Not all choices are created equally.
I'm really tempted to write something about free will vs Dean's "I don't have a choice" in 13.23, because he did have a choice... but the other option was to drink copious quantities of alcohol and wait for the inevitable blast wave, you know? Everyone keeps quoting the "we'll always end up here" nonsense from 5.04 as if it proves they never really had a choice. But the thing is, they absolutely didn't "end up there." Lucifer is DEAD.
DING FREAKING DONG, BITCHES.
They're in the bizarro world version of that original "end" because all their previous choices had led them here-- all those times they chose wrong (and right, or just chose what they could live with in the aftermath), all those times Lucifer didn't get shoved back into the box, and God's choice to leave Lucifer alive in the first place after 11.22. This is the result of Sam and Dean being left to clean up God's mess… So in a way it was inevitable, because you can't just lock up problems and hope they stay locked up. And AU Michael is actually a problem of Lucifer's own making… if he hadn't deliberately tried to spit in Chuck's face by making a nephilim, that doorway to AU Michael's world would never have opened in the first place.
At that point, Sam and Dean absolutely DID have choices. But by 13.23, all their choices boiled down to "which is the lesser of two evils."
Sometimes there just aren't any GOOD choices.
And anyone suggesting that Dean should've just locked the door to the bunker and waited for the end, as if that was in any way the better option… well I’ve got to really side-eye the rest of the entire season worth of choices and consequences. Because that’s the rub of free will. Dean said it way back in 6.20:
CASTIEL: I'm doing this for you, Dean. I'm doing this because of you.
DEAN: Because of me. Yeah. You got to be kidding me.
CASTIEL: You're the one who taught me that freedom and free will--
DEAN: You're a freakin' child, you know that? Just because you can do what you want doesn't mean that you get to do whatever you want!
Since then we’ve learned a lot about not only what Free Will is, but we’ve been more and more blatantly reminded about the fact that all choices have consequences. And sometimes Big Choices have Cosmic Consequences. Consequences that affect the future, narrowing down the potential future array of choices.
It’s no longer a matter of Free Will vs Fate at that point, it’s a matter of navigating through the consequences of PAST CHOICES until-- like Jessica the reaper told Sam and Dean in 13.19-- the only option is to go nuclear or go home.
Jessica: Rowena’s changing people’s fates. She’s killing them before their time and when a reaper shows…
Sam: She torches them too.
Jessica: Yes.
Dean: Why?
Jessica: You’ll have to ask her when you stop her because if she keeps this up she is going to throw off fate…. The whole greater machinery of death.
Sam: That means?
Jessica: Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect?
Dean: Ashton’s second best movie!
Sam: { looks at Dean incredulous} Yeah of course….. one small mistake can cause all kinds of bad. What about it?
Jessica: If just one person dies before their time a lot of things that were supposed to happen… don’t. The ripple effect from just one early death can affect hundreds of lives and changing their fates changes even more fates until things just become sincerely unfortunate and we have to hit the reset button.
Sam: What does that mean?
Jessica: Usually? A mass kill off like the Black Plague or a mid sized war… Something to wipe the board clean. So… you’re help in avoiding that would be greatly appreciated by everyone.
So there is a sort of “fate” attached to death, because dying is the one thing we’re all fated to do, you know? It’s the one thing nobody can wiggle out of (well, unless they’re Winchesters, apparently, but the whole premise of the show has always been that they’re different-- and yes I’m including Cas in that because duh). And messing with life and death this way-- not to mention messing with alternate universes which was Billie’s concern in 13.05, wherein resurrecting Dean to deal with that mess was the lesser Cosmic Consequence-- has a wider-reaching series of consequences. It’s not fate, but the inevitable result of screwing with the Natural Order.
(and quick lil reminder that in 13.05 DEAN CHOSE to die, accepted his death... and Billie basically said... NOPE THAT’S NOT AN OPTION TODAY, in a tidy flipping of everything Dean ever thought Free Will was about.)
And this is what Death has been teaching to Dean since… ever. (see 6.11 for the major exposition on this point)
I've seen people saying it was pointless to have Dean say he didn't have a choice (and people who then make the entirety of his decision based on saving Sam and no one else), but Free Will doesn't mean there's always going to be a GOOD choice to be made. I mean, that's not how life (and the inevitability of death) works. It's not always "easy 100% virtuous option" vs "terrible and easily condemnable option." Sometimes the choice is between fighting and surrendering entirely, and there is no other viable option. (and on a meta level, from outside the narrative, this is the sort of narrowing down of options that drives the story to this sort of do-or-die choice that makes season finale cliffhanger drama happen.)
(and again, Naomi reminded us again in 13.18 that everything eventually ends... even when it doesn’t)
And surrendering entirely is just... not an option for Dean in any universe.
And of course Dean chose to fight, and NOT JUST TO SAVE SAM >.>
I mean he could have let Sam die and felt helpless, but there were absolutely stakes beyond that, like seeing Lucifer eat Jack's grace, and knowing what Lucifer would do with that sort of power. He hadn’t been up to his usual Threat Level all season long. Dean had seen a much weakened Lucifer in 13.13, but boosted with Nephilim Grace, and lacking any other reason not to just burn the world down, this was absolutely a DEFCON 1 situation here. Nuclear war was imminent.
(and largely out of Dean’s potential array of choices, here. It was basically a choice between which nuclear warhead he was gonna fire, and he chose the one he had at least a remote chance of being able to pilot himself)
(*spends 30 seconds imagining Dean waving a cowboy hat around as he rides the nuclear bomb as it’s dropped a la Dr. Strangelove*)
Lucifer’s depowered state and general apathy, and then his desire to get his hands on Jack to use him for his own purposes of elevating himself to a sort of stolen godhead, remaking the world (sans humanity, unless they learned their place and worshipped him because he believed he deserved that) in his own image, and basically using the entire planet to give a big fuck you to God… I mean, these aren’t obscure and unknown things about Lucifer. These have always been the stakes when he’s been in play. Dean learned this firsthand in 5.04.
But there’s also Jack. You know, the kid they spent the back half of the season trying to rescue (along with Mary) from the AU? The kid that Cas had told Dean he'd literally argued his way out of the Empty to protect? I'm... ?????
It’s not possible for Dean to look Cas in the eye and NOT acknowledge that he’s just as focused on saving JACK (who just had his grace ripped out in front of his eyes after finally rejecting Lucifer’s status as his “father” and completely throwing his lot in with Humanity, making the ultimate declaration of his place in the universe as a member of the Winchester Family and TFW 2.0) as he is on saving Sam. To say otherwise is just… disingenuous at best, and completely ignores more than half of the season’s major themes to do so.
Just because Dean said he didn't care about himself, but did care about his brother a few episodes earlier... that doesn't make him saying yes to Michael ONLY about Sam. More than half the season centered around the rescue mission for both Jack AND Mary, and to reduce the emotional struggle Dean went through over them to something entirely unimportant in this ultimate moment of choice is just… gross. Even if Sam had died in 13.21, Dean would press on to get them home, or or what did Sam even die for?
Going back to the Cosmic Consequences of previous choices, Billie sort of warned him all along that messing with the AU was gonna lead to trouble, and here we are. I wonder what Jessica the reaper reported to Billie when Dean said yes? And I keep thinking about this from 13.05 when Dean chose to die:
Billie: That doesn't sound like the Dean Winchester I know and love. The man who's been dead so many times but it never seemed to stick. Maybe you're not that guy anymore, the guy who saves the world, the guy who always thinks he'll win no matter what. You have changed. And you tell people it's not a big deal. You tell people you'll work through it, but you know you won't, you can't, and that scares the hell out of you. Or... am I wrong?
She said that to him like she was issuing a formal challenge. That was the bait that dragged Dean through the rest of the season, and it got an immediate boost when Cas came back to him at the end of that episode. Cas gave him the emotional carrot to push through to the end.
The reapers and their "clean hands" policy can't interfere, but Death can do the usual Death thing of nudging Dean to where he needed to be. Giving vague warnings, and even vaguer directions… Like in s6 Death’s warning about “the souls” didn’t help change the ending, but it kept Dean pushing in the right direction to eventually understand; even if he couldn’t stop the bad thing happening, at least he’d be forearmed to fix it once it was broken.
So going back to Dean’s choice to say yes to Michael. It was always only ever going to come back to this choice-- not in a replay of 5.04 or even 5.22, but in the ultimate subversion of it, with a few conditions attached. And in a truly disturbing twist, this is exactly what Jack promised in 12.19…
Cas in 5.22, after successfully stopping the original Apocalypse, at great personal cost:
CASTIEL: You got what you asked for, Dean. No paradise. No hell. Just more of the same. I mean it, Dean. What would you rather have? Peace or freedom?
Dean asked for freedom, and he got it. Just more of the same. But in 12.19, Cas swallowed the kool aid Jack’s powers served up-- the promise of peace and paradise. And this is the result. In 5.22, Dean wasn’t terribly content with the consequences of his choices, and I mean yes they very much did save the world, but at what cost? And he couldn’t even begin to see the future consequences of his cosmic interference yet (see: the rest of the series post 5.22 for evidence).
And this result in 13.23? Is the cosmic opposite. For reasons entirely beyond their control (because the Winchesters are not omniscient nor omnipotent-- not even Cas or Jack), and all they’ve ever done was the best they could in any circumstance, it’s unfair to suggest that this ultimate choice Dean had to made wasn’t entirely the result of a season-long (or even series-long) flow chart gradually cutting off options until the final coin toss could only be between these two final options. Peace or freedom, flee or die, Michael or Lucifer. He’d just reached the last chapter of the Choose Your Own Adventure story, where the only way out is through.
Sure, Dean absolutely had a choice. He could’ve chosen to barricade the door to the bunker and wait for their inevitable death at Lucifer’s hand, but we know what he does in that circumstance (hello 12.22). So even if it gets them all killed, he’ll use the grenade launcher, because really, Dean will always choose to go down fighting rather than surrendering to fate.
And now we know that drive has ultimately led him to the unthinkable choice to accept what he’d always been told was his fate. Because it was either that or watch the world burn.
And yes, he knows exactly what Michael wanted to do to our world, and he understood there was a bigger risk to this choice than anything else he’s ever had to do. He knows exactly what Michael intended to do to the world, because in addition to the rescue mission aspect of the back half of the season, this was the other Major Threat, and the other side of the coin that Cas suggested might be why he was resurrected. Michael brings War. And Cas believed he was resurrected to also stop that war from happening.
So there Dean was, looking Cas in the face. Cas, who’d been Dean’s personal win in 13.06, and yet NONE OF THAT was stated by Dean directly TO CAS, while Cas repeatedly stated that his two-pronged reason for even being alive was 1) to protect and save Jack, and 2) to stop AU Michael from making war on their world.
(not even touching on Cas’s PERSONAL issues with Lucifer, and his personal mission to-- if not kill him outright, at least grind Lucifer’s face into the ground in every possible way, from everything about how impotent he was to even stand up to the least of his creations to adopting and teaching human love to the greatest of Lucifer’s creations… I mean, THIS WAS NOT INSIGNIFICANT TO CAS)
And in that moment, immediately after Cas had to watch his first mission go up in flames as Lucifer undid Jack and stole his grace, and had to confront this ultimate personal failure against Lucifer and the ultimate personal failure of his promise to Kelly, and his ultimate personal failure to protect Jack… even in that moment there was still one final choice to be made.
Dean clearly negotiated terms (which we don’t know the entirety of, but hopefully will learn in 14.01), because Lucifer was the immediate threat RIGHT FRIGGIN’ NOW. Not only to Jack and Sam, but to the entire universe. They had one weapon that could stop him, which was utterly useless without an archangel to wield it. But they also had one slightly used archangel in the scratch and dent bin and one perfect vessel…
Sometimes the choice is really that limited, but to say it wasn’t a choice is doing a disservice to the entire season, and to the entire series going right back to the start.
