No matter how much you shame and scare them, women will still come for abortions. Pretty recently I had this young woman, 15 maybe, and we did the procedure. I said, ‘Your uterus is empty, the procedure is over. I have to go check to make sure we got everything,’ and I left the room to examine the tissue. Then I came back and told her, ‘Everything’s fine, your uterus is healthy.’ And she said, ‘So … when are you going to use the steel ball?’ I picked my jaw up off the floor and said, ‘Steel ball?’ She said, ‘Well, I went to the crisis pregnancy center and they told me you’re going to put a steel ball that’s covered with sharp blades into my uterus and twirl it around.’ And this kid still came! I was thinking, How did you ever make yourself walk in the office believing I was going to do that? — The First Legal Abortionists Tell Their Stories – The Cut (via rhrealitycheck)
So, let’s talk about the clever use of negative space in the episode:
Castiel doesn’t understand how “orange correlates with black in a way that’s new”. Dean immediately understands what Castiel is referring to, he gets the reference although the association would not be obvious to people unfamiliar with the show Orange Is The New Black.
Dean tells Castiel that everyone has binge watched on Netflix, although he doesn’t admit to binge watching the show OITNB specifically.
When Castiel calls again, Dean asks Cas to tell him something that doesn’t involve chicks in prison. This indicates that Dean knows what the story of OITNB is, has likely watched it.
Sam, now in the car with them but having missed the previous conversation, doesn’t make the connection between “chicks in prison” and OITNB, but instead seems to assume on past precedent that it’s some kind of lesbian porn thing. He laughs derisively at his brother and says “Bet you thought you’d never say that out loud”. Sam assumes that Dean is making a reference to objectifying pornography because that’s what he expects his brother to do.
Previously in the episode, Dean raised his eyebrows at Sam’s hook-up being named Piper (a bisexual character from the show OITNB) as though it amused him, whereas Sam made nothing of it. Sam hasn’t watched the show. But Dean has.
Sam is missing context here. Just like the audience is missing the context on what happened inside the Road House during the night Dean spent there. Robbie Thompson continues in the grand tradition of the polysemic storytelling the show has been engaged with since its inception.
Dean has watched a show about women, featuring a bisexual main character, with a massive queer following, but because Sam is lacking context, his brother continues to interpret Dean’s character through his own bias.
This scene bothered me when I first saw it. Cas is bleeding out on the floor; why is Dean’s first reaction to look at Sam instead of, say, rushing to help him?
I just recently realized what was actually going on. As many, many people have pointed out, Cas is in almost the exact same position as the last time Dean saw him. While it’s been a few months since that happened for the audience, just remember it’s been, like, three or four days tops since that happened for Dean. Just yesterday, he was having guilt hallucinations about a bloody, beat-up Castiel in his mirror.
So here he is, in the same spot as three days ago, seeing a bloody, beat-up Cas in the same position he was when Dean beat him up, but this time asking him for help.
The look he’s giving Sam isn’t “what do we do now?”. It’s “are you seeing the same thing I’m seeing?” Is Cas actually here, or is this a residual hallucination still following him around?
