[S02.E03: Every Mother's Son]

But it's not like Mikael is gonna stupidly trust his wife and wear a talisman. He knows she was this incredibly powerful witch. He'd chuck any necklace she gave him as far as he could throw it. LOL

 

I doubt that Mikael would be so distrustful of his own wife, he still has never even said a bad word about her or to her that I know of. Even when he referred to her to Davina a little while ago he said something about Davina using the Grimoire of "a master." Klaus claimed that once Mikael found out that Klaus wasn't his son by blood, Mikael killed Esther when he slaughtered the werewolf pack -- but in reality, Mikael didn't attack Esther even then.

 

Also, I think it actually would be more likely than not that he actually did and maybe still does carry something around of Esther's, like a "favor" or lock of her hair or something, as a token of their marriage (since I don't think men wore wedding rings back then?). I don't think Esther would have to use a magical object to put a spell on him anyway, I think that she could probably just have put a spell on him directly. She even eventually put that binding spell on Klaus directly so that he couldn't turn into a wolf, so I doubt that it would have been impossible for her to put a spell directly on a regular human being like Mikael.

 

I doubt Esther would even need a talisman to get Mikael to stop abusing Klaus, I don't see why all she'd need to do is tell Mikael "if you beat up my kid one more time I'll snap my fingers and break your spine" or something like that. Regardless, Esther could have easily stopped Mikael in one way or the other. I think Mikael suspected the entire time that Klaus wasn't his kid, so he tortured Klaus for fun to make himself feel better about that.

 

What I got from their conversation at dinner is that she actually thought it was a good idea that Mikael was beating Klaus, it wasn't even just that she was neutral about it, she supported it, she thought that it was protecting Klaus from his own monstrous/werewolf impulses. I dunno, I was pretty shocked that she would do things like:  When her young kid tells her he's scared to go hunting with his dad, apparently she thinks, "uh oh, if he's scared, soon he's going to be pissed, and then since he's a ticking time bomb/monster, he'll murder someone and trigger the curse -- so I'd better do something to keep him in check now," and gives him a talisman to make him more vulnerable. When she finds her son impaled to a tree with a sword and beaten bloody, and he's holding something that's *weakening* him, she doesn't slap it out of his hand, she tells him to go on and put it back on. Can't he not wear the necklace while he's healing at least?

 

If it turns out that Mikael is so rabid because she put a spell on him, so that he'd act as a sort of guard dog and keep Klaus "in his place," and they manage to break that spell, can you imagine how Mikael would feel? His kids only know him as a monster. He *has* been a monster for a 1000 years. This is probably wishful thinking on my part, that they'll break a spell and he'll just kinda shake his head and be like, "what? I did WHAT?" and suddenly be a kind/not bloodthirsty person. It's probably not even a good idea, story-wise. I mean if that happens, then what, Mikael is a total victim and Esther is a total monster? But after this necklace thing, and Esther's new plan destroy her kids' lives to keep them in line (and this is the softer-and-fuzzier Esther, at least she's not planning outright murdering them or to create yet another Golem (aka, Original, aka, Alaric) out of some human being to sic on them), I'm wondering what else Esther was rigging up back then.

 

Speaking of Esther's plan, I'm actually not really sure what specifically she's trying to take away from each person in order to bend them to her will? She said she'd already gotten Klaus where she wanted him, but I don't really see how? He seemed to end the episode with as much hubris as ever, but I don't think that was what she was going for? I also literally can't understand what she says when she mentions that at the very end when she's talking to Finn, which probably doesn't help. I was trying to think about what she would do to everyone else anyway, but I'm not coming up with anything very interesting, tbh. What do they even have that she could ruin/take?

 

Also, why was she late for that dinner, and why did she send Finn to stall for her?

 

Anyway, because I KEEP FORGETTING to mention it, I wanted to put out there that I *love* Esther/Lenore and Finn/Vincent, these actors are wonderful. I have no idea how they pulled a coup like getting Sonja Sohn on this show, but I hope she stays for the duration, she's perfect for the role. I really can't wait to see Esther and Mikael's reunion now, I'm practically rubbing my hands together in glee. And I don't think I've ever seen the actor playing Vincent before, but damn, in this past episode I actually cared about Finn (and was scared of him, he was incredibly creepy). They're really bringing the characters to life, it's great.

 

What is UP with Finn, anyway? Why is he so bizarrely obsessed with Esther? When they said before that he was a momma's boy, I didn't realize that he was jealously watching from afar whenever she spoke to her other kids or anything as creepy as all that. And I feel bad for him, because Esther repays him for his (albeit uncanny) devotion by murdering him in her spell last time, and using him as her lackey now. If Esther's MO is to put people in such a vulnerable, awful position that they have no other option but to turn to her for help, and then she can make basically whatever deal she wants with them, then what did she do to put Finn in that position? Also, why do Finn and Elijah apparently despise each other? I thought that Elijah was the apple of everyone's eye in that family. Oh. Wait. Never mind, I maybe answered that last question myself.

[S02.E03: Every Mother's Son]

There is a reason Mikael loathed weakness, it's because strength meant survival in their society. If she made Mikael weak it would come at a terrible cost to their family.

 

It seems like Mikael was injuring Klaus pretty seriously. I mean, in this past episode he impaled him into a tree with his sword, and in other episodes he was doing crazy shit like beating him with a bull whip. During all the time Klaus would have to spend recovering from injuries like that, how could he contribute to the family in virtually any meaningful way? The cost of not weakening Mikael and therefore keeping him working at top capacity, was the Klaus's work capacity was severely diminished (because of Mikael's violence toward him). On net, I doubt that the family was better off with, for example, Mikael operating at 100% (no necklace, no injuries) and Klaus operating at 50% (necklace + injuries), compared to Mikael operating at 80% (necklace, no injuries) and Klaus operating at 80% (necklace, no injuries).

 

I think that Esther thought that Mikael was *helping* Klaus by "keeping him under control." Like she said about the necklace, I think she saw Mikael's violence and intimidation as a way for Mikael to protect Klaus from himself. She seemed to assume that the minute Klaus got out from under Mikael's thumb or lost the necklace (or got rid of the binding spell) or otherwise got "out of control," that he would become the monster he was ultimately doomed to be (triggering the curse, etc). If she could have daggered human!Klaus and kept him completely paralyzed/compliant/"controlled," in the same way he eventually kept daggering all his siblings, I feel like she would have. Now I know where he got that from, I guess!

 

In light of this SL about the weakening necklace, I actually wonder if Mikael was/is also operating under a spell of Esther's to make him especially strong and wrathful against Klaus specifically. It's bizarre how bloodthirsty he's always been toward *just* Klaus, especially considering he supposedly thought Klaus was his own son the whole time they were alive.

[S10.E03: Soul Survivor]

I hope this borrowed grave thing doesn't become the norm, I'd hate a story that has Cash being a Grace Vampire of sorts.

Why even have his grace sputtering out in the first place if he's just going to suck down some more from an anonymous angel? I would have been more interested if it had at least been Hannah's grace. And also I would have been more interested if Cas had actually had to make the decision himself, rather than Crawley playing nurse and basically pouring the grace down his throat. I mean, Cas has previously shoved an angel against a wall and stabbed him to death while sucking down his grace, it's not like they haven't already gone pretty dark with this. At least have Cas making his own choices. Otherwise there's no storyline.

Speaking of no storyline, why did Crowley go to Cas and help him on his road to the Winchesters, asking nothing for return, and then leave? Why didn't he just go to the bunker himself or send some demons there or some other more direct thing, OR just leave the whole issue alone? I don't even understand what his goal was -- for Dean not to be a demon? I really don't understand the whole "out of control" thing because isn't putting "out of control" dead people on lockdown what Hell is even for? I mean, isn't dealing with people like Demon!Dean exactly what Crowley's "King of Hell" gig exactly about? Bizarre.

 

Also, when Dean was shoving Crowley and stuff last episode, I figured Crowley must have been just sort of letting him for some reason, and couldn't believe that Dean was actually all that ZOMG OUT OF CONTROL!!1! -- because I figured that seriously, having a hot temper and hanging around being sleazy and getting drunk could not possible be considered "out of control" for a demon. Was the "out of control" part that when Crowley sent Dean on a contract hit, Dean instead killed the guy who'd put out the contract and was being casually misogynistic instead? COME ON. Wtf are all the other demons doing that's even more well behaved than that? Though every time we've seen them lately, they've been standing around wearing suits and taking orders, so maybe Dean was just out-demoning everybody, who knows.

 

    Loved every single minute of Dean/Sam and couldn't believe how far Sam was willing to go to find Dean.

On the one hand, I agree, I thought it was clever and interesting that Sam used a patsy to get to a crossroads demon. On the other hand, when Sam first saddled up to Lester, I thought *he* was going to be the one to buy Lester's soul, that Sam was acting *as* a crossroads demon as part of some sort of deal. So when it turned out that Sam and Lester had this weird "[stage whisper] what's my line?!" scene planned out to lure the crossroads demon to them, I was disappointed. Also, I don't see why it's on Sam that Lester is an idiot. Lester was the one who rushed to sell his soul, that's his funeral. I actually would have thought that Lester would have asked Sam, the creep who came up to him in a bar and started talking about demon summoning, if *he* would kill his wife. But maybe he did, I wasn't paying very close attention.

 

    The problem I think with keeping Dean DemonDean is...one note character. Deliberate hedonism and casual violence just can't hold your interest for that many episodes.

There's a whole lot that I think they could have done with Demon!Dean, imo. I actually think Vanilla!Dean is harder to find fresh stories for. One thing that I would have really wanted to see, would have been for Demon!Dean to go to hell. I would have just generally liked seeing him go down there as a demon, but I also really wanted Demon!Dean to see John (who's in hell currently, right? I don't really remember). Actually, though, speaking of that  reunite the whole family! I would have loved to see the whole Winchester family finally have their big, long-awaited reunion, except it's in hell, and Dean is a demon (sad trumpet). I mean damn, that would be one way to make John feel terrible, huh? It's one thing to have Dean talking trash about John and the meaninglessness of being a hunter while safely ensconced in the Bunker already getting shot up with the Cure, it would have been another thing for John to actually see Demon!Dean in full glory -- if he did, John would probably have been the one bemoaning his choices, Dean wouldn't have had to even bother. But I guess Demon!Dean wasn't even mean enough to do that? He wasn't even mean enough to parade himself in front of John and be like "Look at what you've done!"?

 

Another thing I would have wanted to see, is Demon!Dean as a hunter. They hinted at that when he took out Lester instead of his wife, and even how he dealt with the Cole situation so handily, and I wish they had kept going with it. I would have loved to see Dean take on what he would consider "villains" in an unsettling, twisted way (seeing as he's a demon). He kept doing everything else he'd been doing his whole life once he became a demon, why not hunting, too? He's also clever and a planner, and I can completely see what catrox is saying about him amassing power or playing the long game. Still hoping for him to come back and be the big bad somehow, I guess.

 

Ugh, and I just find it so hard to swallow that Demon!Dean's big mano-a-mano, fight-scene showdown was apparently with *Cole.* COME. ON.

 

With DemonDean more than willing to kill Sam if he got in Dean's way (and not at all reluctantly), they were really skirting going to that event horizon.

 

I've figured that the introduction of the MoC implied that some kind of Dean-kills-Sam SL is coming. What else would the point of introducing the MoC even be? That's what it's famous for. How do you have a show about two brothers, one of whom has the MoC, and *not* even put the SL of one brother killing the other on the table? On the other hand, the "year of the Deanmon" was about half an hour of Dean being just a tinge more of an asshole and, in aggregate, probably involved in *less* killing than is usual for him as a hunter, so who even knows.

 

If it had seemed like he was ramping up to be a serious villain, then okay.

 

Why wasn't he ramping up to be a serious villain? I figured he was on track to be the season's Big Bad, because obviously Demon!Dean is going to upstage whatever other Big Bad they could try and introduce. We've been watching Dean for a *decade,* the entire audience is obviously going to be invested in his character, if he's wondering around as a demon, there's just no way for some other Big Bad to compete with that.

 

I kept thinking that Dean must be faking being cured, too, but when Sam and Cas threw the holy water on him, I had to accept that apparently curing a demon was Just That Easy (this one time, though not any other time, really). On the other hand, when Dean dies again, won't he come back as a demon *again,* as long as he has the MoC? And I assume he'll die again because he dies like every other week, or at *least* once a season. So I'm holding out hope (albeit probably in vain) that this is a pause rather than an ending for the demon storyline.

 

Also, remember when Dean first got back from hell, way back at the beginning of S4, and had that vision of himself as a demon, and that "This is what you'll become!" thing? He was pretty freaked out, it was obviously nightmarish. I'm interested in what the difference in his reaction will be now versus what it was then, especially since he's spent all the time in the interim on earth and being himself, not doing something major off-screen like torturing people in Hell, so it'll show something w/r/t his character development since then.

[S10.E03: Soul Survivor]

Wow, that script was a mess. Such a disappointment. Also, are they out of money already? This was such a bizarrely cheap-o episode for so early in the season. IIrc, 7 speaking parts total and 5 locations? What, are they going to have to start using camcorders next week?

 

Probably best that they skimped on the budget, though -- the script wasn't worth spending any money on. I seriously would have been pissed if I were the EP and had writers try to pass this bullshit off to me as their finished product. I hope the writers got their asses handed to them for basically not plotting this episode, because that's pure laziness. How much money did the production company have to spend and how many hours did the cast and crew have to work to get that bullshit, nothing script onto film? Ugh, what a waste.

 

As far as I could tell, the A-plot was that Sam was injecting Dean with blood until (off camera, natch) Dean just up and walked out of the cuffs and the devil's trap, then Dean chased Sam for a bit and they flicked the lights on and off, then Castiel showed up and said it was over. The B-plot was Castiel and that other Angel driving to a convenience store, and the C-plot was Crowley reading forms aloud. Seriously? READING FORMS ALOUD was a plot?

 

More minor gripes:

 

Why was Sam waving around that demon knife if he wasn't even going to use it? What was the point of that? Just stab Demon!Dean in the chest and let Chekov's freaking gun go off, please. Plus, Dean was already killed by getting stabbed in the chest, it's not like that's some Unthinkable Plot Point That Can't Happen, there's not really any reason to pull that punch. Also, if there ever could have been *any* suspense w/r/t that knife, it was totally ruined when Dean wasn't even scared of it. He just shrugged it off and said Sam wouldn't use it, and Sam didn't deny that, and then Sam didn't use it. Wtf was that? At least *pretend* that the supposed threat is a threat, or at the very least don't have the characters just explicitly say it's not a threat and that they don't feel threatened even. Or, if there's no way to make that threat seem credible, only dismiss it if you have an even better/bigger/more credible threat to introduce, ffs. Don't just snuff out all suspense and all sense of jeopardy.

 

Second of all, that Demon!Dean/Sam confrontation was so warmed over. I mean come on, they have had those same fights like TEN ZILLION TIMES. Dean got more personal and mean with the woman he was hooking up with in the premiere. Do the writers even watch this show? I know they've written other episodes not so long ago, so they must, but it seriously felt like they'd seen one episode from back in S3 or something and were trying to wing it based on that. There was nothing new, nothing interesting, absolutely nothing added in terms of anyone's characterization, not even any actual fight scenes. The closest they came to a fight scene was when they had that ridiculous cliche of Sam looking very intently for Dean in one direction when Dean was actually behind him. Too bad they forgot to do the thing of someone hearing a noise coming from the closet, slowly reaching for the closet doorknob, swinging the door open and -- a cat jumps out! Phew.

 

What was the point of some demon guy immolating himself in front of Crowley? Nobody on screen got scared at all, because again, even things that could arguably be made into threats weren't sold as threats in this episode because god forbid there's any suspense at all -- but I thought that it would at least have *some* kind of consequence, because why else include it? But no, nothing else happened in that so-called storyline, it remained inexplicable. I'm still even confused because, if the guy was already in hell, who cares if he decides to immolate himself? What even happens to him after the immolation, doesn't he just stay in hell? Meh.

 

My favorite WTF was actually the end/tag of some lady sitting in a chair with people she murdered on the ceiling dripping on her. Who in the entire world cares about this random lady? And why is she sitting right below these people letting them drip on her? Demon!Dean was so much more interesting as a villain than some random lady who likes to read and has no common sense, so what was anyone even supposed to feel/think upon seeing that take? Was it to make everyone sad that this Demon!Dean arc wrapped up too quickly and is about to be replaced by something utterly generic? I guess that *is* horrifying, so never mind, this episode was scary after all.

 

Anyway, sorry to be so cranky, this episode honestly just annoyed me because I love this show, so even though I understand that the writers and everyone are bored/tired/want to move on, it frustrates me to see the ball get dropped like this. I also really liked the demon!Dean idea and was just settling into it! It's so frustrating for them to throw away such an interesting idea -- that was also working really well, imo -- without really bothering to explore it.
 

I'm not even clear why, as a demon, Dean was so opposed to hanging out with Sam. He had all the same likes and dislikes otherwise, it seemed like. Why wouldn't he want to spend time with his same old bff? Why wouldn't he even try to trick/persuade/whatever Sam into becoming a demon, too, especially if he genuinely liked it and wanted to stay that way? I thought that the thing with demons was that they weren't that sentimental and were pretty pragmatic -- so wouldn't Dean actually be *better* able to win Sam over than he usually is, because he could be totally pragmatic about it? Wouldn't their relationship actually be *less* adversarial if they didn't have real feelings/morality/whatever?

[S02.E03: Every Mother's Son]

I'm not sure how I'm feeling about The Worst Parents in the World returning in such a big way to the plot.  These parents are so awful, there's no grey anywhere with them.  It's fun watching villains on tv, but entertainment is lost when the villains are just so evil.

 

One of the things that I think TO genuinely does well is that its characters just *cannot* shake the past. So I get kind of a kick out of it when a character is just terrible and Iimpossible to deal with because I figure that the other characters are just going to have to figure out some way to deal with them anyway. Like, Klaus is the biggest PITA who ever existed, and Rebekah tried to make that work for a millenia, and like ten minutes after she finally got a break and moved away (and the actress even left the show, she was really gone), she had to come back to pick up Klaus's goddamned kid! Or, and this is kind of sick, but I actually find it hilarious how Mikael is just The Worst, I mean, he has literally not one good quality that I can think of, but he's like a bad penny the way his kids can't lose him. If he's not turning up in his kids' dreams or they're not having arguments about what he did way back when or they're not fleeing across the world trying to avoid him or they're not having flashbacks about him or they don't have to "explain" him to some shocked friend or Klaus isn't literally dragging his coffin around, then Mikael's even coming back ALIVE ffs! It's so terrible that you just have to laugh. I mean COME ON. What do you know it, he's going to come back with his stupid white ash stake and call Klaus "boy" and say Rebekah is his favorite and beat Elijah up while claiming that he doesn't particularly want to beat Elijah up and be EXACTLY THE SAME. He even listens to the same Islandic folk chants as he did 1000 YEARS AGO. LOL. He's probably going to get killed again and haunt them again and come back again, and on and on for eternity.*

 

So yeah, when the parents, or any of the characters really, are just absurdly awful, I find it amusing, because it's like...I dunno, watching the supernatural teen soap version of a Beckett play or something. Yup, life is futile. Yup, it keeps going anyway. Yup, always with these people -- the sucky side of kismet. It always cracks me up to think of it (HOW many times have they "won" and "lost" NOLA now?).

 

*Reminds me of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn. They're frozen in this one moment/dynamic that eternity has drained of meaning. Thinking about it, their indestructability/immortality and the way they each have this prescribed personality and role in their family/the world make me think of myths about the Greek gods in general. ANYWAY. It's too late, I'm now not talking sense.

[S02.E03: Every Mother's Son]

it seems that could she have easily stopped her husband's abuse of her child with a literal snap of her fingers, so I find it far more likely she actively encouraged his behavior than anything else.

 

As I understood it, in that first flashback in the woods, when Kid!Klaus told Esther that he was too scared to hunt when he was near Mikael, Esther's takeaway from that conversation was that Klaus's fear of Mikael could keep him in his place and stop him from getting too uppity/"able to hunt"/likely to trigger the curse. So she weakened Klaus with the necklace, to keep Klaus from being able to protect himself from Mikael, and to paint even more of a target on Klaus's back for Mikael -- because weakened/targeted like that, Klaus would have plenty of reason to be afraid of Mikael and to stay afraid of Mikael forever (or at least, as long as he wore the necklace), and therefore to stay in his place (aka, not trigger the curse) forever (or at least, as long as he wore the necklace). Considering how appalling that is, Klaus handled the realization pretty calmly, imo.

[S10.E02: Reichenbach]

I think the point of Cole is that Dean is setting him up to become a hunter, that's how Dean's going to torment Cole (or at least set him up for endless torment). Which is kind of clever, in a way. There's kind of a weird horrible/cursed thing about how the Winchesters constantly *constantly* die but can't stay dead. It seems like there's zero escape from the hunting life, they're doomed to be in it (literally) forever, they're not going to have peace. So by making Cole into a hunter, Dean is setting him up for that. Even Vanilla!Dean's supposed to be good at torturing, and tbh, that's legit the most thoughtful/interesting/efficable way of torturing someone that I've ever seen on this show. So, props to Alistair and Dean's own ingenuity, I guess?

 

I watched Dark Side of the Moon today, and remember how Dean was complaining about how in heaven, everything is static/unchanging and everything is fake? I guess that's probably how he would see the (non-heaven, regular) world now. I mean, he really belongs in hell, and dead, but he's still there in some random bar drinking beer and singing karaoke and getting picked up by Sam, for the n-th time. He's sort of made his own hell, out of what should have been a perpetual heaven (triplets, latex, etc).

 

Maybe the show is edging more toward hell-in-the-Paradise-Lost-sense and away from hell-in-the-Dante's-Inferno sense? As something you carry with you rather than as a place you go? Because what I think is interesting/frightening about Demon!Dean is that he's obviously so similar to Human!Dean that it's just like he moved another notch on a continuum by becoming a demon, but apparently he was already on that continuum beforehand. I also love that Demon!Dean is so similar to Vanilla!Dean that there's not really a way for Sam (or honestly, for Dean) to imagine them as two seperate people. This is obviously Dean-but-a-demon, not an entirely new entity. That's genuinely nightmarish, imo.

 

Sam was really pretty interesting to me in this episode, at how quiet and matter-of-fact he was. He seemed like somebody with a gameplan already in place. When Dean was fighting Cole, wasn't Sam right there in the doorway, just watching? I guess Sam used Cole as a distraction, frankly, so he could get close with the cuffs and holy water. (That Cole didn't seem to notice that while he was quipping/fighting with Dean, Sam was just sitting right on the sidelines not doing anything, seems ridiculous. Wouldn't Cole expect Sam to help his brother? They weren't in a refereed boxing match or something. On the other hand, Cole had been studying up on "every" martial art and apparently devoted at least a hefty portion of his life to taking on Dean Winchester, yet he didn't even know that supernatural stuff exists, so I guess he's not the sharpest tool in the shed and my expectations are probably too high. Well, anyway. I don't mind Cole in theory but he seems like such a doofus that it's hard to care about him as a character in his own right. But we're probably not meant to care much about him anyway, I guess, seeing as it's going to be pretty hard to drum up a lot of sympathy for a character who was introduced by kidnapping and torturing Sam. I know the guys are supposedly master torturers at this point *shudder* so I should give Cole somewhat of a hypocrisy!pass but I still find the torturing horrible).

 

Anyway, to go back to Sam and his eerie calm:  when Sam was in the bar (one of my favorite scenes of the episode), and he said he was taking Dean home and pulled out those handcuffs, like Dean was just supposed to put them on -- I wonder what he was up to? It was sort of like when a magician makes a big show of holding out one object, so that you miss when he's doing the actual magic trick with his other hand. Hey, maybe literally, maybe they're going to work JP's sling into the story. LOL.

 

Or maybe Sam really does have no tricks up his sleeve (really, though?! he's not an idiot), since he did also seem sort of butter-wouldn't-melt-in-his-mouth in other parts of the episode. Like when Sam pointed out that Dean showed he still had empathy by letting Cole live. Honestly, I don't think he was *wrong*, but I don't think he was right for the right reasons. I think that Dean must still have empathy, in terms of understanding what other people are thinking, because he's able to get into people's heads enough to screw with them. I think he just doesn't have compassion anymore. And I did think that Dean's response to that was pretty chilling ("it won't be a mercy when I do it to you, either" or something similar?), it sounded like he already had something up his sleeve that he was planning to do to Sam? Or maybe Sam was acting so innocent to lull Demon!Dean into a false sense of security, I dunno.

 

Anyway, I enjoyed this episode a lot, much more than I expected, frankly. Of course there were holes and dull spots (for example, I was totally distracted by Metatron's prison outfit, couldn't imagine how they got him in that straight jacket, or even why), but the Sam/Dean setup is pretty good, imo, and that's really all I ask.

[S05.E16: Dark Side Of The Moon]

It's so strange to go from the episodes being aired currently back to this, gives a person whiplash!

 

This time through, I noticed that just like Sam's heaven memories were all times when he was away from Dean, all of Dean's heaven memories were when he was away from John. In the fireworks memory (which I thought was pitch perfect, loved it), Kid!Sam says something about John being out of town and (from memory, sorry for this being inexact!) "Thanks, Dean. Dad would never have let us do this!" Also, they're celebrating *Independence* Day of all holidays, lol. Then in the memory of Dean eating lunch with Mary, most of the memory seems to be focused on John not being at home for a few days and the marriage being on the rocks. Seems weird that that would be a happy memory at all, let alone (apparently) one of the happiest memories of Dean's life? I get why Dean found the memory of Sam estranging himself from the family to go to college upsetting and hurtful, but meanwhile, he himself dredged up a memory of John threatening to estrange himself from the family and cast it as a happy event in his mind, too.

 

I'm not really going anywhere with this, it's just something I hadn't thought about before. I don't really think that Sam wanted to get away from Dean or that Dean wanted to get away from John, particularly. They've got free will, after all, I guess they could have left and stayed gone if they'd really wanted to? Or maybe not, honestly. I dunno.

 

It's strange that the guys both apparently created their heavens out of memories that are basically variations on "when the cat's away, the mice will play," and then Dean gets angry about God not coming back to set things straight, isn't it? I mean, the whole time they're in heaven it's like this wish-fulfillment Down With Authority! fun zone, but then when it turns out that God is actually MIA, for good, that freedom suddenly isn't fun anymore, it's a burden in and of itself.

 

I guess also, the hurt that Dean feels when he sees that Sam's memories are all about getting away from him/the family, is anogolous to the hurt that God would ostensibly feel about people/angels using their free will to get away from him. And therefore feeling like he should just abandon people/angels to their lot. I'm hazy on the mytharc that was going on at that time, though, so that might be a total reach.