spn: brother parallels S8
Dec. 8th, 2012 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterflyBasically, Dean was re-playing what Sam would have been feeling after Dean disappeared after last year’s finale. All of Sam’s advice about Dean trying to get over Cas is stuff that Sam likely told himself, over and over, to try to move past the implosion of his world that was losing Dean. When Sam is talking to Dean, it’s the echo of what Sam went through back during the missing year.
Which then made me go back to that theme of “hey, I loved a monster and then he/she died” that we got a lot of before Cas came back. It was something of a mini-theme there for a while:
8x01: Kevin’s girlfriend has become a demon. Crowley snaps her neck.
8x02: In the flashbacks, we see Dean’s reunion with Cas and we see Dean losing Cas.
8x03: Brick and Betsey. He was a monster; he fell in love; he died (pre-episode but it’s centered around the results).
8x04: Bitten – all about monsters and being in love and death.
8x05: Benny and Andrea. Double-whammy here. Benny is first the monster who falls in love and dies for it. When he meets Andrea again, now she’s the monster who dies (and yet still loves). This episode appears to close off this mini-theme (it hasn’t re-appeared in 6, 7, 8, or 9) and, with Sam’s glowering hostility toward Benny, we begin a new one.
8x06: Introducing the new mini-theme: you can’t rely on anyone. What Dean confesses here under the specter’s influence – that he feels let down by the people he loves (except Benny, who he has known only a year) – he will later re-confess of his own free will in 8x09.
Why close off the lost monster love mini-theme? Because Cas is about to come back. He was Dean’s monster who was as good as dead. Now, because Cas is coming back, we can shift away from that theme and into the theme of not being able to count on people. In 8x06, we get some closure on the Dean/Bobby relationship and we get Dean opening his old wounds – Sam and Cas both let him down. The supernatural element is all about bringing up people’s feelings of betrayal and forcing them to lash out.
In 8x07, Dean gets to experience what Sam experienced in 8x01 – the person he cared about unexpectedly returns from Purgatory. Just like Sam, Dean had not been looking for Cas but rather treating him like he’d died. Just like Sam in 8x01 when Dean returns, Dean does not question the reality of Castiel, but is curious about the manner of his return. Both Dean and Castiel escape Purgatory with the help of a ‘monster’ (Benny/the angels) and neither divulge the details of said escape (though Dean chooses not to, while Castiel is unable to). What he thought was true isn’t – Castiel isn’t out of reach but, also, Castiel chose not to come with; it’s an odd sort of betrayal that isn’t a betrayal. Cas did abandon him but did so under the weight of so much guilt and pain that Dean can’t blame him for it.
In 8x08, Fred’s mind is betraying him (just like Castiel’s is). He’s not the person that Dean and Sam knew when they were kids; isn’t able to be reliable and trustworthy the same way. Again, there isn’t a theme of loving monsters anymore (though the heart theme is still popping up). It’s about not being able to depend on someone the way you used to – in this case, for reasons that are out of Fred’s control. And even as Dean was getting his hopes up that, this time, Cas might choose to stay with him – Cas doesn’t. He chooses to be left behind, again, just like with Purgatory.
Then we come to 8x09: here, no one is able to rely on anyone and everything falls apart. Dean sends Sam away because he doesn’t trust him not to kill Benny. Martin threatens an innocent woman in order to try to kill Benny. Sam abandons Martin to rush off to help Amelia. Benny doesn’t call Dean for help when Elizabeth gets threatened (which I was personally begging him to do). He also appears to have broken his personal vow not to kill humans (for understandable reasons, but once the taste of blood/the kill is back in his mouth, will he be able to let it go again?) and Elizabeth is never going to look at him the way she did when he was her friend Roy.
No one is allowed their comforting illusions – Fred taking comfort in cartoons was literally killing people, Martin believed he could go back to hunting and it got him killed, both Sam and Dean feel disillusioned about being able to trust each other, Castiel knows he can’t just pick up and re-join team free will (no matter how much he might want to), and Benny isn’t allowed to stay in his old home town where his granddaughter lives. You can’t live in the past.
I suspect that 8x10 will be the culmination of this mini-arc in the discovery of what Naomi has been doing to Cas, just as 8x05 ended the “monster in love dies” mini-arc. Which has ominous implications for what might happen to Cas.