Dean was in a bar in which the victim had been working as a waitress, talking to the bartender and her friends (whom were likely also waitresses). We see a man walk away from the scene behind the bar while Dean is chatting to a woman. His body is angled away from her. There’s a pen and some napkins to their left.
Dean tells her, “Really? [???] five years?” [she mumbles a reply] “Well. Alright.“ [She says “Yeah, ???] “Awesome.” [Upon seeing Sam, Dean downs his shot and dismisses her] “See ya.”
Considering body language and tone, Dean wasn’t particularly interested in her.
Upon the bar there’s Dean’s shot glass, two more empty shot glasses to her left (the direction of where the dude left), an empty beer glass, a half full glass of beer or cider and a full wine glass. She’s into him, though. Maybe Dean was playing it cool.
847-555-4??6 (it looks a little like 547-555, but 847 is a Chicago area phone code and there are no area codes beginning with a 5 in the area.)
But wait a minute, Dean’s really excited about having gotten the
bartender’s phone number. Sam calls the bartender that he never saw
‘her’. Dean refers to the bartender gender neutrally as the bartender. There’s a wistful smile on his face as he thinks back at the bartender.
After Meg dismisses him, Dean goes to get a drink from the bar. The guy that delivers him his drink ie. the bartender is the guy I’ve helpfully marked with the red arrow. The woman Dean was interviewing at the bar was not, in fact, the bartender. Like Dean told Sam, he interviewed the bartender and everyone who knew Meredith [note also the order: the bartender and everyone else]. Because Dean was actually working the case.
There’s an interesting visual gag once Sam and Dean leave the bar in that the traffic light man sign behind Dean turns on the second he says ‘chick’.
Because Supernatural’s subtext is nothing if not heavy-handed. But let’s look at the interesting bit, Dean’s notes:
3/847-555-01[?]66 Caleb, highlighted by a light source. Underneath his notes on the case. Circled.
The bartender? It’s left ambiguous.
You see, Dean calls Sam to tell him he figured out the sign. Sam asks him how he figured it out, sounding kind of incredulous at the amount of information Dean had been able to uncover. Dean tells him Sam doesn’t “have a corner on paper chasin’ around here“, ie. he worked the damn case. Sam asks him what the last book Dean even read was.
Sam, that is, remindsDean – Dean who that begun the episode by calling Sam a geek – of the role he plays, of a dude who doesn’t read books and who never went to college, the dude who thinks with his ‘downstairs brain’ and makes EMFs out of walkmans, the front he puts up for his little brother, who does not feel as smart as Sam. So, Dean’s face falls and he tells Sam:
“No, I called Dad’s friend, Caleb. He told me, all right?“
The thing is, though, that Dean had their dad’s friend Caleb’s number already in his cell phone since they called him up in Asylum. He’s written the number of this Caleb underneath the notes, meaning that if he had gotten the information from Caleb, he’d have called him before getting the number. The number of Caleb on his notes is a Chicago area number, so if their dad’s friend Caleb was in the neighbourhood, Dean would have visited him instead of attempting to explain over the phone a symbol they had never seen before (how do you even describe that over the phone?). If their dad’s friend Caleb was in the neighbourhood, they would have called him for back-up when they called their dad for help.
This Caleb, friends, is not their dad’s friend Caleb. Dean just pulled the name out of his ass as he was lying to Sam about not having done the research because he’s not some geek and Caleb was the first name that came into his mind because he had been thinking about him all night long.
This Caleb with the Chicago area number was the fucking bartender.
The year is 2063. We re-watch Supernatural episodes on our hologram projecting Apple Rings. One of us excitedly opens the Eye Dictation app and composes a post on the social network Stumblr. It’s a meta about a piece of bisexual Dean subtext no one had ever caught before. We wonder how many pieces of bisexual Dean subtext are still there waiting to be discovered. We hope we won’t die before finding them all out.
Waiting anxiously for Jerry Wanek to publish his autobiography…
The year is 2138. In a box in a dusty attic, a diary is found by an equipe of historians. They open the diary. On the first page, there are words hand-written in purple ink.
No Homo Intern
and The DC Squad
The historians turn the pages. The diary is written in code, but several calligraphies can be noticed. At the end of the diary, there is a cutout picture depicting two attractive males. Someone has drawn a heart around them. Below the picture, there are the words The most profound bond. These words are followed by signatures:
