SPN spoilers

[rivkat]

Okay, I’m not that interested in debating the ethics of sleeping with a demon in a comatose body, because in the end I’m not sure it gives us much purchase on actual ethical problems. What I object to from last night is not the backstory, which on its own I could accept and would actually find quite interesting. What makes me furious is the retroactive discontinuity created with Lazarus Rising, which was also a version of Ruby I could accept and find interesting.

In Lazarus Rising, I can handwave Sam as in shock when Dean shows up, so that we don't see the five-minute hug that then occurs half an hour later. What I cannot do is accept that Sam would have the coherence to fake a random hookup at the same time as he’s reeling from Dean’s return, and even more I can't accept that Ruby would be able to hide her reaction to seeing Dean Winchester risen from the dead. Unless her game is longer than anyone else’s, we haven’t seen her able to hide reactions like that. Trying to reconcile the two episodes is what makes my head spin.

Lazarus Rising could have made plenty of sense if Ruby had possessed Sam’s one-night stand after she left. It would mean we couldn't get that version of fucked-up Sammy having sex we saw last night (though there are plenty of other flashbacks I could suggest that still got him naked), and it would mean Sam had to accept the serious ethical problems of Ruby possessing a person with an active soul. If they didn't want that, they shouldn't have had played the first scene with GC in Lazarus Rising the way they did, and once they did have that scene in canon they should have sucked it up and done something different with Sam/Ruby.

catdancerz has suggested to me that maybe Ruby knew Dean was back through the demonic grapevine, which … okay, then her lack of reaction to Dean’s reappearance is merely evil and puzzling, not incomprehensible. That still leaves the problem of Sam; perhaps he’s just ashamed of being with Ruby, but I find Lazarus Rising indigestible in retrospect.

In itself, this was a strong episode. But you can't keep taking shortcuts to get the moment that's good now at the expense of overall characterization. Short-term returns lead to long-term losses, as I think we've seen on Wall Street.

On a separate note, when Sam talked about how Ruby reminded him of Dean, I was reminded very much of SV’s attempts to revitalize Clark/Lana by having Clark & Lana reenact all the key Clark/Lex moments of S1. Disavowing subtext: you’re doing it wrong.

Comments

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Honestly, as much as I love the overall arc, and as stunning generally as Lazarus Rising is, Sam is written really awfully in that episode, a casualty of the Dean-focus. For example, "I don't pay for it" makes no sense to me as something he'd say under the circumstances. At the very least, we needed a break to indicate that he'd had time to calm down before much of what he says in that first conversation makes sense. I don't blame the actor; he clearly had no idea what was coming later. I can buy Sam panicked and terrified, but that was not what I saw on screen. In the end, I may simply have to rewrite that episode in my head to give us what you're talking about: a Sam so thrown that he just says the first lie that comes into his head. Though even there, he wasn't as ashamed initially as he got later, when he learned that the angels didn't want him to use the powers. When Dean first returned, my read was that Sam just didn't want to upset him because Sam knew Dean wouldn't approve, but he didn't seem to feel shame about it.