So, let’s talk about the clever use of negative space in the episode:
Castiel doesn’t understand how “orange correlates with black in a way that’s new”. Dean immediately understands what Castiel is referring to, he gets the reference although the association would not be obvious to people unfamiliar with the show Orange Is The New Black.
Dean tells Castiel that everyone has binge watched on Netflix, although he doesn’t admit to binge watching the show OITNB specifically.
When Castiel calls again, Dean asks Cas to tell him something that doesn’t involve chicks in prison. This indicates that Dean knows what the story of OITNB is, has likely watched it.
Sam, now in the car with them but having missed the previous conversation, doesn’t make the connection between “chicks in prison” and OITNB, but instead seems to assume on past precedent that it’s some kind of lesbian porn thing. He laughs derisively at his brother and says “Bet you thought you’d never say that out loud”. Sam assumes that Dean is making a reference to objectifying pornography because that’s what he expects his brother to do.
Previously in the episode, Dean raised his eyebrows at Sam’s hook-up being named Piper (a bisexual character from the show OITNB) as though it amused him, whereas Sam made nothing of it. Sam hasn’t watched the show. But Dean has.
Sam is missing context here. Just like the audience is missing the context on what happened inside the Road House during the night Dean spent there. Robbie Thompson continues in the grand tradition of the polysemic storytelling the show has been engaged with since its inception.
Dean has watched a show about women, featuring a bisexual main character, with a massive queer following, but because Sam is lacking context, his brother continues to interpret Dean’s character through his own bias.
What’s interesting about this Netflix binge that Castiel is on is that we learn about Dean’s tastes at the same time. Sam said that Castiel had just started the second season of the Wire, a show famous for its LGBT characters (Kima Greggs and Omar Little).
Dean quips that “Oh yeah, he’s not coming out any time soon“. Because Dean knows what happens in the second season. Because Dean has watched the Wire.
At the end of the episode, Dean also talks about the Cowardly Lion in connection with the Wizard of Oz – the film (or the book), not the events of their own lives connected to Oz of which the characters of the Scarecrow, Tinman, and the Cowardly Lion played no part. Dean has also seen the Wizard of Oz.
So, in addition to OITNB, Dean has been watching The Wire and the Wizard of Oz.
The angel might not be coming out for a while, but the hinges on this closet are coming loose pretty fast.
Further chronicling the LGBT shows watched by both Castiel and Dean on the show, the episode Our Little World is the third episode in a row to make mention of Netflix and shows with prominent queer characters. In the episode, Dean mentions The Wire and Game of Thrones, which contains both gay and bisexual protagonists, as “socially acceptable binge watching“.
He contrasts this with a talk show, Jenny Jones, which Dean has also watched enough to know what it was. Dean Winchester confesses to having engaged in both socially acceptable and socially unacceptable binge watching. As the episode made visual references to the episode Changing Channels, it bears a remark that we have seen Dean watch both an American and a Spanish soap opera on screen, even confessing sexual attraction to the main actor of Dr. Sexy, MD.
Can I just add that Dean making an explicit textual reference to the film How Stella Got Her Groove Back in the same episode that he confessed he has partaken in socially unacceptable binge-watching on occasion is pretty far from a fucking co-incidence.
I see people reblogging the original post a lot but I think the additions are pretty important.
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