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I can't really do any analysis of spn without acknowledging that it is a show that fundamentally retconned itself and who its two main characters are - the entire character-growth narrative arc for both Sam and Dean, that it was working toward for 5 whole seasons. Decided to just... start from scratch, flatten and rewrite them hundreds of episodes into its runtime.
Longpost incoming.
I've gotta assume someone else has already pointed this out and lots of people already know this. Except that I've just... never heard anyone acknowledge this before. I've heard people acknowledge it with other side characters like how the archangels were flattened/rewritten in the post-kripke era.
But I've never seen anyone point out that this also happened, most dramatically, to Sam and Dean.
I'm sitting here behind the keyboard chomping, biting clawing in frustration that I can't pull up every single piece of evidence and explore the impact of every interwoven subplot. This is already going to be very long, and if I footnoted this to its fullest possible extent, it would probably just crash tumblr. So you'll just have to take my word for it, a little bit. But Sam and Dean are fundamentally not the same characters when they show up onscreen again in s6 that they were when they walked offscreen in s5. And they never are, ever again, for 10 seasons.
Because the post-kripke era spent 5 seasons giving both of them clear, linear character arcs. Nailed the landing, where both of those characters - at the very end, climax of the story - reached apotheosis. They internalized the lessons the previous 5 seasons had slowly but surely been trying to teach them. And grew. They became who they were meant to be.
And then the show just... pretended all that character growth never happened.
In order to get on board with this, you have to know what the main theme of the kripke era story was, which I do think is difficult to clearly grasp. Especially so, if you went into watching spn knowing it's really long, or coming to it once the show had already ended. No one goes into a story expecting the characters to reach the end of their emotional/thematic/narrative journeys 1/3 of the way through.
But for kripke era Sam and Dean, they... well, do.
So. What is the main theme of kripke-era spn?
Growing up.
Specifically, how to grow from a young adult. Emphasis on adult, as no matter that this was a show that ended up on the CW, this was a show that started out with two characters who were solidly already adults. Sam was about 5 minutes away from graduating from college, a major rite of passage denoting the last leg of the portal into adulthood for most Americans, especially in the era the show came out. A very final, late stage rite. Meanwhile, Dean is already in his mid-20s, pushing into late-20s. If we take the concept of hunting as the family business, Dean is already going off and hunting successfully on his own; he is, in a sense, managing the family store himself while the owner is away, or maybe taking over his own branch to manage. And he's inherited the Impala - not just the family car, but the family home. Symbolically and literally, Sam and Dean are adults in their-mid20s, with both feet already outside the nest when we first meet them in episode 1. Despite how tight their father still clings in some ways to his role as parent and patriarch, they are both able to run around the country on their own recognizance, doing their own thing and making their own decisions for themselves.
Except.
The kripke era is obsessed with interiority - with what motivates and drives its characters.
And when we meet both Sam and Dean in s1, despite being really real adults, if very new to it... Both "boys" still have the mindset of people who aren't quite adults yet. In one very particular way. Which becomes the core theme of the s5 narrative arc:
The boys are still making all of the decisions in their lives in response to the way they were raised, their childhood frameworks, and the ideals their father embedded into them.
The brothers represent two competing, oppositional approaches to viewing one's upbringing:
When we first meet Dean, he is "the good little soldier," who follows his father's orders; sees questioning his father, their family lifestyle, and the values they were raised with as both disrespectful and dangerous. He defends and makes excuses for John. Not only that, he glorifies John; it becomes important to him to see his father as a hero, to the point that he sees John as a positive role model and intentionally bases large portions of his personality after John. At the beginning of the series, Dean glorifies/actively embraces the hunter lifestyle as a result, and bats away any attempts by Sam or anyone else to think deeper about their father, their lifestyle, their values or moral framework, and, mostly importantly, what Dean himself might want or need beyond the framework he was raised within. Dean represents a person who enters adulthood making decisions that primarily embrace and emulate the way they were raised.
When we first meet Sam, Sam rejects pretty much every aspect of the way he was raised. He sees both their childhood, the family lifestyle and values, and the father who enacted all of it, as a problem, as a bad path to be avoided at all costs. He has chosen a particular path for himself, sure, but at it's core, the path he has chosen is in direct opposition to the way he was raised. It's not just that he is able to acknowledge the toxic environment while Dean initially refuses to; the kripke era doesn't actually care if John is abusive or not. "Abuse" or "mistreatment," overall, are not actually intentional themes of the show. The kripke era is concerned not with what has happened specifically in the Winchester family dynamic, that is a vehicle for the real theme. Which is how people grow into processing their childhoods and moving beyond them. Sam, when we meet him, knows that there were problems within his childhood, and his solution is to swerve left at every opportunity where he's seen John swerve right. Sam represents a person who enters adulthood basing all their major life decisions on trying to avoid the way they were raised.
Beginning immediately in the pilot, we see the boys begin to butt heads about this. Over the course of the next 5 seasons, we watch both characters, separately and together, wind their own narrative frameworks into each other's way. Like cats, about to trip their owner, even though that's not what they really want to do.
But they can't help it. They love each other. They were raised in the same home life. They're family. If they want to make their relationship as brothers work... they're going to have to deal with the fact that the other has a very different perspective on their family dynamic, their father... and ultimately what a good life looks like. What a good framework for making adult decisions looks like.
Especially because the show doesn't just throw them together. But it throws them headfirst into a complex, challenging, adult world. And takes away their ability to crawl back into childhood and "I need an adult" their way out of it. In the first season, it does so by having John be largely absent for the better part of a year, forcing both of them to make decision after decision after decision completely on their own, building their own skills and relying on their own judgments. The training wheels version of adulthood, for them both, as they know John is still out there somewhere, a parent figure who holds mysterious but still very real keys to the kingdom of adult knowledge. They use his journal, but it doesn't always serve them. Or it's never a quick fix, just a guiding post. As parental advice should be.
And then, after that... he dies. Leaving them, like the angels, absent a world without a god. Benevolent, deserving of obedience and love, in the simplistic view of Dean. Or fallen, broken, disappointing, in the simplistic view of Sam.
Left alone, in a big, scary universe, now confirmed to be even bigger and scarier than they'd even known before. With no parent figure to point them in any sort of meaningful direction. Either to follow, or to rebel against. His last will and testament a vague, nonspecific, and extremely unhelpful edict ("kill Sam or save him") that calls into further question whether either of them could trust the man... or their individual perceptions of him.
Over 5 seasons, the show puts challenge after challenge in front of the two main characters. And, just like in life, instead of easily conquering those challenges, they spend more time failing than they spend succeeding. And each challenge escalates, casting them deeper and deeper into a world that, not only was bigger than anything they had ever known...
But was ultimately bigger, more complex, and stranger than anything their father could have prepared them for.
Because in the end, the pedestal both boys put their father on, as god-hero to be to be emulated and obeyed, or as negative role model who's path is to be avoided pathologically... it's a perspective born of childhood, when parents are like gods. When all decisions are filtered through those simplistic lenses. When our parents' voices are the loudest ones in our heads.
But that's not the adult way to interact with the world.
If you're not convinced that "growing up" in this way is the major core theme of the kripke era, allow me to pull a couple selected quotes from crucially important moments in s5, in their full contexts:
"No, I- I won't let you," Ellen tells Jo through tears, as Jo outlines her plan to build a bomb and die. "If I can get us a shot on the devil… Dean, we have to take it," Jo tells Dean, who is also struggling to process this, in the same way he will struggle to process Sam's sacrifice half a season later. For the same reasons, as Jo is originally set up as a younger-sister figure for him specifically in the narrative. "No!" Ellen says, "That's not-" "Mom. This might literally be your last chance to treat me like an adult. [emphasis mine] You might wanna take it?" Her sacrifice, and Ellen's handling of it, being both doylistic foreshadowing and a watsonian example for Dean to follow later on.
"Time to grow up," Gabriel says - the only archangel brother who did grow into finding something he cares about beyond his family drama. To Lucifer, the Sam-foil who both refuses and is not allowed to grow, never able to move beyond acting in eternal response to his father's beliefs about him or his world.
The very first Swan Song scene with Sam and Dean in it, which takes place in a private moment between the brothers: Dean joins Sam for a beer leaning on the impala, while they discuss next steps, the plan to put Lucifer back in the cage, if this is what Sam really wants. And about how, in the end, Dean is going to back Sam up in whatever he chooses to do here. Among other talk about growth and choice and adulthood, we get this line: "You're not a kid anymore, Sam," Dean says. "And I can't keep treating you like one. Maybe I gotta grow up a little, too.
Grapple with and gradually come to realize that the tenets of the hunter lifestyle are ultimately flawed, overly simplistic, and unhealthy. That monsters are not always evil. That simplistic, vigilante violence is not always heroic, or the best solution.
Go from believing his father was a good father, to realizing his father exploited and neglected him. That even in the ultimate sacrifice, it just left Dean cold and alone, with more questions than answers, and with a horrific and inexplicable new set of burdens.
Go from believing John was a good father-figure/patriarch, to Dean but also to Sam. To realizing Dean himself is, was, and could be a better father-figure and patriarch than John ever was. Who could see parenting/family-leadership solutions and frameworks that his father never could. And then embracing that not just as a belief, but as an action.
Realize that he wants better for both himself and for Sam as Dean's own child-figure than his father was ever capable of truly wanting for either of them. That what is better for Sam is supporting whatever Sam chooses for himself, even if it hurts or scares Dean, or breaks his heart.
Realize that he wants something better, healthier, more normal for himself, than anything he was raised or burdened with. That, even if it hurts, even if he's forced to grieve all that he's lost... he has to make his own decisions for himself. Based on what he knows about himself and the world. He doesn't assume Sam's position - he's not rejecting everything John is or his family has been wholesale, just to reject it. He's proactively choosing something for himself, something he's learned he wants through getting to know himself in the context of the adult world that has challenged his core convictions, and brought him out the other side. His own man.
Realize his father and the way he was raised are not the cause of Sam's problems, his "freak" status. That, even though it seemed like it at the time, Sam was not an outsider because he was raised a hunter. But because of an identity, a path, a destiny that predated his father's involvement or his childhood.
Realize at least some of the tools in his family's toolbox, and the family itself, are important support systems which will help him on his journey. Which will help him fulfill and succeed at the final challenge put before him.
Realize that, even if his father is not a perfect father or his family a perfect family, that neither is Sam himself; he fumbles and ends up replicating some of the same mistakes he'd once sneered at his father for making, and comes out the other side with more humility and less arrogant disdain.
Realize that the true moment of growth, of adulthood, of apotheosis on his journey, is learning to control his resentment, and make decisions for himself, by looking ahead. Facing/making decisions for himself, in situations expanded far beyond anything his childhood could have prepared him for, or that would be reasonable to expect it to have. Accept and embrace that his choices are his own, and the path laid out in front of him is his own; that retroactively making future choices based simplistically on what came before will not serve him in a world, in a life, that has grown beyond the one of his childhood.
The climax of both of the boys' growth stories, separately and together, comes in the... well, the climax episode/scene of the story.
Sam is possessed by Lucifer - his narrative foil. The younger brother who is resentful of his father and older brother. Like Sam, has good reason to be. And yet, unlike Lucifer, Sam is able to "grow up" by embracing and taking control of the symbolic family resentment ("I've got him"). He is able to stop himself-as-Lucifer from beating Dean into a pulp in a resentment-fueled rage. And eventually cast that version of himself away. While embracing the part that mirrors and connects to his own identity role as "other," who was never destined to have a normal life.
But he couldn't do it without Dean.
Specifically, he couldn't have done it if Dean hadn't let him. Hearkening back to that first scene earlier, from the beginning of Swan Song, when Sam and Dean are sitting on the impala talking about growing up:
Sam: "You're gonna let me say yes?" Dean: "No. That's the thing. It's not on me to let you do anything. You're a grown - well, overgrown - man. If this is what you want, I'll back your play."
Dean's arc is ultimately about rejecting the values of his father, in the episode, and in the final moment in the cemetery with possessed!Sam. Literally and symbolically, by supporting Sam's choice to allow himself to get possessed, accepting/allowing Sam to drink demon blood to prepare to do so (an act that caused him to kick Sam out John-style one season before), and to allow Sam to choose to die... a thing Dean had been unable to accept. Either for himself, or for Sam, previously.
Then, again, he rejects the framework he was raised into in the end - tied to his father's last mission, his final words - save Sam or kill him. Dean accepts that 1. it's not his job to save Sam, because Sam is an adult, and deserves the autonomy/respect to make decisions for himself about what salvation & safety look like to him. And 2. rejects the role of Sam's killer.
Dean chooses door #3. The one that John would never choose. The one that is never supposed to be available to monsters, under the hunter's code:
Support him.
"I'm not going to let him die alone."
"I'm not going to leave you."
Sam is able to choose his path, one that ultimately contains and moves past resentment, because his own last father-figure and the connection to his family allows him to. Embraces the true, healthy role of supporter.
Sam embraces his role as monster/other/freak, effectively becoming the biggest monster of all and tossing himself into the realm of monsters, for what is meant to be all eternity... And the world doesn't end. He didn't need to be saved or killed after all. But neither was it in the cards for him to choose a normal life.
Not death. Not salvation.
Not hunting. Not normalcy.
But the secret third thing, that only he was able to figure out for himself. Not by looking backward and navigating in reverse.
But by looking at his adult life, the complex adult world, as it was.
Navigating it all by learning, growing. Looking ahead.
His last image (at least right before he's grabbed by Adam!Michael) is one of peace, as he tilts his head back, opens his arms, and lets himself embrace his path.
Dean, meanwhile, is saddened, devastated. Alone, with the family dynamic he'd grown up with now literally and metaphorically gone.
He could keep hunting. Or follow his brother into the realm of monsters. But that's not what Sam needs, and... that's not what Dean wants for himself.
Over the course of 5 careful, painstaking seasons, the show made us and Dean both realize that Dean doesn't like hunting. He never really did. He had to learn to detach from hunting, because hunting didn't serve him. And the dirty little secret, Dean has figured out, is it never even served his family to begin with.
So... he leaves. Puts the toxic, un-useful parts of his family, his childhood, and the beliefs he was raised with, behind him. Moves forward in his own way. His own path.
The world of humans. Normalcy. No absentee gods or fallen heroes here. No missions, and no violence.
Hope. Health. Normalcy.
The Winchester brothers achieve their earned resolution at the end of the story. They move beyond the childish two-dimensional good/bad binary when it comes to looking backward. And therefore, more importantly, when it comes to looking forward. Seeing what options are available to them as individuals, in building an affirming, nuanced future. Full of decisions, and the emotional skills to make them, based on situations as they come. Free of the burden of carrying the past - their childhood frameworks - into every decision, when it doesn't serve them and is no longer relevant.
If you're thinking, hey. That's weird. That's not what happens in the next 10 seasons of the show. That's not the dynamic that Sam and Dean have for the rest of the series. That's not the psychological framework/approach either of them take to... to hunting, or family, or lifestyles, or identities. Or mental health or morality or relationships to the concept of parent figures, or the concept of autonomy, or... or.... or....
Yeah. Yep. That's my point.
Sam and Dean got over 100 episodes where they were being painstakingly written, in a way that had them learning very important lessons, step by careful step.
Very important lessons that they both effectively did ultimately learn, as evidenced in Swan Song, the original climax of the kripke-era arc.
From the point of view of the show, from both a doylistic narrative lens and a watsoninan psychological lens... both characters have already grown past where they end up when they show up onscreen again in s6e1.
From where they will be for the next 10 seasons.
Sam and Dean aren't the same characters, in any sense of the word, in the post-kripke era than they are in the kripke era. The post-kripke era, by its very nature, immediately forces the characters to show up and either unlearn every bit of growth they've struggled for 5 years to attain. Or it just flat out ignored and retconned that this growth even happened.
This makes it so that the entire arc of spn is, in effect, a tragedy, btw. I have mixed feelings about the meta handling of Chuck's role in s15, but he's right about this: Sam and Dean are trapped in the narrative. They were trapped the minute they showed back up onscreen again in 6.01, Dean drawn away from the normal life and back into hunting, Sam away from the world of monsters and back into hunting. And both of them back into the roles of older-brother-leader, younger-brother-inferior. Either way you look at it, they're either... unspeakably sad and broken people, who achieved true growth, and then were immediately dragged away by forces beyond their ken from being allowed to realize it.
Or they're just... two different dudes.
And I'll never be able to fully reconcile that. Or not acknowledge it, when it comes to writing complex spn meta. Never. Anytime I go to do any sort of analysis that bridges the gap between the two eras, I'm forced to acknowledge that spn is a tragedy, it's a horror. And despite the brighter coloring and the sillier tone, it's so much more a horror story in later seasons because the characters aren't allowed to grow, to have ownership over their own lives. That they are the definition of trapped in the narrative, frozen like bugs in amber, eternally their earlier pre-Swan Song childish selves. For the amusement of everyone, creative team and audience alike.
Every time I do any form of analysis, I have to do the most bizarre thing I've ever had to do when analyzing any piece of fiction. Which is make the decision to either pretend the end of s5 just... didn't happen. Or acknowledge in the meta itself that the different spn eras are showing us two unique sets of fundamentally different guys.