The thing is though, if you check my ‘Brother’s Keeper’ post from before I read that meta, I already thought Dean had hit Death by mistake even without understanding it completely. The only thing that makes sense to me now, is the rest of the explanation, the contextualization of the mistake. But I already thought he’d done it by mistake simply by the way it looked.
It wasn’t addressed because as soon as we’re done seeing Sam and Dean’s horrified and surprised faces we switch back to Rowena&co. She casts the spell, we go back to Dean who is near his bag/the table and Sam who still looks kinda out of it. Keep in mind that Death was supposed to take Dean to somewhere he couldn’t hurt anybody nor go back on his own, so the problem is not just that Sam is still alive, it’s also that Death is no longer there for the second part of the plan. Dean is hit by the spell a second later, at which point the priority becomes gauging the damage and then, well, running for their lives.
Rewatching the scene, that explanation is the one that makes the most sense to me, especially because both Dean and Sam explicitly agree to killing Sam right until the moment Dean swings.
The scythe is not a weapon Dean is used to wielding, and it is bloody awkward if you don’t know what you’re doing with it or aren’t using it as it’s meant to be used. Also, it’s a lot heavier than you’d think. So that 180 was mostly down to physics.
Scythes are meant to be swung low to the ground in a kind of pendulum motion; the weight helps keep the motion going and takes some of the effort out of that constant swinging. If you’re going to swing it as high as Dean did, you’re going to have to use a lot more muscle and put your back into it more.
Dean was counting on the resistance from cutting through flesh to slow the blade down, but when that didn’t happen, the weight and the momentum of Dean’s wind-up just carried him on around.
So what you’re saying here is that Death deliberately handed Dean an unfamiliar archaic farm-tool version of the scythe with a massive turning radius (rather than the Garden Fun Size scythe that Dean had held before), stood behind Dean at exactly the right distance to get whacked by the scythe if Dean missed on his first swing at Sam, and then just stood there looking peeved as Dean did, in fact, miss?
Either that was not the true form of Death standing there, or Death has a reason to want to be dead.
I was reading the tags by rebloggers of obsessionisaperfume‘s meta on the Sam-Dean-Death scene and I’m wondering what someone outside the fandom would think reading them because half of them are like
#I’M SO HAPPY #THE MAIN CHARACTER TRIED TO KILL #THE OTHER MAIN CHARACTER HIS BROTHER #YES #THIS MAKES EVERYTHING SO MUCH BETTER
From what I’ve seen most people are like: the sole purpose of having Rudy in this episode is to make the mirror scene no homo. Well, I get where are you coming from but… what if there actually WAS some other purpose? Because now as I think about it, the death of Rudy in Dean’s mind might have been that next time he told Cas about. He looks in the mirror, sees Cas, who isn’t well but is at least alive, and then he sees someone he didn’t even thought about saving, he didn’t hesitate, didn’t even flinch. He sees Rudy and realises it REALLY could have been Cas. It hits him with a great force, that realisation how out of control he really is, if he came this close to killing someone he loves. This is why he doesn’t contact Cas, doesn’t say goodbye. He just can’t risk putting his angel’s life in danger. If he wasn’t planning on killing Sam, he wouldn’t contact him either (note:.he calls him only after his little talk with Death). It could have been shown differently, yes, but I can see the reason behind this and it’s not solely a fuck you to shippers.
Exactly! Rudy’s death wasn’t about Rudy himself. Rudy was a symbol of ‘innocent person that gets killed because of Dean’s condition’. It takes a toll on Dean because there was no reason to get Rudy killed. He had no reason to get Rudy killed. He had no ill against Rudy. And yet he got him killed. And it terrifies him because he realizes that he could get literally anyone killed. He almost killed Cas… and ‘next time’, he figures, he could actually kill him for real. Because if he’s gotten a random acquaintance of his killed for no reason… who knows who else he can get killed. He had just an insignificant little squabble with Rudy, and yet that apparently was enough for him to want him dead. What’s gonna happen if next time he faces a person he’s got a whirlpool of confusing, messy, vaguely scary feelings for?
Yes, the meaning of the mirror scene indeed was ‘that could have been Cas’. It probably would have been more clear if they had shown Rudy first and Cas second (’hey Dean you killed Rudy – hey Dean it could have been Cas instead’), but I guess they went for ‘BAM Dean look how you trashed Cas – you could have killed him like you did with Rudy, you know?’. Dean was feeling guilty about Cas before (that’s why he was drunk in that motel room trying to tell himself he was good…), what’s changed now is that Dean has gotten the proof that he’s indeed able to kill someone he knows just because. And that has a retroactive effect on Dean – ‘oh my god when I said ‘next time won’t miss’ I could have actually meant it’.
[the Darkness starts rolling in]
My 9 year old [screaming at the screen to Sam and Dean sitting in the Impala]: CLOSE THE AIR VENTS CLOSE THE AIR VENTS
say what you want about the finale (i actually liked it so w/e have it your way) but this was almost this year’s big cliffhanger. The solution to the Mark of Cain problem. This was almost canon.
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