WOW!! This one, not unlike last one, left me catchng my breath. Aside from a few stupid things, I really liked this one a lot.
We picked up where we left off… Sam comes to the camp with Lucifer in tow, head hanging in sorrow for, how he feels, brining Lucifer around his loved ones. Thankfully, he is greeted immediately with a hig from mom. Then he appologizes to Dean for Lucifer and Dean asks if he good… Sam says “IM alive, so yeah” and Dean tells him, with a warm hug, that he has nothing to applogize for. When he tells Sam he thought he lost him, Sam closed his eyes and melted into the hug. All his fears of rejection and shame were gone The most important person in his world still loves him. ❤
I was groaning the whole time Lucifer talked to Jack. I have always fely like Jack might go to the drk side for a bit, but he’ll come back. I need for Sam to tell Jack what Lucifer has done to him… however.. Lucifer says he lost his virginity to kelly, and now I am satisfied he never physically raped Sam. Psycholoigically? Metaphysically? yeah sure, its hell, but the common prison style rape y’all seem to enjoy, apparently didnt happen. Yay!
A very VERY stupid thing was Hitler!Cas … I didnt see any point in it, I had thought he’d kill regular Cas and then try to pal around the Winchester, which would have made that interesting but nope…. just had to sit through another one of Misha’s bad accents and facial expressions.
How badass does Sam look in camo?? CHuck bless whoever decided on that!Lets do that more 😀
I loved when Sam rescued Charlie and hugged her, then remembered she doesnt know him… “Oh sorry” and she smiled and jokingly punches him. Because really… who wouldnt appreciate a hug from Sam Winchester?
I thought Dean was great, gruff and grumbly but trying to look out for Jack. Leave it to him to be able to revive a long dead bus!
The young girl, the one who referred to Sam as Dean’s friend last episode…. I have a feeling shes up to something, Just sayin.
So Sam chokes Lucifer, gets all strong and badass “HOw did you think this was gonna end?” But leaves him there, which is fine but they dont have any archangels left to reopen the rift what??? Oh hey, lets get Michael out of the cage! I think our Michael wil posses Dean to take on AU Michael… something goes awry Maybe hes losing, Maybe Jack is being hurt? and Luci talks Sam into letting him use his vessel… together they defeat AU Michael, but Sam and Dean are still hosting, these less than upstanding arch angels into next season. Thats my prediction…. lets see how it goes 🙂
ALl in All I was pleased with this.. on a scale of Bloodlines to Who We Are, Ill give it an 8. cant wait to watch again!
Me too. I actually did like it. I didn’t have any complaints. Lol what a surprise huh?
The one thing I may have to disagree with you on is the rape issue. I’m wondering how is Lucifer having sex with Kelly proof that he didn’t rape Sam? Because the former implies consent and therefore invalidates the latter?
Also, the rape survivor Sam thing really isn’t headcanon. It’s basically canon from s7 Hallucifer to s11 Lucifer. I say basically because as you know no one has ever outright said the words Lucifer raped Sam but the heavy-handed implications and innuendos both Lucifer versions have thrown out are too obvious to miss.
However, I agree with you 100% that physically speaking rape did not happen. Rape is very much a physical act and neither Sam nor Lucifer had a body so rape in its traditional sense couldn’t happen and yet what about mind over matter? The psychosomatic link shouldn’t be underestimated. If it happened in Sam’s mind because Lucifer made the mental so real as to be indistinguishable from the physical couldn’t it be argued then that it really did happen? Also, Sam’s mind in s7 obviously couldn’t cope with the torture and trauma of whatever Lucifer did to him and in trying to it processed the memories in ways that it could understand, i.e. hooks and fire and possibly rape.
I know you never liked the implications that Lucifer raped Sam but it’s something I don’t see as out of place. Lucifer is evil, the devil itself. Why would or should rape or its psychic/mental/spiritual equivalent be out of bounds here? To me it makes perfect sense.
Consent, isnt necessary to lose ones virginity, just sex is. And if Luci was the rapist, he was consenting to do it. If Sam was raped, he was not consenting. But as I said… physically no… not this human-like prison style rape that many fans talk/write about, didnt happen, even as you said they didnt have bodies. Psychological, spiritual, metaphysical, sure, it was Hell.. imagine that anythin you want happened, and it very well may have. But every rapey taunt that Lucifer used verbally, can also be said by someone who literally wore your flesh. In the cage in S11, at the end of 11×9 was a threat not a recall of somethin that happened.
Sam can come away from that saying “Ive never had sex with a man” and be telling the truth, but it doesnt mean he doent feel like he has. Not unlike he actually didnt have sex with Toni, though to him it felt like he did. But in any sense, its not what has been tormenting him since, its whatever Lucifer’s true face is. I have a theory on that too, but I wont put it here. Message me if youd like to hear it though 🙂
Did Lucifer choke Anael in Heaven? Did Naomi drill into Cas’ head with a drill? Was Dean “on the rack” in Hell? Did Dean “pick up the knife” in Hell? When Sam and Dean both remembered meat hooks, were there really meat hooks? Was there fire? Does the devil really “burn cold”? Was it even really “torture”? Do angels really “fly”; it seems more like they’re teleporting to me. Do they even have “wings”- people walk around angels where their wings would be all the time and there’s nothing physical there.
Why doesn’t anyone ever point out that the “torture” in Hell wasn’t purely physical torture of living human bodies, or complain when people writing fics use any of the above canon representations in a literal way? People only seem to feel the need to point out it wasn’t “real” or “physical” in regards to that one particular act and not all the others. Why would that be?
Everything else here I’m not gonna touch atm, because I know we’re both fully aware of what the arguments are, and are not going to be able to convince one another. What I want to know is why. Why does it matter so much whether it was “common prison style rape” or some other kind of violent act that the involved parties (and Mark P) conceptualized as having a sexual component that made it analogous to rape?
I honestly wish I could answer it, and answer it in a post short enough for people to actually read. For me it matters in so many levels, but I guess Ill just point out, for now, that for some reason unbeknownst to me…. people LIKE the idea of the physical prison style rape taking place between Lucifer and Sam. I’ll post this and gaurentee that at least 5 people I dont know will argue it with me and Ill be baffled as to why they want this of someone they say they love? With a show like this, it was a very bad seed to drop. SPN is in no way equipped to deal with it properly, and they dont want to try because its “not that kind of show” but Gamble put the image in our minds and its been a topic of convo ever since. Mark P’s panels and photo ops are always peppered wth giggly girls asking stupid shit like “In the cage with Sam, who topped?? hehehehe” “Did Lucifer really rape Sam giggle giggle and if so, was it repeatedly? gigge giggle” and then the scary amount of Samifer shippers, it makes me sick. Sometimes Id like to read a late season fic, but its very hard to find one that doesnt mention the rape, or even describe it in detail.
Ill say I dont believe there was a physical rape for reasons XY and Z and people will jump on me about this being why women dont come forward because no one believes them…. what?? No…. Sam is a fictional character for one… he does whatever the writers make him do and thats all. If he said “Hey I was raped” or we saw it, then there would be no question, But he didnt, and everything hallucifer said can also be applied to someone who literally wore your body, so its always been debatable. To me, it looks like the show is coming away from the idea… and Im happy about it, Im like #unrapesam2k18 and other sam girls are fighting it. Im sorry… it just baffles me. I dont get how a Sam girl cant be happy to let that go.
I don’t think anyone besides nasty “Samifer is sexy” sickos and seriously nasty Sam haters WANTS Sam to have been raped by Lucifer–certainly not Sam girls, Sam-loving Dean girls, or anyone else who cares about him. But there’s no denying that something happened, whether literal physical assault or some kind of psychological equivalent, that both Sam’s memories via Hallucifer in S7 and Lucifer himself in S11 onward viewed as rape, as judged by the various “bunk buddy,” “bitch in every sense of the word,” and “wittier rape” sort of comments both versions of Lucifer have made. As much as we would love for Sam to not have suffered something so horrific, we can’t ignore that it was part of his trauma.
And I would take Lucifer’s comment about being a virgin before Kelly Kline with a hefty grain of salt. He is the Prince of Lies, after all, and always tries to warp the truth to make himself look sympathetic or right. He’s especially going to do so when trying to impress Jack.
Everyone is skipping over his comment in LOTUS when he commented hed never done that before, which he didnt need to lie about. But no, they like it or, theyd be happy the show is coming away from it and wouldnt include it in nearly every late season fic. Every comment hallucifer made, as I have said before, can be said of someone who has actually worn your body. S11 was a threat, not a recall of something that already happened and “The Rapier wit, the wittier rape” is an old saying used to describe a sharp debate (a rapier is a thin blade) which is what Lucifer was talking about when he said it. But look….. no one wants to hear that.
Sure Sam absolutely went through horrible torture, we see him being burned alive, hanging by his flesh and eyelids while being stabbed, all of which could very well be worse than a rape. but no one here wants it to be, Ive never seen anyone ever meta on what being burned alive is like or skinned alive, just rape. Even when Sam with his own words tells us and Rowena that its seeing Lucifers true face is whats had him sleepless and scared for years, no one accepted it and try to twist it into them both meaning they were raped. So something billions of men and woman have lived through throughout history, is worse than any torture Hell can deliver? Of course its not, but look at everyone coming out of the woodwork to talk about it. Dont let someone be happy to see it being written out, argue with them that it HAD to have happened because…. reasons
“Rapier wit” is a phrase meaning sharp wit (yes, because a rapier is sharp). Everyone knows that.
“Wittier rape” is not a saying, that’s Lucifer turning the phrase around into another thing he misses from the cage.
The dialogue is “That’s what I’m talking about, Sam; real interaction again, I missed that — the rapier wit, the wittier rape.”
Sam’s reaction is not to roll his eyes or laugh, but to flinch.
Why is it so important to you that Lucifer’s torture didn’t include sexual assault?
I’m with Wings here. There’s more evidence to say that Lucifer did than didn’t. Just because Bucklemming tries to retcon or plain forget something for the sake of a (lame) joke doesn’t mean it didn’t actually happen. Bucklemming’s episodes in particular tend to be inconsistent from one to the next. They’ve made rape jokes between Sam and Lucifer, yet written Kelly/Lucifer and believed it to be unwanted consensual sex and Lucifer’s loss of virginity. This itself is strange because in the episode before Lucifer raped Kelly, it’s implied that Lucifer had sex while possessing Vince…
I don’t remember the dialogue of 12×08 to a T, but if I recall, Kelly says he’s acting like he’s never done it before because he’s asking about his performance, etc. In this episode, a cross also affects anything ‘evil’ even though it’s canon from season 1 that hallowed ground/objects only repel weaker beings (Meg can walk into a church, Azazel isn’t affected by holy water made by praying on rosary beads, but less powerful demons are). The only other episode a cross affects Lucifer is 11×18, another Bucklemming episode. However, in 13×02, Lucifer is seen with a Bible in his hand (even though Kelly’s hand burned a Bible when she was impregnated).
So I think the logical explanation is that Bucklemming has their own canon where in dramatics and comedic effects are more important than consistency. The rest of the writers don’t believe that Lucifer lost his virginity to Kelly. And Bucklemming may retcon, but other writers don’t always follow through. Yockey in particular retconned a Bucklemming retcon in 13×19 when he makes it explicit canon that reapers aren’t angels.
There’s not only concrete evidence to say Lucifer raped Sam, but there’s much more across several seasons that proves it than evidence which disproves it. Some in Bucklemming episodes, some otherwise. It’s something that has stayed consistent between three different showrunners. Most importantly, to Sera Gamble, who created the story of Sam’s rape in the first place. The episode before this, by Berens, carries heavy implications that Lucifer is a rapist and also implications that he is queer (or at least capable of a joke about liking Drag Race, which obviously has a large audience of queer men). Bad villain-coding or not, Berens is gay if I remember correctly, and I’m sure he included this as an intentional signal. Cas also says that possession by Lucifer was “the worst violation” and that he was “used.” In any case, much of 13×21 was heavy-handed rape-coded language when it wasn’t fun sexual innuendo between Rowena and Gabriel. Furthermore, 13×12 potentially used seeing “Lucifer’s true face” as a metaphor for rape, as it’s described as an unimaginable violation which can only be understood by those who have experienced it, or is at least difficult to talk about to those who haven’t experienced it. Referring to it as his “true face” is also a significant choice of diction because it is similar to showing one’s ‘hidden self’ or ‘true colors.’ Even when it’s not about the physical rape, the writers have alluded to it in the metaphysical sense multiple times this season.
It’s hard to think about it happening to Sam, and fic that doesn’t delve into the details is nice (especially for survivors who want to read the content but don’t want to be triggered, which is who those fics should be most accessible to imo, unless it’s just pwp…), but I find it disheartening to see people handwave everything that’s happened with such ease (no offense, Jacki, I really do understand why). It’s always easier to believe a happy lie than a sad truth, and I feel that this happens too frequently in real life. I want to see the show continue on with this implication in a way that respects Sam, as it seems to in the latter half of this season. And I want Sam to have a successful revenge arc against his abuser without the writers woobifying said abuser. Bucklemming may have attempted to woobify Lucifer through his Kelly comments (hahah, what a funny, charismatic guy, he can’t be a truly uikabke villain!!! look, he has fun-guy but Deep TM feelings and motives!!! we made him cry bc Gabriel was ~meeaaaannn) but to me, those don’t say anything about Lucifer except that he doesn’t even realize what he did to Kelly is rape. By all logic… Lucifer is still a virgin. And quite frankly, it mirrors his redemption situation well. He claims to be changed and claims Sam is indebted to him, but he hasn’t actually redeemed himself in any way, given the opportunity. All that Lucifer has really done is use people, but he thinks it’s a positive for his character. Creepily like season 5’s Lucifer.
I am in the camp that believes Lucifer raped Sam—and did worse to him.
The Supernatural fandom has a large number of people in it who were sexually attacked at some point in their lives (for women this is not particularly astonishing, a huge percentage of women have been raped) and when someone says that Lucifer didn’t rape Sam, I believe that for some people this feels like a pattern of denial they’ve experienced in their lives from family and friends. Denial and silence, or at least, don’t make waves.
I have studied English Literature and it’s true that ‘rapier wit’ is a pretty stock phrase. It is not ever followed, in my knowledge, by ‘the wittier rape’. In Los Angeles, Supernatural is on at 8:00 and television standards mean that even though the CW is a cable network, there are certain topics that will get pushback from studios and networks and you can bet that Lucifer raping people in Hell is one of those things.
I’m usually a person who says that if it’s inferred, it’s not canon. In this case, it feels to me as if it very strongly inferred. Unlike Wincest or Destiel, where people are responding to subtext (and Kripke has talked about homoerotic subtext between the brothers as intentional—there are scripts that use the term ‘eyefuck’ to describe the way Sam and Dean look at each other) I read the rape references as not joking, and ways of talking around material that they can’t really show.
That said, I understand if someone prefers to not see that in the show. However, ‘the prison style rape y’all seem to enjoy’ feels like a personal attack on people who watch the show the way I do, and made me cringe thinking of people who feel like this discussion echoes the denial they’ve experienced all their lives.
Many non-con writers use writing about rape and non-con to explore and perhaps defang some of their own experiences with trauma. So ‘the prison style rape y’all enjoy’ seems a particularly tactless way to talk to fellow fans. Butfandom is large.
I hate this argument.
Did Sam jump into the cage with his body? Yes.
Did Castiel, at some later date after Dean has settled in with Lisa and Ben, have to pull Sam’s physical body out of the cage? Yes.
Does Lucifer twist the truth? Yes.
Do people who have been raped or sexually assaulted face a world that diminishes and denies their experiences based on what their attacker says? Yes.
Do writers sometimes use fan fiction to work through their own trauma and emotional problems? Yes.
I know I have. It’s a phenomenon called post-traumatic play, and you’ll see it in professional writers’ work as well as nonprofessional writers’.
In denying Sam’s rape experience, it feels to survivors that you are denying their own experiences. I sense that is not your intention, but intention or not, the size of the reaction shows that you are hurting real people.
Please stop. You can learn more about this real-life issue at StartbyBelieving.org
@katrina-katrina-blog-blog this doesn’t have anything to do with someone who was raped in real life. But hey… Yes Sam jumped in with Luci in his body. Did the sexual assaults happen while Luci was still in his body? If not, then Luci didn’t have a human body and angels are junkless
Since when are angels junkless? Balthazar and Gabriel both had sex for fun.
And Lucifer has the ability to be corporeal while in the cage. We saw that with Sam’s memory of the cage (Hallucifer) and we saw it again when Sam went back into the cage. Lucifer has the ability to control what Sam feels and sees while in the cage and that’s been pretty consistently portrayed.
okay i honestly don’t understand why people are getting pissed at gabe for calling lucifer cancer like ?????????
this isn’t some dumbass guy trying to be edgy and calling something he doesn’t like cancer bc he wants to sound cool or something. this is gabriel comparing what lucifer did to humanity, to a dangerous and deadly disease bc that’s essentially what lucifer did
lucifer corrupted humanity. cancer (in a way) corrupts cells. once lucifer corrupted the first human it spread. just like cancer spreads to other cells. and just like some cancers you can’t stop it once it gets too bad and “the damage is done”
this isn’t gabriel being a cringy teenager. this is an archangel comparing what his brother did to his father’s creation to a deadly disease. bc that’s what he sees it as
Most I’ve seen complain about this 1) already see Lucifer as someone to be pitied and 2) are personally offended on behalf of siblings everywhere.
“Lucifer is his brother! How dare he say that to his brother!” Yeah, well, how dare his brother give a human the ultimatum to kill HIS brother or lose bro’s soul for good. And how dare he torture a human soul unendingly until it became a blackened thing known as a demon. And tortured every subsequent demon, all while thinking them disgusting and “just demons.” Damn, I could go on. Bottom line? Lucifer’s a piece of shit who ain’t foolin’ the person he helped raise, because Gabriel knows him better than anyone.
Speaking as someone who has dealt with actual cancer, Lucifer IS cancer. It’s the perfect metaphor.
Cancer takes and takes and takes, contaminates and robs, and cancer only wants cancer to survive. It’s an insidious alien growth on something otherwise healthy and thriving. It’s a predator and a user. That’s Lucifer.
I’m starting a petition that s14 of supernatural will be written by fanfiction authors.
Fan sourced and the best season so far.
If the actual writers can’t treat the characters nicely, then they don’t get to play at all.
I support this, just… don’t hire me because it will turn into the Gabriel show
Umm that’s exactly why I’m hiring you
😂 okay then, what about a Gabriel spin off? Fuck the winchesters, let’s have a series of Gabriel’s history since creation, whatever he did since he ran from heaven till Tall Tales and everything he did in between his episodes in the next seasons.
Then we can fix the mess of a story they gave him in s13, and throw away that “Gabriel ded” bullshit
Yeeeees.
I’m calling all my favorite Gabriel girls to do this.
In my fanfictions, as a matter of fact, I often write Gabriel as continuing having odd janitorial jobs rather than strictly speaking hanging out with the Winchesters.
I dunno, he could have picked any position whatsoever to perform his tricks as, and yet he goes with janitor. Made me headcanon that maybe he kinda likes it. Then again, I am the same field of profession and I kinda like it on an occasion xD
(Yes I’m aware this meta has probably already been jossed already. Bite me.)
The show utterly destroying the “rapist redemption trope” was my favourite aspect of the episode. By “rapist redemption trope,” I mean of course the trope commonly seen in movies and TV where an abuser is “redeemed” by means of, for example, losing their powers, becoming more human, starting to understand things they hadn’t before, and – often- the trope ends with the abuser saving one of the heroes, leading to a change of relationship between the heroes and the abuser, where the abuser is now seen as “one of the good guys” or at least as “not one of the bad guys.”
Lucifer’s arc this season has been playing with this trope, leading many of us to be afraid of where this is going. Lucifer has lost his grace, making him closer to human. He’s been reduced to a period of powerlessness and suffering (panhandling on the street), and seems to be in a pitiful place of drinking his troubles away in a bar. This is all playing into the “villain redemption trope,” but it has also been resisting it because Lucifer has not seemed to learn anything transformative from these experiences – he says he has, but I’d argue it’s very clear he hasn’t.
Lucifer *saving* one of the Winchesters is the ultimate redemption arc thing to do. But by making this happen on a Watsonian, or internal story level (i.e. by having the character Lucifer make the decision to try and redeem himself to another character this way, instead of having the writers make the same decision externally), that terrible trope was beautifully punctured! Instead of saying “look how good Lucifer is now!” and humanizing abusers, it said “look how abusive this trope is!”
So, Lucifer saves Sam from death for the sole purpose of making himself look good. Instead of seeing Sam suddenly agreeable and grateful, we see Sam react to this action as it actually is – as Sam being used in a forced manipulation to make his abuser seem like a good person. The exact thing that so many of us have been afraid the show would do straight up, has been done in a way that subverts the toxic meaning we feared.
Because the trope we all feared is the ultimate emotionally and physically abusive violation after all the other violations Lucifer has forced on Sam. Literally remaking your victim’s entire being for the sole purpose of forcing him to gaslight his entire history of abuse by existing as a testimony to your goodness. We got to see just how violent that is.
So, the action of saving Sam instead of redeeming him, shows is what a monster Lucifer continues to be.
And for Sam, who has struggled his whole life with feelings of shame and worthlessness after his childhood messages about his worth were reinforced by learning that his entire existence came about FOR his abuser to destroy the world.. Sam, who has managed to subvert that prophesied end by trapping Lucifer inside his own body, taking on a century of further abuse as a consequence… Sam is now forced into once again physically existing for his abuser. But this time he exists not for Lucifer to use as a weapon of destruction, but to use as a testament for his abuser’s supposed goodness. Right now Sam exists so that Lucifer can have done something “good” in order to gaslight Sam’s entire abuse history. That’s an extra layer of violence.
And you can see it on Sam’s face when he walks into the clearing ahead of Lucifer. That all of this has thrown him back into the toxic shame he’s struggled his whole life to overcome.
Sam’s reactions were entirely justified. The violence of this act is brutal. The show has so far depicted it as brutal. Of course, Sam does not deserve the shame he feels. But his anger at and against Lucifer is entirely just and right.
This was an amazing deconstruction of the abuser redemption trope. We’ll see if they continue to uphold the good they have done here. The story of Sam’s survival under these abusive conditions is why I watch the show. If the next episode manages to somehow misunderstand what they have just done to play the trope straight, not only would it be beyond inconsistent, I would not be able to forgive it.
Maybe on this, some of the male showrunners of Supernatural have learned from #metoo, which alerted many men to some of the realities of abuse. We’ll see.
<big>13.21: Sam and his desire to escape victimization</big>
Leading up to this episode, we’ve seen Sam thinking about his relationship with Lucifer and starting to ACT to overcome his feelings of helplessness and victimization.
It started with Rowena. Being able to talk to someone who felt the same way was validating for Rowena, but I think it was validating for Sam too. As he said, Sam doesn’t talk to Dean about his feelings about Lucifer. They’re there, below the surface, and he hasn’t known what to do with them. He’s just carried them in silence. He hasn’t trusted his own feelings enough to act, because in the past when he acted on his pain and anger and desire for revenge, it led him to do things he later understood as mistakes (being with Ruby, letting Lucifer free), and he blamed his own feelings for what happened. While personally I don’t think Sam’s self-blame in those areas is justified, I understand why he feels that way. So, for a long time Sam has been in a state of self imposed passivity with respect to acting on his feelings. (How much this passivity has been because of Doylist
With Rowena, he acted for the first time by giving her the spell to make herself powerful again, acting as an abuse survivor to another and giving that precedence over his usual rules of engagement with Dean not to give witches power.
This decision had positive results. While Rowena began killing bad people to get at death, and Dean blamed this on Sam, Sam said he would take responsibility for the consequences and he showed he was willing to. This is positive; instead of backing down from his past decision to act on his own feelings and give Rowena that power, Sam continued to stand by his decision and simply said he’d take responsibility for whatever the results were. Rowena’s supposed evil killings led her to her goal of confronting Death, and she got to rage at death and learned that death could not be overcome, some things happen that are bad that can’t be changed. This acceptance was also positive, and Rowena ended in a position where both Sam and Dean believed she was on a road to redemption. Sam’s act of solidarity about their shared feelings of victimization from Lucifer had good results.
In 13.20, Sam helped Gabriel get revenge against the people who abused him. Sam has been trying to figure out what to do with his feelings of victimization, and he stood up for making this happen because like with Rowena, he related to Gabriel’s struggle against his feelings of victimization and powerlessness. From Gabriel we heard that some things cannot be forgiven. Sam ended this episode by checking in with Gabriel about how he feels after getting his revenge. Gabriel says he feels great, and we see Sam decide that this is the action he wants against Lucifer too.
I felt increasingly nervous about this, because the show has a long history of letting Sam act on his feelings and then summarizing that as a negative. The glibness of Sam’s desire for revenge made me very uneasy. If this was how Sam was deciding to tackle his problem at this stage, what would he have left to learn in the final moments of this story arc?
Because it was originally Cas and Dean who wanted to go after Lucifer, I think we can rule out Sam’s death being as a result of Sam’s own plan. However, Sam’s desire for revenge still seems to be leading up to a bait and switch for me. It was too clearly communicated and Sam was too happy in his decision. Before going through the portal, Sam promised Lucifer that he would kill him when he retuned. Usually this kind of narrative requires an approach to a problem that is “wrong” to begin with, so that a moment of learning can happen later on (in movie terms, the protagonist must attack their problem from the wrong angle for most of the movie, only changing tactics to victory at the moment of the story’s climax). So I am still suspicious that the revenge journey Sam is on is going to end up being a “wrong” choice — something I disagree with, I would be all for Sam getting revenge.
Going into the tunnel, Sam seemed especially in charge. However, Dean agreed with the tunnel plan, so I’m not sure it can be said that Sam’s agency led to his death per se.
I’m not sure if this death was a narrative punishment of his desire for revenge, or if was a way of setting up how much that desire is justified, or if it was value neutral with respect to the revenge desire. It seems to me that the show may still come down anti-revenge, while at the same time presenting Lucifer’s actions as irredeemable and Sam’s desire to do something to have power over his feelings of victimization as justified.
Personally, I’m all for Sam getting revenge on Lucifer. I’m all for Sam getting to express his anger and all his emotions about Lucifer’s abuse, and I’m all for Sam getting to do whatever he damn well wants to with those emotions.
I Aim To Misbehave 