Nearly took out a kidney on Sammy, there. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Flowers… in the attic?

Oh… no, sorry, it’s a basement.

It’s NOT pie!!

So it must not be love.

Why can’t she stick around????? I liiiiiike her.

Now why would the Mark act up when Dean takes a drink?

Huh… RV in the background? Home on wheels.

Smelled flowers. Flower flowers. (LOL) Is that a flowered tie Sam is wearing?

Visual motifs and narrative themes: Leaving the Family Home

Throughout season 9 and 10, we’ve had maps, stars to guide our journey, and means of travel. Just recently we got the hint of the destination. The journey ends at the source.

At the same time, we’ve had stories of young women embarking on journeys of self-determination and self-discovery. Charlie, Alexis Anne, Kate, and Claire, they’re turning their backs on their pasts, taking control, and making themselves anew.

it was their pasts that formed them. People they loved. Traumas they endured. These were the source. Out of their experiences came both the good and the bad. Both the Good!Charlie and the Bad!Charlie with an “anti-authority disorder.”

Charlie’s journey took her back to the source of her duality. In search of the source, Bad!Charlie invaded and destroyed homes.

Until the journey lead her the person who caused the trauma, who broke her home.

He had his own duality. He was both a creator and breaker of homes. He built and he destroyed.

Charlie found a way to integrate that duality. She confronted the source of the duality, accepted it for what it was, and forgave herself. She made peace with what it made her.

All this foreshadowing, and we even have Crowley directly confronting his own less than stellar parent. "I don’t eat and you don’t cook.“ His experiences set him off on the journey of his own duality: The Kind of Hell and the feeling addicted demon who was abandoned to a work house and only wants to be loved.

And if the foreshadowing of Dean’s need to go back to the source of his own duality, both the good and the bad, wasn’t enough, we’ve been given a visual hint. Here we have a incongruous, nicely lit and centrally located orange flower both at Rowena’s introduction and during Dean’s story about who John was as a father.

I’ve written before about the use of flowers to hint of secrets, things yet to be revealed. It’s rare to see orange flowers on Supernatural. Someday I’ll actually finish my meta on the use of the color orange. Here I’ll only say that we’ve most often seen it during themes of temptation, the effects of staring into the abyss for too long when fighting monsters make us monstrous.

Visual Motifs: Trapped by the lies we tell

Here, in Russell Wellington, we have a character who has tried to put his ugly past behind him. Like Celeste Middleton, he’s split himself in two. He’s hidden away the monster, but the duality remains.

It can be seen in an office split between stark black and white. Symbols of wealth, prosperity and recognition housed alongside alcohol and cars.

It can be seen in a handshake between figures in dark and light hovering just over his shoulder.

He is a man who builds homes. He’s created his own environment. He lives in a cage of his own making. We can see it in the bars that shutter him in.

Charlie, too, has found a way into the cage.

But also a way out, busting through the bars. Wellington and Middleton – both city names. The town of Welling and the town of Middle. Russell chose the path to rejecting his duality. It did not end well for him. Celeste accepted a middle way. She accepted her duality and forgave herself. She destroyed the cage and found a way out.