#hell is... hell

The Mark of Cain arc as a whole has spent a lot of time doing callbacks to season four, both visually and thematically.  We’re back in hell with Dean, we’re visiting the basement (9.13, 9.23, 10.09), we’re looking at torture and violence and death.

10.10 had this lovely callback to Dean torturing

Dean’s back in the basement, torturing, because they need answers.

And then we hit 10.14.  Dean’s been struggling for months with the time he spent as a demon, he’s got a knife in his hand because he said yes and made a deal, cause he was in a bad place and it seemed like a way out. And oh he doesn’t want to admit it, but he liked how it felt the first time he used that Blade on someone else. I tortured souls and I liked it, I like the disease.

We come to a point of conflict - the worst demon you’ve heard of, the demon who remade Dean into something Else, is locked in a room inside of a devil’s trap, waiting. How much did you learn from me boy, can you best the master of the craft (torture from Alastair, murder from Cain).

There’s a beat outside the door, while Dean talks it out. Then, it was “You ask me to open that door and walk through it, you will not like what walks back out.”

Now, “I need you three out here to take out whatever comes out of there. And I'm serious. I mean whatever comes out.”

He knows that by stepping into that room, going across the line into the demon trap, he’s going to be confronting his own humanity and how much he’s lost, what amount of darkness is in his soul. Monster or hunter, Dean, which one? It’s a fight, back and forth.

"Is that all you’ve got?”

“This is weaker than I expect from you with the Blade, I think you can do better.”

The master gains the upper hand.

When the fight is over, Dean is broken. Not a monster, not yet. He did what he had to do (and oh how I hate that phrase through the years of this show, Dean selling his soul, Sam drinking blood, Cas fighting Raphael, letting Gadreel into Sam, taking another angel’s grace, setting Lester up to die to find Dean... everything that goes into the spell to break the Mark, and Dean’s lowest point of standing in front of Sam with a scythe in his hand knowing it’s what he must do to save the world from himself...)  Now he has to live with the damage, with the knowledge that he is not strong enough to face what comes next (he won’t be able to save Sam, he won’t be able to resist the Mark).

Castiel, on the other hand, is getting visual callbacks to s5 and s6, and while I know exactly where s10 and the whole damn show goes, from a “I’m deliberately analyzing this season without overlying the knowledge of what comes later” standpoint it makes me nervous.

Welcome to hell

Humans are monsters and monsters are all human.

It’s one of the basic tenants of the show; and it’s a critical theme for both Winchesters.  What does it mean to be human?

What does it mean to be a monster?  Am I a monster? 

For Sam it starts back in S1, from Pilot on, with his visions and “Freak” being thrown around like candy.  For Dean, it starts in 1x06 with Skin.

Sam’s version is all about not being pure and loss of self, which ends up with a lot of dubcon overtones/subtext in certain arcs.  Dean’s version is about loss of control and agency, about how far he’ll go and whether it’s his own decision.

This plays into so so many of the boys arcs, and most especially Hell and the memory thereof.  Which is all going under a cut because this got long, fast.

Season 3 is all about hell.  Shocker, I know.

We open up the premier with Hells Bells, AC/DC, which is all about, you guessed it, going to hell.  The first episode is all about the seven deadly sins, the basic categories under which all misdeeds fall, and the reasons you end up in hell.  Sin City (3.04) returns to this theme; all the vices are right there in plain sight, but this time the weight is all on people.  People make choices that send them to hell, and according to the demon bartender, if you give them ‘whiskey here, a hooker there, they’ll walk into hell with big fat smiles on their faces.’  That hits hard for Dean, because for the past three episodes he’s been using alcohol and sex as a coping mechanism.  The theme of sin is mostly dropped, outside of the title of the finale (No Rest for the Wicked), with one exception: kinslaying.

Now, kinslaying is set apart in almost every culture; from Cain and Abel to Tantulus and Sisyphus, kinslayers get a special place in hell, normally a worse one than the average population.  The show plays with this theme in 3.02, where the changelings kill their ‘parents’ and the parents wrestle with killing their child, but it well and truly comes home with Bela in 3.06.  The ghost ship follows people that have killed family members; it isn’t until Bela’s almost hellhound chow (in 3.15) that we learn it was a) her parents, and b) she had a really really good reason to want them dead.

This one is worth mentioning separately; kinslaying is…. it’s supposed to be something that no normal person would do.  It’s beyond the pale, something that belongs to monsters; something that strips away your humanity.  Sort of like Hell.

Now, there are a few themes for what Hell is that are played with throughout the season; the show presents them as either direct “this is Hell” moments, or most of the time it’s presented as repeated motifs.

Hell is being trapped: 3.02, the mothers of the changelings are trapped, living with monsters and unable to tell what is real and what isn’t; 3.03, Sam and Dean are powerless in the face of an outside force; 3.05, our victim of the week is trapped inside her own body for years; 3.10, being trapped with your worst fears; 3.11, Sam is trapped watching someone he loves die over and over again, and then not being able to let go; 3.12, the boys are threatened with being stuck in a small confining cell, alone; 3.13 is all about being trapped, in the house and in death loops, and on a larger level, none of the Ghostfacers learn anything or move on after their experience; 3.15 is filled with images of confined spaces, starting from the cold open with a car trunk and ending with a refrigerator stuck in a grave; and 3.16, where a family is trapped in a nightmare wrapped in the appearance of a normal life.

Hell is being alone: 3.07 tells us that in exact words —

Vampire: Can you think of a worse Hell than staring down eternity alone? Dean: Well there’s Hell. Vampire: I wasn’t thinking.  You know what that’s like?  Like being dead already.   I just didn’t care anymore.

3.08, John was absent and both boys were alone, and then Sam couldn’t bear the thought of celebrating Christmas when Dean wouldn’t be there next year; 3.10, Dean is left alone with himself, and it’s his worst nightmare; 3.11, Sam is alone, the only person who remembers what’s going on, and then he’s separated from all friends and family for months; 3.12, the boys are threatened with being isolated from each other for the rest of their lives.

Hell is forgetting who you are: Ruby tells Dean that exactly in 3.09, and then it comes back in 3.10 with his dream demon; and then the thread continues from there to the end of the season where both Winchesters are confronted with ‘what are you willing to give up to save Dean?’  How far will you go, and and what point have you stopped being human and become the monster?  3.14 hammers this home; Dean loses sight of his morals, almost kills a man out of desperation, trying to save himself.  For a moment, he is the monster.  And then we hit 3.15 and Dean finally snaps.  He shouts “I would rather go to hell” than be like Doc Benton, giving up his humanity piece by piece in order to survive.

That leads me to the other main mirroring arc of s3: Sam Winchester, the Boyking, Antichrist, Freak.  Season 3 for Sam is all about being tempted to the darkside; or rather, not tempted so much as pushed and bludgeoned to it.  We, the audience, get to watch him go through all the shades of Hell alongside Dean; but while Dean is coming to terms with what Hell will mean, and drawing moral lines of what he will and won’t do, Sam is falling apart.  We get to watch him deciding which pieces of himself he has to give up in order to save his brother.  By the time we hit the finale, he’s ready to give up everything; he’ll take Ruby’s deal, he’ll accept being a freak; he’ll do everything and be everything he’s wanted to avoid since s1 in order to save Dean.  He’s been through metaphorical hell.  The concept of being trapped and alone is enough that he starts to forget himself.

Season 3 is a mess, meta-wise; it tugs in a dozen different directions, especially when the show had to change to compensate for the writers’ strike.  The original ending, though, was for Dean to be saved, and Sam to be lost.  Rescue was coming; there was always a light at the end of the tunnel, it was just hellfire.  But the way that made it to the screen, both Winchesters ended up in a kind of hell.  Trapped, alone, with a demon for company, forgetting the things they once knew, the things that kept them human.  Waiting for rescue.