I’ve been waiting, literally all season, to see which kind of shape Sam’s future journey is going to be going on. His journey has been left on the wayside for many years. If I’m generous, his stories stopped having proper conclusions long before his arc to close Hell led to an aborted conclusion, and while yes I will concede that Sam got the Mark off Dean’s arm, that was ultimately a step back for his narrative, and it sent him spiraling at the beginning of 11 with his whole aborted ‘divine cause’ storyline (which I’m still mad about), and which sidestepped to Lucifer taking a driving seat in that season’s narrative while Sam breathed heavily in the background because heavy breathing was all the trauma Jared was allowed to add.
So this season they seem to have, in my opinion, made something of an apology in acknowledging that trauma, though like other apologies made inside the frame of storytelling this season, it comes with a sting in the tail of ‘Well if you know this was a problem why are you addressing it now?’. It would have been nice to do it without Lucifer, but then since Sam’s has always been a good vs evil/hero vs villain narrative, addressing Lucifer at last is important if he’s ever to be able to move on. Sam, then, has been trapped in season 5 for the last 8 years, he has never got past it, so the parallels back to it are traumatic for him.
Pure Sam POV is hard to grab hold of. If we don’t have eps which are Sam eps, then all we see is Sam from Dean’s POV, or more rarely from Castiel’s, or worse from Lucifer’s. Look at 11x10, for example. It looks like Sam’s POV, but really it’s Lucifer’s, mocking Sam. That’s why when we went into this ep dreaming in Sam’s POV, I let out a little whoop of delight. Sam’s dream, Sam’s POV. Pure, unadulterated Sammy.
So, let’s look at that dream, shall we?
Sam sits on one side of the table alone, but surrounded by his family. He is closest to Cas. Dean sits at the head of the table (which is the war table incidentally, and I’ve mentioned marching off to war in my tags but nnngh). Everyone is eating pizza, even Sam, who is dreaming about his family being together--all he wants. But even in his dreams Sam can’t help but torture himself: he can’t stop Dean from being gross and eating food that’s going to kill him, and even with a table between them he can’t keep Cas and Dean apart. War metaphorically stands between him and Jack and Mary, and Jack sits between Cas and Mary like their son, closer to them than he is to Sam. Mary stands and crosses to Dean, showing affection for him, touches him, and talks about happily family memories involving herself and John, evoking this idea that Sam is not belonging, that Dean has something that Sam doesn’t and he exists only on the periphery, and Dean doesn’t really appreciate the sentimentality either, shrugging it off. Then Sam and Mary head out into the hallway, and Sam asks how Mary is feeling. Mary is explicit - she clarifies - “Somehow I always knew that you - you and Dean - would come and save us” - and makes it about Dean. The ‘you’ is nodded at Sam, then the clarification of it as a plural, like Castiel’s ‘I love you’ sequence. (Btw this isn’t the only we vs I parallel in this episode, Cas once again has moved to using the right pronouns in the ‘We let Lucifer out of the Cage’ parallel back to when he used ‘I’ in S12)
Sam then wakes up, and it’s ten more minutes of dick jokes from there on in. Reality is literally full of dicks, and everyone is getting it except for Sam. This is a continuation of Sam’s POV. His exposed throat signals his vulnerability, and we film the scene in the kitchen from his perspective, sitting on the floor looking up at Cas and Dean tower over him with the threat of Lucifer hanging in the air.
When they go through the rift, the POV immediately switches back to Dean. We get immediate Dean/Cas focused comic relief where Dean’s reaction is POV. You can literally see it happen here: Sam > Gabriel > Cas > Dean.
We get Dean’s POV to Sam’s exhileration and Cas talking to Gabriel. Flipping back into Dean’s POV delivers the impact when Sam is attacked (btw we’re getting LotR here re. Gandalf’s death, but we’re also getting Star Wars with the glowsticks. We see Sam from a distance, images that Dean flashes back to. Sam can’t have a POV here because he’s dead.
We only return to Sam’s POV for his conversation with Lucifer.
This scene. This scene is amazing. The Hell fan turning in the background, the parallel to Sam’s scene when he wakes up in bed at the beginning of the episode--it also mirrors both Sam in Bobby’s panic room detoxing and Lucifer’s attempt to manipulate Castiel inside the ring of holy fire (Sam wakes inside the circle, defining how trapped he is and feels). This is his hell, his trauma, being trapped with Lucifer, and Lucifer knows it. For once, it felt like I was seeing the Lucifer I missed again. It’s been years since he was this intimidating, this villainous. Lucifer demonstrated his self centered motivation - Cat’s in the Cradle was very on the nose - because Jack’s existence is about him, about giving his life meaning, and he doesn’t care who he walks all over to have his way. One line that stood out to me was when he was talking to the bartender (Gabriel) at the beginning of the episode. Lucifer has no motivation here, and nobody to impress or convince, and he says “Not that finding him will change anything, his bitch of a mother probably poisoned him against me forever.” That’s the way someone talks when they aren’t prepared to acknowledge their faults, their mistakes, having led them to the point they’re at. Lucifer can’t be redeemed because he refuses to accept his culpability.
So Lucifer raises Sam from death. BY THE WAY. Lucifer ATE angels. He ate angels to recover his grace supplies on the way to finding Sam and ugggh. I missed that the first time through. Blech. Anyway. Sam is confronted by his trauma again, and this time finally, it feels like it’s about him. It’s about him addressing and surmounting his trauma. Rowena and Gabriel have sort of got theirs, but Sam has always pushed his trauma down, done what needed to be done to be the hero, but he has fought the idea of ‘teaming up’ with Lucifer again this season, and here he is manipulated and forced into it, put into a situation - again - where he cannot say “No”.
But Sam considers it. “What if I say ‘No’?”. He looks off into the vampires and I feel that he genuinely considers getting eaten instead.
I’m coming back to the parallels though because the drawing of them in this episode finally put the last lego piece on the board for me. This is the season of things which look like other things, and the dialogue, Lucifer here himself, is a thing which looks like something else, a “redemption arc” which cannot be a redemption arc. We’ve commented a lot on how he’s a Cas mirror, and briefly on how Cas was being framed as a Lucifer mirror for a while, but I’m talking about the repetition of old imagery and evocation of old episodes as we’ve fastforwarded from season 1 to season 5 in mirrors and parallels through this season. We got all the way to season 5, with scenes from this episode mirroring episodes 4 and 10 and several others, which is why meta writers have been talking about a Swan Song redux right from the beginning of this season. But in mirroring the dialogue for Sam’s story, it is being repurposed. When Sam and Dean flip roles over Mary and Cas and their grief and frustrations, when the vault scene “I need you” is performed between Gabriel and Sam, and yes in this episode where Lucifer says “You need me” and tells Sam that he raised him from the darkness into the light, evoking Castiel rescuing Dean from Hell, it is all showing - in my opinion of course - the emptiness of Sam’s existence. He is completely bound by Lucifer’s influence on his life, trapped by it and without personal meaning. By stripping Dean/Cas dialogue and slapping it on Sam it raises the dialogue in terms of Dean/Cas, yes, but it also shows us Sam’s emptiness.
Which is why I’m excited, because Sam has the chance, now, to lift himself beyond this emptiness, to find purpose. Once Lucifer has been faced once and for all and set aside, we can move on. Now a lot of Sam fans are going to be making frustrated noises and saying ‘Well look, we thought that in season 11′ because so did I. I thought that Sam was going to face Lucifer and work through his shit, but we never went there because Amara/Dean and Casifer took over the writer’s intent. They prefer writing Dean and it shows in the way things so easily drip back into Dean’s POV. But unless right now Sam’s arc is focused on and he is given the opportunity to grow beyond season 5, we will never have enough time left in the series for him to do so. This is Sam’s opportunity for a wake up call re. Sam vs. Reality, the chance for him to step beyond himself and out into that reality himself. I like to believe - though perhaps I’m deceiving myself - that the writers know that, and we’re going to see Sam flourish, because up until now I have believed that Sam’s will have to be dead at the end of the show because he doesn’t have anything else. In order to move past it and become someone who isn’t defined by his mistakes, Sam must face the villain of his piece himself, and come to an emotional victory. He won by surrendering to the inevitable, to fate, and Sam has been caught in that web ever since, a part of him that never really got free of the Cage, while Dean and Castiel chose free will.
I’m not saying this requires revenge. I think it specifically doesn’t. If you follow the LotR or Star Wars parallels then Lucifer dies by his own hand, either for Jack or selfishly in trying to claim him, and for Sam to kill him would only tie him right down into that place of being defined by his villain. Dean, too, knows that revenge isn’t the answer, and that being bound up in it solely doesn’t do anyone any favors - it’s what killed their dad, after all, and yet the burden sits on Dean that killing Azazel didn’t fix anything, because even years later it hasn’t fixed him. It wasn’t a magical bullet on making the struggles of his childhood go away, and there was no going back to a normal life afterwards, as John had always made out in his quest to find YED.
I’m sure there was more I wanted to say, I always want to talk more about Sam. Thanks to @trisscar368 for being awesome bouncing Sam thoughts off since Thursday night and @teamfreewillbettertogether for the parallel they drew between Sam waking up at the beginning and his waking up in the “vault” with Lucifer. Check out their gifset here.
