It’s never what you expect, is it? You never get where you’re going taking the road you planned on taking. Things never go according to plan. You expect that you and your brother will stand tall against Lucifer, and The Darkness; you expect that you’ll be ripped apart, and dropped into the Deep Dark, and that you and brother will be side by side, forever.
You expect it to be grand.
But it’s not that, is it? They get you when you’re not looking; when you slip up, just a little bit. They get you when you and your brother are sleeping; they get you when the gun that slipped from your fingers finds it’s way into theirs.
Sam gets shot. Sam struggles to breath. Sam is bleeding through his shirt.
* * *
It’s never what you expect.
Corbyn put his hand over Sam’s mouth and pinched his nose shut. He held on until Sam suffocated. Corbyn murdered one of the greatest warriors to ever walk the Earth, because he was in the right place at the right time. He had killed one of the only people capable of saving the planet from sure destruction, because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Do you think Sam thought about it? Do you think that at any point during that final, brutal struggle, he realized he was about to die at the hands of a civilian? This is a man who stuffed Lucifer back into his Cage by the strength of his will alone, and the man who survived centuries in constant torment, and the man who had his organs burned out from the inside by the Trials; and yet, here he was, bleeding out from a bullet wound, of all things, being suffocated by a total nobody.
It had to have been so frustrating; it had to have been so defeating. All of this, to end like a chump. All of this pain, and loss, to end up on the floor of an abandoned cabin.
It’s never, ever what you expect.
* * *
I don’t think Sam went into shock.
I think Sam died, and I think he was resurrected. I think that Dean was right when he said Sam was the only one who could take down The Darkness. It’s not because Sam is special, but because he isn’t. Sam is selfless, and even if Dean were to be ripped apart in front of his very eyes, he’d do the right thing. Sam gets shot in the stomach, and choked to death, and he takes down two werewolves by himself.
Dean is probably the most dangerous human on the planet, and if he isn’t the greatest hunter to ever wield a blade, he’s 1B. But his weakness is his dependency on his brother. It makes him weak, when he needs to be more. Sam loves his brother, but he saved The Book Of The Dead out of guilt, not codependency.
They make a perfect team together. But only one of them can survive with out the other.
* * *
This episode starts off stronger than it ends. Watching Corbyn choke the life out of Sam was very, very dark; not a hint of camp in that. I almost wish that Corbyn hadn’t been a werewolf; his desire to leave without Sam wasn’t technically incorrect, as Sam was slowing them down. There needed to be a more human weakness there, instead of him being driven by monster-lust.
Also, it felt at times as if we were watching a different television show; a Supernatural crossover, perhaps. The Cop, The Doctor, and Michelle and Corbyn all felt like characters that existed outside of the Supernatural universe, and while that made for a more complex characterization, it was still slightly jarring.
It’s also strange that Corbyn didn’t just slice Dean into pieces. It would’ve made more sense then him trying to choke him out; there are no parallels drawn about Sam’s death versus Dean’s, so it doesn’t really function as a callback. A better ending, perhaps, would’ve been to string it along as a chase, until Sam could arrive and shoot Corbyn.
The thematic through line was one we’ve dealt with before: Dean can’t live without Sam. But I thought it was solidly-written, and very, very well-acted. The actress who played Michelle, Erin Way, was too good for just a guest spot. She had some beautiful, poignant moments, and though this won’t ever happen, she’d be an interesting addition to the cast.
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