Another note on the acting/responses to the ‘confession’ from a purely mechanical/practical standpoint:
It’s painfully obvious that the actors were given the explicit instructions of “Do not move”. They were not given any direction as to what to do with their bodies. They were not given multiple places to stand about in the room, to pace or walk or emphasize with their feet/hands. Their blocking in frame of the camera was rigid by design and not up for debate. There’s likely a few reasons this happened.
First, this was Misha Collin’s scene. An actor’s final moments, final lines, in the role of a lifetime. Misha will never have another part/character like this in his career and few actors get to play these types of characters for so long, mathematically speaking. He has been with this character, has portrayed Castiel, for 12 years and obviously he needed the spotlight. All eyes needed to be on him. He was the point of focus. Think of it like the goal was to make the audience forget Dean or any other character was in the room/on screen at the same time - regardless of the content of the scene. Misha needed to have the floor to be able to put as much emotion into his voice and face as possible. Tell me where you have seen more love in a character’s eyes (the number of tears is irrelevant when you take into account how many takes Misha probably did/how many were sliced together for the final product). Point me to that character.
The second reason, I believe, was the writers were hanging onto their claim of ‘subtext’ until the last possible second. Whatever their reasons, even if the reasons were positive to allow audiences to come to their own conclusions on the characters, the writers obviously wanted Dean and Castiel’s relationship to remain open-ended. A question mark. A blank slate for the viewer to project their own thoughts and feelings onto. Plain and simple, any physical contact, purposeful or accidental, leading up to and including shoving Dean out of the way, would have made the subtext into supertext. Keeping the characters at arms distance, motionless, staring intensely at one another, was the best solution they came up with to keep either from reaching out to the other at any point during the confession and mudding the waters/reading. The result, as I see it, is the scene can be read as the characters were brothers, soulmates (in the biblical sense of Cas saved Dean, thus had to die for him to complete the circle), or as a romantic/queerplatonic pairing.
Was it the best ending Castiel/Destiel fans could have hoped for? Not really. Not even close. Was it the direction the writing/plot was heading in for multiple seasons? Unfortunately, yes, it was. Was Misha Collins happy with his final scene and the conclusion of a role he enjoyed taking on? Absolutely! And Jensen Ackles was ‘polite’/professional (for a lack of a better word) and gave Misha the floor to work in as he was instructed and likely eager to do. That’s something to be celebrated!
***Basically, be nice to the actors for doing their jobs. Any other actors in the same situation would have played out the rigid scene in the same way. It was still a good/fine moment in an overall spectacular role***.
