As the young people say - THIS EPISODE GAVE ME ALL THE FEELS!!! What follows is mainly meta ramblings on the character aspects of the episode and the season as a whole
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With Sam I think the parallel with Castiel is clearly about atonement.
Agreed. They seem to share the idea that amends are made through acts of reparation (Sam jumping into the Pit, Cas taking on Sam's damage), and that it's possible to reach a point where the scales of guilt are returned to balance, and they can stop actively feeling bad. (The way Cas is acting right now, though, isn't reparation, especially not in Dean's eyes; it's avoidance. Whether he's behaving this way out of genuine incapacity--he *can't* deal, not yet--or deliberate denial, though, is the big question.)
I love that the show's paralleled Sam and Cas in the way they deal with guilt, because it puts them in direct contrast to how Dean *doesn't* deal with guilt, really: he takes every bad thing that happens in the world and is vaguely related to him onto his own shoulders, but he doesn't seem to have any workable strategy for ever finding *relief* from that weight. He drinks, and he throws himself into work, and he can sometimes come to terms with his role in the badness, but he rarely *forgives himself* for *anything*.
Which feeds into this excellent parallel you drew:
in The Man Who Would Be King, when Castiel's plans for purgatory and its souls are revealed he tells Dean - "I'm doing this for you, Dean. I'm doing this because of you."
Hester brutally reinforces this with her accusation that "The very touch of you corrupts. When Castiel first laid a hand on you in Hell, he was lost!"
Whether Cas intended to *blame* Dean for Cas's own actions, I'm not sure--I think an argument can be made that, in saying what he did, he was just trying to get Dean to understand that the choices he made were based on the values Dean taught him. But whatever Cas intended, Dean almost certainly felt responsible--because that's what Dean does--and so, when Dean told Kevin that angels can't care about things without becoming broken, he was saying that Cas is broken because Cas cared about Dean.
And then Hester's accusation confirmed it for him.
...sorry for the word gush all over your comments. This episode makes me HAPPY, and your meta was GOOD. :)
With Sam I think the parallel with Castiel is clearly about atonement.
Agreed. They seem to share the idea that amends are made through acts of reparation (Sam jumping into the Pit, Cas taking on Sam's damage), and that it's possible to reach a point where the scales of guilt are returned to balance, and they can stop actively feeling bad. (The way Cas is acting right now, though, isn't reparation, especially not in Dean's eyes; it's avoidance. Whether he's behaving this way out of genuine incapacity--he *can't* deal, not yet--or deliberate denial, though, is the big question.)
I love that the show's paralleled Sam and Cas in the way they deal with guilt, because it puts them in direct contrast to how Dean *doesn't* deal with guilt, really: he takes every bad thing that happens in the world and is vaguely related to him onto his own shoulders, but he doesn't seem to have any workable strategy for ever finding *relief* from that weight. He drinks, and he throws himself into work, and he can sometimes come to terms with his role in the badness, but he rarely *forgives himself* for *anything*.
Which feeds into this excellent parallel you drew:
in The Man Who Would Be King, when Castiel's plans for purgatory and its souls are revealed he tells Dean - "I'm doing this for you, Dean. I'm doing this because of you."
Hester brutally reinforces this with her accusation that "The very touch of you corrupts. When Castiel first laid a hand on you in Hell, he was lost!"
Whether Cas intended to *blame* Dean for Cas's own actions, I'm not sure--I think an argument can be made that, in saying what he did, he was just trying to get Dean to understand that the choices he made were based on the values Dean taught him. But whatever Cas intended, Dean almost certainly felt responsible--because that's what Dean does--and so, when Dean told Kevin that angels can't care about things without becoming broken, he was saying that Cas is broken because Cas cared about Dean.
And then Hester's accusation confirmed it for him.
...sorry for the word gush all over your comments. This episode makes me HAPPY, and your meta was GOOD. :)
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