![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
How fun was SPN last night? A lot. And I feel like the best fun is yet to come as people write about it, because this ep had a lot going on in it. Not only were there clever plans being put into operation right and left (almost everyone had a moment of "surprise, I've been playing you!"), scenes from the past were recalled and switched around. Seems like there's probably many different strands to look at in the ep. One that occurred to me today was the theme of faith in another person.
This ep really showed how the Team of Team Free Will acts as an entity. We saw how the different members relied on each other and carried each other when necessary, especially when it came to faith. As long as someone on the team has faith in someone else, the team went on. When you don’t have that faith, you fake it. That was a fitting theme in an ep following the one where we learn God has stopped taking calls, so faith in him (or at least faith in a particular kind of help from him) is pointless. It’s fun to look at the way faith plays out in different characters in this ep and wonder if there’s any foreshadowing there.
Dean
The person who’s defined himself by doing his duty by others is suddenly the one everyone’s chasing down to keep from abandoning the team. It was wonderfully ironic to remember how many times Dean had been yelled into shape by someone ordering him to stop thinking about himself and do his duty when it was exactly that thinking that was driving him away this time. As Sam put it, "Could you stop thinking about sacrificing yourself for ten minutes?"
Still, ultimately with no bright ideas of his own, he fell back on his oldest motivation. (Though I also think that Zachariah being such a tool brought out his instinctual stubbornness as well.) He did the right thing because his younger brothers were counting on him.
The new wrinkle was Dean confessing that he didn’t feel like he could count on Sam. Dean spent last season sure that Sam was being tricked by a demon, and he’s been on the receiving end of an angel’s campaign to get a vessel. Dean feels, partly out of habit, that it’s up to him to make sure Sam doesn’t say yes, that Sam will fight his attempts to do what’s best for him, and he thinks Lucifer has him beat. As harsh as it was to say, it was something that had to be dealt with, so it’s good he said it. Sam’s response to Dean saying he didn’t think he could count on Sam was basically: fine, then I’ll count on you. Completely the right answer in the short-term. The long-term still must be dealt with later.
Sam
![[livejournal.com profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yourlibrarian did a great post about the ep here that makes this point about the end conversation:
I love the detail here that Sam says Dean is still his "big brother." The question of whether or not Sam will hold out should be a source of uneasiness. Not because Sam’s evil or weak or doomed, but because it’s unknown. He hasn’t faced the test yet. He doesn’t even know what the test will be. So for this ep both he and Dean took refuge in their earlier roles of big brother who doesn’t want to let the little brother down, and little brother who knows his big brother never would let him down.
Perhaps Dean’s words about Sam being grown up aren’t really about faith in Sam but acceptance of the reality that whether or not he thinks Sam’s up to the job, it’s still Sam’s job. If Dean’s going to help Sam with it, he needs to get to know grown up Sam. This return to the way they counted on each other as kids worked now, but they need to learn something else.
So Sam and Dean wind up representing two different situations, each requiring a different kind of faith. The other characters in the ep reflect back different aspects of them as well.
Adam
Zack sends Adam to his brothers with a warning: they only care about each other. They are "erotically codependent." Adam is not their family. And Adam is ready to believe him, having never met them and only knowing his dad as a distant figure. But any time a plan of Zachariah’s gets close to working he blows it by gloating and reminding us how little he understands the humans he despises, here by revealing that his whole plan actually rested on knowing Dean and Sam *would* save Adam because everything he said before was a lie. Zack has nothing but contempt for the word family, but his triumphant speech about it being the Winchester weakness gives Adam time to process their rescue for what it is: proof that he can count on these guys. If Adam ever returns, he won’t forget it. (Even if they were unsuccessful in saving him, Adam for the first time believed it was possible.)
Adam doesn’t believe Sam and Dean will help him, but they help him anyway. Perhaps this might echo God’s role later on.
Bobby
Bobby, like Dean, is on the edge of despair. He claims the only thing keeping him from suicide is that he promised Dean he wouldn’t give up. Like Dean in the ep, Bobby demonstrates that when you no longer believe in anyone else, other people believing in you will do. When Bobby can no longer be there for himself, he’s there for Dean. The show has always balanced duty to others (more associated with Dean) with being true to yourself (more associated with Sam). The state Bobby is in isn’t ideal, but when he lost faith in himself, it was there.
Castiel
Castiel’s spent his entire existence (how many millennia?) depending on God and he’s still reeling from the information that God has abandoned him (he thinks). Castiel doesn’t have much practice being true to himself. When he gets frustrated, his instinct is always to feel like the humans have led him astray.
Castiel plays out another scenario both like and unlike Dean’s. Castiel’s story so far mostly involved learning that most every angel has betrayed their purpose (including him now), and then switching to humans who are by definition undependable in angel terms.
Still, at the end of this ep, he has to take out several angels so that Dean and Sam can go i. Castiel gives Dean a short speech obviously meant to parallel Dean’s to his brother: Unlike Sam, he doesn’t believe that Dean won’t give in to Michael. But he’ll carve a sigil in his chest with a box cutter anyway. It’s better than watching Dean fail.
This is all very Dean-centric, but I think that’s a natural result of the ep being about Dean’s deal with the angels who are an extreme version of a lot of the ideals Dean represents—self-sacrifice, following orders, relying on learned rules for morality, knowing you are good because you are doing official good things, faith in God. It remains to be seen if we’ll see a different scenario once Lucifer starts in on Sam, because demons would presumably represent the opposite extreme: doing what’s right for you, challenging authority, deciding right and wrong for yourself, frustration at being told you are bad, faith in yourself.
This ep really showed how the Team of Team Free Will acts as an entity. We saw how the different members relied on each other and carried each other when necessary, especially when it came to faith. As long as someone on the team has faith in someone else, the team went on. When you don’t have that faith, you fake it. That was a fitting theme in an ep following the one where we learn God has stopped taking calls, so faith in him (or at least faith in a particular kind of help from him) is pointless. It’s fun to look at the way faith plays out in different characters in this ep and wonder if there’s any foreshadowing there.
Dean
The person who’s defined himself by doing his duty by others is suddenly the one everyone’s chasing down to keep from abandoning the team. It was wonderfully ironic to remember how many times Dean had been yelled into shape by someone ordering him to stop thinking about himself and do his duty when it was exactly that thinking that was driving him away this time. As Sam put it, "Could you stop thinking about sacrificing yourself for ten minutes?"
Still, ultimately with no bright ideas of his own, he fell back on his oldest motivation. (Though I also think that Zachariah being such a tool brought out his instinctual stubbornness as well.) He did the right thing because his younger brothers were counting on him.
The new wrinkle was Dean confessing that he didn’t feel like he could count on Sam. Dean spent last season sure that Sam was being tricked by a demon, and he’s been on the receiving end of an angel’s campaign to get a vessel. Dean feels, partly out of habit, that it’s up to him to make sure Sam doesn’t say yes, that Sam will fight his attempts to do what’s best for him, and he thinks Lucifer has him beat. As harsh as it was to say, it was something that had to be dealt with, so it’s good he said it. Sam’s response to Dean saying he didn’t think he could count on Sam was basically: fine, then I’ll count on you. Completely the right answer in the short-term. The long-term still must be dealt with later.
Sam
yourlibrarian did a great post about the ep here that makes this point about the end conversation:"I think it was no coincidence that when Sam releases Dean from the panic room, he doesn’t say Dean is his brother, he says he’s his big brother. Whether he was speaking from the heart, or being smarter than he admitted, it certainly worked.
Thus, I found Dean's conversation in the car to be rather contradictory. Because there Dean talks about how he realizes Sam is grown up now and not the kid he once was. In other words, Sam could be seen, and counted on, as an equal partner. But his justification for that is because Sam is "grown up" enough to believe in Dean. It seems to me that Sam has generally believed in Dean, but has been less convinced that Dean ever understood where he was coming from. And given Dean's line about leaving Sam to rot in the panic room, he wasn't always wrong about it either."
I love the detail here that Sam says Dean is still his "big brother." The question of whether or not Sam will hold out should be a source of uneasiness. Not because Sam’s evil or weak or doomed, but because it’s unknown. He hasn’t faced the test yet. He doesn’t even know what the test will be. So for this ep both he and Dean took refuge in their earlier roles of big brother who doesn’t want to let the little brother down, and little brother who knows his big brother never would let him down.
Perhaps Dean’s words about Sam being grown up aren’t really about faith in Sam but acceptance of the reality that whether or not he thinks Sam’s up to the job, it’s still Sam’s job. If Dean’s going to help Sam with it, he needs to get to know grown up Sam. This return to the way they counted on each other as kids worked now, but they need to learn something else.
So Sam and Dean wind up representing two different situations, each requiring a different kind of faith. The other characters in the ep reflect back different aspects of them as well.
Adam
Zack sends Adam to his brothers with a warning: they only care about each other. They are "erotically codependent." Adam is not their family. And Adam is ready to believe him, having never met them and only knowing his dad as a distant figure. But any time a plan of Zachariah’s gets close to working he blows it by gloating and reminding us how little he understands the humans he despises, here by revealing that his whole plan actually rested on knowing Dean and Sam *would* save Adam because everything he said before was a lie. Zack has nothing but contempt for the word family, but his triumphant speech about it being the Winchester weakness gives Adam time to process their rescue for what it is: proof that he can count on these guys. If Adam ever returns, he won’t forget it. (Even if they were unsuccessful in saving him, Adam for the first time believed it was possible.)
Adam doesn’t believe Sam and Dean will help him, but they help him anyway. Perhaps this might echo God’s role later on.
Bobby
Bobby, like Dean, is on the edge of despair. He claims the only thing keeping him from suicide is that he promised Dean he wouldn’t give up. Like Dean in the ep, Bobby demonstrates that when you no longer believe in anyone else, other people believing in you will do. When Bobby can no longer be there for himself, he’s there for Dean. The show has always balanced duty to others (more associated with Dean) with being true to yourself (more associated with Sam). The state Bobby is in isn’t ideal, but when he lost faith in himself, it was there.
Castiel
Castiel’s spent his entire existence (how many millennia?) depending on God and he’s still reeling from the information that God has abandoned him (he thinks). Castiel doesn’t have much practice being true to himself. When he gets frustrated, his instinct is always to feel like the humans have led him astray.
Castiel plays out another scenario both like and unlike Dean’s. Castiel’s story so far mostly involved learning that most every angel has betrayed their purpose (including him now), and then switching to humans who are by definition undependable in angel terms.
Still, at the end of this ep, he has to take out several angels so that Dean and Sam can go i. Castiel gives Dean a short speech obviously meant to parallel Dean’s to his brother: Unlike Sam, he doesn’t believe that Dean won’t give in to Michael. But he’ll carve a sigil in his chest with a box cutter anyway. It’s better than watching Dean fail.
This is all very Dean-centric, but I think that’s a natural result of the ep being about Dean’s deal with the angels who are an extreme version of a lot of the ideals Dean represents—self-sacrifice, following orders, relying on learned rules for morality, knowing you are good because you are doing official good things, faith in God. It remains to be seen if we’ll see a different scenario once Lucifer starts in on Sam, because demons would presumably represent the opposite extreme: doing what’s right for you, challenging authority, deciding right and wrong for yourself, frustration at being told you are bad, faith in yourself.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
And I agree about Castiel too. Really, one of the things I liked about both the "I don't trust you" speeches was that as harsh as they might have been to hear, I think in each case the person was truly just telling the other person what they were feeling so that they would know. In Castiel's case there wasn't the same emotional issues--it wasn't personally painful to Dean to know that Castiel thought he would say yes to Michael. But in Sam's case even if it was painful it was probably better than Dean denying he felt that way but showing in all his actions that he did.