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:
I can only gleefully imagine the arduous decisive process on this one.
CW: [posts a random, congratulatory photo of Jared]
Meanwhile, in the writers room:
[heterosexual alert wailing in the distance]
“Jeremy, it’s been a whole hour already since we congratulated Jared, we have to respond to the… other one.”
“For bro’s sake, Robert, we’re trying! But every single shot of these two is just, y’know.”
“Pretty gay?”
“Yeah.”
“What about season 4? They’ve just met, it can’t be too bad.”
“Oh, it’s bad, Bob. It’s so bad. It had been before we realised the danger. They’re like animals. It’s disgusting.”
“What about season 7? Cas can’t even remember who Dean is and then he’s insane, right?”
“Oh Bob.”
“What.”
“I’d rather have you, cursed or not” is not exactly the epitome of straightness. Don’t even get me started on the Emmanuel fiasco, I told you, we should have let Eugenie and Brad handle this one. Maybe then we’d have some shots of Cas snogging Daphne.“
“And have Jensen watch it all with an even more crestfallen look?”
“Oh. Right.”
[angry heterosexual fuming]
“Maybe we should use the one from the burger da… meeting. Or something from Brokeba- from Purgatory. Or, you know, anything from season 8. They seem pretty straight to me.”
“You know what, Mysterious Intern That Should in No Way Have Right to Be at This Meeting, maybe you’re righ-”
“HAVE YOU COMPLETELY LOST YOUR MI- whatever. I give up. Just… crop them or something. No one will notice.”
no but am I the only one that realizes this whole Rudy storyline was basically the biggest ‘no homo’ spn has EVER pulled? if this whole ordeal with Rudy got completely erased and the show had actually explored how broken Dean was after beating Cas up and brought that up to discussion in this episode instead of utterly ignoring it, they would’ve had the same outcome. Dean could’ve easily summoned Death because beating Cas up made him realize he needed to die. instead of “I let Rudy die”, he could’ve said “I almost killed Cas”, and let’s be honest, that would’ve made just so much more sense.
but no, they had to go and introduce some random guy to make it less gay. they even added Rudy to the mirror scene like ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME
i don’t think the writers knew what it would do to us when they wrote that line about cas being able to pick up on people’s longings
to them, it was probably just a line in the middle of a dialogue meant to explain how cas found claire
to us destiel trash, it meant that cas has definitely sensed dean longing for him on previous occasions, and that fact seems to have destroyed us all
Castiel could have said that he can pick up on a wish. A longing and a wish have the same basic meaning but the words evoke different emotions, and every writer knows that word choice is important to give the correct emotion for a scene. Saying that Claire wished Castiel was there would have been more emotionally accurate than saying she longed for it
But that scene wasn’t just about Claire and Cas. That scene was also explaining how Cas kept popping up where Dean was in season 8 even though Dean is hidden from angels. The word longing doesn’t fit the emotion of the Claire/Cas scene, but it perfectly fits the emotion of all the season 8 scenes where Cas suddenly appeared where Dean was
if you look up these words on thesaurus.com one of the synonyms for “wish” is “prayer” which is why it’s the more obvious choice
“longing” does not have prayer as a synonym, but it does have “pining”
using the word longing was a choice, and I’m sure they knew exactly what they were doing when they chose it
If I was going to rationalise that word choice as a writer pretending I have no idea there was a second character attached to this whole praying thing and it really was just about Claire, I’d say it was because I wanted to make the prayer/not prayer distinction really clear, and things like wishing imply a slightly more active component which could be borderline prayer, i.e. it can literally be read as a prayer, just without the “Dear Cas” attached to the front. Picking a word *like* longing makes it into a passive action which was never intended to be fulfilled.
On the other hand as a writer I understand very well that “longing” itself carries way too many romantic implications as it’s a very emotionally powerful word (and the best synoyms I can think of it off the top of my head are all *other* romantically coded words like yearning and desire etc), so unless they clean forgot about the existence of Dean for a few minutes, words like “hope” or even the kinda Destiel-coded but still broadly more platonic “need” or non-romantically coded synonyms thereof would probably have worked a lot better.
I mean at the very least they’re just being clumsy and no one is thinking carefully about not writing Destiel-related stuff. There’s no confused intern sitting in on the writer’s room who’s literally just there to say, “Uhh that sounds kinda gay…” :P
You just launched this extended fantasy in my head, whereby there is in intern—an intern whose entire job it is to try to Defuse Destiel. My fantasy intern was hired sometime after the 9x03 twitter debacle. The job tasks were twofold:
Figure out what input the “crazy Destiel fans” were latching on to.
Make sure SPN stopped producing that input.
The thing is, the intern soon figured out (after failing to protect 9x09), the Destiel scene was a unique beast. The higher ups seemed to think it was all about hormones and “eye sex”—something that could be solved by throwing in a few ladies—but the astute intern realized the issue was more intricate than that. There was a substance to the Destiel madness—one that no simple lady sticker was going to be able to contain.
The intern then decided that this task was going to take advanced knowledge. She or he dug deeper: into the headcanons; into the metas; into the group narrative…into the tumblr. But what the intern hadn’t accounted for was that the madness…was contagious.
Destilence.
The intern caught it. The intern caught it hard. By the time the late season 9 scripts began to arrive, the intern could fight it no longer. “And why fight it?” thought the intern. “Why fight it…when I can…fight for it?”
Mwahaha. Mwahahahahaha!
And so was born the intern’s very own Destiel Agenda.
