4.16 On The Head Of A Pin: There’s No Going Back

[bardicvoice]

4.16 On The Head Of A Pin: There’s No Going Back

Facing Alastair,
Dean learns what he cannot bear:
He broke the first Seal.

Comments

[bardicvoice]

Thank you for reading and commenting!

I suspect that Castiel's garrison is only one group of angels, not the entire heavenly host, but the question of just how large that garrison is remains, as does how many of them Uriel had approached. He only killed the ones who said no, but he hadn't raised the question with Castiel before this point; it's very possible that Cas wasn't the only one in the garrison still in the dark and innocent of knowledge of what Uriel was about. But how to distinguish the innocent from the ones who embraced Uriel's cause? I don't envy poor Castiel the torment of not knowing whom among the brothers and sisters of thousands of years of service he can still trust.

Azazel's whole game and what he understood or didn't remains fascinating, doesn't it? It's especially fascinating to me because of the way in which this show plays with the concepts of fate and free will, and emphasizes the importance of choice. That emphasis suggests that the show believes we are not bound by fate, and yet there are all those pesky prophecies that seem to suggest that some things are predetermined and inescapable. And the angelic time travel thing is similarly pesky. Dean was told by Castiel that what happened and what he did on his trip into the past were real (and writer Jeremy Carver said the same in a magazine interview), but that set up so many apparent paradoxes it makes my head spin.

Me, I believe that the boys have free will and that the choices they make are what will define what happens to them. I don't believe that Dean was destined from birth to be the "righteous man" of prophecy, but that the choices he made throughout his life to deal with all the things that happened to him brought him to a point where he fit the terms of an event foreseen. And the rest of that prophecy was ominous, not reassuring: Cas said that only the man who began it could finish it, not that he would finish it. So he might do it, or he might not; he might succeed, or he might fail, or he might do nothing at all and by inaction be overtaken by events. Did Azazel realize what Dean might become? I don't know. But considering that Azazel was about to kill him with the final bullet from the Colt - a weapon that killed the supernatural, and might by extension have destroyed Dean's very soul in the process of killing him permanently, as is would have destroyed a demon rather than sending it back to Hell - I don't think that Azazel was trying to send him to Hell and set up the domino effect on the Seals by breaking him to shed blood in Hell.

So what the heck was he doing, anyway? And did he remember encountering Dean in his own past, or were his memories tampered with along the way?

Inquiring minds want to know! *grin* (Of course, we probably never will ... but then, that's what fanfic was made for!)