#spn 9.04

[weanwinwhester]

Ding Dong, Bitches

[lower-the-volume]

slumber party

[ardentpoop]

oof

[castiellesbian]

Robbie Thompson:

7.06 Slash Fiction

7.12 Time After Time

7.20 The Girl with the Dungeons and Dragons Tattoo

8.04 Bitten

8.11 LARP and the Real Girl

8.17 Goodbye Stranger

8.20 Pac-Man Fever

9.04 Slumber Party

9.11 First Born

9.18 Meta Fiction

10.05 Fan Fiction

10.11 There's No Place Like Home

10.18 Book of the Damned

10.20 Angel Heart

11.04 Baby

11.11 Into the Mystic

11.16 Safe House

11.20 Don't Call Me Shurley

Eric Kripke:

1.01 Pilot

1.02

1.09 Home

1.16 Shadow

1.22 Devil's Trap

2.01 In My Time of Dying

2.22 All Hell Breaks Loose: Part Two

3.01 The Magnificent Seven

3.16 No Rest for the Wicked

4.01 Lazarus Rising

4.10 Heaven and Hell

4.22 Lucifer Rising

5.01 Sympathy for the Devil

5.09 The Real Ghostbusters

5.22 Swan Song

6.22 The Man Who Knew Too Much

[peach-coke]

No vacancy, just emptiness Without your love, I'm homeless

[foxthefanboi]

9x04 - Slumber Party

[mittensmorgul]

Hi everyone! I feel like I haven’t been on tumblr at all lately, but I wanted to write something about this, since I’ve been thinking about it for hours. I will begin with this thesis (which is my tag for this subject):

#dean is a genius and if you disagree you can fight me

There have been numerous posts over the years detailing his intelligence, and they often cite similar examples to demonstrate this. Everyone knows the homemade EMF meter from 1.04, foiling the Ghostfacers episode with the electromagnet in 3.13, and “Slaughterhouse Five-Vonnegut or Cat’s Cradle-Vonnegut?” from 4.18, among many others. But I can’t recall off the top of my head if 7.12 has ever been used to illustrate Dean’s particular brand of intelligence before.

Of course, this was written by Robbie Thompson, who has always been a Brilliant Dean stan. I mean, this is the guy who was so pissed about J2 switching lines in 9.04 about “What, I read,” and being completely ruined as a result that he specifically wrote a scene in 11.04 that they could not take out of context for the purposes of making a “lol Dean’s the dumb brother” joke out of it, and forced the “I read” line into Dean’s mouth where it belongs.

So that’s our baseline for the tone and the narrative arc of this episode.

At the beginning of the episode, Sam actually chides Dean about his online activities:

Sam: I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I hope you're watching cartoon smut, because reading Dick Roman crap over and over again is just self punishment. Dean: It's called anime. And it's an art form.

Dean does what Dean ALWAYS does, and this line is brilliant. We already saw that yes, Dean was reading about Dick Roman. But what does he default to? Exactly what Sam EXPECTS from him. Does Sam believe him? Possibly. Because Dean has made this sort of comment SO MANY TIMES in the past and it has always worked as a deflection from what this episode has already shown us was the truth. This one line invites us to question every other instance where Dean has diminished his own intellect with comments that specifically play into his carefully cultivated facade.

Does this mean that every instance in the past where he’d made a lewd or provocative comment was merely a deflection? Of course not! But it invites us to wonder, and to consider that history through this alternate lens. And on reflection, it casts Dean’s entire character into a different light. His “performance” in this instance is revealed to be a complete sham, and we MUST wonder how often that is actually the case.

Once Dean lands in 1944, we see a different angle of his intelligence. He’s thrown into a completely different reality with no preparation and must adapt instantly to the situation, including a car full of police drawing weapons on him. He judges the situation as best as he can, and starts gathering intel, putting puzzle pieces together to figure out what has happened to him, and how he might hope to get home again.

During the course of the episode, he adapts to life in 1944 with aplomb. There’s a bit of a language barrier, with misunderstandings of their respective slang terms (Dean continues, of course, to say “awesome” a lot, and I love his reaction to Ness calling him “bindlestiff.” Poor bab!) When he first meets Ness, there’s a bit of idol worship, “confusing reality with fiction” in thinking Ness was his character in The Untouchables and discovering the truth. But he also opens up to Ness in ways that he hasn’t really with anyone since... well probably since before Cas... did that thing he did at the beginning of the season...

But Dean is also no slouch in the investigation department. He not only figures out the culprit (Chronos), not only does he figure out exactly why all of this is happening, but he figures out a way to get this information to Sam 68 years in the future, and then trusts and hopes that Sam will find his note and figure out how to act on it.

Yeah, he references a lot of pop culture sources as the credit (Back to the Future films were referenced several times). But at the beginning, when he first met Ness and before he knew Ness was Ness AND a hunter who would take him seriously, he thought he was “twelve monkeyed,” and figured he had nothing to lose by just stating the complete truth of who he was and how he got there. And it literally set him free. (Dean’s own intelligence and wits enabled him to outmaneuver the 12 monkeys, as it were)

I could go point by point through the entire episode detailing this entire process, but it’s evident just watching it, watching Dean discard his mistaken impressions and find the truth. What a smart bean.

[sensitivehandsomeactionman]

[nancylou444]

#not seeing the lie

#Priceless (9x04) 

[nancylou444]

I thought Charlie's reason for hunting was magic and a quest or something, that's what she wanted? I think it's something she said in the Dorthy episode. No saving people, not killing evil. Very self-centered.

Right you are darling. 

Slumber Party:

CHARLIE:Okay. It was just a couple little cases. I took down a teenage vampire and a ghost...........It was, uh... It was intense. But I kind of wish hunting was more...magical, you know?

CHARLIE: Saving people, hunting things, the family business? I am down.But... I was raised on Tolkien, man. I mean, where is all this? [She holds up the Game of Thrones disc] Where are my White Walkers and my volcano and magic ring to throw in the damn thing?Where -- where's my quest?

----------------------------------

Yeah she kind of cared about helping people, but she wanted to hang out with Frodo. 

[jumblejen]

If Charlie had stayed dead in Slumber Party (9.04), Dean would have been eaten up with guilt. But he would also have gone and found Cas right away. It would have spurred him to go save the person that mattered most to him. He would have just left all of it to go protect human!Cas. It would have become the point of him.

[lower-the-volume]

9.04 Slumber Party

[super-sootica]

Sam: All right. Well, first, I think I might have found a way to help Cas

Dean: Did you talk to him?

Sam: No. And, by the way, I still don't understand why he left in the first place

Dean: *Sits* Well Sam, sometimes when two men like each other very much. They experience urges...normal urges. But dangerous urges. And it's great and it's powerful and suspenseful and it builds and builds until you just have to

Sam: Have to what?

Dean: No homo

[castiellesbian]

Robbie Thompson:

7.06 Slash Fiction

7.12 Time After Time

7.20 The Girl with the Dungeons and Dragons Tattoo

8.04 Bitten

8.11 LARP and the Real Girl

8.17 Goodbye Stranger

8.20 Pac-Man Fever

9.04 Slumber Party

9.11 First Born

9.18 Meta Fiction

10.05 Fan Fiction

10.11 There's No Place Like Home

10.18 Book of the Damned

10.20 Angel Heart

11.04 Baby

11.11 Into the Mystic

11.16 Safe House

11.20 Don't Call Me Shurley

Ben Edlund:

2.05 Simon Said

2.12 Nightshifter

2.18 Hollywood Babylon

3.03 Bad Day at Black Rock

3.09 Malleus Maleficarum

3.13 Ghostfacers

4.05 Monster Movie

4.08 Wishful Thinking

4.16 On the Head of a Pin

5.04 The End

5.10 Abandon All Hope...

5.14 My Bloody Valentine

5.20 The Devil You Know

6.03 The Third Man

6.09 Clap Your Hands If You Believe...

6.15 The French Mistake

6.20 The Man Who Would Be King

7.02 Hello, Cruel World

7.09 How to Win Friends and Influence Monsters

7.15 Repo Man

7.21 Reading Is Fundamental

8.05 Blood Brother

8.13 Everybody Hates Hitler

8.21 The Great Escapist

[peach-coke]

Sam being soft for his big brother ♥

[mittensmorgul]

Here, allow me to at least attempt to un-baffle you...

This... is not disdain. In this particular example, it’s FRUSTRATION. I mean, these dudes have arguably the largest collection of supernatural research and information in the Western Hemisphere, and yet... they still do not have an answer to their problem. Because their problem is so far fucking out there. Like, literally an alternate universe out there.

This is not the sort of problem that 99.99999999% of hunters will ever have to deal with. Hunters that, as we’ve seen numerous times in the past, tend to have “specialties.” Rougarou specialists Wally in s12 and Travis in 4.04, Gordon Walker the vampire specialist, etc. I mean, Bobby was first introduced as a sort of “demon specialist” before we discovered he was just a hoarder of lore in general. Sure there are “generalist” hunters, but they still tend to deal with stuff they can call each other for help with-- like Garth being the “new Bobby” back in 8.06 and giving info to someone about hunting a revenant, not interdimensional search and rescue missions.

In this particular scene in 13.17, they’re attempting to find ONE SPECIFIC RELIC, the only purpose of which was to perform the spell to open a doorway between dimensions. They found A SINGULAR REFERENCE to the artifact in an obscure MoL document, which led them to believe that it might at one time have been in the possession of the MoL. That led them to going through EVERY. FUCKING. BOOK. in the bunker looking for any other reference to this one extremely obscure object. The montage here of their research appears to cover HOURS AND HOURS of time.

Of course they aren’t reverentially poring over what has amounted to a useless stack of books that have brought them no closer to a solution to their problem that they’d been struggling through all season long at that point.They are TIRED, and FRUSTRATED. They’re beginning to lose hope again, and they feel as if no matter what they do they’re just spinning their wheels.

So, IN CONTEXT of the entire season to this point, we’re supposed to FEEL THEIR FRUSTRATION HERE. THAT IS THE ENTIRE POINT. IN CONTEXT.

I mean, remember 9.04, the flashbacks to the first two guys to be stationed at the bunker? How wide-eyed and excited the younger guy was to be there, surrounded by that magnificent and important collection? And then flash-forward a few months and he’s out of his mind bored and calling the place a “dump?” Yeah, that’s how it’s gotta start feeling after a while. Especially when nothing in there is helping them find a solution to what feels like their One Big Problem they’re absolutely desperate to solve.

Maybe out of context of the rest of the episode, and the rest of s13, they’d look like “spoiled brats” in this one scene, but... context actually does matter here.

(not to mention... the show isn’t actually about the rest of the hunters in the world, and it can’t really be about the rest of the hunters in the world. We know that other hunters DO call them for advice and input all the time... everyone from Jody and Garth to hunters we only ever hear about in passing, and I think we’ve been invited to assume that they DO give other hunters a hand when asked, but that THE SHOW IS ABOUT SAM AND DEAN AND THESE LARGER COSMIC ISSUES, so “in passing” is about all we’ll ever see of other hunters having access to the library... because it’s just... honestly not the premise and purpose of the show...)

“I love books.” | 13x17 The Thing