Thoughts on Dean’s story so far in S7

[rusty_halo]

So aside from the raging misogyny that infuses everything that ever happens on Supernatural, I am really enjoying this season and am particularly happy with Dean’s story so far.

In the season premiere, I was worried that they were just going with a continuation of "Dean is a fucking mess in the background and his story never goes anywhere while other stories get precedence." But 7x03 quite clearly shows that they are going somewhere.

Dean is effectively in the midst of a breakdown. His behavior is paranoid, misanthropic, and suicidal. (Even Bobby thinks Dean's fear that "the other shoe" will drop with Sam is reaching paranoid extremes; Dean's response to Castiel veers between giving up completely and ordering his friend dead; and between the excessive drinking, the line about driving himself and Sam off the pier, and the hopeful quality of his comment to Amy's son that he might be dead in a few years, his suicidal thoughts are more apparent than ever. )

(Sadly, from Dean's point of view, all of these issues are completely justified by his experiences. One of the things I love about the character is that I disagree with most of what he does, but I understand and sympathize with why he does it.)

I appreciate that the show is dealing with Dean's issues head-on, via the story, instead of just having him withdraw into himself or be a mess in the background. (I am angry that it manifested as yet another excuse for SPN to show one of its male characters killing a female character in an intimate and penetrative way, but that's another post.)

I really don't think we were supposed to think that Dean was right to kill Amy. Every aspect of the set-up was done in a way to make the audience sympathetic with Amy:

* The only victim we met was a drug-dealing rapist. If the show wanted to emphasize the ambiguity, we would have met his tearful mother, not watched him manipulating a client into sex. Who wouldn't want him dead after seeing that?

* Amy didn't do anything the Winchesters themselves wouldn't have done. How many times have they used the Colt/the knife instead of performing an exorcism, because it was the most effective way to keep each other safe? Think also of Dean selling his soul for Sam, or of Mystery Spot!Sam killing "Bobby" without being entirely sure it was the Trickster.

* In a show that absolutely fetishizes the concept of a mother's love for her children, what could possibly be a better justification than "I did it to keep my child safe"?

* The show spent a lot more time on young, sweet, idealistic Amy than on adult killer Amy. We watched her inspire Sam to accept himself; we watched Sam declare her a good person and protect her. Hell, we saw her kill her own mother to save one of our heroes.

* In what world is killing a mother in front of her own child supposed to be a good thing? Dean has just become his own worst nightmare, this child's Yellow Eyed Demon.

* ETA: Dean's justification for killing Amy contradicts itself. Amy isn't just a monster killing indiscriminately; she's a thinking being making a moral decision that her son deserves to live more than a few drug dealers. If it's wrong for Amy to decide lives and who dies, then how is it possibly right for Dean to make the exact same decision?

* Even the logic that Dean uses to justify killing Amy contradicts itself. If it's wrong for her to play vigilante, why is it okay for Dean to do the same?

* Dean wasn't able to convince Sam that he was right. If the show wanted us to come down on Dean's side, they wouldn't have shown him lying to Sam and sneaking off on his own.

Of course we were meant to be on Amy's side, and to recognize that what Dean did was at best on the dark side of ambiguous.

Dean's decision to kill Amy is most obviously a direct consequence of:

* Sam asked Dean to trust him about the demon blood, and the result was Lucifer rising from hell and killing lots of people.

* Castiel asked Dean to trust him about the purgatory souls, and the results was Leviathans breaking out of purgatory and killing lots of people.

These lead to a Dean who, duh, has trust issues. Combine it with the fact that his life has been defined by supernatural creatures killing almost everyone he's ever loved, and of course he's not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to a supernatural creature.

Also, more interestingly, you can see Dean's decision also stemming from:

* Dean convinced Castiel of the value of free will. Result: Castiel went crazy and opened purgatory.

* Dean refused to kill the little girl while wearing Death's ring. Result: more people died, and the girl still didn't survive.

* Dean tried to live a normal life with Lisa and Ben, but he was back to hunting and torturing again by the end of the season.

"Free will" hasn't actually worked out so well for Dean. The result: Dean giving up on free will and embracing fatalism. (In a way, this is a defense mechanism. If success is impossible, it's not your fault you failed, and you don't have to try anymore. It justifies him violating Lisa and Ben's memories and giving up on his dream of a normal life.)

Dean's actions with Amy in 7x03 mirror his actions with Castiel in 7x01. In both cases it's clear that Dean doesn't want to kill, but he orders Death to kill Cas and he kills Amy because he believes it's the only possible solution. He's given up on free will as a possible answer, on any chance of convincing them to change, or of them sticking to the change.

I also was surprised how many reactions haven't drawn the parallel that Dean's choice is really about how he thinks he himself can't change. It was a direct callback to 6x06:

"What I'm good at is slicing throats. I ain't a father; I'm a killer. And there's no changing that."

My response when I saw that was "Please let the narrative repudiate that later" and I appreciate that they're bringing it up again, because it needs to be repudiated.

The reason I expect this story to go somewhere not-entirely-misanthropic is that there's plenty of evidence within the show that Dean's wrong. The most obvious is that Team Free Will did stop the apocalypse.

It makes sense that Dean and Sam drew different lessons. For Sam, who overcame Lucifer, it's more apparent that free will saved the world. But for Dean, his world still did end, because he lost Sam. It doesn't surprise me that the lesson he absorbed emotionally was just another layer of tragedy and loss.

The show knows that Dean isn't just a killer. Dean is the one who held the family together, who said No to Michael and inspired Sam to defy Lucifer, all out of love. Dean thinks he's defined by being a "killer," but what we've consistently seen is that he's defined by love and family.

Not to mention that Sam's entire story this season is set up to be about overcoming something. You can't tell me this show isn't going to draw parallels and have Sam set an example to Dean that fatalism isn't the answer.

And of course Dean's decision in 7x03 isn't SPN's last word on the subjects of free will and shades of gray. We've seen again and again that it's wrong not to recognize shades of gray: Gordon was wrong to hunt Lenore; John killing the ghoul who wasn't hurting anyone led directly to the deaths of Adam and his mother; Travis trying to kill Jack's unborn child is what ironically pushed Jack over the edge.

7x03 explicitly paralleled 2011!Dean with 1998!John; since when is a parallel with John Winchester a good thing? Consider how SPN has portrayed John Winchester since JDM left. It's not as a hero who Did What Had To Be Done, but as a complete mess who may have tried to do the right thing, but who ended up fucking up his children via pretty much every choice he made.

I love this theme of the boys rejecting/becoming their father, because 1) John Winchester was such a fabulously complicated character, so awful and so tragic and so heroic all at once, and 2) it's true to life, that these boys would always be impacted by the profound influence he had on their lives.

I loved the irony that Dean, the son who so desperately wanted to be like John, was actually less driven by anger and obsession and vengeance and control then Sam, who wanted to be nothing like John. I loved how Dean was inspired partly by Sam and partly by John's own failures to finally recognize the destructive impact his father had on his life. And I love how Dean, who now doesn't want to become John, is falling into those destructive patterns anyway, abandoning a family that needs him, killing "monsters" without recognizing shades of gray.

Also, I love the show letting Dean be legitimately dark. Sam got the whole of season four to really explore his worst tendencies, but we more often get Dean as the sympathetic audience stand-in character.

When we've seen Dean dark before, it's either been AU (how much do I love the parallels with 7x03!Dean and 2014!Dean?) or it's been in ways that the audience was mostly set up to sympathize with: torturing Meg was creepy, but she was a demon who'd been tormenting them; torturing Alistair was creepy but he was pressured into it and it was Alistair; torturing Bobby was creepy but it was the only way to save Bobby from the monster possessing him; enjoying the pain of a dying man was creepy, but the guy was a lowlife who'd just threatened to murder a child; etc. I think this is one of the first times Dean's done something awful where the audience really isn't set up to be on his side.

Anyway, long story short: I think the show is just starting to delve into something really interesting and there's no way 7x03 is the last word on the subject.

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[rivkat]

I agree that Dean's a lot more than he thinks he is right now--I see him as, in some ways, very realistically depressed, narrow-focused in the way depression can manifest. And you explained exactly why--he tried his best, agreed to give up the thing that defined him for good or ill since he was four and his/Sam's sacrifice just led to horrible torture for Sam and the release of some bigger bads.

Dean's always fit well into structured situations (prison, the film set, construction work), so I think if he regains his understanding that the supernatural isn't always and irredeemably evil he could rebuild the institutions that have been destroyed--the Roadhouse, Bobby's house--and (in my perfect ending) train people to hunt what needs hunting and to remind what might need hunting that there is a sheriff out there.

I would love it even more if they did this with Dean and Sam building each other up; I think it's still possible.