SPN 10.07: i was just telling him what he needed to hear.
SPN 10.07
… well, that was a bit of a Plot Spurt, wasn’t it?
(SPOILERS follow)
1. i have a code-no cash for ass.
Dean Winchester is his own PR agent-and he’s the best. I found it interesting that he got on a dating app in the first place, but his image has taken a bit of a beating recently. He took on the Mark of Cain, only to have it turn him into a rage-fuelled killing machine, and even that wasn’t enough to stop Metatron from killing him easily. He then traipsed around as a demon-an experience he describes as “embarrassing”-only to have his brother almost singlehandedly (literally) bring him back from the brink. He’s acutely aware of the Mark still on him, and of Sam’s fears about what he’ll transform into. On top of that, he’s been made fun of for his age at least a couple of times. So he gets on that app-using his real name, no less!-and enjoys a bit of ego-stroking. It also accounts for his behaviour once he finds out Shaylene is a prostitute-it’s another blow to his ego and he spouts some nonsense about a “code”.
It’s almost like he’s careening into a midlife crisis, and Sam’s just been pulled along into this ride to reclaim Dean’s identity. Dean doesn’t want holidays to process what’s happened and rest creaky bones and weary souls; Dean wants to hunt. Dean will drive the Impala from job to job to job; he will swear by rock “classics” and refuse to admit any taste for other music; Dean will fucking take an eight-hour detour on the off-chance that this lady he’s been chatting with on a dating app might have sex with him. Dean will talk a great game about having “touched darkness” and being “beyond saving” and repeat the same goddamn pseudo-fatalistic rhetoric (“that’s all I’ve got waiting for me at the end of this crappy-ass tunnel”/”I’m poison, Sam”/”I know how my story ends-at the edge of a blade or the barrel of a gun”), but will make no efforts to change himself or seek to repair the damage he’s done in the slightest. He will drown in self-deprecation but not actually take responsibility for the things he’s actually done in fear of upsetting a delicate status quo.
But Dean-the damage is already done. The more desperate and obvious his efforts are to push Sam down and keep the chain of command intact, the less effective they are. Him bringing up Lester to counter Sam’s very valid concerns about the Mark was laugh-worthy at best. His double-standards have never been more obvious. There is some hope in this desperate scrambling from Dean-he’s holding on by his fingernails, and Sam’s begun to notice.
2. and now it’s time to step aside.
Hannah has seen the world through so many prisms: as a soldier, recruited and brainwashed and employed under several generals; as a fallen angel, rudderless, powerless, searching for another leader; as a leader herself, making important decisions on behalf of a larger community; as a ‘human’ as Castiel describes it, full of sensation and desires and urges but a near-ascetic focus on a higher purpose as though you can straddle two planes of existence at once; as Caroline, trusting, anguished Caroline, who showed her that the human experience is nothing without the actual human beings that drive it all. In the end, she took her leave with a grace and gratitude that really became her.
It’s an interesting situation now for Castiel. For so long he has been following the Winchester playbook on humanity-but here is an angel, far less experienced with humans than he is-who managed to understand what they were really fighting for. There was such sad fondness when he talked about Claire, and at the end of the episode, he looks up Jimmy Novak for the first time in over five years. More than five (ten) years of creating and abandoning battlefields, and now we are finally taking a look beneath the debris.
3. … mother?
I really like how Rowena’s been introduced-she comes in with no real power outside of her wits and her natural ability. She appears for now to have no aspirations beyond escaping the Grand Coven and establishing one of her own. She uses incredibly strong spells, but they quickly burn out most of the people that she uses them on. And finally, while she’s captured pretty easily by the demons, she has Crowley pinned with Esther-like precision even before she realises who he actually is. Really looking forward to seeing much more of her.
4. but you’re still a monster.
Imagine how utterly shattered Cole must be, though. Here is the man he wanted to kill for the better part of the last ten years, more than anything, and he’s just handed Cole’s ass to him twice in less than three months. He was a soldier very early in life, and then fast-tracked through becoming a hunter. He knows better than anyone that there is no innocence in the battlefield-one man’s saviour is the other man’s devil. Even so-to hear his father’s murderer call his father a monster, and to be forced to accept it as a very real possibility, given what he’s learnt and experienced recently, is a special brand of painful.
There’s every possibility that Cole might return, carrying yet another part of his father’s legacy.
(Or maybe it skips generations and it’s Cole’s son that he needs to defend from SamnDean in the future. Now that would be poignant.)
5. you have family.
Does anybody feel like this season knows it’s the last of the series? Concepts and themes and plot points are being drawn in and tied together like balloon strings. We don’t really have an extraneous Big Bad or a Grand Mission. It’s refreshing, actually.