something’s broken here.
not sure if it’s just me, but when dean went down into the basement after alonso and entered the room marked ‘private,’ did anyone else get the feeling that we were being granted a glimpse of the darker parts of dean’s psyche? i got chills watching him making his way through the shadows, finding the one lonely bed and then, of course, the scattered jars of fat sucked dry by a man so desperate to fill that gaping hunger, that utter emptiness. it made me uncomfortable in the sense that it almost felt like we were trespassing, knowing that dean has never, ever allowed anyone this deep inside. and if this indeed was the intent of this scene, it was bloody brilliant. dean has always been a fascinating and enigmatic character, but i think they’re really outdoing themselves this season specifically in regards to his personal development.
reblogging because i feel like this is becoming even more eerily relevant now. sam’s denying dean any hope of restoring the brotherly relationship to what it once was, mirrored in 9×13 by maritza putting alonso on a more restrictive diet, and dean’s more desperate than ever to fill the void that’s eating him from the inside out. except now that we’ve seen dean officially take his first steps into the dark descent of the first blade’s power, that void is inevitably going to be filled with a thirst for the carnal; the thirst for bloodshed. if a person is deprived for so long, eventually, he’s going to find ways of lashing out and taking drastic measures of his own.
and now dean’s dead like alonso too
fuck this show
I may be the only one who thinks this, but on some levels I actually think this journey into darkness is a road back up to the light for Dean. Because so much of his darkness/inner void is what amounts to self denial and self starvation, caused by his repeated refusal to acknowledge his own pain and trauma and suffering. Dean’s been presenting a guise for years, to himself as well as to others, and the strain of that has taken it’s toll, splintering the outer veneer into more and more tiny crushable pieces with rot of untreated infection pooling ever larger and larger just beneath the surface.
But now, first with the Mark – which hints at the depth of his inner rage, and with the increased honesty we’re likely to see from him full demon if his visions of his demon self prove accurate, all those pockets of death inside him are going to get lanced and then spill past his lips whether he wants to keep his secrets or not.
DemonDean from days past was a horror, yes, but he dealt his damage via HONESTY. He said the kind of things Dean couldn’t or wouldn’t, for fear of harming others or destroying himself.
DemonDean is far less likely to worry about such things.
Which could be a good thing, if Sam and Cas can hear the truth meant as violence and use it to heal instead in the long run. Because Dean needs honesty desperately…from himself, more so than anyone else. He needs to voice, to purge, to let loose all the stuff he’s hid from himself and from others, while it sat inside and poisoned him.
It won’t be pretty to drain the wound, it won’t be polite, it’s going to hurt like hell for those who have to watch, but at the same time the truth, once spoken can either destroy OR set you free.
And lets be honest…Dean’s worst jailer, worst tormentor is himself. No one hates him more than him, as was so baldly summed up by Crowley.
A Dean who speaks truth to harm, is STILL SPEAKING TRUTH, to himself and everyone else around him. And that truth, hard as it may be to cope with, will leave him open in a way he’s spent his whole life teaching himself not to be. It’ll leave him in pieces yes, but those pieces will washed clean of the deception he’s used to duct tape himself into a false form for decades of his life.
I like this discussion and very much agree with what is being talked about here, because it matches very much how I perceived not only this particular episode, but the whole season. We had many instances of Dean underground, locked in caves and lost in basements. To me it was always very much aluuding to Dean getting lost, exploring and succumbing to his id. I have been writing about exactly this and particularly Dean’s psyche and Freud’s model of personality with the superego, ego and id back when the episode aired (see here). “The Purge” was a milestone in terms of subtle or maybe not so subtles foreshadowing (as was “Dog Dean Afternoon” as well btw – episodes people would wave off as filler – no damn, those were important!!!). Dean getting drugged and losing himself in the haze imo was foreshadowing what would happen later on with Dean getting lost in his bloodlust and the feelings the mark provided (see here) as well as one more instance of foreshadowing for Dean’s death (x). There were many aspects about this episode heavily relating to the mark though. In general we have the mark the pishtacos leave – red and raw and then of course there is the thing about them basically ~killing people from the inside out, leaving just empty ~vessels, the people and who they used to be barely recognizable. I’m sorry, but S8/S9 have been golden in terms of structure and foreshadowing. I mean, we got the first hint for Dean’s death in 9×02 “Devil May Care” when his shot in death position followed the shot of Abaddon’s burnt corpse and in the end killing Abaddon as Dean said himself marked the moment, he was unable to turn it off. And while it was Metatron, who killed Dean, Dean has been decaying and dying for a lot longer than that…
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