6.10: Caged Heat - My Rewatch Review
This is the episode that I am always expecting when I get to ‘Family Matters’, probably because they are the bookends to the brief story arc that has Sam and Dean bagging monsters for Crowley in exchange for the eventual return of Sam’s soul, and because this episode has all of the action that ‘Family Matters’ lacks. And it always catches me a little off-guard just how much actually happens in this episode, which is likely yet another reason that my brain tends to transfer some of the story beats from here over to the less action-heavy earlier episode.
And I love everything that happens in this episode. The return of Meg and her interactions with Castiel are very weird and fun, especially when she kisses him in the hallway to get her hands on his angel blade and he goes all ‘hot porno kiss’ right back. Additionally, the interlude where Cass is watching porn while Sam and Dean do research, and then Samuel walks is, is an extremely memorable funny scene in an otherwise serious episode. And there is something to be said for Cass being completely uncompromising with Crowley and just burning his bones as soon as Crowley says he can’t help Sam get his soul back, even though on a rewatch it has a lot less power because we know that it was all just an act from both of them.
Which is actually an interesting and disturbing lens to rewatch this episode through in the first place. Because when you consider what we know on a rewatch about what is really going on, and about the professional relationship that Cass and Crowley have, all of his actions in this episode take on much more disturbing tones. And this is not the first or the last time that this show will go all ‘unreliable narrator’ all over Castiel; that actually ends up being his primary character trait over the course of the series, and one of the more fascinating realizations once you get to the end of it all is just how inconsistent he really was with both his actions and his intentions throughout the entire story. This season is actually a perfect example of a pattern that has already occurred in his relationship with Sam and Dean, and which will repeat itself over and over again: Castiel has his own orders and his own agenda behind the scenes, which is in turn impacting the crisis that the Winchesters are dealing with down on Earth. At some point, they will call Cass and ask for his help; Cass will provide it, albeit reluctantly, but he will either not be as helpful as they would have wanted him to be, or his help will turn out later on to have not actually been help at all, but rather some misdirection to keep them happy that also serves his agenda and keeps them in the dark about his true intentions. He’s playing out the same pattern now that he did with Sam and Dean in the run-up to the Apocalypse, and he will do the same again several more times down the road.
This episode is also a great one for exploring the full measure of Soulless!Sam, right before he becomes a near-irredeemable character in the next episode. Him standing up to Cass is a legendary scene among the fandom (though I think I more like him using the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark to lure Cass down in the first place, and then calling him an idiot for not recognizing it), and the scene where he chews into his arm and uses his own blood to draw a devil’s trap on the ceiling of his cell is also both extremely clever and badass. Soulless!Sam has all of Sam’s quick thinking, and stubbornness, and iron will, and this episode shows all of that off beautifully, but it also never forgets that this Sam is also lacking the one thing that makes Sam truly Sam, and it comes out the most in the way he really can’t understand why Dean is so hell-bent on getting his soul back, even when everyone else is now telling him that it’s a bad idea.
But the one thing that no one ever says, not even Dean—though Dean is obviously the one thinking it (the only one, unfortunately)—is that getting Sam’s soul back is not just about changing the Sam that’s in front of him back into the one he remembers; it’s about saving the part of his brother that is still being tortured in the Cage from an eternity of suffering. Because as long as a part of Sam is down there, Dean can’t just let him go. Even if it means that Sam dies again when his soul is returned, or suffers horribly before the end; at least that suffering would be finite, and he would find peace once it was over. And I think that’s really what Dean wants, more than just getting his brother back. I just wish he knew how to tell everyone else that, or that anyone around him would understand and support him even if he could.
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