Or, Sam and his powers

I’ve been thinking a lot about Sam and his powers lately. Lots of people have written lots of meta about whether or not they’re bad. But I haven’t seen much, if any, talk about what powers he has, or even whether he still has them post-S5.

Hold on, Sanity, you say. We don’t talk about it because Sam has visions and can exorcise/kill demons with his brain, and hasn’t used his powers since season 5. We know that!

Sure, I say, we do. But have you forgotten that Sam is canonically telekinetic? In fact, there’s a strong argument that he’s demonstrated all, or almost all, the known Special Children powers over the course of the series - including as late as Season 7.

What? you say. I don’t believe you!

That’s fine! I say. Let’s take a look.

First, HUGE thanks to @dreamsfromthebunker, who made almost all the gifs in this post. You are amazing and I could not have made this post without you! <3



Now, let’s start with a review of all the known Special Children powers.

Prophetic visions, as demonstrated by Sam:

and Ava:

Telekinesis, as demonstrated by Sam:

and Max:

Mind control/persuasion, as demonstrated by Andy, Ansem, and Jake:

Super-strength, as demonstrated by Jake:

Death by touch, as demonstrated by Scott and Lily:

(Scott notes that he has a choice, and Lily apparently doesn’t, nor does she explicitly say that she’s electrocuting people, but their abilities are similar enough for our purposes to be lumped together.)

Power over demons, as demonstrated by Ava:

and Sam:

What’s interesting here is that most of the recurring Special Children, despite starting with a single apparent power, eventually develop multiple abilities. Ava and Jake both gain the extra powers only after giving in to Azazel - but not Sam. He has the visions and telekinesis both before he even knows they’re linked to Azazel’s blood. Even when he starts drinking demon blood, he doesn’t fall into the same “give in to the Dark Side” mentality that both Ava and Jake describe. While he does seem to get a power high off it, his goal for drinking and using his powers is always explicitly to save people: the human hosts who would otherwise be killed by Ruby’s knife, the countless people who would die if Lilith got her way. Ava and Jake both begin to revel in their ability to harm innocent humans; Sam only ever hurts demons. So from the very beginning, he shows more powers than the other Special Children, and less inclination to use them for evil.

Even more interesting, Sam arguably demonstrates all the other powers in the Special Children’s repertoire (except death by touch, which may or may not count depending on how you believe his demon-killing abilities work). The list above shows him using three of the six powers in canon, but what about the other three?

Let’s review, from the most obvious to the least.

Super-strength

Sam uses a coil of barbed wire, with nothing but a bit of cloth to protect his hands, to slice off Gordon’s head.

While it’s hard to find a reliable answer to the question “How much force does it take to cut off someone’s head?”, discussions on Quora and elsewhere indicate that even a razor-sharp sword, with the force of a full two-handed swing behind it, still takes several strokes to cut through flesh and bone. Sam would have ripped open his own palms, and the blood would have caused his hands to slide off the wire, before he could come anywhere close to decapitating a friggin’ vampire.

Unless he was using super-strength.

Mind control

Sam’s puppy-dog eyes are legendary. I mean, what heartless monster

could say no



to that face?



(okay okay sorry)

(does it creep anyone else out the way lucifer’s head stays perfectly still in that gif, like, that is some inhuman movement right there mr pellegrino pls stop)

Anyway, we all agree that Sam has a killer puppy-dog face. But consider this: while Dean regularly asks Sam to use that irresistable charm to get witnesses to open up:

Sam doesn’t usually do the full-on sad eyes when he does. He just… asks.

Sound familiar?



Death by touch

This one’s debatable. Sam never kills anyone by touch, human or otherwise, but he develops quite the knack for killing demons without touch.

Close enough, right?

Now, obviously, he’s not aware that he has these other powers; except the demon-killing, he isn’t using them consciously or deliberately. But most of the Special Children have little to no control over their powers, at least at first. Neither Sam nor Ava can control their visions; Lily can’t control her touch of death. We don’t know as much about how the other Special Children’s powers started out, but the ones who do have greater control over their powers are the ones who’ve been actively using them the longest. If Sam doesn’t reailze he has these additional abilities - if they didn’t start out as strong, or as readily accessible, as his visions or his telekinesis, it stands to reason he’d never use them enough to get conscious control over them.

Okay, fine! you say. Sam has more powers than we give him credit for. But he was cleansed, right? He stopped having visions after Azazel died:

and God cleansed him of the demon blood at the beginning of Season 5.

Wrong! says I. He has his powers at least through the end of Season 5, remember? He killed Famine in the middle of Season 5:

And he showed off for Lucifer in Swan Song:

And it’s not just the demon-killing stuff: his own telekinesis nearly killed him during the forced detox at the end of Season 4:

Fine! you say again. What about after that? He’s never demonstrated powers since Swan Song. Wouldn’t he have been cleansed (again) of demon blood when Castiel raised him from the Cage?

Well, I answer, probably not. Even God didn’t actually remove his powers when He teleported Sam and Dean onto the plane at the beginning of Season 5 - all He did was detox the demon blood from Sam’s system. So, since God didn’t do it, it’s extremely unlikely that Castiel would have been able to do so when he yanked Sam’s body out of the Cage. (Given that Castiel also didn’t notice that he forgot Sam’s freaking soul, I don’t think he did much close investigation of his handiwork.)

However, that’s all speculation. The most compelling argument that Sam still has powers as late as Season 7 comes from, of all people, Hallucifer.

Huh? you say. What does Hallucifer have to do with any of this?

Allow me to direct your attention to 7.02, “Hello, Cruel World”. Aside from the wham moment in the previous episode, this is where Hallucifer is really introduced. He can only be seen and heard by Sam, but throughout the episode, he - and the hallucinations he causes - have a direct physical effect on the real world.

Take the knife, for example:

That’s an awfully pointed (heh, heh) shot of that knife, don’t you think? Is it an illusion, like the poker he impales Bobby with later? Maybe. Or maybe not. When Halluci-Dean comes to pick up Sam just a few hours later, he takes a beer can out of Sam’s hand.

He also opens doors for Sam, once at Bobby’s and once when they arrive at their destination:

(Morningstar Endeavors, LTD. Cute, Lucifer.)

He also closes the door behind them, ensuring Sam is trapped inside.

When the real Dean arrives, he has to open the door again to come in (it’s not shown on-screen but you can hear the sound of the door latch turning over and the door squeaking open). But Sam clearly didn’t close it.

If Hallucifer/Halluci-Dean is nothing but an illusion created by Sam’s Cage-tortured mind, how’d Sam get through those doors? What happened to that beer? Unless Hallucifer masked the beer can falling to the ground when Sam let go of it, then somehow got rid of the mess before the real Dean got back to Bobby’s, and unless all those doors were just sitting open (which we know they weren’t), then something had to have moved those objects.

Something like Sam’s telekinesis, activated unconsciously and against his will just like in Bobby’s panic room during the detox.

Sam still has his powers.

My personal belief is that the Special Children were natural psychics already, like Missouri or Pamela, before Azazel fed them demon blood. All the blood did was shape the nature of their powers and bind them to Azazel so that he could keep track of them and exert some measure of control over them. As Ruby herself notes:

Of course, even if Sam does still have his powers, he almost certainly wouldn’t use them - too much has gone wrong that way. But it’s fun to speculate - after all, if Sam did start practicing again, and if they found another Hand of God to act as a power supply, the Winchesters would have one hell of a weapon…