The problem of Crowley
Yesterday on spn_heavymeta there was meta about Crowley. I clicked on it, and I read it, and I almost posted a comment ... but the thing is, cheery 'I am intrigued and excited by these revelations about Crowley!' posts don't really invite responses that go 'I am annoyed and disappointed by these revelations about Crowley', so ultimately I decided to treat it the same way I do posts celebrating Castiel or Gabriel: I kept my mouth shut and backed away because it's churlish to intrude on other people's fun. The thing is, though, I've been bothered by the problem of Crowley all year. So instead of inflicting my ranting on poor etoile444, who wrote the post, I figured I'd just give in and lay it all out in my own space.
I've been bothered by Crowley's characterisation since We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's not that he's acting as this year's main villain; I thoroughly enjoyed the villainous side of Crowley in season six, because he behaved like the sort of bad guy I thought Crowley would be. My main problem is that the way they're using him gives us very little of what is interesting and distinctive about Crowley as an individual, and instead hands us a whole lot of Generic Demon Evil Overlord-ness.
All demons use torture and murder to some extent. The fact that this is such a dominant part of demonic culture is one of the strong horror elements of Supernatural - they use it to play up exactly how bad hell is and what going there does to people. But because it is common to all demons, it's not very interesting in and of itself; it's just an identifying marker like their black/red/white eyes or the columns of smoke they become when they're not possessing somebody. What makes a demon interesting is the personality that emerges around their demonic nature.
etoile444 remarks that Crowley 'has acted in a manner that’s a bit different from typical demons' right from his inception. I think that's only true insofar as most of the demons we see on the show are basically extras. They stomp onto the scene, flash their black eyes, maybe deliver an offensive line or two - and then get stabbed or exorcised. They're cannon (and canon) fodder, not characters, and that means they're simple. When we look at demon characters with whom we spend a significant amount of time, they are complex people with a variety of good and bad traits and a baffling array of potential powers.
Meg, for instance, was basically a straightforward soldier type. Though she used subterfuge in the short term, her real game was always revealed to the audience by the end of the episode - and right from her first appearance in Scarecrow we saw her express a preference for the direct approach over all this messing about with undercover work. Ruby, on the other hand, was a master manipulator - a demonic chameleon, adept at shaping her behaviour to suit the role she chose to play.
Crowley, then, is a man who understands that sometimes the most cunning and advantageous thing you can do is keep your word. He has never been portrayed as a good person - in fact I would say that both Meg and Ruby were in their own ways far more moral than Crowley - and he has certainly lied, cheated and exploited loopholes, but he once understood that there was a time and a place for backstabbing, and that the fact that you know how to use a stick doesn't mean that offering a carrot won't sometimes get you better results. When Crowley wailed 'I'm in sales, damn it!' way back in Abandon All Hope, that was his defining character moment. Because he really is: Crowley is a silver-tongued devil (now there's an episode title they should use sometime), who can talk pretty much anyone into pretty much anything. The interesting thing about Crowley as a villain in season six was not that he kept a prison full of alpha monsters to torture for information, it was how easily he was able to convince the supposedly more moral Castiel that this was a really good idea.
Though I'm not generally a fan of Dabb and Loflin's stories, I thought that Crowley's backstory in Weekend at Bobby's was inspired. It fits neatly with the general theme within Supernatural that people are shaped, for good or ill, by the monstrous things that happen to them. Sam and Dean are who they are because an unknown (at the time) monster killed their mother and sent their father off on an obsessive and futile hunt. Bobby Singer developed his lust for knowledge after not knowing how to save his possessed wife. Most monsters are 'evil' simply because they have been bitten or cursed and don't know how to handle it. And the king of hell was once a 17th century tailor who fell for a silly crossroads deal and eventually succumbed to torture in hell. It's startling to think that Crowley wasn't always bad (he doesn't seem to have been a great father, but he certainly wasn't Hitler) and more than that, that Crowley was once naïve. You can imagine how the drive to never be taken advantage of that way again could shape a simple man into a Machiavellian genius. He had centuries to learn and get there, just as Bobby had decades to build himself up from scrap dealer to scholar. It made sense. I liked it.
It has also been Crowley's habit to work from the shadows. In seasons five and seven, he stayed exclusively in the shadows - he talked, he schemed, he made deals and found ways to provide his chosen allies with the tools they needed to get the job done. He certainly took some risks, but he never decided it would be a good idea to face Lucifer, Castiel or the leviathans in open combat. In season six he stayed in the background as much as possible. At the tail end of Family Matters he was forced to step into the spotlight to protect Castiel; Dean was determined to find out what had happened to Sam and needed to be distracted. Just three episodes later he managed to fake his own death and disappear again for a further nine episodes.
All of which brings me to the lead up to Crowley's second stint as a villain:
Dean: Crowley ain't the problem this year.
Meg: When are you going to get it? Crowley's always the problem. He's just waiting for the right moment to strike. I know what I'm supposed to do. And it isn't screw with Sam and Dean or lose the only angel who'd go to bat for me.
7.21 Reading Is Fundamental
When Meg gave that warning, I believed her. Because Crowley is the guy you don't see coming. You generally only remember him when you want something from him, or when he comes to collect what he's owed. It's what makes him scary, interesting and even likeable. Because working with Crowley isn't necessarily a bad idea. Not if you're desperate. As long as your interests are aligned, he'll probably have your back. But how sure are you that you and he want the same thing? And what will you do when the battle is won?
I don't really believe in the threat of Crowley now, because we've done nothing but see him coming all year. And he certainly hasn't been subtle or believably manipulative. As far as I can tell, Jeremy Carver and his writers have decided that Crowley should always do the most evil thing possible, because he's evil and he's a demon and demons are evil and did I mention that he's evil? So, as I said, we get a whole lot of Generic Demon Evil Overlord-ness, and not a whole lot of Crowley.
This extends from big things right down to small things. An obvious big thing is my unanswered question from We Need to Talk About Kevin: why the hell did Crowley want to open the gates of hell? When Azazel did it, he had a reason: he was going to war against the angels and he needed an army. This was repeatedly hinted at over the course of the first two seasons, leading to this chilling exchange between him and Sam:
Sam: I thought we were supposed to be -
Azazel: Soldiers in a coming war? That’s true. You are. But here’s the thing: I don’t need soldiers. I need soldier. I just need the one.
Sam: Why?
Azazel: Well, I couldn’t just come out and say that, could I, Sam? I had to let everyone think they had a fighting chance. But what I need is a leader.
Sam: To lead who?
Azazel: Oh, I’ve already got my army. Or I will soon, anyway.
2.21 All Hell Breaks Loose pt 1
When the gates of hell opened at the end of season two, we knew why. Now, I could certainly understand Sam, Dean and Kevin not understanding Crowley's reasons at the beginning of the season. There's no reason to tell a story the same way twice. But no one has so much as wondered why. Seventeen episodes later, I think that incident is pretty much forgotten. There was no reason. Crowley just did it because he's evil.
But, well, I could forgive that. It's the little things that bug me. At this point, Crowley's main purpose in the season seems to be being randomly nasty to his minions. We have him insulting and vanishing - and possibly killing, it's hard to tell - the witch Delta in A Little Slice of Kevin despite the fact that she delivered Kevin right to him. We have him abandoning his torturer, Viggo, to die in Torn and Frayed. I honestly have no idea why he did this. If Crowley were human I'd say it was to buy himself time to flee, but he can vanish in an instant. He left someone who had extracted vital information for him in enemy hands, both utterly betraying Viggo and risking that Viggo might (as he very nearly does) let Sam and Dean in on the secret. In Trial and Error we establish that Crowley made a series of crossroads deals without telling the victims the rules, because .... evil? And in Goodbye Stranger we have him making the classic Evil Overlord move of announcing that if you want something done right you have to do it yourself before butchering his unfortunate minion. Because obviously you want the people who work for you to be too scared to report mishaps to you, so you don't know things are going wrong until the enemy is at the gates.
There are a lot of those 'to do' lists for Evil Overlords out there, but notice how most of them tend to have at least one section on not treating your minions like shit? Apparently Crowley hasn't. And this is a big step back from the way previous villains behaved, and the way Crowley himself used to behave.
Azazel, after all, delivered on his promises: he got the demons out of hell, he held them together until they were free of the place they despised - and it cost him his life. Lilith's job was tough: as the bridge between Azazel and Lucifer, she had nothing practical to offer her people; they could win battles, but they weren't going to see any rewards until the boss got there. And yet when we saw her and her fellow sacrifices waiting for Sam in the sanctuary, and she said:
Lilith: Don't be afraid. We're going to save the world.
4.22 Lucifer Rising
Those demons were scared, and they knew they were going to die. And Lilith had the sense to be kind, and to make it clear to them that she wasn't asking anything of them that she wasn't willing to do herself. Because you don't make frightened people stand their ground by being mean to them.
Lucifer despised demons, and intended to betray and destroy them, but he wasn't stupid enough to go around announcing that to their faces. Abandon All Hope offers us that ugly dichotomy: we have on the one hand Lucifer sacrificing demons en masse to raise Death (having clearly convinced them, from their behaviour, that this is a noble and necessary sacrifice) because they're 'just demons' and on the other his unfailing politeness and gentleness with Meg, because she's been serving him well and he wants her to go on serving him well. And we see how well it works. Meg believes Lucifer and is loyal to him, and won't be swayed by what Crowley believes Lucifer will do.
Meg: We're going to win. Can you feel it? You cloud-hopping pansies lost the whole damn universe. Lucifer's going to take over heaven. We're going to heaven, Clarence.
Castiel: Strange, because I heard a different theory from a demon named Crowley.
Meg: You don't know Crowley.
Castiel: He believes Lucifer is just using demons to achieve an end, and that, once he does, he'll destroy you all.
Meg: You're wrong. Lucifer is the father of our race. Our creator. Your god may be a deadbeat. Mine - mine walks the earth.
5.10 Abandon All Hope
That leaves Crowley himself. When we meet Crowley in season six, we find that he has remodelled hell (a fact that I bet we're going to be ignoring in the future) into an endless queue. It now lacks all the 'pit of despair' stuff that so terrified the demons, and yet remains an efficient way of grinding down human souls to serve demonic needs. In Weekend at Bobby's Crowley explains, via complaining, why he is doing this.
Bobby: Trouble in Paradise?
Crowley: Mate. You... have no idea. I thought … when I got the corner office … I thought it was all going to be rainbows and two-headed puppies. But, if I'm being honest, it's been hell.
Bobby: I thought that was the point.
Crowley: You know what the problem with demons is?
Bobby: They're demons.
Crowley: Exactly. Evil lying prats. The whole lot of them. And stupid. Try to show them a - a new way, a better way. And what do you get? Bugger all. You know, there's days that I think Lucifer's whole 'Spike anything with black eyes' plan wasn't half bad. Hmm. Feels good to get it off my chest. We should make this a thing.
6.04 Weekend at Bobby's
Crowley is trying to forge a way forward for the demons in a post-apocalyptic world. It's not really surprising that he's having trouble convincing some of his followers of the virtues of his plan, given that they just lost out on their chance at heaven, but it's clear that he does have a vision, and he's making promises that give his followers a reason to stay loyal to him.
This little speech of Crowley's highlights a big problem I have with his behaviour this year. If Crowley had difficulty keeping the demons on side when he was behaving reasonably ... how the hell is he doing it when he's behaving like this? Granted some demons at least seem to have been born in the shallow end of the gene pool, but they're not that stupid. They do their jobs in the expectation of being paid. Low-level, less bright demons in particular are shown to be greedy for rewards - Meg uses this to her advantage in Reading Is Fundamental - and the dreamers like Azazel, Ruby and Meg herself have their eyes on the big prize of freedom at the end of their labours. How many of his own kind does Crowley have to slaughter and deride before they decide he is a really shitty boss? Everything I've learnt about demons from watching Supernatural tells me that they should be in open rebellion against Crowley by now. But they're not. Because ... he's evil ... and they're evil ... and it's all about the evil, right?
The other big problem that I'm having with Crowley this year is the amount of torture he's using. Now the simple fact that Crowley utilises torture is not in itself a problem: he's a demon, it's always been in his toolkit and we've seen him use it in previous seasons. But here they seem to be having him use torture at the expense of his other skills and personality traits. When was the last time we saw Crowley actually convince someone that trusting him was the right course of action - without that argument being '... And if you don't I'll kill your family'? When was the last time we saw him make someone an irresistable offer (Well, to be fair, in the backstory of Trial and Error - but that is ten-year-old information and irrelevant to season eight's plot)? Where is the Crowley who fixed Bobby's legs without being asked, because he understood that that's the kind of thing that makes people trust you? Where is the Crowley who did his best to dance around harming Sam and Dean, because leaving them alive kept Castiel on side? Why has he never found a way to make Kevin doubt that what he's doing is right? Why has he not made friends and struck deals that could keep him and his safe?
Instead, we have an endless parade of gore. Crowley kills Kevin's girlfriend because ... he has so many hostages to work with? Crowley tortures future prophets to scare Kevin. Crowley cuts off Kevin's finger to make him toe the line. Crowley tortures Meg for a year because apparently he has nothing better to do. It goes on and on - and I thought the torture scenes with the angel Samandriel were particularly gratuitous. Did we really need to watch a slow-motion lobotomy? Why is that interesting?
The thing about torture is that it is large-scale, in-your-face evil. Much of Crowley's game has been the art of making people forget, or at least gloss over, that part of his nature. The fact that he does this does not make him less dangerous. It makes him more dangerous. Crowley admits to torture when it suits him to, and not otherwise. It's a card he pulls out when he needs it, and can put away just as easily when he feels that a civilised chat over a glass of Scotch will get him his way more easily. This 'decking myself out in people's entrails is my first response to conflict!' character seems peculiarly at odds with the Crowley of earlier seasons, who generally preferred it when people weren't paying attention to him. He still did violence, sure, but unless the plot required us to delve into Crowley's torture chambers, mostly he did it when we weren't looking. It's as though Crowley got randomly replaced by Alistair, but even Alistair had a greater sense of nuance than season eight's Crowley.
As far as I can tell, Crowley is simply being set up to be the biggest bastard possible - and I'm not sure why. He was already quite evil enough to justify Sam and Dean killing him. But it was a degree of evil that made sense, and was mitigated somewhat by an understanding of human nature and how to deal with other people. I don't know why they are making him act like a stupid minion type. It makes him far less unsettling and far less interesting.
To head into spoiler territory (although, for obvious reasons, I haven't seen the episode so I hope I'm simply misunderstanding the context)
[Spoiler for the sneak peek of Taxi Driver]
I find it difficult to believe that Crowley would take Bobby's soul to hell for no reason. Bobby may have annoyed him somewhat, but he shouldn't be anywhere near the top of Crowley's hit list. I could certainly understand him taking Bobby as a hostage - it seems likely that that was the point of reneging on his bargain with Bobby in season six. Dragging Bobby to hell gains Crowley very little. Being able to promise Sam and Dean that he won't as long as they leave him alone would gain him a lot. And sure enough, when he lost control of Bobby's soul he immediately threatened Sam's, and when Sam was safely back in his body he moved on to threatening Lisa and Ben. But apparently Crowley has had Bobby all this time and yet has said nothing. Wouldn't it be smarter to show Bobby, safe, sound and torture free, in hell - and make it clear that he remains under Crowley's protection as long as Sam and Dean stop messing about with tablets? As it is, it looks like he's just going to have to deal with a seriously annoyed Sam Winchester. What happened to the Crowley who didn't underestimate his enemies?
So what are they doing with Crowley? Under the circumstances, I think the likeliest thing is that they are hinting that he is a knight of hell. His conversation with Naomi in Goodbye Stranger hinted that he is much older than he claimed to be and hails from Mesopotamia. His remarks about Metatron hinted that he met him. He gives every sign of being a demon - the red eyes, the reddish-black smoke, the tendency to possess people on a whim. And the character of Abaddon, fun as she was, served no practical purpose except to introduce us to the concept of the knights, who, as an ancient order of demons, presumably parallel the Men of Letters.
What I do not understand is why they are doing this. Abaddon, after all, was still a demon: still a tormented human soul with a great capacity for violence and a lot of magic power. Why scrap years of characterisation in order to make Crowley a slightly different version of what he already is? What's the point? If you specifically want a knight of hell, why not just make Abaddon your main villain and have her oust Crowley from his throne?
There is, of course, an outside chance that they have decided Crowley ought to be an angel or some other monster entirely ... but that would be breaking even more rules than they already are. While I'm sure you could make a case for the extent of Crowley's powers being a sign he is not a demon, it's not one I find particularly compelling. Demon powers, like the powers of ghosts, are really only limited by the imagination of the demon in question. Azazel was immune to holy water. The Seven Deadly Sins could control people's minds with a touch. Casey-of-Sin-City cheerfully blew Dean's exorcism away from within a devil's trap. Ruby supplemented her demon powers with witchcraft. Sure, they could turn around and insist that it's 'obvious' that he's not a demon, but I don't think it's any more 'obvious' than it was that Gabriel could do things a Trickster god could not when he was the only one we'd ever met.
Ah, well. In any case: that is my problem. Crowley's behaviour is inconsistent with his earlier attitudes and relies too heavily on evil stereotypes and the less interesting parts of demon nature. My dream answer is that this is not really Crowley, but some other monster who has stolen the body he was possessing and using Crowley's position for his own ends. I don't really believe that, because I think anybody who could see Crowley's true face would know - and that would include Castiel, Meg and Crowley's demon minions. But if there are retcons going on here, that is probably the one that would annoy me least. I could handwave that with 'face-disguising magic'. Crowley's sudden inability to scheme properly is a much larger problem.
I've been bothered by Crowley's characterisation since We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's not that he's acting as this year's main villain; I thoroughly enjoyed the villainous side of Crowley in season six, because he behaved like the sort of bad guy I thought Crowley would be. My main problem is that the way they're using him gives us very little of what is interesting and distinctive about Crowley as an individual, and instead hands us a whole lot of Generic Demon Evil Overlord-ness.
All demons use torture and murder to some extent. The fact that this is such a dominant part of demonic culture is one of the strong horror elements of Supernatural - they use it to play up exactly how bad hell is and what going there does to people. But because it is common to all demons, it's not very interesting in and of itself; it's just an identifying marker like their black/red/white eyes or the columns of smoke they become when they're not possessing somebody. What makes a demon interesting is the personality that emerges around their demonic nature.
etoile444 remarks that Crowley 'has acted in a manner that’s a bit different from typical demons' right from his inception. I think that's only true insofar as most of the demons we see on the show are basically extras. They stomp onto the scene, flash their black eyes, maybe deliver an offensive line or two - and then get stabbed or exorcised. They're cannon (and canon) fodder, not characters, and that means they're simple. When we look at demon characters with whom we spend a significant amount of time, they are complex people with a variety of good and bad traits and a baffling array of potential powers.
Meg, for instance, was basically a straightforward soldier type. Though she used subterfuge in the short term, her real game was always revealed to the audience by the end of the episode - and right from her first appearance in Scarecrow we saw her express a preference for the direct approach over all this messing about with undercover work. Ruby, on the other hand, was a master manipulator - a demonic chameleon, adept at shaping her behaviour to suit the role she chose to play.
Crowley, then, is a man who understands that sometimes the most cunning and advantageous thing you can do is keep your word. He has never been portrayed as a good person - in fact I would say that both Meg and Ruby were in their own ways far more moral than Crowley - and he has certainly lied, cheated and exploited loopholes, but he once understood that there was a time and a place for backstabbing, and that the fact that you know how to use a stick doesn't mean that offering a carrot won't sometimes get you better results. When Crowley wailed 'I'm in sales, damn it!' way back in Abandon All Hope, that was his defining character moment. Because he really is: Crowley is a silver-tongued devil (now there's an episode title they should use sometime), who can talk pretty much anyone into pretty much anything. The interesting thing about Crowley as a villain in season six was not that he kept a prison full of alpha monsters to torture for information, it was how easily he was able to convince the supposedly more moral Castiel that this was a really good idea.
Though I'm not generally a fan of Dabb and Loflin's stories, I thought that Crowley's backstory in Weekend at Bobby's was inspired. It fits neatly with the general theme within Supernatural that people are shaped, for good or ill, by the monstrous things that happen to them. Sam and Dean are who they are because an unknown (at the time) monster killed their mother and sent their father off on an obsessive and futile hunt. Bobby Singer developed his lust for knowledge after not knowing how to save his possessed wife. Most monsters are 'evil' simply because they have been bitten or cursed and don't know how to handle it. And the king of hell was once a 17th century tailor who fell for a silly crossroads deal and eventually succumbed to torture in hell. It's startling to think that Crowley wasn't always bad (he doesn't seem to have been a great father, but he certainly wasn't Hitler) and more than that, that Crowley was once naïve. You can imagine how the drive to never be taken advantage of that way again could shape a simple man into a Machiavellian genius. He had centuries to learn and get there, just as Bobby had decades to build himself up from scrap dealer to scholar. It made sense. I liked it.
It has also been Crowley's habit to work from the shadows. In seasons five and seven, he stayed exclusively in the shadows - he talked, he schemed, he made deals and found ways to provide his chosen allies with the tools they needed to get the job done. He certainly took some risks, but he never decided it would be a good idea to face Lucifer, Castiel or the leviathans in open combat. In season six he stayed in the background as much as possible. At the tail end of Family Matters he was forced to step into the spotlight to protect Castiel; Dean was determined to find out what had happened to Sam and needed to be distracted. Just three episodes later he managed to fake his own death and disappear again for a further nine episodes.
All of which brings me to the lead up to Crowley's second stint as a villain:
Dean: Crowley ain't the problem this year.
Meg: When are you going to get it? Crowley's always the problem. He's just waiting for the right moment to strike. I know what I'm supposed to do. And it isn't screw with Sam and Dean or lose the only angel who'd go to bat for me.
7.21 Reading Is Fundamental
When Meg gave that warning, I believed her. Because Crowley is the guy you don't see coming. You generally only remember him when you want something from him, or when he comes to collect what he's owed. It's what makes him scary, interesting and even likeable. Because working with Crowley isn't necessarily a bad idea. Not if you're desperate. As long as your interests are aligned, he'll probably have your back. But how sure are you that you and he want the same thing? And what will you do when the battle is won?
I don't really believe in the threat of Crowley now, because we've done nothing but see him coming all year. And he certainly hasn't been subtle or believably manipulative. As far as I can tell, Jeremy Carver and his writers have decided that Crowley should always do the most evil thing possible, because he's evil and he's a demon and demons are evil and did I mention that he's evil? So, as I said, we get a whole lot of Generic Demon Evil Overlord-ness, and not a whole lot of Crowley.
This extends from big things right down to small things. An obvious big thing is my unanswered question from We Need to Talk About Kevin: why the hell did Crowley want to open the gates of hell? When Azazel did it, he had a reason: he was going to war against the angels and he needed an army. This was repeatedly hinted at over the course of the first two seasons, leading to this chilling exchange between him and Sam:
Sam: I thought we were supposed to be -
Azazel: Soldiers in a coming war? That’s true. You are. But here’s the thing: I don’t need soldiers. I need soldier. I just need the one.
Sam: Why?
Azazel: Well, I couldn’t just come out and say that, could I, Sam? I had to let everyone think they had a fighting chance. But what I need is a leader.
Sam: To lead who?
Azazel: Oh, I’ve already got my army. Or I will soon, anyway.
2.21 All Hell Breaks Loose pt 1
When the gates of hell opened at the end of season two, we knew why. Now, I could certainly understand Sam, Dean and Kevin not understanding Crowley's reasons at the beginning of the season. There's no reason to tell a story the same way twice. But no one has so much as wondered why. Seventeen episodes later, I think that incident is pretty much forgotten. There was no reason. Crowley just did it because he's evil.
But, well, I could forgive that. It's the little things that bug me. At this point, Crowley's main purpose in the season seems to be being randomly nasty to his minions. We have him insulting and vanishing - and possibly killing, it's hard to tell - the witch Delta in A Little Slice of Kevin despite the fact that she delivered Kevin right to him. We have him abandoning his torturer, Viggo, to die in Torn and Frayed. I honestly have no idea why he did this. If Crowley were human I'd say it was to buy himself time to flee, but he can vanish in an instant. He left someone who had extracted vital information for him in enemy hands, both utterly betraying Viggo and risking that Viggo might (as he very nearly does) let Sam and Dean in on the secret. In Trial and Error we establish that Crowley made a series of crossroads deals without telling the victims the rules, because .... evil? And in Goodbye Stranger we have him making the classic Evil Overlord move of announcing that if you want something done right you have to do it yourself before butchering his unfortunate minion. Because obviously you want the people who work for you to be too scared to report mishaps to you, so you don't know things are going wrong until the enemy is at the gates.
There are a lot of those 'to do' lists for Evil Overlords out there, but notice how most of them tend to have at least one section on not treating your minions like shit? Apparently Crowley hasn't. And this is a big step back from the way previous villains behaved, and the way Crowley himself used to behave.
Azazel, after all, delivered on his promises: he got the demons out of hell, he held them together until they were free of the place they despised - and it cost him his life. Lilith's job was tough: as the bridge between Azazel and Lucifer, she had nothing practical to offer her people; they could win battles, but they weren't going to see any rewards until the boss got there. And yet when we saw her and her fellow sacrifices waiting for Sam in the sanctuary, and she said:
Lilith: Don't be afraid. We're going to save the world.
4.22 Lucifer Rising
Those demons were scared, and they knew they were going to die. And Lilith had the sense to be kind, and to make it clear to them that she wasn't asking anything of them that she wasn't willing to do herself. Because you don't make frightened people stand their ground by being mean to them.
Lucifer despised demons, and intended to betray and destroy them, but he wasn't stupid enough to go around announcing that to their faces. Abandon All Hope offers us that ugly dichotomy: we have on the one hand Lucifer sacrificing demons en masse to raise Death (having clearly convinced them, from their behaviour, that this is a noble and necessary sacrifice) because they're 'just demons' and on the other his unfailing politeness and gentleness with Meg, because she's been serving him well and he wants her to go on serving him well. And we see how well it works. Meg believes Lucifer and is loyal to him, and won't be swayed by what Crowley believes Lucifer will do.
Meg: We're going to win. Can you feel it? You cloud-hopping pansies lost the whole damn universe. Lucifer's going to take over heaven. We're going to heaven, Clarence.
Castiel: Strange, because I heard a different theory from a demon named Crowley.
Meg: You don't know Crowley.
Castiel: He believes Lucifer is just using demons to achieve an end, and that, once he does, he'll destroy you all.
Meg: You're wrong. Lucifer is the father of our race. Our creator. Your god may be a deadbeat. Mine - mine walks the earth.
5.10 Abandon All Hope
That leaves Crowley himself. When we meet Crowley in season six, we find that he has remodelled hell (a fact that I bet we're going to be ignoring in the future) into an endless queue. It now lacks all the 'pit of despair' stuff that so terrified the demons, and yet remains an efficient way of grinding down human souls to serve demonic needs. In Weekend at Bobby's Crowley explains, via complaining, why he is doing this.
Bobby: Trouble in Paradise?
Crowley: Mate. You... have no idea. I thought … when I got the corner office … I thought it was all going to be rainbows and two-headed puppies. But, if I'm being honest, it's been hell.
Bobby: I thought that was the point.
Crowley: You know what the problem with demons is?
Bobby: They're demons.
Crowley: Exactly. Evil lying prats. The whole lot of them. And stupid. Try to show them a - a new way, a better way. And what do you get? Bugger all. You know, there's days that I think Lucifer's whole 'Spike anything with black eyes' plan wasn't half bad. Hmm. Feels good to get it off my chest. We should make this a thing.
6.04 Weekend at Bobby's
Crowley is trying to forge a way forward for the demons in a post-apocalyptic world. It's not really surprising that he's having trouble convincing some of his followers of the virtues of his plan, given that they just lost out on their chance at heaven, but it's clear that he does have a vision, and he's making promises that give his followers a reason to stay loyal to him.
This little speech of Crowley's highlights a big problem I have with his behaviour this year. If Crowley had difficulty keeping the demons on side when he was behaving reasonably ... how the hell is he doing it when he's behaving like this? Granted some demons at least seem to have been born in the shallow end of the gene pool, but they're not that stupid. They do their jobs in the expectation of being paid. Low-level, less bright demons in particular are shown to be greedy for rewards - Meg uses this to her advantage in Reading Is Fundamental - and the dreamers like Azazel, Ruby and Meg herself have their eyes on the big prize of freedom at the end of their labours. How many of his own kind does Crowley have to slaughter and deride before they decide he is a really shitty boss? Everything I've learnt about demons from watching Supernatural tells me that they should be in open rebellion against Crowley by now. But they're not. Because ... he's evil ... and they're evil ... and it's all about the evil, right?
The other big problem that I'm having with Crowley this year is the amount of torture he's using. Now the simple fact that Crowley utilises torture is not in itself a problem: he's a demon, it's always been in his toolkit and we've seen him use it in previous seasons. But here they seem to be having him use torture at the expense of his other skills and personality traits. When was the last time we saw Crowley actually convince someone that trusting him was the right course of action - without that argument being '... And if you don't I'll kill your family'? When was the last time we saw him make someone an irresistable offer (Well, to be fair, in the backstory of Trial and Error - but that is ten-year-old information and irrelevant to season eight's plot)? Where is the Crowley who fixed Bobby's legs without being asked, because he understood that that's the kind of thing that makes people trust you? Where is the Crowley who did his best to dance around harming Sam and Dean, because leaving them alive kept Castiel on side? Why has he never found a way to make Kevin doubt that what he's doing is right? Why has he not made friends and struck deals that could keep him and his safe?
Instead, we have an endless parade of gore. Crowley kills Kevin's girlfriend because ... he has so many hostages to work with? Crowley tortures future prophets to scare Kevin. Crowley cuts off Kevin's finger to make him toe the line. Crowley tortures Meg for a year because apparently he has nothing better to do. It goes on and on - and I thought the torture scenes with the angel Samandriel were particularly gratuitous. Did we really need to watch a slow-motion lobotomy? Why is that interesting?
The thing about torture is that it is large-scale, in-your-face evil. Much of Crowley's game has been the art of making people forget, or at least gloss over, that part of his nature. The fact that he does this does not make him less dangerous. It makes him more dangerous. Crowley admits to torture when it suits him to, and not otherwise. It's a card he pulls out when he needs it, and can put away just as easily when he feels that a civilised chat over a glass of Scotch will get him his way more easily. This 'decking myself out in people's entrails is my first response to conflict!' character seems peculiarly at odds with the Crowley of earlier seasons, who generally preferred it when people weren't paying attention to him. He still did violence, sure, but unless the plot required us to delve into Crowley's torture chambers, mostly he did it when we weren't looking. It's as though Crowley got randomly replaced by Alistair, but even Alistair had a greater sense of nuance than season eight's Crowley.
As far as I can tell, Crowley is simply being set up to be the biggest bastard possible - and I'm not sure why. He was already quite evil enough to justify Sam and Dean killing him. But it was a degree of evil that made sense, and was mitigated somewhat by an understanding of human nature and how to deal with other people. I don't know why they are making him act like a stupid minion type. It makes him far less unsettling and far less interesting.
To head into spoiler territory (although, for obvious reasons, I haven't seen the episode so I hope I'm simply misunderstanding the context)
[Spoiler for the sneak peek of Taxi Driver]
I find it difficult to believe that Crowley would take Bobby's soul to hell for no reason. Bobby may have annoyed him somewhat, but he shouldn't be anywhere near the top of Crowley's hit list. I could certainly understand him taking Bobby as a hostage - it seems likely that that was the point of reneging on his bargain with Bobby in season six. Dragging Bobby to hell gains Crowley very little. Being able to promise Sam and Dean that he won't as long as they leave him alone would gain him a lot. And sure enough, when he lost control of Bobby's soul he immediately threatened Sam's, and when Sam was safely back in his body he moved on to threatening Lisa and Ben. But apparently Crowley has had Bobby all this time and yet has said nothing. Wouldn't it be smarter to show Bobby, safe, sound and torture free, in hell - and make it clear that he remains under Crowley's protection as long as Sam and Dean stop messing about with tablets? As it is, it looks like he's just going to have to deal with a seriously annoyed Sam Winchester. What happened to the Crowley who didn't underestimate his enemies?
So what are they doing with Crowley? Under the circumstances, I think the likeliest thing is that they are hinting that he is a knight of hell. His conversation with Naomi in Goodbye Stranger hinted that he is much older than he claimed to be and hails from Mesopotamia. His remarks about Metatron hinted that he met him. He gives every sign of being a demon - the red eyes, the reddish-black smoke, the tendency to possess people on a whim. And the character of Abaddon, fun as she was, served no practical purpose except to introduce us to the concept of the knights, who, as an ancient order of demons, presumably parallel the Men of Letters.
What I do not understand is why they are doing this. Abaddon, after all, was still a demon: still a tormented human soul with a great capacity for violence and a lot of magic power. Why scrap years of characterisation in order to make Crowley a slightly different version of what he already is? What's the point? If you specifically want a knight of hell, why not just make Abaddon your main villain and have her oust Crowley from his throne?
There is, of course, an outside chance that they have decided Crowley ought to be an angel or some other monster entirely ... but that would be breaking even more rules than they already are. While I'm sure you could make a case for the extent of Crowley's powers being a sign he is not a demon, it's not one I find particularly compelling. Demon powers, like the powers of ghosts, are really only limited by the imagination of the demon in question. Azazel was immune to holy water. The Seven Deadly Sins could control people's minds with a touch. Casey-of-Sin-City cheerfully blew Dean's exorcism away from within a devil's trap. Ruby supplemented her demon powers with witchcraft. Sure, they could turn around and insist that it's 'obvious' that he's not a demon, but I don't think it's any more 'obvious' than it was that Gabriel could do things a Trickster god could not when he was the only one we'd ever met.
Ah, well. In any case: that is my problem. Crowley's behaviour is inconsistent with his earlier attitudes and relies too heavily on evil stereotypes and the less interesting parts of demon nature. My dream answer is that this is not really Crowley, but some other monster who has stolen the body he was possessing and using Crowley's position for his own ends. I don't really believe that, because I think anybody who could see Crowley's true face would know - and that would include Castiel, Meg and Crowley's demon minions. But if there are retcons going on here, that is probably the one that would annoy me least. I could handwave that with 'face-disguising magic'. Crowley's sudden inability to scheme properly is a much larger problem.