Supernatural - Episode 7.21
So here's my review of the episode....not late at all....what's two weeks between friends? Oops.
I started this ages ago, but forgot about it. I haven't seen episode 22 yet and I'm gonna watch it as a kind of double bill with the finale tomorrow, so I had to finish this and post it first.
I rattle on a bit, as per usual. It also makes very little sense, as per usual. But, hey, it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble.
Oh Castiel.
I kinda don’t even know where to start with this episode. Maybe I’ll start at the beginning. That’s usually an appropriate place.
First off , the writer and director is Ben which makes me delightfully happy. Ben Edland + Ben Edlund = My kind of crazy. It was the same case with, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, which is pretty much my favourite episode . I’m sure I’ve detailed why somewhere on my journal. He writes Castiel like no one else. I’ve got a hundred different theories for why this is, but bottom line is it just works.
So, the boys are in some sort of abandoned building. I actually think if they spent a little time and effort they could renovate it nicely into a modern studio flat. That’s what I’d do, I’d totally rent it off them, no questions asked. They can even come and stay with me! I could be like the new Bobby! However, there’s Leviathan to kill and blocks of clay to smash up so my dreams of a Extreme Makeover; Home Edition and Supernatural crossover will have to stay in my head (where they probably belong).
We’re cutting between this and to where a teenager is playing the cello and fretting about tests and essays and such. I actually like the two kids in this, both likable and there’s a nice dialogue between them. I’m empathising with them a bit, I recently wrote applications for Masters courses and scholarships and you just know that however much of your pain and passion you squeeze into that one essay, there’s always going to be someone else applying who climbed Mount Everest to raise money for orphans and puppies, while simultaneously doing their undergrad and working in a homeless shelter at the weekend. Selfish bastards.
The boys set to work painstakingly and cautiously trying to extract the item from the clay. In Winchester Land though, this mean hacking at it with a big arse hammer. As Dean strikes it, there is lightning outside. Yeah, I’m sure that doesn’t mean anything. Nothing is ever significant in this show. Lightning is also striking near Kevin. It happens again as Dean hits the clay. He stops, weighs up his options of this maybe not being the brightest idea and proceeds to smack the hell out of it. While all is well with the boys in Chicago, poor old Kevin gets microwaved. Don’t write that in your admissions essay Kevin. That’ll be put in the ‘refer to the nurse’ pile.
We cut to The World’s Worst Psychiatric Hospital where Castiel is still conked out. Apparently it’s less of a risk to leave your crazy angel in the hospital that almost killed your brother and being looked after by the demon that’s killed all your friends, than it is too just shove him in the back of whatever ‘Steal-A-Car’ your riding around in. I personally would have taken Castiel and Bobby’s hip flask and put them in lockdown with Baby. But, I suppose there’s something to be said about not putting all your eggs in one basket. Anyhow, Castiel isn’t asleep for long once the lightning strikes.
Kevin wakes up and does that thing we all do when we dramatically oversleep and starts to rush around. Like that extra minute we save will make up for the 2 hours late we are. I can’t say that when I’ve been late for something my eyes flashed gold though. Usually I’m squinting because I’m trying to put my contacts in while cleaning my teeth. Dean’s waking up too. Sam I assume didn’t need any beauty sleep and he’s still on his laptop. Which he was on last night. I’ve got to find out what make of laptop he has that has a battery that lasts 10 hours.
Dean washes his face, when the cup on the side moves. Oh hey Bobby! It’s like Supernatural meets Harvey. Next season Jim Beaver isn’t going to be in it at all, we’ll just have objects moving around. It must be a little weird, him just being there a lot of the time though. I suppose they want to keep the hip flask near them and safe for obvious reasons. It would be stupid to do something risky with it like….oh I don’t know…LEAVE IT IN A MENTAL HOSPITAL WITH A DEMON!!
Meg calls Sam and tells him that Cas is awake. Well, after you use a snark translator on what she said, that’s pretty much what you’re left with. Turns out Cas could hear Dean hacking up the tablet from Indiana and that’s when he awoke. Back to Highly Strung Kevin, who is driving when he’s disturbed out of his trance. I like this kid, he makes me laugh. He does that ‘Ahh!…Ahh!’ thing that I do when I’m jumpy.
The boys arrive at the psychiatric hospital and meet up with Meg and share a little snark before going in to see Castiel. God love him, he is actually wearing his little trench coat over his hospital clothes. The coat is very symbolic for him and important. It’s so entirely cute. Cas delivers his standard “Hello Dean” and then greets Sam. I don’t know if it’s possible to convey ‘yeah sorry about the breaking of the wall thing, glad you’re better now’ in a single name, but if it is, Cas manages it. I always find it adorable that Jared actually completely mispronounces ‘Castiel‘.
Dean looks happy that Cas is up, “walking and talking” and tells him so. Unfortunately it comes off in a way that you tell it to a 101 year old relative. You’re not dead…well done. Although he seems to be pretty much ok, so that‘s good. Tuck the little angel under your arms boys and let’s hit the road! We’ve got Leviathan to kill, tablets to translate…
“Pull my finger” Uh oh. It was all going so well.
Our dear little Cas, as it turns out, is quackers. Or is he….? Well he seems it for now. He’s a whisker closer to 2014!Cas at the very least.
The boys ask Castiel to translate the tablet. He can’t read it or make sense of it, but he knows who wrote it. That’s kind of how I feel about the Twilight books. Sam looks genuinely stunned and excited that it was written by a Transformer. Three episodes to go and we’ve got our ‘Big Bad’ for next year! Who foresaw the fact it would be a Transformer? That’s awesome!!! I mean slightly weird and out of the blue, but…
Oh! MET-atron. Right then. So it won’t be a Transformer, but it’ll be Alan Rickman. I can get with that. Jared made me majorly giggle during that part. You could see Sam’s cogs whirl into action, dreaming up ways that him and his brother were going to have to bring down Megatron.
Dean and Meg are having a little bitch out. Apparently it’s ok to trust a demon to babysit your angel, but not have a peek at a lump of rock. Castiel doesn’t like it when they fight, so he disappears. So, not so different to old Castiel then?
That leaves Meg and Sam alone. I kinda sometimes forget about Meg and Sam’s history. She did jump him, so to speak. They’ve got a weird sort of background there. Meg says that if she’s not going to be involved she’ll grab Cas, make like a tree and get out of there. Um, back up there Meg, he ain’t your angel. He stays with the two boys who screwed him up and screwed him over, thank you very much! Meg suggests they both call and see who he comes to. I’d quite like to see that actually! Meanwhile, Sam’s left the Word of God all alone. Nice going, Brainiac.
Meanwhile, Castiel has retreated to the day room, where Dean joins him. Dean says that Cas is like this because he took on Sam’s crazy shit. Cas remarks that it actually “Took everything for him to get here.” This isn’t about what happened in the past couple of months. This is about what’s happened in the past 4 years.
I think Dean spent most of the year pining over the fact that he’d lost Bobby and Cas. Now he’s got them back, but they’re not how he wants them. He could maybe deal with it if they were, but the fact that Bobby’s a ghost and Castiel is short his fruit loops is more of a problem for Dean than when they weren’t there at all. He likes things black and white sometimes. Like he said to Cas, he just wants him to “button up his coat and fight Leviathan with them.” Instead Cas just sets up ‘Sorry!’ for them to play.
“Do you want to go first?” While Dean very clearly has anger towards Cas, it reminds me how upset Castiel was last year. Firstly, that Dean just left the life and didn’t speak to him for a year when he needed his help. This was when Crowley approached Cas; at his most vulnerable. Then when Dean discovered his deal with Crowley, he didn’t give Castiel a lot of room for manoeuvre or excuses. He didn’t understand his motives or help him out. That’s Castiel’s side of the story anyway. Me? I’m impartial, I think they both need their heads knocking together. However, like Dean still has issues with Cas, the angel still has issues with him too. Because they are both of the same stubbornness though, neither of them is going to make the first move.
Ultimately, I don’t think Castiel is as bonkers as he appears to be. Dean and Castiel aren’t good communicators with anything that isn’t to do with their job. So Cas is trying to get through to Dean and Dean is trying to get through to Cas, but ultimately it’s just frustrating for both of them. Almost everything that Castiel says in this scene can have double-meaning. So which meaning is Cas really saying to Dean. Is he really so detached that this is just a simple board game, or is he just playing at not caring and there is actually deep meaning behind his words. I know which one I think.
When Dean pushes the game off the board, 2 pieces stay put. That’s a nice unintentional symbolic symmetry there. I do like it when things like that happen. He knocks everything else out of the way, leaving the two counters by themselves on the table.
Meanwhile outside, Sam chasing Kevin is pretty much how you’d imagine a drunk T-Rex chasing a meercat would look. It’s hilarious.
The sweetest thing in the world is Castiel picking up the board game piece by piece. He gets distracted though, as his Angel-Radar goes off. He’s a little more excited about it than he really should be. He thinks Angels, Meg, Sam and Dean is the best party ever and is blocking out the fact he’s not been anyone’s favourite feathery friend this past year. It’s like if he acts like everything is hunky dory, then everyone else will too. This washes a bit with Sam and Dean, but those Angels aren’t so easy to get past.
It’s kinda nice to see some Angels. I’ve somewhat missed them. I was getting kinda curious about what was happening up above. I feel we missed out on our Heaven Newsletter without Castiel being around this season.
Dean ‘Angel Flashes’ them, (I don’t actually know what the proper term is) and the angels, including Castiel all disappear. Poor old Kevin starts freaking out at the being surrounded by demons, angels and two handsome brothers. Dean, showing his empathetic nature nods towards the student and asks “What’s that?!”.
ROAD TRIP!! WOO HOO! Possibly the most awkward journey ever. If Dean grips that steering wheel any tighter it’s going to weld to his hands.
Castiel calls Meg. Dean gets a bit sniffy. It’s a little bit like Stockholm syndrome, with Castiel and Meg. You might have to be nicer to your angel, Dean, if you want to get him back. Cas is at a greyhound track, “He’s surrounded by unhappy dogs”. Aww! He apparates into the back of the car, taking away another of Kevin’s nine lives. It’s ok though, Castiel “Boops” him and makes it all better. Did Ben watch Dogma while he was writing the episode?
Dean, meanwhile, is still trying to get the conversation back on track. Cas asks Dean “Are you angry, why are you angry?” Castiel, you really don’t want to open up that can of worms right now. Don’t get me wrong, the two of you need to duke it out, but not with the brother, the demon and the prophet in the car and certainly not while your marbles are strewn all over the floor. Sam wants to check that Cas is still on their side. Apparently he’s not on any side anymore. He’s “watching the Bees.” How long do we think it’ll be until Castiel gets back in the dogfight?
They’re at Rufus’ Cabin and Castiel tells Sam that they have to lay easy on the Angel proofing or he’ll be frolicked out of there too. Yeah, Cas, I think Dean knew that when he did that at the hospital. It wasn’t a lack of knowledge that made him do it. I mean he needed to get the other angels out of there, but he was still pretty pissed with Castiel. I think having him out the way for a little while helped clear his head.
“This looks like a sex torture dungeon, is this a sex torture dungeon?” Hey, who knew what Rufus did on his time off, but for now it’s just a regular basement…with large knives and weapons. Dean denies it while waving around a scythe. Way to calm the kid, Dean.
“You seem troubled. Of course that’s a primary aspect of your personality so I sometimes ignore it.” I loved Sam and Castiel’s little chat. I think Cas has basically lost his tunnel vision. First, he was loyal to God and the Angels, then to the brothers. Now he’s free of that. He ultimately trying to protect himself and everyone else by not caring or focusing on a cause, because look what happened last time he cared. He pretty much imploded heaven and earth, just by caring about something and someone.
Sam forgives Castiel quicker than Dean has. I think that is a little bit because of the position Sam’s been in, but also the fact that Dean’s got a whole other set of issues with Cas. Sam and Castiel’s chat is brilliant at contrasting to the one with Dean earlier. Castiel is articulate about what happened to him and his state of mind. In his scene with Dean, you weren’t quite sure if he was playing at not caring or if he actually didn’t care. With this scene with Sam we can see that he knows what he’s doing. It’s not that he can’t get involved, it’s that he won’t.
Kevin starts freaking out in a “Why me?” sort of way. As you can imagine this doesn’t wash well with Dean. He’s not really the person you want on hand for tea and sympathy about that. I like that Kevin doesn’t just accept this whole Angel/Demon/Leviathan/Prophet deal without questioning it. For a Winchester, it’s just your average slow Wednesday though. Dean basically tells Kevin that it sucks, but to cowboy up. He tells Kevin’s that the Angels don’t care and the ones that do try and care, get broken.
When it comes down to it, Dean believes he broke Castiel. I think part of his anger towards the angel is a little bit of guilt in his part of it. You’ve got one broken angel and one broken human. Either they’re going to have to fix themselves, fix each other, or Sam is going to have to fix both of them. Which ever way it is, it’s gonna need to happen soon because I don’t think they can win the battle against the Levis with Sam holding them both up in the ring.
Meanwhile, Meg has gone to meet the two demons she ran into at the petrol station earlier. She tells them she has Castiel. Apparently these are spoiler free demons as Cas being alive is brand new information to them. She kills them and then heads back to the cabin where the boys have set up a demon trap for her. She explains to them that her current cause is to bring down Crowley, what with her being a Luciferite and all. Will someone explain to me again while we’re so happy to invite Meg up to the cabin for a holiday weekend?
In the end, I actually don’t want Meg to become an ally of Dean and Sam. It just wouldn’t work. There is too much history there, she can’t be redeemed. It also makes the whole freezing Cas out for working with a demon thing seem silly too. I’m happy for Meg to stay on the show, but I’m hoping that they won’t forget the fact that she’s pretty much working for herself and that’s obviously going to clash with the Winchesters at some point.
Meg in her killing spree managed to leave a big red arrow to where the cabin was, so the angels find them. It’s Hester and the other one again, from the hospital. I’m not quite sure the other one’s name. I think it’s Anises. Dean explains that they’re doing all this to clean up a mess made by an angel, so maybe they shouldn’t be so pissed off at him and Sam. Castiel speaks in the third person and says that an angel did do this, even though they tried to stop him. Turns out Hester’s not really blaming Cas in this, but Dean, and tells him that “Ever since Castiel laid a hand on you in hell he was lost.” I wouldn’t say lost, although Castiel never should have got as close to the boys as he should have. It’s not something that was done. There was no precedence for it. On the surface I think Cas has sometimes seemed the most ‘alien’ of the angels, but ultimately he is the most human and the most celestial.
Hester wants to make Dean pay, but Castiel steps in. Interesting, I thought he was keeping out of it? Hester’s got even more anger issues at Cas than Dean has, and starts beating the hell out of him. Sam and Dean are halted at stopping this by two angels holding their fingers up at them. Really boys? Really?! Meg however, has an angel sword and chooses this moment to gank Hester. Castiel looks mildly offended that Meg hasn’t taken the same vow of pacifism that he has.
Anises flirts a bit more with Castiel before taking Kevin and leaving. He seems like a good egg. Although angels on this show drop like flies so I wouldn’t actually expect to see him again. He’s got a serious crush on Cas though.
Sam reads out the translation that Kevin left for them. One of the things it says they need is the blood of a fallen angel. I would say Castiel jumped rather than fell, but that’s all semantics. It’s pretty convenient for the boys that they just happened to have a friggin fallen angel standing next to them. When I try and make cupcakes I’m usually have to at least pop to the shop to get the ingredients. Apparently baking cakes is slightly more longwinded than a weapon to kill Dick.
“I’m always happy to bleed for the Winchesters.“ Yeah, Cas knows exactly what he’s doing and saying. He’s free in his mind, but not his heart. He knows where his loyalty has been, and where it will return to. That’s going to be what pulls him back in the game. Cas leaves, not knowing where he’s going or what he’s doing. I think Castiel has gone to free the greyhounds. Or live with them. One or the other.
Back at the Trans where Kevin’s mum is fretting with a police detective. Some angels bring Kevin back though, so everything is fine. Oh except for the fact that that police dude may not be a police dude anymore. Quick as a shot he plays the age old game of Angel-Demon-Leviathan. No wonder Leviathan beats Angels, the feathery ones aren’t generally the brightest sparks. While Detective Leviathon was murdering one angel, why didn’t the other grab the kid, the mum and vamoose out of there?
I have to say I’m quite enjoying Castiel’s little story arc. I think Supernatural is hard show to watch week by week, because you don’t see why things are happening at the time. I wasn’t a happy bunny rabbit when the got rid of Castiel in the second episode. On the one hand, I missed him lots and lots in the episodes he was gone, but if you look at it retrospectively it’s a great story, starting from beginning of season 6 to now (and beyond). I mean I have no idea how much of it was intentional, but it just makes a nice arc when you look back on it. It’s all relating to Dean and Castiel. Both arcs that Cas has been a part of started with pulling a Winchester out of hell. The Season 4-5 was when he grew closer to Dean and humanity. Season 6-7 was the distancing. Starting from when Castiel pulled Sam out of hell it all seemed to go wrong for him. I’m hoping that it ends with Dean finally forgiving him.
There is only so long Castiel can plead pacifism and stay out the fight. I understand his motivations. He feels like he caused all the problems. I sense though that he’s going to be needed for some reason. I do think it’ll relate to Dean asking him to do something. That’s what will get him back in the game I only hope it doesn’t kill him…again.
