#dramatic irony is the the magnetic force holding all of s13 together

[mittensmorgul]

Season 13 and the Big Bad

A defining characteristic of Supernatural in seasons past was the early identification and buildup of the Big Bad character of the season, to the degree that the cosmic escalation of big bads became a running joke. And then the show itself transcended the running joke with the whole “God’s SISTER!” thing, and honestly, where the heck do you even go from there.

Demons, Bigger and Scarier Demons, More Demons, Apocalypse-starting Demons with a side of Dick Angels, Lucifer and Michael, Raphael and Monsters, Leviathan, Demons and basically the Winchesters screwing with the natural order, Angels and Bigger and Badder Demons, MoC!Dean, God’s Sister the Darkness…

I mean who else was waiting for Fuckhands McMike to show up?

Once you hit that level, the whole IDEA of a single season Big Bad just… loses the power to engage. Almost everything after that point is gonna have a Been There Done That element to it.

That’s why the whole point of s12 wasn’t about a Big Bad Character, it was about the Winchesters finally having moved out beyond the plot far enough to look back at their legacy in a critical way. The BMoL weren’t there to act as the Big Bads, despite filling in part of that role. Same with Lucifer. Same with Mary. The real Big Bad of s12 was the Winchesters’ past, their legacy, their “destiny.” And finally beginning to find some sort of resolution and a fuller understanding of themselves. And that theme is continuing full-steam ahead in s13.

The real Big Bad is the friends we made along the way.

Nah, just kidding. The real Big Bad of s13 so far is Dramatic Irony. But let’s back up and examine the players on the board so far:

(under a cut because it’s like 3.6k words and this just seems practical, if annoying) :P

--There was much speculation that Wee Lil Nephilim Jack could “grow into his power” and become the season’s Big Bad, and 13.01 certainly tried hard to make us believe it… for about 15 minutes. He’s certainly got a terrifying amount of power at his disposal, but he’s such a lil marshmallow and just wants to be GOOD so badly. Just give him some nougat and watch him struggle to understand human morality with his Beyond God-like Abilities. So while he’s definitely a source of Major Cosmic Disruption, he can’t really fit the Big Bad bill.

--In 13.02 we met the Kentucky Fried Demon, the last yellow-eyed Prince of Hell, Asmodeus. Thanks to later retconning, we’ve tied yellow-eyed demons right back to the opening scene of the entire series, and the Inciting Incident of all the drama we’ve watched unfold over the last 12+ seasons. And the last one standing has now also been referred to by Lucifer as the “least” of his creations, yet Asmodeus has had a few surprises up his sleeve-- including his shapeshifting. But for all his inexplicable raw power to even confidently best Lucifer in a head to head fight, what are his actual goals? We know he’s long wanted to release the Shedim from Hell, but to what end? What does he even want? He talks a big game, but does he even have a Big Plan? Halfway through the season, we just don’t know, and as a result Asmodeus reads more like a cartoon than an actual threat, despite his “weirdly strong” powers.

--The Empty Entity, which after 13.04 I saw numerous posts speculating that maybe the Entity would grow weary of sleeping (or of being woken up by other angels and demons who somehow began awakening as a result of Cas’s disturbance to the force). But really, the essential nature of that force is… the opposite of interfering in reality. Much as God’s powers of creation held no power in the Empty, the Empty’s eternal stasis can’t hold power within Creation. Obviously Jack’s powers are somehow capable of bridging the gap between them, the same way he’s able to bridge the gap between alternate realities, but so far, the Empty Entity seems like a one-off.

--Billie as the New Death. I, for one, am SO GLAD she’s back, and that the mantle of Death has finally passed on to her. I’d been screaming about her being the New Death since 11.02, and she’s finally come full circle and stepped into that role. As such, she’s in a position to see the full scope of the Cosmic Circumstance, and her previous insistence on what amounts to a tiny cosmic imbalance of the Winchesters’ continued existence is more like a tiny grain of sand out of place while the problems the Winchesters’ continued existence SOLVES is like an entire beach crumbling away. As the linchpins holding the multiverse together, she’s counting on the Winchesters being ALIVE now. Hardly seems Big Bad-ish to have thrown her lot in with the protagonists of the piece, yes? She still has cards to play, especially after warning Dean about the cosmic house of cards and its current precarious state due to Jack’s interference with multidimensional affairs. Rather than having an agenda to do harm, like the Old Death, Billie serves more of a bellwether role. She’s a neutral force that’s acting within her powers to at least drop hints and warnings to the Winchesters.

--Lucifer has incredibly found his way back to the story AGAIN. Like, why won’t he just DIE already? *sighs heavily* At least now he’s been officially de-powered by AU Michael to the point where he’s become rather… ineffective. Poor thing and his little stick. So far, since he’s returned to the regular universe, his function has been running around Chicken Littling at everyone. Ironic since his main stumbling block so far has been his own personal Colonel Sanders impersonator. *cue all the chicken/egg metaphors* *something something chickens coming home to roost* *finger lickin’ good* It’s hard to take those sorts of parallels too seriously.

Just as Asmodeus is the “weakest” incarnation of a Yellow-Eyed Demon who has become “weirdly strong” mostly through the emotional significance that Yellow-Eyed Demons have held for the length of the entire series, Lucifer has become “weirdly weak” himself despite the effect his mere presence has just looming over the entire narrative since he was first mentioned way back in s3. His power is now largely symbolic through the psychological trauma he inflicted on Sam (and now as of 13.12, on Rowena). His Big Bad status seems far more weighty on a personal level for the Winchesters (and particularly on Sam), in finally confronting how their cosmic destiny has truly fucked with their lives.

Lucifer himself, meanwhile, has spent most of the season impotently locked in the AU, physically locked in AU Michael’s Iron Maiden, physically depowered by AU Michael’s rift-opening spell, and then tossed around by his “weakest” creation and locked in a cell for the last six episodes. Granted this gives him motivation for taking action, but his obsession with destroying Michael still seems to be his underlying motivation. Sure, he’s still interested in saving “the last perfect handiwork of God,” i.e. the natural world, but he still doesn’t give a damn about humanity. As of 13.12, the most danger he represents is the fact that the Winchesters have no idea he’s back in this world, and that he’s not the one holding Mary captive in the AU and torturing her. Which brings us tidily to…

--AU Michael. The Ultimate Big Bad of s5, at the end of the day, was Michael. He was the one who insisted on sticking inflexibly to his “destiny.” The “good and obedient son” who was prepared to carry out what he believed he had to, despite every opportunity to resolve the apocalypse peacefully and just choose not to fight. Even LUCIFER tried to make peace with him when they finally met at Stull Cemetery, and yet Michael regarded it as yet one more act of “disobedience” from his disobedient brother. And in the AU, their version of Michael actually won the big throwdown, and as a result left the entire planet a wasteland. Lucifer may have wanted humanity wiped off the planet, but witnessing the destruction of all of God’s creation was a shocking reminder that he never wanted to destroy nature… Michael didn’t even care, as long as he’d fulfilled his destiny. How… righteous (in the worst possible sense of that term, bordering on self-righteous). That has some Big Bad makings, no?

The problem with Michael so far this season is that he’s already succeeded in destroying his version of Lucifer, and destroying his own Earth in the process. It’s a fait accompli in his world, but as soon as he stumbled across the rift and learned of another world where he’d failed in the past, he’s been rejuvenated with fresh purpose. It seems almost compulsive for him-- Find World, Destroy World. It’s like his Prime Objective, and he’s incapable of NOT living up to that destiny. It doesn’t make him a Big Bad, just based on that alone, but it does give viewers the ol’ raised eyebrow of suspicion, just based on Michael’s past history.

Not to mention, Lucifer’s pointed out several times that like Asmodeus who seems “weirdly strong” (and yes I keep harping on that phrase because the Plum Sisters were also “weirdly strong” in 13.12, and for Yockey to write such terribly awkward dialogue there HAS to be a purpose, aside from gently mocking standard Bucklemming dialogue), AU Michael is more powerful than the version that the Winchesters (including Cas) helped defeat in 5.22.

The fact that Lucifer keeps insisting that Michael is so powerful, that Michael always gets his way, for those of us actually WATCHING the show, that’s just… blatantly false. The one thing Michael wanted most back in s5 was for Dean Winchester to say yes to him. It’s the one thing he never got. Because Dean’s will proved stronger than Michael’s sense of destiny and obedience. Back in 5.22, Michael rendered himself irrelevant when TFW “ripped up the ending.” The AU where this version of Michael is from never had the Winchesters to contend with, and so has never had to confront the true power of Free Will. Honestly? With TFW 2.0 resurrected from the ashes, how big of a threat does AU Michael truly pose? Because from OUTSIDE the story? No matter how “weirdly strong” that Michael is, it looks more like he and Lucifer are playing out the same pantomime they did back in s5, with just as much chance of actual success as they’d had back then.

What Michael and Lucifer DO bring to the story right now isn’t so much their power to be New Big Bads, but their power to bring the PERSONAL trauma that Sam and Dean (and Cas, by extension) went through as a result of the original setup and downfall of the Apocalypse, and an outlet for them to finally examine the emotional and psychological fallout of what they’ve suffered through and sacrificed to keep the universe from derailing itself over and over again. Which brings me to…

--The interdimensional rifts themselves. Billie had warned Dean about the cosmic house of cards that was dangerously close to toppling as the characters become more self-aware, and realize there are actually ways to cut through to other universes where they might find a way to give themselves a mulligan… where they might be able to “start all over again,” where they made different choices that led to different results. But the stability of the multiverse relies on individual realities maintaining internal continuity, and not bleeding over into one another at random. Which brings me back around to what Chuck told Dean when he left Dean in charge of the universe back in 11.23, and which Dean referenced in his anguished plea for help in 13.01, namely…

--Dean’s not only the “firewall between light and darkness,” but he’s been set in place as the figurehead for balance in the universe. He’s been appointed the guardian of creation by proxy, and hell he really doesn’t want the job. And yet who else is even going to try? Is that what Lucifer is trying to do, at least on the surface? Is that what Cas is attempting in trying to find Jack? Is that what Sam’s attempting in trying to help Jack learn what it means to be human versus a monster?

--Heaven and their Endangered Species Repopulation Project. It seems the angels are growing more desperate as their numbers dwindle. They’ve mostly ceased their interference on the mortal plane, aside from their desperate quest to find and use Jack’s powers to replenish their numbers. But considering Jack’s power level, it doesn’t really seem like much of a real threat to Jack himself. Considering the burst of power that came from Jack’s “power up” of Kaia, that seemed to make BOTH of them “weirdly powerful” enough to tear open another rift and simultaneously nuke six angels. Something tells me that if Jack wanted it enough, he’d have the power to snuff out pretty much any threat to himself. Sure, he’s trapped in the AU right now, but even that’s effectively removed him from the angels’ grasp anyway. It’s been a non-issue for the most part, and in the overall scheme of things, doesn’t seem like a top priority concern for anyone right this second...

--and finally, after 13.12, Rowena’s true nature and full powers have finally been unbound. What is she? What will she do with her powers? What are her goals now that she’s finally been restored to her full power? Will she retain reluctant Frenemy status with the Winchesters? Will she actively seek revenge against those who wronged her, primarily Lucifer? Will she make a play for power in revenge for Crowley’s demise? What does she even want now that she’s attained the personal freedom and safety she’d been seeking since her first introduction back in s10? Right now, she’s a wild card, but we do love her dearly, and I’m glad she’s back. :)

So… who’s really the big bad?

Between the season’s major themes of “things that look like other things,” and things not being what they seem on the surface, as Lizbob’s been saying all season, the Big Bad seems to be Dramatic Irony. The story ITSELF is its own worst enemy.

It’s the narrative structure screaming, “What you don’t know absolutely can and WILL hurt you.”

And all of this is being delivered through the resurfacing of old friends in slightly “off” ways. How many characters and cases and circumstances have directly pinged circumstances from the Winchesters’ past? Going right back to the opening scenes of 13.01, and the “vision” Dean had after Jack knocked him and Sam out-- the flashback to Mary burning on the ceiling overlaid against her being dragged through the rift by Lucifer in 12.23. The entire setup of that scene was rife with flashbacks to Sam losing Jess in the pilot episode, the woman in white played by Kelly Kline, the yellow-eyed monster in the nursery played by Jack, and Cas playing the role of the loved one who was burned and therefore was supposed to “stay dead.” But Mary had already defied that assumption, because she didn’t stay dead. Cas didn’t stay dead either. And now Rowena has also defied that particular truism...

Right from the start of the season we’ve been confronted with things from the past, but which only hint at the past because they’ve now either been applied to different things, or they’ve been transformed into something different, or encountered under entirely different context.

--The “Black Spur Bar,” which had previously been Demon!Dean’s hangout during his summer of love with Crowley was transformed into an entirely different bar where Dean mourned Crowley’s death and was unwittingly confronted by a new demonic adversary (dramatic irony!).

--Donatello the prophet, now purposeless in this post-prophecy, post-God world, left to live on without his soul, and yet still doing the best he could in the circumstances he was left with.

--Literal Alternate Universe versions of lost friends-- from Bobby to Kevin, to mentions of John and Mary and their existence in that other world. There’s no bigger metaphor for “Things that look like other things” than literal alternate versions of loved ones…

--Missouri Moseley, absent from the narrative for thirteen years, returned to pass on her legacy to her granddaughter, who’d been raised to doubt her own psychic powers and has now been forced to face what having those powers means for her.

--Not to mention Patience Turner’s last name dredges up questions about who the “Turner” who gave his name to James and Patience may have been, and as I sit here watching 11.16 I’m again reminded of the speculation that maybe it was actually Rufus Turner… we may never know, but heck, it’s definitely not wild to believe it might be true.

--Buddy the shapeshifter, in the sense that nobody is GIVEN the name “buddy.” It’s a nickname, and one that Dean has used many times in the past for Cas. But “Buddy” by his very nature… wasn’t. He impersonated Dean and attempted to shoot Sam. He wasn’t their “buddy” either.

--I mentioned her above, but Billie is no longer what she was before. She’s not a reaper, nor a dead reaper, but has been returned to the story as Death.

--The reaper who comes to collect Dean (and who Dean defies) in 13.05 is named JESSICA. That name is never spoken lightly in Supernatural. It’s a name nearly as loaded with personal baggage for the Winchesters as Mary or John, and again resonates straight back to the pilot episode of the series.

--Themes of monsters and the old west and cowboys and time travel (it was an antique pocket watch that even tipped Jack off to the case in Dodge City in the first place), with Cas now fully reintegrated with TFW, all call back to 6.18, even with the same musical cues, but the themes have all been twisted around sideways and reframed to new purpose. The fight’s no longer about external monsters and stopping the apocalypse, but internal monstrousness.

--We all thought Arthur Ketch was dead until he showed back up pretending to be his own “good twin.”

--We all also thought Rowena was dead.

--Nick’s Bar, where Lucifer chose as a convenient spot to have a chat with Cas about the potential Apocalyptic Situation they may be facing… while Lucifer’s now perma-trapped in the vessel formerly known as Nick…

--The new King of the Crossroads who survived less than the run of a single episode before being dethroned… He thought he could be the next Crowley, and Dean slapped him down with the truth, calling him “Some random demon.”

--Smash, aka Alice; the human dragged against her will into matters Supernatural, who pretty much everyone saw and immediately yelled OMG CHARLIE.

--The return of the Wayward crew, Jody, Donna, Claire, Alex… but now they’re no longer victims of the narrative. They’ve got their own entire spinoff. :P

--The Bad Place. Aka Purgatory Redux.

--Darth Kaia

--A monster auction that put the Winchesters on the chopping block, run by an FBI agent who literally served the monster population, in contrast to Human Authority Figures of the past, up to and including the BMoL who’ve fairly unilaterally wanted to destroy monsters in favor of protecting humanity.

--In that same episode, we finally see a bit of Donna’s personal life-- from her care for her niece to her relationship with Doug 2.0, and Doug’s ultimate rejection of the hunting life when he’s finally introduced to it.

--Jamie, aka Dean’s temporary “soul mate” in 13.12, was also the name of the bartender in 4.05 that was symbolically Dean’s “new first time” after having been “rehymenated” after his resurrection from Hell.

Not to mention Various and Sundry Villains, the theme this season being “Not what it appears to be,” as demonstrated at its most basic visual level with physical masks and hoods obscuring identity, monsters that take on different faces like shapeshifters and ghouls, or force their victims to PERCEIVE an altered version of reality such as the wraith.

Things are not what they seem on the surface, and the entire plot, the monsters of the week, and even ALL the potential “Big Bads,” and the narrative structure itself-- which is turning around and around this central point of Dramatic Irony-- is the fact that even us as the audience to this entire spectacle, with our added insight into SOME of the dramatic irony playing out week to week, even WE still do not see the bigger picture.

I'm cautiously optimistic that a lot of the Winchesters' problems regarding what they Don't Know will resolve when Cas joins up with them again. Cas holds a lot of Important Information that Sam and Dean need. They’ve been kept as much in the dark as a result of Cas’s imprisonment as Cas himself has. But even through the early part of the season, the validity of information they’ve worked off of has been suspect at best. The info they got from Jack's Vision Download in 13.09 wasn't the WHOLE truth about Mary’s imprisonment in the AU. They’ve made several rather large inaccurate assumptions based off that quick glimpse, though. Just like Patience's vision of Claire's death wasn't the WHOLE truth either, but it let to making several Big Choices that ended up having Massive Consequences.

Even when they think they're seeing the Big Picture Truth, there's still critical info missing from that picture.

The entire SEASON is the big bad wolf in sheep’s clothing.

That’s the entire POINT.

[mittensmorgul]

Paving the Road to Hell

After 13.14, an episode whose title even deliberately prompts us to question the actions and choices of Team Free Will, I’ve seen a lot of backlash over the moral dubiousness of some of those choices and actions. It’s rather frustrating that the distant past is being used as a comparison for why their current moral quandaries are somehow condemnable. But Sam and Dean Winchester, going all the way back to s1, have always operated in this wide morally grey area. Even Castiel has struggled with this since the start, despite his initial conviction that his orders were just and beyond moral reproach because they came from Heaven. It took uncovering the extent of Heaven’s corruption for him to reject those orders, but even that choice didn’t come from a standpoint of Lawful Good intent. Siding with humanity (and Dean) simply became the less morally objectionable choice in Castiel’s opinion.

This goes right back to season one, and Dean telling Sam and John that he was appalled at what he was willing to do to protect them. He shot and killed what he knew to be an innocent human being possessed by a demon in order to save John and Sam in 1.22, and he didn’t regret it one bit. Tell me how objectively heroic that was?

(in the sense of “When in doubt, when none of your choices are good, save what you love,” yeah, it’s entirely understandable.)

And that’s just one instance out of hundreds. For anyone who truly believes that Sam and Dean (and now Cas, as well) haven’t always occupied this moral grey area, I invite you to rewatch the entire series. I rewatched 4.16 today, and I think this episode is a particularly excellent example of this for all three of them.

S4 had been gradually revealing the extent of Sam’s involvement with Ruby and just how “darkside” he’d gone under her tutelage. We learned right up front in 4.01 that he was lying to Dean about her and in 4.04 that he was lying to Dean about using his powers. We (and Dean) learn even more about Sam and Ruby’s relationship in 4.09, and we (but NOT Dean) learn about the blood drinking power up in 4.16. Dean only discovers that bit of trivia in 4.20, and he takes immediate steps to “detox” Sam from Ruby’s influence and the demon blood in 4.21. All of that fails because Cas frees Sam on Heaven’s orders, but the big dramatic irony of the entire season was that they’d all been lied to and manipulated into doing exactly what Heaven (and Hell) wanted them to do.

They were told all along that they needed to kill Lilith because she would start the apocalypse, when all along KILLING LILITH was the key to freeing Lucifer and STARTING the apocalypse. All their fraught moral compromises were for naught, their squabbles over who was strong enough or destined to kill Lilith were a distraction. The entirety of s4 was about setting the board for the actual prize fight in s5.

Knowing the futility of all their actions through the power of Hindsight™, it makes their moral corruption (Sam’s conviction that his self-sacrifice was for the greater good, and Dean’s conviction that Heaven’s path to killing Lilith was morally just) is where the dramatic irony of the entire season comes to a head.

But let’s explore some of their morally questionable choices and actions just from within the context of a single episode, and specifically a single episode that directly addresses what is right and what is objectively wrong, and pits them against their current beliefs and their good intentions.

The episode begins with a woman in white, lying dead on the ground as car alarms blare. That was the episode’s version of the Kill Bill Siren going off here. Cas silences the alarms-- ignores the alarms, essentially, over his sister’s body. He disappears in a flap of wings as we see the dead angel’s wings imprinted in charcoal on the ground.

What he doesn’t know, but will by the end of the episode, is that her murder was arranged to convince him to agree to support Uriel’s “orders,” to recruit Dean to torture Alastair. The entire situation was a setup to further Heaven’s corrupt agenda, to keep Dean under their thumb, to encourage Sam to continue his self-corruption drinking Ruby’s blood in preparation to kill Lilith as it was prophesied.

In this episode, Anna was the wild card. Her position as a fugitive from Heaven, who’d rebelled against her orders, who cared so much for humanity that she’d fallen and become human and only recovered her grace to save her own life and continue working to undermine Heaven’s agenda, allowed her to act as both the metaphorical angel on Cas’s shoulder, as well as his literal savior.

At the beginning of the episode, Sam and Dean are returning from Pamela’s funeral. Yet another character killed because they thought they were doing the right thing asking for her help. Saving a seal was more urgent, so they brought her in to help despite her clear objections in 4.15:

Pamela: Yeah, I do. And guess what? I'm sick of being hauled back into your angel-demon, Soc-Greaser crap.

She also delivered the coup de grace of this entire point leading into 4.16. As she lay dying because she’d agreed to help and been caught up in the line of fire, she whispers this warning in Sam’s ear:

Pamela: I know what you did to that demon, Sam. I can feel what's inside of you. If you think you have good intentions, think again.

But of course he doesn’t… his inability to save Pamela only drives him further into Ruby’s confidence, doubling down on making himself “stronger” by drinking her blood and intensifying his psychic powers. But Pamela’s dying words, now made the title of 13.14, set up some of the biggest examples of Good Intentions paving superhighways to Hell.

While torturing the demon who’d literally trained Dean to torture, put into this position by angels of Heaven, Dean learns that his own personal self-ruination through his moment of weakness in Hell had been the singular act that broke the first seal and ushered in the apocalypse. Talk about a demoralizing blow.

Cas fought against what he’d always believed was wrong. He may have doubted Heaven’s orders, but Anna’s suggestion that they were on the same side was a bridge too far for him to cross yet. At first he was receptive to her council that forcing Dean to torture was wrong, because he felt similarly ambivalent, until she implied they could work together… his doubts continued, but it took Dean breaking again, and the further uncovering of evidence that Uriel (and possibly Heaven in general) were at the very least working against the general good:

Castiel: Lucifer is not God. Uriel: God isn't God anymore. He doesn't care what we do. I am proof of that.

Cas continues to struggle with what is right, with whom to trust, and what lengths he’s willing to go to, how much of his loyalty to Heaven is deserved:

ANNA: What do you want from me, Castiel? CASTIEL: I'm considering disobedience. ANNA: Good. CASTIEL: No, it isn't. For the first time, I feel... ANNA: It gets worse. Choosing your own course of action is confusing, terrifying. ANNA puts her hand on CASTIEL's shoulder. He looks at it; she drops it. ANNA: That's right. You're too good for my help. I'm just trash. A walking blasphemy. CASTIEL: Anna. I don't know what to do. Please tell me what to do. ANNA: Like the old days? No. I'm sorry. It's time to think for yourself.

Meanwhile, when Dean is taken away to torture Alastair, Sam’s first move is to call on Ruby for help. She not only locates Dean for him, but reinforces Sam’s dependence on her and his belief that drinking her blood will make him more powerful. When Sam eventually arrives to find Dean unconscious and beaten by Alastair, who’s on the verge of defeating Castiel as well, and he uses the demonically-given powers that Uriel and Castiel-- not to mention Dean-- had been warning him off of all season long to literally save the day. Talk about positive reinforcement of a massive objectively Morally Negative behavior, you know?

Cas stands appalled when Sam proudly tells Alastair that he’s become strong enough to kill with his powers, and then proves it by killing Alastair.

The thing is, based on the information they had at the time, ALL of their actions seemed morally justifiable. They had goals they’d established in the name of the good of the entire world. Their INTENTIONS were GOOD. And they literally paved the road to Hell by the end of the season.

So, no, the entire fandom hasn’t suddenly flipped our collective morality in justifying any of their actions in season 13. We as the audience are being given more information upfront this time around, underscoring the dramatic irony of some of their objectively morally grey choices, but the characters’ beliefs that they’re all acting with Good Intentions is easier to deconstruct when we have more of the puzzle pieces to work with than we did in s4 (or s6, or s8 for that matter…).

We’re not being show a more morally corrupt or objectively shady version of TFW. We’re just in on the season’s irony so that we can see their good intentions go so horribly wrong in real time instead of only with the benefit of hindsight.

I’m just really tired of holding up s13 TFW up against past seasons and refusing to recall just how bad most of their intentions have gone in the past.

[mittensmorgul]

So I’m watching 4.17 right now, and have been thinking about making a long post about grey morality, anti-heroes, and the dramatic irony of hindsight in s4, centered in 4.16,  compared to s13 (because hey, y’all... these dudes have never been objectively morally Lawful Good, you know? And it’s a mental retcon to say they’ve become something they never were in s13.) But I was finishing out the TNT loop for the day, and I noticed something I never did before.

Admittedly, 4.17 pushes us to see this entire trip through Dean Smith and Sam Wesson’s terrible two weeks as a lesson specifically for Dean, since Zachariah frames it that way in his revelatory chat with Dean at the end of the episode, and we never really know if Sam even remembers his time as Sam Wesson, IT Support Dude, because he never references it again. It’s easy to forget or to assume he doesn’t remember it. I’d personally always worked on that assumption... yet knowing what we eventually learn by the end of s4, Zachariah’s setup here seems equally designed to motivate Dean to do his job for Heaven as it is to reinforce Sam’s dedication to his own assumptions and beliefs that Ruby had been plying him with since Dean went to Hell.

Sam’s dreams and visions throughout the episode are something that carried over from reality with him, but the NATURE of the "visions" is interesting. It's all flashes of him heroically defeating evil things... and nothing about his demon blood addiction, nothing about Ruby, nothing about anything shady.

Even the other tech guy he talks to tells him he's heroic (even if it's in a gently mocking way), but also calls him Wizard as if it was a good thing. It’s reinforcing Sam’s assumption (based on Ruby’s manipulation) that he’s behaving heroically. It’s soothing his own fears and reservations about what he’s doing in order to gain that power without doing so directly.

So as much as this was a lesson for Dean, it seemed like positive reinforcement for SAM as well-- that his "visions" were the truth, that he was the hero by being the wizard here, and that Sam had insights into things that he needed to push Dean into seeing and accepting.

And yet by the last conversation between Sam Wesson and Dean Smith before Zachariah showed up to pull back the curtain, Dean was still unwilling to give up his life and consider Sam’s suggestion that they take up ghost hunting together. As far as Sam knew at that point, his belief that Dean wasn’t “strong enough” to handle killing Lilith was only reinforced.

Aah, Zachariah and his manipulative visions.

Ironically, it’s Dean’s ongoing refusal to believe in “fate” that keeps him from buying into what Zachariah was selling. All the while, Sam’s need to feel like he hadn’t turned himself into a monster in vain, demonstrated by his “success” against the ghost and his failure to convince Dean to resume hunting, only fed into his personal fears.

Which is why I never considered that he objectively gained anything from this experience before. Ugh, dramatic irony strikes again.