#spn1.16

his first interaction with her is to "compliment" her boobs, right in front of sam—it feels as though he's trying to stake a claim, put her down (in her place, perhaps), assert a sense of dominance over her. in shadow, this weird, sexual fixation surfaces again with meg, and dean can't stop pressuring sam to fuck her or insinuating that sam has already fucked her.

the only noticeable difference between lori, jessica, and meg is that dean was present for the formation of the relationship with lori. but meg—sam never even mentioned her. they met when dean wasn't around, when sam was living his own life. on top of that, meg accused dean of treating sam like "luggage" and dragging him around—implying that sam would leave if he could.

comparing lori and meg, it comes off then that dean is feeling threatened here, abandoned yet again by his brother, and indeed the insults meg slings at him in the beginning of the episode resurface during their emotional conversation when sam says he plans on going back to school. meg has come to represent sam leaving him, and throughout the episode he overcompensates for his insecurity by channeling it all into this invasive sexual commentary.

what this ends up implying is that dean wants to fuck his brother.

dean’s fear of abandonment presents as such that he always feels sam is one wrong move from leaving him and going off on his own. it’s a deeply anxious attachment, and he ends up overanalyzing every interaction they have and misinterpreting any attempt on sam's part to put or maintain distance between them as total, unambiguous abandonment.

and in scarecrow, sam really did abandon him by splitting off from dean and making his way to california (or at least, that was the intent). scarecrow is the realization of dean's core fears: sam will eventually leave him, sam wants to leave him, and in the end they’re only together out of convenience.

and now dean finds out that sam met a girl while they were separated.

the conclusion he must have reached is that sam will inevitably leave him in favor of a girl: at stanford he had jessica, here he has meg. both times he and sam were apart, sam found a (pretty, blonde) girl to get close to. the girl therefore comes to represent sam's abandonment, or rather the goal of sam's abandonment: to find what dean can't give him.

because if sam secretly doesn't want to be around dean, then dean isn't providing an environment or a relationship that sam would want to be in. sam wants to leave, so dean is somehow inadequate.

that feeling of inadequacy, both in the pilot and in shadow, manifests through a sexual lens, just as sam's abandonment is represented by the girl. by putting these examples together, dean is seeing the impetus of sam's abandonment as something sexual: sam wants sex with girls (and a stable relationship beyond one-night stands), so he is leaving dean to find that. this connection is so strong to him that he's ignoring sam’s actual feelings and displacing his own biased perspective onto sam.

dean cannot fathom sam interacting with meg platonically, and this is rooted in his feelings of inadequacy and fear of abandonment. dean believes he can't satisfy sam's needs to an extent that will prevent sam from leaving him, which according to dean are sexual in nature. he can't (or won't) put out for sam, so sam is going to leave him. and to hide these fears (from sam, from himself), he gets sexually aggressive about the women who threaten to steal (or succeed in stealing) sam away from him.

the development here is so crazy. shadow is an episode about sam choosing his revenge (fate) over his family: when dean wants to "be a family again" sam shuts this down, saying he can't return to the way things were before. but in my time of dying shows sam repeating dean's words almost exactly: they were just starting to "be brothers again."

sam maintains a distance from dean throughout season 1 because he can't commit to him—revenge is too forefront in his mind, and dean is the opposition to sam's revenge. the more he pursues revenge, the farther he gets from dean. this is what azazel and meg want for him: they're leading him away from dean, deliberately so, and as they do that he gets closer to fulfilling his destiny.

it's not until devil's trap that sam chooses dean over his revenge once and for all, committing to his brother in a way that he hasn't been able to up until that point. he abandons his revenge and picks dean over his destiny and they achieve a deeper, more twisted and tangled-up relationship as a result.

and in the exact next episode, sam is quoting dean. it signifies that he's on the same page as dean now, or he's trying to be, and he's committed to the relationship they've developed over the fate he's supposed to be pursuing. it's a complete 180 flip from how he thought just 7 episodes earlier—their new relationship comes with new rules, and we see sam's definition of this relationship again across the next few episodes too, when he feels betrayed and abandoned because dean is keeping secrets from him and won't talk to him (compare to bloody mary, where he himself refuses to be honest with dean because "there are some things he needs to keep to himself").

so meg is out here suggesting that she and sam are the same: they're acting out of love and loyalty. it's an interesting line with a lot of layers.

first of all, what is sam doing? i imagine the obvious answer is that he's pursuing revenge—meg brings up mary and jessica here to cement that conclusion. but when you think about it, that's not what he's doing at this point in time. after scarecrow, sam admits that while he still wants revenge, he's willing to run the marathon so long as it means staying with dean.

after scarecrow, revenge is an afterthought, and with nightmare and the benders, the suggestion that revenge will make a monster out of sam is glaring and sobering. after his run-in with max during nightmare in particular, sam begins to divert his attention toward saving people over everything else. and at the beginning of shadow, too, sam and dean are just checking out a regular case—they only stumble into meg's trap for them by accident.

the point is, sam is not pursuing revenge right now. it's not off his mind completely, but it's certainly not what he's doing. what he's doing, rather, is hunting small-scale with his brother.

with this understanding, meg's statement takes on a new meaning: sam his hunting with dean out of loyalty and love.

and then meg declares that this "love" sam is acting on is like the love he feels for mary and for jessica.

so here's another layer. jessica and mary are paralleled, and meg is implying that the love sam feels for both of them are the same. there's an interesting pause here: that em dash says a lot. mary is mentioned first in meg's list because she, too, is acting out of devotion for her father.

so it makes sense to compare azazel and mary—they're both parental figures. but then meg extends this by including jess. meg therefore implies that her own relationship with azazel is not just that of a father and daughter, but also an incestuous, sexual one. her feelings for azazel resemble sam's feelings for jessica. she becomes a manifestation of incestuous desire by her own admittance.

and sam is just like her.

so meg is implying that sam is acting out of the same kind of incestuous love that meg is—they're the same after all, and on a narrative level meg functions as an allegory for sam's fate.

the conclusion, then, is that sam is hunting with dean out of a love that is simultaneously like his love for mary and like his love for jessica—an ambiguous love that blurs the lines between the familial and the romantic and the sexual, blends them all together.

it's an interesting line. on the surface it's rather innocuous, but when you give any amount of thought to the meaning behind it, the implications really start to pile up. meg is loyal to her father and helps him with his plans because she loves him. sam is loyal to his brother and hunts alongside him because he loves him.

we can continue seeing meg as a parallel to sam to extract some interesting implications from the episode. she additionally compares herself to sam in their first scene together to cement their connection: "if i were you, i’d kill [dean]." this comparison allows sam's jess vs dean conflict to shine, because meg represents the path sam is destined to go down as boy king.

their roles and strengths in hunting are examined here: sam is book smart and charismatic with men and other non-hot girl people, so he becomes a sympathetic ear during investigations to obtain information, and he also naturally drifts toward hard research. dean, on the other hand, is better at interviewing hot girls, and he's also got a lot of field experience under his belt which makes him good at pattern recognition and quick thinking, and he's got connections and a network of hunters to help him. other episodes up to now which explore this work dynamic more directly are 1.04, 1.07, 1.08, and 1.11. 1.05 also confirms these roles are not so rigid as dean can certainly hold his own in research, and sam is a more sympathetic investigator to the hot girl charlie (granted she's in high school, so she might fall out of dean's range of acceptability—lmao i'm joking no she's not). ergo, they're both versatile, but their strengths have them fall into certain roles naturally as they work together.

dean is weirdly jealous of meg, and this manifests as invasive sexual comments about sam and her which begin popping up as soon as sam reveals that they met while he and dean were separated in 1.11 scarecrow. he's overcompensating for his jealousy in a way that has only been even hinted at with jess (consider his weirdly sexual comments toward jess once sam introduces her as his girlfriend)—and if meg represents the path that sam is supposed to follow via seeking revenge for jessica, then this positions dean and jess as diametrically opposed once again (consider too how meg really does not like dean).

this jealousy that dean is overcompensating for gives the indication that dean wants to be able to satisfy sam sexually: basically, dean's fear of abandonment means that he feels that he is one small step away from losing sam at all times, and so he has to make sure he can satisfy all of sam's needs so that sam will have no reason to leave him. the one thing he apparently can't do is satisfy him sexually, and the dialogue in this episode suggests that this is something dean sees as important to sam, and a worthy reason for abandoning dean to run off with a girl he CAN have sex with (see: jessica). instead of being normal, dean's jealousy toward meg, which presents itself through sexual commentary, suggests that dean is upset that he can't sexually gratify sam.

dean's fears of abandonment are directly, textually linked to sam achieving his revenge on azazel. if sam gets his revenge, sam will leave dean, and dean will be alone again. this supports the idea that dean is projecting his fears onto meg through his sexual comments, but the sex becomes a symbol and an indication of abandonment. sex becomes a thing that separates him from sam, and it is a threat to their relationship because dean can't have sex with his brother. sam will leave him for sex; sam will leave him for a girl; sam will leave him for stanford. killing meg therefore becomes the same as fucking meg because the outcome is the same—notably, the sexual comments don't stop even after they learn meg is an enemy.

dean misinterprets sam's "i don't want [things to be the way they were before]" as an indication that sam wants to leave him. what sam doesn't want is a return to the origin. sam remains family-oriented but needs to be included by his family (dean) to oppose his fate and choose them.

meg tells sam she's "doing this for the same reason you do what you do: loyalty, love." she draws a direct connection between them and invites the audience to compare them. examining more closely what, exactly, sam is doing though, it's decidedly NOT avenging jessica, because at this moment he has temporarily given up on that in favor for the marathon (1.02) this hunt actually is. right now, he's working small cases with dean and standing by him. this implies sam's loyalty and love are for dean, not jessica, and again points to the conclusion of this arc when sam chooses dean for good.

she also says sam's love is "like the love you have for mommy. and jess." the "and" here blurs the lines between familial and romantic love by implying they're the same. at the same time, meg's loyalty and love are for her father, and she is directly likening that love to sam's love for jessica. meg and azazel both imply incest within their family structure and through their comparisons to the winchesters imply incest within sam's family as well. and if dean is the person sam is loyal to, the person sam loves, then this incestuous fidelity is for dean as well.

dean has no faith that john will have gotten their call and come to help them. this reveals his own developments as he internalizes john's betrayal and abandonment and the destruction of his ideal family structure. at the end of the episode too dean is the one who sends john away, recognizing that family makes them weaker and invites ruin (similar to the message of 1.11). dean is turning away from the family and toward sam, caught halfway in his reverse development because sam won't let him achieve actual independence from the family (again, in 1.11 scarecrow sam returns to the family after dean accepts his independence, thus halting dean's development in the direction of selfhood and orienting him around sam—priming him for the codependency they achieve at the end of the season). dean is extricating himself from john but fails to do so with sam, which is why sam's threat of abandonment in this episode becomes unbearable to him.

sam once again shows that he wants to be part of the family and belong to this collective no matter the cost (personal or otherwise). he hasn't yet committed to the family, but he still covets it and the more dean accepts him in the coming episodes, the more sam will commit to him.

my actual notes are under the cut 🥰