SPN: 5x03 reaction and "To Try Men's Souls"

[alexseanchai]

Shallow bit first: SHIRTLESS JARED PADALECKI. Also, assuming the closing scene was a continuation of the opening, CONTINUITY PEOPLE. Where'd the shirt come from?

Cas is...a very poor hunter. Fantastic comic relief, though.

And we thought the hunting community was pissed at Sam after the Devil's Gate. Just wait till the word gets out about this. (Speaking of, who're all the names in Sam's phone?)

I'd say I love having an angel of color, but...fuck's sake show, stop it with the black antagonists. Two of 'em this episode.

We seriously needed a few more reaction shots of Lindsey freaking the fuck out.

You go right on lying to yourself, Dean.

Everybody who was thinking Sam was supposed to be Lucifer's vessel, Kripked to hell. And judging by the promo, in five-years-later 'verse, Sam's taken Lucifer up on it.

Hey, if Lucifer knows he can bring back Sam, why couldn't he bring back Sarah for Nick? Okay, door number one is obvious, he was lying to Nick. Door number two is equally obvious: he was lying to Sam. Door two's less likely than door one, I'd say, because he needed Nick to think Sarah can't come back, but it's still plausible, because if Sam dying would be a bad thing for Lucifer, Lucifer needs Sam to be convinced enough that suicide would be futile not to try it. But I'm kinda fond of door number three, myself: between Cold Oak and Dean's crossroads, Sam was either in hell or arguing with a reaper, which is exactly where he was for a few minutes in "Wishful Thinking" and exactly where he'd go if he died now, and once a reaper gets somebody, there's no getting them back. (Maybe what reapers do is dissolve souls into the ether, which would explain everything Tessa said in "Death Takes a Holiday", and then there's no reassembly possible.) And Lucifer probably wouldn't have any trouble finding Sam's soul once it stopped being attached to Sam's carved ribs, and could certainly get there quick enough to grab Sam before the reaper could. But by the time Lucifer found Nick, Sarah was long gone, off with the reaper to whatever her afterlife actually is. So Lucifer didn't have to lie to anybody.

ETA^2: comment thread on fanficrants:
moi: Sam and Dean Winchester are twenty-six and thirty and I cannot think of them as anything but 'boys' for the life of me.
smallcaps: *snicker* You could argue that, in terms of maturity, "boys" is not a completely inaccurate descriptor for those two...
moi, which I'm putting here because I can't be bothered to go find how to do the spoiler-blackout thing so I can put it in a reply comment there: When the boys get their acts and themselves together a couple eps from now, I want there to be a prank war. I don't think we've actually seen any pranks since Hell House.

I need to rewatch. So damn bad. (If only to remember what I was talking about when I Twittered "What's that mean for Michael and Dean?") (ETA: OH YEAH, the catatonic vessel.) (I think.) And I have to deal with crappy VHS quality until I can get to high-speed for a download on Monday. *sulk*

Also, a coda, which neatly manages to use the 5x02-coda idea I had at quarter to eight, and three guesses what I just added to my music collection. (Yay libraries.)

Title: "To Try Men's Souls"
Rating: Am I allowed to say PG-13 when there's instances of "fuck"?
Summary: Free To Be You And Me coda. Spoilers, obviously.
Word Count: 1000

Sam doesn't do well on his own. There was always Dean.

Then there was Stanford, where Sam floundered hopelessly for a week until his roommate mentioned a deep and abiding loathing for Stephen King, and then there was Sam and Zach. And then Sam and Zach and Becky, and then Becky's friends and Zach's, which to all appearances added up to half the undergraduates at Stanford. Okay, part of it might be that somebody his size is hard to lose in a crowd, but there were certainly enough people Sam could count as friends that he never had to be alone. But mostly it was Sam and Zach and Becky.

Then Sam walked into an art history class—distribution requirements, what could he do—and this hot blonde chick sat down next to him and pulled her nose out of Diana Tregarde and introduced herself, and that was that right then. Sam and Jess, Jess and Sam. One plus one is two.

Then Dean came back, and everything clicked into place in Jericho in a way it had sometimes when Sam forgot to hate the hunting life. One plus one is two. But the price of having his brother was losing his friends, and Sam and Jess and Becky and Zach were four, and Sam meant to keep that.

(Jess would have liked Dean.)

And then the desperate search on through the never for Dad and for Jessica's killer (I hunt, therefore I am), and somewhere along the line they shifted from Sam and Dean, one plus one is two, to SamnDean. A single unit. Take the square root to separate them, add one point four one to one point four one, and the answer is nearly three. The two of them together are just that awesome.

But the synergy bonus only applies when they're working together, when they have the same goal in mind. They lost some of it between Cold Oak and Wyoming, when Dean set himself on a path Sam couldn't let him follow, and the irony of it is that Dean could have survived Sam's death a lot better if they weren't so awesome together. And the irony of that...but Sam shies away from that thought, because it was Ruby's presence that kept him from falling apart while Dean was in hell, and Dean's presence that glued him back together after hell and Broward County both (trust you gave, a child to save, left you cold and him in grave), and it's only been a week since he saw Dean and he's been hearing the broken ceramic of his bones scrape against itself for six point eight days of it.

It doesn't help that Lindsey has decided he's a man of mystery and she's going to solve him. (Hush little baby, don't say a word, never mind that noise you heard, it's just the beasts under your bed, in your closet, in your head...) Or that she looks like Lilith at the convent. Or like Ruby used to. Becky. Jess.

She only said exactly what he's been thinking. Dean's out there somewhere, cheerfully belting out "Wherever I May Roam", and Sam's right here, remembering when Sam plus Ruby equaled bright is the moon high in starlight, chill in the air cold as steel tonight, hearing only Never free, never me, so I dub thee unforgiven. And then she turned into Lucifer—she was Lucifer all along—and he's singing I'm your life, I'm the one who cares, they betray, I'm forever there, you're my mask, you're my cover, my shelter and fuck it. Just. Fuck it. If Sam ever gets the chance he is stealing that tape from Dean and smashing it like he did the one with "Highway to Hell".

If his mental iPod must be stuck on that album, his theme song is fucking well going to be "Don't Tread On Me".

But what does he actually have that he can use against Lucifer?

That Lucifer's an angel and Lucifer needs a consenting vessel. But judging from the stunt Zachariah pulled, angels define 'consent' in a way that would send Jess and Becky into a two-part harmony rant on rape culture. Zachariah has nothing on Alastair, Sam's pretty sure, so Dean can hold out for a good long while, but if Dean's capable of breaking, what chance does Sam have? So really that only buys them time until Sam gives in, and meanwhile the world gets smashed to bits around them.

That Dean's Michael's intended vessel. That has promise, in that Dean is still under orders to save Sam or kill him, in that Dean hasn't explicitly broken his promise to Sam to follow that order. (Implicitly, oh hell yes, but there are reasons Sam meant to go to law school. Most of them boiled down to wanting to keep saving people and putting bad guys out of commission, as demonstrated by his plan to become a prosecutor, but factored into his long-term plans had been that Sam would have been one hell of a lawyer.) But if Sam caves and Dean doesn't, the world still gets smashed to bits, only in this scenario Sam's complicit in the way he was with Meg, raised an order of magnitude because demons don't actually need consent, and he'd rather be complicit in the way he is now. Sin of commission, sin of omission, not that there's a difference in the end because either way he's failing to stop it.

If Dean caves and Sam doesn't—ha—then they're back at Lucifer's promise to resurrect Sam. Whose life would have been infinitely simpler from infancy if dead shit stayed dead.

Sam thinks about calling Castiel and asking if Jimmy's awake in there, if it's possible that Jimmy has a shot at affecting Castiel's behavior the way it's demonstrably possible for demon-possessed people to. Because if that's the case, he can call Dean and they can both lie back and think of England and Sam can keep a lid on Lucifer long enough for Deanmichael to kill Lucifer—probably best accomplished, because Sam isn't convinced that Dean has gotten over preferring himself dead to Sam dead, by arranging it so that Samlucifer and Deanmichael kill each other—and then they can be done.

Sam wants, so badly, to be done. To be no one, nothing, zero.

To have what he lost. To be the square root of two.

Better not let Lucifer hear that thought. That's the whole reason Lucifer wants Sam; even when Sam and Dean were SamnDean, they weren't as close as Sam and Lucifer could be.