#s13e03
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13.03 Patience
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JOHN BISHOP as DAN LEWIS Doctor Who - "Once, Upon Time"
#dwedit#doctor who#dan lewis#userbbelcher#cinemapix#chewieblog#usertom#filmtv#tvcentric#dailytvfilmgifs#tvandfilm#tvfilmsource#cinematv#season 13#s13e03#*#by lanie
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i loved this little scene
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She really is just so ready for an adventure.
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Turnadette in s13e03
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#on the floor.#waterloo road revival#waterloo road#jamie glover#andrew treneman#kim campbell#angela griffin#gif tag#s13e03
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Missing Mothers and Missed Opportunities
Or: There can be three, four fathers in this show but there can only be one mother (and she doesnât even want to be there, lol)!
One way that I like to see the first episodes of s13 is focusing on missed opportunities. Samâs mind is in the past, he is very much ruminating about his missed opportunity with his mother while Deanâs mind is in the future as he is trying to deal with the fact that Cas is dead (although, to be honest, I think Casâs death is a catalyst for Dean's much deeper issues related to his identity. As Iâve already said, in s12 Dean was in the process of understanding who he was regardless of his relationships and while he had some sort of reconciliation with Mary, he didnât have any with Cas).
Itâs no wonder, then, that Sam thinks that Cas and Mary might still be alive while Dean doesnât. In Supernatural the past can come back and if itâs come back once why canât it come back again? Past is hope. The future, however, is always âdoom and gloomâ in this series, itâs apocalypses, itâs âit ends bad, it ends bloodyâ, it is, in other words, super pessimistic. And âThe Futureâ is impersonated in Jack and in the visions of the future he transmitted to Castiel which Dean blames for his death.
Sam is smart but it doesnât take a genius to understand that if Jack has opened the rift once he might be able to open it again. Therefore, Sam sees in Jack an opportunity: if Jack can control and manage his powers he might open the rift again and Sam could get his mother back. Whatâs more, he also starts to see (what he thinks heâs) himself in Jack.
Dean: I told him the truth. See, you think you can use this freak but I know how this ends and it ends bad. Sam: I didnât. Dean: What? Sam: I didnât âend badâ. When I was the freak, when I was drinking demon blood. Dean: Come on man, thatâs totally different. Sam: Was it? Because you couldâve put a bullet in me. Dad told you to put a bullet in me, but you didnât! You saved me! So help me save him! Dean: You deserved to be saved, he doesnât! Sam: Yes he does, Dean, of course he does!
The âWhat?â shows how the two are talking about completely different things. Maybe it was the word âfreakâ that triggered Sam, however I tend to agree with Dean here: Sam and Jack are not âtotally differentâ but they are different. What I disagree with is when Dean says that Jack doesnât deserve to be saved (Dean, Dean, Dean⌠you, just like everybody else, donât need to âde-serveâ anything. I swear to God the day we realize what the words we use actually mean maybe the world will really start changing). Because the thing is that Jack doesnât need to be saved. Heâs not a human who drank demon blood for what he thought was âthe greater goodâ but turned out to be the beginning of his end. He was not part of a gigantic, messy, blatant scam involving Heaven and Hell. Jackâs partially the result of both Luciferâs delusions of grandeur regarding Creation and Kellyâs conservative and dreamy desire to have a baby with the President of the USA (he was never gonna put any ring on it, girl and you knew it. Btw, Kelly is the baby-trapper in this story and no one else, I wonât change my mind ever), but he is nevertheless one of the most powerful beings in all existence. I honestly think that the only character who has ever understood Jack was Donatello.
Donatello: Oh. Speaking not as a prophet but as a scientist, I donât think teaching him is in the cards. Itâs like asking a lion not to be a lion. Sam: But this is not a lion! This is a human! Donatello: With a strong dose of God juice.
Itâs not a strong dose of demon blood, Sam. Itâs God juice, okay? LOL. Anyway, Donatello is super on point here: Jack is human and not-human. Heâs a living aporia, the character where all the false dichotomies of the series show their fallacies. Heâs âboth⌠andâ incarnated. Heâs born and heâs already in his 20s. Heâs a child and heâs a not-child. He has an age and heâs without age. Nobody will ever come close to understanding him if they cling close to a âblack or white, good or evilâ mentality. And this is why the show totally failed (for me) in s14 and how Sam is also failing here because he projects his own (respectable and very real) Lucifer-related issues with evilness onto Jack. Jack is beyond âgood and evilâ because heâs both human and angel, he embodies two different moralities and also transcends both of them because heâs neither only human nor only angel. To sum up, I donât think that Supernatural, with its structure and its specific morality, could have handled a character like Jack. And this is why the show has to de-power him, de-soul him, make him die and resurrect etc.
Back to Sam and his failings. He projects his own stuff onto Jack, he wants to use him as a âcan-openerâ, he thinks Jack can be saved from âevilâ because he can teach him. My question is: how much can Sam be negatively judged for these actions? My answer is: not so much.
As far as projections go, this is what heâs been doing from S1. Per SPN structure, both Sam and Dean have been projecting and identifying their issues onto the monsters of the weeks for 15 seasons. Jack is just the âMonster of the Seasonâ. Projection and identification, identification and projection⌠I mean, this is what the show is about. If all of sudden Sam had woken up and miraculously solved all his identity-related issues the show would have been over.
As far as the utilitarian aspect goes, Sam has actually made some progress here. He âonlyâ surveils Jack via cameras and tries to convince him to do some stupid exercises with a pencil. Previously on Supernatural Sam had literally enslaved, chained and imprisoned the people/creatures he wanted to use. These kids, they grow up so fast :â).
As far as the âdo no evilâ teaching goes, now hereâs whatâs really interesting to me.
The episode is âThe Rising Sonâ and Samâs passionate plea for Jackâs goodness via his teachings is paralleled to Asmodeusâs attempt at locating Jack in order to find him and harness his âtimeless knowledge and unschooled powerâ. Asmodeus acts like Lucifer acted with Sam in S11 in that he pushes Jack to open up the earth âfor Godâ (âI speak the words of Godâ, âGod has a message for youâ, âDo it for Godâ etc). Since Luciferâs not here, though, Asmodeus wants to â[have]him (Jack) found and trained to rule. With me as his humble advisor, of courseâ. Of course we know he will fail because he himself says that he had tried to train the Shedim in the past and utterly failed.
ASMODEUS: I know the perils of Luciferâs disappointment. DREXEL: Heâhe did that? ASMODEUS: Long ago. Eager to please, I freed the shedim. DREXEL: You⌠Oh, Iâve heard stories aboutâ ASMODEUS: Oh, Iâm sure you have. Hellâs most savage. Things so dark, and base, God himself would not allow them into the light. But I, in my pride, believed that I could train them. Use them. But Lucifer feared them, as well he should, so he forbade it, locked them up again.
This, of course, means that Sam will fail to train Jack/the Shedim too.
The parallel between Asmodeus and Sam must be explored because the show seems to pass it as an Evil (Asmodeus) vs Good (Sam) training but itâs not as simple as that. Thereâs even a scene where Asmodeus-as-Donatello talks about Jack with Sam and he seems to agree with Samâs theory that Jack can be molded. While Sam thinks so because âKelly was a good personâ, Asmodeus-as-Donatello is obviously more interested in his evil fatherâs lineage.
While itâs true that both of them donât even consider to give Jack a choice, to ask him questions and to try to understand him, theyâre not exactly wrong when they agree that Jackâs powers do need some training, regardless of why theyâre interested in his powers, Jack doesnât have a grip on how his powers work. The show insistence on âgood vs evil", however, completely ignores the very valid point where Jackâs powers are simply neither good or evil per se but they are âonlyâ a(nother) force to be reckoned with.
This âgood vs evilâ thing obscures something very important and I think a distinction must be made here about what "training" really means in this context: Sam wants Jack to learn to master his powers, so that he (Jack) can be in control of them; on the other hand, Asmodeus wants to exploit Jack because of his powers, he wants to be the one whoâs in control of them.
Both Sam and Asmodeus have an agenda, clearly, theyâre also two characters very much interested in power. But when Asmodeus says that he wants to train Jack what he really has in mind is to groom him. Asmodeusâ techniques are very similar to Crowleyâs with baby Amara and Demon Dean (I know Dean was not a child but he was one metaphorically because Crowley calls himself âFatherâ and âdaddyâ while he calls Dean âa rather scrumptious altar boyâ. Ugh). These are predatorsâ techniques: their intent is to create intimacy with a person (for instance, Asmodeus takes on Donatelloâs resemblance to lure Jack and take him to the Hellâs Gate), usually a child, to make them do what they want and abuse their victims, victims who usually donât even realize theyâre victims (Jack doesnât know heâs being manipulated).
This is NOT what Sam means when he says he can teach Jack. Samâs utilitarian mindset can be reproachable but his intent is not the same as Asmodeus. Sure, itâs still absolutely problematic but, again, his intent is not to open up the earth to release the Shedim and use Jack to rule Hell. He wants to open the rift to the Apocalypse World to find his mother. He is, in other words, being a softer version of John Winchester. In fact, he is replicating Johnâs methods because this is what he grew up with and this is what he knows. Avenging Maryâs death, finding Mary in the AU⌠even if the intent might be comprehensible it doesnât justify both John and Samâs attitude towards the reaching of their ends. Yet, their ways are still not the same ways of a Crowley or an Asmodeus.
The other thing is that John was Samâs father. He was father to two human children whom he raised as if their childhood was a huge, endless military training. Training someone, as a concept, is not evil: if you have a skill or a talent or whatever, you need to train and learn and explore your limits. Having someone who believes in you and wants to help you in your training is not evil too: in fact, it might be a very good thing. Itâs a problematic thing, however, when your caregiver is more focused on the training than the care. Itâs even more problematic if said caregiver is a paranoid who raised his sons as soldiers. But this is still NOT the same thing as demons such as Crowley and Asmodeus do.
The differences in "training" and what Sam fails to understand about what happened with Asmodeus is explained in "Patience":
SAM: Even with Asmodeus, that just happened?
JACK: No, he made me. It was like, like he was in my head.
SAM: Okay um, then uh⌠Imagine him doing that.
JACK: No!
SAM: No? Why not?
JACK: Because I donât want to! Itâs just⌠I canât do this! And you keep staring at me, waiting!
Asmodeus made Jack use his powers, he was in his head. He had also abducted him, manipulated him: he wasn't trying to train him, he was trying to groom him. Of course Jack doesn't want that.
If Sam is replicating his father's teachings we must then ask: who is Jack to Sam in this moment in the narrative? Heâs definitely not his son nor his sibling. But he's not someone Sam keeps in locks either. As Iâve said, Sam has never been above imprisoning people in his dungeon to reach his goal, yet he takes another road with Jack, maybe precisely because heâs identifying with him and projecting onto him his own fears and issues with âbeing evilâ and âbeing a freakâ. There is something very similar between the two but what is it? And why is it not expressed? Maybe Sam is not Jack the way he thinks he is but they do share one thing: they have both missed the opportunity to create a bond with their respective mothers.
Sam only really utterly fails Jack when heâs dishonest with him. He eventually understands that and comes clean with him but I think that a lot of the initial issues happened because he was not communicating with Jack at all. And he didnât even give him a choice. I think that if Sam were honest with Jack and gave him the choice to help him he would have discovered another thing that make them veeeery similar: both of them are okay with twisting human morality and⌠sort of⌠manipulate people a little to get what they want. Does this make them evil villains? To me, no. Does this make them human, layered, compelling characters that raise interesting moral questions more than give black and white answers? Totally yes!
Sam and Jack are not âtotally differentâ but they are different. Conversely, they are not âtotally similarâ but they are similar. The Rescuing of the Mother can happen because The Loss of the Mother is something that Jack can deeply understand and relate to. He doesnât want to save Mary just to please Sam and Dean. I think itâs deeper than that.
In case it wasn't clear, the conflation of Mary and Kelly is very clear in "The Big Empty":
MIA: Youâve lost someone recently? DEAN: No. JACK: My mother. SAM: Uh, our mother. Weâve having a difficult time.
Mary-as-Missed/Missing-Mother is such a central theme in this season that the Apocalypse World is a literal ramification of the Original World that's solely dependent on Mary Winchesterâs choice to not deal with Azazel. John is never brought back and, more importantly, Sam and Dean are never born. This is a world where sheâs not the mother. But why is Maryâs choice so vital it can create different timelines?
S12 and S13 implicitly seem to tell that everything that happened was because of Maryâs choice and⌠itâs, like, not true? Sometimes Sam and Dean are so ultra-focused on âfree willâ and âmaking the right choicesâ that tend to forget the part where both them and their parents were part of a larger scheme that was predicated on people ultimately being herd towards a designed pen. Like, while I think that Dean and Sam having issues with their mother is completely real and plausible, I donât understand why the narrative re-frames itself in this way⌠I understand that they were going for a specific retelling of the first seasons but this is not just retelling, this is demolishing the premises of those series. S4-5 were precisely about the mystification and the perils of a glorified, Grand Destiny that in reality was nothing but a Big Scam. Itâs not your destiny if your destiny is something that somebody else is telling you about and when this somebody else has a vested interest in you believing that you have that specific destiny. Or if somebody else is removing all of your choices leaving you with close to nothing to choose from.
Apocalypse World is, thus, such an unfair double-edged sword, cause on the one hand, it gives Mary agency but on the other it shows us that both choices resulted in⌠well, frankly, catastrophes. And I think itâs unfair to throw this huge weight onto her shoulders after they had dug her up from her grave while completely ignoring the whole thing about senior management angels playing puppeteers with the Winchesters.
Kelly-as-Missed/Missing-Mother is the other side of the coin of this little argument of mine because in s13 the writers demonstrated how Kelly must stay dead because one mother is enough and they didnât know what to make of Kelly since she was not a hunter. She was just, as a character, Jackâs mother. The rift to the Apocalypse World was even possible in the first place because she (more or less, itâs complicated) decided that she would.have.her.baby. But, just like Mary before her resurrection, if his actual mother were back in the game it either meant that Jack was out of the game or that they had to include her in some capacity into the Winchesters dynamics and they didnât want any of that. Maryâs death meant that Sam and Dean entered the huntersâ life, Kellyâs death assures the same for Jack. Plus, they all have an angel watching over them, isn't it just great? But hey, wait, this is the absent fathers show so weâre gonna give this kid three, four, five fathers!!! (sarcastic). Also, Alive Kelly wouldnât be the Good, Perfect, Dead Mother that she is to Jack because, well, she would be a Real Character, not a memory on a pen drive and Alive Kelly would be so faaaar from the Good and Perfect Mother. Do we have to try to write another complex mother? One is enough!!! (sarcastic).
In conclusion, in s13 Samâs (and Jackâs) huge missed opportunity stays⌠missing. Jack will go to the Apocalypse World and fight the angels with Mary whereas Mary decides to stay there (lol!) to help with the fight. They literally have to find a bus and move all the remaining AU people to the Original World because Mary has decided that she wanted to stay in a world where she didnât choose John and she didnât give birth to her sons (me asking Sam who has just died and was resurrected by Lucifer only to find out that his mother didnât want to be saved: are you REALLY okay? LOL). Iâll stop here cause this is getting way too long but maybe, just maybe, s13 as a whole was a giant missed opportunity.
#leaving out rowena from this post feels criminal but I don't have it in me to add her here#it's already a long post and she deserves her time to shine#suffice to say that Billie totally scammed her. imo#anyways. forever in love with the mothers in this show <3#they did them sooo dirty but i see you girls#supernatural#spn#spn meta#jack kline#jack the puer#super-m/Others#b/w spn#kelly kline#mary winchester#asmodeus spn#spn s13#the rising son#s13e02#tw: grooming#s13e03#s13e04#the big empty#patience
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Taskmaster (2022): I think I've got this.
Taskmaster NZ (2021): Heat Stroke.
Taskmaster AU (2023): Foot juice. || Taskmaster NZ (2023): A pretty skux cartwheel.
#how contestants feel inside the lab#judi love#urzila carlson#david correos#uk s13e03#nz s02e02#s13e03
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[Strolling.]
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god dean is such a fucking dick the whole beginning of s13. he is an open wound. an exposed nerve. a walking psychic scream.
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13.03 Patience
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THIS JUICINESS COMING FROM THE PORK. BUT TRAIN AND GETS OFF AT ANY STOP THAT AROUSES HIS INTEREST AND THE VINEGAR FROM THE PICKLES, 'CAUSE YOU'VE GOT THE SWEETNESS TO OPEN THE OVEN OF THE SAME GARBAGE AND THERE IS NO ONE ELSE THAT CAN CHOSE WHAT YOU USE TO BE A HUMAN. And now you are a good lad as a fellow human and with only the right sort of things to do. I think my first impression of you was that you were quite fair.
#s13e03 kid rock's detroit tour#guy fieri#guyfieri#diners drive-ins and dives#but train#juiciness#the#pork#stop#interest#vinegar#pickles#sweetness
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A get well card for Fred
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Oh, sweetie.
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Turnadette in s13e03
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