#that theory that's like maybe dean and sam had so much bad luck throughout the seasons because of all the broken mirrors in this episode

[bloodydeanwinchester]

🩸Bloody Dean Every Episode🩸 ↳ 1x05 || Bloody Mary

[phynali]

SPN 15x10 Heroes’ Journey

So I kind of thought people were maybe overreacting with the hate for SPN episode 15x10 but no - it was That Bad. 

I really, really, wanted to like this episode. The actors talked about how fun it was in the pre-season press tour. There was excitement about it. I was kind of expecting another The French Mistake or Scooby-Doo type episode - canon but mostly taking the piss, not consequential to the overall plot, incredibly self-aware.

And I think it tried to be a lot of those things, but failed so utterly. And I want to a) unpack a bit of why, and b) write some fix-it interpretation that you can take or leave but that I’m gonna headcanon for my own sanity.

First, here are so many problems with this episode in what it implies about the canon and the characters.  

It says that they haven’t ever been normal. Okay, sure, I’m there. God gave them a bit of Plot Armour because they’re his favourites.  They’ve come back from the dead like a dozen times, I’ll buy that.

But then - 

Then it says that they’ve never got parking tickets, that they don’t get colds, cavities? Okaaaaay, so God gave them some extra luck and fortitude. Alright.

But then they can’t pick locks? Fight monsters? The engine fails when we know Dean has built it from the ground up, loves it obsessively, and obsesses over its maintenance? Sam can’t fucking boil pasta? Things they’ve done their entire lives are suddenly beyond them, as if they never learned nor developed a skill nor have common sense.

What the fuck?

It is absolute bullshit if taken at face-value but okay IF you set aside the canon hand-fed interpretation of what’s going on. Garth tells them that they’re suddenly experiencing ‘normal person problems’ because they are no longer the ‘heroes’.

Suddenly losing a bit of fortitude and luck doesn’t make you lose skills you’ve developed over decades or make you suddenly unable to boil water. So either we have to reject the episode, or reject the false interpretation sent our way. I choose the latter.

Think about it (let me convince you to appease my own frustration) - Chuck is a liar. We know this. Chuck is also our narrator, in canon and meta-textually. 

We know we have an unreliable narrator.

Is it not reasonable to suggest that Chuck didn’t “make them normal” or “take away their special Hero Status” and have Dean suddenly lactose-intolerant, ridden with cavities (okay that part is realistic but to suddenly feel them now?), have it so Sam, who got a full ride to Stanford University - cannot boil water and grabs hot pots with his bare hands. 

Actually for that last bit - if you’ve worked in kitchen for a long time or done a large amount of cooking, the sensitivity in your hands decreases a lot. Sam might actually be able to grab things straight out of the oven for short periods of time, or grab pots by the handles off the stove without feeling the burn the way someone like me might. My partner can do shit like that, though normally at least uses a tea towel for things straight out of the oven, but i’ve seen him do it. So Sam might do that typically and that just lends itself to my theory that - 

Chuck is fucking with them.

Chuck didn’t “make them normal” - he sent a bunch of annoying inconveniences their way to slow them down, and to undermine their confidence in their skills. Just enough that they think it’s them and not Him. That they think it’s their shine worn off, their luck run dry, their skills as never being as good as they thought - just enough hits to keep coming and uncomfortable facts that fit close enough to their lives to make them Doubt.

He is God, what does he do but deal in Faith and Doubt?

(He doesn’t like to be questioned. He knows them inside and out, knows everything about everything - including how to sew discord).

He took away their credit card that Charlie had hacked for them so they can’t move around as quick and easy, switched the flip on some of their biology (lactose intolerance, clumsiness, a head cold) to slow them down, fucked them up a bit in terms of the Impala (parking tickets, spark plugs) to stall them up. 

Not bad luck, not a loss of Plot Armour - Chuck is playing with the narrative. He wanted Sam to give up hope in the previous episode, and now he wants to weedle at that weakness. He wants them inconvenienced and down on themselves, knows that they excel when they’re faced with violence and a Big Bad but it’s like Lilith and her ‘death by a thousand cuts’. He knows it will be easier to get under their skin with a series of minor vexations that has them questioning themselves.

They are cursed. Dean is right. Cursed with God’s Wrath - which in this case looks a bit more like God’s No Good, Super Annoying Goddamn Day(s), but y’know. Whatever.

And then there’s the skills - the inability to pick locks, to fight monsters. As if a lifetime of practice and training disappears when Plot Armour does. I cannot suspend my disbelief to accept that being Normal means having no learned skills.

So although the narrative (the narrator, Chuck, God Who Art Unreliable) is telling us that they only have these skills because He wanted them to.

We must reject that interpretation of the canon. 

(Just like I wish Sam and Dean had rejected that misinterpretation of their lives.) 

God waved his hand and took away skills they’d need in a pinch. He didn’t fuck with their personalities because he likes to watch too much, but he wanted to see what they’d do if he (re)set their skills to zero: if they would learn again, if they would realize how fucked they were, make bad decisions to regain those abilities, drink blood or take on Angels or anything else vile so they might kill each other. He’s trying to get his story back on track, and lying to the audience (which now, oddly, includes the protagonists) is small change next to forcing the plot the way he wants to go.

Literally, Chuck is retconning the canon because he’s written himself into a corner, and he’s jealous of his own protagonists.

(Oddly - I think he’s kind of lying to himself too. Taking all this away and convincing himself that he gave it to them all in the first place, fucking with coincidence because these things do happen and messing with their biology because other people do have these sorts of issues. He takes all the credit for their success and therefore convinces himself it’s okay to change and take away whatever he wants, to manipulate luck and chance because hey - he’s God. They are his Creation, and therefore this is All Him, really.)

Only bad writers force the plot to go where they want irrespective of what it means about the characterization and being hard left-turn OOC. Chuck is a bad writer. We know this. Without Metatron as his editor he kind of writes complete crap? Even Becky and her purple prose had multiple critiques of his writing throughout the seasons.

So tl;dr - 

The Heroes’ Journey isn’t about Sam and Dean losing the ‘plot armour’ and bonus to skills that Chuck had given them to make them badasses with no Normal Person Problems. 

Instead, it’s an (undoubtedly unintentional from the writers and therefore ironic) exercise in unreliable narration where the audience is told the heroes are only special because someone else made them so. The creator of the in-canon narrative is retconning his own canon and trying to tell the reader it was this way all along, underneath plot armour. 

He’s also doing this because as a self-insert OC into his own story, and now the antagonist of the story who fails to realize he’s made himself the bad guy, he’s buying time, aiming to slow them down and trying to cut away at their confidence and hope.

And he succeeds - and backfires. He chips away at them only enough to frustrate, to convince them that they Are and Must Be special in order to do what needs doing. They know that they have ever lacked in heroism, and the narrator fails to convince the audience that normalcy and heroism do not go hand in hand - in part because God’s favourite or not, they aren’t the only heroes in this story.

(Thanks Garth)

PS - Building from here into 15x11, if we accept this explanation but also know they do get their “mojo” (luck) back thanks to a  Goddess, we can extrapolate that although she maybe can’t undo the changes that Chuck’s thrown their way, some of what he’s doing is based on coincidence (luck), and they should be ‘lucky’ enough to be able to access their skills despite having Chuck’s bullshit placed on them (or be lucky enough to have it removed entirely?). Luck seems a shorthand term here for so much more, something more like the suppressor/bullshit Chuck’s using on them, so I take it to mean that she basically reset the balance.