Totally agree with your first paragraph--and the whole comment, really. There are eps that I dislike because I didn't like what happened. But this ep made me feel--and reading some other comments around I know other people had the exact same feeling--that I kept expecting the whole thing to be an illusion. It wasn't so much *bad* as unsettling because of the behavior not making sense.
Like with Sam's decision to lie to Dean, I could totally buy that motivation. I would still think it was a terrible thing to do, but I could follow it if I thought Sam misguidedly thought it was a good idea. But then the plot of the ep totally undermined it. Just having Sam stay after he kills the djinn--shouldn't he have just run off? This MOTW wasn't really important enough to change Sam's commitment if he really believed it. And then they kill them together and Sam's telling Dean why it's not a good idea to stay with Ben and Lisa. I'm not seeing Sam really believing in this idea. Which leads, as you say, to wondering if there's some other secret here.
Then there's the Campbells who seem untrustworthy. They came across to me, too, like they were some sort of feral version of hunters. They kept talking about their bloodlines and I would have believed inbreeding. I mean, they almost seemed like that sort of stereotype!
To me, I got the sense that Dean actually liked the life he was living with Lisa--possibly especially the part of having a foster-son--but that he couldn't make peace with the fact that his happiness was coming at the expense of Sam's suffering.
Oh, I gave the wrong impression there. I did think Dean liked his life and I liked the dean, Lisa and Ben dynamic a lot! I was more commenting on how totally unappealing going with Sam seemed to me. I mean, I think his current life was attractive in itself. But when Sam asked him to come it seemed like a no-brainer in ways it wouldn't have been if it had felt more like Sam in an earlier season. The idea of having to get in a car with that family and Sam was like...even if Dean had been living on his own I can imagine him being reluctant to do that. That he had a life that was actually really valuable to him was almost unnecessary to the choice.
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Date: 2010-09-26 03:27 am (UTC)Like with Sam's decision to lie to Dean, I could totally buy that motivation. I would still think it was a terrible thing to do, but I could follow it if I thought Sam misguidedly thought it was a good idea. But then the plot of the ep totally undermined it. Just having Sam stay after he kills the djinn--shouldn't he have just run off? This MOTW wasn't really important enough to change Sam's commitment if he really believed it. And then they kill them together and Sam's telling Dean why it's not a good idea to stay with Ben and Lisa. I'm not seeing Sam really believing in this idea. Which leads, as you say, to wondering if there's some other secret here.
Then there's the Campbells who seem untrustworthy. They came across to me, too, like they were some sort of feral version of hunters. They kept talking about their bloodlines and I would have believed inbreeding. I mean, they almost seemed like that sort of stereotype!
To me, I got the sense that Dean actually liked the life he was living with Lisa--possibly especially the part of having a foster-son--but that he couldn't make peace with the fact that his happiness was coming at the expense of Sam's suffering.
Oh, I gave the wrong impression there. I did think Dean liked his life and I liked the dean, Lisa and Ben dynamic a lot! I was more commenting on how totally unappealing going with Sam seemed to me. I mean, I think his current life was attractive in itself. But when Sam asked him to come it seemed like a no-brainer in ways it wouldn't have been if it had felt more like Sam in an earlier season. The idea of having to get in a car with that family and Sam was like...even if Dean had been living on his own I can imagine him being reluctant to do that. That he had a life that was actually really valuable to him was almost unnecessary to the choice.