there's something just sooooo like. bananas about Sam getting visions of burning bushes and his dead father and flashbacks of the Cage believing that it's because he's praying to God and God is telling him that he needs to go back to the Cage and there's soooo many implications in that alone and then. AND THEN. he goes back to Lucifer and Lucifer tells him that it was him all along. Lucifer reaching out from the Cage to bring Sam back in.
like - whatever you do, you will always end up... here
11x17 Red Meat truly insane episode. saved person of the week chokes sam because he's understood that the brothers' codependency will kill his wife. dean overdoses to talk to billie but sam wasn't actually dead, just shot and losing blood. after many hours of just being left there on the floor with no food or a bandage on his wound or anything he kills two werewolves in thirty seconds then drives to the hospital where he shoots another werewolf. dean tells sam he's always known he was alive. DID HE EVER TELL HIM? DID HE EVER TELL HIM THAT HE KILLED HIMSELF???
Thinking about the s11 finale again, and Dean telling Cas to take care of Sam the way biblical stories call for brothers to marry their dead brother's widow. (Sam is the widow, obvs)
like i know I've probably said it before, but. as much as s11 is my favorite of the late seasons of SPN, Dean's half of the season plot is boring and any potential it ever had is consistently squandered, and Sam's half only works if you're seeing the shrimp-colors cage-trauma version that jarpad is acting, not the "enemies to reluctant team-up to celestial-family reconciliation" nonsense that the writers think is a neat way to arrange their toys in the Big Epic (Unspeakably Stupid) Arc Plot dollhouse.
and i can't speak to how much of it was really intended or by whom, but there IS a throughline in there that may not be well developed or resolved, but still reawakens the good old "oh right that's why i ever went apeshit feral over either of these guys to begin with" feelings. the one where every step along the path of the Lucifer plotline is one of the most pants-shittingly terrifying things Sam has ever had to do, and every encounter brings a fresh kind of betrayal and violation that he somehow was not expecting, and every escalating step of the team-up is far too much to ask of anyone with the kind of history he has with this fucker. and he does it anyway, even though it's unbearable. and it just makes him more determined to stay capable of faith and charity and trust in the face of all this, because he needs to, because it's been foundational since season 2 that some kind of faith in a benevolent higher power is a psychological need for him to keep going in the crapsack world they inhabit.
that's the version jarpad is acting, the one where okay fine, sam will do it, but he'll look like he wants to fucking die the whole time. and the instant he (visibly! you can see it! like a switch got flipped between episodes!) gets told to stop harshing the vibes of their stupid "god and lucifer do family therapy" comedy bit with all that buzzkill Resting PTSD Face... that's the exact instant s11 dissolves like tissue paper. and i stop being able to suspend my disbelief that it's anything but a collection of unusually solid one-off episodes held together by the dumbest excuse for an arc plot on god's green earth. like oh, shit, this entire time they were literally just finding neat ways to arrange the toys in the dollhouse without any attempt to delve into what makes these characters tick in that configuration. even though it is RIGHT! THERE! and at least one of the actors is serving it up to them on a platter. they TOLD HIM TO STOP SERVING UP THEIR UNDONE CHARACTER WORK ON A PLATTER.
so yeah. entire season arcs propped up by jared padalecki's acting. who'd've guessed.
They really didn't do enough with the sam seeing visions and thinking that they're from God, when really they're from Lucifer plotline in s11, because holy crap that was good. There is something that is just so devastatingly fascinating about sam, desperate to believe in a force greater than himself, and for that force of divine intervention and purity to have chosen him. Then to have these visions show him his deepest and most central traumatic wound, to lead him back towards this suffering. Oh the TURMOIL.
Sam has always craved purity - he has always wanted desperately to belong, to be pure like everyone else. The little kid who thought he could never go on a holy quest because he wasn't clean enough, who went on to find out about the demon blood fed to him when he was an infant and thinking this is the puzzle piece he was missing - this is the answer to why he feels the way he does - he is impure and wretched on a biological level. He is filled with self-doubt in s1-2 as to his powers and what this means for him, clawing at faith (faith in Dean and their policy of saving people as much as faith in a religious sense) to feel stabalised. He is frustrated and angry in s4 at this demon blood in him, the fact that there is something innately evil in him that he can never 'rip out' or 'scrub clean'. Then by the time s8 rolls around he LEAPS at the chance to purify himself. Yeah, cause that's healthy. All of this is to say that when sam gets his first vision after praying in the hospital chapel, he wants so desperately to believe that it is God who has looked down on him and thought him worthy. That, for once, the divine have been the ones to put their faith in him, not the devil.
And then the reveal. It was never God. It was never something holy.
Evil has kept its claws in him since he was six months old and he will never be clean of it. It was the devil all along. This realisation is crushing and I will never get over Sam's face as he realises, wide eyed with shock and horror as a tears spills out of his eye. Devastating.
But yet the deep seeded horror of this plotline is so underexplored. Like, call me biased but I would have really stretched this idea out a few more episodes at LEAST. Place more emphasis on this moral conundrum between wanting to have faith and yet this faith asking you to do something no person should ever go through.
In fact, I loved the first few episodes of s11, they had me on the edge of my seat. The black veined virus thing?? Amazing - I want more. It would have been cool to have seen this be a continuous thing across the whole season. Like if the season slowly devolved into this kind of wrought post-apocalyptic thing. Ik that probably wouldn't work but I would have loved to see it. And creepy baby Amara and that exorcism stuff - so cool. Anyway, this post is kind of a mess, but I just loved how s11 started; the darker tone, the boys completely out of their depth, the idea of this biblical plague that makes people 'unclean, in the biblical sense' - super fun ideas. It's not that I didn't like where s11 ended up, but I just feel like at some point the tone completely changed and it just got a bit... goofy. I blame Lucifer, mainly (and chuck). Every scene with Lucifer and Sam I was pulling my hair out cause WHY IS SAM SO CALM?? This guy literally tortured him for centuries and had him so dreadfully freaked out at the start of the season and now its like yeah whatever. And it's not like I expected it to take centre stage or anything but in theory, the idea that the Winchester's bestest bestie Cas is possessed by Lucifer, who they actually now need to stop Amara should have been some crazy psycho horror shit. Sam should have been seeing Lucifer's mannerisms like second nature, thinking he's going crazy. Dean should be worried that Sam's is going off his rocker and yet also feeling something so fundamentally off with Cas. But they just didn't feel the need to delve into that whatsoever I guess.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that I really loved the ideas, particularly surrounding Sam, that were going on at the start of s11. I think using this as a springboard would have been a really interesting exploration of character for him, and Dean too as he is forced to confront how Sam's relationship with faith and purity differs from his own, and then ultimately a revaluation of the way he sees him. I mean, he wasn't exactly supportive once he found out Sam having demon blood had some side effects. Even when he didn't know about Sam drinking demon blood or Ruby, even when Sam was truly just saving people he called him a monster, told him that if he didn't know him, he's want to hunt him. Crazy times.