#I'm being very productive at work this week. veeeeery productive.

[katsidhe]

Why isn’t Sam insane? 2/3: Mitigating Factors

Welcome to Part Two of my TED talk about Sam’s Sanity :D Refreshments are available in the lobby. 

(Click Here for Part One, and the ask that prompted this.)

This isn’t a topic that can be covered neatly in a few hundred words, or a few thousand. I’m just gonna touch on a few things here: Sam’s coping methods, the amount of time he spent in Hell, and Cas’s polarizing fix in 7.17. 

What are the mitigating factors keeping Sam on his feet?

In brief: 

Lucifer’s diligence in keeping Sam recognizably Sam (see post 1);

The muffling effect of switching dimensions and timelines; 

Death’s wall, however temporary; 

A year of soullessness; 

Cas’s s7 intervention; 

Sam’s heavy-duty coping mechanisms and frankly alarming degree of compartmentalization, which is aided and abetted by all the previous factors (see post 3).

Sam’s a very internal type of guy, which is damn PERILOUS for someone who’s been through things as extreme and awful as he has. Luckily (?), Sam’s basically been built on dissonance, on hiding and separating and fracturing various spheres of his life and pieces of himself. He’s always been good at compartmentalization. Even so...why is he able to rope off his Cage trauma so effectively for several months in s7, into more or less one handy Hallucifer package?

Part of this is because his time in the Cage is already packaged differently. First by the nature of the memories themselves— they’re generally a bunch of mind-bendingly awful, time-dilated memories that took place in an inhuman dimension, in sort-of an alternate timeline while his soulless self was getting up to an entirely separate set of Earthly shenanigans. The Cage doesn’t slot neatly into Sam’s personal sense of human time and continuity. Second, both sets of memories were cordoned off and separated from him by Death’s wall for a number of months, before being set loose all at once in 6.22. That’s another factor making things easier. Third, his recent experience with the empathic disconnect and extreme pragmatism of his soullessness acts as, frankly, a really effective way to steel himself for an inundation of horror. Soulless!Sam himself was born from trauma and had been coping with what parts of the Cage he remembered; he’s basically given Sam a head start on that legwork. 

But the trauma’s still there! Sam’s unique methods for compartmentalization still need to do the heavy lifting. 

I have a lot more thoughts about that but this post got long; look out for a part three to come!

How long was Sam in the Cage?

Let’s talk timelines. I don’t think Sam spent millennia in the Cage. This is something I see discussed a lot. I know the calculation many people use for that conclusion comes from the time in s6 when a crack in Sam’s wall leaks out a few weeks’ worth of memories in a few minutes...but that evidence makes no sense, why in the world would traumatic sudden recall be 1:1 with how Hell time actually, physically operates?? It’s not like Sam literally went to Hell for a few minutes; he just got a bunch of stressful memories dumped on him all at once, that’s what “a few weeks” is meant to quantify: volume. There’s no reason to think the timeline would match up with the real physics of the place. Admittedly, it’s not a stupid idea to postulate that Hell works on the logic of “deeper” = more time dilation, but there’s no canon basis for this. Not to mention that I think six thousand years is several bridges too far even for the mitigating factors in play. Sam could conceivably still be functioning, but I think he’d be much less recognizable. ~120-180 years, while still absurdly long, is at least on the same order of magnitude of a human lifespan.

How much did Cas’s fix in “The Born-Again Identity” actually accomplish?

We know Cas shifting the burden in 7.17 didn’t solve everything. Sam still remembers the Cage; he’s obviously still very impacted by it even when it’s not the narrative focus; S8 Sam is quite different from s5 Sam. I view Cas’s bandaid fix as an analogue for getting Sam on the right meds/a short stay at a crisis facility that gets him back on his feet: the underlying problem is still very much present, but it’s not as acute and dangerous (no more hallucinations and no more literal psychosis), and Sam has been given tools (in the form of some type of mental muffling/emotional distance) to cope. I go back and forth on exactly what I think it is Cas DID. There was obviously a supernatural element to the way Sam’s illness was manifesting, in the sense that Sam couldn’t be sedated. Plus, it was a “transferable” condition. I sometimes am of the opinion that Cas extracted an infected fraction of Lucifer’s grace, but I’m not married to the idea... especially because I am firmly convinced that Hallucifer was 100% a construct of Sam’s creation, and I don’t like to muddy those waters too much. 

I did think 7.17 was a disappointingly cheap ploy back in 2011; that’s when I started watching the show, and Sam’s struggles were a big draw for me. When it aired, I feared 7.17 would be used as an excuse to never address Sam’n’Lucifer again. But instead I was shown to be happily incorrect: Sam’s ongoing Luciferian issues have since been addressed in multiple ways, large and small (especially in s11-14), so I’m mostly satisfied with the fallout of 7.17.