Why is Dean telling Dark!Charlie the game plan?????? Cuz THAT’s a good idea.

ACK! That god awful musak.

Sam: You guide me in the process and I’m the bad one

Well, there we go. There’s Sam’s future.

Dean: It’s a twisted version..
Charlie: Me.

Dean parallels – hmmm… about taking ownership of your dark side instead of passing it off as immutable.

it’s ringing my head a little bit that they were Gabriel and Collins – Phil Collins, of course, took over as lead singer of Genesis after Peter Gabriel went solo.

HUH! Genesis = back to the source. oooooooooooooo. Nice catch.

Hmmm. Charlie as the Black Widow. 🙂

Hmmmm. Charlie’s blade looks a lot like Dean’s. Double-edged sword.

I keep seeing three lamps clustered together all the time in this episode. Same thing in the last episode, too. Makes me wonder about the themes of the need for more than just yourself or more than just one other person to make it.

Visual Motifs: Where are you going, where have you been?

The Journey

The visual imagery of ships, moving water, and stars by which to guide them have popped up throughout season 10 so far. They seem to be coming to a head in the 10th episode, The Hunter Games. Visual imagery associated with journeys is everywhere.

We have stars:

And the means to track them:

Maps to follow:

We have planes:

and ships:

and a massive boat of a car:

We have metaphors:

And, now, a destination:

An end to the road:

flyingfish1:

They’re taking a new approach to hunting this season, I think.

Claire’s arc in her two episodes subverts the typical hunter origin story. It starts out in the usual way, with a terrible monster slaughtering Claire’s family and Claire, filled with rage and heartbreak, setting out to exact revenge. It’s the same story we’ve been seeing since the show began. But then, something different happens: Claire realizes that she doesn’t want to become a monster herself. She tamps down her own monstrous, violent instincts and she calls everything off. And instead of killing the monster, she has a tiny moment of connection with him. Shortly afterwards, she goes on to reconnect with the other monster currently in her life—the creature who destroyed her first family—and against all odds they part on good terms. Instead of hunting her monsters, Claire makes peace with them.

Cole does much the same thing, though it takes him longer to get there. After spending half his life consumed with his desire for revenge, Cole also meets his monster, takes some time to understand him and himself, and chooses to let the monster go free.

Twice now, we’ve seen people who seem destined to become hunters (how many people said, “It’s a hunter origin story!” when Cole first showed up? How many people hoped for Claire to reappear in 10×09 as an angel hunter, or still want her to become a hunter even now? That’s how ingrained these patterns are) and twice we’ve seen them break the pattern, decide not to become killers, and turn away from that life.

On the other side of the coin is Donna, the season ten character who gets introduced to the supernatural world and does get into hunting. She does it for a very different reason than the usual one, though. She’s one of the only hunters we’ve met who enter the hunting life due to something other than a revenge quest or trauma from monsters killing the people she loves. Donna goes on her first hunt simply because she wants to help protect people from the dark things in the world, and most likely because, as a cop, she feels that it’s her duty to do so. She doesn’t let it bring out her dark side—nor is the idea that it could bring out her dark side even brought up as a possibility. She’s still the same sunny Donna after she’s chopped off a vampire’s head. A little more knowledgeable, a little more confident, but no less human and good.

Maybe it’s not just the individual characters who need to “let go of the story”; maybe the show as a whole is doing the same thing.