#s12 hellatus rewatch

[mittensmorgul]

Anna, Grace, and Humanity

(note: I’d written about a thousand words of this post when my laptop suddenly rebooted without warning and ate the entire thing. This is my post-screaming-fit attempt to recreate it. This time I’m typing it in a google doc because autosave is my friend… I should really do this more often and stop playing so fast and loose with typing directly into tumblr posts, especially on long posts…)

I know I’ve written a metric ton of stuff about angels and grace and souls. I’ve got multiple tags for all of these things. I just rewatched 4.10, though, and realized just how Anna’s situation has served as the exemplar for how all of this functions within the entirety of canon. Despite a lot of exploration in later seasons that may seem to tinker with these fundamental ideas about exactly what grace is, I think that these essential facts still hold true. Even through what we later learn about Chuck creating the angels and human souls, the nature of Free Will, and what happens to Cas in s9 after Metatron removes his grace, and what happens to Metatron after Cas subsequently removes his grace. All of that still firmly fits within the framework of everything laid out in 4.10 about angels and identity and what grace actually is.

Sam: Wait a minute. I don't understand. So, angels can just become human? Anna: It kind of hurts. Try cutting your kidney out with a butter knife. That kind of hurt. I ripped out my grace. Dean: Come again? Anna: My grace. It's... energy. Hacked it out and fell. My mother, Amy, couldn't get pregnant. Always called me her little miracle. She had no idea how right she was.

Grace… is energy. And whatever makes Anna who she is-- for lack of a better word, her personality-- her memories, her thoughts and feelings, her emotions, her very consciousness, is explicitly differentiated and separated from “her grace.” In this analogy, her grace is not equivalent AT ALL to who she is. It’s not her identity.

DEAN: So, what, you're just gonna take some divine bong hit, and, shazam, you're Roma Downey? ANNA: Something like that. DEAN: All right. I like this plan. So, where's this grace of yours? ANNA: Lost track. I was falling about 10,000 miles per hour at the time. SAM: Wait. You mean falling, like, literally? ANNA: Yes. SAM: Like the way a human eye can see? Like a comet, maybe, or a meteor?

She fell, but she lost track of this “energy” falling separately from her. That energy doesn’t have its own consciousness. So then what is it? I’ll get to that in a second, but first, Sam confirms this separation from who Anna identifies as versus the power itself:

SAM: Here. In march '85, a meteorite vanished in the night sky over northwestern Ohio. It was sighted nine months before Anna was born, and she was born in that part of Ohio. RUBY: You're pretty buff for a nerd. SAM: Look, I think it was Anna and here, same time -- another meteor over Kentucky. RUBY: And that's her grace? SAM: Might be.

Anna fell over Ohio, and her grace, separate from her, fell in Kentucky. We learn a few minutes later what her grace actually is, confirming the sort of “energy” it is, which is essentially how Chuck describes all of creation toward the end of s11:

SAM: Yeah. In '85, there was an empty field outside of town. Six months later, there was a full-grown oak. They say it looks a century old at least. DEAN: Anna, what do you think? ANNA: The grace. Where it hit, it could have done something like that, easy. DEAN: So grace ground zero -- it's not destruction. It's... ANNA: Pure creation.

Grace is potential, it’s energy, it’s power. It’s batteries. That’s it. It doesn’t even affect Anna’s assumptions about her own identity. Before Pamela helps her recover her lost memories, Anna believes she’s human. After a lifetime of forgetting who she was (after some psychotherapy she had as a small child that HELPED her forget who she was), nothing changed except her ability to recall her true identity, and yet she immediately stopped thinking of herself as human after regaining those lost memories.

Anna hadn’t recovered her grace. She was still the exact same metaphysically both before and after that scene with Pamela, except that afterward she no longer identified herself as a human:

ANNA: Thank you, Pamela. That helps a lot. I remember now. SAM: Remember what? ANNA: Who I am. DEAN: I'll bite. Who are you? ANNA: I'm an angel.

Even without her grace, she identified WHO she was as an angel, even if that wasn’t WHAT she was at that moment, without her grace. Even after choosing to fall, tearing out that grace so she could experience humanity, this still shows her perceptions about herself-- with or without the power pack installed-- aren’t any different. She still fundamentally identifies as an angel. Even though she was physically and arguably metaphysically human at that moment.

A common misconception about s4 is that Cas somehow “stole Anna’s arc” or “replaced Anna” as Dean’s guardian angel, and I know I’ve already written multiple times how that’s just… patently not true on any level. But here we go again, for the sake of completeness and transparency.

Anna was introduced as an inverse mirror for Castiel. An angel who chose to fall, who was fascinated with humanity and lived Anna’s entire human life as a human, forgetting who she was, prompted to recall her original nature by Cas’s shout of DEAN WINCHESTER IS SAVED, and then being manipulated into restoring her grace. And even the restoration of that grace didn’t fundamentally change WHO SHE WAS. What it did allow was the return of her full angelic power. She didn’t lose her identity because of it, at least not until the very nature of that grace itself made it possible for her to be “reprogrammed” in Heaven. Only after she was captured and tortured and reprogrammed did she really lose her identity.

In later seasons, we see Cas go through almost the exact opposite progression. He retains his grace, his angelic nature, and yet becomes more and more human despite that. When he eventually does have his grace taken against his will and becomes fully human, he is still fundamentally the same individual. It’s only after being manipulated in Heaven that he’d lost control of his own identity. Even taking on the stolen grace of other angels did not change how he thought or behaved or felt. He was still Cas, but with a different set of cosmic batteries powering him up. Like he’d been a drained car battery that got a jump start from another angel.

Grace is not WHO Cas is. Though having grace versus not having grace might change WHAT he is.

And over the last several years, this has been Cas’s crisis of identity. EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of Anna’s arc in practically every way.

When Anna remembered everything, she had no crisis of identity. She had no doubts about WHO she was. Even before she took her grace back to reclaim WHAT she used to be. She never doubted that she was an angel or struggled to resolve her humanity with her identity as an angel. And this is the fundamental difference between how she identified herself, and the struggle Cas has been facing. When asked if he’s an angel or a man, he just doesn’t have an answer for that yet.

Even with his grace restored, even after telling Sam and Dean that he feels that they’re his family, even after telling Kelvin flat-out that he doesn’t care about his reputation in Heaven and he’s entirely motivated by his relationship with the Winchesters, he’s still conflicted. It’s almost as if his grace is what’s actively preventing him from letting himself really, truly feel all of that.

ANNA: Perfect... Like a marble statue. Cold... no choice... only obedience.

And then how Anna refers to angelic disobedience:

ANA: I don't know. Maybe I don't deserve to be saved. DEAN: Don't talk like that. ANNA: I disobeyed. Lucifer disobeyed. It's our murder one, and I knew it. Maybe I got to pay. DEAN: Yeah, well, we've all done things we got to pay for.

Disobedience is “murder one” for angels. And what has Cas essentially embodied as an angel? Certainly not one for following the rules…

In s5 when he was cut off from Heaven and his powers faded, he wasn’t fundamentally different, aside from not having powers. In 6.19 when Eve cut off his powers, he was still the same. In s9 living entirely as a human, he was still Cas. With Theo’s stolen grace, and then Adina’s, he didn’t suddenly become a different “person.”

At the very end of the episode, after everything Dean learned about Anna, what motivated her desire to be human, and what’s now become of her now that she had been manipulated into taking her grace back on, we get one of the most painful truths about all of it:

SAM: So, I guess she's some big-time angel now, huh? She must be happy... Wherever she is. DEAN: I doubt it.

She hadn’t wanted to lose WHAT she’d become (as a human). She really had no other choice. WHO she was, though… that never changed at all. Grace or not. The only thing she got back with her grace was her powers, and through them eventually the obligation, the duty, that Heaven could “reprogram” back into pure obedience and loss of self.

Dean had it right. Everything that had made her happy, she lost it when she had to retake her grace. If she’d had a choice, I don’t believe she ever would’ve reclaimed her grace. And it wouldn’t have altered her identity one iota.

[mittensmorgul]

Rewatching 3.15, and I noticed an interesting parallel, and once again wished I could gif things, because Dean’s face is delightful:

Sam describes Doc Benton’s activities while Dean’s enjoying a burger. Please note in the second pic how pleased Sam is with himself thinking he’s managed to put Dean off his food (x):

SAM: According to this, Benton's picky about where he sets up his lab. He likes dense forest with access to a river or stream or some kind of freshwater. DEAN: (Taking another huge bite of his burger) Why? SAM: Because that's where he likes to dump the bile and intestines and fecal matter. (DEAN looks disgusted and lowers his burger, gagging slightly) Lost your appetite yet? [DEAN considers this, looking at the burger and then at SAM, then back at the burger.] DEAN: (to his burger) Oh baby, I can't stay mad at you. [DEAN takes a huge bite, staring at SAM as he chews.]

This reminds me of two distinct scenes that we yelled about A LOT in 12.18, and it makes for an excellent game of Spot The Difference. First, we have Dean stealing Sam’s veggie omelette or whatever it was, complaining that Sam should’ve ordered pancakes, and then regretfully digging in anyway. Sam gets his revenge by being as gross as possible while trying to put Dean off his food as if this was some game they played regularly (x):

SAM: So listen, satyrs are creatures of uncontrollable lust. They would lead people to the woods for massive orgies. DEAN: Nice. SAM: And when the fun was over, the satyr would, "feast upon the flesh of his victims until his belly was full to bursting with their moist, slippery meat." DEAN: That's descriptive. [Dean pushes the plate of eggs away, looking a bit ill] Uh... All right, what do we do?

In this scene, Sam succeeds at putting Dean off his food. But there’s a difference. Dean didn’t choose that plate of egg white veggie nonsense. SAM DID. Dean had only started eating it because it was there and he needed food. He even states out loud what HE would’ve chosen for himself, if he’d been able to place his own order. Sam’s gross-out attempt is enough to make him stop eating this time. He pushes it to the side.

Funny thing is, Dean literally walked in the door of the diner with the waitress he’d spent the night with. He could’ve said something to her like, “Oh, I’d love a stack of pancakes when you get a chance,” or she could’ve offered to bring him breakfast since that was her place of work and literally her job to do, but no. Dean doesn’t ask, she doesn’t offer, so he settles for what Sam had in front of him already. And it’s really not to his taste.

A few scenes later, after Sam and Dean visit the meat packing plant, we find Dean back in the cafe. This time he’s sitting alone at the counter while Carmen bustles around in the background, doing her job and not really paying ant attention to Dean (or he to her). He’s also eating a very messily ketchup-ed burger, and apparently relishing every bite... (x):

SAM: Seriously? Dean? After what we just saw, how – how can you eat? DEAN: Grow up, Sam, okay? Burger's beef, bacon's pig, Soylent Green's people. But this – this... This is heaven.

FINALLY. Dean doesn’t make apologies or excuses for what he enjoys. He’s not pretending to himself or Sam, and he’s not letting Sam play their game of gross-out. He’s just unapologetically enjoying what he wants. Not only does he not coddle Sam or humor him or play to his expectations. Dean puts his foot down and tells Sam flat-out that he’s not bullshitting him here, and if Sam’s grossed out that’s his problem. Dean’s not making jokes or excuses or apologies.

[mittensmorgul]

After getting to the end of the TNT loop and marathonning 11.23-12.23 over the weekend, looping back to 1.01 this morning was strange. As it usually is.

But immediately after watching 12.22, going back to the story of Constance Welch, for the first time, felt like a relief rather than a horror.

Constance’s revenge mission against “unfaithful men” was only a distraction from HER real issue-- guilt over having killed her own children because of her husband’s infidelity. Her husband was merely an excuse, turning her personal guilt outward into misdirected anger and violence.

Almost as if Mary’s personal story in s12 brought her to a similar point, before allowing her redemption and forgiveness in 12.22, because the life she’d WANTED for her boys never came to pass because of her own actions, but her children had long ago accepted the life they DO have.

Like Constance’s children saying, “You’ve come home to us, Mommy,” when Sam drives her ghost into the house, and their spirits are what devours hers. It was acknowledging her personal guilt toward them that unmade her vengeful spirit.

Constance, over years of repeating her mantra of “I can never go home” because she couldn’t confront the reality of her guilt, instead set out on a mission to destroy “all the monsters” who she believed might hurt other women the way she felt her husband had hurt her. Like Mary running off with the BMoL and joining their mission to destroy all the ACTUAL monsters in a misguided attempt to save her sons from having to.

Both of their stories were about guilt, what they felt guilty for (for what they believed they’d each done to their children), misdirected anger and a misguided sense of revenge against another target in order to deflect or avoid dealing with their personal guilt, but in the end being forced to acknowledge that guilt and finally understand their children forgive them, and had only been longing for her to come home.

[mittensmorgul]

Family Business

I just rewatched 7.18 and couldn’t help notice a LOT of connections back to 12.18, so here’s a bullet-pointed list:

-Both episodes involve a long-standing family business. In 12.18 it takes the form of a meat packing plant owned by a single family for generations, while 7.18 is a brewery owned by three friends who intend to pass the business on to their children. Legacies!

-12.18 involved a man who was desperate to leave the horror associated with his family’s legacy behind and atone for the bad deeds of his ancestors, while 7.18 involved two of the three partners in the brewery “selling the business out from under” the third, and the third seeking revenge for having been “sold out”

-7.18′s brewery was called Northwest while it was lampshaded several times that it was actually located in Kansas, despite the beer they produced being popular in the PNW... and the plant in 12.18 was actually located in the PNW but for some reason (I meta’d at the time) prominently featured a real-world beer brand produced in the midwest... (also see this post about the rule of three, since it also seems relevant to the three owners of the original brewery in 7.18)

-both episodes involve the subversion of a legacy... in 7.18 one partner was cheated out of the business by the other two because he refused to “sell out” to a brewer and was trying to preserve the integrity of their small craft beer, but in 12.18 one man was trying to reclaim his family’s integrity by selling out the “company town” to the people his family’s dark past and greed had essentially held bound for generations.

-in 7.18 the excluded party uses a shojo-- a spirit trapped in a bottle of sake and specifically targeted to kill an entire family via a spell-- to exact his revenge. In 12.18, one brother had tried to dismantle the influence his family had wielded via an entrapped old god while another brother discovered that legacy and freed the god to do HIS bidding.

-both episodes featured an “illegitimate son” of the families in question-- in 7.18 he was unaware of his status as a potential heir to the business and it only came out in order to save his life from the shojo. in 12.18, the illegitimate son KNEW his whole life that he’d been excluded from the family business and had been the one to begin the killings again in a misguided grab for some of that family power he’d never been allowed to have before.

And then there’s just the surface-level similarities between the episodes, such as the fact that Sam and Dean were brought into both cases by an outside party. In 7.18 it was a “friendly” party-- i.e. Garth-- who had no malicious intent behind asking for their help. In 12.18 it was the BMoL, who used the entire case as a distraction to gain access to the Winchester’s secure base (and tidy Family Legacy Metaphor), the Bunker.

Garth always seems to show up some of Performing Dean’s manly-man mask, freely admitting he specifically chose the weird motel room BECAUSE of the reasons Dean mocked him about it for:

DEAN picks up a motel card on the table next to him. DEAN: "Afternoon Delights"? Really, Garth? Don't you think this place is a little, uh... GARTH: Uh, you want a nice hot tub after a day at the office. It's the little things.

and then makes fun of the froofy beer before actually tasting it...

SAM: Hey. Either of you ever heard of Thighslapper Ale? GARTH: Is that a stripper or a beverage? DEAN: Beverage for douchebags. SAM: Uh, number one microbrew in the Pacific Northwest. GARTH: But we're in Kansas. DEAN: Yeah, I rest my case. What's your point? [...] DEAN: All right, that's it. [He gets up.] No microbrew is worth… [He puts his flask down on the counter near GARTH and the EMF reader starts to make noise.] ...what was it – eight Food Magazine awards? [He takes beer bottles out of the fridge.] Beer's not food. It's... [He puts a bottle down for GARTH.] ...whatever water is. DEAN gives SAM a bottle and inspects the label on his own bottle. DEAN: Hmm. Thighslapper. [He takes a drink.] Wow, that's actually awesome. Damn it, I'm not even mad anymore.

And I think we’ve meta’d the Performing Dean of 12.18 to absolute death, right? Right.

And in both episodes, Cas is... out of the picture. In 7.18 he’d just taken on Sam’s hell damage and was catatonic in a mental hospital. In 12.18 he was MIA and the Winchesters had been trying to reach him (they didn’t know yet that he was in Heaven). In 7.18 they were also being “haunted” by Bobby, and just about to figure out the full truth of that situation and reaching out to Bobby. In 12.18 they were being “haunted” by Mary’s deal with the BMoL and were just about to figure out the full truth of that situation and reaching out to Mary...

For two seemingly throw-away episodes, there’s an awful lot going on here. If I weren’t too hopped up on cough medicine I’d go into more detail, but wheee at least I provided links for anyone interested in making connections for themselves. :P

[mittensmorgul]

The maddest thing a man can do

I’m currently suffering my way through a rewatch of late s10, which is the point where Cas’s personal character development was temporarily sidetracked along with Dean’s, in favor of writing the SPN universe’s origin story in s11... but my s10 complaints are taking a back seat for this post, and instead I’m gonna focus on how 10.18 has brought us (FINALLY!) to where Cas is after 12.23. That’s EXACTLY where the story’s led us.

(I’ve been talking about this with Lizbob this morning, in relation to the reply she posted earlier about Dean and Jody connected up through Biggersons, Gas N Sip, TDK slammers, and 13.03 speculation, because this is the Cas version of that speculation. This is the text post equivalent of the red string conspiracy picture: “okay I'm writing the thing. 10.18, 10.20 *which I'm watching right now*, 10.23, 11.10, 11.22, 11.23, 12.01, 12.02, 12.03,  12.09, 12.15, 12.19, 12.23... *ties red strings around all of them* “

So that’s my premise for the progression of Cas’s journey to the Maddest Thing A Man Can Do. We get all this exposition from Metatron in 10.18, reminding us of Cas’s humanity (that Metatron forced on him in 8.23, and which he’s struggled with throughout s9-- sacrificed in 9.09 when he stole Theo’s grace in order to survive and alert Dean about “Ezekiel” having died in the fall, lamented in 9.11 with Sam, struggled with nearly dying in early s10 before Crowley gave him another infusion of stolen grace in 10.03, and then pushed to the side in the name of saving Dean through most of the rest of s10... until Metatron brings this back to the surface in 10.18, sending Cas off on a series of personal side-missions to collect enough Experience Points to prepare him for the Final Boss Battle. But I’m getting ahead of myself here...)

METATRON: Really? That song is a classic. Yeah I hear you. I do. And you’re right. Inclement weather on the day of your nuptials and the wrong cutlery at inopportune times is hardly ironic. But it sure is catchy. Yeah, fair point. Can’t argue taste. But since I became human, it’s just so….strange. All these feelings, you know? I mean, I can feel music. Like that last song, “Sussudio.” I don’t even know what it’s about and I love it. I always enjoyed lyrics, words, stories. Gives me goose bumps. And Goosebumps – don’t even get me started on those. Creepy! And yet….arousing.

and then

METATRON: Mmmmmm! O…M…Me! Oh. Food. Glorious Food. Mmm. All the countless descriptions in so many books, but those are just words. Oh, the taste, the – the actual taste…. I had no idea. Oh. And the process. Goes in here [he points to his mouth]…comes out here [points toward his rear]. Sorcery. I mean, you used to be human. Don’t you miss all this? CASTIEL: No. I don’t miss digestion. I don’t miss indigestion. METATRON: No, no, no. Not that. I mean, don’t you miss the feeling of all this? Like the taste of these waffles. The sound of a child’s laughter. Look at us. We’re a couple of angels who’ve touched not only the divine, but the mundane. You and I have a lot in common.

and then

CASTIEL: “What is the maddest thing a man can do?” It’s a riddle? What – what’s the answer? METATRON: Beats me. I’ve only been a man a day. Um, the – the answer to the riddle will lead to another book. And inside that book, you’ll find your Grace. We’re gonna work this out together, okay? Teamwork.

leading up to:

CASTIEL: What we did back there was unfortunate. No more of our brothers and sisters should die. METATRON: Brothers and sisters? Listen to you. Still spitting out the company line like anyone cares. Like we’re actually a family? When what we really are – are a bunch of glowing lights filled with self-loathing or delusions of grandeur. Or both. CASTIEL: You shut up! METATRON: No! If I’m gonna die, I want answers. Like, who are you now? Like, you’re obviously not an angel of the Lord. And what about all of this walking the earth like Caine from “Kung Fu” crap? Cleaning up Heaven’s messes. How many more rogue angels are there out there? And, what are you gonna do once you’re done with all that? Go back to Heaven? Please. The angel formerly known as Hannah has restored order up top. Smoothest it’s run since God cut the ribbon on the pearly gates. So tell me, Castiel, truly, what is your mission now? CASTIEL: You shut up and keep looking. [Castiel walks away.] METATRON: Well…Cannot say I didn’t try. [He activates the sigils and walks toward Castiel in the next row. Castiel is coughing and collapses.] Poor Castiel. Swam so far just to drown in shallow waters. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t ya think?

Metatron has just stated Cas’s eventual entire journey, even though like most of Metatron’s “stories,” it all happens in ways he never expected. Metatron uses his clue (“What two things do you need to succeed in life?” Ignorance and confidence.) to find the Demon Tablet, while Cas uses the Cervantes quote to find his grace. 

What’s the maddest thing a man can do? Let himself die.

The “human” part of Cas that he’d been struggling to reconcile with the angel part since 9.01 is sacrificed in a last-ditch effort to save himself from burning out entirely. But instead of being the END of Castiel’s journey, it’s truly the very beginning of it. It’s more a reuniting of these two halves, and the next two seasons are about Cas coming to terms with what he wants, and with who he is, where he belongs, and where he wants to be regardless. Metatron spells it all out:

who are you now? Like, you’re obviously not an angel of the Lord. And what about all of this walking the earth like Caine from “Kung Fu” crap? Cleaning up Heaven’s messes. How many more rogue angels are there out there?

And, what are you gonna do once you’re done with all that? Go back to Heaven? Please.

So tell me, Castiel, truly, what is your mission now?

And as we’ve come to see post 12.10, 12.12, 12.15, and 12.19, maybe the problem is the fact he feels he has a “mission” at all... Maybe what he needs is to finally TRULY BELIEVE that he is a full-fledged member of the Winchester family, and not just because that’s where he wants to be. He needs to understand that THEY want HIM to be an equal part of the family, and not just because he’s useful to them or because of what he can do for them.

(aside to point out the episode immediately following this one also deals with this theme of a man letting himself die being the maddest thing he can do, but that sharing the burden out between multiple people has the power to save everyone... but I know I have meta on this comparison back in my 10.19 tag so I’m gonna shut up about it here *ties that red string into a neat bow and moves on*)

Cas spends 10.20 tying his own personal little red strings into neat bows with regards to Claire and his obligations to her for feeling responsible for everything that’s happened to her and the loss of her parents, but this was just step one in making peace with himself. Helping Claire find her mother, and then helping her move on with her own life, giving her some peace over Jimmy’s sacrifice, helping her (and the audience) understand that Cas is (and has been since 4.22) an entirely separate entity from Jimmy, and that Jimmy’s arc for Cas is officially over. From that point on, Cas can progress through his own ordeal of humanity.

Of course he gets sidetracked by the narrative (as all of TFW do while dealing with the Darkness), but as I said earlier, each of those side quests provides him more insight into his own situation. All those episodes I mentioned above provide him the chance to sort through his own sense of guilt, his unresolved feeling of obligation to Heaven, to repairing the damage he’s done through releasing the Leviathan, for the chain reaction that led to at the end of s8 and his feelings of complicity with Metatron in the Angel Fall event, and the subsequent damage to Heaven and Earth that the ensuing battles have led to... right the way up to his complicity with Sam in using the Book of the Damned to “cure” Dean of the Mark and releasing the Darkness...

This led directly to the sense of personal desperation that prompted him to say yes to Lucifer, feeling that he was useless for anything else, and choosing to make what he believed was the necessary sacrifice so that Sam and Dean wouldn’t have to. This is the same logic that drove him to agree to work with Kelvin in 12.15, and to steal the Colt from Dean in 12.19. He was going to do the Terrible Bad Thing (killing an innocent-- Kelly) so that Dean and Sam wouldn’t have to.

Up to that point, he’d been trying to do the maddest thing an angel can do... to sacrifice himself in the name of humanity (and Humanity). Again, a Metatron quote, that Cas may have draped himself in the flag of heaven, but in the end he’d done it all in the name of one man. And while Cas may have understood this on an intellectual level, ever since 10.18 when he’d taken on the burden of his own grace again, as Metatron had told him, as an angel, he could go through the motions of eating the waffles, but only as a human could they truly EXPERIENCE those feelings directly.

Through everything that’s happened to him since 10.18, Cas has had this barrier of his grace blocking him from FEELING the humanity of it all. He’s got the advantage of experience to guide him through an intellectual understanding of this, and a memory of what it DOES feel like from a human perspective, and that certainly has played a role in guiding his actions. But he’s still struggling with those same essential questions posed by Metatron. The essential ones also posed to him back in 9.06-- that yes he wants to live, but as what? An angel or a man?

The same one raised throughout his history going all the way back to his doubts about Heaven’s Plans way back in 4.07. His story has been slowly reconciling those doubts with his own exploration of humanity, dealing with his guilt and his choices going right through 12.23, when he’s finally done the maddest thing a man can do.

That’s not to say that Cas “let” himself die in 12.23, and we clearly don’t have a full understanding of everything that happened there yet, but we do know one thing. Cas still needs to answer those questions for himself.

[mittensmorgul]

So the TNT loop stopped at 11.22 today, will show 11.23 first thing Monday, and then loop directly back to the pilot. Whoa.

So me being me, I watched 11.23 this afternoon, and am now bingewatching all of s12 this weekend. I have Thoughts™ about early s12. I mean, I don’t have any thoughts I haven’t had before, but up until now I hadn’t done a complete s12 rewatch, finally having seen the entire season. Yeah, I watched each episode at least three or four times (except that one... you know the one... with the scream-worthy time travel that made zero sense...). And I watched 12.01-8 again right before the winter hellatus ended to feel current...

But whoa the themes surrounding Mary, and Dean, and Sam, and Cas... they’re all there right from the start. In the first three episodes it’s impossible to miss how much like Dean Mary really is, how terrified she is to face Sam because of the guilt she feels over everything that happened to him. Meanwhile Sam has come to terms with all of that years ago, proven by his conversation with Magda.

Dean feels Mary’s need to leave as a failure on HIS part, while Sam sympathizes with her needing some time and space (because heck HE needed that once upon a time too), but he’s completely in the dark about that guilt she feels OVER WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM.

Which Dean internalizes instead. I mean, like mother, like son. And it takes until 12.22 for Dean to say it out loud, that when she died HE had to become the mother to Sam, as well as the father. Because John wasn’t that “great dad” that Mary remembered and had believed in. But she couldn’t face that, she couldn’t deal with that guilt of not being able to protect her boys from that life, and from her deal having thrust them right into the middle of it. Like Dean rushing to sell his soul to save Sam, or insisting that HE should do the trials instead of Sam, or taking on the Mark of Cain without reading the fine print, Mary ran headlong into the BMoL. She couldn’t keep them out of hunting, but maybe if she killed all the monsters herself they’d never need to hunt again. They’d never be in danger again. It’s irrational, but fueled by her guilt and grief, and her inability to see through that to the men her boys grew into. Men who have entire lives she can barely comprehend. Men who don’t blame her for any of it. Who’d rather have her in their lives than have her sacrifice herself for them. Again.

And throughout the season, that’s the same lesson Cas is struggling to internalize himself. He feels guilty that Lucifer is free again, feels it’s his duty to clean up that mess, and feels like now that Mary is back he might not be quite so welcome as a part of the Winchester family. Like maybe they don’t really need him as much now that they have their mother back. It’s essentially what he tells both Dean and Mary before he leaves in 12.03.

But that, of course, changes as he comes to terms with his past, present, and he gets a glimpse of his future... a future built on a deception, that led directly to his death (and transformation, which we know is coming in s13). But the guilt that drove Mary to the BMoL was paralleled to the guilt that drove Cas to collude with Heaven and steal the Colt in 12.19-- and a desire to spare Dean and Sam from terrible things.

Okay I’ll probably have more to say on all of this (basically I’m only resorting to typing it all out as a post because Lizbob went to sleep and I have to type it all at SOMEBODY), but this is nothing new. Just sorta... condensed... watching the whole season in one go like this. :P

[mittensmorgul]

Rewatching 4.03, and feeling the sense of horrifying futility combined with the horrifying urgency of fighting against destiny. The entire premise for Dean being sent back to 1973 proved a false assumption by the end of the episode:

DEAN is dreaming. We see flashes of his terrified face, in red, and the sound of screams. He wakes to find CASTIEL sitting on his bed. CASTIEL: Hello, Dean. What were you dreaming about? DEAN: What, do you get your freak on by watching other people sleep? What do you want? CASTIEL: Listen to me. You have to stop it. DEAN: Stop what? CASTIEL puts two fingers to DEAN's forehead.

There’s the first “STOP IT” Dean’s charged with. He’s given no further information, thrown into a baffling situation, and left to his own devices at the mercy of the entire situation:

CASTIEL: Time is fluid, Dean. It's not easy, but we can bend it on occasion. DEAN: Well bend it back or tell me what the hell I'm doing here! CASTIEL: I told you, you have to stop it. DEAN: Stop what? Huh? What, is there something nasty after my Dad? [DEAN turns as a car horn sounds. When he turns back, CASTIEL is gone.] Oh, come on! What, are you allergic to straight answers, you son of a bitch?!

And Cas again gives him that instruction, to “STOP IT.” We feel Dean’s frustration, but his own curiosity about his parents drives him to insert himself into the events of their lives, from following John to the car dealership and convincing him to buy the Impala all the way to discovering Mary and her family’s lives as hunters. But he still has no idea what he’s been ordered to “stop.” He’s been shoved into a situation he has no reference for and the demand is made for him to intervene and prevent some unknown event. Frustration intensifies. :P

Strangely enough, our next “STOP IT” comes not from Cas, but from John Winchester. While Dean’s questioning him at the car dealership, Dean’s floundering while trying to understand this entire bizarre situation he’s found himself in, so he defaults to what he knows in an attempt to find his feet here:

DEAN: I've been hung over before but, hey, I was, I was getting chills in that diner. You didn't feel any of those cold spots, did you? JOHN: Nope. DEAN: I swore I smelled something weird too, you know? Like... like rotten eggs. You didn't happen to smell any sulfur by chance? JOHN: No. DEAN: No... There been any cattle mutilations in town recently? JOHN: Okay, mister! Stop it. DEAN: Yeah, if only I knew what to stop. Listen, uh – watch out for yourself okay?

Poor Dean, he leaves this confrontation feeling no less confused and frustrated than he’d been before. He even acknowledges that this is becoming a theme for his day, “if only I knew what to stop.”

After discovering the Campbell family, that they’re hunters, and that clues from John’s journal about the history of Azazel’s involvement in what happened in Sam’s nursery in 1983, linking it back to events that happened in Lawrence in 1973 (conveniently within DAYS of when Dean had been sent back in time), he thinks he may have hit upon his reason for having been sent there. Maybe this is the thing he’s been sent back to stop...

Dean knows from his own experience where the Colt is (Daniel Elkins had it in Colorado, and Dean had visited the man’s house after he was killed in 1.20), so he puts his Major Play into action, thinking he has a real chance to stop Azazel before he has a chance to destroy his family.

DEAN: I know you guys think I'm crazy. SAMUEL: You seem like a really nice kid, Dean, but yeah, you're crazy. DEAN: Yeah, maybe, but I know where this bastard's gonna be, and I'm gonna stop it, once and for all.

But wow, wouldn’t that be something. Dean’s entire life would’ve been different if he’d managed to stop THAT, you know? 

DEAN: Alright, if I do this, then the family curse breaks, right? Mom and Dad live happily ever after, and – and, Sam and I grow up playing little league and chasing tail? CASTIEL: You realize, if you do alter the future, your father, you, Sam – you'll never become hunters. And all those people you saved, they'll die. DEAN: I realize. CASTIEL: And you don't care? DEAN: Oh, I care. I care a lot, but these are my parents. I'm not gonna let them die again. I can't. No, not if I can stop it.

Before we move on to the conclusion, there were two other events in this episode that involved this concept, but as they related to the story as opposed to how they related to Dean’s involvement specifically, and are worth mentioning:

The boy, Charlie, who Dean and Mary interviewed in the guise of a priest after his father had been killed. Charlie had made a deal (unbeknownst to him) with a yellow-eyed demon, because that demon had promised that his father’s drunken beatings would end:

CHARLIE: Did I want the beatings to stop? I just thought he was crazy, I didn't think – and the next thing I know, Dad's dead. Am I going to jail?

He just wanted the Bad Thing to stop (which ended up leading him into something far worse, the consequences of which he couldn’t even BEGIN to imagine...).

Next we have Dean’s confrontation with Daniel Elkins over his “borrowing” the Colt. It led Dean to make this ultimatum:

DEAN: Look, I have a chance to save my family’s lives. My family. But I need this gun to do it. So if you want to stop me? Kill me.

That’s pretty dramatic there, Deano. So the only way to “stop it” in this instance was really an untenable threat.

After all of these events, after Cas boops him back to the present, Dean feels like a failure, that the whole mission was futile. No matter what he did, he couldn’t stop anything, but Cas also finally reveals the truth:

DEAN: I couldn't stop any of it. She still made the deal. She still died in the nursery, didn't she? CASTIEL: Don't be too hard on yourself. You couldn't have stopped it. DEAN: What? CASTIEL: Destiny can't be changed, Dean. All roads lead to the same destination. DEAN: Then why'd you send me back? CASTIEL: For the truth. Now you know everything we do.

The whole point wasn’t about stopping anything, it was about understanding and knowledge. Which makes the last command Castiel issues to Dean at the end of the episode feel particularly weighty and inevitable:

CASTIEL: We know what Azazel did to your brother. What we don't know is why – what his endgame is. He went to great lengths to cover that up. DEAN: Where's Sam? CASTIEL: 425 Waterman. You brother is headed down a dangerous road, Dean, and we're not sure where it leads. So stop it. Or we will. 

And right there we have the inevitability of the apocalypse laid out for us in this one tiny order. STOP IT.

Of course Dean couldn’t stop it alone. It took Castiel finally rejecting the “destiny” set forth in Heaven, it took Sam eventually choosing to say yes to Lucifer and finding it within himself to overpower that destiny through sheer force of will, and it took Dean refusing to say yes to Michael who was the ultimate symbol of Heaven’s inflexible rejection of free will. It took all of them in order to eventually overcome destiny, and to finally stop it.

Way back in 4.03, though, they didn’t even have a complete understanding of everything they’d need to stop in the first place. This right here was stone number one in building that understanding that would eventually give them firm enough footing to wrangle that destiny around to their will.

[mittensmorgul]

Interesting that it’s 100% clear that Mary knows about Lucifer’s nephilim-to-be in 12.09, it’s reconfirmed in 12.12 that she’s in the know when Wally reacts disbelievingly when Dean asks Cas about how his hunt for Lucifer’s kid is going. And we know Mary is already working for the BMoL on this case, using their intel and even handing over magical weapons (that she believes are nonfunctional, but still...), and yet she never shared the intel that she had first-hand info about Lucifer’s nephilim with the BMoL, because Mick thought he was bringing the Winchesters a bombshell with that small fact in 12.17.

I think that was the moment Mick realized he’d seriously underestimated the Winchesters...