I spent several happy minutes staring at the gifs and this is the best I can come up with:
As far as I can tell the table is actually pretty narrow but they all manage to sit ~1-2 ft from each other: Cas can’t get in the shot with Dean but he also has to lean considerably far over to get into Charlie’s space.
Unfortunately as wide as Dean’s knees spread I don’t think he was plausibly bumping against Cas’s leg under the table. 😛
Thank you science side of tumblr.
This is probably just for my own amusement by this point, but regarding my bemused note “how long is this table?” I was just rewatching 9×13 as you do and there’s a lovely depressing shot of the whole kitchen right before the end:
The table is revealed to seat six (eight??) people and as far as I can tell has the weirdest stools ever? You kinda straddle them and I don’t even know, do they move around or something? I can see why they never normally sit in the kitchen. That table is weird.
At this point I barely care about the hows and whys of the Last Supper seating arrangement, I just want to know more about this table.
Anyway at one point in the scene Sam sits on the second stool in on his side (his same seat as the Last Supper as far as I could tell), and Dean’s on the corner stool (Cas’s stool) but he’s properly at the table unlike how Cas was kind of obviously on the corner. If you are desperately trying to focus on the melodrama for serious highly relevant purposes but actually find your brain drifting when Sam is talking, you can see Charlie’s stool is skewed off to the side in opposition to Dean’s seat in this scene (I’m now certain these things rotate):
I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t build a table with a corner chair as a permanent feature so I figure Sam’s stupid 10 mile long legs mean that stool is always kicked out to the side anyway, and … metaphoric of him creating his own distance?? Anyway it explains how Charlie was so much on the corner/basically sitting at the head of the table instead of on the same side as Sam if the stools rotate.
I feel like I probably should have absorbed something more in this scene aside from bafflement at the table, but all the Winchester drama flew over my head and I’m just like “LOOK AT THIS FUCKING TABLE.”
Oooh furniture. *claps hands* Google “swing stools” and you’ll get a lot of similar-looking items. Apparently these were common in 1920s factory lunch rooms.
Those are some fancy swing stools. I like the ones with sort of bendy arms. 😀 They still look wildly uncomfortable though. The MoL were not messing around with things like encouraging people to slouch.
There’s a better shot in the opening of Captives which makes me more convinced it’s an 8 person table and therefore the Last Supper was an unnecessarily crowded clump of people all crammed on one end of the table. Someone’s straightened all the stools out so you can see them properly if you screw with the brightness:
I have now giffed this moment for microanalysis because I saw him pat Cas’s shoulder but I had missed the thing with his eyes and I had to see it for myself and just:
HE ACTUALLY DOES COMPLETELY AVOID EYE CONTACT AND GO STRAIGHT FOR THE SHOULDER.
And then he’s like BEER AND SNACKS ARE SO INTERESTING I KNOW YOU JUST GOT YOUR GRACE BACK BUT I HAVE TO UNPACK THESE RIGHT NOW, RIGHT THIS SECOND
And this last one just kills me because Cas is clearly SO UPSET about having to lie to Dean again and you can see Sam do this little micro-frown thing and he can totally tell Cas isn’t happy about the lying. And then there’s Charlie who appears to be LITERALLY WITNESSING AN OTP MOMENT. Like fucking look at her and that glowing smile. She’s not looking at Cas at all, she’s looking at Dean and I feel it in my soul that her internal monologue has got to be something along the lines of “MY SWEET LITTLE BISEXUAL PRODIGY! OH THE PLACES YOU’LL GO! (like Cas’s ass)”
I mean honestly, if she were paying even an iota of attention to Cas in this moment, she would have seen him in full on I-AM-LYING-TO-DEAN guilt mode. But no, she just watches Dean be reunited with his “dreamy” angel and UGH I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH TWO FUCKING IDIOTS!
“Take my advice and live for a long, long time. Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.”
Does Quixote himself say it? Is Cas being compared to Don Quixote? His attempts to execute Heaven’s missions (like tracking down rogue angels) comparable to Quixote’s delusional tilting at windmills??
Wow there’s some serious meta in that I wish i had more time to think about it!
if i’m not mistaken, don quixote does everything he does in order to impress the woman he loves, whom he sees as a noblewoman but is in fact a peasant, someone who’s worth nothing. dean is referred to as a ‘back-road nothing’ by jacob styne. i’m not saying what i’m saying, but yeah i’m saying it. don quixote acts all noble but in fact he acts to impress the person he’s in love with. compare it to a certain metatron quote about cas doing everything just for one man…
thank you for not saying what you’re saying but still saying it!
well said
heh
(best not to compare Quixote’s love for his
Dulcinea too closely to Cas and dean tho – the point with Quixote was that the woman was a stranger to him and he basically picked her to call his true love at random because according to him a true knight needed a woman to love from afar, part of what is called the “courtly love tradition,” so what he loved wasn’t the woman herself but a FICTION of a woman he projected onto her… I would say Dean’s feelings for Lisa fit Quixote’s for Dulcinea a bit closer…)
Also, IIRC, Don Quixote and Dulcinea/Aldonza never even speak to each other in the book. Sancho knows her but that’s it. I remember the first time I read it being exasperated that nothing at all ever happens. And it’s a super long book for nothing to happen in, too!
The musical is different and they do speak and she even reciprocates his love by the end (though it’s too late).
Ok, but. Charlie. Charlie has read the books, and she knows about “I’ll just wait here then,” and “I did it, all of it for you,” and about that one time when Cas disappeared for months and Dean worried himself to bits. She looks at Dean, then looks back at Castiel just in time to catch his reaction
(Cas looks like the guy in romantic comedies who watches his love interest walk down a staircase in her prom dress. Open-mouthed and gobsmacked), and her smile. Her smile.
I’ve seen several people talking about how pointedly not gender-specific Dean’s “mingle with the local wildlife” comment was–it was pointed enough for me to comment on it as I was watching.
And it reminded me of Dean earlier in the season, talking about the things he’d given up in an effort to reduce the effects of the Mark, things he was looking forward to experiencing again when it was gone: burgers, beer, and… more burgers.
There was some discussion when that episode aired about how the “more burgers” was something that tripped us up because the word everyone was expecting to hear was “babes.” In addition to the obvious alliteration, casual sex is something we’re used to seeing Dean use as a coping mechanism, and so a lot of people were surprised when Dean very pointedly failed to say the expected thing.
And now here we are, with Dean talking about a vacation, and what he’s going to do when the mark is gone, and he mentions the beach, and he mentions beer… and then, exactly when we would normally expect him to mention something about babes in bikinis, he comes out with “mingle with the local wildlife.” His expression definitely gave that a sexual tone, so why wouldn’t he just talk about pretty bikini-clad (or hell, topless, on some beaches) girls?
This is the second time now that Dean has very pointedly not mentioned women in connection with what he wants of life after he’s gotten rid of the Mark.
Except you know what? It’s really the third time, because he talked about non-gender-specific people he wanted to experience differently, or maybe for the first time.
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