#spn1.09

[incesthemes]

considering each episode as an allegory for sam and dean's story has done irreparable damage to my psyche. if bugs is about cursed land and if bugs is about sam and his relationship to his father, his family, then bugs is about how sam's body (his "land") has been cursed, later even confirmed to be by his ancestors just as oasis plains was cursed by its ancestors. mary sacrificed sam's body to azazel, poisoned him, sent him to the slaughter. you can't break a curse, you can only outrun it. the fact that sam and dean were stuck within the curse only solidifies the connection: they're fruitlessly fighting the literal curse while sam fights the metaphorical curse within him. it's an episode about sam and his anger at john, about dean and his loyalty to john, about how they're both wrong in different ways. it's an episode about family and ancestors and killing your children, making your lands infertile so no future generations can survive on them. it's an episode about sam.

and it comes right before home, the episode which presents with full, explicit confirmation that sam has developed psychic powers. there's evil inside him and he's scared—"what's happening to me?"—and he's uncertain about himself, his past, and his future. the episode that reveals his psychic powers is the episode they return to their childhood home, is the episode where mary's ghost makes an appearance. sam was cursed by mary and their home was made inhospitable; she forced them out like the white man forced out the euchee.

and it comes right after hook man, the episode which wraps sam's feelings of being cursed in sinful, evil, religious language, which shows his deference to the christian god, which implies there's something evil within him that's hurting the people he loves. sam is evil, sam is cursed, sam is harboring something bad within him and the way to absolve him of his sins is to pray for divine retribution and punishment, for death, because the thing inside of sam is inextricable from himself, is bound to him.

all three episodes are about family and repeating curses, the echoes of harm carrying through generations. all framed through sam's relationship to john, to his past, to the people who came before him he knows nothing about. all culminating in the revelation that sam's fears are coming true and the curse he mentioned two episodes ago is real and it's getting worse and no one knows how to stop it.

but you can't break a curse. you can only get out of the way.

[incesthemes]

i like how in home, sam occupies a liminal space between the blue-collar hunting lifestyle dean exemplifies and the mystical, psychic world missouri inhabits. he's a hunter himself, but he's also psychic, and so he blends the mechanical with the magical to create something new on the show. it's interesting to see just how unfamiliar dean is with missouri's magic because it highlights the fact that sam and dean were not raised using magic to help them hunt, and i like particularly that dean is the one who raises questions: it makes him seem out of place and disconnected from this side of hunting, which positions him and missouri as two opposites of a spectrum which sam necessarily has to stand between. dean is rather uncomfortable with most of the developments in this episode, from sam's freaky visions to the use of magic to kill the poltergeist to the return he has to make to his childhood home. and in doing so, it positions sam farther away from him on the spectrum, pushes him toward missouri's opposite end, while sam's own worries ("what's happening to me?") and hunter upbringing keep him from tipping fully into missouri's camp. thus he stands on the threshold with one foot on both sides, unable to commit to either and embodying the anxiety of that liminality. very cool imo