I find Joyce Bicklebee quite amusing LOL!
I find her the PERFECT exemplar of the Leviathan, actually.
(yes I am watching 7.16 too... *waves hi across the TNT loop*)
Well, some combination of her and George. They were going for “Evil Corporate Monsters” in s7, and that really comes across here. Joyce is the Evil Ambitious Micromanager trying to advance her own career on the back of her employees, and George is the more-competent-than-he-gets-credit for grunt worker who just isn’t properly appreciated.
JOYCE: We have a chain of command here, George. You see a Winchester, you don't eat him. You tell me, and I eat him. What do you think, I'm gonna tell Dick, "I think he ate him, but I didn't see it"? What, I'm supposed to vouch for you, George? Like you're not one dumb move away from a bibbing already? Come on.
JOYCE: Sam and Dean. It is such a pleasure to make your acquaintances. Now, just so you can put names to the faces that’ll be eating you, I'm Joyce, and this is my assistant, George.
But George had been playing his own game, trying to make a deal with Sam and Dean, helping them kill Joyce, telling them about the Leviathan’s “Big Picture Plans,” and tells them they’re building a research facility to “cure cancer.” But he does live... (or at least we don’t see him die...)
(meanwhile Sam is cracking up, Dean has to fight the urge to Prince Sigfried himself into oblivion, and Frank is telling Dean that when you dig down deep it’s all Dick... a big old giant nesting doll of Dick... and right at the end Sam and Dean lose another anchor--however paranoid and whackadoo-- in their lives... Frank.)
I find it really interesting, aside from the Joyce and George dynamic, that Sam describes what’s happening inside his head as “Lucifer” doing these things to him.
SAM: Yeah, well, every time I close my eyes, Lucifer is yelling into my head. It's like I let him in once, now I can't get rid of him.
SAM: It doesn't matter what I do, Dean. Lucifer will not shut up.DEAN: Even now?SAM He's singing "Stairway to Heaven" right now.DEAN Good song.SAM Not 50 times in a row.
I mean... that’s Sam’s own mind generating “Lucifer” as his tormentor. It’s not actually Lucifer. It’s the damaged part of his soul that remembers Hell taking over.
And then we go right into 7.17, where that damaged part of his soul takes over to the point where it’s actively killing him. The Lucifer hallucination even points this out to him:
HALLUCIFER: I’m just sayin’... back when you had no soul you never had to sleep.
and then Sam confirms it to Dean when Dean suggests there could be a cure out there:
SAM: When you put my soul back...DEAN: No.SAM: ...Cas warned you about all the crap it would –DEAN: Screw Cas! Quit being Dalai frickin' Yoda about this, okay? Get pissed!SAM: [sighs] I'm too tired. This is what happens when you throw a soul into Lucifer's dog bowl. And you think there's just gonna be some cure out there?
The hunter who calls Dean back, after he follows Bobby’s clue, essentially reports his meeting with Emmanuel in a way very reminiscent of Dean’s first meeting of Cas in 4.01--
MACKEY: Heard the best way to get to him is through his wife, Daphne, out in Colorado? So, I go. Tell her I'm going blind. It's true. My right eye's burnt out. She says, "Go home. He'll come." So, I go. I set every trap, every test in the book.DEAN: That's what I would have done.MACKEY: Emmanuel shows. He passes every one. There ain't nothing weird about this guy. Except... he's the real deal.DEAN: What do you mean?MACKEY: He touched me, and my eye was fixed. Look – I don't believe in much that don't suck your blood. But I wouldn't call you on a maybe.
And oh gosh there’s quite a few narrative and visual callbacks to 4.01 in this episode-- Dean peering out the window of the closed convenience store, talking with the demon on Emmanuel’s porch in a way that recalls talking with the demon waitress in the diner in 4.01, even Meg showing up as a “helpful” demon to parallel Ruby-- and it’s even DEAN who vouches for her to Cas, telling him she’s a “friend.” I know there’s more, but I keep getting distracted watching it instead of keeping track of them...
And then when Cas does finally remember everything, the crushing guilt he hadn’t been able to remember from 7.01 finally returns:
CASTIEL: What I did. What I became. Why didn't you tell me?DEAN: Because Sam is dying in there.CASTIEL: Because of me. Everything. All these people. I shouldn't be here.
And suddenly, everything Dean just couldn’t find it in himself to forgive Cas for, that he’d confessed to Emmanuel that he just couldn’t let go, suddenly when it’s CAS again none of that matters. But it’s now CAS that can’t forgive himself, who believed he DESERVED TO DIE for what he’d done.
DEAN: If you remember, then you know you did the best you could at the time.CASTIEL: Don't defend me. Do you have any idea the death toll in Heaven? On Earth?
And it’s Dean who offers him redemption, giving him his coat back and telling him that they can still fix it. Sadly, in his depressed state, he feels like the only thing he can fix is Sam, but it’s a start.
Taking on the damage to Sam’s soul, healing Sam, also becomes penance for Cas as he suffers through that damage himself. And still it’s less punishment than he thinks he deserves (since he’d intended to stay in Purgatory as well... and really everything he’s done since then, everything he’s done trying to do the right thing in the last five years, has been an extension of this moment... whether by direct result, guilt, or as the consequences of his self-sacrificing attempts to fix everything, or at least to do one right thing... to make one right choice)
This... sorta got away from me.
