So 10.14 (The Executioner’s Song) has been analyzed to death, but we finally hit that episode last night in meta club and I’m halfway alive so I’m throwing two whole thoughts onto my blog.
The Mark of Cain arc as a whole has spent a lot of time doing callbacks to season four, both visually and thematically. We’re back in hell with Dean, we’re visiting the basement (9.13, 9.23, 10.09), we’re looking at torture and violence and death.
10.10 had this lovely callback to Dean torturing
Dean’s back in the basement, torturing, because they need answers.
And then we hit 10.14. Dean’s been struggling for months with the time he spent as a demon, he’s got a knife in his hand because he said yes and made a deal, cause he was in a bad place and it seemed like a way out. And oh he doesn’t want to admit it, but he liked how it felt the first time he used that Blade on someone else. I tortured souls and I liked it, I like the disease.
We come to a point of conflict - the worst demon you’ve heard of, the demon who remade Dean into something Else, is locked in a room inside of a devil’s trap, waiting. How much did you learn from me boy, can you best the master of the craft (torture from Alastair, murder from Cain).
There’s a beat outside the door, while Dean talks it out. Then, it was “You ask me to open that door and walk through it, you will not like what walks back out.”
Now, “I need you three out here to take out whatever comes out of there. And I'm serious. I mean whatever comes out.”
He knows that by stepping into that room, going across the line into the demon trap, he’s going to be confronting his own humanity and how much he’s lost, what amount of darkness is in his soul. Monster or hunter, Dean, which one? It’s a fight, back and forth.
"Is that all you’ve got?”
“This is weaker than I expect from you with the Blade, I think you can do better.”
The master gains the upper hand.
When the fight is over, Dean is broken. Not a monster, not yet. He did what he had to do (and oh how I hate that phrase through the years of this show, Dean selling his soul, Sam drinking blood, Cas fighting Raphael, letting Gadreel into Sam, taking another angel’s grace, setting Lester up to die to find Dean... everything that goes into the spell to break the Mark, and Dean’s lowest point of standing in front of Sam with a scythe in his hand knowing it’s what he must do to save the world from himself...) Now he has to live with the damage, with the knowledge that he is not strong enough to face what comes next (he won’t be able to save Sam, he won’t be able to resist the Mark).
Castiel, on the other hand, is getting visual callbacks to s5 and s6, and while I know exactly where s10 and the whole damn show goes, from a “I’m deliberately analyzing this season without overlying the knowledge of what comes later” standpoint it makes me nervous.
The thing that is utterly frustrating is knowing that this is where the plot derails. I can take all of s10 to this point and draw a straight path in one specific direction, I can even make a solid interpretation for “and it is written, the river shall end at the source.” And most of the visual and metaphorical and parallel dictionary I’ve spent the last... five months? building is about to be thrown from a very tall window. I don’t know where the Castiel visual references were going to go. I don’t know how the hell callbacks and s4 parallels would have played out in a world where s10 was actually the finale of the show.
It’s one of the basic tenants of the show; and it’s a critical theme for both Winchesters. What does it mean to be human?
What does it mean to be a monster? Am I a monster?
For Sam it starts back in S1, from Pilot on, with his visions and “Freak” being thrown around like candy. For Dean, it starts in 1x06 with Skin.
Sam’s version is all about not being pure and loss of self, which ends up with a lot of dubcon overtones/subtext in certain arcs. Dean’s version is about loss of control and agency, about how far he’ll go and whether it’s his own decision.
This plays into so so many of the boys arcs, and most especially Hell and the memory thereof. Which is all going under a cut because this got long, fast.
Dean’s version starts all the way back in Skin, with a shifter that’s a dark mirror and goes on a killing spree. It crops up again right before the s1 finale, when Dean confesses to Sam that he’s scared of what he’ll do to protect the family. And it plays directly into Dean’s trip to Hell and his arc in season 4 - there’s a continuous thread of Dean dealing with ptsd, but the sticking point and the thing that breaks him is what he did in Hell, what he had to do to survive, what he feels he became. The show plays with lighter versions of that theme in s5/6, more on the free will side, and then brings back questioning his humanity in s7.
In S8 he’s struggling to readjust to life on earth after being in Purgatory, a place that was... pure, in that it pulled out all his hunter and predatory instincts. It made him just a little into a monster. And s9, well... s9 introduced the Mark of Cain, which spiraled into actually being a demon and then further, into a human that was addicted to killing and couldn’t control the craving. S11 really pulled back from that, focusing on free will. S12, we had a massive parallel to Arthur Ketch; Ketch was everything Dean tries not to be. I don’t have enough of s13 to grab a broad stroke for it, but right now it’s looking a lot like this is an Agency season; things are outside of Dean’s control.
Sam’s version is there from Pilot; he starts out with visions and powers that turn out to be demon blood, constantly questioning in the first two years whether or not he’s a monster, whether or not he deserves to live. He’s a freak, outcast, contaminated, and it only escalates once Ruby comes into the picture and his addiction arc begins and he’s confronted with the threat of possession by Lucifer. Soulless is pretty obviously a loss of self, but what compounds the arc there is that Balthazar tells Soulless that he has to contaminate his vessel to keep his soul out. When Sam gets his soul back, the rest of the focus for him in s6 is with not remembering and wondering what it is that he did. How much of a monster was he?
S7 and S8 were contamination again, dealing with memories and hallucinations that he couldn’t escape and then with guilt that kept building. S9 he’s possessed by Gadreel and then has to deal with the aftermath, the grace and the guilt he still carries. In s10 he’s mirroring Dean’s arc, giving up pieces of his humanity while trying to save Dean; s11 brings back purity and contamination and being called to do something. S12, Sam’s struggling with his identity, with having these massive gaps introduced by Mary and questioning what it means to be a hunter; it’s a much lighter season for him. Again, s13 is only half over, but Sam has been referencing his own earlier struggles with loss of control and his powers.
When it specifically comes to Hell, to remembering Hell, what happens to the Winchesters is rooted in these patterns.
And they mirror each other.
In s3-4, when Dean’s looking down the barrel at Hell and then when he’s recovering from having been to Hell, Sam’s going through the same thing. I’ve written a longer piece on what Hell means in the context of s3, but in both seasons the trauma that Dean is preparing for and then recovering from is mirrored in Sam’s arc. Dean’s confronted with the possibility of being alone, of losing his humanity, and Ruby dangles the same in front of Sam. Dean’s processing his trauma and what he did to souls in the pit in order to survive (which he also liked), his loss of humanity there; and Sam’s being tortured by his own demon, drawn deeper into an addiction (something he liked) that he’s doing to save himself -- oh and he’s torturing corrupted souls (demons) with his powers.
Season 6, Sam lost his humanity. He lost his soul and he lost his way and what he did was go through the motions, the things he knew worked before. That’s exactly what Dean was doing with Lisa; living a hollow life that wasn’t his, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do. When Sam’s pulling his soul together at the end of the season and regaining his memories, Dean’s dealing with Cas having lied to him and kept secrets. They’re both pulling together missing pieces, and where it leads is bloody.
And while Sam’s dealing with hallucinations of Lucifer and his torture in the cage, Dean’s falling apart because of Cas’ betrayal and subsequent death. Both Winchesters have spiraling mental arcs that they’re... pretending don’t exist, which are resolved when Cas comes back into the picture.
If you look at the s9/10 arc, the darker Dean goes, the darker Sam goes. During the 9/10 gap where Dean is a demon, Sam ends up torturing demons and convinces Lester to sell his soul. The more Dean falls under the sway of the Mark, the more of Sam’s morals are set aside in his quest to save his brother.
When Sam’s dealing with visions of Hell in s11, they’re a question. Who is sending these, why am I being drawn to this, if I do X will this stop? Dean’s dealing with the same thing: who is Amara, why am I drawn to her, how can I stop this? For both of them the answer turns out to be something they don’t like, and something they also can’t really fight on their own; something that’s connected to their minds and souls, that they can’t simply sweep clean.
Our one mention in s12 of Winchesters in Hell was for Sam; basically a “you have no idea who I am” statement, which is the Winchesters vs the BMoL in a nutshell, all the wrong information and no idea of the experience.
This is a wonderful, beautiful, painful pattern. And then there’s 13x08.
Unless you’re counting interactions with Hellhounds (s5, 8, and 12) and the s11 visit to Hell with bonus twitch a la Jensen’s acting choices, this is the first point since the beginning of s4 where the focus of Hell has been on Dean’s torture and trauma instead of what he did under Alastair’s training. The show has been dealing with Dean’s comfort with his capacity for violence for years now, throughout the s8-11 arc; it hasn’t been explicitly tied to Hell over the years, but Dean’s willingness to torture angels in 9x22 was a direct callback to Alastair.
13x08 is full of vulnerability for Dean. Letting Sam drive Baby, being placed under a spell by a demon, sticking his hand into a dark trap to open the vault door, callbacks to not one but three characters (Charlie, Crowley, and depending on how you look at it either John or Dean himself in the form of Shrike) to whom Dean had a very complicated emotional relationship. Thematically, remembering just the trauma of Hell and hellhounds fits perfectly.
There is no parallel moment for Sam.
Not yet, at least. Sam’s been drawing on his own life experiences and his powers in trying to teach Jack, but doing so hasn’t required the sheer vulnerability of Dean remembering Hell. The deeper into s13 we go, the more we’re delving into Dean’s grief and emotions, the more Sam’s mental state is a narrative gap. One of the things I, at least, have been hoping will come out of s13 is that this new trend of Winchesters Using Their Words will actually result in some amount of catharsis for what they’ve been through. We’re getting there with Dean, but Sam’s side of the equation is still unbalanced.
We open up the premier with Hells Bells, AC/DC, which is all about, you guessed it, going to hell. The first episode is all about the seven deadly sins, the basic categories under which all misdeeds fall, and the reasons you end up in hell. Sin City (3.04) returns to this theme; all the vices are right there in plain sight, but this time the weight is all on people. People make choices that send them to hell, and according to the demon bartender, if you give them ‘whiskey here, a hooker there, they’ll walk into hell with big fat smiles on their faces.’ That hits hard for Dean, because for the past three episodes he’s been using alcohol and sex as a coping mechanism. The theme of sin is mostly dropped, outside of the title of the finale (No Rest for the Wicked), with one exception: kinslaying.
Now, kinslaying is set apart in almost every culture; from Cain and Abel to Tantulus and Sisyphus, kinslayers get a special place in hell, normally a worse one than the average population. The show plays with this theme in 3.02, where the changelings kill their ‘parents’ and the parents wrestle with killing their child, but it well and truly comes home with Bela in 3.06. The ghost ship follows people that have killed family members; it isn’t until Bela’s almost hellhound chow (in 3.15) that we learn it was a) her parents, and b) she had a really really good reason to want them dead.
This one is worth mentioning separately; kinslaying is…. it’s supposed to be something that no normal person would do. It’s beyond the pale, something that belongs to monsters; something that strips away your humanity. Sort of like Hell.
Now, there are a few themes for what Hell is that are played with throughout the season; the show presents them as either direct “this is Hell” moments, or most of the time it’s presented as repeated motifs.
Hell is being trapped: 3.02, the mothers of the changelings are trapped, living with monsters and unable to tell what is real and what isn’t; 3.03, Sam and Dean are powerless in the face of an outside force; 3.05, our victim of the week is trapped inside her own body for years; 3.10, being trapped with your worst fears; 3.11, Sam is trapped watching someone he loves die over and over again, and then not being able to let go; 3.12, the boys are threatened with being stuck in a small confining cell, alone; 3.13 is all about being trapped, in the house and in death loops, and on a larger level, none of the Ghostfacers learn anything or move on after their experience; 3.15 is filled with images of confined spaces, starting from the cold open with a car trunk and ending with a refrigerator stuck in a grave; and 3.16, where a family is trapped in a nightmare wrapped in the appearance of a normal life.
Hell is being alone: 3.07 tells us that in exact words —
Vampire: Can you think of a worse Hell than staring down eternity alone?
Dean: Well there’s Hell.
Vampire: I wasn’t thinking. You know what that’s like? Like being dead already. I just didn’t care anymore.
3.08, John was absent and both boys were alone, and then Sam couldn’t bear the thought of celebrating Christmas when Dean wouldn’t be there next year; 3.10, Dean is left alone with himself, and it’s his worst nightmare; 3.11, Sam is alone, the only person who remembers what’s going on, and then he’s separated from all friends and family for months; 3.12, the boys are threatened with being isolated from each other for the rest of their lives.
Hell is forgetting who you are: Ruby tells Dean that exactly in 3.09, and then it comes back in 3.10 with his dream demon; and then the thread continues from there to the end of the season where both Winchesters are confronted with ‘what are you willing to give up to save Dean?’ How far will you go, and and what point have you stopped being human and become the monster? 3.14 hammers this home; Dean loses sight of his morals, almost kills a man out of desperation, trying to save himself. For a moment, he is the monster. And then we hit 3.15 and Dean finally snaps. He shouts “I would rather go to hell” than be like Doc Benton, giving up his humanity piece by piece in order to survive.
That leads me to the other main mirroring arc of s3: Sam Winchester, the Boyking, Antichrist, Freak. Season 3 for Sam is all about being tempted to the darkside; or rather, not tempted so much as pushed and bludgeoned to it. We, the audience, get to watch him go through all the shades of Hell alongside Dean; but while Dean is coming to terms with what Hell will mean, and drawing moral lines of what he will and won’t do, Sam is falling apart. We get to watch him deciding which pieces of himself he has to give up in order to save his brother. By the time we hit the finale, he’s ready to give up everything; he’ll take Ruby’s deal, he’ll accept being a freak; he’ll do everything and be everything he’s wanted to avoid since s1 in order to save Dean. He’s been through metaphorical hell. The concept of being trapped and alone is enough that he starts to forget himself.
Season 3 is a mess, meta-wise; it tugs in a dozen different directions, especially when the show had to change to compensate for the writers’ strike. The original ending, though, was for Dean to be saved, and Sam to be lost. Rescue was coming; there was always a light at the end of the tunnel, it was just hellfire. But the way that made it to the screen, both Winchesters ended up in a kind of hell. Trapped, alone, with a demon for company, forgetting the things they once knew, the things that kept them human. Waiting for rescue.
