Jan 7, 2025
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Episode 64: 4.04 Metamorphosis
Major important developments, ahoy! Dean discovers what Sam has been up to with Ruby since he was dragged to Hell, and he is not impressed. If it was all so great-- as Sam has desperately tried to convince himself-- then why hide it from Dean? From everyone? Why completely cut even Bobby out of his life completely and lie about Ruby? Sam attempts to justify his choices and actions, but savvy viewers who know how all of this plays out by the end of s4 will be able to see the season-long addiction metaphor Sam is already struggling with. And even we the viewers won’t know what’s driving Sam back to making that choice again, what’s strengthening his powers, for a good long while to come...
Also, Dean uses the nickname “Cas” for the first time, and the entire fandom decides it has one s. :’D
(and nobody enjoys watching Jack Montgomery eat... ew...)
Things referenced in this week’s episode:
the Superwiki page for this episode
my tumblr tag for this episode
but especially this post here
Casting Sides for Michele, Jack, and Travis
Listen now on AnchorFM, or wherever you enjoy podcasts!
4x04 - Metamorphosis
I didn’t watch Metamorphosis today on TNT. But I was thinking about it last night when I knew it was coming on. It’s such a powerful Sam episode. He bares his soul to Dean, and although we’ve seen him open up again here and there, I think it’s the last time he does it quite like that. I think this is when Sam learned that Dean was never going to really “know” him or understand how he felt. That they were always going to be separated by what had been done to him as a child. And he realized that Dean would really rather not know how much pain Sam keeps on the inside. Jensen is very good at showing Dean’s surprise every time Sam shares a tidbit of it, and at showing his rejection of it as well. Dean is the one who hates himself, only sees himself as Daddy’s hammer and on and on. Sam is the confident, superior one.
Dean has always been a hot mess. He wouldn’t have sold his soul like it was nothing if he wasn’t. But in this episode, he’s just gotten back from hell and discovered that “Sammy” died the day his soul was dragged to hell. He comes back to a Sam he doesn’t understand, mostly because he never really did. All he saw was the smart, independent little brother who left him for a better life. He refused to see the desperate guy who would rather have died than be the last Winchester standing. The guy who had to live with the fact that his whole family had died because there was something wrong with him. Dean reacts poorly to finding out just how desperate Sam is, to say the least.
And something else that occurred to me. Not only is Sam dealing with being the cause of his family’s demise but Dean, whether consciously or unconsciously, has something that he can manipulate Sam with for the rest of his life. He does it consciously in season 3 of course. But for the rest of his life, Sam will always be the guy that Dean went to hell for. To everyone. Because even though in his heart of hearts, Dean knows he didn’t really do it for Sam, that is how it’s framed and that is how Sam will see it and it is a hair shirt he can never shed. And because Sam reacted to the grief and anger of it by throwing his principals out the window and doing something Dean expressly forbid him to do, Dean can justify his own bad reaction. The words might never be spoken out loud, but it’s there. Sam betrayed Dean’s sacrifice. Even though technically, Dean made a decision that would make Sam’s life a literal living hell for years to come and was pretty much the beginning of all of the bad things that happened afterward to both of them. Sam was the betrayer, not Dean. Even jumping into hell for everyone’s sins was not framed as Sam being a hero. It was framed as what he deserved for not being the guy Dean and the show told us he was supposed to be. And it would be many seasons before anybody said differently. Is it any wonder that Sam holds all of those feelings of inadequacy inside until he’s under so much duress that he loses his grip?
And like I said, I know that he has moments in later seasons when he might let some of it out, i. e., the trials, but he is never this angry, defiant guy who still thought he had some control of his life again.
Dean | SPN 4.04 | dedicated to @jensenscomedyelbows
Still catching up with all the excitement about the latest episode. :) Has it been mentioned that Dean may have also felt uncomfortable around Jack because he absorbed some of Michael’s grace? As if looking at Jack and his altered behavior triggers Dean’s Michael trauma?
Hi there! And isn’t it fun? This was just a delightful episode, even though it dealt with some pretty dark themes (mind control, free will, identity, morality, etc.). Which is always a refreshing switchup on Supernatural.
I think there’s a lot of reasons that Dean would feel uncomfortable around Jack right now:
Jack is a Teenager™ in terms of emotional development, even before The Incident with Michael last week. Teenagers are by nature volatile beings, and Jack has a heck of a lot more potential danger wrapped into him than the average emo teen
Dean is currently Tired™. Like, not just regular-tired, but emotionally wrung out from his own ordeal with Michael. He’s been living with this all season to this point, and he’s tentatively adjusting to the fact that Michael really is gone from him now. I mean, he had a brief reprieve for a handful of episodes before, but what happened to him in 14.09 was such an unsettling violation that he then had to deal with all over again, combined with facing an eternity trapped with Michael in the Drama Coffin, and the guilt of thinking that again he was responsible for Michael escaping, killing all the AU hunters in the bunker, in their home, for being “not good enough” to stop Michael from escaping because of how hard Sam has taken the murders of all of his hunters and is now running himself into the ground to both avoid dealing with the trauma of their deaths AND to compensate for the loss of these hunters and trying to do the work of a dozen people himself... Talk about a lot of reasons to feel emotionally and physically exhausted.
The unsettling shift in Jack now, after he’s spent some real quality time with Jack until recently. He’d finally allowed himself to make this emotional connection with Jack this season, and like he felt toward soulless!Sam before he learned what was really wrong with him in s6, his behavior toward Jack in this episode has felt similarly wary and arm’s-length, whether or not he makes this connection in so many words inside his own head. A lot of his reactions to Jack have seemed subconscious, even while he see him displaying this conscious effort to analyze Jack directly, even taking him to visit with the one soulless person he knows for help.
and let’s not forget the direct personal guilt he likely feels that Jack was even put into that position to sacrifice his own soul in his confrontation with Michael in the first place, because to Dean, if he’d only been “strong enough” to keep Michael locked up, or if he’d only ignored his loved ones and gone through with the Drama Coffin plan, Jack could’ve been safe. I mean this entire misconception is prefaced on the fact that Dean had no idea that Jack was already beginning to suffer the effects of Nephilim Consumption that had led to his original death, and had already been burning up bits of his soul to heal himself and hide his symptoms from everyone else. So of course some of this guilt is misplaced, just as some of Sam’s guilt over the deaths of his hunters is misplaced, but guilt is not rational. And to the Winchesters, they have a long, long history of bearing this sort of burden for the entire world, you know? Gotta save ‘em all, and it’s entirely on them if they fail.
And yeah, a lot of this is also tangled up with Dean’s recent trauma with Michael, and the potential fear that some bit of Michael’s influence could’ve tainted Jack now, even if Jack insists he’s himself again and that all the parts that made up Michael are actually burned off and gone now.
We saw glimpses of Sam’s Mental State, and the trauma that is currently haunting him in the flashes of the dead hunters around the War Room, but from the very first clip of Dean in the THEN segment, we were reminded of 4.06 (yes, in a humorous, snake-relevant fashion, but still...), which was an episode specifically about fear, and weaponized fear at that.
So Dean is kind of experiencing a bit of an emotional overload, physical and mental exhaustion, guilt, relief, worry, and is still being run ragged by Sam’s current coping strategy of keeping himself so busy hunting that he doesn’t have to face his personal trauma that he hasn’t even had a moment to breathe (or consume one (1) giant freaking sandwich in the privacy of his own kitchen) without this manic energy pulling him along into Yet Another Hunt.
Basically, there is A Lot informing all of TFW’s current mental states, and of course they’re all processing and dealing differently, because they’ve all experienced different aspects of these shared traumas and they all cope with their particular burdens in different ways.
But heck if they aren’t taking strides toward acknowledging all of this, too. I just had to squeeze this in there because I’ve got another few anons in my inbox who seem to have entirely missed like... all of this... for whatever reasons, and it’s clear their view of the situation is not... objective... whatever. Moving on!
There’s a whole complex of issues that are affecting Dean’s reaction to Jack, including his very real worry (tinged with guilt and abject fear and the aftereffects of his trauma related to Michael) of what this has done to Jack now. And he doesn’t even KNOW about the deal Cas made with the Empty yet to preserve Jack’s humanity, and the fact that it all might be for naught if-- as Dean once said to Sam way back in 4.04 after having suffered 40 years in Hell for the sake of saving Sam’s life once upon a time--
DEAN: Slippery slope, brother. Just wait and see. Because it's gonna get darker and darker, and God knows where it ends.SAM: I'm not gonna let it go too far.DEAN: It's already gone too far, Sam. If I didn't you know... I would wanna hunt you.
Dean’s watched these sorts of good intentions go bad too many times not for that to be reason enough to handle situations like this with Extreme Caution, you know?
Hello from the tnt loop today! 4.04, Metamorphosis, and if I'm not mistaken, the first incident of Direct Lamp Abuse.
SAM: I'm pulling demons out of innocent people. DEAN: Use the knife! SAM: The knife kills the victim! What I do, most of them survive! Look, I've saved more people in the last five months than we save in a year. DEAN: That what Ruby want you to think? Huh? Kind of like the way she tricked you into using your powers? Slippery slope, brother. Just wait and see. Because it's gonna get darker and darker, and God knows where it ends. SAM: I'm not gonna let it go too far. [DEAN smiles at that, walks over to the wall and hits the lamp on the side table, making it crash and fly. DEAN looks angry again.] DEAN: It's already gone too far, Sam. If I didn't you know... I would wanna hunt you. [...] SAM: You were gone. I was here. I had to keep on fighting without you. And what I'm doing... It works. DEAN: Well, tell me. If it's so terrific... then why'd you lie about it to me?
Sam doesn't have an answer right away, but dealing with the monster of the episode gives him a depressing new insight into his own tenuous condition. Sam makes Jack's state about himself, desperately trying to save himself, find some proof that Dean and the angels are wrong about him, that he's not trapped heading down the "darker and darker" road Dean described it as.
SAM: What if he doesn't hulk out? I did a little homework. Uh, I've been checking out the lore on rougarous. TRAVIS: What? My 30 years of experience not good enough for you? SAM: What? No. No, I-I- I just wanted to be prepared. I mean, not that you didn't.. [...] SAM: Look, everything you said checked out, of course, but uh. I found a couple of interesting stories about people who have this rougarou gene or whatever. See, they start to turn, but they never take the final step. [...] TRAVIS: Good on you for the due diligence, Sam. But those are fairy tales. Fact is, every rougarou I ever saw or heard of... took that bite.
Sam's final stance is that he's not gonna kill Jack unless he does something to deserve killing for... like with the possessed people Ruby's been teaching him to exorcise. And it's a noble concept, but so far beyond flawed as a way to deal with rougarou... but Dean capitulates, because he feels guilty and at least a little responsible for why Sam's in this state now. So they try to deal with a rougarou with logic, giving him all the facts and hoping he chooses to resist giving in.
But unlike Dean, Travis the hunter who brought them in for help on this case, goes back to kill both Jack and his pregnant wife, and it forces Jack's hand. He may have resisted killing up to that point, but when backed into a corner to save someone he loves, he lost control, and that was all it took to turn him into the monster.
Sam's so distracted trying to stop Jack from killing Dean, too, he missing the Huge Flashing Arrow, which Travis had warned him about-- rougarou leave their wives pregnant when they turn. Jack told him Travis had tried to kill his wife, too, but when Sam asked why, Jack lied, used that fact to villify Travis in Sam's mind, making HIM look like the monster. And in the fashion of the overarching spiral narrative, we're left to assume that somewhere out there, there's now a 10-year-old kid who's completely unaware of his family legacy, waiting like a ticking time bomb to go off and eat someone in a couple more decades. (unless Michelle was as horrified by what she learned and saw Jack do that she was smart enough to end the pregnancy...) And of course Dean knows none of this because he's been knocked unconscious and is unable to hear it at all.
And isn't that just a tidy metaphor for how Sam was lured into working with Ruby? Using his own powers, believing the manipulative lie Ruby fed him, which fed right into his own need to be good at all costs, to feel like he's at least working toward scrubbing himself clean of the stain of what was done to him.
SAM: You have no idea what I'm going through. None. DEAN: Then enlighten me! SAM: I've got demon blood in me, Dean! This disease pumping through my veins, and I can't ever rip it out or scrub it clean! I'm a whole new level of freak! And I'm just trying to take this - this curse... and make something good out of it. Because I have to.
One of the things Sam worries Dean thinks of him is that he doesn't "know the difference between right and wrong," as if there was a simple, black and white answer. (lol because that's the whole premise of the next episode on the loop... a simple, black and white case, that turns out to be anything BUT that... but that's for the next post). They're both trying to do what they feel is the right thing, when there really is no clear answer. In those situations, they have to decide what really matters most to them and at least try to do THAT. For Sam, that's the Saving People half of the job description. Not wanting to kill Jack until he's got enough evidence to prove to himself that he's too dangerous to live. Unfortunately for Sam, there's two problems with that strategy:
1. Jack is pushed into doing something that would make him "deserve" being killed, which means "letting" him kill an innocent person. But of course Sam's hoping he won't do that, as armed with the facts about what that would make Jack as he is, sometimes we're not given a choice and circumstance dictates our choices in the moment. Things are never as simple as they seem on the surface...
2. Travis and his 30 years of experience dealing with rougarou knows this, and seeing he's not getting the help he asked for from Sam and Dean, goes ahead and does what he thinks he has to do without them... and ends up becoming the "innocent" person Jack kills that turns him. What a plot twist...
That's effectively what happens to Sam over the course of s4, as he becomes more and more convinced that he alone is right, because they don't have all the facts (and in fact have the deliberately misleading facts about what their ultimate goal of the season is-- not killing Lilith... if only he could've resisted taking that final bite, as it were, in 4.22. But instead he believes he's doing the right thing, protecting people he cares for, even at the cost of his own humanity, just like Jack in this episode, and honestly just like Jack the Nougat Babby in 14.14 and beyond... and the narrative loop spins again...)
If only Sam could understand why Dean’s so afraid for him... but:
Sam: Anyway, it doesn't matter. These powers... it's playing with fire. I'm done with them... I'm done with everything. Dean: Really? Well, that's a relief. Thank you. Sam: Don't thank me. I'm not doing it for you. Or for the angels or for anybody. This is my choice.
is it really, Sam? Or will the narrative back you into corner after corner until you feel compelled to use those powers anyway? Until you’re completely stripped of choices and see only one way out?