Ok, so while watching Brother’s Keeper, I thought I recognized the picture Sam pulled out (top) as the one from Home, but I thought I remembered John being in the right part of the image, behind Dean. I thought ‘oh wow, interesting that the picture’s been damaged so that it’s blurred John out of the image – that’s symbolic.’ and I’ve been focusing mostly on the idea that it was seeing Mary that pulled Dean away from killing Sam – and specifically, it was seeing her that triggered his realization that he was following John’s order to kill Sam if necessary, and his decision not to kill Sam was very much in line with Dean’s move away from the “old story,” as it were, and towards a new way of living, yadda yadda, that’s all for a different post.
What THIS one is about is the fact that John was purposefully edited out of the picture. The bottom pic is from Home, and I’ve just cranked up the exposure so you can see the image better, and just, John is supposed to be right there. But other than that change, the lightening of a lot of the shadows, and some weathering from being carried around for years, its the exact same picture!
I don’t quite know what to do with this information but it excites me a lot.
Fascinating! I do wonder still though why they chose to edit and use a picture that already existed within the show so that it omitted John, rather than just using the picture of Dean and Mary and maybe the other pictures Dean was looking through in 10×03. That would have connected them back to Dean’s first overcoming of the darkness this season, and to Sam’s efforts in that battle. But instead, they chose this one – and i can’t help focus on how in line that is with the themes of questioning origins/roots/changing the story thats been so prevalent this season like i wrote about here
I could have sworn I saw a photoset, like, yesterday, that had a clear shot of that photo from 10×03, and John was already missing from the picture.
And now I can’t find it.
I just checked, and they don’t use this image, with or without John, in 10×03 but there is some other interesting stuff going on with the pictures they do use.
When Sam goes into Dean’s room as a reprieve from Demon Dean, he finds a pile of pictures and flips through them. One of them is the picture of just Dean and Mary that we first saw Dean put in his room some time in season 8, and which was the other of the two pictures Sam pulled out in the finale.
Then, as you can see, he flips to one with both John and Mary in it
and then ones with Bobby, and then just Sam and Dean
What’s interesting for me is what comes after that.
After Dean’s been cured, he’s looking through the pictures as well.
They’re in the same order as they were when Sam was looking through them, but their positioning has changed. While for Sam, the John-Mary picture is very prominent beneath the Dean-Mary one, for Dean, the John-Mary one is completely obscured by the Dean-Mary one. And not only that, but Dean doesn’t even flip to the picture with John –
He goes right past it to the one with Bobby, and then to the one of just him and Sam.
Since this is within the same episode as Sam’s perusal, I doubt this was also an issue of not getting permission to use JDM’s image. I think this is an interesting moment for Dean, to not look at John, but instead focus on Mary, Bobby, and Sam, all of whom had views about life/hunting etc that really contrasted with John. Someone noted recently that while Dean has always consciously tried to be like John, especially in the early seasons, Sam was always the one who was more naturally alike to John – Dean mimicked his music taste, his clothing, his voice, his behavior, but Sam unconsciously spoke like him and approached hunting like he did (i.e. their conversation in Dead Man’s Blood). This season has really emphasized that distinction, with Dean admitting to wanting to try things a different way, experience new things, focus more on helping people, etc, while Sam’s “John side” has really come through in his intense focus on revenge and ends-justify-the-means thinking, and in his talk with Charlie in Book of the Damned about how he views hunting now. So to have John present when Sam is looking through these pictures and finding guidance/a reason to continue with the cure, and then not present when Dean is reflecting himself, is really interesting.
So, looking again to the finale, I think this pattern of omitting John from Dean’s experiences/perspectives/reflections is really, really intriguing. Whether or not there was a technical/logistical aspect to the decision, the story implications are really compelling. I still don’t know what to do with this necessarily, but I really need to rewatch s10 again to track all the instances of rejecting the old story, going back to origins, questioning issues of identity, and all that jazz.
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