Maybe. But maybe that’s the point of the whole damned show.
Think about it. In Supernatural, we have antiheroes (Sam and Dean Winchester) who commit crimes against society (in this case, our society of supernaturally oriented beings). We have misunderstood opponents of a social order who pay a heavy price for their rebelliousness (though a heavy price for them-unleashing an increasingly demonic nature or going to Hell-would be a sweet reward for us).
Haven’t we seen that somewhere before? Haven’t we embraced a similar figure whose rebelliousness laid him low? And hasn’t he been considered a monster, too? Don’t his enemies see him as such, the same way we see Sam and Dean?
In the end, aren’t we all devils to someone?
And don’t we all deserve a little sympathy?
ROBERT T. JESCHONEK wrote Mad Scientist Meets Cannibal, a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories from PS Publishing. Robert’s work has been featured in Smart Pop’s House Unauthorized and in publications including Postscripts, Helix, and Abyss & Apex. He has also written Star Trek fiction, including New Frontier, Voyager, and Starfleet Corps of Engineers adventures. His prize-winning stories, “Our Million-Year Mission” and “Whatever You Do, Don’t Read This Story,” appeared in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Visit him online at www.robertjeschonek.com.
“There’s no place like home,” a famous Kansas resident once said. For Dean Winchester, “home” might have burned to the ground back in Lawrence, along with Mom and any shred of normality he could have hoped for, but family is forever as far as he is concerned, and taking care of his family, specifically taking care of his “pain in the ass little brother” Sam, is his job, his purpose, what makes him who he is. His home.
Does this make Dean more of a care-giver than an ass-kicker? Tanya Michaels investigates whether the two roles are mutually exclusive.
TANYA MICHAELS
DEAN WINCHESTER: BAD-ASS … OR SOCCER MOM?
This is humiliating. [I] feel like a freaking soccer mom.
-DEAN (driving a minivan), “Everybody Loves a Clown,” 2-2
Even casual viewers of Supernatural are familiar with Dean Winchester’s black Chevy Impala, a classic car he loves that was given to him by his father. Symbolic of Dean’s life and how he sees himself, the Impala is practically a character in the show. However, after the car was nearly destroyed in the first season finale, a subsequent episode found Dean temporarily-and hilariously-behind the wheel of a minivan. While we equate Dean with his Impala and the classic metal rock always blaring from its cassette deck, the incongruous minivan is surprisingly reflective of who he is deep down.
Deep, deep down. But trust me: it’s there.
When grown brothers Sam and Dean Winchester were introduced in the pilot episode, the audience was clearly meant to accept that Sam is the good brother and that Dean is the rebel/screw-up. Within minutes of meeting Sam, we knew that he had a steady girlfriend and that he was a successful Stanford student with an important law school interview scheduled. Our first look at adult Dean? He broke into Sam’s apartment in the middle of the night, making a wiseass quip about looking for beer, and stopped just shy of hitting on his brother’s girlfriend. (In the later “What Is and What Should Never Be” (2-20), which imagined an alternate reality for the brothers, Sam accused Dean of hooking up with “my prom date … on prom night.” Dean admitted, “Yeah, that does kinda sound like me.”)
Dean’s seeming disregard for authority is peppered throughout the series, starting in the pilot, when he told Sam to “blow off” his interview and when he was rude to the police, which drew righteous indignation from Sam. Dean’s full of attitude and smart-aleck comebacks when he’s arrested midway through the episode-and again when he’s arrested in “The Usual Suspects” (2-7), and in “Folsom Prison Blues” (2-19), and in “Jus In Bello” (3-12). Although little brother Sam was along for most of these bookings, he wasn’t the one cracking jokes and being a generally uncooperative pain in the butt. Where Sam is more likely to follow rules and question the ethics of their actions, especially in the first season, Dean seems untroubled by a conscience:
DEAN: Well, let’s see… . Honest. (weighs imaginary scales with his hands) Fun and easy. No contest. (“Bugs,” 1-8)
In the two brothers’ habitual squabbles, Dean derides Sam’s attempts to be Joe Normal. During the pilot episode, they fought on a bridge after Dean countered that Sam was not born to be a lawyer and marry his girl-that, sooner or later, Sam will have to admit he’s “one of them.” Meaning, a Winchester. Dean sneers at normalcy in general, claiming in “Bugs” that a typical suburban existence would be intolerable.
DEAN: Manicured lawns. How was your day, honey? I’d blow my brains out.
SAM: There’s nothing wrong with normal.
DEAN: I’d take our family over normal any day.
(Liar! But we’ll get back to that momentarily.)
On the surface, this exchange seems to cement the idea that Sam is the Boy Scout while Dean is happily bent. Dean himself buys into his role as the Bad Boy and Sam’s as the Sensitive One, prone to “touchyfeely, self-help yoga crap” (“Phantom Traveler,” 1-4) as well as “angst, more droopy music, and staring out the rainy windows” (“Playthings,” 2-11). When Sam began behaving out of character in “Born Under a Bad Sign” (2-14), Dean protested that “smoking, throwing bottles at people … sounds more like me than you.” Thankfully, the Winchester brothers aren’t simply the Bad Boy and the Sensitive One. Were that the case, the show wouldn’t be nearly as compelling and both brothers would be as one-dimensional as their parodied caricatures of themselves in “Tall Tales” (2-15).
Seemingly insubordinate Dean Winchester, with a quip for every occasion and a questionable moral compass, is far from the family rebel. Instead, the son who has repeatedly proven his disdain for authority is militaristic in his devotion to their father John. It was Sam, erstwhile do-gooder, who defied their father’s wishes, took off on his own, and metaphorically (and perhaps literally) told John to go stick it:
DEAN: I remember that fight. In fact, I seem to recall a few choice phrases coming out of your mouth. (“Bugs”)
Throughout the first season, Sam expressed frustration with their impossible-to-find father, challenging the absent John’s actions and motives, while Dean continued to follow orders without question, the good son. (This specific tension outlives John himself. Dean snapped in “Long Distance Call” (3-14) that even with their dad dead, Sam’s still butting heads with him. And Sam countered that Dean was still following their late father with blind faith.) When Sam assured a sixteen-year-old boy in “Bugs” who didn’t get along with his own father that it would all be okay once the teen could escape to college, just as Sam did, Dean was appalled. In a following scene, Dean took on the more traditional, rule-abiding role when demanding to know how Sam could tell the kid to “ditch his family”:
DEAN: How ’bout telling him to respect his old man? How’s that for advice?
The undercurrent while they searched for John wasn’t merely that Dean wanted to find their father, but that he also wanted them to be a family again. After they finally did catch up to John, Sam wasn’t shy about challenging his father directly. In “Dead Man’s Blood” (1-20), Sam was driving the Impala-the symbolic bad-boy-mobile-when he decided he’d had enough of taking orders, swerved off the road, and nearly came to blows with their dad. Edgier than Sam’s status as black sheep of the family was the emergence of his psychic powers and their connection to the Yellow-Eyed Demon Azazel. By the halfway point of the second season, both Sam and his brother feared that he would “go Dark Side” (“Hunted,” 2-10). And there were still lingering questions at the end of the third season about whether or not Sam, brought back from the dead, is entirely human-especially given the power he demonstrated in the finale. (In “Fresh Blood” [3-7], fellow demon hunter Gordon Walker went so far as to proclaim Sam “the Antichrist.” But given that Gordon was a vindictive nut-job, we’ll overlook that
assessment.)
From season to season, no matter what Sam is ultimately proven to be or not be, there is one unwavering constant in his life-Dean Winchester. Earlier, I mentioned our first look at adult Dean, which also included his trademark smirking and a physical scuffle between brothers. But that “introduction” is far less crucial than the one we received in the pilot’s prologue, where we saw Sam as an infant and Dean as a child himself, the night Mary Winchester died in a demon-conjured fire. While his home burned around him, young Dean was charged with getting baby Sam out of the house and keeping him safe. It was a task he took to heart.
In many ways, Dean became the mother in the Winchester family dynamic. (Okay, a completely sarcastic mother, but even the best moms can be real smartasses. So I’ve heard.) Sure, upon first glance, lascivious, pool-hustling, credit-card-fraud-perpetrating Dean doesn’t seem like someone you would entrust so much as a goldfish to. It was punch-line fodder in “Dead in the Water” (1-3) when he tried to hit on a single mom by saying he liked kids:
SAM: Name three children that you even know.
Yet Dean is the one who went on to form a breakthrough bond with the mute boy in the episode; even after Dean and Sam left town the first time, Dean was troubled enough to go back and check on Lucas, which resulted in their saving Lucas’s mother. Then there was the connection between Dean and the boy Michael in “Something Wicked” (1-18). And again with Ben, the eight-year-old in “The Kids Are Alright” (3-2). In that particular episode, Dean had reason to wonder if the child he was getting along with so well was actually his son. When Dean’s former lover assured him that he wasn’t the father, she noted that he looked “disappointed”- an uncharacteristic reaction from the person Dean is usually portrayed as.
Are Dean’s sometimes funny, sometimes poignant scenes with kids simply a contrivance designed to melt fangirl hearts? No. (Frankly, it doesn’t take much more than Jensen Ackles’s eyes to melt fangirl hearts. So I’ve heard.) The truth is, Dean is a nurturer.
He defends Sam physically, of course, as any lethal mama-bear would. But he also tries to shield Sam emotionally, as we saw in flashback in “A Very Supernatural Christmas” (3-8), when Dean refused to answer Sam’s childhood questions about their father’s work. Dean referenced occasions like these in “All Hell Breaks Loose (Part 2)” (2-22) when he said Sam used to ask questions Dean begged him not to ask, because Dean wanted to keep him a kid for a while longer. In the pilot episode, Sam criticized their father for giving him a gun instead of telling him not to be afraid of the dark; while Dean dutifully stood up for John in that conversation, Dean himself tried to give Sam a normal childhood:
SAM: Sometimes I wish I could have that kind of innocence.
DEAN: If it means anything, sometimes I wish you could, too. (“Something Wicked”)
The above is an interesting exchange because both brothers so readily accept Dean’s parental role. Forget how whacked out it is that a small boy was conditioned to believe himself the liable caretaker for his even smaller brother (John Winchester, you kinda suck), but how is it that Sensitive Sammy has overlooked Dean’s right to innocence? In point of fact, Dean lost more the night of Mary’s death than Sam did since, as Sam says in the pilot, Sam wouldn’t even know what their mom looked like without pictures. She was never part of his life, so how can he miss her-how can he miss having a family-as keenly as his older brother?
In Mary’s absence, can there be any doubt that Dean was the most nurturing influence in Sam’s early life? That role certainly wouldn’t fall to John. What does it say about your parenting skills when your kid only realizes you’re demonically possessed because you finally told him he did a good job? That’s essentially what happened in the first season finale (“Devil’s Trap,” 1-22), when John praised Dean for always looking out for their family. Dean contended that his actual father would be furious that Dean had wasted a necessary bullet, no matter the reason, and would “tear me a new one.”
In the subsequent “In My Time of Dying” (2-1), John did praise Dean (this time not because he was possessed but because he was dying). John’s own recollections of the past further prove that Dean was the de facto mother-hen in the testosterone-fueled Winchester family:
JOHN: I’d come home from a hunt, and after what I’d seen, I’d be wrecked… . [You’d] put your hand on my shoulder and look me in the eye and say, “It’s okay, Dad.” Dean, I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have had to say that to me. I should have been saying that to you.
Well, duh. And John lost any points he won with me by finally giving his kid kudos because he immediately followed it with the caution that Sammy might, um, become a demon and that it was Dean’s responsibility to save Sam, even if that meant destroying him. Frankly, it’s a shock that Dean didn’t snap under pressure and resentment and shove his kid brother under a bus years ago. But the strongest indication the viewers-or Sam himself-ever get of Dean’s discontent is in “Skin” (1-6). Though the episode opens with Dean scoffing at Sam staying in touch with his college buddies (“A job like this, you can’t get close to people”), the shapeshifter who later inhabits Dean’s skin tells us that Dean’s not as nonchalant about his loner persona as he would like others to believe. After proving that it has access to Dean’s thoughts and memories, the not-quite-Dean shares a few revelations with Sam:
SHAPESHIFTER DEAN: He’s sure got issues with you. You got to go to college. He had to stay home. I mean, I had to stay home. With Dad. You don’t think I had dreams of my own? But Dad needed me. Where the hell were you? … Deep down, I’m just jealous. You got friends, you could have a life. Me, I know I’m a freak and sooner or later everyone’s gonna leave me. You left. Hell, I did everything Dad asked me to and he ditched me, too. No explanation, nothing.
This expresses not only Dean’s sense of familial obligation but his fear of being alone, his desire for relationships in his life. For all that Dean projects a love-’em-and-leave-’em image, giving the impression he would break out in hives at the very mention of meaningful commitment, we find out in “Route 666” (1-13) that he previously had a very serious girlfriend, Cassie, a woman in whom he was so emotionally invested that he told her about his real job-prompting her to freak out and abandon him (ouch).
He and Cassie were reunited in “Route 666” when she contacted him to ask for help with paranormal murders. During the episode, she slept with him but made it clear, after Dean saved her butt from a homicidal spirit, that it was a one-time thing. When they exchanged their goodbyes (again), even though she’d hurt him before and in spite of his usual aversion to sentiment, Dean voiced the hope that maybe this farewell would be “less permanent.” Cassie effectively squashed that, choosing to be a “realist” about their situation.
Normally Sam encourages his brother to share his feelings (and gets a sarcastic retort for his troubles), but it’s Dean who made himself vulnerable by breaking Winchester Rule #1 and confiding in Cassie. Even Sam, who we are led to believe would have proposed to Jessica, never told her the truth about how his mom died or what’s really out there.
Don’t be fooled by the blaring Metallica or the fact that Dean’s nickname for his brother is “bitch”-Dean Winchester is a big softie. Despite his abilities to kick ass and his contention that the dark job is full of “perks” (“Skin”), what he really craves is home and hearth-that which the yellow-eyed demon stole from him decades ago.
Perhaps the most telling episode is the second season’s “What Is and What Should Never Be,” in which Dean was attacked by a djinn/genie, a creature whose fabled wish-granting powers are actually a method of subduing prey inside a dream world while the djinn feeds off the person for the next few days (resulting in the victim’s eventual death).
In Dean’s dream world, was he a heavy metal superstar dating half a dozen lingerie models? No, he worked at an auto-garage back home in Lawrence, Kansas … where his mother still lived. Though his father was dead in this alternate reality, Dean was thrilled to learn that Da
d died in his sleep, after watching his sons grow up and spending his spare time on prosaic pastimes like softball. Included in a set of family photos was a delightfully clichéd Christmas picture where all four Winchesters wore coordinated holiday sweaters.
It’s a far cry from the actual past Winchester Christmas we were shown many episodes later, where adolescent Dean and Sam spent the holiday alone in another temporary efficiency apartment or hotel room. One of the sweetest-yet most painful to watch-flashbacks in the show was Dean doing his damnedest to give his kid brother Christmas because their father was out on a hunt and couldn’t be bothered to make an appearance (“A Very Supernatural Christmas”). The first flashback in the episode featured a young Sam complaining that their father would probably forget Christmas, with Dean in the wifely role of trying to placate the whining child while at the same time defending the father. A following flashback had Dean declaring that John returned briefly in the middle of the night and left presents and decorations-a lie not even young Sam could believe after he opened gifts that were all intended for a girl. Dean admitted to stealing the wrapped presents from a nice house.
In the djinn dream world, Dean not only had a steady job that required no bloodshed, he had a steady girlfriend who was a nurse, which he proclaimed to be “so respectable.” The character who once said he’d blow his brains out if he lived somewhere with a manicured lawn became nearly giddy at the chance to mow the Winchester’s yard … which was surrounded by an honest-to-goodness white picket fence. Even after Dean realized that the djinn world was an illusion and that the “real” Dean was being slowly killed somewhere, he was reluctant to give up the dream.
The djinn-perpetuated characters in Dean’s fantasy argued convincingly for him to succumb rather than fight, even after he asserted that none of them were real:
In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural Page 10