#me writing a message yesterday about jump the shark that i didn't send has had this on my mind

[septembersghost]

#this is one of those episodes that was almost a little...too much" @laurelwinchester - I saw your tag on the photoset for 4x04, but this is too many thoughts to reply with and became a post. this is actually an interesting (interesting in a distressing way?) theme to me in S4 - Metamorphosis, Family Remains, and Jump the Shark are probably three of the most overtly horrific-as-in-bloody-and-gross episodes that they ever did (maybe also with Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid in S5?), and there's the scene of the boys tending their injuries in Heaven and Hell, there's everything about On the Head of a Pin (which is a masterpiece and a perfectly scripted/acted/directed episode, but it's brutal and visceral and crushing in a way that feels different in scope than almost anything else the show did) - I have a theory that S4 is in some ways the most "honest" depiction of how terrifying and awful their lives really are, and that we see it exposed in a particularly graphic sense due to the extreme trauma underlying Dean's death and torture and suffering in hell, and the rage and grief and feeling of helplessness that led Sam to become everything he feared in Dean's absence by drinking demon blood. Dean comes back, but nothing is what it was, and they hide truths and they hurt (themselves and each other) and are plunged into the violence of hunting in a starker way. angels are suddenly as real as demons, and they're faced with the bleak knowledge that heaven's machinations are as cruel as any devices of hell. trusting anything feels illusory. it's like...the veil that keeps us safe as viewers, that cleans the circumstances up a little bit, thins. the fear is nastier and is a monster all its own, and there are so many fractures and psychological issues and angst that even the episodes of levity, where we'd ordinarily just enjoy being in the story with the Winchesters, are tinged with that underlying trauma. they don't know each other like they did, and so we suddenly, after loving them and watching their story unfold, don't exactly know those versions of them either. there's this pervasive feeling of uncertainty and dread. S4 makes that more raw than they did anywhere else - and it's effective as what was originally planned as the penultimate chapter of the story, despite the fact that it didn’t end up being that - and it's necessary to expose the nerves of what's happened to them, but sometimes it's hard to look directly at it. (I think a lot about the scene between Dean and Tessa in Death Takes a Holiday, and why that's there, why we needed to hear that acknowledgment of, essentially, depression/suicidality, and how it was meant to speak to his arc...I've thought more about it since S15 ended than perhaps I even did a decade ago, for obvious reasons...and it aches that they managed to render so many of these themes, if not inert or irrelevant, then...antithetical to why they existed in the first place. I digress.) when they tried to lean on/recycle those themes again later, it never had the same resonance (and S4 and S5 function together in a number of ways regarding those themes and eventual breaths of reunion/reclamation/relinquishment/recovery...hmm unexpected alliteration is fun!) because the circumstances of S4 were so specifically entwined with those initial journeys. we can't see what happened to Dean in hell, so instead we're presented with the routine gore and the daily unease, wounds being stitched up in motel rooms, and sharp, ugly edges that exist on earth, alive. I watched Buffy for the first time essentially simultaneously with S4 ("I don't know how to live in this world, if these are the choices, if everything just gets stripped away. I don't see the point," is a very circa S4 Dean quote in my head), and I remember when she said - everything here is hard, and bright, and violent. everything I feel, everything I touch. this is hell. - it hit me hard for personal reasons at that time and has rattled around in my chest since, but it also made me think of what Dean was going through, despite the fact that he was literally in hell and didn't have the catharsis of the peace or relief she'd felt - you're pulled from the pit and put back together, every visible scar you once had gone, but every inner one still bleeding, and with the memory of every moment of loss and torment, and your vision of the world is not the same. your brother is not the same. you are not the same. hell, like a shadow with teeth, follows after you.