What did the pot call the kettle?

Visual motifs: Crowley’s greatest hits

Here we have the scene in First Born in which Dean and Crowley convince Tara to show them how to locate Cain and the First Blade.

First off: It’s a pawn shop. No symbolism there, right?

And then take a look at the items that are displayed. It’s a pawn shop which sells:

1) drums, guitars, banjos, stereo equipment, tape decks, speakers, headphones, horns, and golden records

2) watches, rings, necklaces, and shirts/jackets

So here we have on one scene: a place in which people sell things that are precious to them in a time of desperation, in exchange for things to wear, and in which there is everything you need to play music.

Crowley’s greatest hits, indeed.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream: Dean’s relationship with his bed

How many layers he’s wearing and whether he’s under or over the covers often visually reinforces the story of Dean’s emotional state.

In Season 1, the biggest mission at that point was to Find Dad. There we saw Dean stripped down, half-clothed, under the covers, and vulnerable.

There are notable exceptions of times of urgency, where ease is set aside in favor of the greater plan to Get The Demon Who Killed Your Mother.

Here are Sam and Dean after the reveal of John’s plans about The Colt. John is awake off screen and monitoring for activity related to the vampires who stole it from Jenkins.

Dean’s ease with his sleep continues even in to Season 3:

This changes with the start of Season 4. After his return from Hell, Dean’s sleep is disturbed with flashes of his experience there, and we see him full clothed and laid out atop the sheets of his bed.

Until after 4×11 Family Remains, in which Dean confesses the shame of breaking in Hell and taking up the knife to torture other souls. It’s after he unburdens himself that we see Dean again without the armor of his layers of clothes and seeming to have deliberately laid down to rest, instead of sleeping wherever and whenever he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore.

At this point, we return to the contrast between times of greater safety and those consumed by the need to remain vigilant.

Here, Dean sleeps and dreams of fishing at the beginning of the episode. In contrast, once Jimmy is in their care and requires their guardianship, we see Dean again clothed during sleep.

In Season 5 and 7, Sam and Dean are on the run, hunted by demons, angels and leviathans. Dean sleeps as if only giving into his body’s demands reluctantly, requiring “at least four hours” before getting back in the game.

Being among family may not always be the time to let your guard down. See Dean bunking down with Soulless Sam and a grandfather he has little reason to trust.

Contrast this with his post-apocalyptic period with Lisa and Ben and the relative safety of the bunker in Season 8.

Contrast the joy of Magic Fingers and Metallica:

With the self-protective shell from Season 9:

Visual motifs: Use of specific flowers

filleretive reblogged your post and added:

Ooh, relevant to my last post about Adaptation…

Perhaps, or perhaps not. I think you got to the meat of the matter in your meta without it, that you need to look deeper and that there are multiple layers hidden here beneath the flower imagery. And I like what you say about errors the authors make as informed by their flawed and limited interpretation of the narrative and that many things, including subtext, may also be true. I’m afraid I’m not familiar enough with Adaptation and The Orchid Thief to comment with anything specific about what you’ve said beyond that. 🙂

I’ve seen Supernatural do that before, use both flowers in general but a certain flower type in specific to evoke certain themes. Once was back in Season 4 with the Siren in Sex and Violence. The flower they used then was hyacinths, which were strategically placed to 1) throw you off the scent and on the surface imply that the doctor was the Siren but 2) below that to both imply that something was secret and yet to be revealed and 3) evoke the myth of Hyacinth.

Hyacinth was a youth who was loved and killed out of jealousy by the greek gods. Which fits with the Siren’s goal to force people to kill that which they love the most. I think he was jealous of their love and attention in the sense that he wanted it ALL for his own, for it to be proven to him.

What I also thought was interesting was that the writers’ entwined that theme with all the Disney character names as the aliases assumed by the Siren. Jasmine, Belle, Aurora, Ariel – all children’s fantasies of the grown up world. The Siren promised relationships in which only the lovers’ needs mattered, in which they liked the same music, cars, way time is spent together, etc. The Siren promised the first blush of love that Dr. Cara referred to, that is a fantasy of the relationship, rather than a mature and fully adult relationship.

It highlighted for me just how much that kind of emotional mirroring had been lacking in Dean and Sam’s early life, and how it left a hole that adult relationships with their differences of opinions and needs can’t really fill. That theme and its ripple effects, I think, is still operating even today in season 10.

Narratively, why have Crowley force feeding Cas grace at this point in the story? I wonder.

All that talk about feeling things because you’re human. (Crowley: “Feelings!”)

Lots of discussion among fans that something seems not quite right.

Cas requires doses of grace to remain what he is.

Is this foreshadowing that Dean will need ongoing doses of blood in order to remain human?

No Exit: Season 2 In My Time of Dying and Season 10

Monsters and chickens: Just who is eating who, now? And when are they coming home to roost?

Non timebo mala (I will fear no evil)

Samuel Colt’s journal from Frontierland

Samuel Colt’s Colt:

Samuel Colt’s “100 square mile devil’s trap” from AHBL2

larinah:

minorkeepsakes:

pirrofarfalla:

lost-shoe:

Mine is an unpopular opinion but I see posts discussing Crowley and Dean’s relationship in 10.01, mainly how Crowley doesn’t have the hold on Dean he must have hoped for when manipulating Dean all last season, and I see this dynamic between them differently. While of course ultimately Crowley isn’t going to win (this isn’t Supernatural: The King of Hell Diaries afterall 😉 ), I don’t think he’s lost yet. In fact, I see him as the same manipulator he was last season with a similar influence over Dean’s actions (as I speculated might be the case here). They’re not sailing smooth waters for sure but Crowley for me is, for the time being at least, very much still at the helm.

Take this scene for instance. Crowley and Dean are speaking at the bar when Dean stands to leave.

Crowley, not finished, tells him to sit. Which doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t. It’s Dean Winchester. This is a reminder, much like we saw being suggested more than once last season, that to try to overtly control Dean is a mistake and does not end well. Crowley already knows this and so I have to suspect that partly this was done by him to try to give Dean the sense of autonomy that were he to feel was lacking, Crowley truly would lose any and all control.

So we see Crowley move back into surreptitious manipulation territory, speaking in terms that frame them more as equals. In fact, he even frames the discussion in such a way as to suggest that Dean is calling the shots, that Crowley wants to leave but since it’s Dean who holds the power all he can do is try to convince him. And sure enough, pretty quickly Dean is sitting back down, placing the two more on an equal level again.

Crowley then resumes with emphasising how they are equals, that they’ve shared various experiences together and, once re-establishing that they are connected, are a team, broaches one of his main objectives and that is how the two of them together might rule Hell.

And once he has Dean considering his suggestion, where does he position himself next?

Right where Dean was at the start of the conversation, higher up, with authority, ensuring that he as ‘alpha’ speaks down to his ‘beta’.

And just to further drive home his dominant status…

…he moves closer into Dean’s personal space, which from a body language point of view absolutely emphasises his authority, and proceeds to remind Dean who really is in charge.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this is Dean knocked into submission and compliant from here on in. Not at all. There’s much more to Dean than that. He will be playing his own game, this is going to be a relationship fraught with tension with both jostling for the upper hand over the other. But, to me, I feel as though nothing we saw in the Season 10 opener suggested Crowley had lost control of the situation.

Yet.

As always, just some (likely unpopular 😉 ) thinky thoughts.

I am of much the same mindset in regards to the dynamics that Crowley is attempting maintain in his ‘professional” relationship with Dean. He has reinforced their status as equals – as best friends – by lavishing in sex and decadence and their epic bromance. But while I do believe that a part of him is desperate for companionship – for love – Crowley doesn’t understand how to have a relationship that isn’t a business transaction in which one partner is owned by the other. Crowley was the King of the Crossroads for centuries. Deals and ownership are his life. He hasn’t learned any better.

Crowley is, first and foremost, a politician. Always has been, always will be. He has taken on the roll of the Consigliere, while allowing Dean to believe that he is Michael Corleone in all of this. But when it comes to business, to purpose, to the job – Crowley becomes Al Capone in all his alpha male glory, laying his minions into subservience for the sake of his wants and his needs. So while Crowley does have a heart, he doesn’t understand that love and respect and gratitude cannot be earned by force of will, that just because he wants it, needs it, doesn’t mean that he can manipulate his way into obtaining it by making Dean fall to his knees.

I don’t believe that Dean is buying any of Crowley’s crap, mostly because of a certain amount of clarity that he has maintained. This is why we see Crowley moving his chess pieces across the board – sending demons at Dean like mice to a snake, allowing Sam to find them… It’s all a part of the plan. Crowley says that the less he feeds, the more aggressive Dean becomes. But since when does a demon not lie? Feeding the Blade has always been what causes Dean to get lost, to fall, to float farther and farther away from his humanity. And the more demonized Dean becomes, the easier Crowley believes it will be to keep him by his side as he rules the new kingdom that he intends to build together.

The problem is that the more consumed by the Mark that Dean becomes, the less he cares, the less he understands about partnership and companionship. Crowley wants companionship. He wants someone who is just like him. The problem is that he has a great deal more humanity in him and a lot more feelings than Dean does. He doesn’t doesn’t know how to wield them because he’s not human. All Crowley is truly succeeding in doing is pushing Dean farther away, pushing his soul further down into nothingness, and creating a monster that he has no idea how to control.

Hmm. All interesting points to consider. I think though, that for Crowley, in an Ideal world, Dean would be as equally ambitious as he is. But alas, Dean is not. Dean is pretty much the opposite of ambitious right now. This is partly what makes him a bit easier to influence. So it’s not because he’s gullible, he just doesn’t care. But that can only get Crowley so far. It’s kind of like trying to ride a lazy mule. You can steer it left and right once in a while, but it’s still more interested in stopping to chew on grass than it is in getting you from point a to point b. So I don’t know if it’s so much a question of overt versus covert control (although in some cases I think that may be true), as it is about motivation. Crowley ‘s trying to figure out what kind of carrot he needs to put on the end of the stick to get Dean to follow.

That’s an interesting description considering that they are at the Black Spur the whole time we see them. You can lead with the carrot or you can poke with the spurs. Crowley was totally attempting to “spur” Dean on as well as offering the carrot. We can’t know this yet, of course, but I think Crowley is having some success, perhaps by switching back and forth between the two. He tricks Abaddon’s followers into going after Dean when he knows Dean can’t lose (and specifically had one attack Dean at a place with a security camera), and he sits around while Dean sings and plays darts and drinks and has sex, and then he conveniently “forgets” that Sam might trace the call and tells Dean Sam’s coming right when Crowley was ready to leave. (Maybe because Dean was starting to get along with Ann Marie a little too well?) Dean may have left without Crowley, but how are we to be sure that’s not what Crowley intended to happen? Maybe he’s planning on popping back up right when Dean is in need of something and providing it so that Dean will be happy to have him around again.

Crowley’s biggest non-supernatural power is the spoken word. He goes back and forth between telling lies, and telling the truth, and saying he shouldn’t be trusted because he tells lies, and saying he should be trusted because he doesn’t lie. I think that’s how he gets everyone so twisted up in knots, because as soon as they’re sure he’s lying, he says something true that they don’t believe and then later they feel bad about it. (Like Linda being alive, for example.) So then they start working with him and trusting him and he trips them up again.

That’s what was so beautiful about Cain’s trick of silencing Crowley. That’s probably the worst thing you can do to him. As long as he can speak, he can weasel his way out of practically anything.

I’m bolding what you’re saying, Larinah, because, one, I think it’s nicely insightful, and two, it’s what makes this interaction so intriguing for me.

What is being implied here? That the web Crowley is spinning is going to be his downfall? That Dean knows that Crowley is spinning a web and it’s pissing him off? That Crowley’s web-spinning is working and keeping Dean off balance?

I can’t really put my finger on exactly why, but I have a hunch that Crowley is spinning Dean and Sam along, ramping both of them up and setting them on the path of a confrontation. Maybe it’s what you were saying about Crowley laying down breadcrumbs for Sam and then putting the spurs to him with that phone conversation they had. Maybe it’s that and the fact we have a lot of clues that the Cain and Abel theme is still alive and well.

Given what we saw in the preview for the next episode and Dean’s urges around Sam, I have to wonder if Crowley is spinning Dean along a knife edge of addiction, feeding the Mark just enough to keep Dean functional, but not enough to fully sate it. I have to wonder if Crowley knows something about the Mark that hasn’t been revealed yet. And I have to wonder if that thing is that the Mark is goading Dean to kill his brother to complete the Cain and Abel cycle, and thus it’s control over Dean.