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#spn 1x21
2sw · 6 months
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hehehe
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shallowbelever · 10 months
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Supernatural | 1.21 Salvation
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sirlancenotalot · 11 days
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pagannatural · 24 days
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1.21 Salvation
-John finally, after some 22 years, lets his sons in on his plans and shows them everything he’s got on the demon that killed their mom and Jess.
-John is such a good character. I’m not really interested in liking or disliking him, I just love his part in this story. He reacted to an unimaginable situation in a human way. Who among us can say, really, how we would parent two small children if our wife was brutally murdered on the ceiling by a demon who then burned down our entire house? John truly thought the whole world was a war zone so he made his kids soldiers rather than getting them to safety. To understand John you have to understand that Safe and Normal as concepts were destroyed for him. He wanted to protect his boys so badly that he tried to prepare them and toughen them and train them but he also wanted to shield them so he hid as much as he could from them. He taught them that people were dying and they were responsible for stopping it. He put all of that on their way-too-young shoulders all while refusing to trust them or let them in.
Under all that pressure, Sam and Dean created their own world, their bubble of safety with each other. They give each what they need in the most vital and fundamental sense, nourishing each other in a hostile environment. They share something that no one else could ever understand.
So thanks, John.
-“It’s not your problem, it’s our problem” is an objectively kind and supportive thing to say so I’m proud of Dean for managing to shout it angrily at Sam. Such passion such energy
-Sam looks like a little kid this whole scene where Dean and John are arguing about parenting him. Dean stands up to John again and defends himself. He’s Sam’s daddy now (sorry)
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-John tells Sam “I want you to go to school, I want Dean to have a home” which is hilarious to me because it implies that he thinks of Dean as a homeless man (which he is).
Dean glances at Sam when John says this and then hangs his head. Sam is his home. And he feels responsible for Sam leaving school (which he is).
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-In the car Sam tells Dean “I want to thank you” but the you comes out as “ya”. This happens another time when Sam tells Dean “I still love you” (or something close to that) in s5e11. It’s unusual for Sam. He doesn’t ya his you’s regularly at the end of a sentence. Jared and Jensen both have typical midwestern accents on the show. Jared intentionally changes his speech pattern when he’s possessed, so that words like “wasn’t” or “doesn’t” are enunciated when normally Sam pronounces it like “wud’n” or “dud’n” with a very soft “d.”
Point being, something is causing Sam to shy off of saying these things and making them sound too serious so he says “I want to thank ya” which sounds more casual. When he’s lost in emotion (like later when he throws Dean against a wall and says “don’t you say that”), he enunciates his you’s. I think this is unintentional of Sam and intentional of Jared. Sam’s trying not to scare Dean off or sound too confessional- he’s seen how Dean reacts to that.
-Sam says “even when I couldn’t count on anyone”
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Dean gave him consistency and safety and the knowledge that he was always loved. Dean’s his sanctuary.
-Dean says the house is “burning to the ground, it’s suicide”
“I don’t care” “I do”
Sam is reckless. He has a safe place to land, so he often acts without really thinking through the consequences, and Dean is always there for him. This is the THIRD house fire Dean has protected Sam from. Interesting that Sam asked Jessica, his Dean replacement, “what would I do without you?” in ep1 and she said “crash and burn.” Actually that’s what you would do without Dean :)
-Sam says killing the demon is “all we’ve ever cared about” he doesn’t realize that Dean has always cared more about him than about revenge or justice or whatever else. Dean would rather have Sam. Wild that Sam doesn’t know he’s Dean’s top priority yet. I wonder if he knew that pre-Stanford?
-Sam gets angry when Dean says they can’t bring Jessica or their mom back. It mirrors Dean slamming Sam against the wall in ep1 when he told Dean their mom is never coming back. Sam’s anger melts as soon as Dean speaks and he ends up just kind of grasping Dean’s shirt and pressing into him with this desperate look on his face. They look at each other’s mouths.
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-Dean is accepting of Sam grabbing him and throwing him against a wall, just like Sam handles it in s2 when Dean punches him in the face. They have no normal way to express how intensely they feel about each other so it comes out as violence or care when one is injured. Love and need and pain are inextricable between them- they love each other in ways that are painful. So they just submit to each other like Yes, finally something that feels strong enough. It’s like it’s soothing to express and receive each other’s needs, even as pain. It has to come out somehow.
-Dean says that the three of them are all he has and “sometimes I feel like I’m barely holding it together” Dean doesn’t let himself fall apart, and he wants to fall apart with Sam here, begging Sam to be careful with his life, to understand that he needs Sam. He’s saying Please don’t get hurt, I need you, I’m falling apart.
Sam could kiss him right now. Dean’s not holding it together enough to try pushing Sam away or protecting him from their feelings.
-Dean says “without you and dad, I-” and I think that Dean obviously loves and cares about John but the real issue is that he couldn’t say “without you, I-” on network television because they would have just made out. The mention of their dad brings Sam back to himself. He turns away from Dean and lets go of him with what looks like some effort. Dean looks lost and he’s also still tilting his head up with his lips parted looking like Sam didn’t kiss him. Sam asks him to call John.
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-This parallels when Dean told Sam to call Sarah in 1x19. Dean calls even though he’s still emotionally involved in the conversation with Sam and didn’t finish what he was saying. He’s just admitted something that was difficult for him, and Sam reacted by pulling away, distancing himself, exactly as Dean did when Sam admitted Jessica isn’t the main reason he’s not interested in anyone.
I’m a John-would-kill-Dean truther if he found out about anything untoward going on between his boys, so the mention of their Dad and the fact that he’s in danger would absolutely make Sam force himself away from Dean.
This specific dynamic of Sam pleading with Dean for something and Dean surrendering brokenly to Sam in a Please give it to me Please just take it loop where neither is willing to act makes me want to chew on my own ribcage.
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justpadaleckisackles · 5 months
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Sam and Dean in every episode: 1x21 ➡️ Salvation
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shirtlesssammy · 27 days
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Dean Winchester every day -- 21/326
Supernatural 1x21//Salvation
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arcanespillo · 6 months
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Squeeze, The X-files 1.03/
Salvation, Supernatural 1.21
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samsrowena · 2 years
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↳ 1x01 // 1x21
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kirathehyrulian · 2 years
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😌 Sam wants to be recognized for his efforts too. inspired by this post [x] @carfuckerdean​
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Some how, no matter the world, one of John’s most important friends’s last names will be Murphy
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deancaslover · 9 months
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All these years I told myself I remembered who Pastor Jim was. Well I'm watching 1x21 and I'm like "oh so that was Pastor Jim huh" :)
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2sw · 4 months
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Supernatural S1E20 Dead Man's Blood // S1E21 Salvation // Hélène Cixous, Ay yay! The Cry of Literature
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stealingdeansgender · 10 months
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1x21 (Salvation):
“SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE I’M BARELY HOLDING IT TOGETHER, MAN”
the whole confrontation between the boys is just — painful!! it’s PAINFUL OK. Sam’s gone full in on the hunt to his detriment and Dean just doesn’t want anyone he loves to DIE. Dean looks scared — and it isn’t being scared of Sam, it’s being scared that whatever’s inside of John is inside of Sam.
and that’s RIGHT BEFORE the reveal at the end w/ Meg. nobody look at me I’m fragile
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sapphicsapphiresunset · 10 months
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1x21 Salvation
Oh hey Pastor Jim and Caleb. Oh. Bye Pastor Jim and Caleb.
It is funny that these characters that are implied as pretty important to the winchester boys growing up show up to just instantly die.  Except Bobby. At least we have Bobby. 
And then John’s all like ‘blah blah blah you should’ve called me bout Sam’s visions” and then Dean’s like, “dude. seriously?” and then I’m like, “dude. seriously.”
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destielshippingnews · 2 years
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Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 1x21 Salvation
The penultimate episode of Supernatural’s first series begins with a scene which had potential to be ominous and atmospheric, but unfortunately suffered a lack of build-up, context, or reason to care. Pastor Jim received one or two mentions throughout the whole of series one, but never appeared on screen before this episode and whom the viewer never even heard speaking to Dean or Sam on the phone. As such, his death is gruesome and unpleasant but falls flat on the viewer because there is no particular reason to care. He has not been especially important to either the story or the Winchesters in series one, nor has he even had a face until he first appears in the same scene Meg kills him. Meg is using him to get to the Winchesters, regardless of the fact Jim does not know where they are, but since the viewer has never seen him before nor seen him contribute to the Winchesters’ goals in any way, it is unclear why exactly she goes after him in particular.
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In her own analysis of this episode, Paula R. Stiles adds the fact that Meg going after Pastor Jim now is strange. We have no idea how easy or hard it was for her to locate him, and so we are left wondering why she did not go after him months ago. We are also left wondering why Meg did not simply go straight after dean, Sam, and John: she has managed to get very close to them on several occasions in the past, so what is different this time? The show has neither told nor shown the viewer anything about Dean, Sam, or John using any protecting warding on the place they are staying, and we have no information on whether or not they are wearing any protective amulets to prevent tracking. So what is stopping Meg simply going straight after them? And if she can get to John’s friends so easily to slit their throats, why did she not simply do that to John a few months ago before he got his hands on the colt? This is another instance of Supernatural suffering first draft problems. ...Which would be a problem if I watched it for the plot, but as has been made abundantly clear by now, I do not.
That aside, one thing this episode and the following episode 1x22 Devil’s Trap succeed in is giving demons a presence which they later completely lack. Meg of course is heralded by the wind blowing through the church, causing the candles to flicker, and Azazel is preceded later on by radio interference, electrical problems, strong winds, and creepy paranormal activity in the baby’s room. Things like this should have been a greater part of Supernatural’s aesthetic. People with black contact lenses are not scary, but people with black contact lenses who make candles flicker and die, whose presence causes winds to blow, electrics to fail, and clocks to stop are pure horror material. This kind of presence suggests much which we cannot see, and what we cannot see is scarier than what we can.
I have said before that I do not care much for Meg 1.0, and this opening scene exemplifies a lot of what did not suit my personal tastes. She sounds far too laconic and the dialogue written for her is bland, resulting in her sounding like a bored human. She also has some rather cheesy lines late in the episode which might have been amusing in 2006 but ‘We’re going to rip the skin from your bones’ is both anatomically questionable (skin covers fat and muscle, and muscle covers bone) and yawn-inducing.
That said, I do not think Nicki Aycox is a bad actress at all. I think she did both a good job with what she was given, and gives a very strong performance in 1x22 Devil’s Trap as well as 4x02 Are You There, God? It’s Me, Dean Winchester. She just got given sucky material in this show. I was saddened to find out she never got a long-term acting job, and that she is fighting leukaemia now (August 2022).
One thing I did like about Meg 1.0 is her motivation, determination, and dedication to her family and their goal. I said as much in my review of 1x16 Shadow, and Paula R. Stiles drew a parallel between her and Dean, describing her as a mirror image of Dean fighting for the other side.
Noteworthy in the first scene is that, even though Pastor Jim is a man of the church, he does not invoke either the Abrahamic God nor Jesus nor any other figure from Abrahamic mythologies to help ward off Meg. He does not even refer to the church as a ‘House of God’, but rather calls it ‘hallowed ground’.
Noteworthy is also that John’s tight-lipped withholding of information is likely the reason Pastor Jim and Caleb died: Pastor Jim seemed completely taken unaware and unprepared, and we can assume the same was true for Caleb. Surely if John were half the hunter we are told he is, he would have known that demons would be willing to use his friends and acquaintances to get to him just as they would his sons, yet he told them nothing which could have helped them prepare and protect themselves. John, however, had not made contact with Jim for over a year. Well done, John.
The cold open ends with Jim dead and Meg 1.0 smirking a Bad Ass Baddie smirk, then the scene switches to Dean, Sam, and John who are still in Manning, Colorado where they fought the vampires in 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood. They have been doing a lot of research, planning, and talking about the demon based on the sheer amount of stuff plastered on the walls. Base don their conversation, however, part of it has been conducted by John alone, and that is the research into weather patterns and sulphur, i.e. demonic activity. John reveals to his sons that he picked up the demons’s trail a year ago based on signs like these, whereupon he abandoned Dean (and all his other contacts) without warning or any information which might have helped him or kept him safe. The trail John found was linked to houses burnt down on the day a newborn turned six months old, i.e. the same circumstances surrounding Mary’s death and thereby similar to Jess’s death.
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Once more I will refer to Paula R. Stiles here: episode 4x03 In the Beginning… makes it clear that Azazel visited these houses ten years after one of the parents made a deal with him. Mary made a deal with him in 1974 in order to bring John back to life, and Azazel appeared in Sam’s bedroom in 1984, to give just one example. If we assume Azazel stuck with this mode of operation, he would have been making his latest round of deals in 1995 and 1996. John was a hunter while this was going on, and he missed it completely after tracking the demon for over a decade at that point. If we are supposed to think John’s an awesome hunter, the writers are doing a bad job. Bobby also missed it, as did Missouri Moseley, Caleb, and Pastor Jim. How did they all miss loads of houses across America (and it does seem to be exclusively America for some reason, not even Canada or Mexico) burning up like that, and the occasional reports of mothers on ceilings? Surely this is something John would have been keeping an eye out for, and that the others would have been helping him with.
John reveals that he found the same signs, e.g. strange weather, cattle mutilations, and whatever else, in Lawrence and Palo Alto before Mary and Jess’s deaths. Sam, as always, proceeds to make this All About Sam. Sure Sam has psychic powers, and his conversation with Max in 1x14 Nightmare made him aware of other psychic kids whose mother died in similar circumstances, but a person’s response to this should be ‘This is because somebody wants us for something’ rather than ‘This is because of me.’ If you remember my analysis of 1x19 Provenance, I brought up Sam’s bipolar depression and that sometimes he believes he is the scum of the Earth. I can accept that this is a contributing factor to his response here, but only part. The rest is the writers wanting Sam to be the main protagonist and to tell his story accompanied by Sam’s own understandable guilt and trauma, but also his self-centred understanding of events, his self-centred motivations, and his narcissism. Everything has to be About Sam, even when there are dozens if not hundreds of other people effected in the same way.
On the subject of bad writing, Dean, Sam, and John investigate the town of Salvation, Iowa. Signs of demonic activity have been surrounding the town for a few days, and they suspect Azazel will appear soon in a baby’s room on the night of its sixth month. Posing as policemen in order to get information from hospital staff, they try to find out which babies in the area are approaching their sixth month. They split up, one taking each of the three medical centres in the county, and Dean’s first line of dialogue in the scene is just god-awful writing. A good-looking nurse at reception asks Dean ‘ Is there anything I can do to help you?’ to which his response is ‘Oh God, yes’.
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I am aware I am supposed to laugh at this, but am I to believe that a man experienced in posing as police officers, federal agents, and whatever else who is on a case trying to find the demon who killed his mum is going to blow his cover almost straight away by acting incredibly unprofessional and turning into a twelve year-old boy who has just found out girls are pretty? Pfft. Miss me with that, show. Who wrote this? checks notes Wait, Gamble and Tucker? That is such a Sera Gamble line.
Apropos unprofessional, the costuming department also failed in this scene. I am to believe that Dean, Sam, and John look like working class or underclass men to the rest of society, and that people spot this straight away. However, all three of them waltz into the medical centres in their everyday clothes which are supposed to look like poor men’s attire, and claim to be policemen looking for information. Is this something about American society which I do not understand?
Rather than finding useful information in a hospital or doctor’s clinic, their breakthrough comes in the form of Sam’s vision of a woman being killed like Mary was. This leads him to a woman in a nice middle-class area of town pushing a baby in a pram down the street. He deduces this woman to be Azazel’s next target after she tells him that her baby is almost six months old.
One thing I wondered while watching Sam’s vision is why the mothers in these situations always have white nighties on. I have a mother and I have never seen her wearing a white nightie.
Moving on, Sam tells Dean and John about the woman and how he found her, which leads John to try chewing his sons out for not telling him about Sam’s psychic powers earlier. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’I wrote ‘chewing his sons out’, but he directed this specifically at Dean, tasking him specifically with informing John of Sam’s visions and holding Dean specifically accountable for John not knowing.
This, of course, after John took off without notice or warning, and then refused to answer any of Dean’s calls, even when Dean was dying. I swear to God, the balls on John would be impressive if I did not want to murder him. Perhaps emboldened by calling John out on his bullcrap at the end of 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood, Dean takes John to task for this ‘order’, calling him out his hypocrisy in demanding Dena call him when John never once answered a call from Dean in the year he was missing. Dean even brings up the fact he was dying in 1x12 Faith and even then John left Dean’s call unanswered. The gall, the impudence, the sheer unmitigated audacity of the man. Once again, I was so proud of Dean for standing up for himself against John.
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I was disappointed, however, that the writers gave this specific grievance so little space. This was an opportunity for him to lay into John as Sam did in 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood and rip him apart. John clearly did not care, as his face hardened the moment Dean called him out. The expression John wore said loud and clear ‘Oh look, the door mat’s talking, and it thinks I care’, and Dean should have picked up on this. John apologised to Dean, but what exactly John meant when he said ‘I’m sorry’ is anybody’s guess. Presumably he intended Dean to interpret this as remorse for leaving him to die. Many viewers may understand John’s final ‘I’m sorry’ after Dean reads his articles of accusation as John admitting failure, but I saw it as little more than a weasel move to end the discussion. The fact John embeds his ‘I’m sorry’ in the sentence ‘Although I’m not crazy about this new tone of yours…’ shows clearly he is not sorry. Dean brought up John’s abandonment of him, and John’s response it to try asserting dominance by essentially saying ‘You are my child and my servant, and you will talk to me with respect’.
He did not mean his ‘I’m sorry’, he just did not want not have that conversation with Dean then. Dean had shown that John’s control over him was failing. Abusive parents fear their abused children shaking off their control and one day hitting them back. Given a chance, Dean could easily have John saying ‘I’m sorry’ from the other side of his head. John even tries to reassert his dominance over Dean by talking to him like he is a child:
Sit on a cactus, John. Naked.
Alas, I had to content myself with Dean giving John a minor bitch-slap with his words, a minor bitch-slap which is unfortunately the most Dean ever gets to say straight to John’s face. It is a huge moment for Dean, and should have been a major step on his road to recovering from John’s abuse of him, but… alas.
By the way, Dean still has a gay man’s heart which he got in 1x12 Faith. I just thought it was worth repeating.
A phone call from Meg ends this discussion and changes the subject completely. The conversation involves Meg murdering Caleb and making John listen to him die after she cuts his throat, and then Meg threatening to do the same to all John’s other friends and contacts unless John meets her in Lincoln, Oregon at midnight. It is all very clichéd (and Crowley tries something similar on Dean and Sam in 8x22 Clip Show) and it is hard to care much because I do not know any of John’s friends or contacts, other than Missouri Moseley (and we all know what I think of her). Meg’s actions mean nothing because the people she is doing them to mean nothing to me: they are just more male characters introduced with the sole purpose of being killed. Finding out Meg killed Jim clearly got to John (and he was visibly upset about his death when he found out from Caleb earlier), so he cares, but I do not. I am supposed to see Meg as a scary threat, but the conversation ends with me thinking ‘Shut up, Meg.’
‘The last time I saw you, you were thrown out of a window’ was an amusing line, though.
John devises a stupid plan to try to trick Meg with a fake gun, and gets Dean and Sam to remain in Iowa to deal with Azazel. The dialogue in this scene is awkward and amateurish and functions to spell out the plan to inattentive viewers, and to answer necessary questions. It was so bad that I almost saw actors acting rather than characters in a show. I find Jared’s acting passable most of the time in the early years of the show, but Jensen’s almost always top-notch. As much as I bitch about John, Jeffrey Dean Morgan does a great job with what little screen time he has. In this last part of the (long) scene in the motel, though, even Jensen and Jeffrey felt like they were acting because the writing was so off.
Anyway, Sam spells out the subtext for the viewer that John wants Dean and Sam to kill the demon alone, to which John gives a weirdly melodramatic response (I expect Sera Gamble wrote this scene). ‘No Sam, I want us to stop losing people we love. I want you to go to school [by which I presume he means ‘university’], I want Dean to have a home. I want Mary alive.’ I of course had to pause the episode here because I want Dean to have a home is a hilarious line coming from John who did his best to keep Dean from having a home (e.g. 9x07 Bad Boys) and made him into a man who could never fit into normal society or have a normal home.
We are of course supposed to empathise with John here, as we were in 1x20 Dead Man’s Blood when he admitted some of his wrongdoing, but I do not care about John’s sadness over losing Mary any more. His obsession over his dead wife ruined his sons’ lives.
Dean procures a colt from an antique shop (once again doing the heavy lifting in the episode off-screen) and then urges John to get himself to safety if things go wrong (spoiler warning: things go wrong). Their interaction here seems almost like a normal father-son interaction, and even I wonder whether I have sometimes taken my readings of John’s treatment of Dean too far. After all, Dean clearly cares about John and wants him safe, and their conversation in this scene bears no trace of John’s abuse.
Then I remember 1x06 Skin, 1x12 Faith, 1x14 Nightmare, 1x18 Something Wicked, and all the evidence of John’s abuse seen in Dean’s behaviour and other characters’ comments of John’s treatment of his children. ‘Child abuse, really,’ in Toni Bevell’s words (somewhere in series 12, in the episode where the British Men of Letters were torturing Mary is my best guess). I experience a little of what it is like to have a relationship with an abuser when I remember this. Often the abuser seems completely normal, even charming, warm, and loving. Occasionally that almost makes us forget about the other side of the abuser. It could not have been that bad, after all, surely. ...Except it was, and the abuser’s charm is part of the abuse. It makes us question our own reality and doubt ourselves, even blame ourselves for things being what they are.
(Here is a fan video on this very subject. Spoilers up to and including 15x20.)
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Returning to 1x21, John somehow manages to drive from Iowa to Oregon (a journey of roughly 2,000 miles, equivalent to travelling from the north of Norway to the south of Germany) by midnight by car. He turns the contents of a water tank into holy water , then goes to meet Meg and her ‘brother’, left unnamed in this episode but whom I have given the delightful moniker of The Loquacious Terminator. John indeed tries to fool them with the fake colt, but this plans fails when The Loquacious Terminator fires a round into Meg, failing to kill her. John tries to escape them, opening a water valve and spraying the passage behind him with holy water, impeding the demons’ chase of him. For some reason, he stops to gloat over the holy water hose working rather than using that time to get away: once more, why exactly does John have a reputation as a brilliant hunter? His trick with turning the water supply into holy water was crafty, but other than that he is pretty basic and stupid. His car’s tyres are slashed, and before he can manage to get away, The Loquacious Terminator pins him to a wall with telekinesis. John is trapped.
This runs parallel to and interspersed with Dean and Sam’s part of the story. As John is travelling to Oregon. His sons are staking out the middle-class house and family from earlier in the episode. Quite how nobody noticed two men who are (apparently) obviously poor sitting in a car watching a house on a residential street is anybody’s guess. They have fake IDs and can make up a story, but what is the story?
Anyway, stake it out they do, and Sam takes advantage of the opportunity to thank Dean for always having his back and being somebody Sam can rely on. This was indeed a touching, gratifying moment. ...Or it would have been had it come a few episodes ago accompanied with an apology and penitence for shooting Dean twice in 1x10 Asylum, letting him take the fall for murder and assault in 1x06 Skin, and all his other less-than-decent behaviour. It would also actually mean something if his gratitude were reflected in his treatment of Dean, but that very night Sam tries starting something with Dean. As things are, it feels like Sam forcing an awkward conversation to give an empty performance. In Dean’s words, ‘I don’t wanna hear that friggin speech, man’.
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This discussion ends with eerie interference coming over the radio, along with the wind outside picking up and the electrics flickering. They deduce it is Azazel approaching (and what presence he has this early in the show) and sneak into the house. Quite why a middle class house did not have an alarm is also unanswered, but within seconds of entering the house, the father attacks Dean while the mother runs into the baby’s room.
Being the drama queen he is, Azazel does not simply snap her neck, but goes through the whole show of lifting her up the wall onto the ceiling. Funnily enough, the same happened to Jensen’s character Jason Teague in Smallville 4x08 Spell, but that ended up with the witch possessing Lana yeeting him out of a window where he would have died had Clark not saved him.
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(Jason survived the meteor shower in 4x22, by the way, and is currently living his best life in a committed relationship with Lex Luthor who faked his death to be with him. I will not hear a word to the contrary.)
Returning to the show Jensen left Smallville for, Sam enters the baby’s room in time to stop Azazel killing the mother, but he hesitates a second too long and fails to shoot Azazel. This raises the question of why Sam hesitated for all of five seconds before shooting. I am aware he has a lot of emotional baggage regarding Azazel, but he is an experienced hunter at this point and should not be freezing up like that. I understand the plot needed it to happen, but ‘the plot needed it to happen’ is never a good reason for something to happen.
I understand the plot also needed there to be a clear trail for John to follow in order to lead him to Azazel, but it is far too convenient that Azazel always kills in the same way, leaving the aforementioned clear trail for John to follow. It is soon revealed in 2x05 Simon Says that there are plenty of psychic children whose mother Azazel did not kill, but he killed enough in the same way for John to notice. This is too convenient.
Based on events in this episodes, I can also deduce that Meg and Azazel are not in frequent contact, and she does not know his exact whereabouts, nor he his, though they are supposedly working together. Had they communicated more, they might have been able to work out that the Winchesters were perhaps onto their plan. The Winchesters were now back together and had the colt, so they would have had good reason to plan contingencies for in case the Winchesters found out where Azazel would be. It is true that John has not been able to find Azazel for twenty years, but things were clearly changing and the action was building towards something. If Meg can find John’s friends, she can work out how to track phone numbers, and could have told Azazel the Winchesters were in Salvation, Iowa.
This brings me onto a gripe with demons on this show; they are mostly stupid. The same becomes true of angels later in the show. Meg and Azazel are not stupid, but they are not as threatening or ominous as they could be if they worked together and used all the resources available to them.
Returning to the episode at hand, while Sam rushes upstairs to help the mum, Dean knocks the father out (remember what I have said several times about blows to the head: a blow hard enough to knock a person out is hard enough to cause brain damage or death) and takes him outside. After rushing upstairs to find Azazel gone and the mother panicking, Dean orders Sam to get the other out and rescues the baby from the cot in the nick of time.
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Quite why Azazel chose to try burning the baby when he needs as many psychic children as he can get is also a mystery, but as I said before: demons in Supernatural are often stupid.
After Dean once again does the heavy lifting in the episode, rescuing both the father AND the baby, the family and brothers escape the house moments before the first floor explodes in a fireball. In the flames, a Jensen cardboard cut-out the silhouette of Azazel stands wreathed in flames, watching the boys outside in the garden.
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Sam tries to get back inside in order to kill Azazel, but Dean stops him because it would be suicide. ‘I don’t care!’ Sam says. ‘I do!’ is Dean’s reply. It is all moot anyway, as Azazel vanishes.
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The final scene of the episode begins in the motel room. Dean is frustrated because John is not answering his phone, all the while Emo King Sam mopes on his bed like a petulant teenager. ‘If you had just let me go in there…’ Not for the first time, I am tempted to reach through my screen and slap some sense into Sam. He failed the first time when he had the element of surprise, five seconds and a clear shot, so why on Earth does he think he could possibly succeed in killing Azazel in a burning building when Azazel knows he is coming? This is exactly the same narrow-minded, self-indulgent, whiny attitude he displayed so clearly at the beginning of the episode, and it is as repellent now as it was then. This would be forgivable if he were a teenager, but he is a twenty three year old man now. Intertwined with this is his self-destructive tendencies, a trait he shares with John, a result of their obsessed fixation on revenge at all costs. Dean himself draws this parallel in the very next episode.
Sam is focused wholly on the goal, that is killing Azazel. Everything which has to be sacrificed along the way is worthwhile, as long as Sam gets his revenge. This is exactly like John. Dean represents sanity and moderation in this exchange: he also wants revenge, but Sam’s life is more important to him than killing Azazel (however, Dean’s life is secondary to Sam’s due to John grooming Dean to be his brother’s keeper).
Interesting is the change in Sam’s character evident in this scene. The scene was undoubtedly intended as a mirror of the scene on the bridge in 1x01 Pilot when Sam’s says ‘Mom’s never coming back’ as a way of dismissing the idea of joining Dean to hunt monsters. Dean gets upset and says ‘Don’t talk about her like that’. The roles are almost reversed in this scene: while Dean is not being dismissive of anything, he is trying to call Sam off the hunt, whilst Sam brings up Mary and Jess’s deaths as justification for continuing.
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‘No matter what we do, they’re gone, and they’re never coming back.’ Sam gets all melodramatic, grabs Dean and slams him against the wall (Dean, predictably, offering no resistance). ‘Don’t you say that, not you,’ Sam says, dialogue befitting a soap opera more than Supernatural.
Wanting to protect Sam from getting killed is of course only part of Dean’s motivation for wanting Sam to give up his suicide mission: John is missing in action, and all Dean has left is Sam. If Dean loses Sam, he loses his brother and his sole reason for existing. Furthermore, he will be alone with John if John is still alive, and completely alone if John is dead.
Dean has no hope of ever having a normal life or having anything other than hunting. Paula R. Stiles points out in her analysis of this episode that Dean believes that whatever happens soon, the only life he is comfortable with will end. John is the reason for Dean being a broken mess, and Sam does not like Dean, but dean has nobody else. If Azazel dies, he believes their mission will be over: Sam will return to university, and John will stop hunting. Dean will either have to continue the hunting life alone, or struggle and fail to fit into normal society… where he is a wanted murderer and (unbeknownst to him) FBI agents already know a lot about the Winchesters. If, however, they fail in their quest, they will probably die anyway. Whatever the outcome, Dean’s life is beginning to fall apart, and his mental breakdown which leads to the decision he makes in 2x22 All Hell Breaks Loose Part II begins here.
Apropos John, Sam is a John mirror in this scene in both his obsession and his treatment of Dean. Sam turns his frustration, disappointment, and anger on Dean as an outlet (see above RE: kicking the cat). He is upset that Dean will not support his self-destructive behaviour, and Dean does not fight back when Sam turns his anger on him. Dean does not respond in kind: he could snap Sam like a twig if he wanted, but in spite of rough treatment, chooses care, compassion, and emotional connection to try to help Sam see sense.
It has been a few analyses since I last did this, so please allow me to indulge myself: Jensen’s acting, Dear Reader! Dear Reader, Jensen’s acting! The roller-coaster of emotions Dean goes through is plain to see on his face: steely determination o keep a straight face, then his façade fails and the broken, suicidal man from 1x12 Faith is revealed. He does this so well – and the Widower Arc from 13x01-13x05 – that I worry about him sometimes. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m barely holding it together, man’ is delivered in a cracking voice of somebody speaking through the onset of tears. It even takes him a while to recover after Sam backs off: once the mask has been removed, it is difficult to put it back on.
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Dean’s vulnerability snaps Sam out of his mood, but this vulnerable part of Dean is one Sam always seems to forget exists. His treatment of Dean has not changed since he found out about John’s treatment of him in 1x18 Something Wicked, and through out the whole show Sam simply does not see past the two dimensional idea Sam has in his brain of who his brother is. Regardless, Sam backs off after Dean lets his vulnerability show. This brings the focus back to John, who has still not answered his phone.
Dean makes one last call to John at Sam’s behest, only to be met by Meg on the other end. ‘You boys really screwed up this time… You’re never going to see your father again.’
Cue end credits...
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quwarichi · 2 years
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"i want dean to have a home" bold line from the guy who made them live in motels
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