Jared is pretty good at crying, like when Dean died, but there's something about the way Jensen can do all those mixed emotions and of course the single tear (although in this care there were more).

And I realized that the actress who is playing Ruby physically reminds me of a cross between Lea Michele of Glee and Ellen Muth from Dead Like Me.

In early seasons Sam didn't drunk as much. There was one episode maybe even in S3 where Dean finds him in a bar drinking and is surprised by it.

Isn't Dean also quoted as saying something like "two beers and he's singing karoke"?

ETA: It was in The Benders

That was college!Sam who was the alcoholic lightweight. Massive!Sam, as Morgana says, has more body mass to absorb the alcohol.

I'm always struck by the similarity of composition of the end scene in Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things and the one in Heaven and Hell. The emotions and revelations are too large to be confined within the Impala's interior, but as a member of the family, their history, pretty much their only stability, she anchors them, they rest on and against her while those things are revealed and reacted to. I know Manners directed CSPWDT; J. Miller Tobin was director on the latter. He evidently cribbed from Manners. Both are gutting scenes, and both actors aquit themselves beautifully.

That was college!Sam who was the alcoholic lightweight. Massive!Sam, as Morgana says, has more body mass to absorb the alcohol.

I think we've seen them both drink a lot more as the past 5 years have gone on, too. Dean has definitely been drinking more than Sam, but we've seen Sam drinking more now than he did at the beginning. (I'm remembering scenes from the beginning where he'd be tucked into the corner of a bar, more or less ignoring everything while hunched over his computer. Now he's more likely to be drinking than doing research.) I'm not making any kind of value judgment - given what they're facing I'd be surprised if they weren't looking for some sort of temporary escape from the horror of their daily lives. I was just originally commenting on something that I've seen a lot in fics that I've read.

I think we've seen them both drink a lot more as the past 5 years have gone on, too.

This is definitely true. They both are consuming extraordinary quantities of alcohol. I fear for their livers, you know, should they survive the apocalypse.

Our first view of grownup Sam was at a bar too. The "two beers and he's doing karaoke" line is what Dean says but it's what he says to a cop when Sam is missing. So take your unreliable narration times a million. I don't think when your cousin (brother) is missing (and you think something spooky took him) is the time for a frank discussion of how much drinking is happening. It's a cute line but sometimes misused in fic, in my very judgey judgment.

I mean not totally impossible for someone of Sam's size. I have a lot of body mass, and I can get drunk on one glass of wine. But I don't drink much and Sammy does. I would think that if I took up even serious social drinking, I would get hardened pretty quickly and build up a tolerance. And Sam shows a big tolerance on the show. I seem to remember him helping a woman polish off a bottle of some sort. Bourbon? Scotch? Some other type of whiskey? The woman he fucked who turned out not to be the siren...

I think it varies from person to person. In Madison I was surprised that my tolerance hadn't gone down much despite several years of almost no alcohol (didn't manage more than a buzz despite our 11th hour scramble to drink our way up to the open bar minimum).

I watched After School Special today and I realized it was more of a Sam centric episode and showing where the idea for leaving hunting came from but to me it felt like there should have been a bit more of Dean in the episode.

Or maybe it was supposed to be subtle, but I kept thinking -- Dean pay attention! But I was really tired when I watched it so maybe there was some clue that he was paying attention. I was also thinking about my own experiences in middle school when I was cruel to a few other kids because it felt good (in a bad way) not to be the victim and to be putting that pain on someone else.