thumblr: SAFIYA Hiatus Rewatch "I Know What You Did Last Summer"

 SAFIYA:
"I Know What You Did Last Summer" is one of my favorite episodes of all time.  We get to meet Anna Milton, one of the few angels I feel doesn’t need to be deep-fried extra crispy (for the most part.)  We get to meet Alastair, getting a better view of Dean’s time in Hell.  We get to see more of Ruby, and more Ruby means a happy Safiyabat.  We get to see how Sam coped with Dean’s death. 

I Know What You Did Last Summer: The Episode

 We get to meet Anna Milton.  This poor woman.  She’s going about her life, living it and being vaguely normal, when suddenly she starts hearing angels in her head.  Can we take a moment to appreciate how horrifying all of this must be for her?  Because a lot of what they’re saying isn’t nice - they’re talking about the End of Days, and not the “sanitized” version of the Book of Revelations.  She somewhat predictably winds up in an asylum, which is then infiltrated by demons.  She doesn’t let her circumstances define her.  When she sees the demon, she fights even though she doesn’t really understand how she knows how to fight.  She just does it and she flees. 

We meet Alastair, the torture master from Hell.  He’s got a special relationship with Dean, we’ll learn more about that as time goes on, but he’s there and this is our first encounter with “Picasso with a razor.”

 We see more of Ruby.  We see her in three different hosts in this episode: a blonde secretary from Sheboygan, the hotel maid and the lovely host we’ve come to know and love.  We also learn about the fact that she’s possessing someone whose soul is no longer present - a choice she made for Sam’s benefit. 

Dean Winchester

 Dean brightens up visibly when Anna refers to him as “the Dean,” appealing to his hero complex and his need for recognition.  He’s very much enamored of Anna once they meet, although he was firmly reluctant to take the case.  He’s also very friendly and understanding of her once it’s revealed that she’s only tuning into angel radio and not actually mentally ill. The dirty work, though - telling her about her parents, for example - he leaves to Sam.

 Dean’s encounter with Alastair is brief but it doesn’t take more than a couple of words for Dean to recognize his tormentor.  This strongly suggests that Alastair had personal charge of Dean and that Dean probably didn’t interact with many demons outside of Alastair.  It’s not proof of course and he he could have interacted with others in company with Alastair, but Alastair would have been his primary guard and tormentor as well as instructor.

Sam Winchester

This is a very Sam-centric episode.  It is a rare glimpse into Sam’s head.  While parts of the fandom like to describe Sam as “talkative” and “needing to express his emotions and feelings,” that’s not Sam at all and we have to rely on flashbacks and very surreal “trip into Sam’s head” episodes to have any real idea what Sam’s thinking.  We’ll look at this trait a little bit more in the next section, but it’s worth mentioning now that when Dean presses him on how he can describe Ruby as “saving his life” he snaps back with a demand that Dean talk about his time in Hell - not because he actually expects Dean to talk, but because he knows it will shut him up.

We do see Sam’s time without Dean in this episode, and it’s not pretty.  We see him outright attempt suicide once, when he summons the crossroads demon (who appears in the guise of an attractive man, not a woman) and demands to exchange places with Dean.  The trade he wants isn’t like Dean’s was, he doesn’t want any time with Dean or even a moment to explain what he did and be thanked or punched or to even say goodbye.  He wants an immediate exchange, do not pass go do not collect $200.  This is suicide, plain and simple.  And I think that it’s worth noting that he does not want to spend time with Dean again, he just wants to die and go to Hell.  
When that fails he moves on to suicidally reckless - Ruby calls him out on it and he doesn’t deny it, he just puts the demon-killing knife to her throat and refuses to allow her to stop him.  And I wouldn’t say, honestly, that he ever really stops with “suicidally reckless.” 

What he’s not willing to do is to let other people suffer for his sake.  He’s able to pull off his first exorcism because Ruby is in danger, danger she got into saving him.  Ruby initially possessed a blonde secretary, and Sam refused to work with her even after she saved his life (again) unless she let the secretary go. 

It should be pointed out that Sam was deeply, incredibly resistant to sex with Ruby at first and their conversation emphasized the nature of possession.  She had to remind him that the body was entirely free of its original owner, and even then he was resistant.  He was drunk, he’d taken some pills (presumably painkillers considering the circumstances) that he washed down with more booze.  What we saw was not a loving act, however… visually appealing… the scene may be. 

Back in the present, it falls to Sam to do the dirty work when it comes to the brothers’ interactions with Anna.  He’s the first one to speak with her, to coax her out of her hiding place.  She’s initially excited because she knows the name, but then he’s shunted off to the side for “The Dean,” and gets “and some of them don’t like you at all.”  Sam has to be the one to break the news to Anna about her parents.  At the same time, for all that it was Dean that she was excited to meet it was Sam that she asked for permission to call her parents and Sam who actually tried to comfort her.  Not Dean.  Considering how things played out, in season 5, that makes me very sad.

Winchester Family Dynamics

Dean is furious when Ruby shows up at the bar.  Some of that fury may be the result of Sam giving up the money to go talk to her but that’s not really what’s going on there, it’s not what he’s talking about.  He complains the whole time and tries to block the conversation about the case, objects to Sam’s involvement with her.  He doesn’t talk about the money at all.  It is entirely about Ruby.

He continues to pursue the matter in the car later, pushing and pushing Sam about his relationship with Ruby.  He is neither gentle nor nice about it.  He has never approved of Sam’s relationship with Ruby even when Dean himself trusted Ruby, and now he’s just incensed.  Sam, though, Sam stabs back.  He demands that Dean talk about Hell - “And don’t spare the details.”  Per their conversation at the end of “Wishful Thinking” he knows Dean won’t actually talk about Hell, and that’s not what he actually wants here.  He wants Dean to shut up and he’ll use whatever means necessary to achieve that end.  This is a far cry from the man people see as “needy and wanting to always talk about himself and his feelings.”  This is a man who is willing to hurt his brother rather than talk about himself.  He does not see Dean as a confidant.

The scene where they “patch each other” up is a favorite one in the fandom, and it’s an important one for the window it provides into the boys’ lives.  They get beat to hell all the time and it’s not like they can really access hospitals.  The thing is, they’re not “patching each other” up, the way I see it described a lot of the time.  Sam gives himself stitches (which we’ve seen him do before, in Mystery Spot.)  He’s giving himself stitches in a challenging location with one hand while Dean complains about how long it’s taking, apparently without ceasing because he should be Sam’s priority.  Then Sam resets Dean’s shoulder.  They’re not patching each other up.  Sam patches them both up while dealing with Dean’s complaints.

Of course, now the brothers have to talk - again, at Dean’s insistence, not Sam’s.  This is a conversation that never fails to infuriate me toward Dean.  Sam describes his failed suicide attempt - failed because Lilith didn’t want his soul.  He describes coming home to find Ruby and two other demons and how he didn’t even fight, just told Ruby to go ahead and kill him.  He describes his suicidally reckless fight with Lilith.  He also talks about having sex with Ruby and using his abilities.

So Dean sits there and he hears his brother talking about wanting to die, trying to die, and what’s his takeaway?  Sex with Ruby and “manipulative bitch who did all she could to get you to go bad.”  Sam’s using his powers to save possessed people from demons.  In what world is that “bad?”  Dean’s.  The sex is bad because Sam is having sex with someone that is not Dean-approved in a context that was not Dean-arranged.  But seriously, his brother wanted to die, tried to die, and his takeaway is “Sam had sex that I didn’t approve of and turned into a bad guy because he used his powers that I told him not to.”

He does make a half-hearted attempt to thank Ruby for not letting Sam die.  She points out the half-assedness of the attempt.  The moment passes.