My First "Supernatural" meta...
Sam's Journey: Pre-Series, Stanford, and the First Season
Sam Winchester left his family to go to college, but why (for the record, I do not and have never believed it was because he was selfish)? Flashbacks in Something Wicked, A Very Supernatural Christmas, and After School Special as well as the recent publication of John Winchester’s Journal gave us viewers perspective on how the events of Sam’s life led him to become the young man we met in the pilot. Knowing more about that young man makes it clear that season one of Supernatural was much more emotional journey for Sam than just planning to leave school temporarily to hunt down his girlfriend’s killer.
Wayward Son: Sam, Pre-Series
There are five important things about Sam Winchester that defined his childhood and helped shape him into the young man we met in the pilot (and beyond):
Sam lost his sense of stability at the age of eight. On December 24, 1991 in Broken Bow, Nebraska, if you want to be exact. Before then he knew who he was and who his family was. Sure, he didn’t have a mom and he and the rest of his family didn’t live like other people, but that’s the way it had always been for him. He asked questions about these differences but, as we saw in AVCS, they were more curious than probing. Hell, he guessed his oft-absent “traveling salesman” father was really a spy - an idea from a young boy making up a super-cool scenario to explain why his father wasn’t there, not someone who was suspicious and impatiently demanding the truth. The questions didn’t make Dean nervous, either; he answered them with the irritated patience of someone who’s answered the same questions a million times before.
Then Sam brought up Mary. Judging by Sam’s reaction, Dean had never yelled at him with the fury he did before he stormed out. He looked a little scared, especially when Dean was in his face, but mostly it was shock that was all over wee Sam’s face at the end of the first flashback. He had no idea what had happened so he went looking for the answer in that motel room.
And he found it. Boy, did he find it.
He found out that his dad hunted monsters and spent the last eight years of his life lying to him about it. He found out that there were terrible things out there and his father left him and his brother alone to deal with whatever came their way whenever he was gone for days on end (knowing your older brother sleep with a gun under his pillow might seem a little cool to an eight-year-old, but believing that gun could very well be all that stands between you two and something truly evil is terrifying). He may not have found out that night, but soon he learned that any dreams he had for the future were pretty much moot: Sam as the son of a traveling salesman could grow up to be anything he wanted to be; Sam as the son of a hunter had his career - and life - planned out for him by the time he could walk.
Finding out the truth broke the trust he had in his father and forced him to change the way he looked at his life in the past, present, and future.
Sam was the black sheep of his family and community. Thanks to the way he found out about hunting, there was no one in his family or the small batch of hunters that make up Sam’s community. For every hunter whose initiation into the world of hunting we know - John, Dean, Bobby, and Gordon - it was a violent attack by evil that turned their worlds upside-down and hunting became their way to fight back, like how someone that survives a violent crime takes self-defense classes. Hunting is their way of taking back control, of making sure they and others are never victims again.
Sam finding out about hunting by reading his father’s journal and having Dean confirm the truth was traumatic in a different way. It wasn’t a monster that destroyed Sam’s world - it was hunting. Hunting was the reason John lied to him, hunting was the reason his dad was away so much, hunting was the reason why his family couldn’t be like everyone else’s, and hunting was the reason why he had no say in his future. Unlike John, Dean, Bobby, and probably every other person that made up his community, hunting wasn’t the source of Sam’s empowerment; it was the source of his disempowerment.
Between the ages of eight and fourteen, Sam came to the conclusion that he had to go into the family business. Unlike Dean, who “embraced the life” as a teenager (according to Bloodlust), Sam resigned himself to never escaping his disempowerment.
Sam was lonely and isolated. Sam had no peers in his community. Dean couldn’t even be counted as a peer - the gap of four and a half years seems a lot larger during childhood and in SW, AVSC, and ASS Dean’s relationship with Sam was first and foremost parental. Everyone was an authority figure who might sympathize with him but would ultimately stick up for his father. Sam didn’t have any friends on his side - no best friend who would agree that yes it sucked that his father treated him like his opinions didn’t matter, no group of pals to grouse with about how unfair it was that he had to move again; just a father who acted like drill sergeant, a brother who always said his father was right, and his dad’s friends (and you know John Winchester would never put up with anyone bad-mouthing him to either of his sons).
ASS is a clear example as to just how lonely Sam was. Wee Sam latched onto Barry Cook almost as quickly as lonely Barry latched onto him; the two were never far from each other during his stay at Truman High to the point where Barry would wait for Sam to finish talking to a teacher just to maximize the time they spent together. The impact of this friendly acquaintance on adult Sam proves how rare having a friend was during his adolescence. Think about it: if the number of schools the Winchester boys went through by the end of ASS was typical, Sam must have gone to at least 15-24 new schools through his high school career alone. He only knew Barry for a month, yet twelve years later he recognized the boy’s name right away and remembered him quite clearly.
Sam’s family didn’t understand. Sam’s unhappiness did not go unnoticed by John and Dean, but it did go misunderstood. In John Winchester’s Journal, John chalked up his son’s lack of enthusiasm for hunting as Sam having to learn to pull his own weight (January 24, 1996) and that he’s “shirking” his responsibilities (May 2, 1998). Any speculations as to the reasons why he’s not committing to hunting (besides stubbornness) never came up in the journal; all John could see was a soldier whose attitude he didn’t like.
Dean does a little better in recognizing that something’s bothering his little brother but also falls short in truly understanding. In ASS he could see there was something wrong with Sam as they walked to Truman for the first time and, to his credit, he took the time to make Sam talk about it. He fell short, however, when he failed to understand Sam’s unhappiness went deeper than first-day jitters and worries about how things are going to be like at this particular school; and that things wouldn’t be fixed by a quick move. Dean’s miseries tended to surface when they stay in a place long enough for his bad boy façade to crumble and he didn’t see how Sam’s miseries come from an opposite place: that they left just when he’s starting to get comfortable.
Again, ASS illustrates this lack of understanding in Sam’s life through his interactions with Mr. Wyatt. This teacher, who presumably only spent one class period a day in the same room as Sam, could see through the sullenness of “you can flunk me if you want to” to find how truly depressed Sam was and offered some sympathetic advice. No one - not John, not Dean, not Bobby, not Pastor Jim, or anyone else - ever understood him enough to ask him if he wanted to go into the family business and this meant enough for adult Sam to be unable to leave Truman without stopping by to thank him.
Sam loved his family. Despite how miserable he was, how lonely and isolated he felt, Sam’s love for his family made him stick it out in what was a truly unhappy situation for him. He never ran away from home - not when he was an underage teenager and not the second he turned eighteen. And not when he told his family he wanted to go to Stanford. Running away is packing your bags and leaving a note for your family to find once you’re long gone. Running away is telling your family “I’m out of here” and slamming the door behind you before anyone else can get past being stunned to respond. Sam didn’t do either of these things; instead he told John and Dean his plans and stuck around to fight about it.
Sam stated on several occasions that he was just going away to college and, even at their most pissed, John and Dean never denied that. He never meant for it to become a permanent exile; and if John had just said, “All right, I don’t like this, but if you promise to be very careful and not fall behind in your training we can give it a shot” I have no doubt Sam would have been home for every holiday and several weekends, dragging a bag full of dirty laundry with him and probably happy to be among people he didn’t have to lie to. But John didn’t do this; instead he gave Sam an ultimatum and kicked him out when he didn’t choose the way John wanted him to.
Being forced to choose between family and what must have seemed like the one and only shot at happiness would be hard for an emotionally healthy adult, let alone a teenager who’s spent the last decade of his life feeling powerless and depressed. Being told to stay gone if he left must have been devastating for Sam. Dean may have lost the brother he’d dedicated most of his life to keeping safe, but Sam lost more: he lost his brother, his father, his community, all of the possessions he couldn’t carry with him, the only life he’s ever known (yes it made him unhappy, but it was his), and the knowledge that he had people to go to if he really needed help. He was truly alone.
And, thanks to Dean’s deal and death, we all know how Sammy deals with a loss of this magnitude: by throwing himself into succeeding at doing what he feels he needs to do. If he couldn’t go back to his family he had to make Stanford work. If that meant lying to others, lying to himself, and burying the parts of himself that wouldn’t let him meet his goal of finding a place for himself in the university, so be it. Sam spent the last few years before the pilot with a figurative mask firmly in place.
The Road to Nowhere Leads to Me: Sam, Stanford, and the First Season
Sam Winchester left his family and hunting to find a place he could happy and belong. The emotional journey that was the first season for him, from losing Jessica and leaving school to the turning points of Scarecrow and Shadow and into Devil’s Trap, made him realize he could find it with the only people he would never have to hide so much of himself from: his family.
Sam’s feelings about his life at Stanford were not as rosy as some people believe. The first season has many clues that he may have liked his life at school more for what it was and wasn’t compared to his childhood than for what it was on its own. The threat of him returning seemed to exist more in Dean’s insecurities and fear of losing his brother again than in Sam’s actions - he just didn’t seem to miss school too much once he left (no, I haven’t forgotten about That Conversation; I’ll get to that in a bit).
We know next to nothing about Sam’s life at Stanford outside of his relationship with Jessica, and what we do know doesn’t exactly paint a fulfilling picture of Sam’s life after leaving his family:
The only times we ever saw Sam asserting his life at Stanford over Dean is during the pilot, while he’s still in that life, with no reason to believe he’ll be leaving it anytime soon. Even then he only does it in response to something his brother does. He insisted Jessica stay for a family discussion, but only after when Dean dismissed her like she’s some stranger his little brother’s brought home for the night; he elaborated on the fantastic opportunity that was his Monday interview, but only when Dean casually told him to skip it without even knowing what it was for; and he apologetically refused to go to on with Dean to Blackwater Ridge, but only after Dean conveniently “forgot” that Sam hadn’t agreed to go with him beyond Jericho and that he’d promised to get him back in time for his interview. These weren’t all about Sam’s desperation to maintain his normal existence; these were about Dean acting like his brother’s life at school wasn’t important because he missed him didn’t want it to be important to Sam and Sam trying to make his brother respect that he’d built a valid life for himself at Stanford because he was still hurt and angry that his family made that life necessary by exiling him in the first place.
Whatever Sam’s life was or wasn’t at college was gone by the end of the pilot, burned up in a demon-induced fire that killed Jessica, and he was once again on the road with his big brother. And a funny thing happened: once Stanford was in the Metallicar’s rearview mirror, Sam didn’t seem to miss it all that much. In fact, he only mentions Stanford in three episodes between Wendigo (episode 2) and Shadow (episode 16):
Dean, not Sam, was the reason Stanford came up so much in those early episodes. Sam wasn’t holding it over Dean’s head (if he was, would Dean have found out that Sam was still emailing his college friends only after asking him what he was doing with his phone at the beginning of Skin?) or silently pining (Hook Man was set on a college campus, for crying out loud, and there wasn’t even a throwaway moment of Sam looking longingly at any of the students heading off to class). Dean brought it up constantly, either by teasing Sam about it during moments when Sam was less-than-comfortable or caught off-guard (like in Hook Man) or yelling at him about it when Sam disagreed with him (as seen in Dead in the Water). He used both tones to make it very clear that he believed school had been nothing but a waste of time for Sam - because, of course, he wanted Sam to stay with him and was afraid Sam didn’t want the same.
Sam did leave in Scarecrow, but it wasn’t about school - it was about one of the reasons why Sam left for school in the first place: the large amount of control John had over his life. After six months of hunting (when he never technically agreed to resume that lifestyle in the first place) and putting his own mission of revenge on hold Sam finally had a lead as to John’s whereabouts only to have Dean, because of his dad’s orders, break the promise he made that they’d find John (in Wendigo). That Sam finally snapped and left wasn’t what made this his first emotional turning point; it was that he came back and decided to stay. Not only has he proven he will be there when his family truly needs him, but also - and most importantly - this is the first time in his life Sam was allowed to choose for himself between hunting and his own goals and he chose to continue to hunt with his brother even after the danger in Burkitsville was behind them.
This choice made Sam’s announcement that he planned to return to Stanford in Shadows all the more jarring. It had nothing to do with Sam wanting to go back to college, however, but rather him believing that it might be his only option if they succeeded in killing the YED that night. In his mind, if that hunt ended that night his life would become one big question mark. The argument he’d had with his dad over the phone at the beginning of Scarecrow had done nothing to convince him that John would want to see him; he had no reason to believe that (1) John wouldn’t just order Dean to come with him and leave Sam behind and (2) Dean wouldn’t disobey because he obeyed every order John gave him. Even if John allowed him to rejoin his family, there was no reason for Sam to believe things wouldn’t go back to the soul-crushing way they were before he left for the first time. In the latter case, Sam was preparing to choose the lesser of two evils; in the former, he was anticipating having to find a place to go after being rejected.
The presence of these fears made Sam’s second emotional turning point later on in the episode even more poignant. He was tearfully reunited with his father, who made the first move toward reconciliation by telling Sam it was good to see him. He saw two things I bet he’d never thought he’d see: Dean disagreeing with his father and John actually taking his advice. He also got some validation concerning his own quest for the YED when John promised he’d play a part in the fight. Fifteen years of serious family issues didn’t just vanish, but by the end of Shadow Sam knew he had a place in his family and had hope that the three of them could evolve beyond the drill sergeant-soldiers dynamic of his childhood.
The last two times Sam mentions Stanford during the first season (not counting the art history thing in Provenance, which is just a throwaway line) firmly put college in his past. It was used to push a sniping match between Sam and John into a full-on fight (hey, Supernatural isn’t Full House; conflicts don’t go away just because two people hug) during Dead Man’s Blood. However, Sam grumbled, “This is why I left” and not anything like, “I can’t wait to get back to school” or “I’m so out of here once this is over”. Nor did Sam decide to go back to his notion of returning to school once the final hunt of the YED once again seems imminent in Salvation and Devil’s Trap; he just reminds Dean that this fight was the reason he’d retrieved him from school when he worried Dean’s emotions would compromise the only weapon they had to finish it once and for all. Leaving became past tense; Sam’s focus was on his family and their hunt.
The final emotional turning point came near the end of Devil’s Trap. Holding the Colt on the YED currently possessing his father Sam had to make a choice between his past (avenging Jessica then and there) and his present (saving his family - John physically and Dean emotionally). Sam chose his family. Avenging Jessica, ending the hunt that was his motivation for leaving school in the first place - none of that came before Dean and their father. The season about the past ended with Sam, both literally and figuratively in the driver’s seat, choosing to believe the present was much more important (well, that and a big-ass semi, but that’s neither here nor there…).
Was Sam’s excursion into a life of normalcy doomed to failure? Probably. Should he have never left for Stanford? No. Some journeys need to be taken even if it’s clear from the beginning they won’t work out. Years of loneliness, mistrust, misery, and feeling like he didn’t belong led Sam to college in the first place; only by leaving and finding his way back to his family did he finally find the place where he belonged. He just needed to choose it for himself.
Sam Winchester left his family to go to college, but why (for the record, I do not and have never believed it was because he was selfish)? Flashbacks in Something Wicked, A Very Supernatural Christmas, and After School Special as well as the recent publication of John Winchester’s Journal gave us viewers perspective on how the events of Sam’s life led him to become the young man we met in the pilot. Knowing more about that young man makes it clear that season one of Supernatural was much more emotional journey for Sam than just planning to leave school temporarily to hunt down his girlfriend’s killer.
Wayward Son: Sam, Pre-Series
There are five important things about Sam Winchester that defined his childhood and helped shape him into the young man we met in the pilot (and beyond):
Sam lost his sense of stability at the age of eight. On December 24, 1991 in Broken Bow, Nebraska, if you want to be exact. Before then he knew who he was and who his family was. Sure, he didn’t have a mom and he and the rest of his family didn’t live like other people, but that’s the way it had always been for him. He asked questions about these differences but, as we saw in AVCS, they were more curious than probing. Hell, he guessed his oft-absent “traveling salesman” father was really a spy - an idea from a young boy making up a super-cool scenario to explain why his father wasn’t there, not someone who was suspicious and impatiently demanding the truth. The questions didn’t make Dean nervous, either; he answered them with the irritated patience of someone who’s answered the same questions a million times before.
Then Sam brought up Mary. Judging by Sam’s reaction, Dean had never yelled at him with the fury he did before he stormed out. He looked a little scared, especially when Dean was in his face, but mostly it was shock that was all over wee Sam’s face at the end of the first flashback. He had no idea what had happened so he went looking for the answer in that motel room.
And he found it. Boy, did he find it.
He found out that his dad hunted monsters and spent the last eight years of his life lying to him about it. He found out that there were terrible things out there and his father left him and his brother alone to deal with whatever came their way whenever he was gone for days on end (knowing your older brother sleep with a gun under his pillow might seem a little cool to an eight-year-old, but believing that gun could very well be all that stands between you two and something truly evil is terrifying). He may not have found out that night, but soon he learned that any dreams he had for the future were pretty much moot: Sam as the son of a traveling salesman could grow up to be anything he wanted to be; Sam as the son of a hunter had his career - and life - planned out for him by the time he could walk.
Finding out the truth broke the trust he had in his father and forced him to change the way he looked at his life in the past, present, and future.
Sam was the black sheep of his family and community. Thanks to the way he found out about hunting, there was no one in his family or the small batch of hunters that make up Sam’s community. For every hunter whose initiation into the world of hunting we know - John, Dean, Bobby, and Gordon - it was a violent attack by evil that turned their worlds upside-down and hunting became their way to fight back, like how someone that survives a violent crime takes self-defense classes. Hunting is their way of taking back control, of making sure they and others are never victims again.
Sam finding out about hunting by reading his father’s journal and having Dean confirm the truth was traumatic in a different way. It wasn’t a monster that destroyed Sam’s world - it was hunting. Hunting was the reason John lied to him, hunting was the reason his dad was away so much, hunting was the reason why his family couldn’t be like everyone else’s, and hunting was the reason why he had no say in his future. Unlike John, Dean, Bobby, and probably every other person that made up his community, hunting wasn’t the source of Sam’s empowerment; it was the source of his disempowerment.
Between the ages of eight and fourteen, Sam came to the conclusion that he had to go into the family business. Unlike Dean, who “embraced the life” as a teenager (according to Bloodlust), Sam resigned himself to never escaping his disempowerment.
Sam was lonely and isolated. Sam had no peers in his community. Dean couldn’t even be counted as a peer - the gap of four and a half years seems a lot larger during childhood and in SW, AVSC, and ASS Dean’s relationship with Sam was first and foremost parental. Everyone was an authority figure who might sympathize with him but would ultimately stick up for his father. Sam didn’t have any friends on his side - no best friend who would agree that yes it sucked that his father treated him like his opinions didn’t matter, no group of pals to grouse with about how unfair it was that he had to move again; just a father who acted like drill sergeant, a brother who always said his father was right, and his dad’s friends (and you know John Winchester would never put up with anyone bad-mouthing him to either of his sons).
ASS is a clear example as to just how lonely Sam was. Wee Sam latched onto Barry Cook almost as quickly as lonely Barry latched onto him; the two were never far from each other during his stay at Truman High to the point where Barry would wait for Sam to finish talking to a teacher just to maximize the time they spent together. The impact of this friendly acquaintance on adult Sam proves how rare having a friend was during his adolescence. Think about it: if the number of schools the Winchester boys went through by the end of ASS was typical, Sam must have gone to at least 15-24 new schools through his high school career alone. He only knew Barry for a month, yet twelve years later he recognized the boy’s name right away and remembered him quite clearly.
Sam’s family didn’t understand. Sam’s unhappiness did not go unnoticed by John and Dean, but it did go misunderstood. In John Winchester’s Journal, John chalked up his son’s lack of enthusiasm for hunting as Sam having to learn to pull his own weight (January 24, 1996) and that he’s “shirking” his responsibilities (May 2, 1998). Any speculations as to the reasons why he’s not committing to hunting (besides stubbornness) never came up in the journal; all John could see was a soldier whose attitude he didn’t like.
Dean does a little better in recognizing that something’s bothering his little brother but also falls short in truly understanding. In ASS he could see there was something wrong with Sam as they walked to Truman for the first time and, to his credit, he took the time to make Sam talk about it. He fell short, however, when he failed to understand Sam’s unhappiness went deeper than first-day jitters and worries about how things are going to be like at this particular school; and that things wouldn’t be fixed by a quick move. Dean’s miseries tended to surface when they stay in a place long enough for his bad boy façade to crumble and he didn’t see how Sam’s miseries come from an opposite place: that they left just when he’s starting to get comfortable.
Again, ASS illustrates this lack of understanding in Sam’s life through his interactions with Mr. Wyatt. This teacher, who presumably only spent one class period a day in the same room as Sam, could see through the sullenness of “you can flunk me if you want to” to find how truly depressed Sam was and offered some sympathetic advice. No one - not John, not Dean, not Bobby, not Pastor Jim, or anyone else - ever understood him enough to ask him if he wanted to go into the family business and this meant enough for adult Sam to be unable to leave Truman without stopping by to thank him.
Sam loved his family. Despite how miserable he was, how lonely and isolated he felt, Sam’s love for his family made him stick it out in what was a truly unhappy situation for him. He never ran away from home - not when he was an underage teenager and not the second he turned eighteen. And not when he told his family he wanted to go to Stanford. Running away is packing your bags and leaving a note for your family to find once you’re long gone. Running away is telling your family “I’m out of here” and slamming the door behind you before anyone else can get past being stunned to respond. Sam didn’t do either of these things; instead he told John and Dean his plans and stuck around to fight about it.
Sam stated on several occasions that he was just going away to college and, even at their most pissed, John and Dean never denied that. He never meant for it to become a permanent exile; and if John had just said, “All right, I don’t like this, but if you promise to be very careful and not fall behind in your training we can give it a shot” I have no doubt Sam would have been home for every holiday and several weekends, dragging a bag full of dirty laundry with him and probably happy to be among people he didn’t have to lie to. But John didn’t do this; instead he gave Sam an ultimatum and kicked him out when he didn’t choose the way John wanted him to.
Being forced to choose between family and what must have seemed like the one and only shot at happiness would be hard for an emotionally healthy adult, let alone a teenager who’s spent the last decade of his life feeling powerless and depressed. Being told to stay gone if he left must have been devastating for Sam. Dean may have lost the brother he’d dedicated most of his life to keeping safe, but Sam lost more: he lost his brother, his father, his community, all of the possessions he couldn’t carry with him, the only life he’s ever known (yes it made him unhappy, but it was his), and the knowledge that he had people to go to if he really needed help. He was truly alone.
And, thanks to Dean’s deal and death, we all know how Sammy deals with a loss of this magnitude: by throwing himself into succeeding at doing what he feels he needs to do. If he couldn’t go back to his family he had to make Stanford work. If that meant lying to others, lying to himself, and burying the parts of himself that wouldn’t let him meet his goal of finding a place for himself in the university, so be it. Sam spent the last few years before the pilot with a figurative mask firmly in place.
The Road to Nowhere Leads to Me: Sam, Stanford, and the First Season
Sam Winchester left his family and hunting to find a place he could happy and belong. The emotional journey that was the first season for him, from losing Jessica and leaving school to the turning points of Scarecrow and Shadow and into Devil’s Trap, made him realize he could find it with the only people he would never have to hide so much of himself from: his family.
Sam’s feelings about his life at Stanford were not as rosy as some people believe. The first season has many clues that he may have liked his life at school more for what it was and wasn’t compared to his childhood than for what it was on its own. The threat of him returning seemed to exist more in Dean’s insecurities and fear of losing his brother again than in Sam’s actions - he just didn’t seem to miss school too much once he left (no, I haven’t forgotten about That Conversation; I’ll get to that in a bit).
We know next to nothing about Sam’s life at Stanford outside of his relationship with Jessica, and what we do know doesn’t exactly paint a fulfilling picture of Sam’s life after leaving his family:
- He admitted his distinct lack of a party life in Hook Man. This was most likely the norm, seeing how Jessica had to drag him to the party in the pilot and how even then he sat at a table in the corner with his back to the crowd. He could have just been uncomfortable in a crowd, but not partying a little in college goes way beyond discomfort.
- Besides Jessica we only see or hear about three people he was social with: Becky, whom he barely spends any time with throughout all of Skin; Zach, whom he never visits (he never even asks Becky how Zach’s holding up in prison); and the guy hanging around his table at the Halloween party in the pilot, the guy who didn’t know Sam had problems with his family (I know guys don’t really talk about this stuff, but come on - anyone who hung out with Sam more than casually had to have realized that he never went home during the holidays, never had anyone visiting him, and never received any phone calls or mail from anybody outside of his Stanford life).
- His choice of law school might imply a lack of direction. While there are many people who go to law school because they have a passion for the law, it’s also a popular place for people who want to stay in academia because they have no idea what they want to do beyond school (many people believe you can do anything with a law degree). We don’t know for sure which category Sam falls into, but the fact that he never mentions wanting to be a lawyer makes me lean a little more toward the directionless student side.
- He said it himself in Skin: deep down he didn’t fit in at Stanford. That was probably the first time he admitted it out loud but probably not the first time he realized it.
The only times we ever saw Sam asserting his life at Stanford over Dean is during the pilot, while he’s still in that life, with no reason to believe he’ll be leaving it anytime soon. Even then he only does it in response to something his brother does. He insisted Jessica stay for a family discussion, but only after when Dean dismissed her like she’s some stranger his little brother’s brought home for the night; he elaborated on the fantastic opportunity that was his Monday interview, but only when Dean casually told him to skip it without even knowing what it was for; and he apologetically refused to go to on with Dean to Blackwater Ridge, but only after Dean conveniently “forgot” that Sam hadn’t agreed to go with him beyond Jericho and that he’d promised to get him back in time for his interview. These weren’t all about Sam’s desperation to maintain his normal existence; these were about Dean acting like his brother’s life at school wasn’t important because he missed him didn’t want it to be important to Sam and Sam trying to make his brother respect that he’d built a valid life for himself at Stanford because he was still hurt and angry that his family made that life necessary by exiling him in the first place.
Whatever Sam’s life was or wasn’t at college was gone by the end of the pilot, burned up in a demon-induced fire that killed Jessica, and he was once again on the road with his big brother. And a funny thing happened: once Stanford was in the Metallicar’s rearview mirror, Sam didn’t seem to miss it all that much. In fact, he only mentions Stanford in three episodes between Wendigo (episode 2) and Shadow (episode 16):
- Route 666 was the only time he ever mentions missing his life at Stanford, in his three lines of dialogue during a conversation with Dean about how he sometimes misses the simplicity of it. It was a temporary nostalgia that was understandable given the circumstances of the case - it’s one thing to write papers about polycentric cultural norms; it’s quite another to be dealing with the supernatural result of polycentric cultural norms of the American South during segregation and the Civil Rights Movement.
- Skin, in which school was only brought up in terms of the place where he has some friends. He told Becky he misses his friends, not school itself.
- Bugs, but only in how the Stanford issue led to Sam and John coming to blows. The wonderful brother moments that make this episode worth watching weren’t about Sam’s great life at school and how he wants to go back; they were about Sam wanting to go in the first place and how that turned into the fracturing of their family. Most importantly, it was revealed that Sam’s biggest fear wasn’t that he’ll never get to go back to Stanford but that when the brothers finally found John his father wouldn’t want to see him. Sam, who spent most of his life feeling like he didn’t belong, was insecure about his place in the family.
Dean, not Sam, was the reason Stanford came up so much in those early episodes. Sam wasn’t holding it over Dean’s head (if he was, would Dean have found out that Sam was still emailing his college friends only after asking him what he was doing with his phone at the beginning of Skin?) or silently pining (Hook Man was set on a college campus, for crying out loud, and there wasn’t even a throwaway moment of Sam looking longingly at any of the students heading off to class). Dean brought it up constantly, either by teasing Sam about it during moments when Sam was less-than-comfortable or caught off-guard (like in Hook Man) or yelling at him about it when Sam disagreed with him (as seen in Dead in the Water). He used both tones to make it very clear that he believed school had been nothing but a waste of time for Sam - because, of course, he wanted Sam to stay with him and was afraid Sam didn’t want the same.
Sam did leave in Scarecrow, but it wasn’t about school - it was about one of the reasons why Sam left for school in the first place: the large amount of control John had over his life. After six months of hunting (when he never technically agreed to resume that lifestyle in the first place) and putting his own mission of revenge on hold Sam finally had a lead as to John’s whereabouts only to have Dean, because of his dad’s orders, break the promise he made that they’d find John (in Wendigo). That Sam finally snapped and left wasn’t what made this his first emotional turning point; it was that he came back and decided to stay. Not only has he proven he will be there when his family truly needs him, but also - and most importantly - this is the first time in his life Sam was allowed to choose for himself between hunting and his own goals and he chose to continue to hunt with his brother even after the danger in Burkitsville was behind them.
This choice made Sam’s announcement that he planned to return to Stanford in Shadows all the more jarring. It had nothing to do with Sam wanting to go back to college, however, but rather him believing that it might be his only option if they succeeded in killing the YED that night. In his mind, if that hunt ended that night his life would become one big question mark. The argument he’d had with his dad over the phone at the beginning of Scarecrow had done nothing to convince him that John would want to see him; he had no reason to believe that (1) John wouldn’t just order Dean to come with him and leave Sam behind and (2) Dean wouldn’t disobey because he obeyed every order John gave him. Even if John allowed him to rejoin his family, there was no reason for Sam to believe things wouldn’t go back to the soul-crushing way they were before he left for the first time. In the latter case, Sam was preparing to choose the lesser of two evils; in the former, he was anticipating having to find a place to go after being rejected.
The presence of these fears made Sam’s second emotional turning point later on in the episode even more poignant. He was tearfully reunited with his father, who made the first move toward reconciliation by telling Sam it was good to see him. He saw two things I bet he’d never thought he’d see: Dean disagreeing with his father and John actually taking his advice. He also got some validation concerning his own quest for the YED when John promised he’d play a part in the fight. Fifteen years of serious family issues didn’t just vanish, but by the end of Shadow Sam knew he had a place in his family and had hope that the three of them could evolve beyond the drill sergeant-soldiers dynamic of his childhood.
The last two times Sam mentions Stanford during the first season (not counting the art history thing in Provenance, which is just a throwaway line) firmly put college in his past. It was used to push a sniping match between Sam and John into a full-on fight (hey, Supernatural isn’t Full House; conflicts don’t go away just because two people hug) during Dead Man’s Blood. However, Sam grumbled, “This is why I left” and not anything like, “I can’t wait to get back to school” or “I’m so out of here once this is over”. Nor did Sam decide to go back to his notion of returning to school once the final hunt of the YED once again seems imminent in Salvation and Devil’s Trap; he just reminds Dean that this fight was the reason he’d retrieved him from school when he worried Dean’s emotions would compromise the only weapon they had to finish it once and for all. Leaving became past tense; Sam’s focus was on his family and their hunt.
The final emotional turning point came near the end of Devil’s Trap. Holding the Colt on the YED currently possessing his father Sam had to make a choice between his past (avenging Jessica then and there) and his present (saving his family - John physically and Dean emotionally). Sam chose his family. Avenging Jessica, ending the hunt that was his motivation for leaving school in the first place - none of that came before Dean and their father. The season about the past ended with Sam, both literally and figuratively in the driver’s seat, choosing to believe the present was much more important (well, that and a big-ass semi, but that’s neither here nor there…).
Was Sam’s excursion into a life of normalcy doomed to failure? Probably. Should he have never left for Stanford? No. Some journeys need to be taken even if it’s clear from the beginning they won’t work out. Years of loneliness, mistrust, misery, and feeling like he didn’t belong led Sam to college in the first place; only by leaving and finding his way back to his family did he finally find the place where he belonged. He just needed to choose it for himself.