Tactics and Strategies in the Supernatural World
This clearly shows Dean’s typical response to a long-term goal: if there is a dead end or delay, he finds some diversionary activity, rather than continuing to work away at the main purpose. In fact, Dean’s approach can make a lot of sense – if he can’t find what he’s looking for, he might as well be proactive in a related area. What he’s looking for may still turn up separately, or may perhaps emerge from the diversion itself. For instance, in Season 1, it’s when Sam and Dean go to Chicago to hunt the Daevas who have made a couple of kills (Shadow) that they find Meg, and through her John. In Season 2, it’s the contact made with Ash at Harvelle’s roadhouse that enables Sam and Dean to find the other psychic kids, and it’s the relationship Sam and Dean then established with Andy that enabled them to survive, just about, the showdown in All Hell Breaks Loose.
Season 4: who knew management training might actually be useful?
In Season 4, for the first time in 4 seasons, Dean doesn’t have an overall goal. He finds out in Lazarus Rising that he’s been saved from hell by the angels to do God’s work, but he’s being kept in the dark by the angels on the overall plan. He isn’t able to control what’s happening, other than to deal with the battles for the seals as they are presented to him, and to carry on with the family business in the meantime. By contrast, Sam is still all about the long-term goal: he hasn’t been without one since the time of the flashbacks shown in After School Special, 12 years before Season 4. Since then, Sam has lived his life by a series of long-term goals (get a great education, become a lawyer, get married, find Dad, kill the Yellow Eyed Demon, save Dean from his deal). Sam has a long-term goal after Dean’s death too: kill the chief demon, Lucifer’s first: Lilith.
Here is the crux of the problem the brothers have in Season 4. Sam doesn’t recognise that despite his time in hell Dean is essentially still himself, but has been put in a situation in which he is not able to set his own goals. So Dean’s doing what Dean always does if he can’t work on a longer-term goal: getting on with the job in hand. Instead of seeing this as Dean’s standard way of deaing with an unusual and difficult situation, Sam interprets his lack of a long-term goal as weakness and self-pity on Dean’s part (Sam’s siren-influenced comments in Sex and Violence and his hallucination of Mary in When The Levee Breaks), and as a change in Dean himself which has been caused by his time in hell and for which he needs help (The Monster at the End of This Book).
For himself, Sam has stuck to his habitual security blanket of having a long-term goal. In Fallen Idols, Sam says to Dean “one of the reasons I went off with Ruby was to get away from you” and “It made me feel strong, like I wasn’t your kid brother”. What made Sam feel strong was not Ruby’s attention and approval, but the sense of security and control he found in having a long-term goal, and what made Sam feel that he wasn’t Dean’s kid brother was that Sam had that long-term goal at a time when his brother didn’t have one at all. Egged on by Ruby, that long-term goal of killing Lilith became Sam’s obsession.
Having set himself that goal, Sam’s need to work towards achieving it leads him further into Ruby’s stratagems. Sam doesn’t have any means of killing Lilith other than by using his powers. So if he is to work steadily towards his goal of killing Lilith, he can only do so by working on his powers. Ruby’s plan of getting Sam to increase the strength of his powers by drinking demon blood and killing demons satisfies Sam’s need to be constantly working towards his long-term goal.
Both Sam’s overall purpose and the means he will use to achieve it are well-settled in Sam’s mind when Dean returns from hell, and Dean’s return is not enough to distract Sam from his goal: even in Lazarus Rising Sam sneaks out to meet Ruby and use his psychic powers to kill demons. And even during the time Sam has agreed not to use his powers, between the end of Metamorphosis and Criss Angel is a Douchebag, Sam still has the same goal: “Lilith’s head on a plate, bloody” (Wishful Thinking) and still trusts and works with Ruby (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Heaven and Hell).
Just as Sam doesn’t understand that Dean can be himself even without a long-term goal, Dean does not understand Sam’s overriding need to be working towards a long-term goal. In Sympathy for the Devil, Dean says his problem with Sam in Season 4 has been what he sees as Sam’s personal betrayal of Dean: “You chose a demon over your own brother” and “You were the one I depended on most. And you let me down in ways that I can’t even … I’m just … I’m having a hard time forgiving and forgetting here, you know?” What Sam chose was to fulfill his psychological need to work towards a long-term goal, through disastrous means. That he betrayed Dean, by sneaking out to see Ruby behind Dean’s back throughout Season 4, and by rejecting Dean in When the Levee Breaks and Lucifer Rising, was never Sam’s main purpose. But Dean’s failure to understand Sam’s overriding need to be working towards his goal made it easier for Sam to deceive Dean.
It’s these facts that in Season 4 Sam has a long-term goal and Dean doesn’t, and a mutual lack of understanding about each other’s natural approaches to implementing those goals, which plays such a very significant role in driving the brothers apart in Season 4. Neither Sam nor Dean has the management tools, or the psychological understanding, to realise what is happening to them. It’s this which is a major part of reasons behind the chain of events which led to Sam killing of Lilith, the freeing of Lucifer and the start of the apocalypse.
Season 5: “We must learn to be equally good at what is short and sharp and what is long and tough” (Winston Churchill, October 1941)
In Season 5, after a rocky start, it is beginning to look as though Sam and Dean will manage to agree both a joint goal and strategies for achieving that goal. It hasn’t been easy though, they’re not nearly all the way there yet, and there’s a complicating factor in that at the same time as saving the world they need to find a way to repair their own relationship.
As to working out what their overall goal is going to be, Sympathy for the Devil starts with Sam and Dean releasing Lucifer from hell, getting transported by supernatural means onto an airplane, and finding out Castiel is dead. Sam and Dean are straight into their standard tactical mode at this point. Asks Dean, “Say this is just any other hunt. You know? What do we do first?” Sam says “We’d, uh, figure out where the thing is” and Dean replies “All right. So we just got to find…the devil”. Hmmm. I don’t think it’s going to be that easy, guys. The first articulation in Season 5 of an overall goal comes from Dean towards the end of Sympathy for the Devil. It’s said while he’s putting on a brave face to cheer up Bobby, and when he says it he doesn’t even believe himself that they could succeed, but it comes to be the settled purpose for Dean, Sam and Bobby, and perhaps even Castiel. “Screw the angels and the demons and their crap apocalypse. Hell, they want to fight a war, they can find their own planet. This one’s ours, and I say they get the hell off it. We take ’em all on. We kill the devil. Hell, we even kill Michael if we have to. But we do it our own damn selves.” Both Dean and Sam express the same idea more seriously when they get back together at the end of the End.: Sam “So what do we do now?” , Dean “We make our own future” , Sam “I guess we have no choice”.
Given this goal of saving the planet for humans by getting rid of both the angels (including Lucifer) and the demons, how is it going to be achieved? So far, there are two main strands to the strategy: first, to avoid bringing on the end of the apocalypse by becoming the vessels for Michael and Lucifer, and second, to kill Lucifer. There is at present no overall plan to deal with the angels other than Lucifer, or with the demons. There is one further strand, at the moment still separate but running in parallel, which is Castiel’s idea of finding God.
Dean and Sam have each been presented with the temptation of being vessels, for Michael and Lucifer respectively, in Sympathy for the Devil and Free to be You and Me. Both know, from Castiel’s experiences in Season 4, that their consent is required, and both react with instant denial. These are the first, and perhaps the most important, of the decisions Sam and Dean will make in working out how to reach their goal of ending the apocalypse. Some serious attempts at coercion and temptation, by Lucifer in Free to be You and Me and Abandon All Hope, by Zachariah in Sympathy for the Devil and The End, and by the Trickster/Gabriel in Changing Channels, have been put into trying to get Sam and Dean to change their decisions. Not only have Sam and Dean not wavered from their decisions, they each actively decided to strengthen themselves against temptation, by deciding over the course of The End to work together again as a team.
The aim of stopping the apocalypse by killing Lucifer took a while to be determined upon. After first being mentioned in Sympathy for the Devil, it comes back as a possibility at the beginning of The End, when Castiel says to Dean “…. and if you are still set on the insane task of killing the devil…” Shortly after that conversation, Sam calls Dean to say that he is Lucifer’s vessel, and adds “I’m going to hunt him down, Dean”. Dean is sceptical of Sam’s motives: “Oh, so we’re back to revenge, then, are we? Yeah, ’cause that worked out so well last time.” Sam says “Not revenge. Redemption.” Dean however is concerned at this point that their personal difficulties make hunting Lucifer together an unwise proposition. This may be why in Fallen Idol, Sam says “but I mean, if we’re going to kill the devil”, not sounding entirely certain about the plan. But this time Dean replies “It’s what we’re doing, OK, end of discussion”. And that does seem to be the end of that particular discussion, at least for the time being. This part of the strategy has become a settled purpose for Sam and Dean in Season 5, and the next step is to work out how to implement it.
The first idea for how to kill Lucifer comes from the prophecy planted on Chuck by Zachariah: finding the Michael sword. At this stage, the suggestion is rather lost in the middle of the personal difficulties the brothers are having: Dean feeling betrayed because in Season 4 Sam chose a demon over his own brother, and thinking that they don’t have a snowball’s chance of succeeding. In any case, the idea lasts only as long as it takes Sam and Dean to find out that the Michael sword is Dean himself. Sam then suggests at the end of Sympathy for the Devil that they go after the Colt, a plan which is interrupted by the battle with War in Good God Y’All and by the brothers’ personal difficulties in Free to Be You and Me. The plan is resumed at the end of The End, by which time Castiel has also been brought round to supporting this part of the plan: “If you are still set on the insane task of killing the devil, this [finding the Colt] is how we do it.”
So far, so good, but immediately after The End comes Fallen Idols, and we are back to the behaviours we have seen before from Sam and Dean. They are making no progress in finding the Colt. Dean, as is usual, is proposing instead to hunt a monster of the week. Sam’s view, again as usual, is that they’ve got bigger problems they ought to be concentrating on. “I’m sure the apocalypse will still be there when we get back”, says Dean. “Yeah, right,” says Sam “but if the Colt is really out there somewhere…” “Well we’ve been looking for three weeks,” says Dean “and we’ve got bupkis”. (Three weeks seems to be Dean’s limit for inaction: in the Pilot he went looking for Sam after John had been missing for three weeks.) Perhaps Dean has been learning from Zachariah’s efforts in It’s a Terrible Life as well: part of Dean’s purpose in taking on the case of the Leshi is for the brothers to put the training wheels on and ease back into being a team, after several months apart. It seems to work: the teamwork is pretty seamless on the monsters of the week in the following episodes, I Believe the Children are Our Future, The Curious Case of Dean Winchester, Changing Channels and The Real Ghostbusters. And Sam does eventually get a lead on the Colt at the end of The Real Ghostbusters: once again a side trip for an entirely different purpose has ended up producing a way forward for the main event.
Sadly, in Abandon All Hope, trying to use the Colt to kill Lucifer is revealed to have been a deadly error: an unsuccessful reversion back to the simple tactic that the Winchesters have used so often: “find it and kill it”. So the question of the extent to which Sam and Dean have yet understood that there is a difference between the short-term battle and the long-term war is still open, as is the question of whether they have understood that they have different styles of working towards a long-term goal which they can learn to turn into complementary strengths, rather than letting them tear them apart. It’s implied that this is happening, but it hasn’t yet been completely clearly expressed and tested.
Dean’s move towards more strategic thinking is shown in The End, when Zachariah sends Dean into the future, in order to try to persuade him to become Michael’s vessel. Zachariah is here trying to repeat on Dean an approach similar to the one which was successful in It’s a Terrible Life. It doesn’t work the way Zachariah expects, because Zachariah is himself still thinking tactically: from his point of view the problem is the need for a battle, for Michael to fight Lucifer. By now, though, Dean has at least started to think strategically. He has the goal of stopping both angels and demons from interfering in human affairs, and although he’s still working on his strategy he’s clear that being the vessel for a battle between Michael and Lucifer is not the way to achieve his purpose. Dean, by beginning to think strategically, has made an important advance that allows him to draw from his time-travel in The End a completely different lesson to that intended by Zachariah. Instead of agreeing to be Michael’s vessel, Dean takes steps to ensure that he and Sam will work together, so that they will each “stay human”, and avoid the future laid out by Zachariah.
Sam’s move towards changing his attitude to long-term goals first comes through in Fallen Idols. He’s made progress in recognising that there was a problem “Before didn’t work”, but has not necessarily fully identified the nature of the problem, as he’s still putting it down to a personality issue “You’re going to have to let me grow up, for starters”. But on his main need to adapt a more flexible approach to achieving his goals, Sam does seem to be moving more towards Dean’s style: “The way I see it, we’ve got one shot at surviving this…. Maybe I am on deck for the devil, maybe the same with you and Michael, maybe there’s no changing that…..But we can stop wringing our hands over it. We’ve got to just grab on to whatever’s in front of us, kick its ass and go down fighting.” Sam is channelling Dean here, and Dean takes him up on it: “Well I can get on board with that.” . This change in Sam was noticed by Castiel in I Believe the Children are Our Future “A year ago you would have done whatever it took to win this war.” But as Sam says in reply, “things change”.
So by the start of Abandon All Hope, Sam and Dean have repaired their relationship and agreed an overall goal: end the apocalypse. They have agreed one part of the strategy: they won’t agree to become vessels for Lucifer and Michael. They are working on other parts of the strategy: helping Castiel to find God, killing Lucifer with the Colt. Perhaps most importantly, they’ve learnt to discuss their plans and to act as a team. As Sam says when Dean says it’s too dangerous for Sam to be in the same place as Lucifer, “Haven’t we learnt a damn thing? If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it together”.
By the end of Abandon All Hope, Sam and Dean have found out, disastrously, that the Colt will not kill Lucifer. Once again, they need to take stock, and work out where, and how, they go from here. And there are a lot of questions now hanging in the air. Can Sam and Dean find another way of killing Lucifer? Does the information that a meat suit for Lucifer that isn’t Sam has a only a limited shelf life provide a new vulnerability with which to attack Lucifer? Or are Sam and Dean going to have to revisit the idea of killing Lucifer, and find another way to stop the apocalypse? Some of the demons are turning against Lucifer rather than worshipping him: is this another point of vulnerability for Lucifer? We’ve two months to wait for the answers. Damn you, Kripke.
Faellie, I loved this, what a great piece! A while back I’ve been interested in military tactics and strategy (basically to understand why people like to go to war so much), and read a lot about it. I think you summed up a lot of it beautifully and transferred it to planet Supernatural.
As you touch on Dean’s ‘forward momentum’ – I sometimes thought about this, too, believing I’d like to send Dean to Aikido-class a bit, as that martial arts technique specifically uses the opponent’s forward momentum against that opponent. Might be useful for our dear older Winchester.
Without wanting to sound derogatory to the characters – Sam often served as the brains of their team (and was conceived so by others, after all, he is the one with the higher education. Going to university will do that to you…often complicate your way of thinking), while Dean was the weapon, the army. His mind does not work with highly complex convolutions as Sam’s does. His intelligence is of a simpler nature (just to make sure: don’t misunderstand me here: I don’t mean to say that he is less intelligent, just endowed in another way, yet: he does read Vonnegut, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he read Sun-Tzu as well), his instincts are often sharper, more carnal, which is important in a life-or-death situation when you have to react in a heartbeat – no time to think here. Your instincts have to kick in.
At one point I don’t wholly agree with you – though I second that Sam finds security in following a long-term goal, I’d say that Dean did change in hell. He still is essentially himself, of course, but considering his deeply vulnerable nature (which he likes to hide behind that well-known façade of HanSoloesque behaviour), being tortured for thirty years and then torturing himself (something that goes against everything he believed in) did a lot to Dean. He was weaker, confused, and if he felt self-pity at some point, he was entitled to. That he kept his sanity after all that is a mere miracle (I’ve seen worse when speaking to people who underwent much ‘lesser’ ordeals). He’s coming back to his former self slowly, but the cracks in his souls are still visible (I plan to touch on that more profoundly in an article I’m working at).
I believe Sam really tries to help and take the burden of Dean’s back – probably fearing that Dean wouldn’t survive that battle (and he in all likelihood dreads the possibility of losing his brother again- would he survive that pain a third time?).
To their credit, they are able to alter their approach to the situation at hand which you wonderfully explained. Both have grown and accepted that, accepted each other more after their fall-out in season four and beginning for five.
Perhaps killing Lucifer is not the way to do it. There might well not be a weapon capable of doing that. Maybe they will have to cast him back down to hell. Okay, I’m at a loss here. I have not idea how to do it without Dean giving in to Michael.
Lucifer’s biggest weakness might well be his hubris. I hope they’ll find a way to challenge that. Is it January already?!?
Again, Faellie, thanks a lot for this, Jas
Wow Faellie, what a great article! A very good analyses of the Supernatural “art of war”.
I’ve enjoyed the reading and it helped me to better understand some points of the show, that I hadn’t given such a deep analyses (maybe because I only had one year of psych *and already forgot the most of it* and none in tactics or strategic *don’t think games count*).
Anyway, thanks again for this.
Faellie,
Thank you for this extraordinary article. You’ve plumbed the depths of four and a half seasons to prove your point and done it (from my vantage point) effortlessly. By analyzing this aspect you have shown a cohesiveness to the overall story (despite what sometimes appears to some as fits and starts) that until advanced in this way were not fully clar.
I’ll be rereading and then analyzing the various episodes with a fresher eye in the future.
Thank you for putting this together, no small achievement I would say.
🙂
There’s some really interesting stuff there, Faellie … I hadn’t thought about it like that before ( being too distracted by all the gore/angst/snark and prettyness flying around ) but you’re quite right, up until now it’s been all reactive … Hunt down threat, bust it’s chops, home for tea and medals … But now they need to get proactive ( horrid word, just oozes middle-management Twat-Babble ) to save the planet and it’s pretty much uncharted territory.
Personally I suspect the longer-than-usual Hellatus is due to Kripke having no idea how it’s all going to pan out either and needing extra time to wrack his brains in! 😆
Hot damn, I absolutely loved this mapping out of the initial (and still existing, though to a lesser extent) differences in style each carries, and when each is more/less appropriate. You really captured the fluid nature of the show and how external events seem to be getting the brothers on board the same boat, how they learn from their experiences. That said, if I was in their shoes, and I had the Colt, I might have done the ‘find it/kill it,’ too. Maybe it’s a guy thing. 😎
Great, great stuff.
This is great!
Well observed, well analyzed, well written, so interesting and very logical!
Thank you!
Thank you all for your kind comments. The articles I write tend to come out of trying to make sense of something I don’t understand, and in this case it was the difficult conversations between Sam and Dean in Fallen Idols. I was surprised to find that other difficult things, such as John’s silence in Season 1 and Sam thinking of Dean as weak in Season 4, fitted into the answer I came up with.
Jasminka, I am only an amateur observer of the human condition, and I think you’re likely to be right about Dean. There is an article on the psychological effects that hell had on Dean at http://randomness.liquid-deception.net/sn411a.php that I found interesting (the site was previously recc’d here by PetraO). I’ll look forward to reading your take on the subject.
Hi Faellie, thanks so much for that link, I’m always interested.
Of course I know that you are ‘an amateur observer of the human condition’, and I didn’t mean to criticize, only to add.
I’m just always in awe when I look at this show and find the characters reactions in accordance to their psychological state. I’ve seen some of those reactions on the faces of my patients, especially when I’m dealing with people who have been tortured. Or who were forced to do the torturing. I try not to look at this show with a professional eye, but sometimes I can’t help it. It will just pop up…
Loved your article! Thank you again, Jas