#walker 4.02 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mittensmorgul · 6 years

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Since your anons are on the subject, there is another nitpick I have always had about 4.1. :) What is the point of Sam and Ruby pretending that Ruby is some random chick in front of Dean and Bobby? Ruby knows who Dean and Bobby are and of course we learn later that Sam has been hooking up with Ruby for a while. Why not just say thanks it’s been real and she leaves. We would find out soon enough that Sam is with the new Ruby, who is 3.0 not the blond 2.0 btw. 1/2

2/2 Then if Dean or Bobby asked who she was, Sam could have just shrugged and blown it off as a deflection since the more important conversation was about Dean’s resurrection. Did Sam and Ruby discuss a plan in advance that if Bobby or anyone they knew met up with them at any unannounced time, just pretend she is a one night stand kind of stranger? And why would she act like they are the pizza delivery people too right when she opened the door? Why not say hey Sam, you’ve got company? Weird!

Really 3/3, sorry! Since it would have been a surprise to Ruby that Dean returned, some reaction to that makes more sense even ever so slightly, than acting like she thought they were delivering pizza. She would recognize them but they would not recognize her in her new meat suit. Ok, I’m done! LOL!Hi hi! (I saw these messages come in earlier just as I was leaving the house, so I’ve been thinking about this for hours now... :P)

First off, this is Ruby 2.0 (there have only ever been two “main Rubys.” 1.0 was Katie Cassidy (blonde Ruby), and then Gen in s4. there were two “temporary Rubys” in 4.09-- the woman she possessed when she first returned to Sam who he insisted she stop possessing immediately when she went and found an unoccupied vessel (Gen), as well as the housekeeper at the motel she possessed for “a hot minute” to deliver the message to Sam and Dean.

Okay, now that we have our Rubys all sorted. :P

We-the-audience don’t know the girl in Sam’s motel room is Ruby at first, either. That’s a “surprise” they spring on us near the end of the episode. As Dean finally summons his angel, we get confirmation that Sam’s been siding with a demon all along.

We learn about just how much Ruby has wormed her way into Sam’s life, and just how she manipulated him into trusting her as the season progresses, but we don’t know the full extent of his dependence on her until MUCH later in the season. It’s a progression of creeping horror that you almost don’t see happening because it’s all just so gradual, until the betrayal is complete in 4.22. And it starts with small deceptions...

She’d spent a very long time building up Sam’s trust, and Dean returning was great for Sam in some ways, but heck if there wasn’t an aspect of scrambling to hide the porn under the mattress when your parent walks into your room, you know? Sam had even been out of touch with BOBBY for MONTHS at this point.

When Dean first gets to Bobby’s and asks about Sam:

BOBBY: Oh, he's alive. As far as I know.DEAN: Good.... Wait, what do you mean, as far as you know?BOBBY: I haven't talked to him for months.DEAN: You're kidding, you just let him go off by himself?BOBBY: He was dead set on it.

Because Sam KNEW that working with Ruby was suspicious at best and outright wrong at worst. I mean, here’s a chat between Sam and Dean later in 4.01:

DEAN: Huh. What about Ruby, where is she?SAM: Dead. For now.DEAN: (bites his lip, like he's not sure he wants to ask) So you've been using your, uh, freaky ESP stuff?SAM: No.DEAN: You sure about that? Well, I mean, now that you've got... immunity, whatever the hell that is... just wondering what other kind of weirdo crap you've got going on.SAM: Nothing, Dean. Look, you didn't want me to go down that road, so I didn't go down that road. It was practically your dying wish.DEAN: Yeah, well, let's keep it that way.

He lies about Ruby AND using his “freaky ESP stuff,” because IT WAS PRACTICALLY DEAN’S DYING WISH. And yet... he’s been seeing Ruby and using his powers practically the whole time Dean’s been gone.

In 3.16, Dean essentially called the whole of s4 regarding Ruby:

DEAN: Come on man, she is the Miss Universe of lying skanks, okay. She told you that she could save me, huh – lie. She seems to know everything about Lilith but forgot to mention, oh right – Lilith owns my soul!SAM: Okay, fine. She's a liar. She's still got that knife.BOBBY: Dean.DEAN: For all we know, she works for Lilith.

But now that Dean’s at the end of the line, and Sam will be more vulnerable to her influence once Dean’s dead and out of the way... She tried to bargain with Sam in 13.16, telling him that he had the power to save Dean:

RUBY: Sam, you've got some God-given talent. Well, not "God"-given but you get the gist. SAM: All that psychic crap? That's gone ever since Yellow-Eyes died. RUBY: Not gone, dormant. And not just visions either. Why do you think Lilith is so scared of you? SAM: Right... she's scared of me. RUBY: If you wanted, you could wipe her off the map without moving a muscle.

(which is what he eventually does in 4.22, because that had been their entire plan all along).

I mean, we know how Ruby manipulates. She set up the entire situation in 3.12 at the police station just to prove that she was right-- that people died because Sam and Dean refused to listen to her advice. And that’s what happened again in 3.16, at least the way she explained it to Sam after the fact. But it was ALL a manipulation, to convince Sam to trust her and not Dean.

She used Sam’s desire to save people to lure him into becoming dependent on drinking demon blood, into strengthening his powers until he could kill demons by 4.16. Meanwhile Dean’s being told by the angels that Sam needs to cease his “extracurricular activities,” which Dean discovers in 4.04 when he sees Sam exorcise a demon with Ruby.

I’d pull the quotes from 4.04, but honestly that entire scene from “if I didn’t know you, I’d wanna hunt you” right through Dean telling Sam that an angel told Dean to stop Sam from doing what he was doing... and I mean... it explains why Sam had been lying to Dean about it. Dean even ASKED him point blank: “Well, tell me. If it's so terrific... then why'd you lie about it to me?“ And Sam doesn’t have an answer for that.

So yeah, that’s another part of why he didn’t introduce Ruby to Dean immediately in 4,01. I think he needed some time to figure out how the heck to even explain just how “far off the reservation” he’d gone while Dean had been in Hell.

Ruby does start trying to win Dean over in small ways, but she spends far more time manipulating Sam into trusting Dean less and less. She makes a just enough inroads with Dean for Sam to at least wonder if Dean was just being unreasonable in his dislike of Ruby and her methods, and if Ruby was right about Sam knowing better, being stronger, being more capable of Dean, and being “morally in the right” for using his powers the way she instructed him to.

Because that was the rub, wasn’t it? The only way for Ruby to eventually be able to convince Sam to sacrifice an innocent human in order to kill Lilith, to go through with breaking the final seal, was to convince Sam that it was the morally justified thing to do.

And it was all lies.

We-the-audience only find out how Sam’s been building up his powers in 4.16-- by drinking Ruby’s blood. And we see just how shaky and strung out he gets when she withholds it from him in 4.20. He’s too weak to even focus on keeping Jimmy safe, until Dean and Cas find out in horrific fashion when Sam drinks down some random demon to power himself up during a fight. Sure he saves Amelia’s life, but yeeessssshhhh.

This is all... super dark for Sam. This is addiction, you know? That’s how his behavior is framed, from keeping his association with Ruby secret from his loved ones right on through detox, relapse, and ultimately overdose.

My guess on how she answered the door in 4.01? I think, first of all, that Ruby knew all along that Dean would be back. She would’ve known just as Alastair did about the Righteous Man breaking the first seal in Hell, and likely the fact that Dean would be resurrected. That’s why all the demons Sam and Ruby had been “tracking” suddenly converged on Pontiac... Like Ruby said in 4.02, it was cosmic... She also planted a seed of doubt about angels in Sam’s head, mainly just by being terrified of them (seemingly...)

But Sam had been keeping his distance from Bobby, because Bobby would’ve sussed out the fact that Ruby was a demon, if not that she was the same Ruby he already knew, in short order. If the two of them had been traveling together for several months at that point, it only made sense that they would have a “code word” for “hey there’s hunters here.” Which was probably something about pizza... We already know that Sam and Dean had used code words like that (Poughkeepsie, Funkytown, etc.). But Sam, a hunter working with a demon, who might run across other hunters who would like to exorcise or kill that demon, or kill Sam for the audacity of working with a demon... I mean, he’s already under suspicion from the larger hunting community as demonstrated by Gordon Walker, Kubrick, and Creedy. And as Ellen warned them way back in s2, other hunters were smart enough to piece stuff like that together for themselves...

Sam had been living a doubly risky life during his summer with Ruby, and until he figured out how the heck to adapt to Dean suddenly being back, he wasn’t gonna be just spitting out just how far he’d fallen, you know?

#spn 4.01 #spn 3.16 #spn 3.03 #spn 4.04 #spn 4.16 #spn 4.09 #spn 4.10 #spn 4.20 #spn 4.21 #spn 4.22 #ruby #sam fucking winchester #Anonymous

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