SPN 5.18 - Looks like they made it
This latest episode was notable in giving all the characters interesting things to say and do. “Point of No Return” gathered quite a few players and took them places, which is something I wish I could have seen more often this season. At the same time, I don’t know how it could have escaped anyone’s notice that we didn’t have a single female speaking role in this entire episode, with only a brief shot of one as an angelic heavy, and no characters of color. The problem with individual decisions along the way is that they become cumulative, something Sam has certainly had cause to discover in this episode. At some point, ya just gotta open your eyes to it.
Set ‘Em Up
I had been convinced Zachariah would be with us for a while because he’s proved to be such a great villain. But it wasn’t to be. I should have guessed from our prologue that he was being ushered out, given that he gets a whole scene in which to grouse. For one thing, it’s rare for a secondary character to be able to express his internal struggles on this show. Back in Pin in S4, I noted in my review that it happened for the first time there with Castiel. And unfortunately, we don’t really get much more insight into Zach here than we already got in Dark Side. It’s a rather drawn out joke about how times are tough all over and what happens on earth mirrors what’s happening in heaven and hell. I do appreciate the writers continuing with this theme, as they’ve been attempting to tie current events into their apocalypse arc. But this was more of a love letter to the actor than anything that actually advances the story or character.
At the same time, Zachariah’s prologue did tie into the overall episode with some of the same foreshadowing (the wedding/visit to Lisa) that we saw in 99 Problems. Zach thought he was about to die and was given a last minute reprieve. The same thing happens with Dean, although unlike Zachariah, Dean really is in charge of his own destiny.
I want to digress for a moment and talk about this aspect of SPN which, like the general class issues it showcases, does not get much attention in presentations about the show’s purpose. Back when I wrote about class in SPN one of the things that came out of the discussion were questions about what separates the middle class from the working class, especially since it often isn’t income. It’s a fuzzy issue because it tends to turn on both the type of work done (and the education needed for that work), and the matter of ownership. Does one own one’s own business, for example, or does one have to answer to many other people as part of the job? Where does final responsibility for things lie?
If I look at how SPN stands on this, it’s possible to see the opening scene in contrast to Dean and Sam’s next one. Working class grunts are low on the totem pole and always have “the man” in the picture when it comes to their livelihood. Yet the Winchesters don’t really fit any particular class. Their skills range from highly educated and cerebral to the manual work common to day laborers. Similarly, while they have either no status or an extremely low status to society at large (they’re basically criminals), they also don’t have anyone to answer to. I’m kind of fascinated by the implications of the vessel crisis as a matter of political struggle. We could picture the Winchesters as libertarian socialists and the angels as neoconservatives. Obviously this could be a very long discussion, but I wanted to toss it out here for now, given the prologue’s emphasis on economic and political issues in the workplace.
Returning to Dean and Sam, I love how JA played up Dean’s obvious shock at being found, and how it reversed Dean finding Sam in Lazarus. Even when there’s distance between them, they still understand one another so well. I also liked the fact that Dean put his bitterness out there and Sam validated his feelings. However, it saddened me to hear Sam say that leaving for Stanford had been a mistake. It doesn’t surprise me, because everything he fought for there has been for nothing, and it carried a huge price in terms of Jessica’s death and the division it caused with Dean (and maybe John, as well). Of course, he’s going to see it as a mistake because, knowing what he now does, he realizes it couldn’t have turned out any other way. But while hindsight may be 20/20, what we’ll never know is what might have happened had Sam never left. It might have turned out no better, and it always felt to me that Sam’s leaving was part of his own struggle for survival.
But while Dean always saw Sam’s leaving, and later John’s, as a form of personal rejection, John at least saw it as a necessity. With John being coded as God in this latest round of the separation/togetherness stakes, it seems to me that what we’re seeing in this episode is a replay of the Stanford decision, only with the roles reversed. When Dean calls back their fight in Levee, it only reinforces that for me, because that scene was so clearly marked as a replay of John and Sam’s break.
As an aside, it’s also fascinating to me how both fandom and the show have set up the Stanford decision as this ur-event in the family that gets replayed in so many permutations. In the case of fanfic, we literally see the original event reinterpreted through various stories (with various different motivations afoot). In the case of the show, it’s always saying something about the roles the brothers are playing. So in Levee, Dean was standing in for John, doing exactly what Bobby had warned him not to do, and what Sam was primed by John to expect Dean to do. And it turned out the same. But here, Dean is playing Sam, Sam is playing Dean, and Castiel is playing John, albeit one whose influence has diminished in much the same way that John’s has. The power however, continues to rest mostly with him.
As we see in the next scene, we’re back to a family trinity, and I don’t mean because of Adam. Instead we see Dean pushing Bobby out of that circle by telling him plainly that he’s not part of the family. He never retracts this statement despite Bobby’s bullet speech and his reminder of how he’s still alive because of a promise to Dean. I thought it was interesting that while Sam silently chided Dean for saying it, he didn’t contradict him either.
In the meantime Castiel standis there, silent but totally focused on Dean, as if his glare alone could force compliance (as John’s once did, if we believe Dean in Something Wicked). Significantly, he’s the one who reacts when Adam is resurrected. I have to wonder why this would be? Castiel was absent in JtS, and given his look of surprise, seems to have been previously unaware that Adam is their brother until Sam and Dean say so. But not only is he the one to bring Adam into the Winchester home (for Bobby’s is as close of one as Sam and Dean have these days), but he is the one to mark Adam as a Winchester, and the very act of that marking brings him to consciousness.
In Lazarus, we saw Castiel’s tie of connection to Dean in physical form. He later marks both Sam and Dean in 5.01. And soon after he marks Adam, Sam calls on their shared blood as a means of obligation. SPN has always placed a great deal of emphasis on the physical as the basis for many things, such as the manifestation of evil in the reappearance of ghosts, the consumption of flesh by monsters, the need for physical possession by ghosts and angels alike, as well as the forms of connection between people. Whatever one thinks of this philosophically, I think it’s hard to argue that this isn’t the show’s stance. Other ties exist, obviously, such as Bobby, Ellen and Jo. But when push comes to shove, it’s really the physical that binds. Sam and Dean, for example, may be at odds through much of the episode, but both are united when it comes to Adam, a younger brother to them both in so many respects, yet one whom they’ve literally never met.
Adam is tied to both of them, although it's more obvious how he mirrors Dean. Most obviously, he is being suggested as Dean’s replacement as a vessel. But there are smaller markers as well. For example, before Castiel reappears with Adam, Dean wants Sam to move so he can get a beer. This is an unnecessary bit of scene and dialogue – except that a little later on we see Adam attempting to sneak away, excusing himself as wanting a beer, and it’s Sam who tells him it’s already there, and shares one with him. In fact, Sam’s line about “Going somewhere?” and surprising Adam seems to echo his sudden appearance in Dean’s motel room.
Tellingly though, we also see Adam being more Sam-like in this scene. He doesn’t eat the sandwich, he doesn’t drink the beers. He also is completely resistant to what Sam is telling him about John. He suggests to Sam that he should think about what life would have been like had it been only him and Dean. And although Sam tries to take Dean’s position in JtS, where Dean insisted John had been trying to protect Adam from their life, here Adam takes Sam’s position from that episode, saying he would have been better off knowing, and suggesting that John didn’t do right by him as either father or protector. He also scoffs at the very idea of being a family and of doing family-like things. Sam’s used to having to try and persuade Dean. Here, he gets a good look at what it may be like to be on the other side of himself.
Later, of course, we see Adam being offered the same food and drink in the Green Room, and losing his innocence about angels, in the same way that Dean did in 4.22. Significantly though, Adam recalls his namesake as he eats the burger from the tree of knowledge, and then pays the price for it – something Dean at first resisted. Yet Dean too would have eaten, had he not been stopped by Castiel. I couldn’t help thinking of how this duplicated John’s absence as a father to Adam, with his much greater protective and guiding role for Dean.
So when Sam tells Dean in the motel room that he “brought help” it’s rather interesting to think of what the Winchester family might have been like had it always been Sam and John on the same side, with Dean the odd man out. Dean wants to leave, but Sam and Castiel force him to stay. And then Dean is placed in the unexpected position of seeing himself at a distance, in the form of Adam, someone whose romantic memories and concern for doing the right thing echo his older brother as much as his clothing does. This is what Dean didn’t get in heaven –- a removed perspective of himself.
And even though Sam did learn a lot about both Dean and himself from his time in heaven, he learns more by being around Adam. Dean jokes about “the power of love” (and boy, that may have hit Sam in all sorts of ways given the knee-jerk reaction he must have now to Huey Lewis, performer of the most beautiful song he's ever heard). But I think Sam realizes how thin that seems to Dean when he realizes it’s not a button he can push in Adam. He tries for simple family duty, but Adam puts him in his place there as well.
Adam calls on the memory of his mother as being the most important thing to him. Dean's reaction there points out how this is something that has always separated Sam and Dean, something we saw again in Dark Side. Mary is his blood, but she has never been Sam’s family, not like she was Dean’s. In fact, John is the only thing that unites everyone in that room. Bobby, Sam, and Adam never knew Mary. And Castiel, well, he seems to be in John’s shoes.
Of course, the parallels are also twisted around. When Sam left, he felt he was not only leaving for better things for himself, but that it was a way of avoiding death. In Dean’s case, he’s attempting to make things better for others, but he knows he’ll be both erasing himself and maybe spending a future in servitude. And while Sam never understood then how John feared for his safety if he were on his own, here Dean knows that Sam’s fears are on target. Back then, there was nothing Dean could offer Sam but himself, and here it’s the same in reverse. Sam’s got nothing but himself to offer. That’s all Bobby has either, and Castiel, however violently he expresses it, is essentially saying the same. None of the three have anything to give Dean, except to continue to stand together, whatever comes.
Watch ‘em Fall
There seem to be various possible repercussions from the events in this episode, for both the arc and the characters.
1) Where are Mary and John? My biggest question as I watched this (and we see the scene of Adam waiting on his mother in his dream) is that Mary and John’s absence seems to be intended as significant. Ash made a point of saying they were not to be found in heaven. Zachariah later makes a point of saying that he has gotten to know Dean’s memory of Mary. And also, if family members can be resurrected to become vessels, why not just use Mary and John as Lucifer's and Michael’s vessels?
The obvious implication seems to be that neither are in heaven (nor, as John’s escape would imply, in hell) because they are both on earth, as either themselves or someone else. As God is also supposed to be. On another show this might lead to thoughts of reincarnation as part of the cycle of life, but I don’t get the sense that SPN is going in this direction even though it would make a lot of sense in suggesting why Dean and Sam, specifically, are so vessel-worthy.
As an aside though, when I saw Marc Sheppard on his umpteenth genre show last week, it occurred to me it was too bad he’d already been cast as Crowley because he would be the perfect choice to play God. I mean, he’s been everywhere.
2) I found Sam and Dean’s make-up session in the car unconvincing. I don’t mean that it was played that way. I’m certain it was supposed to be convincing, unlike the coda to Fallen Idols. I mean that it seems too neat and tidy to have Dean turn around and say “My bad, all better now.”
Part of the reason I say that is that his principal concern, whether or not he can count on Sam, is still less clear than the reverse. Because what Dean did there was to come through for his little brothers. I think he did grasp that Sam continues to need him, and to a great degree, still sees Dean as his hero. Dean’s always needed that kind of validation, particularly from Sam, which is just a magnified need of how we all want to be admired and thought well of by our loved ones. I think it was no coincidence that when Sam releases Dean from the panic room, he doesn’t say Dean is his brother, he says he’s his big brother. Whether he was speaking from the heart, or being smarter than he admitted, it certainly worked.
Thus, I found Dean's conversation in the car to be rather contradictory. Because there Dean talks about how he realizes Sam is grown up now and not the kid he once was. In other words, Sam could be seen, and counted on, as an equal partner. But his justification for that is because Sam is "grown up" enough to believe in Dean. It seems to me that Sam has generally believed in Dean, but has been less convinced that Dean ever understood where he was coming from. And given Dean's line about leaving Sam to rot in the panic room, he wasn't always wrong about it either.
But I think that discussion did explain what was going through Dean’s head in those moments before he killed Zachariah, as he looked from Sam to Adam. I mention below that I think Adam’s presence changes Sam’s position in the family significantly. He becomes an older brother to someone, and a middle brother to Dean. Suddenly, Sam’s not the baby of the family anymore. My impression was that Dean looked from Adam to Sam, and saw Adam as that young boy he continues to hold in his mind when he thinks “Sammy.” And then he looked at Sam and realized he was –- not that boy, but someone else he needs to get to know in a different way.
Whether or not that will play out in a positive way in episodes to come remains to be seen. But I think that both have now taken a different look at themselves, and one another, through Adam. For Adam though, his encounter probably brought nothing good, as the implication is that Michael took him as his vessel instead. If Dean and Sam also believe this, that final scene rings a little hollow, since it was Adam who paid for it, and maybe Castiel as well.
3) One wonders what the fallout will continue to be with Bobby and Castiel. Both, one notes, did not believe in Dean the way Sam did. Sam soft pedals it, but Castiel tells Dean this in no uncertain terms before they enter the warehouse. Between that and his attack, you have to wonder where he and Dean will stand from here on out.
I thought the use of the angel sigils in this episode were cleverly done, both in Dean’s escape from the panic room, as well as Castiel’s use of it to defeat the angel guards. However, I also found it contradictory there, as I would have half expected Castiel to blow himself apart since he should have been just as affected by the “removal” aspect of the sigil – yet he couldn’t be removed from it. Perhaps he did, since that’s left in some doubt at episode’s end.
4) Still unaddressed is what happens if you’ve got Michael and Lucifer both in different vessels battling things out. Because the implication is that this is what has happened and it hasn’t been clear at all up to this point, what the difference would be.
Stand Up and Cheer
1) I was thrilled that Adam returned here. While I felt that JtS had played out well, and usefully for where the writers wanted to take Sam and Dean, I regretted the loss of Adam because I felt his introduction to their dynamic so intriguing. That Sam, for example, becomes a big brother for the first time in his life, changes his position within the family enormously. I thought it interesting (though perhaps unconscious on JP’s part) that we have the “hair grab of panic” here when he discovers Adam has disappeared, just as he did when he watched Dean drive away at the end of the last episode.
That Dean, who always saw Sam as being John’s special concern, sees Adam as being more special still, threw that perspective on Sam into question in JtS and, at the same time, hammered his belief in his own insignificance even further. But Adam’s presence also means that neither Sam nor Dean are ever alone in their positions, because Adam ends up echoing one or the other. It also is fun to watch them come together on his behalf as they did here.
Another happy factor is that Jake Abel is great in this role, at times echoing Sam and Dean in terms of behavior, and at others simply showing the general Winchester backbone without letting go of the fact that Adam is younger and less experienced than the rest of the family. Showing both resolve and naivete in this relatively limited role was refreshing to see, and I hope this isn’t the last of it we’ll get.
I’m so glad I stay unspoiled because, even though I spotted his name in the credits, it never occurred to me that the character was coming back as opposed to, say, some dream flashback.
2) I just have to say again, given the scene between Zachariah and Adam in the Green Room, they will both be missed if neither returns.
3) It was really good to see Sam and Dean finally being completely direct and open with one another. I think there's been moments of it throughout the season but here it occurred all through the episode. And as I said at the opening of this post, this was something all the characters got to do, to talk about how they really felt, and for the most part the actors really ran with it.
Questions Answered
1) Back in Abandon All Hope, the whole Colt storyline bugged me enormously because it seemed downright stupid to worry about that weapon when angel killing swords had been introduced some time back. At the very least, the Colt should have been thought of as an additional weapon, used in concert with the swords, not as a substitute.
It had never been entirely clear though, whether or not a sword had to be used by a fellow angel to kill another angel, particularly since this was what Castiel had implied. Clearly though, what he meant was that only angels had either the power and strength to kill another angel without the sword, or that they alone had access to those weapons. Because here the plan involves Sam using a sword to kill Zachariah, and when he fails at it, Dean is successful. The fact that Castiel returns to Bobby’s house with several swords is proof enough he has decided to arm the Winchesters with them.
Of course, one could still argue that Sam and Dean have the power because they’re vessels, not because they’re human. But that was just as true back in Abandon, so the larger question is why they haven’t been running around with those swords all season. Although it isn’t necessarily a given, one would expect that a weapon which can kill an angel will also kill a demon, making these super-handy.
2) Souls only need to say yes once but the body must be souled. This was certainly implied by Castiel having raised Dean in the first place. But one could argue that having the soul in hell and thus out of the purview of the angels was part of the problem. Adam being brought back from heaven, not just having his body resuscitated, would certainly be necessary to pressure Dean into saying yes. But efforts were also being made to get Adam to agree, something he clearly does more than once. And my guess is that once he did, regardless of if he took it back later, Michael could still possess him.
Back in The Rapture, Jimmy certainly didn’t want to play host any longer, and one suspects that if possible he would have said no sooner. However, given his effort to spare Claire the experience, one could say that it wasn’t that he had to say yes again to Castiel, but simply that he had to convince Castiel to change bodies once more.
I still think Anna’s situation is pretty baffling, but it seems unlikely the show will bother using her character again, so no explanation is likely to come forward there.
Other Bits
1) Mike was surprised that “Point of No Return” hadn’t been spelled as Know, as in the Kansas album. I am, too. It seems to me that would have been pretty fitting for Adam. 2) Loved the use of the “man upstairs” song in the background of the bar scene. 3) I also liked Stuart’s line about “maybe doing something with the Internet” next. The first thing I thought of was how this was a shoutout to Ghostfacers finally debuting online, but I suspect it’s also an industry inside joke about where people downsized out of the real paying jobs go. 4) That hanging light over the pool table was rather distracting in some shots that faced the bar. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at. 5) I also liked that melted glasses shot of Stuart – cool effect. 6) I really enjoyed the musical score used for the start of act one, as we see Dean making his preparations. 7) The motel room he was in kept giving me echoes of other rooms – the one in Monster and In the Beginning, specifically. 8) I had two problems with the scene, though. Given that Dean is obviously leaving the Impala behind, already loaded with stuff, I wondered why he was bothering to box up anything to send to Bobby besides the keys. But my second thought was – motel stationery!? The sort of cheap motels Sam and Dean stay in provide at most a small bar of soap and some plastic cups, they sure don’t have stationery. I doubt they had it even back when people still wrote snail mail letters. 9) I’m also going to assume that when Castiel appeared he took Dean straight to Bobby’s panic room and Sam followed behind driving the Impala. So that next scene probably took place at least a day later unless Lisa moved to South Dakota. 10) Although, speaking of Dean’s location, I wonder if he was still near Lisa or there were other stops on the farewell tour? I predict fic on this topic. 11) I thought it was interesting how all the things we see Dean putting in the box are things that came from John – the coat, the keys to the Impala, his favorite gun. I liked the touch, too, of Sam still holding the lock picks in his hand when he confronts Dean. 12) I also thought that Sam’s comment about Lisa suggests that Dean has been tracking her all along, something Sam knows and thus could easily guess at. Given Dean's comment about not having her phone number though, I'm assuming they haven’t been speaking. 13) Nice touch, to have Dean in room 100. 14) I don’t understand why Adam should be brought back out of the ground. He was cremated, not buried. Shouldn’t his dust simply have coalesced? (Cheaper to bury him, I suppose, than to have the CGI effect). 15) I guess Sam and Dean told Bobby everything about Adam at some point. 16) This must be the favorite SPN episode ever for Dean/Cas shippers – “blow me”? “I was about to get laid”? The wink? The “I gave everything for you?” fight? Of course, even Dean/Sam shippers must have had to blink and rewind about “erotically co-dependent.” I think that’s probably as textual as we’re going to get short of seeing them make out on screen. 17) I like the way they hung a lantern on the location of the Green Room. SPN doesn’t have a budget for Jupiter or a blade of grass.