#because she's patroklos. (also kind of mary & jess). her death is tragic and that's part of the point

[antigonewinchester]

The Mark of Achilles, Part 2

Previous parts: Intro post; Dean & Hell, season 4; the Mark & Hell, part 1; Dean & Hell redux; the Mark & Hell, part 2; part 3; part 4; part 5; the Mark of Achilles, part 1.

Shay describing berserk violence as “demonic” fits quite well with the Mark and Blade being used to turn Dean into a literal demon at the end of season 9, freeing Dean from his previous human constraints. Demon!Dean in 10x01 through 10x03 could be seen as a quasi-berserker state, with Dean being violent, cruel, and socially isolated, pushing away Sam and Cas and eventually Anne Marie and Crowley as well. It’s also only after Sam traps him in the bunker and hurts him through the forced cure that demon!Dean tries to kill him.

10x06, with Dean killing Olivia and then shooting her seven more times, highly implied to have been from the Mark’s influence, is one of the few times where none of the situation that trigger a berserk state appear.

In 10x09, Dean has a dream about the Mark, where he’s in a small room surrounded by people he’s killed. The final image we see is of a red lamp with the same red lighting as from Cain’s fight in 9x11. (I still think this “dream” makes the most sense as a flashback to Dean’s time in Hell, although according to the director from an interview on Winchester Radio, he wasn’t thinking about it as such, and it’s unclear if Andrew Dabb as the writer intended that read either.) At the end of the episode, Dean is wounded by Sinclair with a bottle to the head and then trapped in Randy’s house, surrounded by the whole group of loan sharks who want to kill him. Similar to Cain’s fight in 9x11, we get Sam’s outside perspective and his going back into the house to reveal Dean surrounded by everyone he’s just killed.

We can see the next two episodes as a continuing of the berserking power of the Mark in how Dean attacks Metatron and Charlie. In 10x10, despite the importance of needing to give Metatron back to the angels “in one piece,” Dean attacks him, tortures him and would have killed him if Sam and Cas hadn’t pulled him away. Then in 10x11, despite good!Charlie and dark!Charlie being directly physically connected to each other, Dean keeps beating dark!Charlie up even when she’s down, leading to Charlie being very hurt when her two sides recombine. I’ll also note that the worst of Dean’s violence towards dark!Charlie happens after she hurts him first, hitting him and throwing him face-first into a stair railing, consistent with soldiers going berserk after being wounded. 10x11 also marks a turning point for Dean’s violence, with Dean protecting Sam and killing the witch in 10x12, “About a Boy,” without being overtaken by the Mark’s influence. The power of the Mark then goes on a narrative lull until it reappears later in the season.

In 10x14, “Executioner’s Song,” it’s Cain who has gone berserk, consumed by the Mark and going on a killing spree against his descendants. If we take Cain picking up the First Blade and attacking Abaddon’s demons back in 9x11 as his once again using the Mark’s berserker power, going back on his promise to Colette that he would no longer kill, then we can see his slaughter in 10x14 as a continuation of that moment. His actions could be described as “god-like,” with Cain casting his judgement and punishment onto humanity in his genocide. It also intrigues me that Cain connects his current actions back to his original killing of Abel, perhaps Cain’s own original moral wound in his murdering his brother to “save” him.

In 10x21, Sam and Dean rush to Charlie’s hotel only to find her dead, semi-mutilated body in the bathtub. In 10x22, after Charlie’s funeral and Dean harshly telling Sam that “it should [have been him] up [on the pyre], not her,” he leaves to purse revenge against the Stynes.

Shay says that “after Patroklos’s death, Achilles – to use the words of our veterans – ‘lost it.’ When a veteran says he “lost it,” what did he lose? What did Achilles lose?… In the veterans’ own words, they lost their humanity. Beast-god and god-beast replaced human identity” (82). It’s after Charlie’s death that we see Dean under the Mark at his worst, full of unrestrained violence and detached from social norms.

After he’s attacked and trapped by the Stynes, Dean frees himself and slaughters everyone using the Mark’s power, from the controlling patriarch Monroe to the abused teenager Cyrus, before using his new-found strength to beat up Cas. Investigating Rose’s death and Crystal’s disappearance, he makes misogynistic comments about both girls, and pulls a gun on both Crystal’s father and brother during his investigation. Vietnam veterans who went berserk, Shay writes, often “lost all concern for the safety of others, as much as for [their] own…,” and that especially “after the death of [a] veteran’s special comrade… all the diversity and multiplicity of social morality [became] replaced by the single value of revenge,” which fits with how Dean treats everyone and anyone, from victims like Rose to hunters like Rudy, during this part of the show (90).

Shay makes a strong case that becoming an “animal” is connected symbolically to the berserker state, as well as warfare and combat generally. He writes that “[many] ancient cultures teach us to refer to the cruelty of one human to another as “animal” behavior,” and that Homer “compares attacking warriors to wild animals dozens of times” (82, 83). For example, in the climax of his fight with Hektor, Achilles links himself to a lion and wolf, proclaiming his connection to Hektor isn’t one between men, but between animal and animal (83). In light of this metaphor, Alastair in 4x16 comparing Dean to an “animal” (ALASTAIR: I carved you into a new animal, Dean. There is no going back. DEAN: Maybe you're right. But now it's my turn to carve.) fits into the idea of inhuman cruelty during war, and given the threads of Dean’s time in Hell within the Mark of Cain arc, we could connect these two experiences as being similar times of berserking violence and Dean unconstrained from usual human limitations.

While Dean agrees with Alastair’s “animal” line in 4x16, in 4x11 he resists seeing himself that way, framing what he did in Hell as especially horrifying because he was still human. One veteran, looking back on his war experience, expresses a similar sentiment:

“War changes you, changes you. Strips you, strips you of all your beliefs, your religion, takes your dignity away, you become an animal. I know animals don’t… Y’know, it’s unbelievable what humans can do it each other.” (Shay, 83).

Viewing Dean’s violence through the lens of berserking also gives a compelling thematic frame to Charlie’s death.

I’d heard about Charlie being killed off, and the controversy surrounding it, way before I actually got it within the show. From what I’ve seen, it’s a sore spot for fandom, with the majority of takes being that her death is bad writing, narratively pointless, and sexist. Based on the contemporaneous reaction in 2015, the fandom took a similar attitude back then, too. Just see the incredibly awkward moment of Carver being asked about Charlie's death by a fan at Comic-Con 2015. Several articles were written about it in 2015, with three of them from the Supernatural Wiki (from the EW, the MarySue, and Gizmodo) all echoing similar sentiments: “there was no reason for her death to happen,” that her death “[follows] the same formula of fridging female characters with no apparent explanation or even good reason,” and that it was just a “hail-mary throw” for cheaply raising the stakes.

The fandom ire around Charlie’s death isn’t a surprise to me, and I certainly understand the frustration. It fits into the long-running pattern of killing off female characters to raise the stakes and / or give Sam and Dean something to angst over. (From my old LJ lurker days, I still remember the vid “Women’s Work” and its critical look at the show’s treatment of female characters through season 1 – 3.) While both male and female characters die in the show, women are more likely to be killed off than men, and even when men die, they’re also more likely to brought back in one form or another: compare Anna and Ruby’s singular deaths vs. Cas’s many deaths and resurrections; or Naomi getting killed off at the end of season 8 vs. Metatron lasting thru 5 seasons, although Naomi does briefly return in season 13 and 14. Charlie was also a lesbian, so her death meant the loss of one of the show’s few explicitly queer characters, a fan favorite to boot.

As frustrating as Charlie’s death is given these narrative patterns, I would disagree with critiques that frame it as pointless, without a reason, or pulled out of thin air, instead seeing it as a key turning point to season 10 and the Mark of Cain arc.

Shay not only names the death of a comrade in war as a consistent trigger for berserking, but paints it as one with a special importance, both in fiction and in real life: “Homer’s narrative and veterans’ narratives agree that betrayal of “what’s right'' is a conditioning event that prepares a soldier to go berserk at the death of closest friend-in-arms” (96). Patroklos’s death is an iconic part of the Iliad; even if people can’t name him specifically, they likely know someone killed Achilles’s best friend and that’s why he went berserk

The deaths of close friends is a part of war even for today’s soldiers, with technology and battle tactics the Greeks and Trojans could never have imagined. But in American military culture, especially in Vietnam but even now, soldiers’s grief is often downplayed and denied, with men being told instead to buck up, stop crying, and often explicitly to get revenge. For Shay, this denial of grief contrasted to its prominence in the Iliad and points to a particularly American, particularly horrifying problem for veterans: their society encourages the sublimation of grief into rage. “The virtual suppression of social griefwork in Vietnam contrasts vividly with the powerful expression of communal mourning recorded in Homeric epic. I believe that numerous military, cultural, institutional, and historical factors conspired to thwart the griefwork of Vietnam combat veterans, and I believe that this matters. The emergence of rage out of intense grief may be a human universal; long-held obstruction of grief and failure to communalize grief can imprison a person in endless swinging between rage and emotional deadness as a permanent way of being in the world.” (40 – 41).

This thread of grief shifting to rage very much calls to mind the Kripke era’s focus on the danger and futility of revenge, ala John and Sam’s previous arcs. John (who himself was a Vietnam veteran) and his quest for revenge against the YED neatly fit into this framework, especially with how it became an entrenched way of “being in the world” for him. Sam then followed in his father’s footsteps in season 1 after Jess’s death. Often, rage and grief intermingle with one another; John and Sam’s pursuits of the YED are a futile way of keeping both Mary and Jess alive, even if just in their memories. But while John and Sam’s revenge quests may have been “for” their loved ones, Mary, Jess (and later Dean) would have all been horrified to see what John and Sam did and who they became in trying to avenge them.

This same turn happens both in the Iliad and for Dean in season 10: a self-centered need for revenge over what their loved one would have wanted. For Achilles, this idea is directly addressed within the story. After he has killed Hektor and desecrated his body, the ghost of Patroklos appears to him and “reproaches [him] for the whole urgent enterprise of revenge against Hektor,” particularly because Achilles has still not buried him (88). For Dean, there’s first his conversation with Anne-Marie in 10x01, after he’s beaten up her ex. Demon!Dean says he was “protecting her donor,” to which Anne-Marie calls bullshit: “Yeah. I thought so, too… But then you kept going and going, and I realized whatever is going on with you has nothing to do with my “honor” at all.” This same sentiment returns at the end of the season after Charlie’s death with Dean’s killing of the Styne family. Dean justifies his actions as getting revenge for Charlie, specifically mentioning her when he confronts the Stynes in the bunker at the end of 10x22, but she wouldn’t have wanted him to kill Cyrus, let alone go on the whole family murder spree, in the first place.

All of this together means Charlie’s death fits into both the show’s long-running sexism and its questioning of revenge and pursuing vengeance for dead loved ones. Especially considering how the show killed off both Mary and Jess to spur John and Sam on, it would have seemed odd for the writers not to do the same for Dean with Charlie. She was the character who fit best into the narrative role of ‘loved one killed to send Dean on his final revenge quest,’ with her unique connection to him and being another ‘comrade in arms’ as a fellow hunter, and someone whose death would have hurt, both for Dean in-universe and for the audience watching (as is evident from the backlash from a vocal portion of the fandom). Personally, and in contrast to other deaths that do feel more like shock value or convenience, I feel Charlie’s death was a tragic yet thematically fitting end, illustrating her significance as Dean’s ‘Patrokolos’ and the ultimate tragedy of hunting and revenge, and I don’t think the Mark of Cain story line would have worked as well without it.

Sources

“4.16 On the Head of a Pin (transcript).” Supernatural Wiki: A Supernatural Canon & Fanon Resource. 11 Feb 2021.

“10.10 The Hunter Games (transcript).” Supernatural Wiki: A Supernatural Canon & Fanon Resource. 22 Apr 2019.

“Dear 'Supernatural' writers, what were you thinking?” Geek Girl Diva, Community Contributor. Entertainment Weekly, uploaded to the WayBack Machine, 7 May 2015.

Lane, Carly. “Supernatural’s Ongoing Fridging Problem Isn’t a Laughing Matter.” The Mary Sue, 15 Jul. 2015.

Luminosity, Sisabet. “Women’s Work -Supernatural.” The Internet Archive, 21 May 2019.

Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York, Scribner, 1994.

“SUPERNATURAL Comic Con Panel 2015.” YouTube, uploaded by Flicks and the City, 12 Jul. 2015.

“Ugh, Supernatural. You Really Didn't Have To Go There.” Anders, Charlie Jane. Gizmodo, 7 May 2015.

WinchesterBros. “Winchester Radio Discussion of The Things We Left Behind w/ guest Guy Bee.” Blog Talk Radio, 2015.

“Women’s Work.” Fanlore, 30 August 2022.