dissolving-worlds:

Why though did we get in 4×21 a scene of (imaginary) Alastair torturing Sam? I mean Dean was the character who had the thematic relation with hell and Alastair, it was his storyline, not Sam’s. Except for the chain scene in 3×16 and the light flashes in 4×1, it was never explicitly shown what happened to Dean in hell, and the dialogue about it was most often only superficial. So what sense does it make on a narrative level to write Sam being affected by a story element that wasn’t even connected to him (but to Dean) in the first place?! It’s as if even when Dean has a storyline, Sam still gets more explicit written content out of that storyline than Dean.