About to drop a doozy of an opinion, so sorry for that.
5x16 and really all of season 5 remind me of exactly why I hate revived Mary. All Dean wanted was a family who stayed. Zach showed Dean one of his biggest fears and it was Mary saying he was a burden and that at least dying got her away from them.
Like I get that they're adults and her job isn't to coddle them, but revived Mary makes it very clear that she can't get away from them fast enough. That's on top of the betrayal left and right.
Mary and the potential to be so interesting for both Sam and Dean's character arcs, especially when Sam hasn't had a good arc in seasons. And instead she's just a lever to torture them. Her most interesting stuff is with Jack and even that doesn't pay off. She runs around making mistakes, not developing any of the plot lines she's had previously--being a legacy Hunter, wanting a normal life just like Sam, having problems with John that he glossed over after she died, her life being puppetted by angels, heck even the fact that her kids were raised hunters when that's NEVER what she wanted--and being frankly an uninteresting wrecking ball.
Hottest of takes, I prefer John over revived Mary and that man sucks as a human so....
