#healingfields

LMAO did you guys forget who died in this episode? the entire plot was literally centered around sam dying and dean killing himself to bring him back..... did you forget??? jesus christ

Ok, so

Words can have more than one meaning, especially in a tv show. The plot of the episode may have centered around Sam, but that doesn’t mean you can just forget about the overall context of the season.

Let’s remember how the episodes surrounding this one are all very focused on showing how distraught Dean is about Cas. And the entire premise of this episode began with Sam trying to get Dean to take his mind off the situation with Cas. And the flashbacks show Sam trying to get Dean excited by the case, even though all Dean wants to do is find Cas.

So, yeah, obviously it’s partially to do with Sam, but! Sam isn’t dead by the end of the episode. However, Cas is still in peril. Cas’ presence looms in this episode, even though he’s not even in it.

And the line is “the man I love.” Those words would never be how Dean refers to Sam. Of course Dean loves Sam, but that phrasing is particularly romantic. The writers wouldn’t have used those specific words if the purpose of the scene ONLY meant to refer to the relationship between the two brothers. There was something else going on there. The script could have given it a more familial framing in literally a whole bunch of other ways, like “the person you care for most,” or “my closest family” for instance.

But it didn’t. It used a very romantic sounding line in an episode that is saturated with Dean’s concern for Cas. 

And Supernatural is particularly good at making references to itself. Sometimes things take years to be relevant (see 9x20 and 6x20). So you can’t leave out the context of the episode. While Sam is important here, you can’t forget Cas when he is one of Dean’s main concerns at this point in the season.