saferincages:

I don’t usually jump in with commentary these days, but I just saw this episode again for the first time in a lot of years, and I need to talk about this?

#all i’m sayin’ is that if they aren’t trying to ~hint~ at dean having a different take on this than sam does in this scene#then it’s shot and acted really weirdly#like dramatic face-in-shadow cut of dean looking at the house#the fact that dean—who normally jumps to john’s defense—deflects what sam is saying without actually agreeing with what he said via @subcas

this is a really important and yet subtle scene? 

let me back up and talk about this episode in general. this is Early Days, obviously, this is Dean who still almost reverentially defends or is compelled to excuse their father, because he has yet to even begin to process a lot of their childhood and upbringing, and because a key component to he and Sam’s early relationship was the way they argued about John. John himself remains an enigma to us here, we’ve barely seen him, all we know is what Dean tells us and what Sam tells us, and their perspectives conflict. Dean is still meant to be the good soldier; Sam is still meant to be the rebellious son. (the early parallels to the Michael/Lucifer thing are so apparent in hindsight it’s a bit frightening, because they’re cosmic chess pieces, and they have no idea how cruel the game is). but this episode is also really difficult emotionally, and it plays with those emotions in a variety of ways. 

this is at a point where Sam was ostensibly the surrogate, the way into the narrative, because he escaped this world, this life, and then circumstances wrenched him back into it, so the writing intends for us to be learning about the hunt through his rejoining his brother, we’re meant to be riding shotgun, too. there’s an argument to be made that the writing took turns switching that pov fairly early on, but that’s a whole other discussion, as is the fact that the archetypes established for Sam and Dean in the pilot are also deconstructed to a degree fairly early on (I think some of it even happens in the pilot itself, but it’s definitely happening by “Dead in the Water,” and by “Nightmare” the audience already knows – or should be recognizing – that the tropes we’re presented with and the things we’re sometimes told are often not what they seem, or are only scratching the surface of these two boys’ characterizations. but I digress).

anyway, Dean is multifaceted here (as he so often must be), dexterously slipping in and out of roles like he dons a costume, because so much of what he does is tempered by a performative fluidity (especially at this point in the story, with the dichotomous presence/absence of their father looming over him). Dean plays funny-bordering-inappropriate (reveling in dressing up like a priest, enjoying mini hot dogs), Dean plays offense and cynic, Dean has the wrong approach in taking his gun into the house (the wrong approach doesn’t mean it’s an invalid perspective, though, and it’s important to delineate that, and sometimes that nuance is lost when it definitely shouldn’t be), Dean protects and tends to a woman even though she doesn’t really deserve it because he’s not going to let her be murdered in cold blood, Dean has difficulty processing the evil humans do, Dean is terribly afraid for his brother (and of him, to a degree) and is doing his very best masking to cover it up – and he does a lot of this without verbally communicating it. this is fundamentally an episode for Sam with some mythology arc establishment, so his role is more concretely defined in its words.

it’s the beginning, the first glimpse, of the “chosen” children, and it is terrifying and bleak. the “monster” isn’t a monster at all, but a victim, and Sam is the one with the empathetic (and telepathic) connection to him, as tends to happen when Sam sees himself reflected in someone, and that’s a necessity at this juncture. he listens to Max, describing being beaten by his dad and uncle, exposing the fresh bruise on his side, as Max asks if he knows what it’s like to have your father look at you with hate in his eyes, and Sam says no, and realizes it’s true. this is someone who lost their mother the same way they lost Mary, and then had no one to care for him, who was physically hurt with no one to step in and protect him, and it causes Sam to consider what he did have, and in that moment he comes away grateful, not resentful. Max is a dark mirror. the fight is against someone who doesn’t deserve to be harmed, who never deserved to be harmed and who was brutalized throughout his childhood. Max is grief and terror and trauma, and they wish they could save him, but ultimately, they can’t. it’s desolate and horrible and sad, and there was nothing they could do. (it’s also the first time we see Dean die bloody – the Shifter in “Skin,” and his sickness and near-death in “Faith” notwithstanding – and even though it’s in a vision, it’s startling.) ultimately, the Winchesters leave the scene, and head to the car, and have a conversation, and we get the exchange in this gifset.

Sam saying this is surprising, and you’d think after the fights they’ve had about their dad, Dean would be really happy about it. “Scarecrow” was only three episodes earlier, and there their altercation was so bad that they literally split up! Sam says, “We were lucky we had Dad,” and it might be the nicest thing anyone could ever say about John Winchester as a parent. Sam, who is already dealing with visions and telekinesis, who’s afraid of being a “freak,” then follows this up even further by saying, “We turned out okay.” he could respond by being wrecked by what just happened, but he’s grasping onto whatever he can find, and sure, he and Dean are nomadic outsiders who regularly face down horrors of the night, but they turned out “okay!” there’s an earnestness to it, but it’s tonally jarring. you’d think the Dean presented to us at this point should be thrilled, his response should be like, “I know, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! we have our dark spots, but we’re not cursed. we’re awesome!” but it isn’t. their positions are flipped, thrown off-kilter. Sam has been pushed to see what he did have, but Dean has been pushed the other way. suddenly he’s having to look at and truly examine how he was treated, and he’s not prepared for that at all yet, it’s threatening, it’s suffocating, even more than the worry of what’s happening to Sam. if he looks at it too closely and realizes how ruining it all was, he’s not going to be able to handle the other problems at hand. if he looks at it too closely, all those ugly inner demons like damaged self-worth are going to rear up and strike. 

he’s surprised, and then almost bewildered, and then he makes this face that’s like…bordering on repulsion, honestly. look at his frown and that breath and the way he furrows his brow, and he immediately casts his eyes downward, which is clearly a deflection, and then he looks away from Sam altogether, back at the nightmare of a house, and they cast his face almost completely in shadow, the way the lighting is filmed obliterates him. Sam is mostly in the light (it’s a little more than half light, we can still make out his expression), but Dean is darkened and turned from us, and then he turns back and echoes, “All things considered” in an off tone, which doesn’t support what Sam was saying at all, it just parrots it. it is not an acknowledgment or an agreement. nothing on this earth will convince me that this wasn’t a conscious choice to subtextually tell us that he painfully doesn’t believe they turned out okay (despite anything he’s said to the contrary, which suddenly feels like sublimation), and that John abused Dean to some degree, in a different way than he did Sam (because whether he laid hands on them or not, there’s no way to justify his neglect and emotional abuse, which they both suffered and were damaged by in individual regards). we know John was often critical for various reasons, that he got angry over supposed infractions, that he raised his voice to them, that he treated them like he was their drill sergeant, but something more is happening here. and maybe it’s just that Sam got the chance to be a kid, which isn’t to disregard how awful his treatment was, Sam had Dean looking out for him, and Dean had no one, and was forced into a parental role as a child, something he should never have been. maybe it’s just that Sam didn’t have to worry about stealing/finding/preparing food, or stealing Christmas presents in an effort to make believe that your dad loves you, or not getting the last bowl of cereal, that Sam wasn’t the one constantly scared of not being protective enough, of being deficient and failing as a hunter and as a guardian (which we see even more clearly with Dean a few episodes later, in “Something Wicked”); maybe it’s simply a response to the fact that Sam, however briefly, got out, went to college, and had real friends, and knew what it was to sleep somewhere other than a trashy motel room, and there’s a part of Dean that envies that, because he never had a respite, and he’s ashamed that he wanted one. it could be all of those things, Dean is given a lot to express in a matter of nonverbal seconds (also a recurring theme – quick, deep flashes of emotion). but the choices that were made in the filming and the acting allude to something else underneath it.

the ominous quality remains to the last scene, where Dean is seemingly back to himself, composed, asserting they’re going to find and eliminate the yellow-eyed demon. Dean says none of this is Sam’s fault, and Sam expresses his fear that he could turn out like Max, and Dean then tells him that will never happen, because he had an advantage Max never had, and Sam is like, “Dad? Because he’s not here.” And Dean smiles and says, “No. Me. As long as I’m around, nothing bad is gonna happen to you,” and I swear this is still connected to the scene at the car, because yet again, Dean isn’t counting their father as an advantage, he’s putting that on himself instead – I’m here, and I won’t abandon you, nothing bad is going to happen. how many times did he have to be the buffer? how many times did he endure the bad things so that they wouldn’t touch Sam, especially when they were children? how many times did he reassure himself that he’d take whatever came, because he felt he had to be the protector? The moment passes, and he’s joking about using Sam’s psychic abilities in Vegas, and there’s a moment to breathe and hope things are okay, until it closes on the worry and anxiety in his face as he watches Sam get in the car, and that moment is so deliberately emotionally telegraphed that it’s unsettling (nothing is okay!), that it makes this scene prior to it stand out even more imho, because we’re getting cues and undertones to their interior lives that are narratively vital.

tl;dr the acting and directing/lighting take what’s in the script here and make it a shockingly brief and yet profound bit of character study