none of it was real, but all of it was true.
SPN 9.18
I keep liking this episode more with subsequent rewatches. Hope this doesn’t mean my samgirl credentials are revoked.
SPOILERS follow.
1. metatron
what an egotistical little piss-bag. he may be a scribe, but he’s a poor creator. he writes boring, derivative stuff, borrowing generously from other sources and repeating fruitless patterns in the vain, manic hope that they’d work this time. he tears out pages and puts in pointless filler; he puts the characters who prowl the universe he’d taken over without permission into challenges that are beneath them, writes them into forced, awkward conflict, and pushes them towards destinations that they were never going towards again. he has read every book of the last two millennia, and his idea of power doesn’t extend beyond a scene from a third-rate hollywood film,
he thinks he’s the hero of this non-story. what a sad little piece of scum.
i suppose his tremendous, well, ‘god-modding’ powers come from the fact that he has all of heaven to himself. it’s well-established that heaven itself is a source of energy and power for the angels.
2. castiel
the archetypical reluctant leader. i sympathise with his reluctance to ‘lead’ this lot, beyond just ‘really bad prior experience’; they are creepy in the way they desperately look for a messiah, how lost they are without one. already unmoored from home, they don’t seem to possess the slightest understanding of the world they’d watched over for millennia, or the fates they are leading their vessels towards. we’ve burned through enough kings and generals and wily frontmen; these are the angels left. they have none of that authority, none of that charisma; they are drones awaiting their next order, pining for heaven, and showing not the slightest instinctual awareness.
castiel’s got his work cut out for him.
(and how much more smoothly he has slipped into human routines! loved the deliberate earnestness with which he sent that picture via his mobile.)
3. 'gabriel'
he was a bit of a ‘holy shit’ moment for me, i’ll admit (congratulations, show, for keeping this secret as well as you did!), but there was always something off about him: his relentless, awkwardly timed quips; overuse of characteristic mannerisms; unwarranted sentimentality. plus, one would think he would’ve moved beyond putting up an elaborate song and dance to trick somebody into playing a part they didn’t want to.
but what was most suspicious, really, was his drivel about how they were speshul snowflake angels that ‘understood free will’ while all of the rest were ‘sheep’. yeah. that was aaaall metatron.
4. gadreel
he played his part as metatron’s ruthless general rather well, but in between there were moments where, if you will, he took a moment to think about just how wonderful he finds this world, humanity. he talks about how he let lucifer in the garden because he wanted to free humanity.
he has been tortured since the dawn of time; playing dean is nothing to him, especially given the inside knowledge he has of the brothers. that moment where he waits for the blade to slide into him is a moment where the facade drops, and we see how fragile his faith actually is; all he knows for certain is that he does not want imprisonment yet again.
for all that he told samndean, i do believe that he harbours a great respect for sam. he says ‘it must like looking into a funhouse mirror’ to sam when that doesn’t actually make any sense. unless he sees himself in sam, and sam in himself, and that kind of understanding doesn’t come without respect. “reeks of weakness and shame,” yeah, i’m sorry about your state, too, gadreel) plus, his regard for humanity is only heightened after possessing sam, not lessened by it.
5. dean winchester
not much to tell about him that i haven’t already said here.
he is dismissive of how sam might want to process his trauma in favour of his own burgeoning ~manpain. his obsessive staring at his mark and stroking it… it’s like he’s desperate to make it the cause of everything that he is, and everything that he’s become.
6. sam winchester
sam is busy co-ordinating hunters and collecting information; he is alive and buzzing, and showing a lot more passion than dean ever did for his pet knight-killing project, his ~great burden, woe. (about “carlos”… really? nobody thought of a welcome to nightvale crossover?)
it is true that sam walked away at dean’s behest, but i think a good part of it was about his choice, too? he didn’t protest much, and this was a mission to find castiel. he also is willing to give up gadreel to save castiel. so sure, this is dean invalidating sam’s more urgent need to confront gadreel, but sam also consistently puts saving a friend he loves over mere revenge.
in conclusion: sam winchester is magnificent.
(it is a little annoying, i will admit, to have no one pull sam aside and ask him, “are you okay?”, what with all the “are you okay”s sam kept throwing at the brick wall otherwise known as dean. it’s sad to be reminded how little sam’s current little universe cares for him.)
7. you
so… the episode is titled ‘metatron’. was this a really clever exercise in speaking to the audience through metatron’s eyes or was the episode just supposed to be bizarre?
either way, it seems to have been a conceptually ambitious episode, and i can’t ever NOT admire that.