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woot66 · OUTTA PRACTICE Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 4

Everyone talks about Sam wanting to live a 'normal' life. You hear it in interviews, it's practically the first line in the Season One Companion, you hear it on the show. But what Sam said in the pilot was that he wanted 'safe'. He expressed his idea of safety as ignorance, as though children who didn't know about the monsters under their beds were somehow safer. Though he can't possibly believe that, he seems to really wish it were true.

The connection to the legend of The Woman In White (from the pilot) suggests that Sam subconciously blames his mother for failing to protect him. He goes on to 'bury' his family and all they represent the same way Constance drowns her children, but the ties to his family eventually drag him back into Hell. For all that Sam has gone through; for all the hints the show has dropped alluding to Sam's intense desire to save people (i.e. provide safety) instead of kill the demons; for creating a complex, mirror-relationship between the brothers through which they can play out their issues it seems 'empty' to say Sam just wants a normal life. And yet that is the impression.

I'm sure if I dug around hard enough and watched every episode another dozen times (which I may do anyway) I might get a handle on this sense of normalcy. But right now, I'm just bouncing around the possible explanations for the shift without a clue. I may be making a mountain out of a semantics-hill (safe, normal, stable, etc. - all fairly interchangeable), but I would like to know what others think. How did 'normal' become our safe word? Confused