I wrote this up really quickly so it’s not proofread or anything. But that pic of Sam sitting at Jack’s bedside from 14.08 really motivated me to write something for once, so… here you go?
–
“So, what can we do?”
“Watch over him. Stay by his side. As he dies.”
The last three days have been like something out of a nightmare, Sam thinks. It’d started the second Dean had called him, and Sam could barely hear him over the panicked yells of “Jack’s sick, Sam! He’s coughing up blood and he’s passed out and – I don’t know what to do. I need you here. Jack needs you here!”
Sam barely remembers getting back home at all, just running down the bunker stairs two at a time with his heart in his throat to Jack’s room. He’d been in a daze, seeing Jack’s prone form, his white shirt still stained with droplets of blood. Cas arrived a few moments later, and Sam had reluctantly followed Dean out to let Cas try and do what he could.
But it hadn’t been enough. None of it had. Angelic healing, the hospital, the Archangel grace from Gabriel, Rowena… nothing. There was no quick fix it, no miraculous solution.
This is a GREAT gifset. And it drives home the point perfectly. The point Dean made by mentioning Thelma and Luise and saying “We just put it in Drive and go”. And that Sam perfectly understood what Dean meant. Your gifset brings this out very clear. Tank you!
You gave me an excuse to go off, sorry-
I’ve seen other gifsets and screenshots of this scene, of course, and as soon as Dean started talking about “matching outfits” I knew, I knew, that this would cause shipping drama. There have been various, very different takes on this, and most of them were concerned with a) what ship this could possibly be about and, of course, b) what Sam’s reactions meant. Frankly, I’m not concerned with a), because what we can extrapolate from b) makes pretty clear that this isn’t what the scene was concerned with.
Davy Perez wrote this episode, and I would argue, based on this other episodes, that he’s a writer often concerned with the subtleness of grief and mental health. It’s a bit of a subjective interpretation, of course, but it’s similarly clear in last season’s Breakdown, where he was dealing with Sam’s, in that season almost entirely not addressed previously, depression and grieving process. (And, of course, setting the scene for Various & Sundry Villains very well.)
Of course, Mint Condition was very clearly about Dean’s mental health. A lot of the structure was very similar to Advanced Thanatology just a season ago – Dean is seen in his room, struggling with is mental health, Sam suggests a ghost hunt, only the two of them go; but then it appears that Dean is dealing better than he did the previous season, because, y’know, Dean literally killed himself in 13.05, but, oh! Oh! There’s still hints all over 14.04 that Dean really isn’t as okay as it seems at first glance, and it comes to head at the end of the episode, when he subtly, inadvertently expresses that he’s Not Actually Okay. That’s not only obvious by the way Dean looks when he says it (although I’m autistic and Very Bad With Expressions, so I won’t fight anyone on the interpretation of facial expressions)
but even if we just consider what he says: he suggests another pair, but it’s not about Halloween anymore – “we just put it in drive and go” is clearly removed from dressing up for Halloween, even if we don’t consider the implications of that statement within the context of the movie.
The following shot of Sam, of course, reinforces that it’s not about matching costumes anymore, but that it is about the ending of the movie and what Dean is implying with it. All the other shots of Sam are annoyed, but fond – the last one is sombre, and followed by a shot of the Impala driving on into the night.
And, someway, somehow, just like Advanced Thanatology, people have made this obvious theme of Dean being depressed and suicidal about shipping instead.
artherra 