It’s The Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester: The Episode
This one gives us more angels and demons, a hot apocalyptic mess. We see more of Castiel, and we see him in a role that is supposed to be sympathetic (I guess.) We also see him in the role of a commander. Cas is in charge of Uriel, that’s made fairly clear here. He’s joined by the completely unlovable Uriel, whose contempt for humans in general and for Sam in particular is made abundantly clear.
I’m kind of curious about something. I’ve seen
We also have the presence of not one but a team of witches trying to summon a demon, an interesting variant on the old stories I remember (I seem to recall Samhain as a holiday, not as a demon? Or am I misremembering?) whose summoning is one of the 66 seals and whose powers include the ability to summon an army of monsters to do his bidding. It is this monster who the Winchesters have come to town to fight.
Dean Winchester
This is going to seem kind of nit-picky and maybe as a small thing to be annoyed about, but Dean saying that if he could choose any form to be in as an immortal witch he’d pick a hot cheerleader really grossed me out. Dean around high school girls grosses me out in general - we’ll talk about that a bit in “After School Special” too. He also fat-shames the astronaut kid. What was his next move going to be, stealing the kid’s candy? It seemed inappropriate.
We see that Dean is still sold on the angels even if he thinks they’re dicks. He says specifically that they are righteous. Maybe it’s because they see him as righteous? And I don’t know - knowing that they know him, what he is and was in Hell, and still see him as “righteous” himself probably goes a long way toward cementing that loyalty. Knowing that they see Sam the way he sees Sam probably does too.
In the end, Castiel tells Dean what their true orders were and it wasn’t to stop the breaking of the seal. It was to test Dean under battlefield conditions. Where have we seen this sort of thing before? Oh right - “Jus in Bello,” only it was Sam who was being tested by Ruby. This is not a subtle parallel.
Sam Winchester
This is Sam’s first encounter with angels. Sam is the one who has always been faithful to God, he’s the one who has always believed, the one who has always prayed. Ever since Dean’s resurrection he’s encouraged his brother to believe despite never being honored with the presence of an angel himself and he’s never shown the slightest bit of jealousy or bitterness about it. The most he’s done? ”I’m not scared of angels,” to Ruby. An expression of faith.
All of that faith, all of that hope, is undone in seconds. Castiel hesitates to shake his hand and dismisses him as “the boy with the demon blood.” The diminutive is important. Dean is “the righteous man,” Sam is the “boy with the demon blood.” Uriel is worse. Uriel informs him that he will be obliterated the second he is no longer “useful.” He’ll never trust angels again, and he’s not likely to give them much of an ear either. He sees them for what they are.
To be fair, I don’t think that they expected their encounter with Sam to push him away so completely. I think they expected him to remain more in awe of them. Uriel certainly didn’t expect to receive the amount of back talk that he did at the end of the episode. I think they underestimated Sam Winchester, as most people do. (I mean, Victor Henricksen openly referred to him as a halfwit.)
Sam has shown a knowledge of witchcraft on a few occasions and it crops up again here. I sometimes wonder why it is that he’s more comfortable with that knowledge than Dean. We also see his comfort with “winging it,” coming up with a plan on the fly in terms of masking themselves from Samhain.
When Dean forbids Sam from using his abilities (more on that later) Sam goes in with the knife against Samhain, but he doesn’t go in to stab him first. He starts throwing punches. I have to kind of wonder about his thought process here. ”I have the ability to exorcise this powerful demon, and I can kill it with impunity because the host is dead already. But I’m not going to do either. I’m going to punch it in the face because I know that somewhere out there a pudgy Massachusetts woman is watching this, and she needs to see more of me throwing punches in her life. She’s having a bad week.” That’s exactly how it went and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Winchester Family Dynamics
Neither Sam nor Dean wants Lucifer to rise, which ostensibly puts them on the side of Heaven. Sounds great, right? Of course, Sam’s encounter with Castiel and Uriel immediately makes him extremely angel-skeptical. Just as with their father Sam questions everything. When they go in to fight Samhain, Sam brings up the possibility of using his abilities and Dean flat-out forbids it and demands he use the knife, because the angels told him not to use his ability. Sam points out that the angels don’t seem to be right about much but Dean insists that they’re right about this.
And why is that? Well, it’s because in this case they’re saying what Dean wants to hear. He’s hated Sam’s abilities ever since they first cropped up in season 1. They’re something that is uniquely Sam, something that he cannot control and that clearly makes them evil. The angels played on that in showing him Mary’s deal and what Azazel did to Sam.
When Dean sees Sam fight Samhain, the knife is on Dean’s side of the room. He could have stepped in. He saw that Sam had lost the knife. If Sam had not exorcised Samhain, not only would Sam have died Samhain would have been freed to unleash a horde of monsters upon the earth. Dean saw that, and he saw that Sam was suffering and in pain as he used his abilities in his own defense. He didn’t care. It wasn’t important to him. It wasn’t important to him that Sam had no other options, and he didn’t lift a finger to grab that knife and go help his brother. All he could do was angst about how Sam broke orders and used his abilities.
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