#not even 5 minutes into the game and a LITERAL loan sharks comes and just yoinks your shell away

[dragonanon]

Krill: The bitchass Duchess stole my damn house! You can’t have shit in the ocean! >:C

[antigonewinchester]

The Mark & Hell, part 5

(Previous posts: Intro post; Dean & Hell, season 4; the Mark & Hell, part 1; Dean & Hell redux; the Mark & Hell, part 2; part 3; part 4.)

After Dean is cured of his demon-ness in 10x03, he manages to mostly hold the Mark at bay. However, at the end of 10x09, Dean is overtaken by the Mark and, after flashing back to previous kills and his time as a demon, doesn’t just kill Salinger and the three loan sharks attacking him, but also Randy, Claire’s shitty surrogate father. Although Randy manipulated and treated Claire very badly, it’s implied he wasn’t trying to hurt Dean at the time, and Claire is further traumatized by Dean killing him. There’s also a subtext of Dean’s killing as not just about Claire but also as a kind of served cold revenge for his own past experience with sexual violence, with Dean’s story about getting roofied at CBGB and then being rescued by John strongly paralleling Claire’s near rape by Salinger before being saved by Cas.

In 10x10, “The Hunter Games,” when Claire talks about Dean’s killing with the murder couple she befriends, she describes it as: “[Dean] didn’t even know [Randy]. Or the others. And he gutted them. And I saw him standing there, soaked in blood. Looking like he enjoyed it.”

Later on in the episode, Dean goes to torture Metatron for information, and we get this exchange:

[DEAN pulls out an angel blade, slams it on the table and goes to close the door.] METATRON Whatcha doing there, Slugger? [DEAN locks the door.] DEAN I’m settling a score that’s taken way too long to settle. Oh, and while I do that, I’m gonna get some information. [DEAN picks up the angel blade and walks up to METATRON.] And I’m gonna enjoy every minute of it. Because you’re gonna tell me everything. All of it. And it ain’t gonna cost me a damn dime. Slugger. … METATRON I repeat my offer. Each step costs you. DEAN You’re confused. See, each step you don’t give me – is gonna cost you. And it’s been a long time coming. I mean, where do I begin? Stealing Cas’s grace. Casting out the angels. Making Gadreel kill Kevin using my brother’s hands. Starting an angel war. And, oh yeah, you killed me. METATRON [scoffs] My morality is being judged by Dean Winchester? How many people have suffered and died because they believed in you? How many times have you lied to Sam, including, oh by the way, when he was possessed by an angel? And you say, ”Oh well, it’s all for the greater good.” But lately, buddy? That greater good thing just went away, didn’t it? Now, people die just because you want them to. [DEAN punches METATRON in the face. METATRON grunts, then chuckles.] Good, Dean. Go darker. [DEAN punches METATRON again. METATRON, bleeding at the mouth.] Go deeper! [DEAN punches METATRON four times.]

While Dean might justify his actions as being about getting info on how to remove the Mark, he’s also hurting Metatron because he can and because he wants to. And Dean wants to hurt Metatron just like Metatron hurt him, quite literally. If the dialogue isn’t enough to emphasize Dean’s vengeance, the ending choreography of Dean beating up Metatron directly mirrors how Metatron beat up and killed Dean back in 9x23, with Dean now in a position to return the favor:

CURTIS ARMSTRONG [who plays Metatron] What happens right here is kind of interesting, because what [Dean] is doing is a direct mirror of what [Metatron] did to him just before [he] killed him [note: back in 9x23]. Staring with the multiple slugs, and then grabbing the face, and the holding the face, and talking into-- and then taking out the knife. It’s an exact copy.

Dean’s beating also doesn’t lead to any real information, just Metatron blurting out a meaningless phrase that has no connection to the Mark at all, with Dean losing himself to his violence and Sam and Cas again having to intervene and pull him away so he doesn’t kill Metatron.

In 10x11, “There’s No Place Like Home,” Charlie acts as a narrative parallel for Dean and his troubles with the Mark. To win the war in Oz, she split herself into a Dark and Good sides, with her Dark self employing, and enjoying violence, killing and torture. For instance, in the cold open of this episode, the audience sees a man running in fear from dark!Charlie. As he cowers, she tells him “I know [you don’t know anything else I want to know]. I'm gonna torture you anyway. 'Cause who doesn't love a little torture?”

On the commentary track for 10x11, Felicia Day specifically comments that Dean liked hurting dark!Charlie, and that enjoyment as being connected to the Mark:

[note: After Dean has beaten up Dark!Charlie very badly but has stopped. He’s looking at his bloody hands while Sam takes care of her.] PHIL SGRICCIA [director of the episode] Look at [Dean]–  look at him– FELICIA DAY  [actor in the episode] Look at that sad–  It’s your fault! ROBBIE THOMPSON  [writer of the episode] You bad boy, you. SGRICCIA And again, the hand stuff. It’s not shaking. DAY Not shaking because he loved it.

After 10x11 Dean again manages to hold the Mark in check for a long time, although he is very happy after having killed six vampires alone at the beginning of 10x19, “The Werther Project,” describing it as “a personal best” as well as “the only way [he] can take the edge off” from the Mark.

However, things take a major turn when Charlie is killed at the end of 10x21, with Dean spiraling down into intense violence and leaving Sam and Cas to get his brutal revenge on the Styne family in 10x22.

Dean goes on to kill the whole family, whether they had a hand in Charlie’s death or not, including the teenager Cyrus. Although Cyrus hadn’t been involved in Charlie’s death and pleads with Dean that he’s not like the rest of his family, showing that he’s never taken body parts from his family’s victims, Dean still shoots him.

This murder runs counter to Dean’s usual moral compass. Looking at both Sam and Dean’s moral views codes would be an essay in and of itself, so to simplify, I’ll say I quite like this essay on Sam and Dean’s morals. Postmodernmulticoloredcloak broadly frames Sam as a consequential and Dean as a deontologist: Sam generally acts “based on the results of his actions,“ while Dean acts “based on whether he believes that those actions are inherently good or bad.” A great example is 3x12, “Jus in Bello,” and the question of killing Nancy to exorcise all the demons attacking the police station. Sam considers sacrificing Nancy; if her death can save everyone else, then it’s an acceptable, if brutal, act. But Dean refuses to sacrifice Nancy; he sees killing an innocent girl, even if it will save him and everyone else, as an innately immoral act.

As to how this plays out in hunting, Dean is generally OK with killing monsters or people who have already hurt or killed others, but not before then. For example, in 7x03 Dean kills Amy because she had already killed people, but spares her son, because he said he hadn’t hurt anyone. Although there’s some narrative weirdness and ambiguity around Cyrus – the audience directly sees Cyrus’s resistance towards his family’s evil and desire to escape from it, while Dean doesn’t – if he hadn’t been under the Mark’s influence, Dean would very likely have accepted Cyrus’s word and let him go instead of killing him.

In the last scene of 10x22, Dean then brutally attacks Cas when when Cas tries to stop him from leaving the Bunker. I read this fight as Dean taking his ‘revenge’ on Cas on a number of levels. Dean first hurts Cas and then goes to leave, Cas tells him to “stop,” and Dean then returns to beat him up a second time. Similarly to how Dean acted a demon, he doesn’t like Cas telling him what to do and reacts with violence. In these two fights, many of the ways Dean hurts Cas also directly mirror how Cas has previously hurt Dean. As laid out in this post by nottherealdean, Dean forces his way out of Cas’s hold like Cas had bound him in 10x03, breaks Cas’s wrist like Cas did to him in 8x17, and throws Cas against a pile of books like Cas threw him into the fence in 5x18. Now that Dean is stronger than Cas because of the Mark, he’s finally in the position to “deal out some pain [himself],” and he does so quite viciously.

In 10x23, “Brother’s Keeper,” the act that shows Dean has almost been completely overtaken by the Mark is when he goads a vampire holding Ruby hostage into killing him.

RUDY Dean-o, uh, this is Reggie. We're just gonna talk, all right? And -- and come to an understanding. REGGIE [pointing the knife at Dean] Back your ass out of the room, mister, and leave the blade. DEAN [Dean looks down at the machete] Yeah. No. Rudy, walk away. RUDY [panicking] No, D-- no, d-Dean-o, just do what he says, okay? DEAN He's not gonna kill you. You're his insurance, all right? Now man the hell up and walk away. REGGIE Oh, I will kill him, friend. You keep yappin', I will. DEAN Do it. RUDY Dean! REGGIE Back up. DEAN [slowly walking towards Reggie and Rudy] Do it. REGGIE D-don't test me. RUDY Dean, stop! DEAN You don't have the guts. [Reggie points the knife tip over Rudy’s chest. Rudy’s eyes are wide in fear. Dean makes as if to jump at Reggie.] DEAN HAH!!! [Reggie plunges the knife into Rudy’s chest. Crystal screams. Dean looks annoyed. As Rudy falls forward Dean moves in and cuts Reggie’s head off with the machete. Crystal continues to scream and cry.]

Dean is straight up in anti-hero territory in this scene. He makes no move to help Rudy out, to negotiate or trick Reggie the vampire into letting him go. There’s a paternalistic condescension not only in how he deals with Rudy, telling him to “man up and walk away,” but also with Reggie, in how Dean goads him by telling him to just “do it” and that he “doesn’t have the guts” to actually kill someone, before Dean’s final little leap towards them that leads to Reggie stabbing Rudy. He cuts through Crystal’s bonds and is annoyed when she’s not more grateful, instead being horrified at having seen Rudy’s (and the vampire’s) death. Dean also doesn’t check to see if Crystal is physically hurt or needs medical care, not to mention not staying with her to help her deal with the emotional trauma of being kidnapped by vampires and then ‘saved’ in a very violent and scary way. Instead, Dean leaves her entirely alone to deal with the aftermath.

Dean telling Reggie to “do it” and kill Rudy also echoes back to the beginning of the season with Cole, telling Dean to “do it” and kill him. While demon!Dean didn’t kill Cole in 10x02, Dean has no such hesitations in 10x23 and seems mostly annoyed by Rudy’s death, as if Rudy was at fault for not being able to get out of the vampire’s hold in the first place. (He does later feel guilty, tho, and summons Death to kill him so he can’t hurt anyone else.) There’s also that Dean’s “do it” contrasts with the many times we’ve seen this phrasing before, where it’s been said by a cornered person in the face of someone attacking them: Cole shouting it at demon!Dean who has him pinned, Dean saying it to Cas when he’s beaten him up, Dean saying it to Sam when he’s a gun trained on him. But in this situation, Dean saying “do it” doesn’t come from a position of vulnerability but from one of power. In Rudy’s death, Dean has most of the control and none of the concern, using his power not to save a friend but to push a vampire into killing him, because the most important thing was taking down the vamp, and if Rudy had to die for Dean to do it, then so be it. Going back to “saving people, hunting things” family motto, the saving people side has become just a background noise against the killing things part of the equation.

Now that I’ve (finally!) gotten through the Dean & Hell threads, I’m going to loop back around to talk about how Dean’s arc, his actions, and the power of the Mark can be further contextualized through the lens of Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam.

Sources

“4.11 Family Remains (transcript).” Supernatural Wiki: A Supernatural Canon & Fanon Resource. 21 Nov 2012.

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

“10.11 There’s No Place Like Home (transcript).” Supernatural Wiki: A Supernatural Canon & Fanon Resource. 19th Jan 2021.

“10.19 The Werther Project (transcript).” Supernatural Wiki: A Supernatural Canon & Fanon Resource. 13 Jun 2016.

“10.23 Brother’s Keeper (transcript).” Supernatural Wiki: A Supernatural Canon & Fanon Resource. 25th Jan 2019.

nottherealdean. “Untitled” (Gifs comparing 10x03, 8x17, 5x18 to 10x23). Tumblr, 22nd Jun 2015.

moishecampbell. “Untitled” (Dabb’s writing in 10x22). Tumblr, 15th Jun 2022.

postmodernmulticoloredcloak. “Sam and Dean’s ethical codes.” Tumblr, 28th May 2015.

"The Hunter Games (Commentary Track).” Supernatural: The Complete Series, Season 10, episode written by Brad Buckner and Eugenie Ross-Leming, episode commentary by Curtis Armstrong, John Badham, Brad Buckner, and Eugenie Ross-Leming, episode directed by John Badham, Warner Bros., 2021.

“There’s No Place Like Home (Commentary Track).” Supernatural: The Complete Series, Season 10, episode written by Robbie Thompson, episode commentary by Felicia Day, Phil Sgriccia,  and Robbie Thompson, episode directed by Phil Sgriccia, Warner Bros., 2021.