META: Bella, her character, her past and future

[briarwood]

This is a rough draft, but if I don't post now, I'll forget again. Spoilers up to SPN 3.07

Bella Talbot is an irritant. An irritating character is always a risk in a show like Supernatural: if she's too irritating, they'll begin to lose viewers. But Bella is also one of the most intriguing characters to grace SPN since John Winchester. No, I'm not comparing them.

When we first met Bella she reminded me of Highlander's Amanda: a smart, sassy thief with a taste for the good life and not too many morals to hold her back. There are differences: Amanda, for example, wouldn't have shot Sam as Bella did (well, she wouldn't have shot a mortal); Amanda didn't think about the consequences her actions had for other pepole; Bella knows and apparently doesn't care. But the two characters have a lot in common, too, and that's why I like her. Dean could someone playing Amanda to his Duncan MacLeod...

Bella knows all about the Winchesters' world. Until Bella, the characters in SPN who were aware of the supernatural world and its dangers fell into three categories: 1) the supernatural creatures themselves, all of whom were evil or at least harmful in some way; 2) people who needed rescuing, or who had in the past been saved from supernatural nasties; and 3) those who belong to the world of the Hunters. Before Bella, there's really only one character who might stand outside those three categories: Mary Winchester.

Bella is human and, so far as we know, has no psychic ability, but she can command certain supernatural powers via the artefacts she's collected. Bella knows what is out there, but she's not interested in saving the world (or anyone in it): she's interested in making her own life fun while it lasts.

But underneath the sassy wisecracks and the don't-care attitude, Bella seems to be a more complex character. She's a thief, but she has a kind of defiant honesty about her. She tells the truth about herself, unless she's working a con. (Not unlike the Winchesters.) In Red Sky At Morning, when Sam and Dean confront her about why she has seen the ship, why she's been targeted by the ghost, she doesn't deny the charge of having spilled family blood. She merely says, "You wouldn't understand. No one did."

Not "no one does", "no one did". Whatever Bella did in her past, it was known and dealt with at the time. Moreover, her choice of words tells us it was something she did intentionally. It need not have been: at least one of the ghost's victims was targeted because of an accident.

"Family" covers a lot of possibilities but since this is Supernatural, it's probably safe to assume that she killed either a sibling, a parent or her child. The latter is unlikely because the character is relatively young. So she deliberately killed a sibling or parent. I'm stopping short of calling it murder simply because there's no evidence of what happened except Bella's words and "You wouldn't understand" implies that, to her, at least, there is something to understand. There might be a clue in Red Sky At Night. When Sam tells her they intend to save the second brother, she responds, "He's cannon fodder. He can't be saved and you know it." The line is open to a lot of different interpretations, but I think it's a little defensive. I wonder if this is how she lives with what she did: by telling herself that whomever she killed couldn't have been saved anyway.

If so it'll cut her no slack with the Winchesters, for whom no price is too high to save family, but it does with me.

Alongside this is her in-your-face prejudice against hunters. In Bad Day At Black Rock she tells Dean that hunters are "a bunch of obsessed, revenge-driven sociopaths". Later, in Red Sky At Morning she makes that personal, telling Dean, "You do this out of vengeance and obsession. You're a stone's throw away from being a serial killer."

Let's take a step back from that. She's wrong about Sam and Dean, although both men have demonstrated their potential to be what Bella thinks they are. Dean really enjoyed the kill in Bloodlust and in Croatoan he demonstrated a definite lack of care for the collatoral damage. From All Hell Breaks Loose onward we've seen a colder, more ruthless side of Sam: he's stopped drawing the line at supernatural vs human and he, too, is willing to kill innocent humans to get the demons in possession of them. Certainly revenge is a factor for both brothers. But neither of them is a sociopath and they both do this primarily to save people.

But is Bella wrong about hunters in general? Are they all "revenge-driven"? With the single exception of Jo Harvelle, every hunter who has in cannon given a reason why they got started hunting, started it for anger and revenge. Gordon Walker: to avenge his sister. John Winchester: to avenge his
wife (yes, John's motives are more complex than pure revenge but it was definitely a prime motivator for him). Tamara and Isaac in The Magnificent Seven: we aren't told all the details, but we are told that anger and revenge are their primary motivators. And then there's Sam Winchester who left college to start hunting again in order to find and kill the demon only after it killed his girlfriend.

"Obsessed"? It certainly takes dedication to the level of obsession to live the way most of the hunters we've met do. Bobby with his solitary existence, Elkins with his obsessive note-taking, Gordon...well, he takes obsession to a whole new level. John Winchester, too, not exactly the poster-boy for moderation and restraint.

"Sociopaths" and serial killers? Well, the hat certainly fits Gordon Walker and there's no reason to believe he's unique among hunters. "Sociopath" most definitely doesn't describe the Winchesters, but "serial killers"...yes, it might. No, really, bear with me on this. By strict definition, a serial killer is a multiple killer of strangers, with each kill a separate psychological "event" and a "cooling off period" between kills. They have other traits in common with the serial killer: a certain victim profile, a driving need to continue (certainly in Sam's case in S2), a conviction that they are justified in killing and (in Dean's case, if perhaps not Sam's) they get a buzz out of doing it.

From within the narrative, we, the audience, know the Winchesters. We know they are good men with complex motivations. We wouldn't call them serial killers. But from the outside point of view, like Bella, like Henrikson, the label is partly justified.

What all this tells us about Bella is that she does, indeed, know hunters. She's got some foundation for her low opinion of them and it's not surprising she assumes Dean is just like all the rest.

The fact that she's repeated that opinion twice, in almost exactly the same terms, tells me something else about her. We always hate most in others what we unconsciously perceive in ourselves. Bella does display some sociopathic (though not psychopathic) tendencies herself. The way she shot Sam to get leverage over Dean, her willingness to sell the rabbit's foot even though she knew she'd be condemning Sam to death...hell, her willingness to steal it in the first place, since she knew what it did...these are not displays of conscience. Which leaves "obsessed" and "revenge-driven"...do they apply to her?

If we tie this in with the knowledge that she has spilled family blood, then yes, maybe they do. At this point, it's pure speculation, but it seems to me that someone in her close family (father? brother?) was a hunter, and that he either caused her to kill another family member, or was the one she had to kill. Of course "no one" would understand if the supernatural were involved in the death. And after that? I'll bet she swore that she would never become what the hunters are, but she couldn't leave the supernatural alone, either. She's big on contacting the dead...could that have begun through trying to talk with whomever she killed? Her love of luxury and money suggests she started out in poverty...though maybe not as her accent and education suggest the opposite. But that could be a mask.

Bella isn't quite the sociopath she pretends to be, however. Her reaction when she's told spilling family blood is the reason she's about to die is quite telling. That death in her past - it matters to her. It really does. She doesn't come back with a witticism, she lets the boys see her real feelings, just for a moment. Later, in Fresh Blood, she stands up to Gordon. Re-watching the scene, it's clear she has no intention of telling him what he wants to know. Not until she sees he has something she wants. Everyone has their price and Bella's is her own obsession.

I believe she did plan on calling Dean to warn him, as she says, she just didn't care quite enough to make the call quickly. And she certainly didn't have to help them further after Dean's death threat. I don't believe it was fear of Dean that motivated her. I think she knows Dean well enough by now that if she believed he wanted her dead, she would believe nothing she could do to help would change his mind.

I think that as she's getting to know the Winchester boys, she realises they're not what she's always believed hunters are. In Red Sky At Night the brothers' belief that she had spilled family blood made them both willing to leave her to die. I doubt either Sam or Dean could think of a greater sin, by their own lights, and Bella simply must have noticed. In Fresh Blood she knew it was Sam, not both brothers that Gordon wanted to kill, and she certainly believed Dean when he promised to kill her. It doesn't take genius to figure out that he was so angry because she'd put his brother in danger. Together with whatever her own family secret may be, that does, I think lay the foundations for some kind of relationship between the three of them. No, I don't mean romance.

There's one more thing that's striking about Bella from a narrative point of view. Let's look again at what happened in her encounter with Gordon. First, hearing his name most definitely gives Bella pause: she knows who he is, which means she knows he's very capable of killing her. Yet she deals with him confidently, never once showing that she's scared. Why? Because she has something that he needs badly, and she trusts that he will value that enough not to kill her.

This is almost exactly what happened when the Crossroads Demon spoke with Sam at the end of Bedtime Stories. The demon held back the single most important piece of information: the identity of the one who holds Dean's contract. Whether she thought that would keep her alive or whether she was trusting Sam's honour to keep him from killing her human host, I have no idea. But whichever it was, she showed the same confidence to Sam that Bella showed to Gordon. In fact, the two scenes are almost identical in that respect.

In Supernatural, these things are rarely coincidental. It makes me wonder if, in the end, it will be Bella who holds the key to unlocking Dean's contract.

Comments, discussion, disagreement - all welcome. But spoil me and I will beat you to death with a damp lettuce leaf.