In the thirteenth episode of the sixth season of Supernatural, WELL, THAT WAS EXTREMELY DISTURBING. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Supernatural.
Trigger Warning: For arachnophobia, kidnapping, body horror, misogyny and fridging.
Well, shit.
Here’s what I ultimately appreciated about “Unforgiven”: it lived up to its title. There was such an easy path for the writers to take in exploring the difficult and challenging past of Sam Winchester, and instead, they gave us an ending that is deliberately without any sort of feel-good closure. It’s not here. This episode shows us Sam at his worst, at his most inhuman, and then refuses to give his character an easy out.
It is, admittedly, a difficult episode to watch, and I imagine for all you Sam fans (WAVES TO YOU, HELLO, HOW ARE YOU), you went through a similar experience to the one I did. It’s an agonizing thing to watch a character you enjoy so much make TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE DECISIONS. At times, I do feel like Supernatural is more willing to acknowledge Sam’s faults and mistakes than Dean’s, but I also think that’s due to the framing of the point of view. Still, this episode does not allow the viewer to deny what Sam’s done. By the end of the episode, when the flashbacks catch up to real-time, we’ve seen just how detached and revolting Sam used to be when he didn’t have a soul.
“Unforgiven” opens with Dean begging Sam not to return to Bristol, Rhode Island, telling him that it’s not worth it for him to test the wall in his head. And while I sympathized Dean’s concern – especially given that it is validated by the end of this episode – I would argue that at least for Sam’s own development, he needed to understand how he used to be in order to come to terms with it. Dean, Cas, and Bobby have all told him what he was like, but this experience acts as a demonstration, and it helps frame his understanding of his time with Samuel. When he returns to this town, his memories begin to flash back into his conscious mind, but he is also confronted (sometimes rather physically) by what he’d done. Sometimes, he remembers having sex with various women. In the case of Deputy Atkins, Sam is arrested and thrown in jail for the brutal beating he gave the cop over a year prior.
But it’s Brenna Dobbs who is the most significant person that Sam comes across in his trip to his own past. When she confronts him while he’s behind bars, she reluctantly agrees to help him, and in doing so, she repeats what happened a year prior: she trusts Sam. Honestly, that’s what I found so heartbreaking about this. She trusted Sam with her husband, and now, she’s trusting Sam with her life. The tragedy here is that the endgame was always going to be the same. I don’t see how else this could have ended. Brenna would have eventually found out her husband’s fate and how Sam was tied to it.
And it’s in this eventual conclusion that the show doesn’t take the easy route. As Sam genuinely tries to solve this case and provide closure for himself and for Brenna, he doesn’t know that in doing so, he’s about to uncover a terrible truth. We got a sense from the earlier scenes that what Sam had done was pretty awful. We saw Samuel’s disturbed and disappointed reaction; we knew Sam had someone or something; we knew that Sam had gotten so attached to the power of hunting that he didn’t think twice about beating up a police officer and leaving him in the road; we knew he worked on a difficult case, and that this very case had brought him back to Bristol. (Apparently, everyone who has sex with Sam dies or something??? God, could this show please treat women better because there’s a plot here where numerous women literally die just to forward the plot. It’s absurd! It’s almost like the writers go out of their way sometimes to do this shit.)
So when we get to the reveal of the arachne, which I don’t have enough nopes in the world for, I expected something bad. I WAS NOT FUCKING READY FOR IT. Sam used Sheriff Roy Dobbs as bait, and then was quick to dismiss Samuel’s concerns about Roy’s health. As I said on video, it is no wonder that Sam let Dean get turned into a vampire earlier this season. He had already learned to used humans as bait long before that. That would have been horrific enough, except that after killing this spider humanoid thing, Sam reasons that the arachne must be poisonous, so they should just kill all the men and burn their bodies. HE DOESN’T EVEN ENTERTAIN THE NOTION OF AN ANTI-VENOM. NOTHING. He just writes them off as necessary collateral, and he shoots them all.
That’s it. He killed them all. Sam, who normally does whatever he can to save every living human at whatever the cost.
EXCEPT HOLY MOTHER OF PLOT TWISTS, ARACHNE ARE NOT VULNERABLE TO GUNSHOTS OR FIRE. HOLY SHIT, that reveal was fucked up. And it also means that there are a ton of arachne running around, right??? What’s up with that???
Here’s the thing. I’ve been saying that this show didn’t take the easy route out, and the easy solution would be for the writers to have thought of a way to make Brenna thankful for what Sam has done. But she can never forgive him for this. Sam killed her husband. Yes, it’s entirely possible that Roy would have died, but it doesn’t matter what might have happened. Sam set in motion this whole horrible affair, and more people died because of it. It doesn’t matter how complicated the arachne business is; Sam used Roy as bait, and none of this would have happened to her if Sam hadn’t viewed someone as a means to an end.
And it’s clear that Sam knows there’s nothing he can do here except wallow in his own guilt. He can’t change the past, and he can’t force Brenna to forgive him. He’s just going to have to live with what happened. And yeah, it does suck! Sam wasn’t himself for that year and a half because he couldn’t be himself, and it’s almost like he was possessed or under a spell the entire time. I can’t imagine what this sensation is like, and it’s scary and saddening to see Sam have to struggle with it.
AND THEN THE WALL IN HIS HEAD IS BROKEN AND EVERYTHING HURTS, WHAT THE FUCK. That last like two episodes!!! It’s already breaking??? Goddamn it, y’all!
The video for “Unforgiven” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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