kaveh akbar, 'calling a wolf a wolf' // doc luben, 'love letters or suicide notes' // @/nutnoce, tumblr // 'my body's made of crushed little stars', mitski // @/ojibwa, tumblr // 'spring', mary oliver
“People speak of grieving their dead, but they are silent for those that remain. How do you grieve the one who still breathes? You don’t. You can’t. You can only learn to live without them — as seconds turn to centuries. People are not possessions. They cannot be replaced when lost.”
The death of Jack, the rise of the Evil Shadow-Child:
Jack dies.
BATTLEFIELD MOTIF
On the battlefield, TFW is overwhelmed, and Cas more easily takes on the role of acting commander. This makes good sense to me, as angels are codified by open war, and hunters are more associated with guerilla tactics.
The way the spirits hit look like bombs, further underlining the battlefield motif.
Cas calls for them to follow and cover him as they try to get Jack to "safety," as if they're still moving on heroic muscle memory.
As if things will be fine.
Strong Cas: Cas takes Jack in a "fireman's carry." This emphasizes his strength and protector status.
Even though Sam and Dean clear the way ahead, at some point Dean drops back to run with Cas, covering his peripheral. The image of Cas, Dean, Jack here...is devastating.
///
THE CRYPT
Inside, they're reeling. Not processing:
Cas looks away. Dean will do the same shortly, hiding his grief. Sam hangs back in disbelief, as if he's afraid to approach.
Dean's chest starts to heave, the guilt and the grief mixing in the worst way.
Meanwhile, Sam...bargains. Hopes Cas can fix it. (This recalls when Cas died in 13x01, and Sam asked Dean: "What about Cas...is he really dead?")
Here, Sam looks to Cas to clarify reality:
Sam looks like he's in disbelief, like it's hitting him for the first time what's actually happened.
///
THE BLAME GAME
Meanwhile, Dean looks for someone to blame, trying to find a common enemy as a rallying point.
Remarkably, he's also reaching to re-establish a connection with Cas for support and comfort. (But there is no comfort to be had here. Cas can't fix this.)
Dean's distress comes spilling out as anger. To me, it reads as irrational, panicked spousal anger. Cas is supposed to be the one who makes it all okay. ("What do we do, Cas?")
APPEALING TO THE PARTNER
We see one of my fave tropes in action: Dean and Cas sniping at each other when they're backed into a corner. When one doesn't know what to do, they appeal to one another with intense, raw frustration.
["I don't know / I don't know what's going on here / I didn't know this would involve ingesting some magic sphere and disappearing, Dean!" Etc.]
(Aside// Cas has been doing this "I don't know!" since at least season 6, and vice versa).
From a broader view, TFW appeal to each other in when they're feeling lost...
....but all the same, the Dean-Cas appeal is typically a very emotional appeal.
///
SAM AND CAS ARE DEVASTATED, BUT SO IS DEAN
And here is the glimpse of aborted grief.
...followed by rationalizing and denying his own culpability: a protective force that will allow him to function under duress. He fumbles this more horrifically than we're used to seeing form Dean.
"Chuck. Man, I knew it." He didn't.
(The script actually adds: He didn't know it. He was wrong. He trusted the wrong person. It's like Metatron. Like Gadreel. Like Crowley. Rinse, repeat.)
And Jack's death hurts.
And for Dean, it also hurts to be wrong. In a moment of weakness, he trusted, Chuck appealing to authority in a way we don't typically see from him. Typically, he's anti-authority, anti-destiny.
Placing and displacing blame on Chuck allows Dean's grief to be sidestepped. Since Dean cannot face the weight of that grief, he turns to Revenge. (Like how John could never look directly at Mary's death. Revenge is a shield against reality, delaying the grief and intense emotions.)
///
MODES OF GRIEF-IN-ACTION
So, Sam. Sam hops into solve-it mode (TM):
Sensing a potential escape, Sam and Dean work to move the stones.
Of note, they struggle with the stones. Cas does not. Like the fireman's carry, this again serves to highlight Castiel's protector-and-strength imagery.
Cas's angelic strength is usually hidden away by narrative mechanism or dampened by him "taking on the stronger enemy / being targeted by the stronger enemy."
But here it's allowed to be flaunted.
Sam and Dean have to work together to drag the stone away from the wall, but when a zombie tunnels through, Cas just--BAM.
Cass nods-- welcome. Dean rises--
Aside/// Here again, we see the glimmer or Dean and Cas wanting to lean on and appreciate each other, despite the fucked-up circumstances.
///
CAS'S GRIEF AS VIOLENCE
While Dean is playing the blame game in response to Jack's death, and Sam is in problem-solving mode, Cas's grief gets channeled into stoic violence.
He decimates the stone. Later, he'll lose control and incinerate Belphagor. In Golden Time, he brutally stabs the djinn, and the violence of the act is emphasized.
Like with Lucifer, Cas's physical power seems to be actually accented by anger.
If we trust our eyes...when Cas get angry, we see that his powers almost work too well. I
t's the peaceful things he's struggling to do during this junction (healing, control, discipline).
Ergo, when Cas views his grace as "not working properly," could it also be about control? Could it be that he won't use his powers when he's emotional partially because angelic powers are volatile with respect to emotional states? It's fun to explore as a factor, that's for sure!
Instinctually, I think Cas pulls his powers back when he gets hit with strong emotions, lest he become like Lucifer or soulless!Jack, powering it into a, to quote the 15x03 script, a "rage kill." Yes, when he incinerates Belphagor, the script goes out of its way to emphasize the out-of-control aspect of it.
One of Cas's core values is being gentle towards his human family. He is dutiful and reserved with respect to his emotions, and this is something he seems to pride himself on.
In Golden Time, he doesn't want to lose that, so he steps away--he distances.
///
BELPHAGOR AND THE LIMBO OF NON-GRIEVING
And finally, we get Belphegor, the ultimate grief delaying tactic. His appearance functions to delay the reality of Jack's passing further:
CAS: That's not Jack. That's a demon.
And yet...it looks like him. We see Dean being VERY affected by the image. It's almost like Jack's still alive--
But Belphegor is at his core an illusion of life.
He's a shadow anxiety. Not "real," in a sense.
It's a deeply painful authorial interference, superimposing discomfort on an already terrible trauma.
Jack has been recently soulless, he's killed Mary, and Bel is a natural outcropping of every toxic anxiety you can think of that represent the opposite/inversion of what made Jack Jack.
///
The first thing Belphegor does is dons sunglasses.
He puts on the sunglasses to hide the reminder of his death, of course, but in doing so he also becoming a dark reflection.
Jack reversed. Evil child. Changeling. The dark reflection of Jack contains all the shadow-family-unit anxieties--
--and most of those are focused on Dean and Cas, not Sam.
(Why? You know why.)
[Symbolically, sunglasses give you self-confidence and freedom to act against your personas. They hide our insecurities and our pain.]
///
Chuck's love of Freudian anxiety serves to disrespect a death and introduce visceral disgust and discomfort
Belpheghor will directly embody the narrative's trite cliche of "dark family" -> Freudian pop-psy shadow:
(a) The protector-father Cas "is muscle." But ultimately, he's a rival to be barraged with Bel's hostility. Bel would seek to defeat and supplant him. That's why Bel's motif directly parallels Godstiel's past actions.
(b) The [other father] Dean is an object of desire to be admired and possessed: "You're gorgeous." Ultimately, he wants to drive the protector-parent away so he can suck up all the attention from the beautiful parent he admires.
It's a trope. If Bel were to become a recurring character, he would narratively resolve by identifying with the object of hostility (Cas) and subsequently abandoning the desire of false-fixation (Dean).
(Aside/// Like how in Amara's case, healthily identifying with her hated brother and understanding his actions allowed her to abandon her Civil War-type aggression and see through the falsely constructed love object, Dean.)
But in Bel's case, he's not a recurring character. He's simply a falsity, an imposter-doppleganger. So, narratively, it's simple. Once his false image is destroyed, the Enchantment of Delayed Grief breaks.
It's just a tragedy.
///
Jack's actual character has no roots in this trumped-up, cartoonish "Freudian psy-pop melodrama."
Nevertheless, AS a trope used to drum up anxiety, Jack!Belphagor's neuroses is solely focused on Dean and Cas. And it's a flashing neon sign that Bel doesn't pay Sam a lick of attention. It's LOUD.
(There is no scientific basis for this particular pop-psy, and I find it something of a cliche/overused/overemphasized in media (to say nothing of what the flawed case studies usually reveal about the analysts themselves), but I do think Bel taps into this narrative anxiety as the "Evil Child / Supplanter.")
This motif underlines that Sam is a mentor-type of parent who shares in the village caretaking. He's clearly not the raw material for a Freudian Jack-Bel neuroses the way that Dean and Cas are.
///
Anyway, OVERALL, Bel is just a symbol of anxiety in the viewer.
For the characters, he's simply a delaying and denial of reality . When Bel dies, Jack's death becomes real, and the grief is all the worse for the delay.
