never passed on any of the knowledge of hoodoo to her daughter Susan, or even the paranormal in general. Sam noticed the quincunx straight-away and Dean knew a little about its usage in hoodoo spells, but Susan who had spent her entire life there was utterly clueless. Had Rose brought her daughter into the fold and instructed her, her own stroke would not have meant the hotel’s shields came down because Susan would have been there to maintain them. Susan also knows about her aunt Margaret drowning in the pool, but does not know that Rose had been keeping her at bay for decades. This is a huge oversight on Rose’s part which lead to three men’s deaths and the near death of her granddaughter.

This could be explained with Rose herself not having known what she was keeping at bay. She was young when Margaret died, and the hoodoo spells were almost definitely laid down by her nanny. It is possible the nanny did not tell Rose exactly what the spells were keeping at bay, but that raises too many questions, such as why cast the magic in the first place if she does not know what she is keeping out.

That in turn raises the question of why Margaret was kept away for so long. If the hoodoo was cast after Margaret’s death, what circumstances made the nanny feel it necessary to ward her off? It seems like most people’s reaction to the appearance of a recently deceased child as a ghost would be to try to help it pass on, or even to welcome it into the household rather than banish it to wherever. If I have understood correctly, hoodoo has a very healthy relationship to the dead whereby the dead are not confined to a grave in a plot of land and forgotten about, but rather they remain a part of the life of the living, with some people even having bones such as the skull of a dead relative in their home so that they are ‘still there’.

Whatever the reason, Rose did not pass on her knowledge and this is the main fault with the episode. Had she done so, the plot of the episode could still have happened, but another reason would have had to be found for Margaret causing trouble. If Susan were an adept hoodoo practitioner, Margaret would have met with much more resistance in trying to get into the hotel, but perhaps a combination of both Rose being indisposed and Margaret being such an old ghost could have combined to make the defences just weak enough and Margaret just strong enough to overcome them. It would also have been effective if Susan were trying to train Tyler now that Rose was close to death.

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Which brings discussion around to Susan. Oh, Susan. Why, Susan? Susan being uninitiated into the world of the paranormal is not entirely her fault as discussed above, but she displays a surprising unfamiliarity with the home she and her mother grew up in. Surely anybody with an ounce of curiosity would have noticed the sigil in the flower pot and the vase upstairs, as well as whatever other instances there were elsewhere in the residence. It would also have taken an especially dense individual to not have connected them with the photograph of Rose with her nanny who had the same sigil on a necklace around her neck. Susan, however, seems to have joined none of these dots together in what one can assume is almost four decades of living within those walls. Dean found out more about the family and its history over one drink with Sherwin than Susan did in decades. Susan also clearly remembered the story of Margaret’s death, but did not seem to think it weird that her daughter acquired an imaginary friend named Maggie after Rose’s stroke and at the same time men started getting killed in her hotel. If I lived in the same house my mother grew up in and my son had an imaginary friend named Paul… yikes.

Even if she did not recognise ‘Maggie’ as a nickname for Margaret she must have seen that the two are similar. They are hardly as separated as Elizabeth and Buffy (which, funnily enough, was Elizabeth II’s mother Elizabeth’s nickname as a child). One could put this down to plot convenience, but Susan even seemed completely oblivious to the fact that the company buying the hotel off her intended to demolish it. Did she not think to ask about that earlier rather than leaving it until her signature was drying on the contract?

Anyway, Susan does not appear to have all her Moomins in the valley, as it were, and this is to the episode’s detriment. One wonders how much of a threat Margaret would have been in the first place had the adults in this family not acted stupid.

Lengthy preamble aside, the opening of the episode is effective and sufficiently ominous for a television horror show. A man has arrived at the hotel to collect some of Tyler’s old toys and he ends up falling down the stairs and twisting his neck about 180°, resulting in his death. Exactly the same thing happened to one of the dolls in Tyler’s dollhouse moments before the man’s death is shown. The implication is that the dolls are poppets or effigies of people in the hotel, and Margaret uses them to kill. The implication is then that either Margaret was a magic user before death, or that she has learnt some secrets since death. However, it seems the entire dollhouse hotel is one big poppet, because the doors, swings, see-saw etc all control their real-life counterparts. Who built the dollhouse hotel is left unanswered, but can we assume either Rose or her nanny somehow enchanted it?

One thing the opening also does well is very subtly imply that Susan cannot see or hear Maggie. Upon finding out that the man has come to take some old toys away, Maggie says ‘Son of a bitch’ to no reaction from Susan. However, Tyler repeats what Maggie says to which Susan tells her to watch her mouth. Tyler passes on the blame to Maggie, and the viewer is misdirected to believe Susan can see Maggie, but she is just indulging Tyler’s conceit and cannot see or hear her at all.

Before changing the topic to Dean and Sam, sharp-eyed viewers might recognise the building from Supernatural 8x19 Of Grave Importance as the house where the hunter Annie’s ghost was trapped. The Annie whom Dean, Sam, AND Bobby had all apparently engaged in coitus. Eugenie Ross-Lemming and Brad Buckner should have never been allowed to write an episode of this show after 1x13 Route 666.

but before I get too far off topic, this same building was also used in Smallville 4x13 Recruit as the sorority house where a load of vampy teens tried jumping Clarks bones when he clearly was not into it. Gross.

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Dean and Sam end up at this hotel and set about investigating. Their initial recon does not turn up much at all other than a large porcelain doll collection and the knowledge that Grandmother Rose is recovering from a stroke. Dean goes off by himself to do research at the library and gets Sam to look stuff up on the internet. Whatever Sam did or did not find out is not revealed as that night an estate agent is hanged from the ceiling fan and dies. Maggie is responsible, but Sam decides that the middle of an investigation is the time to get blind drunk.

I should allow that Sam is a very young man who has just found out his dead dad told his brother to kill him, and who is also dealing with being one of Azazel’s soldiers-in-training, so I suppose I cannot hold getting drunk itself against him. The timing, however, I can, as well as his utterly self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-centred explanation of his drunkenness: his problem is not that the estate agent died, but rather than Sam could not save him, and if Sam cannot save people then he is not a good person. I alluded to this thinking pattern of Sam’s in 2x05 Simon Said, and here it is for all those who missed it. Bad timing and bad motivation, Sam. This would not be quite as bad if the show did not constantly insist that Sam is actually good and right and that we should be on his side. He is a child who barely functions as a main protagonist.

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Dean on the other hand (oh, you knew this was coming!) is decisive and moves the action forwards in this episode. Sam might call him ‘bossy’, but in an investigation like this somebody needs to make choices and delegate work and Sam apparently is not up to the task. It gasts my flabbers when people insist that Sam is the protagonist of the show and that it is his story, not Dean’s, when Sam is mostly passive, reactive, and whiny and his decisions usually end up putting others in danger, RE: the entirety of 2x10 Hunted.

As if his self-indulgence were not enough, he then proceeds to make Dean promise to kill him if he turns bad. My own thoughts when watching this episode were that Sam should learn to fellate a pistol if he wants to save others from the monster he might become. This is essentially what Dean did with the Malak Box in series 14 because he saw it as the only option which would not endanger life on Earth.

Sam chose to burden his brother with becoming a fratricide rather than taking on that responsibility himself. This was both cruel and the coward’s choice, especially given Sam knew John had done the same. Sam has been watching Dean ‘tailspin’ for the last eleven episodes, and found out why in 2x10 Hunted. Rather than doing something to alleviate Dean’s spiritual malaise, he exacerbated it. This shows a flagrant disregard for Dean’s well-being and a total lack of empathy. If Dean’s going to be laden with all that horrific responsibility, I think it only fair that he be ‘bossy’ and that Sam be expected to duck when Dean says so.

Dean looked so relieved in the morning when Sam was suffering his vomity hangover (serves him right, too) and let Dean believe he did not remember the previous night. The final scene of the episode proved that Sam was not merely being drunk and rambling, as he reiterated Dean’s ‘need’ to kill Sam if necessary whilst he was completely sober.

The only good thing about the scene where Sam was drunk was that Dean got to call John as ‘ass’. Whether he meant ‘donkey’ or ‘rear end’ by that does not matter, but finally the viewer is beginning to see what Dean really thinks of John f*cking Winchester. People who have watched the entire show before might also notice that the opening scene of 2x22 All Hell Breaks Loose Part II mirrors the end of the drunk!Sam scene: Sam is lying on the bed while Dean sits on a chair beside it, tormented.

Their first scene in this episode was quite different. Dean returned from the shop to find Sam still trying to find Ava on the internet or something, and Sam admits it is time to move on to something else because the weeks-long search has brought up nothing. Which means we can forgot the plot of the show for a few episodes. Dean’s reaction to this is on the one hand completely accurate, but also a little inappropriate. He said – and this is not verbatim –: I thought there’d be more moody music and staring out the window.

I would be tempted to say this is ‘out of character’ is that were not a tired excuse for one’s favourite character being a bit of a douche. After all, I have heard somebody write off Sam’s horrendous behaviour in series 8 as ‘The writers just didn’t understand his character’. However, considering Sam lost Jess a year earlier and both he and Dean lost John a few months ago, this is rather douchey and seems like the writer trying to make a funny at the expense of character. Perhaps Dean is so disassociated from him emotional state sometimes that he does not always understand Sam is not, and the way Dean said that to Sam is somewhat reminiscent of how demon!Dean talks to dream!Dean in 3x10 Dream a Little Dream of Me. Observe, if you will, John Winchester’s A* parenting: his kids can be douches to each other because they are copying patterns of behaviour learnt from their abusive dad.

But Sam is the bigger douche. Bigger by a country mile. When Dean is a douche, he is the tiniest douche, but when Sam is a douche he is a King Kamehameha douche.

This would have been another great opportunity for Sam to say something along the lines of ‘So you’ve not stopped passing off John’s treatment of you onto me, then, have you, Dean?’ It would have been so easy, and it would have done a lot to fix their gross relationship, but alas. Dean did make a funny at the end, though: ‘That attitude is just way too healthy for me. I’m officially uncomfortable now, thank you.’

Whilst on the subject of Dean, I remember this episode as one of the ones which turned me off the show early in 2009. And as I have said before, it was Dean who did it. Funny, considering he is the reason I watch it now, but his apparent homophobia tired my 17 year old self. As in 1x08 Bugs and 1x18 Something Wicked, there is a hilarious incident at the hotel reception wherein Susan assumes Dean and Sam are a same-sex couple looking for antiques, claiming they ‘look the type’. How droll.

Dean’s reaction to this moments later is to say ‘Of course, the real problem is why do these people assume we’re gay’. Sam’s reaction is to make a comment which is probably just stupid snark but seems to bother Dean (more on that soon). My metre was almost filled up by that point, and I do not remember whether I even made it to the end of series three. Jensen and Dean were one of the main reasons I wanted to watch the show in the first place, but alas the writing for him made him occasionally resemble my bullies a bit too much

Some might say I ‘could not take a joke’, but people who say things like only do so in the context of things which have not been used as weapons to dehumanise, ostracise, and shame them. They do not have a clue what they are talking about, and in such cases, ‘take a joke’ is almost indistinguishable from ‘absorb our poisonous behaviour and don’t you dare try to make us feel bad about it’. I discussed stuff like this in more detail in my essay Top!Dean vs Bottom!Dean: Anal Sex, Shame, and Gay Trauma, so I will not go into more depth here.

My reaction on rewatch is different. I do interpret Dean’s behaviour as homophobic still, but I believe his homophobia is internalised, not externalised. What I mean by that is that he is not disgusted by homosexual activity and inclinations in other men, but is deeply uncomfortable with his own same-sex attraction. I think Dean has always known of his attraction to men, but has done his best to amputate and ignore that part of himself. Dean does not want to be seen as gay or bi, and does not (at this point in the show) want to consciously acknowledge his attraction to men because of the toxic mess of having been raised in a homophobic society which demands men not be certain things lest they be stripped of their status as valid humans.

There is also the conditioning: I once knew a guy in his early twenties who would happily watch homosexual pornography but was repulsed by the sight of men kissing for years, and hated the idea of going to a gay club. This is not a natural reaction, but rather the result of being exposed to certain attitudes, prejudices, and jokes all his life.

I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere, so I will not belabour the point. He presents himself as heterosexual, but it is almost always him (and Cas) who people make gay jokes about, not Sam. He must notice – as I notice every single time people use female-coded insults and language about me when they find out about me – and this clearly both feels like an attack on his identity and a message that people see through his presentation as heterosexual.

Some people laugh at his reaction (perhaps it is my neurodivergence speaking, but I do not understand the chuckles) but it reminded me very much of a scene from the show Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves (‘Torka Aldrig Tårar utan Handskar’) which is about a group of gay men in Stockholm and how their lives are impacted by the AIDS crisis. The scene I have in mind involves Benjamin, a 19 year old Jehovah’s Witness, and Paul, a flamboyant homosexual whom Benjamin meets one evening whilst spreading God’s word.

Paul invites Benjamin into his flat, talks to him for a while, then sends him on his way. As Benjamin is walking down the stairs, Paul rushes out of his flat and says (My own translation): ‘Just one more thing, sweetheart, to be sure I haven't missed anything. You do know you’re a homosexual, don’t you?’

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Benjamin’s reaction is stunned silence, a state which continues in the next scene. He had tried so hard to present a certain image, but somebody had seen right through it. And if one person can see through it, who else can? And if one person acknowledges it, must Benjamin then acknowledge it?

(Yes, you can interpret Dean as heterosexual if you want to, that is fine. It does not contradict the text. But it is your choice to do so, not a given in the text. Here is another essay on this very topic: The Author is Dead: Long Live bi!Dean)

That said, I disagree completely that the most homophobic people are closeted gays. It is true that a few outspoken critics of ‘the gay lifestyle’ are actually closeted gays, but to claim they are the main issue is to conveniently absolve heterosexual homophobes of all responsibility in the issue. Where did those few homophobic closet cases get their homophobia from in the first place?

One last point before moving on: I still do not really understand what Sam meant by ‘You are kind of butch. Maybe people think you’re overcompensating’. Is Sam saying gay/bi men cannot be ‘manly’? Or that a straight-presenting man must not actually be heterosexual if he acts manly? I am not sure. What he probably meant was a joke that Dean ‘acting manly’ was because he was trying to hide something, i.e. that he is not ‘manly’ but actually ‘gay’. Perhaps it is my neurodivergence speaking, but I do not see the chuckles. Is this one of those déjà thingies?

Moving swiftly onwards towards some smaller points, this episode made two not-so-subtle reference to The Shining. The first was Dean and Sam being given room 237, and the second was the scene where Dean is in the hotel bar talking to Sherwin. The entire set up of the room, Dean drinking whiskey or whatever from a small glass whilst an elderly man talks to him behind the bar is taken directly from Stanley Kubrick’s film. The Overlook Hotel had its share of deaths just like the Pierpont Hotel in this episode, but the more interesting parallel is between Dean and Jack, the man tormented by both alcoholism, his traumatic childhood, and the spirits in the hotel trying to get him to kill his family.

After Dean did the legwork at the library and found Sam indisposed and useless, he visited Sherwin to get information out of him, a task which took him all of one drink. It is, therefore, hard to miss the fact that even though Sam was about as much use as a marzipan dildo for most of the episode, he still got to look like a hero at the end by swooping in to save Tyler. Not only that, but Susan hugged and thanked him specifically, whilst Dean received a curt nod, and then proceeded through force auteur to praise Sam for saving Tyler whilst receiving no recognition for any of the work he did himself.

The Hufflepuff energy is strong with Dean.

Another item on the list of stupid things in this episode is the fact that not a single person mentioned salt or iron to get rid of the ghost. This is very far from Dean and Sam’s first rodeo, so first on their list of priorities should have been to try the basics, even if only to rule certain things out. What also left me scratching my head was why nobody thought to look for anything which Margaret’s ghost might be attached to, such as the doll which is almost definitely meant to represent her. It was only 1x19 Provenance when they dealt with the ghost of a little girl who was attached to a doll made with her hair, so the little Maggie doll should have been on their list of things to burn. Alas, this did not happen. I think the issue here is a lack of oversight and communication between writers and the fact that Matt Witten only wrote this episode and 2x06 No Exit. That episode made use of salt and iron in fighting against a ghost, but those things are absent in this episode. It amuses me when people say that The Winchesters goes against Supernatural canon because Supernatural never cared much about its own canon anyway.

I have said before that 15x19-15x20 showed me that canon is ultimately meaningless, but the show’s magic systems and monster lore should at least remain consistent. ‘Fantasy’ and ‘horror’ do not mean that anything at all can happen: they mean that anything can happen within the rules established in the secondary world.

The porcelain dolls were ultimately a red herring in the episode, although the lingering shot of the Margaret doll at the end strongly suggests that she is tied to that. This raises the question of what will happen to the ghosts of Margaret and Rose when the doll is ultimately destroyed and the hotel demolished. Will Margaret be forced to move on to the afterlife while Rose remains behind? Will the two of them keep killing everybody who tries to sell or destroy the home? I have no idea, but whatever happens the ending of this episode is not a happy one.

A red herring they may be, but they did provide Dean the opportunity to embarrass Sam in front of the hotelier which he sorely deserved after almost getting Dean killed in 2x10 Hunted. I have listened to some other people discussing this episode and they raised the point that they thought Dean and Sam – two strange men – knocking on a door clearly marked ‘Private’ and then asking to come in was weird if not ominous. The people I listened to would not have been comfortable letting Dean and Sam in.

This did not seem like a pathological fear of men (which I am also used to), but if any two people regardless of sex turned up at my private door in a hotel and asked to come in to see the dolls, I would thing it weird, particularly given the recent spate of deaths in the building. That said, men collecting dolls or similar things is not too weird, even if it is always shown to be the case in media. Paula R. Stiles had this to say:

Huge life irony, here – my grandparents used to work in the antiques business and my war vet grandfather not only loved dolls…but had a huge collection of them.

I do not collect dolls, but I have something like eighty Funko pops and I might or might not have given Dean and Cas little woollen hats. Maybe I am completely divorced from reality, but if Dean and Sam came into my hotel and knocked on my door asking to see my Funko Pops… I would let Dean in without hesitation but request Sam wait outside.

On that note, here endeth the analysis.

Note: the actress who played Susan in this episode, Annie Wersching, died yesterday (29/1/2023) of cancer at the age of 45.

#edvard's supernatural guide #spn 2x11 #supernatural #supernatural meta #spn meta #meta analysis #2x11 playthings #bi!dean #dean winchester #spn rewatch #spn #sam winchester #Youtube

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destielshippingnews · 1 year

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x10 Hunted

This episode is Raelle Tucker’s second solo script for the show, and while it is not terrible, it is not her best work. Miles better than her erstwhile co-writer Sera Gamble’s lamentable soap-opera offering 2x17 Heart, but falling far short of 2x20 What Is and What Should Never Be. Funnily enough, the thing I like most about Raelle Tucker’s scripts seems to be the weak point of this episode: she is a Dean girl. Her portrayal of Dean in this episode is spot on, but the way she wrote Sam made him seem like an utter dunderhead.

Let us begin near the beginning of the episode with Dean’s revelation to Sam that John told him he might have to kill Sam. Sam’s reaction to this news is exactly what I would expect from him. As has been eloquently displayed, Sam is a master at making everything about himself and whining about it, so of course he would not even see the fact that Dean’s own father has burdened him with not only murder, but fratricide – one of the gravest sins in almost all cultures. This is all in character for Sam, a guy who likes to think he is doing good but forgets that the road to Hell is paved with ignoring Dean good intentions. Sam himself knows that there is something ‘wrong’ with him, that his visions are portents of something much worse, and he still shoots the messenger. Fine, whatever, nothing new here.

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Sam abandoning Dean and running away in the middle of the night ‘to find answers about himself’ was similarly stupid, especially considering he knows at this point that people like Gordon are after him, as are Azazel and co. What could have happened here to make Sam seem much more mature, thoughtful, and actually respectful of his brother, would have been for him to say to Dean:

‘I don’t want to be around you at the moment. I know this is hard for you, and I know how much you’ve always done for me, but knowing what Dad told you has made me wonder whether I’m safe being near you. I’ve been watching you getting more violent and scary for months, and a few days ago you seemed to have no problem killing people who might have been infected. You’ve already killed innocents: remember Meg and her brother’s hosts? I do. I hate having to leave you, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll be safe around you. If I go to sleep in the same room as you, am I going to wake up with your gun pointed at me? I can’t take that risk, Dean. And I don’t think seeing the man Dad told you to kill every day is doing you any good. I’m sorry. Go to Bobby, or Ellen. But I can’t be around you at the moment.’

That would have been respectable and adult. It would have been like Buffy choosing to not have Angel in her life rather than continuing with their messy, doomed relationship. Given Dean’s behaviour and Sam’s fear of and for him over the last ten episodes, this would be perfectly understandable. What we got, however, was something quite different. Sam simply left Dean, and gave his reason to Ellen as ‘I have to find out about myself and Dean can’t protect me from that.’ In other words, since Dean cannot protect Sam in Sam’s estimations, Dean is useless and Sam does not need him. Paula R. Stiles worded it thusly:

When Ellen tells him she has to call Dean, Sam whines that he has “to find answers” and Dean can’t “protect” him from that. The self-centered, utilitarian view Sam has of Dean in this episode (He only wants Dean around when he needs him for something) is stunning. I’d forgotten how far into the episode it went.

Sam is supposed to be intelligent, caring, and heroic. This is what The Show tells us over and over again, but Kripke’s self-insert really is just an overgrown teenager. Please do not misunderstand: he is young and even if he were not, people are allowed to make mistakes and occasionally be selfish, silly, and stupid. The problem with Sam is that it is a good day if he is not any of those things. His motivation for leaving Dean had nothing to do with Dean’s recent behaviour and everything to do with 'finding out who he is'.

But even given Dean’s behaviour, I felt so sad for him. He is the one burdened with his entire moral framework being shattered after losing his father and being resurrected. He is the one showing serious signs of being driven towards ‘evil’. And he is the one abandoned, rejected, yet struggling with all his might to not become the monster he has to become.

As if Sam’s self-centred nocturnal abandonment of him were not enough, his instantaneous reaction to hearing that Dean might have to kill him is to attack Dean. Constant Readers may well remember my referring to Dean as John and Sam’s ’cat’ (and Missouri Moseley’s dog whom she would not stop kicking): people will sometimes kick the family cat in anger instead of lashing out at the person who angered them, and they do so because they know the cat cannot kick back. John did this to Dean in 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood, and Sam does it to Dean whenever he gets the chance. 1x08 Bugs, for example, with his ’cum ’n ’av a go if ye fink ye’re ’ard enuff’ act when Dean took issue with Sam bitching about him to strangers. Sam’s behaviour in this scene with his blatant aggression towards Dean, and his threat that ’you might have to waste me [because otherwise I’m gonna batter you]’ smacked of knowing full well he can treat Dean as badly as he likes with impunity.

Worse still, Dean allows it. He wastes no time whatsoever in taking all the blame and guilt Sam hurls at him, and confesses he ’deserves it’. Even this early in the show, it makes me very sad to see this because this is 100% true to life codependent behaviour. If you want evidence of a child who has been treated horrifically, here is some right here. If Dean can absolve others of any blame by taking it all on himself, then he can perhaps avoid punishments such as being shouted at or beaten: if he abases himself and crawls in the muck for other people, they might let him be. Clearly he has learnt that such behaviour is necessary in maintaining relationships with John and Sam. Only with Cas does he refuse to take on all guilt (at least all of the time), but that does not stop Cas ultimately letting Dean take all the blame for their fall out between 14x18 Absence and 15x10 The Trap.

This never stops with Dean, and it makes me sad. In this scene, he is clearly trying his hardest to maintain the only relationship he has with anybody, but to do so he must allow himself to be attacked and blame himself for it.

As much as I write this, I am aware that some readers will not ’see this’, and all I can say is: I am glad it is invisible to you. The thing about abusive behaviour and poisonous relationships is that they are often invisible to people who have no experience of them. They are the real-world equivalent of monsters: the fact you cannot see them does not mean people are not fighting them.

It is understandable that Sam be angry, but not that he direct it at Dean. I would have been over the moon if Dean had punched Sam in the face and pushed him into the river for acting like that. Especially galling was Sam’s ’Take some responsibility for yourself, Dean’, which stank of an immature little boy trying to talk big but exposing his own arse by doing so. Think of all the responsibility Sam has not taken for himself, like for example him being to blame for Dean’s taking the fall for shifter!Dean’s crimes in 1x06 Skin, or electro!Sam shooting Dean in 1x10 Asylum because it was much easier to blame Den for all his problems that to admit the fact Sam chose to travel across America with Dean. And then there is 1x11 Scarecrow when Sam ran his mouth off to a stranger about his life... Ironic, really.

All of this would be forgivable, mind you, if the show were not so adamant of absolving Sam of all responsibility, of having other characters treat him like a good boy (Ellen, Bobby, Missouri), and denying Dean the opportunity to get angry at Sam on more than one or two occasions over the whole fifteen year run. The end result is that it looks as though I am supposed to think Sam’s actions are generally good and justified while Dean is in the wrong. Even when Sam is responsible for raising Lucifer, he still tries to pass off the blame to Dean for ’being too controlling and pushing him towards Ruby’, (5x05 Fallen Idols) a claim the show makes no effort to disprove and which Dean humbly accepts.

I just want somebody to give Dean a hug and a big mug of hot chocolate. I think he will have to wait until 15x14 Last Holiday before anything even close to that happens.

Moving swiftly on before series seven Sam’s sideburns distract me too much, this episode shows that though Dean’s overblown, exaggerated archetypical masculine side as represented by Gordon in 2x03 Bloodlust was wounded and momentarily defeated, it is still alive and trying to take over Dean.

Gordon is once again the antagonist in this episode. ’Baddie’ would probably be a more fitting word, but the show ends up proving Gordon to not be completely wrong. It shows Gordon to be pathological in his willingness to believe what one demon told him about somebody he conveniently knows, and his willingness to kill people for what the might one day commit (according to a random demon because demons never lie). He also has a hate on for Sam for turning Dean against him in 2x03 Bloodlust, which likely added to his willingness to believe anything which could justify his killing Sam. Gordon seemed to believe Dean could be a companion for him, but he wanted Dean’s complete, undivided loyalty. For that reason, he sought to turn Dean against Sam and cut him off from his brother in the way that abusive, manipulative, controlling boyfriends and girlfriends do.

Gordon even attempts to convince Dean of the rightfulness and necessity of killing Sam, and apparently believes Dean will see his side and not torture and kill him afterwards.

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It is strange, then, that the show almost proves Gordon’s point right later on, given Sam’s dalliance with Ruby and the apocalyptic consequences thereof. Two things can be true at once, though: Sam is a potential threat at this point in the show, but killing somebody for an innate part of themselves or something they might do is unjustified.

Scott in the cold open is an innocent being tormented by Azazel in order for him to develop his psychic powers and become a ’soldier in the coming war’, a line which sounds nice but had about as much as pay-off as Soldier Boy in The Boys. By which I mean there is none: the Stephen King-adjacent storyline of psykids comes to nothing since all of them bar Sam die by the end of series two, and later revelations of Dean and Sam being the divinely-pedigreed vessels for Michael and Lucifer make that whole plot redundant. Scott, however, was destined to be one of the young people (who are all American because Azazel lacks a passport) forced to fight for a chance to open the gates of Hell and release Satan.

We meet Scott at a counselling session where he reveals he is one of the psychic children with a similar story to Sam: nightmares which began roughly a year ago followed by some kind of power. The counsellor seems unsure whether he believes Scott or not, given he refused to shake his hand, and afterwards Scott gets killed like a gutted fish in a car park. The killer is Gordon, but this is revealed later.

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This happens a month prior to the episode, so perhaps sometimes around episode 2x06 No Exit if we assume that there is roughly a week or so between episodes. Unlike other cold opens involving ESPkids, this one does not turn out to be a vision of Sam’s, and he does not find out about it until after he abandons his brother in the night instead of doing the clever thing and waiting and planning with Dean. His first stop seems to be Harvelle’s Roadhouse in Nebraska, quite a drive away from Oregon (where presumably Dean and Sam had their discussion after 2x09 Croatoan took place there). Here, he is essentially welcomed with open arms and firmly absolved of any wrongdoing or guilt in running away from home like a dumb teenager. The show wants us to think Sam is in danger of becoming evil, but everybody is intent on acting like the sun shines out of his arse and ignoring his bad behaviour.

A prime example of this is presented in this episode as Sam wanders in through the door of Harvelle’s Roadhouse: rather than giving him the excoriation he so sorely deserves after going AWOL whilst Big Things Regarding Kids Like Sam are in motion, Ellen acts almost exactly as she would if the writer (or script editor) thought Sam’s behaviour was good and justified. She gives him a warm smile and speaks in a quiet, soft voice as if she is a mother welcoming her son back home. Ellen enquires as to the nature of the schism between Dean and Sam which Sam deftly deflects, and rather than pushing him on the subject, she conveniently goes along with Sam’s conversation, allowing Sam to refrain from giving an accounting of himself.

Would she have done this if things were the other way around and Dean had abandoned Sam? Almost definitely not, and I am having flashbacks to Missouri Mosely in 1x09 Home. Dean would have been flayed alive, but Sam is practically welcomed with open arms and commiseration. Even after Sam shifts the topic to Jo (whom Sam had a pivotal role in getting into the hunting life. Remember: Sam also neglected to call Ellen and inform her Jo was with them, yet only Dean got the reprimanding), none of the anger she directed at the brothers (one of them in particular) is apparent.

That would have been acceptable to an extent, since he is not her teenage son and it is not her place to reprimand him, but even if his scarpering from the one person most able to protect him from Azazel did not put himself and everybody around him in danger, he has still run away without explanation and let the people in his life fear the worst. In spite of that, he gets not a single sharp word.

As if that were not bad enough, Ellen even gives Sam what amounts to an almost-apology for her behaviour at the end of 2x06 No Exit. Sam is the one in the wrong here, and not only does he get called ’Sweetie’, but he gets the almost-apology which by rights should be Dean’s almost-apology, since he seemed to be the one both Ellen and Jo specifically rejected and drove away at the end of that episode, even though Sam AND Jo were equally to blame for what happened.

Anyway, Sam went to Ellen to get help with finding other psychics like him. Ash searches for people in certain criteria: born in 1983, mother died in a house fire, etc, and manages to call up four results, two of which are dead (Max from 1x14 Nightmare and Scott from the cold open) as well as Andy from 2x05 Simon Said whose adopted mother died in a housefire. Sam decides that since Scott’s death is the most recent (one month prior), he should go to where he died to try to find answers. ...An idea which makes exactly the kind of sense that’s not, but whatever, Sam. I would have gone to find Andy since he is still alive and a possible next target, but Sam is Big Smart so my idea is clearly stupid.

Upon leaving, Ellen tells Sam she will have to call Dean to tell him where Sam is, but Sam requests she not do so. Apparently Sam is going to find out the truth about himself and Dean cannot protect him from that, which makes exactly the kind of sense that’s not, but whatever, Sam. Is this one of those déjà thingies? Anyway, Ellen is apparently a sucker for Sam’s ’puppy dog’ act because she agrees to acquiesce to his request. Personally, I want to cut his fringe off and tell him to stop shaving so closely whenever he tries that face.

Why Ellen did not ring Dean while Ash was doing his thing is beyond me. Sam would not have been happy, but what would he have done to stop her? Assaulted her in a bar full of other hunters? Good luck. Sam would have had to wait around if he wanted his information anyway, so that would have been a smart move. Why she did not ring Dean directly after Sam departed is also beyond my ken: if she is supposed to be a mother hen character, she should do some mother henning and make sure her hens are safe. Sam is safer with Dean than without, whatever Sam’s misgivings may be, so wherefore the lack of henning?

Plot convenience. And treating Sam like Mummy’s Special Little Boy. What else would be appropriate for Kripke’s s Oh-So-Sensitive self-insert? Gross. Sam’s a perfect example of spare the rod, spoil the child.

But speaking of children, Sam’s tendency to run away is likely connected to his need for control over other people, particularly Dean. If he is in control he feels he can minimise potential risk to himself, a trait apparently common among people whose childhoods were characterised by instability, neglect, and abuse. It is a truism that abused children may come to embody the worst aspects of their parents, but such is the nature of trauma: it is often passed from one person to the next like a disease. John abused his children, mainly Dean, but Sam was there too and he suffered instability, neglect, and a lack of control and direction. In order to give himself a feeling of stability and control over his life, he appears to try his hardest to exert control over those nearest to him – namely Dean. If he cannot do this, his instinct seems to be to run away.

People call Dean emotionally repressed because he does not talk about his feelings and ’lies about being ’fine’, but Dean’s problem is that while he mostly understands what he is feeling, he does not have the support or tools to process things properly, wherefor his reliance on hunting as catharsis and alcohol as a painkiller. However, he does not run from his issues (mostly): he just locks them in the room next door. Sam on the other hand talks about other people’s emotions but rarely talks about his own, and appears to be much worse at running from them than Dean is.

Apropos running, Sam’s flight from Dean leads him to Lafayette, Indiana where Scott is buried. Sam interviews Scott’s father and investigates Scott’s bedroom which is home to video tapes, cassette tapes, and novels which look like they were probably taken from Eric Kripke’s bedroom in the 1980s or early 1990s. Further investigation reveals that the wall of Scott’s closet is plastered with pictures of yellow eyes taken from magazines.

Following this, Sam receives company at his motel in the form of Ava, a psychic who had a vision of Sam exploding. She explains that she had visions of Scott’s death but thought they were just dreams until she saw a report of his death in the newspaper. After that, she tracked Sam down by searching for the name of the motel she saw on the notepad Sam used. Clever girl. Shame she will not be around for long, but still.

The actress Katherine Isabelle played Margot Verger in Hannibal (2013), as well as one of the leads in Ginger Snaps (2000) alongside Emily Perkins who will appear several times in Supernatural as Becky Rosen, the fangirl who essentially roofied Sam, tried to marry him, then tied him to a bed when the spell stopped working. Oh, and we were probably supposed to be laughing at that. At least her final appearance in 15x04 Atomic Monsters is much more grown up and socially conscious.

Returning to the episode at hand, Paula R. Stiles concluded that Azazel sent Ava the vision in order for her to prevent Sam getting killed (or at least, that is her interpretation of what the episode must be about to make sense), but if that was the case, why did Azazel not just kill Gordon? Unless it was a test or whether Sam would kill Gordon, or whether Dean would kill Gordon. That is getting into the realm of speculation once again, though, so I will leave it there.

Ellen eventually decides to call Dean, though it is unclear how much time has passed since Sam left. If the Roadhouse is in Nebraska and Sam is in Indiana, that would take a fair few hours of driving. 650 miles by road separate the state capitals of Lincoln and Indianapolis, but the location of the Roadhouse in Nebraska is not clarified, so it could be a few hundred miles farther if the Roadhouse is in the west of the state. However it may be, it appears the journey would take something like ten hours, so it must be the next day at least when Ellen rings Dean. Some pseudophilosophical preamble about ’not always being able to protect your loved ones’ is followed by Ellen spilling Sam’s whereabouts to Dean.

And speaking of Dean, I noticed Jensen’s unusual pronunciation of s while watching 1x15 The Benders last year. I had seen people mocking the way he talks before and never understood what they were talking about, but now I have actually noticed it, I am seriously casting negative judgement on people for making fun of it.

It is not a speech impediment because his speech is fine, but there is something about his s sounds at the end of a word in particular which strikes me as unusual in English. It is definitely not a sh sound, but it is a bit thicker sounding than a usual s. It is almost a palatalised sound like in Estonian, Karelian, or Russian. As well as that, he often does not turn his s into a z at the end of words like native English speakers usually do with words like dogs (normally pronounced dogz) and please (usually pronounced pleaz). Jensen’s please often rhymes with fleece, and his dogs is often pronounced with his unusual s, not a normal z. He also says cars with an s at the end, not a z. I have no idea whether this is an idiosyncracy of his, the remnants of a speech impediment, or a feature of the English spoken in his region of Texas. Now I have pinpointed it, I can hear it everywhere ranging from his work on Days of Our Lives and Dark Angel to the voiceover on The Winchesters and his performance in Big Sky. Valentine’s Day is approaching, and with it my yearly ritual of watching My Bloody Valentine 3D, so I will be listening out for it then.

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Hello, I have been studying languages and linguistics for almost two decades, pleased to make your acquaintance. And now back to our regularly-scheduled broadcast...

Sam enlists Ava’s help in getting hold of Scott’s file from his counsellor (which involves Ava squirming as she tries to act like she belongs there and Sam being an idiot and climbing around on the side of what looks like quite a tall building). They later listen to the recording of Scott’s final session together in the motel room, and this raises the topic of Azazel and psychic children. Sam tries to explain the Yellow-Eyed Demon, psychic children, and ’the coming war’ to Ava, but she understandably thinks he is a weirdo talking a load of codswallop.

Returning to the subject of ambiguous passage of time, it is unclear how long it took Dean to reach Indiana, but he rolls up outside in his noisy, rumbling car which Sam appears not to notice at all. Dean sees his brother and Ava through the window, but rather than going into the room and giving Sam the stern talking to he deserves for being a melodramatic pantaloon, he is content to sit outside in the car assuming that Sam and Ava have engaged in coitus, or are soon to do so.

This makes sense, of course, because Sam in no way deserves a stiff reprimand for his behaviour in this episode. Even the man Sam hurt the most with his actions is not allowed to to be angry at him in this episode. Raelle Tucker, I am surprised. Or was this a script editor decision? Raelle did so well with 2x20 What Is and What Should Never Be.

Enter Gordon and the beginning of a fight scene which in all honesty is a bit naff. Other than Alec X5-494 once more momentarily taking control of Jensen to reset Gordon’s brain with a nasty-looking kick to the head, it is a little silly.

Nobody in the motel seems to hear either the motel window shattering, the gunshots (which were not that quiet), or two grown men whaling on each other across the street.

Dean’s Alec’s kick to Gordon’s head should have done some serious damage and put him at a considerable disadvantage in his fight with Dean Alec, but apparently his head is so thick that Dean’s Alec’s kick did not stun him at all. Neither does Dean Alec punching him in the head following said kick do much more than make his mouth bleed a bit. Luckily for Gordon, Dean and Alec’s vessel’s skull is much more fragile than his, meaning that a blow to the head with the butt of Gordon’s rifle is enough to knock it out cold.

Alas, that meant that Alec was once more driven back to the recesses of Dean’s vessel’s consciousness where, alack, he shall remain for a long while. I love Firefly to bits, but the reason series three of Dark Angel was cancelled three days after it got greenlit was because Fox decided to go with Firefly instead, so thrilled were they to have a Joss Whedon project on their network.

Have I told you about my best friend Alec, by the way? I miss him...

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Rather than finishing his job and killing Sam, Gordon inexplicably leaves the scene with Dean and Alec’s vessel in tow without being seen and with what must be considerable head trauma quick enough that neither Sam nor Ava saw hide nor hair of him. Upon investigating the source of the bullets which nearly perforated him and Ava, Sam discovers a round and concludes somebody used a muffled rifle, much to Ava’s amusing bemusement.

Alec is alas in absentia, but Sam receives a phone call from Dean in which his vessel appears to have taken no damage whatsoever from being once more knocked unconscious with a blunt object, even though a blow to the head hard enough to cause unconsciousness is hard enough to cause serious brain damage or death. Dean is tied to a chair in what looks like an abandoned motel room, and with Gordon’s gun pointed at him he tells Sam to meet him at a certain location, but not without first informing Sam via a code that somebody has a gun on him.

What follows is probably the best scene of the episode for many reasons. Gordon attempts to justify his need to kill Sam to Dean in what sounds very much like trying to recruit Dean to his cause. He sees Dean as somebody who could be very much like him, something which shows Gordon sees all too clearly Dean’s propensity for violence and his homicidal, psychopathic potential. Why else would Gordon leave Dean alive after his phone call to Sam if he did not believe he could talk Dean around to his way of thinking? He could have shot Dean in the chest, cleaned up any blood off his face, and made it look as though Dean were unconscious if he wanted to lure Sam in, but he chose not to. Perhaps the thought of sitting in a room with a dead body which would empty its bowels soon after death was off-putting...

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Dean for his part is still tethered to ’sanity’ by his moral compass, something Gordon appears to misunderstand. Dean would kill him, as indeed he intended to after Sam untied him, and nothing Gordon could say or do would prevent Dean making him sleep with the fishes. Whilst Gordon is busy talking about how it is necessary to kill the psychic kids to save the world (’necessary evil’, ’for the greater good’ and all that) Dean’s bravado slowly fades as he realises Gordon might just be able to kill Sam (the second tripwire wipes the smile off his face) but he almost never looks scared of Gordon. Though he is tied to a chair and eventually gagged, he gives Gordon looks which say ’you are so fraking stupid’ and ’oh my god, you’re an idiot’ and I cannot help being amused. Dean has no overt power in that situation, but he seems inconvenienced rather than weak and vulnerable. Gordon on the other hand has no idea what thin ice he is skating on. He should have ganked Dean while he had the chance, but he was clearly just too sweet on him.

Yes, I am aware not everybody is gay, but neither is everybody heterosexual.

Besides that, Gordon’s seeming belief that Dean will reciprocate his lust join him on the dark side of the force after realising the necessity and rightfulness of his killing people like Sam proves that his mentis is very far from compos.

Back to Sam, he tells Ava to leave town and go back to her fiancé, then goes to the address Dean gave him. He sneaks around the back of the abandoned motel and into the room. There is an explosion and Dean roaring like an angry bull through his gag, but Gordon is not so easily fooled. A second explosion soon follows, but it turns out Sam is alive and he pulls his gun out on Gordon… and then immediately proves he really is the stupidest child in remedial English by NOT PULLING THE DAMN TRIGGER!

Have I already had this rant in this analysis, or was it the previous one? Sam’s hesitancy to pull the trigger on bad guys might have been understandable near the beginning of series one, and even in 1x21 Salvation it was understandable he missed the first shot at Azazel. Even not shooting Azazel!John was relatable, but at that point he should have learnt that trying to have a clear conscience and not harm anybody is selfish, self-indulgent, and GETS PEOPLE KILLED! This is a lesson he should have learnt multiple times, with 2x09 Croatoan being the latest, but he seems incapable of learning form his mistakes. People think Sam is the intelligent one why?

Gordon had shown his true colours in 2x03 Bloodlust, and in this very episode he had beaten Dean with a gun, tied him up, then used him as bait to lure in Sam, not to mention the two explosions which were intended specifically to kill Sam. What part of this says ‘not shooting this man the first opportunity I get’ is a good idea in this context? Gordon might believe he is justified in what he is doing, but most people would call him ‘evil’ without hesitation. Even Sam would, but Sam lets him get away with a little bit of unconsciousness. Pull the ever-loving trigger, Sam, you floppy-haired prat. A clear conscience is a luxury he can ill afford, and one which endangers himself, Dean, and all the other kids like him.

Sam unties Dean, whereupon the latter wastes no time in going to dispatch Gordon, but Sam stops him and – for some unknown reason – Dean leaves Gordon be, taking Sam’s word that Gordon has been taken care of. Once more, people are doing what Sam wants in this episode to avoid conflict, even though Sam was the reason all of this happened in the first place.

As if to prove me right, Gordon wakes up in no time and comes after Dean and Sam as they walk to the car, trying to kill them with his pistol. They run and hide behind a grassy mound, at which point the police arrive and apprehend Gordon. They find lots of weapons in Gordon’s van, and we are left to conclude Gordon will be going to prison for a long time.

Here is my problem with the scene, and it is similar to Sam risking Dean’s life at the end of 1x13 Route 666. The police arriving was not guaranteed to happen at a certain time, and if they had arrived a moment later, Gordon could well have murdered both Sam AND Dean (although he might have spared Dean death). Had Sam arrived later, Gordon might have heard or seen them and run, possibly killing Dean beforehand, or else kidnapping him again. Sam might well have been thinking of the police when he refused to kill Gordon, but his plan was too dependent on contingencies and risked Dean’s life on numerous counts.

There is also the inconvenient fact that Dean is a wanted murderer after Sam made him take the fall for Shifter!Dean’s murders in 1x06 Skin. Had the police turned up whilst Dean was still tied to the chair, things would have gone badly for him.

Stupid, stupid Sam. Even Dean praises him at the end of the episode, for which I have to roll my eyes.

After this, Dean rings Ellen, assuming she must have had something to do with Gordon finding out Sam’s whereabouts. Ellen understands Dean’s assumption, but asserts that she did not tell anybody. Any of the hunters in the Roadhouse could have overheard, and according to her many of them would have easily been able to track Sam and the psychics down.

Anyway, the penultimate scene of the episode is Dean and Sam talking in the car. Ava will not answer phone and Sam is getting concerned, and after making a comment about marital infidelity and carnal pleasure as a reward for saving the world, Dean says ‘If you ever take off like that again…’ which is the extent of the anger he shows Sam in this episode. Sam’s response to this is a laugh, as though a microbe has just started getting lippy with him.

So those people who think Dean has a history of violently abusing Sam… take a look at how little Sam cares about Dean’s threats of repercussions. He does not, not in the slightest. Does that sound like the actions of a man being ‘threatened with violence’ by his abuser? Not to me.

Bismillah give me strength...

Oh, and Dean made a men-being-raped-in-prison joke, because that is hilarious apparently. I mean, those men deserve it, after all. Sam deserved a slap in the face after his behaviour in this episode, but Dean gets a time out. Why do the writers keep giving the characters stupid lines like that? Still, at least he does not make a joke about the man who is actually raped repeatedly in 2x15 Tall Tales, but more on that sometime in March when I get to it.

Ava’s radio silence worries Sam enough that he gets Dean to drive him to Peoria, Illinois (the state next door to Indiana). At Ava’s home, they find her fiancé dead and sulphur in the window: a demon was recently there, but the exact circumstances of Ava’s disappearance and her dead fiancé are anybody’s guess. Did the demon kill the fiancé and then kidnap Ava, or did it possess Ava, kill the fiancé, and then leave? Was the demon already possessing Ava when she met Sam?

Sam finds Ava’s engagement ring on the floor, and then the end credits roll.

Not the best episode, but not the worst either. The mollycoddling of Sam irked and vexed me, as did the writer not allowing Dean or anybody else (but especially Dean) to get angry with Sam. This might be a script editor decision rather than writer decision, but I am still miffed. In hindsight, the psychic kids plot is mostly redundant and never leads anywhere. It could have done, as Lucifer could easily have used the psychics in his army to fight the ‘war’ we never actually see but hear a lot about (probably a budget problem, just like the black contact lenses etc). Dean is struggling with his ‘dark side’ or his ‘exaggerated masculine’ which is trying to deaden him to killing Sam. Dean is, however, in a better position to fight his own corner, and unless I am very much mistaken there is no point in series two after this where it looks conceivable Dean would kill Sam. Although after Sam’s gallivanting off on a jolly jaunt this episode, Dean would only have my deepest sympathies is he chose to do so.

#Youtube #edvard's supernatural guide #spn meta #2x10 hunted #spn 2x10 #s02e10 #gordon walker #dean winchester #sam winchester #becky rosen #supernatural rewatch #supernatural #alec x5 494

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Edvard's Supernatural Guide 2x04 Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

Spoilers us to Supernatural 15x17 and Buffy 6x07

This episode brings the ‘Dark Dean Arc’ to a close (sort of) with the show’s first zombie episode. Zombies were not originally the reanimated, flesh-eating corpses first presented in Night of the Living Dead, but originated from voodoo folklore. A voodoo zombie is a reanimated corpse used as a slave by a powerful wizard. The Romero zombies which have been a staple of horror fiction since 1968 are a blend of this idea and the pre-Victorian era idea of a vampire.

I discussed this in my analysis of 1x18 Something Wicked and referred to the different varieties of vampire in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (to my shame, I have not read the following books yet). There are the Stokeresque vampires such as Louis, Lestat, and Claudia who are highly intelligent, as well as the vampires of the Theatre des Vampires, but in comparison to them are the ‘wild’ or ‘feral’ vampires Louis and Claudia encounter in far eastern Europe. These vampires had nobody to guide or ‘train’ them upon their awakening from the dead, but rather were left to crawl out of their own graves and haunt the forests and villages preying on people. Echoes of strigoi are easy to hear, and it is this mixed with the voodoo zombie which gave rise to the modern zombie.

Zombie!Angela – the reanimated woman – is not much like either. She is nobody’s slave, nor subject to anybody’s will as her voodoo counterparts, but rather she is an embodiment of grief, bereavement, and survivor’s guilt. This is precisely the role of the dead in Stephen King’s Pet Semetary which Dean so aptly references: survivor’s guilt is as good as a revenant which gets angry, violent, and ends up wanting to kill us.

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Given Dean has recently been resurrected and his behaviour becomes more distressed and traumatised, the parallels between him and Angela should be blindingly obvious. She is an extreme version of Dean, as Gordon was in 2x03 Bloodlust, but whereas Gordon revealed the damage Dean could do to other people, Zombie!Angela’s most important function is revealing precisely how much Dean wishes he were dead. The end of the episode has Dean staking Zombie!Angela back into her coffin (a nice reference to strigoi lore) and growling ‘What’s dead should stay dead’. Dean regards himself as dead, and his staking of Zombie!Angela was his suicide by proxy.

This is the pinnacle of the ‘Dark Dean Arc’ as it shows the viewer just how deeply recent events have effected him. Other than this, Dean’s behaviour in the ‘Dark Dean Arc’ do not generally stand out to me as being especially ‘dark’. Chainsawing the vampire to death in 2x03 was a perfectly rational act, as was concluding the Greek professor resurrected his dead daughter. I understand what the writers of these last three episodes were trying to do with Dean, but in my opinion they have not quite succeeded: he is clearly not doing well, but he is not as ‘scary’ as Sam claims. This comes later with everything he does in 2x20-2x22.

One of the reasons, perhaps, why the metaphor of Zombie!Angela sucking the life out of plants and goldfish around her and killing the people who wronged her does not quite land with me is because Dean is not doing any of these things. He did go from 0-60 in two seconds with the professor when he (understandably) concluded the professor in Ancient Greek had used Ancient Greek magic to resurrect his daughter, but Sam’s antagonism and insistence Dean behave in a way convenient to himself is far more consistent and aggravating. This is another instance of the show telling us one thing but showing us something quite different.

Maybe I simply relate to his perspective too much, but he is not ‘being as ass’ as he says to Sam: an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is completely normal. Call me a turd in Dean’s butt if you will (who else’s butt would I want to be a turd in, after all?), but the problem here is not Dean’s behaviour so much as it is the complete lack of stability and support in his life.

Sam relies on Dean to be the older brother / father figure who makes decisions and whom Sam can blame when things go wrong. Sam ‘loves’ Dean, but only when he is about to lose him: Sam needs the semblance of stability Dean can give him, but nobody is around to provide Dean support or stability. Bobby eventually tries, but forces poisonous expectations of stoicism, repression, and self-sacrifice on him, i.e. ‘I’m sorry your feelings got hurt, princess’ (after Sam tried killing him in cold blood in 4x21 When the Levee Breaks). Dean is supposed to be the strong one, the stalwart for everybody else. He is the centre, and when he cannot hold, everything else unravels.

If Sam cared, he would hand Dean a hammer and say ‘Go smash cars in Bobby’s yard. Get it all out. Smash up Baby if you need to as well. This appears to be how you need to process your grief, so get to it.’ He would not patronise and undermine his brother by trying to turn his bereavement into a foundation-level psychology lesson. Rather than being harangued in the middle of a suburban street like a naughty little boy, what Dean needs is somebody he can rely on to be strong for him when he needs it.

Considering his recent bereavement, he is still perfectly competent to lead an investigation by himself whilst his brother is pooh-poohing his every decision, treating him like a child, and generally being completely tone-deaf and myopic.

Somebody is going to write an essay about how I blame everything on Sam at some point, aren’t they? Great.

Having said that Zombie!Angela is a Dean mirror in this episode, it will not have escaped my readers’ notice that it was Angela’s lover who brought her back to life, not her father. This is an odd choice by the writer to reflect Dean’s grief at losing and being resurrected by John. I am quite sure it was not intentional for the writer to imply such things, but since Dean and John are being paralleled with a romantic couple (Zombie!Angela’s willingness in said union being unclear) my mind is going to back to my essay on John’s abuse of Dean and the show’s subtle implications of sexual abuse.

With that disgusting thought firmly in your mind, let us continue discussing Angela for as moment. She begins the episode crying about her boyfriend Matt whom she caught cheating on her with her flatmate Lindsey. What we are shown, however, is that Angela seems mighty intimate with Neil: their hand-holding in the cold open was decidedly not platonic. She was broken up about Matt cheating on her, but she does not appear to be the poster girl for faithful monogamy either. This is followed by the most horrific part of the episode – Matt entering Neil’s house uninvited without taking his shoes off! – only to find Angela has scarpered. She gives Matt one final lachrymose phone call, then crashes and dies.

And that, children is the moral of today’s episode: don’t text and drive!

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After 1,400 words, it is finally time to get onto the episode proper. The first scene after the opening credits shows Dean and Sam in the car discussing visiting Mary’s grave. Sam wants to visit, Dean does not. Sam’s rationale is that is has some meaning to him, which is fair enough, but as with previous episodes his grieving seems very paint by numbers. To be fair to him, he has never done this before (Jess? Never heard of her...) and appears to be using conventionally-accepted, formulaic displays and actions as his way of coping in the hopes it will get him through it. As I said in 2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown, it looks like he is putting on a bit of a performance, and he comes across as very immature. I will allow this because nobody should be expected to be mature, rational, or even tolerable at all times when grieving.

Dean is against the idea of visiting Mary’s grave because it is not Mary’s grave. It is just a headstone erected by a family member he has never met in memory of a woman who burnt up on the ceiling and left no remains to be buried. This is also perfectly acceptable and understandable, and Dean should not be expected to go to Mary’s grave. This is completely fair, but it is also fair for Sam to want to. Dean seems to understand Sam’s rationale perfectly well, but does not want to say ‘visiting Mary’s grave would be too painful for me, so I’d rather stay as far from it as possible’.

It is understandable that Dean be irritable with Sam in the car precisely because Sam is being irritating AND trying to get Dean to do something he does not want to do, but Sam should be allowed to go visit his mother’s grave without Dean’s grumpiness. Sam’s claim that ‘nobody asked you [Dean] to come’ was utterly hilarious, by the way. Sam, my brother in Christ, Dean is the driver.

(I watched this episode after watching the first four episode of The Winchesters, and Mary’s death hit different after that. I liked Meg Donelly instantly as Mary, and Drake Rodger won me over as John. The story takes place in an alternate universe to Supernatural, so that Mary and John is not the same Mary and John from Supernatural, but still… I can understand completely why Dean does not want to visit his mother’s grave.)

Dean is right to say that the grave is meaningless, but funnily enough Sam is also correct to say it is meaningful, but it is only meaningful because Sam gives it meaning. Mary is not buried there, but it is the place Sam wants to go to show his respects for her, and that means something.

I named a star after my friend last year. It does not, of course, mean anything. There is no official ESA or NASA database which will record one particular star in the constellation of Aquarius as being named ‘Thomas’, only databases owned by private companies. The star named Thomas in my database might be named Jamal or Sakura in other databases. But the constellations we know in the sky are just the ones from Ancient Greece, and the names of the stars and planets from Ancient Rome and the mediaeval Arab world. They are not the same as Sámi constellations or Aboriginal names for the stars, so this is nothing new whatsoever. I have given that star meaning, and it does not matter than other people might see it and call it Nipple or Foreskin. For me, its name is Thomas and you can try taking that from me if you really want to.

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At the graveyard, Dean stumbles across a gravestone which says 'Loving father', and after giving it a telling look, finds a dead tree surrounded by a ring of dead grass and soil. In almost uncharacteristic stupidity, Sam refuses to believe it could possibly have anything to do with the supernatural, insisting instead that the perfect circle of dead grass and the dead tree in the graveyard their mum is ‘buried’ must have a perfectly mundane explanation. This is obtuse, facetious, and downright dumb. Evidence of the supernatural was right in front of Sam’s dumbass eyes, but he was too intent on being Mr Smart Smart and undermining Dean’s assessments to even entertain the notion that the obvious abnormality in front of him was abnormal.

He does exactly the same later in the episode when interviewing the Greek professor, Angela’s father. Dean inquires about whether the professor has seen anything strange etc, to which the professor response is ‘I see her everywhere’. Dean’s supernatural senses are tingled, but Sam essentially says ‘Shut up, Dean’ by claiming ‘It’s perfectly normal’ to see your dead daughter everywhere… in a universe where ghosts actually exist and both Dean and Sam have decades of experience fighting them. If Sam’s skills in psychology were not clearly languishing somewhere in lower remedial, I might suspect him of conscious gaslighting.

Dean – Sam is sure – is simply searching for a supernatural explanation for a natural phenomenon so that he can feel in control of something and have something to fight. Getting Dean’s paw in his face after trying to psychoanalyse him in the car park in 2x03 Bloodlust clearly did not teach Sam that treating one’s bereaved brother like a dehumanised test subject is gross, as he does exactly the same in this episode, twice. The first time does not end well for Sam, as Dean does not stand for his crap in this episode.

I noticed long ago that Demon!Dean was not actually all that bad at all: the only reason other characters wanted to turn him back to Human!Dean was because Demon!Dean knew how to say ‘No!’ to other people and was determined to live his own life on his own terms. That fits with my assessment here that Sam’s biggest problem with Dean is that he will not behave in a way Sam deems appropriate and comfortable. Dean responds to Sam’s nonsense with appropriate anger, and Dean’s anger is not uncontrolled rage, but rather cold and scary. Sam question ‘Are you sure this is about a hunt? Not about something else?’ is met with a cold-eyed, calm ‘What else would it be about?’ which was clearly a German Shepherd growling at a chihuahua. Sam, however, does not know how to read Dean nearly as well as he thinks, as his ‘pfft’ reaction was the exasperation of a parent dealing with a petulant, stupid child.

Dean had wasted no time in finding out who was buried in the plot of dead land, and their next stop is the aforementioned Greek professor, Angela’s father. Dean is understandably suspicious from the moment the professor opened the door, but Sam of course is determined to be a combative contrarian and dismisses Dean’s suspicions as mentioned earlier. The visit at the professor’s home turns up nothing tangible (though perhaps Angela actually HAD been lurking around his home after being resurrected, this is never made clear), but attentive viewers will catch the fact that, after the professor says ‘Family’s everything, I’m lost without her’, the camera cuts to Dean. This coupled with Dean confession to Gordon in 2x03 Bloodlust that ‘I’m not alright’ and that there is a ‘hole in him’ tell us quite a bit.

Please remember also that Gordon exploited Dean’s vulnerability to control him rather than acknowledging and helping him with it. Dean was a tool for him to use, just like with John.

Moving on, Sam’s obnoxious, bloody-minded blockheadedness finally becomes too much for Dean to deal with in the motel room afterwards. He wants to dismiss Dean’s suspicions yet again by claiming ‘You’ve got a patch of dead grass and nothing else. ...There’s no reason for it to be unholy ground.’

I can only stare at my screen in utter bewilderment at this line of argumentation. Why would there need to be a reason for it to be unholy ground for something to be unholy ground?

Dean: I found a dead body!

Sam: What do you mean ‘you found a dead body’? There’s no reason for the body to be dead. You’re making stuff up.

Holy ground can be unhallowed, unconsecrated, or generally made into unholy ground. Why does this need explanation? And ‘dead grass’? It was a perfect circle of dead grass and a dead tree connected with a fresh grave. Is he serious? Is he really being serious? Even Scully was not this sceptical: she would not have concluded it to be a supernatural event, but she would surely have conceded there was something wrong.

Forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but Sam has really been trying to get the most out of his foundation psychology course and has been treating Dean as his guinea pig to analyse for weeks, if not months. What Sam should do is be like the rest of us weirdos and write a blog. And learn to read the room.

Then of course comes a moment Deancrits LOVE: Dean gives Sam a look which could easily be interpreted as anger, to which Sam responds ‘You wanna take another swing at me, go ahead…’ Of course, this line has also been used to justify the claim that Dean regularly beat Sam, or at least used the threat of it to control Sam. However, this was clearly a reference to Dean punching Sam in 2x03 Bloodlust, and not to any history of abuse at Dean’s hands. In my ears, it sounded far more like ‘you’re stupid and can only work through your problems by punching things’, or perhaps ‘What’re you gonna do, punch me again, you brutish oaf?’ because we all know Sam thinks Dean has the IQ of, well, a squirrel.

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As in my analysis of 2x03, I will ask a few questions: does Sam act like he is scared of Dean using violence against him? Does he show fear of Dean at any point? Does he show Dean the same obeisance, obedience, and deference Dean showed John? No, he does not. And would Sam continue his frankly disrespectful pestering of his elder brother incessantly for weeks if he were scared Dean would use violence against him? No.

Dean’s response to this is not to punch Sam, but to shake his head and leave the room. which looks like long-suffering exhaustion and offence. Sam clearly has an image of Dean in his mind, and is incapable of seeing the real person standing in front of him. I can relate.

Dean will get his moment of vindication soon enough, but first a short scene involving Angela’s boyfriend Matt getting killed. His death is off-screen, and the viewer does not get a clear view of the attacker, but the reflection in the screen and the video paused on Angela’s face tell us clearly enough that Angela has somehow killed Matt.

Dean uses a card to gain illegal entrance to Angela’s home and ends up interviewing Lindsey, Angela’s ex-flatmate. He is clearly competent enough to do this kind of thing alone, and insightful and perceptive enough to eventually work out that Lindsey might have been the one Angela’s boyfriend was copulating with. This of course, makes it satisfying when Dean gets to rub in Sam’s face the fact that there is a case for them to solve, and that Dean was, in fact, right. ‘Sam, I know how to do my job, in spite of what you might think!’

Does Sam offer a proper apology for his behaviour? Nope, of course he does not. He says ‘I’m sorry’, but his behaviour does not reflect the sentiment. In fact, he goes on to be just as contrarian in 2x05 Simon Says in refusing to believe Dean’s assessment that Andy is not responsible for the killings, but more on that later.

One also wonders why exactly Sam was so quick to hide the fact he was watching porn from Dean. Whether or not Dean is really into sex as much as the show tells us he is, shaming or mocking somebody for watching adult entertainment is hardly something he would do. ...One also wonders why Sam did not lock the door if he was watching porn. Maybe he enjoys the idea of getting caught.

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Dean and Sam conclude Angela has become a vengeful spirit, and decide to burn her remains. However, there are no remains in her coffin, but this is when Dean finds the Ancient Greek symbols on the inside.

They conclude Angela’s dad the Greek professor is behind it, but before confronting him, they go to the library to do some research. The viewer is not shown this, but Dean brings it up during the course of his conversation with the professor.

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This conversation between Dean and the professor is supposed to be the apogee of Dean’s bad behaviour in the episode (or at least so the episode TELLS us). He is combative and hostile to the professor from the outset, and gets aggressive, ending by shouting and getting threatened with the police. This is the only part of the episode where Dean’s behaviour is out of line. It was rational and sensible to conclude that the professor was the one who resurrected Angela based on the evidence he (and Sam) had available to them, but the evidence was circumstantial and indirect. Dean jumped the gun, but his reasons for doing so were also understandable: John had brought Dean back to life after he died in a car accident, so it stood to reason that another father would resurrect his dead child after she died in a car accident.

However, the professor was a stand-in for John and Dean started taking his anger out on him. I see this as traumatised behaviour from a severely damaged man, but that does not negate the fact it was antisocial, threatening behaviour on somebody else’s property.

Once more, note the reference to Stephen King’s Pet Semetary, a story about revenants as an embodiment of bereavement and survivor’s guilt eventually killing the living. Angela is like one of the revenants in that book/film, but as much as I have stated repeatedly that Dean’s behaviour is not that bad overall in this episode, I can see that if he were to continue down the road he is on, he may well become a real danger to himself and others. Dean’s statement that ‘what’s dead should stay dead’ is both a reference to Angela AND himself, after all.

On the subject of Sam, he did have a difficult job in this scene. Perhaps he had also reached the conclusion that the professor might be involved, but had to be a counterbalance to try keeping Dean calm. He was right to focus on trying to keep Dean under control in this scene, and if he had not, there is a chance things might have got violent. Might. Annoying and contrary as he is in this episode, he actually did a good thing. However, he was so certain that the professor had nothing to do with Angela’s death, but based on nothing. Dean was absolutely correct that the flowers being alive does not mean much: the professor could have been keeping her otherwhere. Sam’s insistence the professor is ‘innocent’ is naïve, but in this instance Sam was actually correct.

Dean’s reason for making the conclusion he had was undoubtedly coloured by the fact he was positive John had resurrected him. This maybe blinded him. Perhaps he knew straight-away that John’s death was linked to Dean’s resurrection, and maybe even suspected it was a trade. Misguided and potentially dangerous as it was, it is understandable that he would not be able to see anything else. It is like when you lose a friend to suicide, and then stay in an empty, exhausting ‘relationship’ because the other guy has all the warning signs of being a Prime Suicide Candidate.

After diffusing the situation and getting Dean out of the professor’s house, Sam thinks it a good idea to harangue his brother in the middle of a suburban residential street whilst the police are apparently on their way. This dumbass decision is even stupider when we remember Dean has been a wanted killer since 1x06 Skin, no thanks to Sam and Middle Class Privileged Girl allowing him to take the fall for the shapeshifter’s crimes. Sam once more insists upon bringing up John’s death after weeks or months of Dean asking him not to and clearly finding the subject aggravating. ‘If you bring up Dad’s death one more time,’ Dean says while clenching his fist, ‘I swear…’

I know I give Sam a lot of flak for his incessant badgering of Dean to grieve in a way Sam wants him to, or to have conversations Dean does not want to have, but I am not so myopic I cannot see that perhaps Sam needs to have these conversations, and has nobody else to have them with. Sam is always very involved and up in other people’s business about their problems and emotions, but rarely talks about his own in any way. It is not Dean’s responsibility to do whatever Sam needs him to do at the expense of his own integrity or comfort, but Sam likely needs some reassurance from his elder brother, the only person he really has left who will not reject him.

Sam himself says he is scared of losing Dean in this very scene, and that is the only thing which gets through to him. Dean remembers he is needed and that somebody at least cares about some parts of him, and that cools him down a little. Alas, it is only when Sam believes he is at risk of losing Dean that he shows he cares in any way. How much different would things be if Sam were less like a nagging fishwife and more like an actual adult mature supportive protective brother.

Is that enough? Can I go back to either blithely ignoring or heaping scorn on Sam now?

Moving on, the show soon reveals that Angela has indeed been resurrected by somebody at the university, but rather than Angela’s father being the culprit, it is Neil, the ‘friend’ from the cold open. Dean and Sam soon find this out when – based on Dean’s insight from Lindsey’s diary (or ‘journal’, they seem interchangeable here) – they turn up at Lindsey’s flat just in time to rescue her from a vengeful Zombie!Angela. Dean and Sam do not take long to work out who resurrected her, and this leads them to discover her hiding place in Neil’s basement. This is where Dean finally concludes that Neil and Zombie!Angela are making the beast with two backs.

After meeting Neil at his office and letting him know they know, Dean notices the dead plants in the office and concludes Zombie!Angela is somewhere very close. Dean talks loudly about his and Sam’s plans to cast an antispell at Angela’s grave, ensuring she hear him wherever she is, then urges Neil to come with them. When Neil refuses (and his lack of protestations that Zombie!Angela is ‘alive’ is confession enough that he is responsible), Dean compels him to leave as quick as he can, but not to make ‘any sudden movements’.

Of course, Neil dies almost straightaway after Dean and Sam leave, and if Angela was anything like as clingy and suspicious as Zombie!Angela, I can see why her ex wanted to get away from her.

Jokes aside, Zombie!Angela’s murder of the man who resurrected her is an expression of Dean’s anger at John for doing the same to him. Dean is angry at John, an anger he believes he will never be able to truly express or receive restitution for. In 2x01 In My Time of Dying, he was ready to die and was a hair’s breadth from moving on. He was almost peaceful at the end with Tessa, only to be dragged back kicking and screaming, and then be forced to lose John AND be burdened with what John told him. He has every right to be furious with John after that, whether or not John brought him back out of love. Dean is suffering now because John forced him to do so, so it is no surprise he resembles Zombie!Angela, and even one of the dead in Pet Sematary (if only vaguely).

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The ‘antispell’ Dean spoke about in Neil’s office was a ruse to lure Zombie!Angela into a trap. Dean and Sam working together in this scene was a reminder that they can work well together when the writers are not trying to make Sam look like the heroest hero who ever heroed. The most noteworthy part of the scene is that Dean stakes his narrative mirror Zombie!Angela into her coffin and says clearly ‘what’s dead should stay dead’. This is a metaphorical suicide, like when Buffy almost danced herself to death in 6x07 Once More with Feeling.

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The episode ends with Dean finally opening up a little about what has been plaguing him. He is grieving John’s death, his own death, and struggling with the burden of what he might have to do (though he does not tell Sam this). Dean knows John sacrificed himself for him, and there is nothing Sam can say or do to make that better. Please remember what I wrote about Dean’s grief in 2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown.

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As for Dean’s ‘single man tear’ immortalised by the obnoxious private school girls in 10x05 Fan Fiction, it does not exist. One tear falls from Dean’s eye in the final scene, but both eyes are wet and the camera cuts away before anything more can happen. There are significantly more than one tear in 2x20 What Is and What Should Never Be when Dean is talking to John’s grave...

plenty more in 2x22 All Hell Breaks Loose Part II when Dean is talking to Sam’s dead body...

way more in 4x11 Family Remains when remembering what happened to him in Hell...

14x18 Absence after Mary dies...

way more in 15x17 Unity when Dean is about to use Jack to kill Chuck...

Maybe I take things too literally and the humour is supposed to be that the idea of a ‘single man tear’ is ridiculous, but it does not seem that way to me. Men are supposed to ‘show more emotion’ and ‘talk about their feelings more’, but when it happens, too many people are quick to mock the manner we do it because it is not how women do it.

This episode advanced the story a little in allowing Dean to finally feel ready to open up a bit and allow somebody to get closer. However, Dean’s bereavement and grief are far from over (if it can be said that ‘bereavement’ is ever over at all), and things will only get worse for him as time goes by. That, however, if a story for another time, as this concludes my analysis of 2x04 Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things.

But before I leave, can I hug and make collages with GriefCounsellor!Dean? I never had grief counselling, so I would like to see whether it helps. For science, of course...

#edvard's supernatural guide #spn meta #spn rewatch #spn 2x04 #s02e04 #2x04 children shouldn't play with dead things #dean winchester #sam winchester #supernatural #zombies #pet sematary #Youtube

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