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Not Normal, Safe: Sam in the Pilot
There is a mystery surrounding Sam Winchester from the very beginning.
When we first see him as a baby, he is the centre of his family – a new baby always is. Everyone else is gathered in Sam’s nursery to put him to bed. The nursery is a testament to how important Sam is to his family: the sheer number of cuddly toys, for a baby still too young to play with them, the depth of affection with which each of the others wish the baby good-night, even the baseball-themed mobile above the crib shout aloud that the baby is very much loved.
With the baby left alone for the night, we see the mobile above the crib begin to move, apparently all on its own. Is this the first sign of a supernatural presence? Or is baby Sammy somehow making the mobile move? Perhaps it’s only the wind.
Even taking the pilot alone, with none of the revelations we’ve seen since, there is little doubt that Mary’s death centres around Sam. There’s the mysterious figure beside the crib, whom she at first mistakes for John. Mary dies on the ceiling, directly above the crib; indeed, when John first bursts into the nursery it looks as if baby Sammy is quite entertained by the sight. Blood drips from Mary’s wound to fall right beside Sam’s head; only John’s hand prevents the second drip of blood from touching the baby. And then there’s the fire which so-quickly filled the nursery. It seems certain that, had John not been present, Sam would have died with his mother.
When we meet him as an adult, Sam seems like a normal kid…or is he? He’s a regular student with a girlfriend. But he has an odd dislike of Halloween, and although he keeps a photograph of his parents, Jess tells us Sam won’t ever talk about his family. It’s clear he has money worries, but he’s not living in abject poverty. Sam is also much smarter than average. With what we later learn about Sam’s upbringing, his 174 LSAT score isn’t just impressive, it’s miraculous. This is a young man with a bright future ahead of him…and in a way all of that disappears the moment Dean arrives in his world.
Sam’s desire for a “normal life” is a big theme in the pilot, yet Sam himself denies that desire. In one of the most telling exchanges about Sam:
DEAN: So, what are you gonna do? You just gonna live some normal, apple-pie life? Is that it?
SAM: No, not normal. Safe.
DEAN: And that’s why you ran away?
SAM: I was just going to college. It was dad who said if I was gonna go, I should stay gone. And that’s what I’m doing.
Sam articulates reasons for this estrangement from his family that are very different from what Dean (and, later, John) assume. Both of them frame Sam leaving in terms of abandonment and implied cowardice: they see Sam as having walked out on his responsibilities. Sam doesn’t see it that way. First comes the assertion that it’s not “normal” he was looking for, but “safe”. This echoes the exchange of a few moments earlier about the way they were raised by John:
SAM: When I told dad when I was scared of the thing in my closet he gave me a .45.
DEAN: Well, what was he supposed to do?
SAM: I was nine years old! He was supposed to say “Don’t be afraid of the dark.”
DEAN: Don’t be afraid of the dark? What, are you kidding me? Of course you should be afraid of the dark! You know what’s out there!
This is the root of Sam’s resentment of his upbringing: that he spent his childhood afraid of things in the dark. He was never allowed the luxury that most children have: a parent who would hold him and promise him that everything is alright, even if that promise is a lie. He never had the privilege of growing up in a world where the monsters in the closet can be banished by a night-light and he hates that.
The second thing is Sam’s protestation that he just wanted to go to college. This is tough to evaluate, because it’s not really something that has been revisited in the series, but the implication is that when Sam put in his application to Stanford, and presumably had to find funding, too, he didn’t have any intention of leaving for good. His plan was to get an education. Had he thought beyond that? My guess is at eighteen, he hadn’t. Sam had lived in John Winchester’s world all of his life; I doubt he seriously considered a future that didn’t involve that world in some way. It was the fight with his father that forced him out.
It was Dad who said if I was gonna go, I should stay gone.
We have never been told exactly what was said by John or Sam during that pivotal fight. We see only the result: that Sam not only left his family, but stubbornly refused even to contact them again. Though he agrees to go with Dean to search for their father, it’s clear Sam has no intention of making it anything more than a weekend road-trip. He is four years older than he was when he walked out of his family: old enough to have seen a different future for himself. A future he’s grabbing onto with both hands. Yet, after the fire, Sam almost immediately turns back to the old life he rejected. Why? Part of it must be the loss of Jessica: it would be natural for Sam to turn to the one person left whom he loves (i.e. to Dean). But I think a big part of it goes back to his desire for a safe life. that’s what Stanford came to represent for him: a life untouched by all the things that terrified him as a kid. When that world is shattered by Jessica’s supernatural death, Sam is left without a safe haven. He finds safety in the place he has always found it: in Dean.
There’s a sense that Sam’s quest for a safe and normal life was always futile. I think the weapons we see him handle in the pilot are, in a way, symbolic of that. Sam’s knife – the ornate blade that appears in the pilot and never (so far) since – is a very distinctive weapon and it’s the first thing we see him pack when he leaves with Dean. It’s not something your average law student would keep around. This is a piece of his old life that he’s never let go, even in his haven of normality. Yet, during the whole of the hunt in Jericho, Sam doesn’t use weapons. Well, unless you count the Impala as a weapon. At the end of the episode, it’s not a knife he’s handling, but a shotgun: Dean’s weapon of choice. Probably John’s weapon of choice, too.
Sam slips so easily back into the life of a hunter. His disapproval of credit-card fraud and of Dean’s cassette tape collection comes across more as brotherly banter than serious censure. Despite his resistance, this is a life he’s comfortable with. It makes sense: this is “normal” for him: the only lifestyle he’s ever known. Nothing illustrates this more than Sam’s reaction to Dean’s arrest. Because, really, he doesn’t react to it at all. Dean calls Sam when he spies the cops and tells him to take off:
DEAN: Dude, five-oh. Take off.
SAM: What about you?
DEAN: Uh, they kinda spotted me. Go find Dad.
Sam promptly does just that. And while Dean’s facing a police interrogation, Sam calmly goes ahead and investigates their case. It’s almost weird…except it’s clearly exactly what Dean expected him to do. It’s not until Sam has confirmed what they know and located Constance’s grave that he makes a fake call to the police, thus giving Dean the opportunity to make his escape. It’s not clear why Sam waited for so long, but there are several possibilities. Perhaps he didn’t expect Dean to need help. Perhaps he was obeying Dean’s order to find Dad. Perhaps he waited because to call at once would not have provided Dean with the same opportunity it did several hours later.
Sam is also…well, more of a realist than Dean. When Dean pulls a fake federal marshal’s badge – a pretence he just barely pulls off successfully – Sam plays along. Left to his own devices, Sam chooses an alias that fits his age and appearance: he’s a junior reporter fact-checking a story. But when that assumed persona fails to elicit the information he’s after, Sam barely hesitates before breaking cover and speaking frankly to Joe Welch about the Woman In White myth. That gets him what he needs.
Sam makes the call to get Dean out of jail, but he doesn’t wait around for Dean to join him. He’s already on the road, on his way to find Constance’s grave and destroy her spirit. He’s focussed on the hunt, keen to get the job finished not to find Dad or to save lives, but so he can go home. This is a characteristic of Sam’s to watch as the series goes on: that focussed determination only seems to come to the fore when his goal is essentially selfish. It’s easy to guess it’s what got him his place at Stanford, and what got him through four years there when he must have been essentially penniless.
When Dean drives Sam back to Stanford, Sam’s relief at being able to leave his father’s world behind is almost heartbreaking. There is a moment of regret at parting from Dean, the unspoken knowledge that Dean isn’t going to call. But then there’s Jessica’s little plate of cookies: it’s such a domestic gesture and, for me, it was the moment I understood that she wasn’t just a girlfriend. They are in love. And the look on Sam’s face when he falls back onto their bed is just…the look says it all. I’m home. And I’m never leaving again.
Seconds later, the life Sam has worked so hard to build has gone, literally, up in flames. There are some important moments that we never see in canon. We see nothing of what Sam does or says before the fire department show up. We see nothing of the days that followed the fire except the flashback of Sam’s dream in the next episode (and, since it’s a dream, we can’t know how much of that scene actually occurred). All we have is Sam’s single line following the fire:
We’ve got work to do.
and the emphatic gesture of placing a gun he’s just loaded into the Impala’s trunk.
Sam made the choice to become a hunter again literally before dust of the fire has settled. It’s an instant decision, as if Sam sees no other road available to him…except the road his father chose for him twenty-two years earlier.
[All screen caps from SPN Media or raloria.]
Crossposted from my blog at Devil's Trap. You can comment here or on the blog.
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Perfect. :)
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I don't know if you are just interpreting from the Pilot, without taking into regard what we learn later in which case I would agree, but if not then I don't think that's quite true. Sam didn't know monsters were real until he was 8, going by the Christmas episode in Season 3.
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I don't think it's possible to exclude everything we know from three years of canon, but I'm trying to go by just what's in each episode.
But from the Christmas ep, we know that's when Sam learned about John hunting. I don't think it's true to say Sam knew nothing before that. Certainly both John and Dean did their best to hide it from him, but I think it's very unlikely they succeeded. What we saw in the Christmas ep was a Sam who had lived with the lies for too long; he must have known long before that.
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If they tried to keep it from him I think they would have succeeded up until at least the age Dean was when he learned it was real because I don't think Sam'd be questioning it much at 4 and 1/2 and 5 and he seemed to feel pretty secure all things considered in Something Wicked(where he's about 5), like he didn't really know how insecure his life was yet, it was just normal for Dad to go off and for Dean to take care of him. They seemed to set up the revelation in Christmas as being where he really realized he was unsafe - if they could get mom, they could get dad, they could get us, i.e. none of us are safe.
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It's very difficult to make a judgement about what Sam did or didn't know in the Something Wicked flashbacks because those scenes are soo subjective - and in Dean's POV. But here's the thing: to a kid that age, the monsters are real: a child doesn't have to be told, it's just the reality they live in. The "monsters" a little kid deals with might not be the "real" ones of John Winchester's world, but they're just as real.
The eight-year-old Sam in A Very Supernatural Christmas would have been at about the age when he should quit believing in such things, but in the same way as kids quit believing in Santa: it's a sort of brash assertion that it's a lie, while deep down there's doubt (or in the case of Santa, hope). It's the beginnings of adult rationality. But at the time when Sam and Dean have that conversation, Sam has already read John's journal. So nothing Dean said to him would have been a surprise. (Oh, maybe the "Dad's a superhero" part.) That logical progression from Mom - to Dad - to me/us is the first time little Sam has said it out loud, and that makes it real in a whole new way, but it's not new to him.
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Do you have plans to do that for all the episodes? I sure would enjoy reading it if you ever DID decide to do an episode by episode review.
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Uh, yeah, that's the plan. I'm probably crazy but that's the plan. I'm starting work on Wendigo this weekend :-)
I don't know if I'll do every ep in this kind of detail (five posts so far, on my blog and I've got one, maybe two more to go) but I'll do something for every ep. Except Ghostfacers. That doesn't exist in my canon.
I won't cross-post everything to LJ, though. I want to spare my non-spn friends some of it!
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http://www.devilstrap.net
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