But the man is on edge. As Dean comes back ‘home’ he is almost shot by his brother, and cracking a joke doesn’t change the fact that Sam starts to behave like a trauma survivor. The first hints are there – hypervigilance, jumpiness, and those are paving the way for the first memories to emerge from behind that wall. With Sam so stressed out, that wall can’t hold for long. 

In this state he can’t stay in their hideout. As soon as Dean leaves to pay the shocked husband of the latest victim a visit, Sam is heading out, too, to meet Brenna for help. Can’t hold a Winchester back on a mission like this. Unfortunately Dean can’t reach him, again, since he’s figured out that all this seems to be about Sam. A trap for his brother. 
 
More flashbacks. In Brenna’s home he remembers another scene that took place there – the Winchester Grandfather and Grandson talking about their job. And Sam made clear that family ‘just slows you down’. Haven’t we heard that before? We have. In season four’s "Sex And Violence" In the end, under the spell of the siren, both Sam and Dean smashed each other’s’ heads in with ugly truths. Again the critical limits of the Super-Ego were shut out, only raw instinct speaking. 



More and more I come to the conclusion that Soulless Sam was still Sam. It was the part of Sam that focused on satiation of base instincts and needs. Like a newborn baby that doesn’t know anything of suspending or delaying one’s needs, governed by the self-absorbed Id. I’m hungry, and I want my food now. I see my goal and I do anything to get there. 

Taking this into account it makes perfect sense that Sam feels responsible, since that part of him Dean so desperately tries to deny worked those deeds. I don’t think it’s possible to entirely separate Soulless Sam from Re-Souled Sam. Dean does it, based on his early established basic urge to keep his brother safe. 

Don’t get me wrong – I love my Sam. I do. And looking at him in this way is painful. But I would do him an injustice if I sugarcoated it for him (she said of a fictional character…). The idea is to embrace all of him and try to deal with that package. 

What Soulless Sam did were his choices, resulting from using his intellect and his common sense, much as he did throughout season four. Sam grieving for Dean made some very unpopular decisions based on the same factors, he behaved like another person, almost without conscience, really. Back then Sam chose to work with Ruby despite his conscience. He chose to kill that nurse in "Lucifer Rising" despite his inner turmoil, for the greater good. Even in "Jus In Bello" he considered killing a virgin to thwart Lilith’s plan. He found a way to block out his conscience’s protests and the pain it caused him to act against his usually compassionate nature.

There has always been a side to Sam’s character that was willing to make difficult, almost barbaric decisions. And Sam is aware of that. It’s in his nature, too. He tried to make amends for it through season five and died for it. But there was no redemption. Not so far. His soul, the vulnerable, idealistic, kind part of him, was trapped in hell, while another was roaming the earth committing even more deeds that eventually were going to render his body uninhabitable for his soul.

It’s a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Sam isn’t making any attempts to dismiss it. I think it’s a very brave step, owning up that. What would we do if we did something that terrible? Would we try to set it right? Would we kill ourselves? 

It’s already eating away at him. And it’s weakening the ‘Great Wall of Sam’. More memories come flashing back, their emotional impact increasing. He remembers the arachne now. And he will soon remember exactly what he did to Roy. I have a feeling that Sam already senses that he might be directly responsible for Roy’s disappearance, and he tries to give Brenna whatever consolation he can muster up. Alas, words are just shadows of emotion. In a moment like that there is nothing one could say that would actually soothe another’s pain. But – it’s the compassionate gesture that counts. 
 
Leaving Brenna’s house Sam notices a huge piece of web – and again almost shoots his brother whose instincts led him straight to this place. Of course Sam wouldn’t stay out of it, come on! He’s a Winchester. 
 
Sam’s revelation that he remembered slowly works on bringing Dean’s own wall down. As long as he keeps an eye on his brother, Sam is safe. That’s his personal mantra. I think it is also of major importance to Dean that Sam never hears of what he did to his older brother. I can imagine Dean being afraid of Sam’s distressed reaction to that – perhaps the one blow that could bring the wall down? I haven’t thought of it so far, but watching Dean desperately rejecting Sam’s guilt issues brought this idea up. He tries to get his brother out of town, as soon as possible, but Sam is, yes, a Winchester, and as stubborn as they come. 



Dean can’t be fooled. And his own despair can’t fool him either. It’s not hell Sam remembered. ‘Not yet, anyway.’ He knows from personal experience that you can’t hold memories like that back, doesn’t he? And he needs to get his brother away from possible triggers.
 
Traumatized people know exactly how the trigger game works. And their instinct bids them to run. Because they are aware of the terror that awaits them if they allow memories to be awakened. Dean reacts with that personal experience in mind, and he’s as adamant as if he was hanging to his own life by a thread.  



‘I don’t think you get the risk here, Sam. Do you get that every time you scratch that wall that you’re playing Russian Roulette?’
‘… I’m starting to think that I might have done some bad stuff here, Dean, and I don’t care if it’s dangerous, I have to set things right, ‘cause I’ve got a friggin’ soul now and it won’t just let me walk away. I’m staying here and I need you to back me up.’
The plot thickens or shall we say – the web begins to show a certain pattern.

Soulless Sam did what hunters have been doing for millennia: if you want to catch a certain animal, ahem, monster, you need the kind of bait that will attract their attention. If you want fish to bite, use a worm. If you want a lion to run into your trap, use a goat. And if you want to catch a spider, use live, moving bait. It’s quite common in the hunting world. The only difference here is that Sam used a human being instead of something else. And that is cold, even to an experienced hunter as Samuel. 

Sam’s back up plan worked. They found the arachne’s lair. And the moment the enwrapped victims begin to move, I feel reminded of Aliens. All I could think of was – you can’t save them. They have something in them, spider mommy uses them to breed some new ones… 

Sam quickly decided that any help would come too late, and I assume that he was right. He drew his conclusion by thinking of brown recluse spiders. Now those, according to my dictionary of spiders, are native to the United States from about Nebraska to the Gulf of Mexico. With Kansas lying in that area, it’s safe to presume that Sam has seen bites of these particular spiders. Their venom is hemotoxic which means that it destroys red blood cells and disrupts blood clotting and can cause organ degeneration. Part of the function of hemotoxic venom is to aid digestion. So, such a bite can be deadly, but rarely is. More frequent are cases of necrosis, the death of living tissue, which can result in the necessity to remove the damaged tissue surgically to prevent larger areas from being affected. First signs of this are cutaneous lesions, much like those we see on Roy’s and the other victims’ faces.  Chances are, their blood was already losing its clotting abilities and proteins were broken down to help digestion. In Aliens killing the victims was the right thing to do, and I guess that applies to this scene as well.



The manner in which Sam conducted the coup de grace sends chills down my spine. Unfortunately, shooting the victims wasn’t enough. They should have decapitated them. I wonder if the other ones are walking around somewhere, preparing for the Mother of All’s master plan.

Connecting the dots, Sam and Dean rush to Brenna’s house (don’t you have winter clothing, guys? It’s a miracle that you don’t catch any severe colds the way you dress and eat?!) where Roy already showed up. He’s pissed. Revenge is a strong drive, indeed. A moment later both Winchesters are glued to the wall. In the following showdown it’s Brenna who saves the day by freeing Sam who then cuts of her husband’s head in one smooth swing. She probably knows that there was no other way, but that doesn’t mean that it hurts less. She can’t deal with Sam’s apologies, not now. 

Sam, however, can’t take Dean’s encouraging offer. 

‘Sam, you gotta understand, all that crap last year, all of it… none of it was you.’
‘Let’s be crystal clear, okay? It was me. ‘



There’s nothing Dean could respond to that to make Sam feel better. Or himself. Dean’s view of the situation is at its core a philosophical one, and he distinguishes his perception of Sam in terms of en-souled or soulless, which allows him to be close to his brother again – a necessity for the grieving elder Winchester who never managed to come to terms with losing his brother. 

Despite the physical resemblance he states that soulless Sam was not his brother, while Sam argues that it was him. To Dean the soul is the one essence that outlines a person’s nature, character and humanity (something he didn’t detect in Soulless Sam), while Sam feels the need to own the deeds he committed as he sees them as a part of himself and doesn’t really draw a dividing line. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sam also remembered, perhaps more than ever, that the decisions he made a few years back after having lost Dean and being with Ruby were not entirely different from the ones he made without his soul. He found a way to somewhat regulate his suffering by pushing the pain away by becoming hard and unyielding.
 
I expect this argument to continue throughout the following episodes, as Death stated that it was all about the souls, so perhaps the show will give us some more philosophical/theological/metaphysical theories to ponder. I would welcome that, as I love to wrap my head around these questions. 



And then, triggered by all the pressure that has been building up, Sam experiences a dissociative seizure, I would presume. These seizures resemble an epileptic one, but the reasons are different and so is the neurological pattern, and since Sam has never had any neurological abnormalities, I’ll go with dissociation which is very common in the wake of severe trauma. 



It can be understood as a phenomenon in which a psychological state is converted into physical and/or neurological symptoms, as a manifestation of an emotional processing of a traumatic event. During a dissociative seizure, the person affected is mostly non-responsive, entrapped in their flashbacks. Patients I’ve had that showed these seizures could need more than an hour (and longer, of course) to come back. These phenomena can hardly be avoided in the case of very severe and continuing trauma as Sam has experienced in Hell. I wonder where we will go from now on. 
 
Sam, with his soul and thereby his centre of humanity, kindness and honour restored, will be more vulnerable to what he did without his soul and to the memories that will keep coming. What he has experienced in the past and the wrong decisions he has made (while believing to be doing the right thing in order to save his brother and the planet) will make him even more adamant to atone. He had no chance as of yet to even fathom what his soulless alter ego did, and I hope that this new assignment he’s given himself will help him gain some equilibrium, because I believe that he will need the notion of being capable of redeeming himself in whatever way to carry the weight of the agonizing memories that will be coming up. 



Dean, on the other hand, will also struggle with this development. He can’t hold Sam back from his task of fixing things. He will need to be there for his younger sibling, as he has always been, and find a way to cope with his own fear. Not for the first time I wish the writers would give these guys a break. They are in need of some peace. 

The title ‘Unforgiven’ seems like a compass foreboding future episodes. I hope to be wrong, though. Personally I want to believe that anything can be forgiven if a person is truly, deeply sorry. I try to forgive whenever I can, but I am still a novice when it comes to forgiving evil deeds. The most difficult task, however, will be for Sam to forgive himself. That is, in general and to my personal experience, indeed hard, and harder even might it be to understand why somebody does what he does. But most important, too.
 
This episode moved me and I like it the way the story was depicted. Using black and white for the flashbacks (like an allegory for Sam’s loss of his soul’s colours) and the usage of light and shadow was brilliant. The acting was extraordinary, and Jared Padalecki had multiple scenes to show the variances between the two Sams. I guess some fans will not be satisfied with this Sam-centered episode. But I think it was necessary to give him room to find out – through personal experience in flashbacks – what the enemy he intends to fight feels like.  I certainly hope that Sam will slow down now in his quest, but I doubt that he will heed the warning the last flashback from hell gave him. Or – I will be surprised again.