First of all, who is Lazarus in this story and what does "rising" mean?
Assuming Lazarus is Dean would be correct, although he is already risen (from the dead). This interpretation would make Castiel, the one who resurrected him, Christ in this story. Castiel, on the other hand, is the only character who is literally "rising" as in "coming to light" or "showing up" in this episode. But this would mean that he is also Lazarus, which means "God's help". Veeery interesting. We haven't even seen Castiel yet and we know that he can resurrect people, can himself resurrect and God has something to do with all this.
The funny thing is that Castiel has technically already showed up but we can't see him. It's "funny" 'cause "seeing" plays a huge role in the story of the Resurrection of Christ: the first to see him was Mary Magdalene, the one who didn't see him (because he was not there) was Thomas. He didn't see, therefore he didn't believe.
The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.
Dean can't see Castiel. Pamela maybe could for like one instant and it cost her her sight. The guy must incarnate 'cause we're living onto two different planes of reality and communication doesn't seem possible bewteen the two realms. And so he does. And once he does the first to see him are Bobby and Dean.
Dean sees Castiel but his problem is that he still doesn't believe. So he inserts his blade in Castiel's chest and metaphorically put his finger in a non-existing wound: yeah, it's true Castiel is risen. "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed". Except they're totally not. 'Cause the one guy who hasn't seen and yet he has believed is Sam Winchester and he's totally screwed.
I’ve been trying to understand what the heck “natural order” means in Supernatural until I’ve finally realized I was giving it too much thought than necessary because it was much simpler than what I had in mind: the natural order in Supernatural is…. Supernatural from s1 to s3.
I can explain.
First of all, the natural order is an “arrangement”:
EVE: You misunderstand me. I never wanted that. Not at first. I liked our arrangement.
SAM: What arrangement?
EVE: The natural order. My children turned a few of you, you hunted a few of them. I was happy.
Eve turns up in s6 after s4-5 madness and she’s unhappy: the arrangement has been broken. This leads me to think that the key-factor in keeping the natural order alive and well is honoring deals. When Crowley starts crossing boundaries in s6 Eve steps up to put him back in his place. However, she doesn’t realize who her real enemy is until it was too late for her. As always, the enemy of the natural order, the breaker of deals, the one you cannot expect to keep his word, the snake in the grass is our very Castiel.
Billie shares Eve's storyline. She’s also unhappy about the discombobulation of the natural order and she takes it on the Winchesters and then later on specifically on Dean. What's more, with Billie we see that uncontrolled resurrections without deals are a real problem for her. She fails to realize who her mortal enemy is twice: once when she’s a reaper and Castiel stabs her in the back and in so doing he’s breaking a stupid deal; the second time when they die together in s15. This time, though, they die because Cas is honoring a deal, but he’s doing it on his own terms, not waiting around wondering what true happiness is but taking matter into his own hands. Although I have things to say about how happiness is framed in “Despair”, I’ve got to admit that, in its own convoluted way, it was a badass move.
Interestingly, when it comes to Chuck we don’t see the same respect and passion for the natural order that Eve and Billie seem to share. This is also where I think the writers sort of dropped the ball. In s11 it was established that Chuck had created nature and then nature “created on its own”. Here he seems to respect nature and calls it “divine”. In “The Trap”, however, he says the following things:
SAM: It'll be better. It'll be better. It'll be better. If we win – When we win – When we beat you, I will make it better!
CHUCK: You can't, Sam. You, Sam Winchester, have been playing fast and loose with the laws of nature and magic for a very long time – you and your brother. Always breaking the rules. And that's what I love about you, Sam. It's so heroic. It's so...Promethean. But there's still so much about the fabric of the universe that you don't know... that you can't know. 'Cause you're only humans. But I'm God. Think about what I showed you. Look beyond the Mark, beyond you and Dean fanging out – heartbreaking, but not the headline news.
SAM: The monsters.
CHUCK: The monsters.
CHUCK: Without me, it's a law of nature – dark forces prevail, monsters rule, and you, your brother, and everyone you love will die. Can you really live with that?
First of all I find it fascinating that Chuck, of all people, likes Sam and Dean precisely because they break the rules (but then he can't stand Castiel, looool, much to think about). He’s eventually angry at them because they don’t follow his script but he’s ultimately invested in these characters to such a degree that he calls them “Promethean”. Now, lol because didn’t Prometheus die, like, in s8 or something? But also: Prometheus is the hero who got impaled on the mountains of Caucasus because he defied Zeus (*cough* like *cough* Dean Winchester*cough*). So whether Chuck likes their "heroism" or not he only likes it up to a certain point (and this certain point is when their actions reveal his secret desires for self-destruction but that's for another day). For sure he wickedly enjoys when he vicariously breaks the rules and the natural order arrangement via Sam and Dean's actions. Not so much when it's Castiel who inserts himself into the fabrics of his story.
Secondly, “without me, it’s a law of nature”. What does that mean? I promised I wasn’t gonna go too philosophical so I went for the simpler route. If we leave aside the “dark forces” and “monsters rule” shit, what Chuck is saying is basically that without him the natural order will prevail. Which should be a good thing, right? Right?! Which also means that he himself is as much of a disruptor of the natural order as Castiel (oh-oh). Just like Billie, Chuck likes breaking the rules only when he or one of this favorite characters break them. Unlike Castiel and the Winchesters, however, he’s on a different plane of knowledge (therefore power) because there’s so much more about the fabrics of the universe that they can’t know but he can. After all, he is God and he (according to SPN) has created nature itself. So what’s Chuck’s signature on this "divine" masterpiece? What are the foundations of the natural order? I think the answer can be found in “Free to be You and Me”:
DEAN: The hell did you do?
CASTIEL: I don't know. I just looked her in the eyes and told her it wasn't her fault that her father Gene ran off. It was because he hated his job at the post office.
DEAN: Oh, no, man.
CASTIEL: What?
DEAN: This whole industry runs on absent fathers. It's, it's the natural order.
That’s it, that’s the natural order according to Supernatural: it’s about absent fathers. It’s on their absence that “this whole industry” runs. Which not so incidentally is also the premise of Supernatural and, like, the whole plot of the first two seasons (and beyond but I'm talking "Dad's on a hunting trip and he hasn't been home for a few days" type of absent father, that is John Winchester).
So if my understanding is correct, it’s accurate to say that Billie won in the finale because the natural order was re-established: nobody is resurrected, they all eventually die and Sam and Dean go on a hunt guided by their absent father’s journal, something we haven’t seen in ages, on a case that John himself had worked on something like maybe 20 years prior? Which is what they did in the first seasons of the show. They even meet a vampire from S1 who was there to signal precisely that: they're back in the past, only not in a positive way because it's a fictional past. A past with a mask.
Yes, the natural order is just the past through rose-colored glasses, a “let’s go back to the fun times of season 1-3 before all that angels-and-god-non-sense”. Which is technically possible but practically anachronistic. These two men are not in their 20s anymore, they're fully grown adults who've been through... let's just say a lot. It's a glorification of youth and a "forever young"ism that I find quite worrying. Moreover, with these premises Castiel couldn’t ever come back because, together with Chuck, he was one of the main disturbers of the natural order, aka the way Supernatural was before S4. Chuck's mistake was precisely inserting himself into the narrative because, in so doing, The Father is no longer absent while he must stay so according to the rule of the natural order. That's the arrangement. Chuck and Castiel's narrative fates are thus weirdly knotted together because the arrangement excludes deal-breakers/father-figures like them. Ironically, the ultimate absent father is not God but John Winchester, period. His absence is Order. It's the Law, aka what gives meaning to reality.
The implications of the finale are problematic because why on earth would you end your series like that? It's not even a positive "full-cycle" moment, it's just sad and uncanny in the freudian sense of the word. I know and understand that Dabb was working on his retelling so that we could all go back to the beginning but what is the point to go back without growth? Or to go back and then die? Or to go back and just leave? To me it doesn't make sense from a storytelling pov. I repeat, why would the people involved in this series decide to go down that road I cannot know. I suspect that they took the emotional, fake-happy ending road because Covid had destroyed the world as we know it so maybe they opted for an ending that would comfort people ("comfort" in the sense that's familiar to people, it follows an established path that's recognizable and doesn't destabilize them, which, for the record, I think they failed to do). Or maybe the intent was precisely the uncanny, that feeling of something disturbing and unsettling in what should be familiar and comfortable for us. As in: the story ends like it began, nothing has really changed and everything can only get resolved in the after-life. True happiness is not in the having, it's in just being (dead in Heaven with your brother). I don't know, two things can be true at the same time, but I'm not gonna lie I smell traditionalism, conservatism and heroism as a cult of death that's very Ur-fascist.
Not that anybody has asked for this but, unlike Eve and Billie, I’m actually quite happy because I’ve managed to find an answer to one of my own questions.
Another thing about the lameness of Apocalypse World being the result of "Mary's choice" is that it gives too much weight to Azazel's deal. That demon spent a lot of energy finding his "special children" and had never even noticed Mary before Dean's interference.
Interference that happened because Castiel made Dean travel through time and told him he had to "stop it" just to show him that it wasn't possible. Of course Cas didn't know, back then, about angels basically acting as and for Chuck by manipulating people, time and events for their own benefit. Still, you have to wonder after "In the beginning" whether Cas actually realizes what he has done.
Whether Mary deals with Azazel or not doesn't matter because of the bloodlines. The only difference is that if she said no an angel would fly in, resurrect John and wipe out their memories. Just like Zachariah and Michael tell Dean in S5.
The whole thing about demon blood as necessary in order to be Lucifer's vessel is just there for effect, I think, because neither Dean nor Adam need to be "primed" to be Michael's true vessel who, apparently, is even more powerful than Lucifer. Or, I don't know, to me that doesn't track at all but I might be missing something. I mean, it kinda shows how Kripke was tired of the "special children" plotline but, yk, the awkward, giant elephant in the room is that the foundation of the show is Sam and demon blood so... they had to justify it in some way, I think. But, again, I might miss something here.
The real importance of Azazel's deal is that it highlights Mary's complete loneliness in the world: in an instant her parents and her fiancé are dead. She deals because she bargains her otherwise horrible present (which is still horrible, tbh) for an unspecified future (which she craves. a lot. we've been told. multiple times that she wants to "escape" her current life). The tragedy is precisely that she doesn't know that she's specifically damning Sam's future in the process.
The real, real tragedy, however, is that she has no choice, whatever she does, SHE will always end up there. Because Mary and John are just "placeholders". The angels are basically just waiting for the demons to do the hard and dirty work while, they think, they just have to manipulate low ranking angels and get Dean's consent. Precisely the two things that fuck them in the end because Castiel rebels and Dean doesn't consent.
The other thing about Azazel's deal is that he doesn't need permission to enter Mary's house, that's just an excuse because of the "red tape". He has to bend the rules of the natural order and, in order to do so, he needs to make a deal. His deals are basically asking people to sign and date a blank sheet which is, obvs, a super manipulation, but, because people accept that, the deals "respect" the rules. It's absolutely unfair considering that this seems to apply only to humans while angels bend even the rules of time as they please with no consequences (well... actually, "what goes around comes around" and they will almost all be wiped out, lol).
The tragedy in the tragedy of the tragedy is that Dean understands that's about the souls. "In the beginning" makes a point of telling us that's not about that but I don't think it's true. Yes, Azazel won't come knocking in ten years with his hellhounds but he's bargaining a soul for a soul. Liddy's husband, if Azazel had managed to deal, wouldn't have died; Charlie's father would have lived; John would have died etc. So, in this episode at least because I don't remember the parents of the other special children tbh, Azazel is exchanging the life or death of 1 parent with the future of 1 of their children. At the end of the day, this is what the deal is about: it's a 1 for 1. This is also why he can't resurrect Mary's parents. Well, because he doesn't care, obviously, but because he doesn't have to: John's resurrection for Sam's future (which Mary has no idea about and neither does Azazel, he's also signing a blank sheet).
And this is so interesting because demons must follow the rules but angels don't because they are SO certain that they will end Time. They think they will put an end to everything and finally have their "paradise". When it doesn't come to pass, when the end doesn't arrive as promised, everybody has to face the consequences of their actions.
Not a fan of Jack is the New God but big fan of Chuck didn't realize how big of a threat Jack was, "I can't tell whether you're the chicken or the snake" kind of mistake, a mistake that eventually didn't kill him but de-godified him.
Like I'm creating this theory of mine where basically Jack's help in Cas' resurrection meant the creation of an alternate timeline where Cas could resurrect on his own. Where resurrection was a possibility for everybody without deals and unnecessary suffering. In other words, a timeline where the past doesn't stay dead and death is "just" a gate between dimensions. That would explain why Billie was so pissed. Jack messing up Time would have been chef's kiss for me but real trouble for her.
Jack wasn't just able to open rifts but he could actually create new timelines, new stories and therefore new worlds that God didn't want. And we know God didn't want a world with Castiel in it because of Dean's prayer to him which he refused to answer (I've always wondered why Dean didn't try and pray to Amara, she got him Mary back maybe she was more amenable to a second resurrection?).
Given the high number of actual and symbolical resurrections from s11 onwards (S11 starts with Billie's threat: from now on what is dead stays dead) I think that what really ticked Chuck off was when Jack tries to resurrect Mary. The "Mary Winchester is complete" is Heaven's bullshit. Jack also decides that Lucifer cannot resurrect and that meant problem for Chuck. In Jack's world resurrection is a possibility for all but he also plays God with it and I think that got Chuck really scared.
The moment Jack wants a world with no lies that world happens and, as we know, Chuck is a liar. It's the straw that breaks the camel's back: he has to intervene.
It's then no wonder that this is the moment that leads to the revelation that he's the man behind the curtain and, in a fit of rage, he shows off his power by resurrecting all the dead the "wrong" way (zombies, ghosts, demons, etc) and starts erasing other "drafts" aka other stories/worlds. He decides what dies and what stays dead, that is his domain. Because if there's somebody else who can create new worlds where resurrection is an option then it means he has no power nor control in those worlds where new stories can happen and the past is never past.
Of course what I'm saying is far too revolutionary for any TV shows, voluntary resurrection is something our brain doesn't even want to entertain (although they did show us a character doing just that). So in the end Cas dies (and then sort of resurrects again but I wonder in what form and how), Dean dies and chooses not to be resurrected (but it's very much clear he's not complete) and Sam plays along the laws of the natural order so he dies too and he stays that way.
Although I mainly see the first six episodes of s13 as an engaging portrayal of two grief-stricken people lacking the tools to deal with what has happened to them, I can also totally see them as the so-called "widower arc". Two things can be true at the same time because yes, Dean was totally grieving Cas' death. But I'll make it worse for you.
Maybe I'm biased by the many times I've read the term "widower arc" but Dean was 100% looking for a consort in Cas in s12 (yes, "consort", I'm tired of "partner" or "boy/girlfriend", they're weak terms, give me "sharing destiny" type of old words) so I think this interpretation is not so far-fetched.
We have a grieving widow(er), a desired consort who's dead and then resurrects and a son who's been defined as "the rising son". As I've already said these are some of the elements of one of the most ancient myths in Western culture, that is the myth of Isis and Osiris.
Now, of course it was not a retelling of that myth, I don't even think it was a conscious effort to shape the story that way but sometimes symbols will be symbols, what can you do?
First of all, two brothers: Set and Osiris and Lucifer and Cas. We know how it goes, one brother kills the other (As an aside in one version Set built a wooden chest and tricked Osiris to enter into it just to seal it and drown it in the Nile. We have totally NEVER seen this image in Supernatural. Not even ONCE).
Things get very interesting from here on because in the myth there's a lot of focus on the body of the deceased brother, Osiris/Cas. The most famous way Set disposed of his brother's corpse was to cut it into pieces, to... tear him apart if you will. It is then kinda WILD that AU!Michael kills "his" Lucifer the same way:
MIchael: I killed my Lucifer. Tore him apart in the skies over Abilene. But hey, can’t get enough of a good thing.
Apparently, the body must be somehow intact for resurrection to happen. In the myth Isis has to find his husband's bodyparts scattered all over Egypt in order to resurrect him. So we need to pay extra close attention to Cas' body which we are actually shown in that tragic scene where Dean prepares him for the pyre. So it's Dean who takes care of Cas' body, who "collects" it, just like Isis. Interesting.
In SPN "What gets burned stays dead", therefore Cas cannot resurrect, or so they think. The mantra is repeated by Jack in "Tombstone" when he first sees his father. To be honest, we don't really know how Cas resurrects. For the first time we see what happens to him between death and rebirth but we miss the technicalities. We can only assume that Cas' ashes were enough. Or maybe, just maybe, that's just a rule that applies in Chuck's story. Just saying.
I'm not sure if they try to discover how Jack managed to do that but the point remains: it was Jack who woke Cas up in the Empty.
And why did he do that? Well, because he can. The very first thing that Jack does is resurrecting Kelly in an episode aptly named "The Future", where Jack is sort of introduced via his mother's resurrection. He doesn't know how to use this power but he unconsciously does it again with his father. And I ask again: why?
Jack wakes Cas up in "The Big Empty", four episodes into the season. He could've done it sooner? No. Because what prompts him to unconsciously act is Dean's grief. And Dean reaches his boiling point when Sam finally provokes him. Osiris/Cas dies and his consort Isis/Dean is inconsolable. Other people like Sam can forget about it, but Dean can't in every sense of the verb.
In the myth it's Isis who resurrects Osiris and has a child, Horus, with him. But she got help. Dean's only human but there is a demi-god running around in his bunker so I think that helped. And Cas must be credited for the effort and the pushing.
Let's just say that resurrecting Castiel took three, actually four people okay? It required a team effort. Because none of them is a fully-fledged god like God or Amara or some Archangel who can just snap their fingers and boom welcome back to Life. Coaxing someone into resurrection (a resurrection with consent) takes a lot of willpower... and a lot of love.
I said four people because the last character in this little story is The Shadow. And we see this in the myth as well!
Isis doesn't "just" resurrect Osiris, she has to convince the motherfucker. Cause, you see, Osiris's heart was tired. A tired heart! Oh so beautiful! He didn't see the reason to go back to life. He was sooo tired. Isis has to literally seduce him back to life. And... this is kind of what The Shadow does, but in reverse? It tells Castiel to go back to sleep, to find peace, it's been in his mind and he wants to sleep, it knows!
The Shadow is Cas' tiredness, all his failures and regrets. But, as I said, it takes a lot of willpower and a lot of love to resurrect the dead, this is what Isis teaches us actually. To love more and then some more. And Cas loves back and he loves hard.
Castiel: You can prance and you can preen and you can scream and yell and remind me of my failings but somehow, I’m awake. And I will stay awake and I will keep you awake until we both go insane. I will fight you. Fight you and fight you for…ever. For eternity.
He didn't come back because he annoyed an ancient cosmic being. He came back because he loved.
So Osiris/Cas are back to life and that's good, right? Well... yeahhh. The thing is that Osiris will then live in the world of the dead so he kinda doesn't really really stay alive for long. And Isis will follow him. Things will likely go bad for Cas.
But the story continues!
Set/Lucifer and Horus/Jack engage in a rather disturbing (in the myth) struggle for power. The myth has different endings: in one they reconcile, in another they divide the realm, in yet another one Horus is the one true winner. So we don't really know (from this point in the narrative) how things will actually turn out for the two of them.
Isn't it interesting? Well, it's not surprising because there is a connection between christian stories and greek and egyptian ones but still? Kinda cool to see how myths keep repeating and repeating. As if we're still trying to understand them.
Anyway: yes to the widower arc, yes to love piercing through the veil of death. Both ways! It takes the love of two to resurrect.
"The dead are rising in Dodge City, Kansas". This is what Jack says a little over-enthusiastically to Sam, Dean and Cas to prove to the latter that he's part of his father's family: "Look Dad! I can move the pencil! AND I've found a case... a hunter's case!".
Little does he know that on a certain day of many years before, Dean was also rising from the dead in Pontiac, Illinois. And the one who resurrected him was none other than his own chosen father, Castiel. Ten years later the same Castiel would also rise from the dead in a blackberry field. And the one who resurrected him was none other than Jack himself. Well, plus Dean.
When Dean met Castiel the first time he didn't believe what he saw while Sam was the one who believed without seeing. It didn't turn out particularly well for him since believing without seeing got him to resurrect Lucifer.
In "Tombstone" something different happens: Dean believes Cas the moment he spoke while Sam is confused ("No. You're – you're dead."). Again, it won't turn out well for Sam (when DO things turn out well for Sam, UUUH?!) this season cause this time he'll die and Lucifer will be the one who will resurrect him in one of the most forgotten scenes of the whole show.
Anyway. Back to Dean. This time he won't act like a total Thomas and will take on a Mary Magdalene's role, the first who turned around and saw Christ. But there's more.
The so-called "Widower's arc" interests me because it shows how symbols percolate through stories after stories and no one can stop them! Ha!
I know that "Tombstone" gives strong "Romeo+Juliet" vibes, I'm a baroque girlie I've seen most of Baz Lurhman's movies when they came out (I'm also an old girlie) so I totally see the reference. But a cross is also "just" a cross and in that scene it stands for "resurrection".
So I've been thinking about a myth, an ancient myth that has to do with brothers/gods killing another, love and resurrection and some more love and there's also gotta be a "rising sun" type of child in the mix. And what I came up with is the myth of Isis and Osiris (and Set and Horus). THEE Resurrection myth of all time. Right here in a silly TV show. Once you start looking around these symbols are everywhere. They're trying to murder me.
Rowena and the thick, bloody umbilical cord between choices and faults.
In a previous post of mine I’ve explored a little bit how Mary and Kelly represent a sort of “missed opportunity” for, respectively, Sam and Jack.
At the beginning of s13 Sam resents the fact that he hasn’t been proactive in seeking to create a relationship with his mother and now that she’s (presumably) gone he doesn’t want to deal with that reality. He had wasted his second chance. Jack, on the other hand, never even had a first opportunity to begin with but, unlike Sam, has experienced a sense of unity with his mother so extreme that one of the first things that he tells Sam is that he was his mother(!!!).
S13 reinforces the Mother-Son symbolism because, after Jack’s birth, a rift is opened in space (apparently not in time?): Kelly stays (dead, rip girl I love you) on one side of it while Mary crosses it and finds herself in Apocalypse World. To make things even more clear, this is no random parallel universe: this is the alternate reality where Mary didn’t deal with Azazel. So mothers and their choices/faults are a central theme in this season. Or, well, more or less.
To complete the mothers’ trimurti or, better, tridevi we’re missing the final mother, the destroyer who is, of course, Rowena. It’s therefore quite apt that Rowena reaches her highest potential this season and even confronts Death. What motivates her in an interesting blend of (missing)love and (lacking)power. Lucifer is as part of her story as Kelly’s and Mary’s. Unlike these two, though, she doesn’t have a son who resurrects her, nor a turned-benefactor cosmic being who offers her resurrection as a gift to her son. Rowena has to resurrect herself. Not once but twice. She is, perhaps, the loneliest character in the whole series.
This is actually quite ironic because, if we look back on previous seasons, her “choice” to kill Oskar, her putative son, was what triggered the whole chain of events (the freeing of Amara first and Lucifer second) that directly link Rowena with Mary and Kelly.
It’s only natural, then, that s13 Rowena keeps representing the reversal of the Mary and Sam/ Kelly and Jack relationships because there is no son who’s looking for her, rather she is the mother who’s looking for her (dead) child. Like Sam, she also needs someone who can access another dimension to bring Crowley back but, unlike him, she’s not successful. Now, ngl, this pisses me off to no end, like of course I can understand the real reasons why Crowley couldn’t be brought back, still I kinda hate how it was narratively framed.
When, in "Funeralia", Rowena says that life is unfair she is right but not in the general, pessimistic sense of the phrase: she's right because in-universe some deaths are more important than others and people get back on board depending on whether or not they're still a role to play for them. Rowena's faith in magic is actually justified because magic is the only thing that can help her. And the tragic thing is that it's also what damns her in the process because it's the only form of power she can have access to. There are no angels or cosmic entities looking out for her. She's just... alone.
So, perhaps, it's not that I necessarily hate how her failure to bring Crowley back is described, I just see it as further proof that Rowena is the best example to show how in Supernatural the game is rigged from the beginning and we didn’t even need an interfering and pervy God to realize it. That's all we've been seeing it since S1. All those infinite, booooring talks about being good/evil or doing good/bad actually mean nothing because, at the end of the day, in this show what really matters is how useful you can be, to whom and why (and this is way less booooring, you learn a lot of interesting things about these characters if you go down this road, it's grim but it's more rewarding).
S13 is also when the final connection between Rowena and the Winchesters, Sam to be more precise, is established which is indicative of the fact that she will inevitably die. Before S13 her story was her own, after “Funeralia” it cannot be extricated from Sam’s. To some degree, it’s quite similar to what happened with Crowley and Dean. What’s more, just like Crowley’s powers and shrewdness are what really carry the plot from s6 to s12, magic and spells (and therefore Rowena’s role in the story) will be the key for many plot points from s13 to s15. But there is a big difference.
Both Crowley and Rowena’s sacrifices are described as heroic but, let’s be honest, only Rowena’s was. Crowley’s demise was a clean-up after his own mess at best. It also proved to be unnecessary. Rowena and that awful MBOL’s egg thingy would have managed to confine Lucifer, like, they actually did it. It was Crowley who perverted the spell for reasons that I personally find OOC. I would’ve liked the Crowley vs Lucifer power struggle but not the way it was done in s12 because it felt very nonsensical to me. As in: I can see you need a reason to keep Lucifer around and this is what you’ve come up with but it’s still quite illogical.
At its hidden and secret core S13 is the season of the “let’s reframe the sons’ stories and blame it on the mothers”. Just like Kelly is blamed for Castiel’s ideal vision of Jack and Mary’s "choice" is established as the most important point in the whole show, Rowena-as-Mother must face the same fate: it was her fault if Crowley, Fergus!, ended the way he ended. It’s a naaaaaaaaaaaaaah for me.
This is what we’re told in “Funeralia”:
Rowena: Oh, but it is. Death has something I want.
Sam: What’s that?
Rowena: My son. After you told me he was gone, how he died, I had an unexpected reaction. We had our differences, but it’s my fault he went down the path he did. I left him.
Dean: We’re talking about Crowley-- demon, King of Hell?
Rowena: We’re talking about Fergus-- a man abandoned and loveless, tricked by a demon, died in a gutter. He deserved better from the world. From me.
Now, just to be clear: yes, Rowena had the responsibility to do better; yes, she was the absolute worst; yes, she played no small role in her son’s story. However, I personally don’t like all these negative associations between “worlds” and “mothers” as if every fucking thing in the universe is dependent solely on them. How did we end up here? It’s almost as if absent fathers are, like, not THAT bad after all (and the show, as far as I'm concerned, ultimately approves of and absolves absent fathers). So I’m very suspicious of the way motherhood is portrayed specifically in s13 and Rowena’s attempt at redemption well demonstrates that there is reason to be so.
This dialogue in “Funeralia” confirms my gut feeling:
Sam: You know, what happened with Crowley? That wasn’t your fault.
Rowena: He never had a chance.
Dean: He made his choices, just like we all do. Look, every one of us has done something that we have to live with, that were trying to make up for. Every one of us.
Sam: Even without all that extra juice, you’re still the deadliest witch around [Sam's flattering Rowena. He's gonna ask for her help in 3,2,1...].
Rowena: Flatterer.
Sam: Yeah, well, we, um... we may need your help [Here we go!]. To save our family. To… hell, to save the world.
Dean: You wanna be redeemed? This would be a pretty big step.
Rowena: And do you think I still can be?
Dean: Yeah, I do.
I mean, not to be rude, but who the fuck cares if Dean Winchester thinks that Rowena can be redeemed? Like, how is Rowena’s redemption (which is strictly connected to her being a bad mother and not, among other things, a zero-regret murderer, which she also happens to be, for instance) connected to saving the Winchester’s family? Don’t get me wrong, I understand that this is SPN and that Sam and Dean’s problems are Apocalypse-level problems (lol, they really did that, when I say that their story is like a cosmogony maybe I’m not that wrong) but, as I’ve said, I cannot help but notice the similarities between Rowena’s arc this season with Mary’s and Jack’s, i.e. you can be redeemed if you either do something useful for the Winchesters or... realize that it's not your "fault" that your sons suffered terribily because "choosing" to deal with Azazel was actually the right choice... for the world. How come fathers saving the world are framed as heroic while mothers actively creating worlds by making hard choices that benefit the greater good need redemption?
So to sum up: while fathers invade S13’s main storyline as solvers, restorers and fixers, mothers are the bones of the story, they carry its weight and its sins but get little if nothing in return: Kelly stays dead, Mary ends up helping out a world that absolves her of her Original Sin but that’s nevertheless a mess (you can never win lol) and Rowena can’t get her son back (but she can save Sam and Dean's family the world!). Looks good, right? Hurray mommy!
