#and although i hated the way she treated sam & dean in s12 I UNDERSTAND HOW DIFFICULT IT MUST'VE BEEN

[destiel-wings]

336. mary winchester | SUPERNATURAL & THE WINCHESTERS

[drsilverfish]

All Along the Watchtower - 12x23 (and 12x22) and Circular Narrative Structure

An entity with yellow eyes enters a nursery:

1x01(Azaezel Prince of Hell over Sam’s crib)

and 12x23 (Jack the Nephilim, son of Lucifer and Kelly)

A woman dies in a nursery:

1x01 (Mary Winchester burns on the ceiling)

and 12x23 (Kelly Kline dies in a blaze of light giving birth to Jack)

(Ugh though - what is it with writing about pregnancy and birth as the ultimate horror <cough male writers cough>).

A woman tells her son that angels are watchng over him:

5x13 (Young pregnant Mary Winchester to yet-to-be-born baby Dean, after having found a plaster angel at a thrift store for good luck):

and 12x23 (pregnant Kelly Kline records a message for yet-to-be-born Jack, telling him the same thing. And  in 12x19 The Future - an angel, Castiel of course, promises to watch over Jack):

At the scene of the nursery trauma, Dean mourns for his mother.

1x01 (Dean, baby Sam and John outside their burning house):

and 12x23 (Dean as he watches Mary disappear into the Apocalyptic AU, whilst she is punching Lucifer in the face):

All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again...

That famous line from Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of Battlestar Galaxtica, which made significant use of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” (it being the song which the final five Cylons heard, calling them together) was no doubt an inspiration for Dabb’s S12 of Supernatural.

The line was borrowed by Ronald D. Moore from the 1953 movie Peter Pan, of which it is the opener. It refers of course to the fact that in J.M. Barrie’s novel, Peter Pan steals young Wendy away from the Darling family nursery to be “mother” to the Lost Boys and, in his follow up play, When Wendy Grew Up, Peter returns to steal Wendy’s daughter, Jane, away and so on, down the generations. When Peter comes for Jane, he initially does not understand that she is not Wendy, because in Neverland, time passes differently...

Lost Boys looking for a “mother” and the cyclical nature of time... Supernatural S12 is a jagged dark reflection of Peter Pan, in which a mother returns to her grown-up sons and they learn she is not the sweet “Neverland” version of her they’d carried all that time in their memories, and as a result, they finally grow up (like Wendy) in the process. 

Dylan’s song “All Along the Watchtower” has a cyclical narrative structure itself (which is why it inspired Ronald D. Moore, given that his retelling is about an eternal Human-Cylon creation and destruction cycle). Apparently in recent performances, Dylan has taken to singing the first verse again at the end of the song - thus emphasising its circularity. 

This is the last verse:

All along the watchtower Princes kept the view While all the women came and went Barefoot servants, too Outside in the cold distance A wildcat did growl Two riders were approaching And the wind began to howl

And this is the first verse:

There must be some kind of way outta here Said the joker to the thief There's too much confusion I can't get no relief”

Narratively, you can see that, chronologicaly speaking, it makes more sense for the last verse to come first, because it sets the scene and introduces the two riders, and then, in the first verse, they have a conversation. 

The lyrics, incidentally, echo a passage in the Bible’s Book of Isiah, about the fall of Babylon. Also very suitable for the Biblical fan-fiction that is Supernatural! 

So the title of 12x23 “All Along the Watchtower” is key to the whole of S12, because Dabb has, from the beginning, with the resurrection of Mary Winchester by God’s sister, been about going back to the start of the Supernatural narrative. 

Now, of course, in Dabb’s disinterring of the bowels of the show, some things are different and some things are the same. 

In 5x22 Swan Song, Sam jumps into the pit with Lucifer (and Michael) to save the world:

In 12x23 Mary jumps into the apocalyptic Hell dimension with Lucifer, to save the world from him:

(Annoying continuity slip here being the degradation of Lucifer’s character, who in 5x22 did not want to destroy the world, which he referred to in 5x04, The End, as the “last perfect handiwork of God”).

But, Mary saves the world, and her sons, from Lucifer this time around, after Dean has told her (in 12x22) that he blames her for everything that happened to him and Sam after she died, because of her deal with Azaezel. (Uh Dean, did you forget about the whole angel breeding programme and the Cupid that made Mary and John fall in love?). 

Still, this time around the cycle, Dean gets to express his feelings, after all those years bottling them up (a fact which is made clear, very early on in SPN, when we learn in 1x03 Dead in the Water that, like little boy Lucas, Dean was mute for a while after Mary died). Dean tells Mary he hates her, he loves her, and he forgives her. He finally utters the words, “I love you” (in 12x22) after all his struggles. Remember his whole, “I’m not, uh, with the whole, love and... love...” speech to Ezekiel/Gadreel in 9x02 Devil May Care? Well, familial love, at least, he’s now managed to speak out loud. As for the second kind of love - well - that’s still subtext. 

Not only that, but Dean gets to speak out-loud the trauma at the root of his co-dependency, to his mother (12x22 Who We Are):  “I had to be more than just a brother. I had to be a father, and I had to be a mother, to keep him safe. And I couldn’t do it... They tortured him in Hell, and he lost his soul.. his soul...”

The ghost of John Winchester, who has been haunting the narrative all season:

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/158388550099/john-winchesters-ghost-and-the-haunting-of-s12

is finally out in the open, as Dean tells his mother that he had to step up and parent Sam, because his Dad was too much of a mess to do it.  

(Although wouldn’t it have been a million times better if it had been Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and not Bobby, who appeared out of the dust in the Apocalyptic AU world?)

Thus, the original trauma which has propelled 11 seasons of Supernatural - Mary burning on the ceiling, John, after her death, being an “obsessed bastard” (3x10) combining “drunken rages” with  “chlld neglect” (12x21), and Dean having to step-up to parent Sammy, is re-visited and re-worked. 

Dean has learned that Sam is an adult and it’s time to let him fully be one, and Sam has learned that he can step out of his brother’s shadow and do just that. Hence, his speech to the American hunters, about how the Winchesters came to be working with the BMOL, which begins, “My brother and I...” and then has Sam say, “No... I....” and take responsibility for the decision himself. Plus Dean lets Sam go take on the BMOL whilst he stays, with his injured leg, to try and de-condition Mary (12x22).  

And Mary? This time around she gets to be active, rather than passive. Instead of burning on the ceiling, she gets to punch the Devil in the face with Enochian magic knuckle-dusters (after shooting Ketch-as-John-Winchester-mirror in the head). Of course, both times she is sacrificed for her boys, but she actively chooses that sacrifice the second time. 

And it is a re-working of the cycle, in that parents should sacrifice for their children, but children shouldn’t have to sacrifice for one another.  

S12 was by no means a perfectly executed exercise in “going back to the start”. Female deaths continue to be treated as throw-away compared to the heroic last stands afforded to male characters (witness Rowena’s nasty off-screen torching vs Crowley’s noble on-screen self-sacrifice). And some of the narrative development was rushed. Sam stepping into a leadership role could have been much more carefully worked into the roots of the season. Some of the dialogue in the last three episodes of the season was also extremely clunky (Sam’s whole speech to the American hunters <cringe>). 

Still, we’re not at the end of Dabb’s cycle yet.

How will a new baby tainted by demon blood - Jack this time around, not Sam, deal with the world, and be dealt with by the narrative? (Unfortunately, Castiel’s vision of Jack’s “perfect paradise” as told to Kelly isn’t a good sign - utopias rarely signal anything other than underlying menace in contemporary fiction).

And Dean has stood over Castiel’s corpse before. He spent most of S7 boozing and bottling it up. How will this narrative thread (the other kind of Dean’s “love... and love”) be re-worked differently in S13?

In Dabb’s Supernatural “Ring Cycle”: 

There must be some kind of way outta here Said the joker to the thief...