Chapter Text
The opening scene, the very first things on the screen, is Mary coming in with Dean, to where Sam's iconic crib is waiting for a fond goodnight. The boys might be the main character focus, but she's right there the first person moving and acting on screen, the very beginning of the show.
We’re here WITH Mary now… It’s so much worse.
I’m enjoying this family scene in a particularly weird, vivid way where I’ve yelled so much at these characters I’m waiting for baby Sammy to whip out a lore book when the creepy stuff starts happening in his room and have some trap ready, Sunny Baudelaire style.
And now for the first time, as I said, we’re here WITH Mary, not FOR Mary.
I sort of need to remember not just that they’re all sort of innocent in a way (John especially because this is where he breaks and stops being the man Mary remembers marrying and mourns, whatever prosaic relationship difficulties they were having…) but that this is their mythology more than just a first establishing scene, with the way their narrative has run.
This whole opening scene especially up to Mary’s death is almost unreal, because it’s the Winchesters depicted before they were anything else than this generic family about to be hit by a mysterious tragedy, even if there was always more to come on their development, historically as well. Like, 1x09 makes it pretty clear Mary was always going to have a bigger role than JUST being fridged, although never until season 12 a way which broke out of the crappiness of said trope.
I suppose Mary’s living the 1st version of “I didn’t make the deal” which is total denial, but it’s about to happen anyway. She gets to tap the light like she has no clue what it might mean and sleepily forget that demons are a thing (if this is even a POV on the story that has her knowledge in it - if it’s how John or Dean or Sam or all of them collective *imagine* this moment to have happened with the info they know).
But assuming it IS Mary’s POV since the camera is following her, she has a harsh reminder the world is not what it seems - literally because she mistook Azazel for John. The next version of “I didn’t make the deal” is 2x20 from Dean’s POV unaware of the cosmic drama that would have sprung from it, and Mary can only exist in it by being an oblivious object who has no idea what she didn’t do. And in the 3rd version it literally didn’t happen and a real AU sprung from that… Anyway the moment here where she’s in suspended animation and has been since 1973 as she’s been given the terms and conditions by Azazel that she can have her peace, in exchange for ignorance of what he might do to Sam.
She’s living as if she never made the deal. And we know how bad that AU is where she truly didn’t, now, and in the here and now, we know she’s going to die. There’s an immediate theme which isn’t obvious in this first scene on a first watch because duh you need to get to season 4, but coupled with going straight to Sam living the life in denial in Stanford with the exact same drama about to play out with Jess looming over him, we have an immediate connection between Sam and Mary (or Sam and John as it’s played before we know all the facts) that puts his first adult choices right next to Mary’s decision when similarly trying to run away and make her own life.
I don’t think it’s her fault, really, that she dies here - especially as the way it’s treated by Sam and Dean later is telling her not to get out of bed etc and the terms of her deal. It’s essentially a horrible accident and yet one that needed to happen and probably was no accident (obviously not agreeing it “needed” to on a critical level) because cosmically, this universe has no place for mothers.
(Insert brief interlude wondering if Rowena appearing as the Awful Mother did manage to start prying open cracks for motherhood to reappear in the grand narrative, especially since Rowena was the means by which Amara was released, and later Amara and Rowena hung out, and Amara had the two families to compare - the MacLeods vs the Winchesters as she made her call on that Dean needed Mary most… which I think is thematically something they always played with since starting to mention the extended MacLeod family from Crowley, e.g. 6x04 starting to flesh out that Crowley had the Worst Father/Son relationship with Gavin in a fairly heavily saturated chunk of episodes about fathers/parenthood as season 6 rebuilt some themes. Including by replaying this very moment in the nursery but with Dean, Lisa and Ben. This show loops around on itself so much it makes me dizzy.)
Anyway, this scene is like, this is how the story goes. And it creates everything that needs to be broken out of later. There’s the musing if Sam is old enough to throw a ball around yet - and Sam’s younger brother status, the weird feeling he carries of that, not being allowed to do things yet (8x23 especially has him crash and burn on this, but season 4 is equally Sam rebelling against this dynamic deliberately to completely different results and personal growth)… It’s addressed to Dean as if he is the arbitrator of whether Sam is old enough yet, and in 12x22 it does play out that Sam steps forward but Dean also steps back - mutual recognition of Sam’s growth and ability to put himself forward. And of course that episode dealing with elements from 5x16 which is like the midpoint between 1x01, and 12x22 as the 3 big episodes dealing with The Family Myth, and not just the history, but this specific story. Mary at home Before, and breaking down the walls built up around it. Challenging her image, not just that she might be more human than saint per the flashbacks, but that even the saint image in its most pristine form when Mary acted as The Mother is not a sacred space.
I feel like the way this scene is presented to us, especially if the show did know Mary was at least going to know more than she let on all along (hence the cut away from her walking in on Azazel to skip her “You!” they may have always planned, as it is an abrupt cut leaving them plenty of room to decide if Mary said or did anything about Yellow Eyes), it IS the mythology version. The reason WHY it all happens, told to us as the fairy tale in the way Dean might grow up hearing this horrible story, remembering his part of it in vivid detail. He and John barely have any info to go on as we follow Mary’s POV for most of it, but obviously Dean already knows this vividly and instinctively because he may not have seen Mary’s death, but his reaction to Jess’s is of one who knows exactly what happened to his mom.
I have a lot of thoughts about their story beginning where it does as they come out of stasis as the demons decide to start pushing things into action. Their reasoning is simply that Sam was getting too complacent and too out of the life here, so everything hinges on Sam being so happy and content - that crossroads of his life where he seems to have it all, just as Mary had grown contented with her family life, and had the prerequisite number of children to start the apocalypse, became a tool that via her death would shove her family onto the revenge path that would fill them with anger and a need to learn about the supernatural, if she would not raise her family as hunters.
Likewise, Sam has the training despite all the attempts to protect him from everything by John and Dean, and his own sense of normality he craves and aims for, and has managed to build. The demons want him angry and unstable because season 4 was always what they were aiming for. So showing Sam happy and with job and romance stuff going his way blissfully, he’s now in that place where it can all be taken away from him and fill him with rage. I just watched 10x12 and it’s kinda like… he needed fattening up before he was ready to eat. Let him have the normality to give him something to lose, and make him lose it and know that extra pain that never having it doesn’t bring, because it makes him that much more delicious when you count the layers of trauma he’s got. Hence, second fridging, “all for narrative symmetry”.
And of course John has been hunting in a kind of way of doing the job while looking for/waiting for a break in the case, which has become HIS stasis for the 22 years since Mary’s death, waiting for what he needs to avenge her. And he will drop everything and leave the mantle of the REAL job not the revenge mission to Dean - the sequence ends with John sitting on the Impala, holding his boys and the pan in on his face as you can see he’s not mourning - he’s swearing vengeance. And for him the intervening time is just waiting for his chance to snap. And the hunting is not who he is, just something he does, while he will raise his sons as hunters, with the death of their mother as an angsty origin story but to have the “saving people hunting things” deal as their main life goal, an endless job that can carry them far far beyond avenging Mary and surviving the revenge arc which normally ends as badly for the avenging character as the one they set out to kill…
Dean is portrayed as having gone along with him all this time hunting, and Sam sees Dean and John almost as a unit, from his perspective as not understanding John’s abandoned the job and Dean’s “picking up where he LEFT OFF” - 1x10 and 1x11 especially have a lot to say about Sam’s sense of Dean bossing him around and not thinking for himself, but for Dean the sense of his character looking at him from Sam’s eyes in this first season is always that he was in on it when Sam wasn’t, he was the one following in John’s footsteps, knowing too much, protecting Sam, and that all goes back to “take your brother outside as fast as you can - don’t look back.” Dean has his life irrecoverably changed by this order, because he doesn’t look back, and metaphorically he doesn’t put Sam down again, until much much later, again 12x22 showing he is capable of doing it (although I think fairly early on Dean was trying to trust Sam, it just… got all messed up by the Carver era codependency stuff. But I THINK 12x22 was a symbolic gesture for the way things had been changing and their growing ability to do stuff like this…) But “take your brother outside” is his core trauma in the codependency, tracing right back to John’s order here whenever Dean kneejerk over-protects.
And Mary? We’re seeing what is literally moments before she ends up in a park in 2016 with a grown-ass Dean poking her - the surreality of watching season 12 and skipping back here is the reverse of how Mary felt to skip ahead in the box set. She was in a very literal stasis - 1x09 shows her as a ghost, which puts her in stasis with unresolved things from life so this theme is present in season 1 but of course that is the last time we communicate with ACTUAL Mary in the ongoing continuity, despite seeing Sam Smith’s face all the time in the early seasons up to 6, and some chances to get to know her while she was younger in the time travel episodes. Still, as a character, Mary is in the same stasis either as a ghost or in Heaven, where pointedly nothing happens to you but peace for eternity, which I think you can apply to all of the rest of them until we get to know them as the show starts up. Mary gets essentially punted ahead to season 12, and for her the story starts again, at long last. And 1x01 is fresh trauma again in the show, and so we get episodes like 12x03 which deal with it for her, and a season long mytharc about yellow eyes and nurseries and demon babies, the scars on Mary’s psyche from this one moment here.
It’s awfully painful to go back to this scene, and see it from Mary’s eyes, not just as an act of empathy to a character who had no agency the entire time she was in the story as I used to, but as the backstory and origin of a character whose story began 11 years later than the rest of her family.