SPN 5:14

[oselle]

Hmm, kind of a mixed bag this week.

1. They Have Support Groups For That, Y'know.
I'm beginning to think someone on this show must have an eating disorder, because I feel like I've seen more than a few episodes over the years that revolve around people graphically gorging themselves -- with food, blood, flesh, whatever. Last night's episode reached new heights of grossout. While I liked the idea that the scourge of Famine is not limited to food alone, but involves all sorts of starvation, the show chose to express this primarily with revolting imagery of people literally stuffing their gullets. I know that the writers take a B-movieish delight in this sort of thing and I'm hardly a fainting-couch type about it myself, but there's a difference between "horror" and "yech" and most of what was going on last night was just "yech."

2. That's Enough Now
I adore Misha Collins and I adore Castiel. I love the way he effortlessly plays the straight man to Dean's one-liners...but I don't want that to get out of hand. I still laugh when Castiel deadpans a mystified response to one of Dean's pop-culture references, but by now I'm laughing warily because I can see that the writers are loving this so much that it's going to become a permanent part of Castiel's character. Peppering it in now and then is funny -- including it in every episode is not. (And of course, if Castiel is starving for anything, it's not hamburger, it's Dean but...well, can't go there.)

3. Trust Issues
There are some shows that I watch whose writers I really trust. Meaning that I don't question what they've written, or question the motives behind it. Those writers may surprise me, or knock me for a loop, but I don't sit there questioning what I'm supposed to take away from a certain scene or line of dialogue. Supernatural is not one of those shows.

Scene in question here is when Dean slugs the cherub. I can understand Dean's anger -- here's this bubbly little feller blithely gushing about John and Mary's "match made in heaven" as if it were a Nicholas Sparks novel, not something that ended in horrific tragedy and years of anguish for all involved...I felt like slugging the bastard too. But then we get Sam's shocked response: "What is up with you lately?"

If I trusted the writers then Sam's response would tell me that something's wrong with Sam. That he's out of touch with his brother and has been for a very long time, that he's been wholly involved with himself to the exclusion of everyone else. But with this crew of writers, I think that what I was supposed to take away from that scene, and Sam's response, was Wow, Sam's right...something is really wrong with Dean! Why, whatever could it be??

These writers have developed a bizarre disconnect between what they show us and what they tell us. For a long time they've been showing us a character, Dean, who for years (decades, if you include his time in hell), has been dumped on, dragged down, crushed, tormented and annihalated in every way possible and yet somehow keeps picking himself up and moving on. But then they go and tell us (through Sam) that there's something really weird about him ever letting any of that show. What is up with Dean lately? Shit...what isn't up with Dean? What the fuck is up with Sam that he would even ask that?

And of course, my distrust of the writers in this area also stems from their demonstrated attachment to Television Without Pity, with its never-ending disparaging of Dean. This just felt like more of the same: Sam's the level-headed good guy and the voice of reason, Dean's the blustering doofus who can't control his temper.

4. Dead Inside?
Setting aside the fact that Sam's question was stunningly callous and ignorant (which, sadly, I've come to expect from Sam), I think it was supposed to anvil us with this episode's theme: Dean is falling apart. We got this idea pounded on us from the opening THEN montage right up to the end.

As I said above in (3), Dean has every reason to fall apart and for all that some viewers sneer at his "whining" and "issues" he has done an heroic job of holding himself together since getting back from hell. However, I'm not sure what to make of Famine's judgment that Dean's "dead inside." Famine is not a demon, so we can't assume he's lying, and Dean's own reaction in that scene would seem to confirm that, deep down, he believed Famine was speaking the truth. But I don't think Dean's dead inside at all. I do think that he's exhausted physically and spiritually, and I think that he's had so much shit piled on him, and, worse yet, been so left to deal with that shit all on his own, that he's just at the end of his rope. But "dead inside?"

Someone who's dead inside has given up. Completely. If Dean were dead inside, he wouldn't care what happened to Sam, he wouldn't care about the Apocalypse, he'd be off somewhere getting drunk and banging strippers until Michael showed up and then he'd say, "Yeah, what the fuck. Just let me get back to banging strippers when you're done." I don't see that in Dean at all. Dean is at the end of his rope but he's still holding on...or trying to. Whether he's doing it for Sam, or himself, or his lifelong sense of duty, or for the whole world doesn't matter. He hasn't given up.

5. However...
When Dean walked out into the junkyard at the end of the episode, I just didn't know what was going to happen. Now...I wish I'd recorded that episode because at first, wasn't Dean just standing there, mouthing words but not saying them out loud? Or was that just the sound on my crappy TV flipping out? Because that? Scared the shit out of me.

I really thought he was calling for Michael. My heart was just in my throat. And even while I was sitting there thinking He can't possibly do this yet! There are still eight episodes to go!!, I was also positive that was what he was doing. Not because he was "dead inside" or had given up but because he just saw that as the only thing he could do. The only thing left. To me, that wouldn't have been a passive submission but an active, albeit desperate, seizing of his one chance to do something, anything to fix this. To fix everything. And I think that's what Michael is waiting for -- for Dean to say yes because he wants to or, more correctly, because he has to. Doing something because you have no other choice isn't exactly an exercise of free will but I don't think Michael is too concerned about the specifics. He's waiting for Dean to believe, as he does, that this is just the way it has to be.

I think my conviction that Michael was about to appear shook me up so much that what came afterwards seemed like an anticlimax. I mean, we've all seen Dean in tears before (and oh, how I just cringe thinking about the TWoP crowd rolling their eyes over this). But thinking back on it, the whole scene was a beautiful piece of acting. For someone who's led something of a charmed life, Jensen Ackles can paint an utterly convincing portrait of despair -- what it looks like, sounds like, feels like. I don't know if Dean was out there praying to God, Michael, his father...it doesn't matter. He was doing what people always do when they reach the end of all their resources -- begging for help, any help, from anyone who might be listening. To see this happen to a character like Dean -- who hardly ever asks for or expects assistance, no matter what -- is all the more stunning. And it tells me, again, that Dean hasn't given up. Giving up is when you stop asking for help...not when you start.

Now, Show? Please don't ruin the exquisite pathos of that scene -- and Jensen's wonderful performance -- by turning that into yet another example of Dean's "weakness." Just...stay off the forums, okay? Do your homework. Behave yourselves. And I'll see you in March.