okay but like. cogs turning .. last holiday truthing cwt maxxing… the sheer difference in dialogue between the script and the episode is killing me. the deliberate choices made to change said dialogue and even the ending…
like am I alone in thinking that this whole exchange in the dungeon was very oddly disjointed? very “nobody fucking talks like that” core. they just say shit but it doesn’t land with the other’s response.
and especially when you compare it to the draft:
for some reason or another, the writers deliberately cut out jack’s lamentation that he is still dangerous, that mrs butters is right to be doing what she’s doing, and that nothing has been the same between him and the Winchesters since he’s come back. they deliberately cut out dean saying “you’re one of us, and you have a chance to make it right.”
there’s also the glaring difference between how sam and dean defend jack in the episode vs the draft. in the draft, they say this:
D: “You said you didn’t want to destroy this family, but Jack is our family.”
S: “You hurt him, you hurt us.”
Mrs B: “No, he’s infected you. I have to keep you safe.”
D: “By trying to kill the people we care about?”
Mrs B: “No, he’s a monster!”
D: “Aren’t we all?”
•••
not only do sam and dean say that jack is their family and someone they care about, but they also explicitly hold themselves on the same monster totem mrs butters holds jack to (much like what dean said in tombstone, “we’ve all done things, so if you’re a monster then we are too,”
…which all then gets cut and turned into “He can save the world.” no, don’t kill jack, he’s our family and we care about him and he is good despite his mistakes -> no, don’t kill jack, he can save the world.
the explicit choice to center jack’s worth on his usefulness rather than his inherent value as the winchesters’ family and even just as a person, rlly speaks so much to the way he’s essentially narratively doomed to be dehumanized as a tool/weapon/device.
and the fact that this is all eventually preceded by Cas saying “you never needed absolution from sam or dean or me. we don’t care about you because you’re useful or because you fit into some grand design. we care about you because you’re you,” (which in turn is preceded by jack fitting into a grand design and fucking off to the raindrops forever), makes it seem either a painful inconsistency or some weird twisted inside joke between the writers (cough season 16 cough cough puke).
I haven’t posted about it a lot but I truly think there’s some vast trapped-in-the-narrative horror working around jack constantly being dehumanized both within the show as a living weapon and by the writers themselves as a plot device.
shits wack I guess
