Various and Sundry Villains 13x12 - Winchester Family Mirrors
On the surface that seemed like a rather odd diversionary episode.
Two random witches, one love spell that lasted for all of five minutes and Castiel and Lucifer, locked up by Asmodeus, doing, well, not very much.
1. Two sisters who spend all their time together and have brought their mother back from the dead - hmmn - I wonder what situation that parallels? She’s come back wrong of course, as a brain-eating zombie (another Buffy nod - remember Dawn’s spell to raise Joyce?). The sisters end up stabbing each other to death. So, in terms of Winchester family dynamics in the mirror - Sam and Dean need to stop wishing for the mother they lost when young to return to them, and accept that she is different now, an autonomous adult person, not a lost ideal “Mom”. The mirror narrative may also hint that the Winchesters need to let go of Mary more completely. Perhaps Mary Winchester is going to choose to stay in the apocalypse world to help the people there? Then of course, there’s the brothers’ relationship with one another - adult siblings bound so exclusively to one another, says the mirror narrative, don’t end well... Dean’s “you and me” speech at the end of the episode certainly falls flat, doesn’t it?
2. Dean is in a bad mood with Cas. I mean, he grieved so intensely while he thought Cas was dead, and now the guy just calls every day from afar with a bunch of questions? Dean is hurting, but, in classic fashion, crushing that feeling down. Which is the point of the 5 min love spell. Dean in love with some random woman is just WRONG. It feels wrong, it looks wrong - that is not what love looks like. What does love look like, the mirror narrative invites us to ask? Oh yeah - Dean grieving at the start of the season... Again (infuriatingly) all subtext, but as so often in SPN, the emotional arc in this episode is mostly subtext. Meanwhile, we know that Cas isn’t calling, it’s Casmodeus (Asmodeus pretending to be Cas) but Dean, poor wee soul, doesn’t know that yet - hence the heartbreak.
3. This episode is by Steve Yockey, who also wrote Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets, which was all about how the angels forbid love between their kind and humans as the most grievous of sins. Is there a call-back to that episode? Yes there is. Rowena’s spell at the end looks a lot like the one Lily Sunder must have performed on herself to angel-power up to help her fight Ishim. So, there in the subtext, is a continuing undercurrent of heartbreak. Cas, after all, has said “I love you,” to Dean. He’s carrying the weight of what his angel-conditioning tells him is a mortal sin, even as Dean sulks because he thinks Cas is being weird with him on the phone. Eternally star-crossed... .
4. Rowena grieving for Crowley and throwing shade at Dean has already been covered by others. If you’re looking out for Drowley, there it is.
5. Rowena having seen Satan’s true face and Sam opening up to her about how that continues to haunt him too, was a significant textual arc moment. Sam is surely heading for a final confrontation with Lucifer. His big win should be, finally, getting to put Satan in the ground, after all the torture he went through in the Cage to save the world from the apocalypse, after all the cost to his mental health, his happiness. If a Michael-Lucifer show-down in the apocalypse world is coming, Sam surely has a powerful part to play.
