#01x16

Season 1 Episode 16: Heavy

1/2

2/2

I rewatched 01x16 and can't stop giggling through the whole kids getting killed and manipulated because apparently Hotch getting annoyed is my happy place right now

(alert! baby brother showed up! annoyed Hotch summoned! alert!)

"Is your name Samuel?"

"You? You look like FBI."

"Me personally?"

"21 feet." *rolls his eyes behind the glasses*

"You carry 2 guns."

"Your problem isn't with your prints. It's with your perception."

Like. Ok, so the obvious takeaway is that Dean's being unreasonable here. And he is! Because S1 Dean is a scared little kid who literally just wants his family to all live together and not fight because he's cripplingly lonely and starved for affection and that's not a realistic goal because they aren't kids anymore and they can't just mentally stay kids until John remembers how to be a dad and gives Dean a real childhood. Yeah. Objectively that is unreasonable no matter how sympathetic.

Also unreasonable because Sam's bouts of John apologism up until now have been gestures toward forgiveness for their childhood, NOT a desire to actually go back to following John as patriarch (...and on a meta level it's the spn writers just never knowing how abusive they wanted John to have been, and therefore unable to ever have Sam reckon with whether he would be better off breaking from John entirely). So, yeah, obviously Sam doesn't want to go back to the way things were. That's a good and healthy boundary for him to draw while speculating "life after demon", and shutting down Dean on the idea that he's gonna fall back in line as a member of John's three man army makes sense.

But then Sam's half of the conversation feels like a good chunk of it is just missing.

Like he asks for Dean's problem, gets the teary eyed confession of Dean's feelings, and then offers absolutely nothing substantial back??? There's a really obvious space between "I'm going back to school" and "I'm not gonna live this life forever" and "you're gonna have to let me go my own way" where it would make sense for some sort of indication that he's not looking for Stanford excommunication Round 2 - but he doesn't actually say that. No hint of reassurance that he'd even call sometimes. Keep in touch. Want to grab a beer if Dean was in town. And Dean's mini-breakdown has that period of zero-contact at the forefront of your mind, so it's obvious what two extremes he's thinking of.

Like this whole thing just feels way colder than I suspect anyone would be trying to make Sam come across as right now, and I'm trying to put my finger on why.

Honestly my best theory at the moment is that it's an artifact of Kripke's intense S1 Main Character Syndrome around Sam? Like in the Main Plot™ episodes he writes Dean becomes way more of a caricature of Kripke's weird masculinity ideas + a foil for Sam and less of a character of his own (this is present in Home, for example), and therefore Sam vaguely saying "we're family" like. Covers it? That counts as the mature middle ground or olive branch or whatever that is contrasting Dean's stuck-in-the-past unreasonableness without needing to go into whether Dean actually feels reached out to?

01x16 Shadow

The brilliance of Kripke and Manners and Serge put together was pure cinema