#s13e11

In s11 Sam must have been thinking about other ways because we know he was thinking about “settling down” with someone who knew the life. That was good, that was growth. That was imagination. But then Mary happened and then Jack happened and now, all of a sudden, it’s not the two of them anymore: whether they like it or not, they’re building a bigger family, they're creating a "home" together with new people in their lives (with great, oh god, greaaaat difficulty).

In “Breakdown” Wendy is family to Donna, therefore she is family to Sam and Dean too because, according to family’s transitivity, the family of my family is my family.

Growing up, gas stations and nomadic lifestyles.

What I like about Davy Perez’s writing style is that it’s very cinematographic. His ability in visual storytelling surely helps the episodes' directors because they are always shot very beautifully. Now I haven’t watched the movie so I don’t know if the vibes match but “Breakdown” is the title of a movie with Kurt Russel (somebody’s crush is showing hehe) and it’s, like, a thriller with truck drivers or something so he definitely took some inspiration from that movie, I guess. Of course, the title also refers to Sam’s depression. So let’s see what this is about.

Wendy is on a gap year trip (and she hasn’t been ho-) and her abandoned car has been found at the side of a road mainly used by long-haul truckers. She took some time-off before college to go on an adventure (s9 teaches us that usually women on adventures end bad in SPN but let’s move on). We don’t know her motivations but her name is Wendy so I must assume that Perez is telling us that she doesn’t want to grow up or maybe she’s not ready to go to college and wants some time, who knows? What’s important here is that the “Kids Who Don’t Want to Grow Up” theme is established. Since Sam will literally take Wendy’s seat in the torture chamber I must ask: is Sam a Wendy or a Peter Pan? In other words: will he leave Neverland/Hunting and go live a “normal” life or will he stay in “Neverland” and only occasionally visit the “normal” world? Will his children go to Neverland one day? We know Sam must be asking himself these questions because Dean has made them see “Lost Boys” 36 times. So, you know.

If the “Kids Who Don’t Want to Grow Up” theme was not clear Dean refers to Wendy as “Alice in Wonderland”. So this is NOT just about growing up, this is also about the loss of innocence. How does our Wendy lose her innocence? By entering “Mann(y)’ Truck Stop Café”. Oh gosh, this will be about SA. Oh my god, Sam, poor Sam (edit: and poor Wendy, the ep doesn't do her justice and neither did I by not mentioning her here).

What’s interesting about this episode is that we have seen these places countless times in the series: diners, café, bars, gas stations etc. They’re familiar to us. And yet, it suffices that a young girl enters one of these spaces during the evening that all of a sudden we realize how unsettling they can be. Wendy enters the café and it’s full of scary creeps: the cashier, the man sitting at the table, the truck-driver at the counter, the dude at the gas pump. To be honest I can’t possibly recall all of SPN episodes but it’s worth noticing that this shift in perception mainly happens when the protagonist of the episode is a woman. In “Ladies Drink Free” we are told that Claire can “deal” with creepy dudes and in “Alex Annie Alexis Ann” Alex is literally used as bait in bars. The first thing Sam asks Donna when they meet and she tells them about Wendy is “What was she doing out here?”.  What I gather from this question and from what the show is telling me is that “out here” is not a place for young girls and boys. In fact, Luis Fernando is met with the same fate as Wendy. Nosy cashier tells girls to “smile more”. Slimy Pastor Hankey is a fucking predator who flashes girls and kidnaps boys. The truckers on the radio make lewd comments at Dean’s request about Wendy. “Out here” is total shit, men are total shit.

And yet. And yet.

This is Sam and Dean’s world. This is where they grew up: between a motel and a bar. This is “John Winchester’s Way of Seeing the World”. Or was he really seeing? Was he paying attention? Evidently not, otherwise he wouldn’t have left his children leave in such danger. All of a sudden monsters don’t seem so bad. Or.

Or are we obsessing a little bit too much over normalcy and monstrosity? Are we losing our focus?

You see, and don’t quote me on that, but I think “Breakdown” is, again perhaps, the only episode where the show examines how they’re portraying a specific lifestyle, the “out here” lifestyle, the John Winchester’s lifestyle. Let me explain.

Post- November 2nd, John’s way of life is nomadic. He changes towns like he changes his clothes, he moves a lot, he’s always in a car, driving. As I’ve established, this doesn’t have to be a hunter’s life, but it’s John’s. He's found his meaning in it. And it’s Sam’s and Dean’s too. The opposite of a white-picket fence lifestyle is not a hunter’s life but it’s a nomadic one.

Now what is this episode telling us about various nomads? Well, to be honest, very bad things.

The serial killer, The Butterfly, is called this way because of his migration pattern: he seems to move from north to south and vice-versa. Like butterflies (by the way, you know Sam is depressed because a. he would’ve totally known Agent Clegg was full of crap, Sam Winchester knows his serial killers and b. Clegg’s pattern description wasn’t solid. I can’t really tell why but years of listening to true crime podcasts tell me so. The Sam I know and love would’ve called bull on the spot).

Wendy was on her gap year, travelling the country and look where she is now.

People who travel alone are targets.

People who won’t be missed are targets.

All the truckers in this episode are creepy.

The itinerant pastor is a sexual predator.

People who move as a lifestyle or because of their job are not portrayed very well in this episode, are they? They live liminal spaces and liminal spaces are always perceived as monstrous.

But then, a light: Liz. Liz is the truck driver that didn’t stop when Wendy waved for help from the side of the road. She didn’t do it because she was behind schedule. Boom.

All of a sudden we are reminded that these are real people with real jobs, they’re not the actual monsters we’re so quick to compare them with. But also, yeah, some of them act preeeeeeeetty bad.

Guess who is the actual monster? Your regular neighbor. The cashier at the café. And guess who ALSO acts bad: The FBI agent. Sometimes even good people can act badly if they’re desperate or if they have the power to do so. Or if it’s both. Donna, for instance, is a police officer who threatens the slimy pastor by telling him that he will get SAed in the cell. Or people don't help other people because they're on a schedule and if they don't make it on time they might get fired. In other words, the world cannot be contained and divided into perfect categories.

“Out here” there’s violence wherever you are on the spectrum between monsters who must be killed and people who must be saved (the show’s favorite false dichotomy).

So I ask: why, again, is the “white-picket fence” lifestyle treated as a standard for normalcy in this show? Why do nomadic lifestyles feel so threatening? What are they threatening exactly? “John Winchester’s Way of Seeing the World” wasn’t bad per se because he made Sam and Dean move a lot. It was bad because he neglected them, he kept them isolated. Because he treated them as adults and they were not.

The hunter's lifestyle is not about the monsters either. You can hunt monsters and have a house and a mortgage and do your job like Donna. But this doesn’t mean necessarily that you’re in the life. As a matter of fact, everybody is in the life. The only ones who are not in the life are the ones who don't know about the life. When they know about the life, they can pretend they’re not in the life but they are. Doug, for example, decides to pretend he hasn’t seen the truth. I don’t judge him for that, he saw a young man getting his arms severed on a webcam and he was turned into a vampire (another parallel to “Ladies Drink Free”). I can understand why he wants to pretend and go back to his old life. Truth is he never will. He will forever know that monsters are real and that knowing it doesn’t change anything: your neighbor can be a vampire and your colleague can be a serial killer.

The line between what’s the meaning of being human vs being a monster has never been thinner than in this episode. The atmosphere is rather bleak. The episode is not a positive one and it ends on a very negative note.

Wicked hearts, everybody needs food, the dark place.

'If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.'

Perez couldn’t find a better Psalm than this for Sam. It contains Sam in a nutshell. This is a psalm about sin and about prayers which are rather fitting themes for Sam. The Lord won’t hear your prayers if you don’t repent and move away from your sins. One has to be righteous, pure of heart and clean in order to be listened by the Lord. Sam struggles a lot against the concepts of purity and cleanliness. He is, after all, “unclean in the biblical sense”. One of the ways it can be interpreted is that Sam, by drinking demon blood, has violated the biblical law against blood consumption which has made him an abomination and has set him apart from humankind because blood is associated with life and therefore with God. Drinking blood is a sin that has contaminated him and he is, now, contaminated food in return. The "you are what you eat" hypothesis.

But blood represents family, too. A family that, no matter what, Sam seems to be unable to keep. And it’s not just family: everyone they know ends up bad (“I mean, when has knowing us ever worked out for anyone?”). Sam prays but nobody listens because (he thinks) his heart is wicked, dirty, impure. He feels unconnected, detached, separated. In a word, lonely.

While Donna is depressed because of her niece’s disappearance, Sam is facing the fact that Jack’s gone and, with him, his last hope of finding his mother. He doesn’t want to help with Donna’s case because he doesn’t want to see. He wants to keep pretending but the wall is already crumbling: he’s not hungry, he doesn’t sleep, he stays in bed, he doesn’t want to “work”. He’s paralleled with Donna because of the huge loss and emptiness inside of his heart but he’s way more similar to Doug. Maybe Donna can live "the life" because she’s a hero but him? He just wants to go home. Neverland is not for him (“I… No. Maybe you all can live this life, but I can’t. I just wanna go home”). The things are two: 1. Doug, darling, there is no life you can get back to. You can pretend but that doesn't make it not-real anymore. 2. There is no “home” for Sam. And I’m not talking about a literal place to go back to, I’m talking about a feeling of “being home”. The dark place is, according to Sam, their lives. A life he has tried to pretend that it didn’t have to be this dark, he has tried to pretend that they could have a “home” but, no matter what, they can’t (although, Sam, heart, you really need to know that Dean actually can have a home and, in fact, has already been building one for years. The good news is that you totally can too, everybody can).

Sam’s heart is so devoid of warmth and nice feelings that’s not the place where the soul lives anymore, it’s just a piece of meat that can be sold on the dark web. How much is Sam Winchester’s heart worth? 500k US dollars. There’s a PRICE for his heart and its price is very high because “Folks, there are many pieces to Sam Winchester… but only one heart”.

I find this scene absolutely brilliant because it’s a very warped form of psychostasia, or the weighing of the soul. First of all, Sam’s not dead but he’s already being judged. Secondly, his heart, the seat of the “ka” (life) has not been weighed on a scale against a feather but it’s been put on auction to the best bidder: in this scenario it doesn’t matter if his heart is pure or wicked, what matters is who wants to pay more for it. In Sam’s world you’re either the food or the eater and Sam’s heart is the main course in this episode. This fits nicely with the myth of ancient Egypt where the soul would get eaten by a deity if the heart is heavier than a feather. I like how Egyptian myths keep popping up this season and how they’re super fitting. In this case, for example, the weighing of the heart is also closely associated with St. Michael who holds a sword and a scale. It’s cool, right? I mean, it’s totally not cool for my poor Sam, but it’s cool how symbols keep symbolling (lol) once you start poking at them.

So Sam. Sam’s being sold as food. He’s food just like the people who won’t be missed are food, according to Clegg. Sam’s complicated relationship with food now takes a new, darker turn. When Sam, Dean, Doug and Donna watch poor Luis Fernando getting chopped by Clegg, Sam winces and stops the video. The cashier/vampire laughs at him and mockingly asks him if he’s vegan. I don't think he's vegan but he sure is red meat this episode.

Another thing that I like about this episode is Clegg’s little monologue:

Sam: Why are you doing this? Clegg: Well, ‘cause somebody has to. How many monsters do you think are out there, Sam? You know, if you – you had to guess. Sam: Hundreds. Thousands. Clegg: Add a zero. Actually, add two. See, those freaks that you and your brother chase, those are just the ones that can’t pass. Either because they’re too mean or they’re too stupid, or both. But most monsters… hell, they could be your next-door neighbor. They work a regular job, mow the lawns on a Saturday. And they need to eat, which is where I come in. Sam: So you sell them people. Clegg: I sell them people other people won’t miss. And because I do that, I save lives. If my customers didn’t have me… then all those hungry, hungry hippos would be out there huntin’ and killin’. And you couldn’t stop ‘em. No one could. You should be thanking me.

If we can set aside Clegg’s sadism and capitalistic acumen for a moment we would see that the man does have a point. Let me explain.

It’s worth noticing that Clegg’s pulse on the monsters' world is paradoxically more realistic than Sam’s: there are thousands upon thousands of monsters. As a matter of fact, Sam and Dean only catch the ones that “can’t pass” (another whole essay could be written on this sentence alone), but here, in the real world, a monster can be anybody. And all these monsters need to eat, just like people.

First of all, hold on because this is mind-blowing: what Clegg is telling us is that Dean and Sam’s reality is not the totality of reality, it’s just what THEY experience. In truth, things are waaaaay much different. Once again in the episode I notice a subtle criticism at the brothers myopic, limited view of the world. They’re wasting their hearts away and for what? For nothing. The battle against monsters is a losing battle. The "out of the life" dream is just a dream when you know that monsters buy human meat on the market and it's, like, a totally normal thing that all monsters living "normal" lives know about. Meanwhile Crazy Clegg "out here" is "saving people" because he feeds people to monsters! The paradox is so incredible it’s almost ridiculous. But he’s got a bit of an ego here because the ones whom we should really “thank” are… the people who won’t be missed (sorry for being me for a minute but these are the poor animals of the world that humans horribly torture and happily buy to eat).

Do you understand that this whole Clegg economy is based on the murder of people on the fringe, people who inhabit liminality? People who are lonely? People who have no ties? People without family? And instead of metaphorically feeding these people with care and love, they become prey and food so that the world can continue on its pretense that everything is fucking normal. It’s not just Sam who was pretending, it’s not Doug who has just now started pretending. Everything is a big pretense. The truth? Life is a dark place.

Dean: Hey, look, I know you’re in some sort of a— Sam: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, don’t – don’t… You keep saying I’m in a dark place, but I’m not, Dean. Everything I’m saying is the truth. It’s our lives. And I tried to pretend it didn’t have to be. I tried to pretend we could have Mom back and Cas and – and help Jack. But we can’t. This ends one way for us, Dean. It ends bloody. It ends bad.

This is the moment where I should say some inspirational stuff but no, as far as Sam Winchester is concerned, that is the truth. He has started off the season with what we now understand was fake optimism, he failed, okay, but he did try in his own way to support Dean in his grief while he was dealing with his own shit. He saw his brother die and then had to carry the faith for him too (all the while having nobody with whom he could talk about what he was going through). But he carried the weight and things got better cause Cas got back and Dean resurrected with him and then they lost Jack and now Sam has lost his hope to ever see his mother again (his mother who’s in an alternate world with his abuser, the angel that broke.him.down).

What’s more, by the end of the season Sam will indeed end bloody and his personal abuser will stick with him only to make sure to resurrect him and to remind him that their wicked more profound bond will be forever. A banner year for Sam.

So what does Sam want? What everyone wants. Love, people. It’s always about love. And some rest, everybody needs rest to love and be loved.

PS: I cannot know for sure but I know it in my heart that “Under Pressure” was some sort of inspiration for this episode. Its lyrics are literally this episode. And this is how the song ends (I don’t want to end on a sad note):

Can't we give ourselves one more chance?

Why can't we give love that one more chance?

Why can't we give love, give love, give love, give love

Give love, give love, give love, give love?

'Cause love's such an old-fashioned word

And love dares you to care for

The people on the edge of the night

And love dares you to change our way of

Caring about ourselves

This is our last dance

This is our last dance

This is ourselves

Under pressure

Under pressure