When going up against Mars Neto—John overdid it, displaying the "overkill" signature of a disrupted psyche.
But his anger saved Carlos. Carlos knows this, and thanks him, but he's unsettled. Perhaps he senses that this experience... injured John terribly.
Carlos just doesn't want to see it... or his part in it.
He tentatively offers this:
CARLOS: Thank you for what you did back there. JOHN: You're welcome. CARLOS: If you ever... want to talk. You let me know, okay? JOHN (an uncomfortable smile): Yeah. I wi—I will.
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What a difference from the flippant pressure Carlos put on John to talk earlier in the episode—the very thing that triggered John and left him feeling cornered!
After delivering a somewhat more philosophical take—not a specific personal trauma—Carlos bailed to do the investigation. He spoke about how they’re all the same, but it wasn’t rooted in an intensely personal grief or loss.
It was about the shape of his life, mostly.
And then he left John to sit in the fallout zone.
Anyway, I’m just saying that why on earth would John want to talk to Carlos now? Carlos accidentally made himself an unsafe figure in John's world of emotional vulnerabilities:
CARLOS: My friend would actually love to go next, right John?
spnwin 1x04
(This is... a little analogous to how Sam Winchester operates with respect to talking it out with his own loved ones.)
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With respect to John's overkill, I can't help but be reminded of Mary seeing Jack's overkill signature in Game Night.
Both Carlos and Mary are "big heart" characters, who sometimes unintentionally lean on others too hard in service of The Cause and The Need to Protect—until those they lean on break wide open.
(NOTE: We see Mary also do this with Cas in First Blood.)
There’s just something so crunchy about circumstances where someone’s so useful, so powerful that you never bench them—because you just need them too damn much. (But well…that kind of weight is way too heavy for anyone to carry.)
14x17
BONUS:
“You left them!” she shouts. John’s not around for her to be mad at, so she takes it out on Cas. (But also, she realizes that she left them too. Sees the error of her ways and apologizes.)
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Sam does this on occasion:
DEAN: Oh, what? You think he's ready? He's had a pretty rough go of it lately. SAM: Which one of us hasn't? Seems insane to leave our one and only angel friend on the bench. DEAN (resigned): I'll call him. SAM: Thank you.
11x06
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So, ofc, does Dean.
(x) (x) (x) (x)
Dean wants Cas to be invincible to both keep them safe as a family... and also to be strong enough to take care of himself.
Jack-Dean-Mary all tend to trade in having great expectations for Cas in particular.
When Dean marshals the forces, Cas often ends up with the heavy burdens—partly because of tragic circumstances of the narrative, and partly because he’s so often physically the strongest.
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And so. The "courage" characters often get revved into overdrive:
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Even Cas has an "overkill" signature on occasion
Godstiel is the obvious example, but the moments in 15x03 and 15x06 often go unnoticed. Respectively, they’re signs of Cas rising to the occasion—but also, like Jack and John, of a worsening psyche. We’ll see how his resilience sometimes slips into something else: the dreaded “destiny.”
Above: Cas overkills Belphegor, destroying Lilith’s Crook and Jack’s vessel in the process—cutting off any chance of getting Jack back, at least for the time being. It’s a decisive move, yes, but also a glimpse of his fraying resilience.
&
How Cas kills the sheriff in 15x05 is also... disturbing. Angry. "Savage."
And the “Take who you want, when you want”shows us Cas’s anger at Chuck. It connects to his later words to Dean: "When God took [Jack] from us…"
We get so locked in and amazed by the strength of certain characters that sometimes we miss these signs.
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No one is unbreakable.
Sometimes, with certain people... we just forget.
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Like:
BELPHAGOR: Funny— they didn't seem to think twice about it—
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Just like The Cause keeps winning out over care in SPN prime, the truth is that the Core Four in SPNwin don’t really hesitate to send John into danger—whether it’s taking on a monster in episode one or facing off against a god:
MILLIE: You sent John into battle against a god who's immortal?
(She didn’t know that, Millie. But it’s true that she sent him into that minefield. That's how soldiers operate... and it's tragic.)
Above: Like Dean, Mary can at times be prone to a mission-oriented (or safety-oriented) insensitivity. She runs hot and cold—tender one moment, tough the next.
..
Mary's hypocrisy and immaturity is every bit as delicious as John's grief- and fear- induced anger:
Later in 1x06, Mary will accuse John of throwing himself into danger, and it never occurs to her that her own hypocrisy might be what chafes. "Everyone's worried about you!" she says.
Then she accuses him of "running towards danger." She says, "this isn't a game; this is life or death." But is he the one who doesn't know that... or is SHE? (See above.)
The bottom line is this: she feels that she can put him in danger, no problems. Because she trusts her own judgment. Her own judgment gives her the illusion of control.
As for John, she wants him to be strong and to be resilient and take on what she determines to be the acceptable level of danger. He should slow down when she says slow down, and most importantly... he should make sure not to actually be in danger, even when and especially when she's sending him into that danger.
//
In 1x06, she asks to be let into his head, but she turns cold the minute he does. "I don't need you using me as an excuse to avoid your issues," she says, even as she verbally minimizes his anger and fear, and sidesteps that the root of his running is loss. (Loss of his father and the terrible fear of losing her too.) That's an approach that shuts down conversation, even if she is right.
Best part? She's doing all this while avoiding her own hypocrisy re: John's safety and her role as his battle commander.
Far from a warning sign, this is actually a sign of the maturing love between John and Mary: namely, that it's scary to care about each other. They want to be stronger for and more cautious with each other’s safety.
(SEE: Dean and Cas in Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets: -> "Wow, this Benjamin seems like he's pretty cool, you know. Like he wouldn't make any half-cocked, knee-jerk choices.")
It's an impossible tightrope. The pot and the kettle!
It's the duality of being a comrade-in-arms with him and the burgeoning desire to be his lover. She wants to be protected by him and protect him from harm.
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John the weapon
Eventually, in SPNwin, they’ll have to reckon with how they use John (and they will, in 1x06 The Art of Dying). It's about the fact that they know John’s struggling, but they lean on him anyway because he's strong and they need him. (Ironically, they do this even though John's the newest to the hunting world!)
It's so interesting to me that in SPN prime, John starts out as an innocent civilian—lied to, unarmed, and unprepared to protect himself or his family. Afterwards, he overcorrects, becoming the hardened, cruel father we know so well.
But in SPNwin, he steps into the life and becomes John the weapon almost immediately. And right away, Mary starts to lean on him in ways that echo how her Season 12 prime counterpart instinctively tried to lean on Cas.
Like Henry before him, John seems unbreakable—like "nothing can kill the guy" (SEE: Larry in 8x12: "So, Henry is dead. I was so sure that—that he had survived.")
In SPN, characters like John—and especially Cas and Jack, sometimes Dean—are often lost to that same sense of duty. Not because they aren’t loved, but because they were so often needed too much to be protected. It's an agony, really.
DEAN: So you're always thinking to yourself, he's indestructible. He'll always be around, nothing can kill [him]. (2x03)
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JACK: Since I've been alive, everyone assumed I would be this special person who goes on forever. (14x07)