#it also happened in 2.03 “bloodlust” when he killed a vampire

[lambmotifz]

something something dean + penetration metaphor/motif. the amount of times he killed/tried to kill someone by brutally penetrating them….

[scoobydoodean]

Made a similar post before but... I think people in their minds actually revise 2.03 Bloodlust to be this episode where Sam is on this "Monsters can be good" train before he ever gets kidnapped by Lenore and he then is burdened with the task of convincing poor stupid idiot Dean who isn't as open-minded and rational as he is to think for just one second and then at the end of the episode, pats him on the head and tells him not to feel guilty about it when he finally becomes enlightened like Sam has always been but that is not how that episode goes.

Sam's immediate reaction to the alleged existence of good vampires is not any different from Dean's. He immediately rejects the idea that the vampires aren't hurting anyone, and throughout his entire conversation with Lenore, refuses to believe her until she goes, "Fine. I'll let you go to prove it to you" which rocks his whole ass world.

Face of man having his whole worldview toppled sideways and having to figure out how to adapt:

So yeah after this Sam and Dean get into a 2 minute fight about it which turns into a completely different conversation because Sam decides for the third time in three episodes to try and pretend he's Dean's therapist then (badly) psychoanalyze him about how Gordon is a substitute for their dad and it (shocker) doesn't go well. But then Gordon steals the car and the moment Sam and Dean walk into the room where Gordon is torturing Lenore, Dean's feelings about the entire thing happening in front of him are "This is bad. This is very bad."

The SECOND he enters the room Dean picks a side, and it isn't Gordon's.

Just like Lenore "proved" her goodness to Sam by letting him go, she "proves" her goodness to Dean by resisting the temptation to consume Sam's blood... but Dean started defending Lenore and trying to get Gordon to back off the moment he entered the room.

Dean is also much more thoughtful about where this leaves him and Sam in terms of their past hunts while Sam doesn't consider the past at all?

Istg people rewrite this scene in their minds to be Sam approaching the whole thing from the perspective of someone who was already "enlightened"... but he wasn't. He was equally shocked by the revelation of good vampires possibly existing in this episode. He just doesn't bother to also consider the implications as far as any previous case they've ever been on. He doesn't feel any guilt about it he just lets it go with a shrug and Dean doesn't.

Add to this that in 1.12, Sam was the one with the hardline stance that they couldn't kill humans—ones who would get away with their crimes because they committed them by supernatural means—and that doing so would make them "just as bad" as the things they hunt. The only difference between a human using a reaper to murder people for clout, and a monster murdering people, is the physical characteristics of the monster versus the human. Dean sees a human using a reaper to murder people for clout and says, "they're a monster in my book". He argues they should take care of it because of the human's actions—otherwise there will be no repercussions for the human involved, while Sam draws a hard line that they can't kill a human simply because they're human and for no other reason. This is also crunchy in terms of how it might relate to Sam's eventual feelings about his inner nature making him evil, versus Dean's actions-based analysis.

Sam has a lot of compassion for Max in 1.14, but it's gone by 2.05 when his reaction to Andy is to immediately assume he's a murderer while Dean rightfully thinks there's something else possibly going on... and that's two episodes after 2.03 Bloodlust.

[soft-pine]

spn20rewatch: 2.03 bloodlust

dean's enormous crush on gordon walker is something that can be so personal.

i think the scene of dean talking to gordon about his emotions is really sweet; he doesn't get to open up that much.

DEAN: Yeah. Yeah, you know. He was just one of those guys. Took some terrible beatings, just kept coming. So you're always thinking to yourself, he's indestructible. He'll always be around, nothing can kill my dad. Then just like that he's gone. I can't talk about this to Sammy. You know, I gotta keep my game face on. But, uh, the truth is I'm not handling it very well. Feel like I have this...

it's interesting that later on sam interprets dean's like and trust of gordon as trying to replace john. i mean sam doesn't know this but dean is actively furious and heartbroken by john right now. and in fact, gordon's presence only reinforces that rift.

GORDON: Word travels fast. You know how hunters talk. DEAN: No, we don't, actually. GORDON: I guess there's a lot your dad never told you, huh?

i think the emotional journey between dean and gordon is really interesting in this episode. dean thinks gordon is cool, he opens up to him, wants to trust his instinct. but as gordon talks more about his hunting philosophy you can see the seeds of doubt in dean that end up turning him against gordon's desire to just kill lenore and the other vampires.

in fact though sam accuses dean of trying to replace john with gordon, it's the realization that gordon is similar to john in some ways that causes dean to pull back from him. gordon talks about hunting being black and white and easy. but that's exactly the thing in john's philosophy that dean is currently struggling with.

DEAN: What if we killed things that didn't deserve killing? You know? I mean, the way Dad raised us... SAM: Dean, after what happened to Mom, Dad did the best he could. DEAN: I know he did. But the man wasn't perfect. And the way he raised us, to hate those things; and man, I hate 'em. I do. When I killed that vampire at the mill I didn't even think about it; hell, I even enjoyed it.

something that always upsets me is the extreme violence of dean's fight with gordon at the end of the episode. i think it's pretty clear that gordon's characterization falls into a lot of racist tropes throughout the show. and certainly subjecting him to intense violence that is framed as almost comedic is definitely in line with that.

but i also do most of my analysis based on intra-textual information and there is something about the fight that just reads as dean acting out of an acute place of betrayal. and yeah, he opened up to gordon earlier and then gordon hurt sam. and yeah dean's really freaked out by how gordon treats lenore. but there is a level of the physicality in the fight that just makes me think.... they hooked up. like it reads to me as dean reacting in hurt and betrayal not just at someone who he opened up to emotionally but physically as well. anyway, take it or leave it but i watched it and i was like oh they fucked For Sure....

lastly, you know her, you love her, shot of all time.

[darkstar6782]

2.03: Bloodlust - My Rewatch Review

I have probably noticed this every time I watch it, but it still surprises me on every rewatch just how dense the narrative of this particular episode is. Along with all the brotherly angst and the great introduction of a new antagonist in Gordon Walker, it is also full of so many great callback parallels and a level of foreshadowing that is only really noticeable after multiple rewatches. It also dives headfirst into the thematic river that will carry this show for a significant portion of the series—‘What makes a monster a monster?’ And even though we don’t yet know why the question of this really bothers Dean so much, once the truth about what his father told him just before he died is revealed, this episode takes on new and heartbreaking dimensions, not just around the emotional turmoil that Dean feels upon realizing that not all monsters are evil, but also around all of the issues that Gordon brings up to Dean with regards to Sam.

Because not only is Gordon the perfect dark mirror for the war being waged inside Dean’s head right now—his sister was turned into a monster, and not only did Gordon not hesitate to kill her, he also appears to feel no guilt or remorse for doing so—but he also doesn’t hesitate to call out all of the ways in which Sam doesn’t seem to be like Dean or other hunters, and right now Dean is probably scrutinizing Sam’s every word and action ten times more closely than he ever did before, watching and listening and wondering if any of it is a sign of what his dad warned him to look out for. It’s also a really good explanation for why Dean hauls off and punches Sam in the face at the end of their fight, above and beyond the fact that it’s probably not unusual for arguments between them to get physical at times, given how they were raised: Dean has just heard Sam, who could be on his way to turning into something evil at any moment, as far as he knows, defend letting a group of monsters go instead of hunting them down and killing them. Given the circumstances, he chooses to lash out in the most aggressive way he can think of, just to see what Sam will do. Is his brother still his brother, or has he gone dark-side already? And when Sam refuses to react by hitting him back, and refuses to retaliate even when given permission later on, that likely tells Dean something about where his brother’s head is at, even if the audience isn’t privy to that information right away. See what I mean about the narrative here being dense? And I haven’t even touched upon the way in which the role of hunter and monster are reversed, even down to the language the vampires use when describing the hunters being an echo of the way John described vampires in ‘Dead Man’s Blood’ last season.

All that would be more than enough for me to gush about in regards to this episode, but there is one other tiny piece of it that is worth mentioning because I love that the show included it. In the scene where the boys are talking to the sheriff about the cattle mutilations, everything that the sheriff tells them is true. In our mundane, non-supernatural world, those are all of the actual scientific explanations for the “unexplained” phenomena that people cite when they use dead cattle as evidence of supernatural or alien entities. That scene has always particularly stood out to me because it was an extremely memorable episode of a National Geographic show called “Is It Real” explaining the science behind cattle mutilations that started me on a path towards skepticism and embracing reality over belief in the supernatural in any of its forms. I’m not entirely sure why that episode of the show was so memorable to me—maybe it was because most of the other ones were on Bigfoot and alien abductions and other things that I was already skeptical about—but the truth about what actually happens to a cow’s body when it dies and decays in the sun, and the simple fact that most people only think it’s unexplained because they lack first-hand experience with such a mundane, natural occurrence always felt like the perfect example of why people embrace supernatural explanations for anything that happens when they can’t easily explain it any other way, and it has always served as a reminder to me to look for the possible natural explanations first. And I love that Supernatural chooses, every once in a while, to poke fun at itself in that regard by placing truths about the real world in the show, despite the fact that, in their world, the supernatural explanation is often the correct and more likely one.