Bloodless Death: Writers, Viewers, and the Death of RoboSam!

I choose Stephen Crane’s poem to frame this analysis because it points toward a specific tradition in American literature: naturalism’s brutal portrayal of the natural order. It also, with its notion of bodily ownership, underlines how “one” exists against the reality of the outside world, “because it is my heart….” Since Supernatural has now adopted the “natural order” as part of its narrative landscape, it has made more apparent the claim  that its creators and writers have consistently made, and that is the show is “American” fiction. 

 
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial, 
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter – bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

                  -Stephen Crane

 
I choose Stephen Crane’s poem to frame this analysis because it points toward a specific tradition in American literature: naturalism’s brutal portrayal of the natural order. It also, with its notion of bodily ownership, underlines how “one” exists against the reality of the outside world, “because it is my heart….” Since Supernatural has now adopted the “natural order” as part of its narrative landscape, it has made more apparent the claim  that its creators and writers have consistently made, and that is the show is “American” fiction. 

For those unfamiliar with the periodizations of American literature (to periodize, by the way, is always a false categorization but nonetheless helpful in organizing information), naturalism appears in the late 19^th century, contiguous with the American Renaissance and transcendentalism as well as Darwin and the increasing popularity of evolution.  Writers like Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser, among others, are notable writers in naturalism, which emphasized the smallness of man, the futility of free will, and the violence of survival (http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/natural.htm). Sound familiar? 

So what happens when you take naturalism, religious metaphors, mid-late 20^thcentury Americana, and the problem of definition and put it on television? Well you get a lot of contradictions….and conundrums. The narrative of Supernatural is plagued by contradictions and tensions, but one major conundrum I’d like to discuss is the character of RoboSam in season six and how his life and death is a flashpoint where the fourth wall meets the first one. RoboSam’s presence brings into relief an ongoing moral and metaphysical dilemma that drives the Supernatural storyline: what distinguishes the human from the demonic and the divine? What is natural in a supernatural (transcendental) world? 

First, an Apology of Sorts

In the more traditional meaning of the word, an apology is “The pleading off from a charge or imputation, whether expressed, implied, or only conceived as possible; defence of a person, or vindication of an institution, etc., from accusation or aspersion” (OED, 2010). Herein I offer an apology for, i.e. a defense of, season six’s RoboSam! You may ask why I would tackle such a feat. RoboSam is purportedly gone. SoulSam! is back. Yes, a fact about which I am most happy, but I have found myself increasingly intrigued by the writing of and the reaction to RoboSam upon rewatching Supernatural’s sixth season and lurking on various websites and message boards. For many viewers, this Sam Winchester is simply the soulless one, the shell left behind long after the spirit has fled. Is he zombie? Is he human? What is he? I think it is in that question that the writers and the audience can define what is disturbingly attractive about Supernatural and produce an articulate summary of some of the show’s more contradictory themes. 

Perhaps my newness to the show’s fandom contributes to my interest. I have, admittedly, not spent five years with these characters, so while my affection for them is real, it does not benefit from longevity, from time. With that said, I’ll confess to feeling somewhat saddened by the animosity toward RoboSam, who has struck me as simultaneously amoral and infantile, making him dislikable but also extremely vulnerable. Granted, he did not have the emotional connection to his brother Dean that we, as audience, have come to count on as the primus modus of the story, but he did still connect to the hunt, to being a hunter, which bore some resemblance to the Sam Winchester we had come to know. In fact, he reminded me very much of the Sam in “Mystery Spot” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” 

So I did recognize him, even while I knew that this Sam was not the “real” Sam of yesteryear. Such reactions can lead to very confusing feelings toward the show. And I kept going back and forth in my own reading of the character. One moment I sympathized with him and his apparent awkwardness at the social relationships he had to pretend to experience, but in the next moment, I felt disdain for his lack of tact and his almost-scientific approach to the hunt. 

I commend the writers for this confusion, even if it may or may not have been an intended consequence, because affective reactions reveal how readers make meaning in a text. So I will be audacious enough to say: I thank you, RoboSam, for making me appreciate the story of Supernatural even more than I had before. To me, this character played a crucial (if brief) role in showing how important the “character” of the Winchester’s brotherhood is to the success of Supernatural. In fact, I would argue that RoboSam! has been a gift from the writers to the audience; he is the gift of acknowledgement. And that acknowledgement comes in the form of absence. RoboSam! is the hypothetical realized: What happens to a story when the major antagonist is missing or incomplete? Now we know – the audience feels disquiet, the story appears slightly off, and the other antagonists, in most cases Dean, struggle to compensate and cannot.
 
But more than that, RoboSam allows the writers, and by extension the audience, to reflect on the first part of the Winchester story through new eyes. These eyes are not blackened by demon blood. These eyes don’t cry tears of sadness or regret. These eyes see but do not know. I find it notable that the final scene of Season Five focuses on Sam’s eyes, on him seeing rather than on what he is seeing. And somewhere over the hiatus, as all of these observations and conversations started to come together in my mind, I realized that RoboSam’s appearance has exposed a thread of the Supernatural plot that needs to be examined, especially in light of the aborted apocalypse.  What is the definition and practice of justice in a world where innocence is not a saving grace? What does it mean to be human, humane, in a world where the demonic and the angelic are not black and white, but subtle shades of gray? For five seasons, the audience has been on the side of the human, not understanding what that definition means. RoboSam provides an opportunity to turn the critical eye back on the original landscape – he does not have the baggage of the traumatic Winchester childhood, so his gaze is the clearest, most clinical gaze we can adopt for the next Winchester journey. And in the end, RoboSam is the perfect embodiment of those contradictions we see but do not fully understand – his guilt comes through innocence. Demonic yet corporeal. Apathetic yet reactive. A creature walking, squatting in the desert, eating his own heart because he can. 

He is pathetically human and inhuman.

The “Meg Problem” 

For me, there is one storyline in particular that represents the paradoxes that have plagued the Supernatural narrative since its inception. I like to call it the “Meg Problem.” This demon, who has woven its way through four of six seasons, is not really Meg. We call her Meg. The show calls her Meg. But we must remember that Meg was simply a vessel, a meatsuit that had been possessed. Meg has long since left the text. Both the first season finale, “Devil’s Trap,” and the fourth season episode, “Are you there God? It’s Me, Dean Winchester,” highlight the difference between Meg, the woman, and the demon that inhabited her. In fact, one of the most poignant scenes in “Devil’s Trap” is the moment when Bobby forces Dean and Sam to realize that the demon is not simply a thing to kill. There was a girl in there somewhere, a victim who could not survive without the demon because of the brothers’ actions. Because they didn’t know that when they were beating her to a bloody pulp and tossing her out of a multi-story window, that they were culpable in a murder, perhaps moreso than the demon itself. So Meg is both innocent and guilty. Both Sam and Dean are innocent and guilty. That moral dilemma is, to my mind, the keystone problem for Supernatural and one that the character of RoboSam accentuates in Season Six.  But first we have to remember what the first five seasons, or the “prequel,” has set up in terms of storyline. 

The First Five Years

Much of the first five seasons of Supernatural focused on one “big” question, so other aspects of the landscape went under-examined, which is understandable. From the outset of the narrative, the differences between Sam and Dean took centerstage as the allegorical tale, with fate versus free will being the most obvious opposition and tension. The final denouement of “Swan Song” sought to resolve that tension. Sam, who wanted to fight his destiny but who was always tempted to capitulate to it, had his “ultimate” showdown. Dean, who had long denied the viability of fate, chose to support Sam in his decision. The final scenes between Lucifer and Sam, as well as Sam and Dean, expose that Supernatural, for all of its gore and horror, was telling a simple tale about spirituality and the power of love in the face of evil. Brotherhood stood in for that love, which could’ve easily been a friendship or even a parental love, but it was always going to be philia, a love that Lucifer had forsaken for narcissism when he ignored the brotherhood of humanity in favor of a false idolatry.   

In a certain sense, the show answered the question of free will v. fate two-fold: free will leads to a fate. The type of love you choose determines the outcome. Sam could’ve chosen self-love, which would’ve been the supplication to fate, to destiny, and the affiliation to Lucifer. He could’ve taken all of his angst and let the self-loathing ripen, a self-loathing that Lucifer counted on turning into self-righteousness. Lucifer hoped that transformation would win him the vessel. But Sam didn’t fall and he didn’t because Dean was there. Either way, Sam was going to die. He could choose to die with control or without. The apocalypse itself is a metaphor for fate – all things lead to an end. In the case of the “Apocalypse”, it’s the big end, but it’s still an end. Sam Winchester, via his love for his brother and his brother’s love for him, forestalled one end by creating another. And he did that by feeling empowered to take control, an empowerment that was fed by the affiliation with his brother. 

The end scene of “Swan Song” mirrors the scene in “Sympathy for the Devil” when Bobby takes back control of his body before he could stab Dean. It’s all about the power we feel with love at the moment we feel the most powerless. This scene, might I note, was instigated by the demon known as Meg.

The ending of Supernatural’s “free will v. fate” storyline is the end of a love story. This love story was the focal point for the stories that drove it. Along the way, though, interesting and intriguing questions emerged, such as what happens to demons after they die and where do they go? Or how is Heaven organized? Who calls the shots, if God is on vacation? 

Most writers know these types of tangential questions will pop up during a narrative, and if successful, these questions will lead to intriguing interpretations for readers, or if a writer has a chance, he/she can follow them from one narrative into another. That is the ethical reason for a sequel. And one of the major issues that has not been properly addressed in Supernatural is the difference between the body, the soul, and the spaces in-between. How does one get possessed? Is there something about the soul that makes it vulnerable to possession? Is possession haphazard and arbitrary as we have been led to believe? What happens to that body without a soul? This is all encapsulated by the “Meg Problem,” which the show has translated into the “RoboSam Conundrum.” 

Meg versus RoboSam

Meg, or the demon we know as Meg, exists in two forms on Supernatural. It is “spirit,” a black formless trail of smoke that appears and disappears at will. The spirit has infiltrated and been exorcized. She has been gendered. She has violated a main character (Sam in Season Two’s “Born Under A Bad Sign”) and used that same character to violate another, Jo. And she has fought against the Winchesters since season one, coming to stand in for what it means to be demonic. In fact, she is the predecessor of the Yellow Eyed Demon – much like a herald announcing his arrival or an abomination of John the Baptist. But above all else, she is recognizable. No matter the visage she or it chooses, the brothers always know when they are dealing with Meg. So, she is unique in spirit, if not in body. So demons are unique. We have a clue now. So is a demon a soul or something else?   

Meg, as a body, first appeared as a seductive character. Her pixie-like figure was a perfect foil to Sam Winchester, who had already displayed, in the first season, a tendency for protecting the innocent and the weak. Granted, anyone can appear small next to Sam Winchester, but her especially petite physical state was glaring when compared to Sam. In addition, she came with a sardonic humor, which was remarkably similar to another character, Dean. So while her body may have signaled vulnerability, her “spirit” signaled something stronger and more adaptable. And demons are the very symbol of adaptability in Supernatural. Their ability to move through skins, to change bodies, and to escape death, makes them the fittest of the spirits. 

I’ll take this moment to address a question that I have asked myself and I’m sure you, as reader, will ask: Why not use Ruby as the demon to focus on instead of Meg? Ruby, to my mind, was a secondary demon, and actually a translation of Meg for public consumption. She needed to be pseudo-sympathetic in order for the writers to draw Sam, if not the audience, into the snare of deception that would be needed to unleash Lucifer. Ruby was folded into Sam’s internal struggles, and she was more a manifestation of Sam’s own desires and moral weaknesses than she was a representation of demonic possession. Furthermore, she was more seductive than demonic. As evidenced by her sexuality, her bloodletting for Sam, and her desire for French fries, her main mode was bodily, calling into play all of Sam’s physical weaknesses to exploit his moral struggles. It is appropriate, of course, since she was the minion of Lilith, the original seductress. I could elaborate on this line of thought, but suffice it to say, Ruby does not meet the criteria for the purposes I wish to pursue. 

Meg survives in both body and spirit, much like her angel counterpart, Castiel, but she is aggressively alive, meaning she struggles to come back, whereas Castiel appears through the deux ex machina of God. How does this connect to Sam? Sam Winchester, and later RoboSam, opens the door for examining the curious shadows that exist between the demon, the angelic, and yes, the human. 

Sam Winchester: The Falling Hero 

Let’s take a moment to consider the character of Sam Winchester. First, we must note that most of his development hinges on his internal moral wrestling from season one through season five. Sam’s struggle is performed again and again, and as many viewers have noted, the show lacks “perspective” episodes for Sam. Most of the point of view, if a television show can have a strict point of view, is often given to Dean. From a creative approach, the lack of Sam episodes is important to portray the internal nature of his struggles. Whereas Dean is the “everyman” of the story; even when his role in the Apocalypse is revealed in season four, it still appears almost apocryphal to the original narrative. The ubiquity of Dean’s point of view makes him the audience’s vehicle of empathy, while the absence or limitation of Sam’s perspective makes him the main character of sympathy. To empathize is to understand the other’s situation through identification; to sympathize is to understand through relationship. 

Note: At this point, I’d like to point out that the performance of Jared Padalecki is very effective for this approach. While many have criticized his “face” acting, I would argue that he has produced a performance that emphasizes the difference between the perspectives of Dean and Sam. Most of the time, we (the audience) can only see Sam, so Padalecki’s acting choices (whether intentional or intuitive) enhance that distance, which we need in order to truly sympathize with his character. His is the text we are interpreting whereas Dean is always an open book. He has to be, since we are seeing through his eyes. He cannot be too enigmatic or the narrative would fail. 

Sam’s transformation from seasons one through five is what we bear witness to, much like Dean does. We get glimpses of Sam’s rationale, but his explanations and experiences are always juxtaposed against two factors: Dean’s expectations/disappointments and the destiny Sam struggles against but achingly moves toward. We can see the difference most startling when we study Sam in season one “Faith,” season three “Time is on My Side,” and season five “Free to Be You and Me.” 

In “Faith,” Sam’s desperation to save Dean carries both of them into the moral dilemma of life and death, quite literally. This episode, in particular, illustrates the subtextual theme of sacrifice that is laced throughout Supernatural. Death is never cheated, only deferred. For someone to be saved, someone else must take his/her place. Dean “sees” this; we are never quite sure that Sam does. He may sense it, but he doesn’t see it and he doesn’t know it. He can’t know it yet, because the sacrifice is at the heart of his existence. He lives because his mother died and that fact blinds him to the external sacrifices. If he were to acknowledge it, then what an abyss he would fall into! He is too close to it, at this point. 

In “Time is on My Side,” Sam’s desperation to save Dean (again) leads him to “chasing immortality,” which we know (and he sees) cannot exist without the sacrifice of others. This time, Sam sees the apparatus of sacrifice, but he refuses to know it. He can’t, because if he did, then the moral ambiguities would stand in the way of saving Dean, which was the most important mission. Again, he is too close to see it. His emotional investment in saving Dean far outweighs his rationale. 

Finally, in “Free to Be You and Me,” Sam’s desperation is a self-directed one; he’s not sure he can save himself. So he isolates himself from the world, choosing to hibernate in a cocoon of denial. His desperation is a quiet, muted one. It’s the saddest form as well. This episode, more than any other season five episode, showcases the emotional toll that Sam’s desperation has had on his soul. While the season four demon blood (drug) addiction portrays the downward spiral of his journey, season five twists the knife by introducing the one person he could not (nor could ever) save: Jessica. Jessica, like Meg, haunts the edges of Sam’s story. These blond women who bear a striking resemblance to the unremembered mother, taunt Sam in a way that Dean’s continual proximity to death made clear: Sam feels impotent. There is a hopelessness at the core of his character that can only be seen in his desolate hope when he says (not convincingly) that “But you’re wrong, people can change. There is reason for hope.” To which Lucifer/Jessica replies, “No, Sam, there isn’t.” That brief exchange, with the accompanying face change from Jessica to Lucifer, summarizes the almost recursive journey Sam makes in the first five seasons. 

All roads, no pun intended, lead back to the consequence of sacrifice. His mother sacrificed her life for his; Jessica was sacrificed for his destiny; Dean’s soul was sacrificed for his life; he sacrificed Lilith for Lucifer. One face is the other; the other is me. This conflation of identity is the sin of Meg’s death. Sam and Dean sacrificed one being for another, without seeing the system underneath, the natural order, as Death would say. To revolt against the natural order is not unnatural; rather it is supernatural. 

Here I would make a side note and cite Sam’s spiral into addiction during season four as, in part, due to his guilt over the violence he and Dean committed against the first Meg. Although Meg was not present in “body” during that season, I would say she was there in spirit all along. If we pay attention to Sam’s reasoning for his demon blood addiction, we can start to see the shape of the first season bothering the edges of his consciousness, like age against fragile paper. During “Metamorphosis,” when Dean confronts Sam about his mind-exorcism trick, Sam responds with “I’m pulling demons out of innocent people…The knife kills the victim. What I do. Most of them survive.” He continues to hold this reasoning, until “Lucifer Rising,” when that rationale can no longer hold, when his thirst for vengeance outweighs his guilt. But throughout, Sam is the one who draws the line between demon and soul, which makes his conversion to demon so resonant with the audience. 

This observation is important because, as we will see in season six, the absence of a guilty Sam shifts that responsibility to Dean, who is ill-equipped to deal with the nuances of such philosophizing. Dean is smart and compassionate, but at his heart, Dean is a hunter who knows the rules of the game, the law of the land. Laws and passions are not the cleanest bed partners. Their interludes can lead to disastrous consequences. 

RoboSam: A Lawful but Inhuman Hunter

In retrospect, the pilot of Supernatural makes clear that Sam Winchester was going to die. He was always looking up at death, so it is only fitting that he would fall into it in the end. As I have noted, one of the underlying questions for the narrative so far has been: What distinguishes humans from demons and angels in this universe? In my reading, season six endeavors to answer this question by turning the show’s previous definitions against itself in the form of RoboSam. What is a monster? What is a soul? What should be hunted? 

What do I mean by this? Simple. For five seasons, there has been a clear distinction between good and evil because the story was driven by a big question: fate or free will? But moreso, it has been the story of brotherhood, of love, that when present, can negate the whole notion of free will and fate. However, in the context of the previous story, humans were the free will wild card. Monsters were peripheral beings, disruptive and destructive and easily disposed of, since they were always tangential to the main plot. 

Also, angels and demons knew their duties. They were servants to higher powers, or so they claimed. There was a law, a set of rules, which had already determined the outcome. And it was their jobs to assure that outcome. God really didn’t matter because God’s word was clear, or was it? In a way, angels and demons are literalists, which is why they are controlled by symbols. They disappear with signs; they are exorcized by language. 

In this world, an effective hunter is the most widely read hunter. But Sam and Dean. They’re human. And humans are not literalists. Far from it. In the Supernatural landscape, the metaphorical stands at the forefront of human interaction. A car is a home. A road is a journey. A necklace is a bond. What happens when you take the metaphor away? Ah, let me introduce RoboSam. 

“How I feel. This. Inside me. I wish I couldn’t feel anything, Sammy.” – Dean Winchester, “Heaven and Hell” 

At first glance, RoboSam could be read as the wish fulfillment of season four Dean. He is a hunter without emotion. He exists in the moment, without forethought or afterthought. His reactions, when they appear, are guided by a primal need to survive. This Sam doesn’t feel the consequence of choice, of sacrifice. His decisions are incisive and economical. In fact, if we were to write down the rules of operation for seasons 1 through 5, this Sam would be the perfect representation of a guardian of those rules. He identifies, hunts, and moves on. He doesn’t read. He reacts. The letter of the law does not feel – it can’t.  

But this is not really a show about rules or laws, is it? It’s about something more, something other than the stories it tells. It’s about humanity, and as demonstrated in the final scenes of “Swan Song,” this show defines humanity as relational. Being human is not simply a state of being. Humanity is connection to the other. The world is saved by brotherhood, by a memory, by a bond. One cannot be bound if the other is absent. And that is the lesson of RoboSam. He is connected and disconnected. He could be demonic or angelic, but for some reason, most of the audience cannot fully identify him as human. This reaction, which is a coordinated one across the fandom, intrigues me. Like I stated in the beginning, I both liked and disliked this character. I felt bad for him, almost maternal toward him. He was a fish out of water, but not in the angst-ridden Sam of season one or season two way, but rather in a deer in the headlights, baby crying without language, or injured animal way. 

How to define him then? In “Weekend at Bobby’s,” the show makes a bold step in its definition of demonic. Demons are simply spirits – once human – whose anger or greed or pride or other base emotion has overridden their reason and corrupted their souls. Demons can die just like ghosts, with a simple burning of bones. Such a revelation is just that, a revelation. Remember that we were told earlier on, in season four, that Lucifer created the demon. So how did he do it? He simply scavenged off the herd, capitalized on primal human desires, and then magnified those desires into the essence of spirit. In a sense, the whole was overtaken by a part. Crowley, for example, becomes the embodiment of greed. It was his horizon of debasement. Demons are id gone wild with emotions unchecked. 

Angels, on the other hand, are not without emotion, but they are without the human experience of a body tied to emotion. Each angel we encounter, before Balthazar, resents the need for “meatsuits.” Angels are detached from the body in such a way that the experience is awkward and unnatural. One could probably parse out a Freudian id/superego/ego analysis here, but that would be a digression. Even Castiel refuses the comforts of his human body, for the most part, and when he does indulge in human physicality, the show often takes it as an opportunity to tell a joke or relay a pun. Henri Bergson noted that laughter was a strictly human way of regulating behavior. He argued that “Comedy can only begin at the point where our neighbour's personality ceases to affect us. It begins, in fact, with what might be called a growing callousness to social life. Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about getting into touch with the rest of his fellow-beings. It is the part of laughter to reprove his absentmindedness and wake him out of his dream” (Chapter 3, Laughter). So one could argue that the show purposefully uses Castiel to undermine the perceived superiority or disconnected nature of the angelic through comedy. Castiel’s hunger in “My Bloody Valentine,” his awkward sexual shyness in “Free to Be Me and You,” and his consistent inability to “get” human nuance highlight how non-physical angels are, as opposed to the almost super-humanness of the demonic. Demons laugh wickedly; Angels don’t laugh at all. 

So where does RoboSam fit in? He laughs, or at least understands humor, as seen in “Clap Your Hands if You Believe,” when he realizes he shouldn’t laugh at Dean’s fight with the fairy. He’s comfortable with sexual encounters, as seen in both “The Third Man” and again, “Clap Your Hands if You Believe.” He eats and drinks. He asks questions, but he has what Dean describes as a “lack of intuition.” He can’t read. He’s so literal that he has lost his humanity. He’s angelic and demonic. He’s connects to his body, but his emotions are void. He is the metaphysical version of a missing link; the measure against which the whole is seen. 

The absence and presence of Sam, in the form of his soulless counterpart, afforded the show an opportunity to do a number of things. First, the disconnection between the brothers had to be addressed. It was an ongoing theme from the beginning of season four through to the end of season five. Dean was there, granted, but the tension and division between the brothers was still present. The story, and the audience, always knew they loved each other. That was never an absence. The absence was experienced in the disagreements as to how to avoid sacrificing themselves (and the world) to the petty battle between Michael and Lucifer. RoboSam rebooted the brotherhood by bringing the connection between the brothers back to the forefront of the story in the form of disconnection. Again, definitions are never singular. Their brotherhood can only be understood in its deficiency.

Secondly, RoboSam reintroduced the problems of the hunt and what is to be hunted. Bodies, souls. Angels, demons. These names for other beings were simply placeholders for five seasons. They were ways to define and categorize, but the definitions themselves did not take centerstage. Even in those episodes like “Roadkill,” “Heart,” “Yellow Fever,” and “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” when the “villain” was sympathetic or “innocent,” the fact remained that they were villains and they had to be hunted and destroyed. But as the Alpha Vamp states in “Family Matters,” everyone has a mother. It’s not so easy to kill something when you realize that it was born, that it had a mother. RoboSam eventually had to be killed because he did not have a mother; he was not born. He happened. However, that fact does not detract from his death scene in “Appointment in Samarra.” He was a motherless child, an emotional orphan, and a clear indication of how the show itself sees the complexities of its moral landscape.

Finally, RoboSam’s presence brings back the monstrous to the narrative in a way that is very human. His willingness to obey the law of the hunt, see “Live Free or Twi-Hard” for his scientific approach, reveals the monstrosity of being both predator and prey. If we look back on the narrative of Supernatural, we will notice that most of the hunters and the hunts are spurred by fear. Fear for survival. Fear for order. Fear for normalcy. (Side note: This observation is why I would argue that the show could only really exist in a post 9/11 world. We understand this fear as an audience now in a way we could not understand it on 9/10/2001). Such a fear can illuminate monstrosities, but it can also create monstrosity. 

The few storylines the show has done that portrayed humanity as monstrous showed how fear was its base (starvation in “The Benders” and molestation in “Family Remains,” for example). RoboSam’s lack of fear, as noted in “You Can’t Handle the Truth,” is actually frightful. Fear is the possibility of loss. RoboSam has nothing to lose, including Dean, and that is the beauty of his character. His fearlessness evokes our fear and makes us (the audience) reflect on what his presence means. He is a perfectly tailored monster.  

No Blood on Our Hands

RoboSam had to exist, and then be sacrificed, in order for Sam and Dean to live on, not only in story, but also in us. RoboSam was the audience’s demon. He was an unfamiliar familiar in the world. He didn’t belong and through clues and gestures, the writers laid crumbs for us to follow, transgressions for us to witness, and finally, in the final act of RoboSam’s story when he moves to scar his (our?) vessel forever, we were in the situation of the demon hunter. We had to want him to die. We had to watch him die. 

Critics often praise or deride shows that break the fourth wall. Supernatural has broken that wall explicitly from season four, but they’ve done it implicitly throughout season six. RoboSam is the crack in the wall. He’s the peak behind the curtain. He manifests all of the moral ambiguities of what it means to be a hunter and what it means to be hunted. The ambiguities that were sacrificed in the first five seasons for the greater good, for the big question: free will or fate. Now we are what we have always been, the hunter in remove. 

We needed to feel discomforted by the presence of this soulless being. He was Sam, but not Sam. Just as a possessed body is that person but not. It’s easy to kill in the absence of connection, but now Supernatural has rightfully returned to a question that it first asked in season one: What should be hunted? What should be killed? And how do we deal with the consequences of that choice? 

In other word, RoboSam is the audience’s Meg. 

Conclusion

As I noted in the beginning of this long tale, Supernatural does fit into an American literary tradition. Beyond its muscle car and its near-Southern charm, the show addresses a complex set of questions and observations that lay at the heart of the American experience. What are we? Who are we? But we often find, when we ask these pseudo-nationalistic questions, that definitions are not the real quests. Instead, the complications along the way are what matter. 

I submit these observations with a heartfelt thank you to the show, for allowing its audience a space to consider the complicated stories of humanity. And I especially thank that fictional RoboSam for his life and his sacrifice. But perhaps I stand among few who see his existence as such. So in conclusion, I will end where I began, with Stephen Crane: 

A man said to the universe: 
"Sir I exist!" 
"However," replied the universe, 
"The fact has not created in me 
A sense of obligation."