“I’m Driving.” Sam in Wendigo

[briarwood]

At the end of the Pilot, Sam chose to rejoin his brother (and by implication, John) in the life of a hunter. These men are his family; given what Sam has lost, it ought to be comforting. But I think the big theme for Sam in this episode is not his bond with his family, but his solitude.

Alone is how we first see Sam: in the dream/flashback of his visit to Jessica’s grave. It’s significant that he’s alone: this isn’t her funeral, he isn’t sharing his grief with others who loved her. He isn’t even with Dean. He’s completely alone. He stares into the distance, searching for the words to express his guilt:

SAM: I should have protected you. I should have told you the truth.

Sam’s guilt is understandable, and given what we learn later in the series may even be justified, but I can’t help thinking that telling Jessica the truth would just have lost him a girlfriend, or possibly earned him a vacation in a rubber room. We don’t know enough about Jessica in canon to guess whether she might have believed Sam’s version of “the truth”, but there’s certainly nothing to indicate she wouldn’t have thought he was crazy. It’s also debatable whether knowing the truth could have saved her, even if she had accepted it. Certainly Sam could have lain down salt around their apartment but would that really have saved her?

Sam leans down to lay his flowers among the other tributes on her grave and a hand bursts from the ground, grabbing his wrist, revealing that this is a dream, or a nightmare. Sam wakes to find himself in the Impala, on the road to Lost Creek. Dean is driving, but their conversation seems to emphasise Sam’s isolation. He rebuffs Dean’s attempt to offer comfort, implicitly turning down his suggestion that Sam could do some driving. He insists he’s fine, when he’s clearly not, shutting Dean out. Sam is focussed on only one thing: he wants to find what killed Jessica. Right here, there is a rift between the brothers. For Sam, finding Dad is a means to an end; for Dean, it’s an end in itself.

Sam’s approach to the hunt is a solitary one, too, in a way. Dean talks to Haley and Ben; by contrast Sam’s approach is to download a video file and to do research into the local area. In what couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours work, Sam has uncovered newspaper articles about disappearances going back almost a century – enough to establish a clear pattern. He has even tracked down the sole survivor of an older attack. Not to mention identifying the wendigo in Tommy’s video message. Sam’s research skills are seriously impressive. He learned the skill first from John, of course, but four years at Stanford can’t have hurt.

I suspect this reflects Sam’s role in his family pre-Stanford. We know that John trained both his boys to be hunters, but Sam was the younger brother, the one who had to be protected. Though I’m sure he did take part in the hunting – he and Dean couldn’t be the great team they are if he hadn’t – I suspect that Sam was frequently assigned to research by John, in part because he was good at it, and in part to keep him out of the worst danger.

For Dean, this is essentially just another hunt. For Sam, it simply can’t be. For one thing, John is missing. Dean may be used to hunting without his father: Sam is not. Dean has been hunting for the past four years; Sam has been a student. Amid all the emotional fallout from Jessica’s death, Sam is effectively in a whole new world here. Aspects of it are familiar, sure, but he has to find a new place in the family dynamic. He must, as he put it in a later episode, learn to be Dean’s brother again.

Sam’s discomfort with being a hunter again combined with his guilt over Jessica’s death lead him to…well, he has a real attitude about the hunt. First he says they shouldn’t be working the case at all.

SAM: The co-ordinates point to Blackwater Ridge so what are we waiting for, let’s just go find Dad. I mean, why even talk to this girl?

DEAN: I dunno, maybe we should know what we’re walking in to before we actually walk into it.

Sam evidently accepts Dean’s argument because he throws himself into the research after that. But once they have clear evidence that there is some kind of creature at Blackwater Ridge, Sam has more arguments. This time, it’s Haley herself who is the problem (as Sam sees it):

SAM: We cannot let that Haley girl go out there.

DEAN: Oh yeah? What are we gonna tell her? That she can’t go into the woods because of a big scary monster?

SAM: Yeah.

DEAN: Her brother’s missing, Sam. She’s not just gonna sit this out. Now we go with her, we protect her, and we keep our eyes peeled for our fuzzy predator-friend.

SAM: Finding Dad’s not enough? Now we’ve got to babysit too?

It’s Sam’s guilt talking, of course. He failed to protect Jessica. He didn’t tell her the truth. So it’s natural that his instinct leads him to “correct” those mistakes with Haley. There’s just one problem: Haley isn’t Jessica.

Sam’s tension is evident throughout the hunt. Dean identifies it as anger, but I think it’s much more complex than that.

DEAN: No you’re not fine. You’re like a powder keg, man. It’s not like you. I’m supposed to be the belligerent one, remember?

Of course Sam is angry. Anger is a natural reaction. He’s been forced back into a life he thought he’d escaped. Someone he loved is dead, and he’s blaming himself. The one person who is supposed to be able to do something about all this, his father, has gone missing. The cryptic co-ordinates left behind for Dean must be a stark reminder of all the things Sam hated about his old life. And now instead of hunting down the thing responsible for all that, they’re camping in the woods, babysitting a bunch of civilians who wouldn’t even be in danger if they’d just stay home.

And there’s the real source of his attitude: his fear of failing to protect them all…again. These are not people he has a personal investment in, but his training makes that irrelevant: they are humans and they have no idea what could be out there to threaten them. He doesn’t know how to articulate his fear; or perhaps it’s Dean’s dread of “chick-flick moments” that compels him to keep it to himself, so instead he goes straight to what he sees as the solution.

SAM: We gotta get these people to safety. Alright, listen up, time to go. Things have gotten more…complicated.

HALEY: What?

ROY: Kid, don’t worry, whatever’s out there, I think I can handle it.

SAM: It’s not me I’m worried about. If you shoot this thing you’re just gonna make it mad. We have to leave now.

ROY: One, you’re talking nonsense. Two, you’re in no position to give anybody orders.

Sam expresses his imperative as an order. He probably doesn’t even realise how much he sounds like his father. Indeed, the fight that almost breaks out between Sam and Roy is, visually, almost identical to the fight between Sam and John in Dead Man’s Blood, right down to Dean breaking it up.

Sam’s fear threatens to endanger the whole mission. He is, as Dean put it, a “powder keg” waiting to blow. The moment when Dean almost steps into that bear-trap, and is stopped by Roy is a perfect, subtle illustration of how on-edge Sam is. Dean isn’t certain, at first, how to react to Roy grabbing him. Is it a threat? A challenge? But look at the way Sam reacts: he tenses, watching the two men closely, ready to take action if he perceives a threat to Dean. There’s a sense that the moment could have gone very badly if Roy hadn’t been quick to explain his action. He’s almost not quick enough.

Yet despite all that volatility, Sam performs well as a hunter. It is he who puts the clues together and figures out what they are facing. It’s logical that he would, since he did all the earlier research, but still - he’s been out of the game a long time. It is Sam who realises, after Roy’s death, that they are being led into a trap.  He gets there a little late, but even so, he is the one to say it. Even when the boys discuss John’s absence, Sam’s response is a logical one:

DEAN: I think he wants us to pick up where he left off. You know saving people, hunting things. The family business.

SAM: That makes no sense. Why doesn’t he just call us? Why doesn’t he tell us what he wants; tell us where he is?

When Dean and Haley are taken by the wendigo, it ups the ante for Sam. There is no thought of taking Ben (the last remaining civilian) to safety; he doesn’t even suggest it. He has no hesitation in taking Ben into danger to save Dean. Yet he isn’t careless of Ben’s safety: in the mine Sam deliberately puts himself in front of the others, shielding them from the Wendigo with his own body, in spite of the evidence that if it wants him dead, it’s too strong and too fast for him to have any chance at all.

What happens in the mine is, I think, the turning point for Sam. It is here that Sam sets aside his own agenda and commits himself to the hunt, and by extension, to the life of a hunter. He accepts Dean’s vision of their journey together: they will find Dad, they will get revenge for Mom and Jess, but in the meantime, there are other “evil sons of bitches” to kill.

I think that Sam taking the keys of the Impala at the end of the episode is symbolic of Sam stating his position on that conflict between his aims and Dean’s. It’s such a simple statement: “I’m driving.” And it’s only sensible that Sam should drive: Dean’s injured and exhausted and it’s likely the paramedics gave him something, too: he is in no condition to drive. But that’s not what Sam means. He’s saying to Dean, “I’ll do it your way, I’ll live this life with you, but don’t forget why I’m doing this. I’m driving.”

Crossposted from my blog at Devil's Trap. You can comment here or on the blog.