I remembered how he left his ten year old son to look after his six year old son for three days, without enough food to share between them–
–but with a loaded shotgun and instructions to “shoot first” should the monster he was hunting turn up.
(All of which is bad enough even without the heavy implication in the episode that he left them alone as bait to draw the shtriga out.)
I remembered how even before Mary died, he was neglectful to his family to the point that Dean–who was less than four years old at the time–felt the need to comfort his mother through his absence.
I remembered how Dean visibly flinched at the memory of John coming back home after Sam ran away.
I remembered how Sam, at age fifteen, told Amy that she didn’t want to see his dad when he’d been drinking.
I remembered how after a sixteen year old Dean was forced to steal food in order to feed himself and his brother because of John’s neglect, John told the police officer who caught Dean to let him rot in jail.
I remembered how he treated his sons so poorly, offered them so little in the way of actual parenting, that the words “I’m proud of you” clued Dean in to the fact that his father was possessed.
I remembered how, when Bobby was looking after the boys in 1989 he took Dean out to the park to play catch, and John tore him a new one over the phone because he dared to suggest that a ten year old child might be better off playing ball than shooting targets for one day of his life.
After I thought about all that, and the countless other instances of neglect and abuse, I realized that “he did the best he could” is giving John Winchester far too much credit.
u know how in fic authors are always like ‘dean was nervous so he kept rambling’
before this ep i was like yes this is true dean is a yapper anD NOW IM LIKE
cas. cas talks so much. he said dean’s name 13 times in one scene. dean was like ‘brb’ and cas didnt even hear he just kept. yappin. cas is just a chatty cathy. he wants to talk to dean so. bad. oh cas.
I LOVED THIS and I loved the way it fitted into their characters so well because Dean, well, Dean mutters and chatters his way through situations when he’s nervous, he’s an awkward talker….
Cas, on the other hand, is all silence and wide eyes when he’s nervous…
but put him on the phone with someone who makes him feel secure and comfortable, and he’ll talk for days.
oftentimes when sam and dean have parallel story lines, sam’s is romantic (left) while dean’s is with men (right). i think it says a lot about the types of relationships they each crave and also dean likes dudes the end
Just gonna tack on a few more, here:
vs.
and
vs.
and (even tho Sam’s isn’t “romantic” in this one, he still matched paired with a woman, versus Dean, who gets paired a man. Again.)
vs.
Also, somehow, whenever they want to put one of them in an overtly queer situation, its virtually always Dean, whereas Sam usually gets tasked with something more ‘neutral’
Sam recognizes an ARM tattoo
vs. Dean, who checks out the guy’s NAKED GROIN for a birthmark
Here we have Sam counseling Charlie with Harry Potter lore
vs Dean, who councils her through flirting with a dude
Sam gets sent to the library for research
whereas Dean gets sent to a bar to be hit on by Aaron
Look at this extremely long string of isolated incidents.
no, not usually. If a heterosexual man wants to watch a threesome it will be m/f/f for sure. Why bother with the extra dick they don’t want to see! Why?
Okay, I know a lot of people have a lot of trouble with this bit, so I was trying to see if I could make out the expressions frame by frame, and I noticed that ROAD CLOSED sign.
I didn’t think anything about it until about the sixth time through when I realized that the second Dean steps directly in front of the sign,the girl steps out from behind the building. And I mean literally the exact moment. supernaturalfansonline didn’t have the whole sequence, but @almaasi, bless her, caught it in this post:
the writers aren’t the only ones who shape a scene. The director can define what the motivation should be behind a character’s actions and last night’s director was Jensen, he knows Dean well. I feel like … last night’s scene was directed as if Dean was trying to get her attention to ask if she’d seen Cas but when she reacted aggressively he chose not waste time going after her. I do think the scene was written as Dean hitting on a woman in the middle of searching for Cas but I think Jensen tried to present it differently.
Another odd thing I noticed about the scene is that the visuals don’t quite match the audio–I can’t see the girl’s lips moving when we hear her, “Get a life!” line, and I suspect those lines were looped later and added in post.
I have absolutely NO confidence that Bucklemming meant anything by this scene but a dudebro moment for Dean, but I completely agree that the production team was trying to ameliorate that.
And in an episode that featured SO MUCH Destiel goodness–that Jensen put in there–I’m leaning toward the notion that the ROAD CLOSED sign and the girl’s perfectly timed entrance may be an example of surface readings being misleading this season.
Because signage very frequently means something in this show, and what I get from that one and the subsequent dialog is that Dean’s go-to coping mechanism of casual sex with women (which he actually hasn’t engaged in for quite some time now as a human, just sayin’) has a Cas-shaped ROAD CLOSED sign in front of it.
I don’t know how they wrote the scene (I mean, there’s barely any dialogue to go on by), but how the set design team interpreted could not be clearer. I mean, it’s not just the ROAD CLOSED sign, there’s also the FORBIDDEN DIRECTION sign.
Do you know why I believe Dean Smith is essentially the most perfect version of Dean Winchester we’ll ever see?
Dean Smith was raised by loving parents Bobby and Ellen Smith, who odds are did not treat Dean anything like John Winchester treated Dean. From what we know of Bobby Singer and from what we know of Ellen Harvelle, they probably would have allowed Dean to be whatever he chose to be, whatever he grew into on his own accord as long as Dean was still good at heart.
You can see that in the way Dean acts, the way Dean dresses.
Dean Smith is secure with himself. He doesn’t hate himself. He’s comfortable being metro and embraces that, yes, he does like nice clothes and that’s okay. He allows himself to go through a cleanse and eat rabbit food and he doesn’t see any of it as something that takes away from his masculinity.
Dean got into Stanford as Dean Smith, and from what we know about Bobby and Ellen, he probably had to get some form of scholarship in order to even be able to go. Dean even finishing high school, even going to college means that Dean is comfortable with the fact that he is smart and believes in himself.
He’s fine with NPR in the mornings and the only person he seems to flirt with throughout the episode his dark haired assistant who looks vaguely similar to a certain angel who follows the Righteous Man around as he chats the guy up about Project Runway. Which may mean Dean is actually comfortable with his bisexuality as Dean Smith because his parents probably didn’t scare him into thinking something may be wrong with him if he was an adorable bisexual.
Dean doesn’t have any of the things his fear doppleganger pointed out as him copying someone. He doesn’t have the impala, he doesn’t have the jacket. He does still have the taste in music, but he’s allowed himself to be okay and reach out to other things he probably wouldn’t listen to unless Godstiel was around, like talk radio. Dean Smith makes his own decisions in this incarnation of Dean. He chose what he wore, he didn’t learn it from anyone. He chose what he drove, he didn’t take a hand me down from a dead father.
Everything we see in this episode is Dean. This is essentially what Dean would have grown up to become if he lived in a healthy, happy household that didn’t put him down and make him feel insecure about himself. This is what Dean should have turned out to become and it’s a shame that he didn’t get the chance to.
This is so true, though. Dean smith is the Dean I fucking live for.
When Cas called Dean in 11×01, the first thing Dean said was: “Where the hell are you, Cas?” Let’s think for a moment. The last time Dean and Cas saw each other, Dean beat him up and told him to stay away from him (10×22). They haven’t talked to each other since then. Are we to believe that between getting rid of the Mark and receiving Cas’ call, Dean didn’t try to communicate with Cas?
I’m calling bullshit! My headcanon is that once they were on the road, Dean called Cas a couple of times. He didn’t get any answer from Cas and that’s why when Cas called, Dean immediately asked about his whereabouts. Besides, if you can rewatch the scene, you will notice that when Dean’s phone rings, he looks desperate to pick up as if he’s been waiting for someone to call.
In 10×14, Dean had been trying to contact Cas, but Castiel wasn’t answering. When Cas finally called him back, Dean’s first question was: “Where are ya?” I checked all of their phone conversations in seasons 9 and 10, and I noticed that when Cas is the one calling, Dean has other things to say when he answers the phone as long as he hasn’t been desperately trying to contact Cas.
When Dean asked Cas about his whereabouts in 10×14, Cas’ immediate answer was “Illinois”. But in 11×01, his immediate answer was “I’m OK.” Dean wasn’t asking that, but I’m sure he had probably sent a “How are youy?” text to Cas when he noticed Cas wasn’t answering. Why do I say that? Because when Cas doesn’t answer the phone, Dean freaks out and uses plan B: texting.
In case we’ve forgotten that, here you have a picture of Cas’ phone in 9×18.
We can see the 6 missed phone calls from Dean and the icon that indicates Cas has god-knows-how-many text messages from Dean. Cas hadn’t called or texted Dean back and Dean was, naturally, freaking out. I’m sure the same was happening to Dean in 11×01.
Just to end this post, I’d like you to watch these two videos and compare Dean’s desperate cry of “Cas!” in both scenes. Last time Dean sounded like that, Cas was dead. No wonder why he wants to go save Cas asap.
I don’t think I will ever be over the complete and utter shock on Dean’s face when he is whispering ‘What?‘ It’s like this thought never even crossed his mind. He never let himself think of someone looking out for him… Let alone Sam.
He was ready for the wrong argument. He was waiting for Sam to say he doesn’t need Dean to look out for him. He had his answer ready for that, but this? This argument never occurred to him.
It’s no bother at all, nonny! Below is a quick breakdown of things we were shown in Dark Side of the Moon;
There are an infinite number of separate mini-Heavens within Heaven and each is constructed around the best memories of the individual or set of soul mates it is meant for.
These different Heavens are connected by the Axis Mundi, which appears differently to everyone, but once a person knows how to travel along it they are able to move between their own Heaven and those of other people they seek out.
For Dean, the Axis Mundi is a literal road. Ash is shown using sigils he’s learned by “hacking” heaven with complex equations and a home-made computer to travel.
The memories relived in the episode are these:
– Dean setting off fireworks with a young Sam on the 4th of July, ‘96 (Dean’s memory)
– Sam eating Thanksgiving dinner with the family of a girl he had a crush on as a kid (Sam’s memory)
– Dean’s bedroom when he was around four years old, and then spending time with Mary (Dean’s memory)
-Sam’s dog Bones in the apartment where he spent two weeks living away from John and Dean after running away (Sam’s memory)
-The night Sam left for Stanford (Sam’s memory)
We can tell whose memory each is in two main ways. First, the person remembering appears their current age in the memory, regardless of how old they were when it happened, and second, they are the only one capable of interacting with the memory.
Dean says multiple times during the episode that Sam’s best memories are some of his worst.
For Sam and Dean to share a heaven or be soul mates as some people believe them to be, they would have to share the same happy memories. It couldn’t have been made clearer that this wasn’t the case when Dean flat out says this:
“This is your idea of heaven? Wow. This was one of the worst nights of my life.”
Other people have already discussed all of this at length–in particular, @ceeainthereforthat wrote a great essay on the topic–so I’ll direct you to that for further reading on that episode, but I will just add that in Angel Heart last season, we saw what a shared Heaven looked like when Amelia arrived to find Jimmy immediately. She didn’t need to go searching for him.
I get what I’ve been doing lately, you know,with the yelling and the acting like a prison guard.It’s just….that’s not me.
This is one of the scenes that convinces me it’s significant that Dean is the Winchester who’s been impersonated by shapeshifters, not once but twice. There’s an absolutely terrifying fluidity to Dean’s character that he’s acutely aware of and unsettled by, even if only subconsciously.
“For you or Dad, the things I’m willing to do or kill, it’s just, uh…it scares me sometimes” (1.22).
It’s my strong belief that in S4, the parallels explored are not only the ones between John Winchester and God (“I guess I’m not the man either of our dads wanted me to be” (4.16)) but also between John and Alastair. For both characters act as fathers to Dean, John as his biological parent and Alastair as the parent of the torturer that Dean becomes in Hell, and both John and Alastair’s characters conflate with Dean’s in extremely threatening ways.
I know I always come back to “Dream A Little Dream of Me” (3.10), but that’s where I think we really get the foundation laid down for this parallel, because that episode is crucial to Dean confronting the conflation of his own identity with John’s, but at the same time, the black-eyed Dean he confronts in this episode is, though none of us know it yet, what he will become under Alastair’s paternal influence. And this takes place in an episode about a boy (Jeremy) who is terribly hurt by his father.
3.10, like “Nightmare” (1.14), touches on the scars left behind by child abuse, the fact that just because the perpetrator is gone or stopped doesn’t mean the effects of that abuse end. Jeremy still cannot dream as a result of the harm his father inflicted upon him. It doesn’t matter that his father is dead; the damage remains. We are meant to understand Dean alongside Jeremy here; Dean, like Jeremy, also loses his ability to dream because of his father, not physically like Jeremy but because his own dead father’s needs/desires/orders crowded out any of Dean’s own when he was too young to protect himself from that influence.
DREAM DEAN No? What are the things that you want? What are the things that you dream? I mean, your car? That’s Dad’s. Your favorite leather jacket? Dad’s. Your music? Dad’s. Do you even have an original thought?
DEAN scoffs, not wanting to admit to anything.
DREAM DEAN No. No, all there is is, “Watch out for Sammy. Look out for your little brother, boy!” You can still hear your Dad’s voice in your head, can’t you?
(It strikes me that the subdural hematomas I talked about in an unrelated post actually fit really, really well as an analogy here because as the blood spreads in the brain, it pushes the brain tissue over, compressing the tissue, eventually killing it. Dean is the brain tissue here, John’s influence the blood, pushing Dean out of the way to make room for John, for what John needs Dean to do.)
I stressed in an earlier meta that the fact that John is associated with blunt force trauma in 3.10 is important:
DREAM DEAN Dad knew who you really were. A good soldier and nothing else. Daddy’s blunt little instrument.
Part of that is because of the weapon Jeremy’s father takes to his head is a baseball bat. (Blunt weapon? Yes.) Thus we have both fathers associated with blunt force trauma now, but wait. Look who else uses a blunt force weapon in this episode.
When Jeremy goes after Sam in the dream, he uses a bat to do it. This visual clue suggests that Jeremy has become his father.
And here’s something I didn’t notice until I was reviewing the SPN Wiki transcript of this ep. Remember that really epic part when Dean’s facing off with his demon/dream double?
DREAM DEAN tries to get up and DEAN kicks him down on the desk again. He holds the weapon as a batand hits DREAM DEAN once and then pins him to the wall with it.
DEAN All that crap [my dad] dumped on me, about protecting Sam. That was his crap. He’s the one who couldn’t protect his family. He-
DEAN steps back and swings the weapon again, hitting DREAM DEAN twice.
Dean uses his own weapon in this episode as a bat. More loops connecting Dean to Jeremy and both of them to their fathers because both of them, this episode implies, end up where they are because of their fathers. And for both of them, the place they end up is in their father’s positions: Jeremy as the one wielding the bat, Dean as the one going to Hell to occupy Alastair’s rack (à la John in 2×01). Dean’s acknowledgement of his father’s overwhelming role in the formation (and appropriation) of his own identity, furthermore, foreshadows the similar shaping he will undergo under his next father figure, in Hell. “I carved you into a new animal, Dean” (4.16). The fact that it is Dean’s demon double that allows (or forces) Dean to confront his “issues” with John means everything; it prompts us to look at John alongside Alastair, and vice versa.
Jeremy sets the stage for the terror we will confront in Seasons 4 and 5 of becoming someone else. That’s an oversimplification of the conflict perhaps, but in S4, so much of Dean’s character revolves around uncovering and dealing with the “new animal” he became in Hell under Alastair, in trying not to become that again (4.16), to redeem himself and reclaim some semblance of himself as someone who saves people. And S5 returns him to the threat of being changed by a powerful male figured as his father: Michael.
Here, though, both Alastair and Michael’s threats may be seen as uncanny ones–their true threat to Dean’s identity is Dean’s fear that the identities they threaten to possess him with are identities he had all along. Alastair plays up the difference between him and John, how Dean broke so much more quickly in Hell, thirty years to John’s hundred. In one reading, this suggests Dean’s weakness compared to his father (“Daddy’s little girl”); in another, it suggests that Dean was more willing to torture, more hungry to hurt, than his father all along. The black-eyed demon he becomes under Alastair isn’t something new, it’s not a foreign thing that Alastair implanted in him; it’s something that was in him all along (an interpretation strengthened by how nicely it dovetails with Sam’s own discovery at the end of the season: “You didn’t need the feather to fly, you had it in you the whole time, Dumbo!” (4.22)).
Similarly, Michael (and I’ll point out yet again the absolute significance of Michael’s first appearance on the show being in John’s body), figures the threat that Dean only ever came to exist as a tool for Michael. He is not, and has never been, himself, only an empty container waiting for Michael, even from before his conception (“The Song Remains the Same”), and the real threat Michael poses to Dean throughout the series is not Dean’s surrender to Michael himself but his surrender to the idea that he is only Michael’s vessel, that his own decisions and actions as a sentient being don’t and never mattered. That’s part of why, in addition to depicting Dean’s depression, Dean’s emptiness in “My Bloody Valentine” is so important. It directly follows Dean’s discovery that his parents were only brought together because of Heaven’s intention that he and Sam be born; he exists solely because of and for Michael. Michael’s threatened possession of Dean, like Alastair’s, is not a foreign or external one; it is one that has existed inside Dean all along, and that is where its true horror lies.
And that is where the uncanny, and the shapeshifter’s uncanny role as “dark double,” come in. Because part of Freud’s discussion of the uncanny focuses on repression: “th[e] uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” “Skin” introduces this to us immediately, uncovering the feelings of bitterness and resentment Dean holds toward his father and toward Sam that he has repressed, further suggesting how, through his very repression of these feelings, Dean is able to become a very different personality than he might otherwise (hunter rather than monster like the shifter who sympathizes, even empathizes, with Dean (“I thought I came from a bad background”). The parallel established between Dean and the shifter in the episode suggests that their very similarity is something repressed (more generally, actually, the similarity between a hunter and what he hunts, but it’s no coincidence that Dean will be explored in parallel with other shifters in later episodes); the shifter-as-monster is uncanny because it represents repressed elements of Dean; its monstrosity is nothing alien to Dean, only alienated from him so that he may “become someone else” (1.06).
That someone else is John.
Later it will be Alastair, and then Michael, etc. (And let’s not forget Dean’s repeated appropriations, voluntary or otherwise, of Sam’s identity.) The point is that Dean’s fluidity, the dangerous shifting nature of his personality in which his own agency is diluted and displaced, is introduced almost from the show’s very beginning, with writer John Shiban’s uncannily meaningful decision to use the shifter as a double for Dean in the series’ sixth episode.
I am firmly convinced, furthermore, that Dean’s mutability plays a huge role in why so many of us identify so strongly with his character. We know what it’s like to need to be someone else, and what it is like to be forced to be someone else. We know what it is to wonder who we really are, and be afraid that who we are or have become isn’t who we should, or could, be. “You tell yourself you’re not gonna be something, you know?”
But here’s the thing. Dean isn’t only the threat of change. He’s also the promise of it. He’s the possibility that who we are now or who we were then isn’t who we have to be in the future.
“You tore up the whole script and burned the pages for all of us. It’s a new era. No rules, no destiny. Just utter and complete freedom.”
(6.03)
***There is more to be said here, on abuse and contrecoup injuries and the castration complex, and if anyone wants it I will write it. But I just wanted to strongly urge anyone who hasn’t watched the shapeshifter episodes of SPN–“Skin,” “Nightshifter,” “Monster Movie,” “Two and a Half Men”–to go back and rewatch them. There is so much being done in these episodes in doubling, and every time I watch them anew I’m struck by some new detail. They are really worth reviewing.
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