it's all very west side story.
I’m glad Cas is back because I love him, but I also think his importance to the Winchester saga is underrated. It’s a little bit strange to think of an angel as a reality check, but that does seem to be Castiel’s function in the narrative. I’m reminded a lot of Anya from BtVS. Castiel’s literalness is funny, sure. But he’s also an oddly innocent observer of human behavior, particularly of the main characters, on whom it’s generally tough to get perspective. Without Cas, it would be entirely too easy to normativize our empathy with the leads. If you’ve been not paying much attention and, say, seeing Sam as having “abandoned” the family when leaving for college or by finding a fulfilling relationship outside of the family, then it’s discordant to also root for Castiel to secede from his own dysfunctional family and do it - all of it - for Dean. If you get mad at a God that lets bad things happen to good people, Cas makes you face the alternative of a deity that decides it won’t. Cas, with his learned heresy and his blunt artlessness, forces us to ask why we think what we do about the Winchesters and their world.
Except now he’s in the world, experiencing all the self-doubt that humans do - he’s dirty, he had to do penance. He had to make a choice, and he knew he just wasn’t ready to be out in the world on his own yet. He had to stay back from Dean because he’s been defining himself around the Winchesters since he fell. And that’s not free will, not really. He chose to stay, running the risk that he would never make it back, because that was the only way he was ever going to start making decisions on his own, and I’m so excited to see what happens now that he can.
Cas had two big moments that hit me like a ton of bricks. The first was in the confrontation with Crowley, when he knew he couldn’t throw down and win, so he broke the Word of God. That’s what he’s been doing on some psychological level since he decided to make it up as he goes at the end of S4, but now he’s gotten to the point where he’s ready to own his defiance without redefining himself around it.
The second was Naomi’s chat with Cas, in which she claimed to have raised him from perdition because she has work for him.
Cas just always brings the awesome. In this case, he intensifies the really excellent work with perspective that we’ve been doing this season. In S4, when we met Cas, he was set up as the guy with the answers, or at least, as many answers as anyone had to give, and we only found out that wasn’t true during the upheaval of Lucifer Rising. This time around, we have a little bit of insight into who’s pulling the strings even before Cas has any idea about the games that are being played. The guys were played by the information they were given, using human tools of communication. Is it that different to keep information from Castiel, using celestial treatments?
We don’t have a whole lot to go on about Naomi. We can’t really take her word for it that she even is an angel, but I’m inclined to go with it - after all, she has no reason to lie if she can control Castiel’s memory. My best guess at the moment is that she, and possibly a few others, stepped in as kind of backstage power players during all the chaos of S6, and then filled the power vacuum left by Cas during S7. Since then, she’s had sufficient time to consolidate whatever forces she has left and get cracking on…whatever Heaven’s new plan is, and I am pretty excited to find out what.
Sometimes, we are the architects of our own skewed perceptions. Dean doesn’t just take a rationalist perspective that everything in the world can be explained by observable rules, but a solipsistic perspective that reality is composed only of that which he knows and accepts. And as destructive as that is for those around him, it also limits the information he’s even going to get before he starts picking and choosing. Cas didn’t explain his desire to remain in Purgatory because he watched Dean dig his heels in over the perfectly reasonable prediction that Cas might not metaphysically be able to make it through the portal, enough to know that Dean wasn’t going to honor his actual wishes. Sam isn’t telling him much of anything about his year off or the plans he’s making for his future, because (as per Heartache) Dean has appointed himself sole arbiter of what Sam thinks and feels. It’s easy to say from the outside that they need to be the grown-ups and set him straight, but seriously, how? And so Dean’s perception of those around him won’t be right even if he does start paying attention, because they’ve learned not to bother sharing.
And sometimes, everyone can be factually right, even if that doesn’t necessarily lead to ambiguity for us.
KEVIN: You killed my mother!
CROWLEY: To be fair, she was plotting to kill me.
Crowley is torturing and murdering prophets as Our Heroes are torturing and murdering not only some random demons, but also their hosts. The hench-demon curled up in the trunk evokes Nancy the nurse back in S4 - what made that a big point of no return, and this a throw-away encounter on the way to a BDH moment? We don’t have to justify rooting for humanity and its protection, but if we did, it might not be as easy as we’d think.
ii.
The groundwork has been laid this season for a broader universe, not ruled exclusively by modern American folklore and perspective on Judeo-Christian theology. It’s not just Americans who are vanishing; you’re talking about another part of Craigslist. Turns out we don’t know what was up with Chuck, or what happened to him.
As the premiere suggested, the Abrahamic God is still a presence, and a mighty one - but still, more accessible and less singular than earlier reports suggested. Crowley sincerely wonders what God was thinking, and then back-burners that for a more important issue at hand. There’ll have to be an explanation for why the other archangels, hung up as they were on each other, never mentioned their brother Metatron, although his “farewell” note (Kevin, too tactful to call it what it really was) suggests a true tragedy in the heavenly family which might predate humanity, or even the angels.
It sounds like there are several dimensions, which until now have had almost no interaction with each other. Heaven is the domain of the angels, Purgatory belongs to the leviathan, Hell is for demons, Earth is for humans and other mortal animals, and there’s no reason to believe that list is even exhaustive. Likely the beings humans have referred to throughout history as “gods” come from a dimension of their own.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed as the camera pulls back and we get a better view of the ‘verse, and it’s true that the introduction of more powerful unknown players makes things tougher to predict, because all of those players have a will of their own. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for Our Heroes. Even wily, ass-covering motherfuckers like Crowley get dissatisfied, and when they do, they draw attention to themselves and overreach.
iii.
I was super-excited for ten minutes of this episode because we had a Bechdel Test pass for the first time in what feels like forever. And that’s still true, and one of the reasons the test is a useful tool is that it doesn’t put an unrealistic play-nice limitation on interactions between women. However, one crucial reason the Bechdel Test is a non-comprehensive tool is that it doesn’t account for conversations which fall into sexist meta-narratives, or for normative patterns within a particular narrative. In this case, we have the young, sexy woman as the betrayer of the naïve mother figure (not quite a Madonna, but close enough), who was well-intentioned but in over her silly head. Linda uses sexualized insults when she compares Delia unfavorably to a “hooker,” and Delia’s initial reappropriation of misogynist slurs gets walked back when she’s revealed to be a witch - and thus, axiomatically, the archetypal Whore (a person engaging in a shady marketplace of personal pleasure/power), and also evil (in service to a man, NATURALLY). After winning a temporary victory by embracing a physical, weapons-based (in modern American context, masculine) fighting style, Linda realizes the foolishness of trusting other women and submits to one male authority to be passed off to another. Garth, previously dismissed as silly and amateurish, suddenly becomes a man of the world when compared to this…woman. There are no normatively neutral or positive encounters between, or even with, women to balance out all that sexism. That is a serious problem in an otherwise excellent episode.
To be sure, there are interesting parallels to S4 going on here? Where Sam projects his Ruby issues onto Linda (Ruby was a witch too), while both boys accept Castiel without comment, when neither character is trustworthy. That’s still the paradigm where boys will be boys and should be allowed forever and a day to get over their mistakes, whereas women are presumptively on their third strike just for existing.
I mean. We’re at least somewhat in the realm of “stuff I usually gripe about” rather than the shocking misogyny of some of the earlier seasons. But this is still Not Okay.
iv.
SO! By the proportional verbiage in this post, I feel like it looks as if my main takeaway is DEAN IS AWFUL!! And it’s not. I really enjoyed the episode - the long-arc development, Cas, the perspective-play and mystery of the mind, the worldbuilding, an Adelle DeWitt-type HBIC to fear and love and her interactions with Cas, Crowley, the moral grayness of the leads, and did I mention CAS - but there’s a lot to unpack in the Sam and Dean interactions, and I don’t like how much of it seems to pass without saying, so. I say it.
Dean’s take on the split-second instance when his grip on Cas broke may not be any more or less valid than the one we see at the end of the episode. It is, as Cas said, what he “needed” to think. And Dean can’t bring himself to think that it just happened, that a gust of wind blew or the portal wouldn’t accept an angel or any number of things that wouldn’t be anyone’s fault. He didn’t choose to skew the memory in a way that he was actually responsible, and he certainly didn’t think to assign Cas any actual agency in what Cas perceived as a decision to stay in Purgatory. No, he needed to be angry and blame Cas for his weakness, that the people around him MAKE him feel so awful and guilty for THEIR failure to live up to the standard HE sets for them. He needs to punish the people around him for his feelings of powerlessness over the circumstances of his life.
Unfortunately, this issue isn’t limited to Dean and Cas. Let’s revisit the season premiere for a tick, because I think it’s extremely illuminating.
SAM: So Cas is dead? You saw him die?
DEAN: I saw enough.
SAM: So, then what, you’re not sure?
DEAN: I said I saw enough, Sam.
So, what Dean (along with a critical mass of viewers, apparently) is choosing to hold Sam accountable for doing to Dean, Dean was actually doing to Castiel. He gave Cas up for dead and didn’t even try to do anything about it. So, the hater-bitches are going to be reapportioning all that betrayal-indignation any day now, right? LOL THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT.
That’s a cheap shot I’m not above taking at the anti-Sam contingent of viewers, but it doesn’t really get at why this hurts my (already low and ever-sinking) opinion of Dean. While he wasn’t quite as clueless as Sam was at the end of last season, the practical concerns of getting into Purgatory from Earth and the issue of personal resources for that effort are similarly at play here. I don’t blame him for not busting Cas out any more than I blame Sam for not single-handedly getting Dean and Cas home.
I do, however, condemn Dean for the fact that within minutes of being reunited with Sam, he had resumed his campaign of undermining and gaslighting, sooner and to a more egregious extent than even I thought. He willfully misled Sam about what happened to their friend, and spent weeks berating and hating Sam for something he was doing at the time. I can’t excuse this big ugly case of projection on grounds of his being hurt and confused in the wake of losing Cas, though I am sure he was. A lie this big is a huge violation of Sam’s trust. By refusing to tell Sam the truth, Dean effectively delegitimizes Sam’s relationship with Cas, yet again reinforcing a situation where the people around him are isolated from others. His attempt to guilt and shame Sam into submission over a “betrayal” equivalent to his own actions toward Cas does such dishonor to their friend’s apparent death. It’s so petty and so very hurtful.
On the cerebral viewer level, I really admire that the show has gone to this ugly place with Dean; my little Sam-and-Cas-hugging lizard brain is throwing a screaming Lucifer-grade tantrum. This adds up to the way I’m still a bit worried about the framing. Neither Sam nor Cas has the information the audience does. Cas doesn’t know that Dean effectively lied to Sam; Sam doesn’t know the details of the incident, simply that Dean unsuccessfully “tried to get [Cas] out.” And so it doesn’t necessarily follow that Dean will be held accountable for the bad thing he actually did in using the incident as a tool in his manipulation of Sam, and I worry that telling us about it and showing no consequences for it will be construed as tacit approval. It’s a replay of the problem brought almost to light in Defending Your Life. Dean makes the very big things about fault because it gives him some twisted sense of agency and control in the horrible circumstances of his life. And because his life really is awful, we get a huge focus on Dean’s ENDLESS GUILT, NO PAIN IS LIKE HIS PAIN, for incidents for which he is explicitly (and often, justly) exonerated by other characters. He then relies on his self-image as someone who feels such FATHOMLESS SELF-HATRED about things he did not do in order to avoid a reasonable level of responsibility for the rotten things he does do. But as long as we see things from his POV, and as long as he is in a position to preserve the image he wants others to have of him, there’s a level of plausible deniability for the audience which feels a bit like hedging on the part of the narrative.
I say “hedging” because there’s no doubt in my mind that this is intentional. It’s strong characterization. It’s not a particularly surprising reaction to his father’s directive to “protect your brother EVERY LIVING MOMENT OF THE DAY AND NIGHT, FROM DEMONS AND ALSO MY DRUNK ASS.” But it has become a self-reinforcing spiral of justifications for the cruel dominance games he gets off on playing with the people around him.
(Oh f-listers who love Sam but not Cas, this must have been a very frustrating episode! But hear this: Dean having someone else around for target practice is the best thing that has happened to Sam all season.) (Sam wouldn’t say that, though. After everything Cas has put him through, his face still lights up when he sees Cas. Because Sam understands what Cas did. Because Cas believed in Sam when nobody else did. Because he’s capable of true forgiveness, of grace, and when he loves, he loves unconditionally and forever. OH SAM.)
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/277601.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
Except now he’s in the world, experiencing all the self-doubt that humans do - he’s dirty, he had to do penance. He had to make a choice, and he knew he just wasn’t ready to be out in the world on his own yet. He had to stay back from Dean because he’s been defining himself around the Winchesters since he fell. And that’s not free will, not really. He chose to stay, running the risk that he would never make it back, because that was the only way he was ever going to start making decisions on his own, and I’m so excited to see what happens now that he can.
Cas had two big moments that hit me like a ton of bricks. The first was in the confrontation with Crowley, when he knew he couldn’t throw down and win, so he broke the Word of God. That’s what he’s been doing on some psychological level since he decided to make it up as he goes at the end of S4, but now he’s gotten to the point where he’s ready to own his defiance without redefining himself around it.
The second was Naomi’s chat with Cas, in which she claimed to have raised him from perdition because she has work for him.
Cas just always brings the awesome. In this case, he intensifies the really excellent work with perspective that we’ve been doing this season. In S4, when we met Cas, he was set up as the guy with the answers, or at least, as many answers as anyone had to give, and we only found out that wasn’t true during the upheaval of Lucifer Rising. This time around, we have a little bit of insight into who’s pulling the strings even before Cas has any idea about the games that are being played. The guys were played by the information they were given, using human tools of communication. Is it that different to keep information from Castiel, using celestial treatments?
We don’t have a whole lot to go on about Naomi. We can’t really take her word for it that she even is an angel, but I’m inclined to go with it - after all, she has no reason to lie if she can control Castiel’s memory. My best guess at the moment is that she, and possibly a few others, stepped in as kind of backstage power players during all the chaos of S6, and then filled the power vacuum left by Cas during S7. Since then, she’s had sufficient time to consolidate whatever forces she has left and get cracking on…whatever Heaven’s new plan is, and I am pretty excited to find out what.
Sometimes, we are the architects of our own skewed perceptions. Dean doesn’t just take a rationalist perspective that everything in the world can be explained by observable rules, but a solipsistic perspective that reality is composed only of that which he knows and accepts. And as destructive as that is for those around him, it also limits the information he’s even going to get before he starts picking and choosing. Cas didn’t explain his desire to remain in Purgatory because he watched Dean dig his heels in over the perfectly reasonable prediction that Cas might not metaphysically be able to make it through the portal, enough to know that Dean wasn’t going to honor his actual wishes. Sam isn’t telling him much of anything about his year off or the plans he’s making for his future, because (as per Heartache) Dean has appointed himself sole arbiter of what Sam thinks and feels. It’s easy to say from the outside that they need to be the grown-ups and set him straight, but seriously, how? And so Dean’s perception of those around him won’t be right even if he does start paying attention, because they’ve learned not to bother sharing.
And sometimes, everyone can be factually right, even if that doesn’t necessarily lead to ambiguity for us.
KEVIN: You killed my mother!
CROWLEY: To be fair, she was plotting to kill me.
Crowley is torturing and murdering prophets as Our Heroes are torturing and murdering not only some random demons, but also their hosts. The hench-demon curled up in the trunk evokes Nancy the nurse back in S4 - what made that a big point of no return, and this a throw-away encounter on the way to a BDH moment? We don’t have to justify rooting for humanity and its protection, but if we did, it might not be as easy as we’d think.
ii.
The groundwork has been laid this season for a broader universe, not ruled exclusively by modern American folklore and perspective on Judeo-Christian theology. It’s not just Americans who are vanishing; you’re talking about another part of Craigslist. Turns out we don’t know what was up with Chuck, or what happened to him.
As the premiere suggested, the Abrahamic God is still a presence, and a mighty one - but still, more accessible and less singular than earlier reports suggested. Crowley sincerely wonders what God was thinking, and then back-burners that for a more important issue at hand. There’ll have to be an explanation for why the other archangels, hung up as they were on each other, never mentioned their brother Metatron, although his “farewell” note (Kevin, too tactful to call it what it really was) suggests a true tragedy in the heavenly family which might predate humanity, or even the angels.
It sounds like there are several dimensions, which until now have had almost no interaction with each other. Heaven is the domain of the angels, Purgatory belongs to the leviathan, Hell is for demons, Earth is for humans and other mortal animals, and there’s no reason to believe that list is even exhaustive. Likely the beings humans have referred to throughout history as “gods” come from a dimension of their own.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed as the camera pulls back and we get a better view of the ‘verse, and it’s true that the introduction of more powerful unknown players makes things tougher to predict, because all of those players have a will of their own. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for Our Heroes. Even wily, ass-covering motherfuckers like Crowley get dissatisfied, and when they do, they draw attention to themselves and overreach.
iii.
I was super-excited for ten minutes of this episode because we had a Bechdel Test pass for the first time in what feels like forever. And that’s still true, and one of the reasons the test is a useful tool is that it doesn’t put an unrealistic play-nice limitation on interactions between women. However, one crucial reason the Bechdel Test is a non-comprehensive tool is that it doesn’t account for conversations which fall into sexist meta-narratives, or for normative patterns within a particular narrative. In this case, we have the young, sexy woman as the betrayer of the naïve mother figure (not quite a Madonna, but close enough), who was well-intentioned but in over her silly head. Linda uses sexualized insults when she compares Delia unfavorably to a “hooker,” and Delia’s initial reappropriation of misogynist slurs gets walked back when she’s revealed to be a witch - and thus, axiomatically, the archetypal Whore (a person engaging in a shady marketplace of personal pleasure/power), and also evil (in service to a man, NATURALLY). After winning a temporary victory by embracing a physical, weapons-based (in modern American context, masculine) fighting style, Linda realizes the foolishness of trusting other women and submits to one male authority to be passed off to another. Garth, previously dismissed as silly and amateurish, suddenly becomes a man of the world when compared to this…woman. There are no normatively neutral or positive encounters between, or even with, women to balance out all that sexism. That is a serious problem in an otherwise excellent episode.
To be sure, there are interesting parallels to S4 going on here? Where Sam projects his Ruby issues onto Linda (Ruby was a witch too), while both boys accept Castiel without comment, when neither character is trustworthy. That’s still the paradigm where boys will be boys and should be allowed forever and a day to get over their mistakes, whereas women are presumptively on their third strike just for existing.
I mean. We’re at least somewhat in the realm of “stuff I usually gripe about” rather than the shocking misogyny of some of the earlier seasons. But this is still Not Okay.
iv.
SO! By the proportional verbiage in this post, I feel like it looks as if my main takeaway is DEAN IS AWFUL!! And it’s not. I really enjoyed the episode - the long-arc development, Cas, the perspective-play and mystery of the mind, the worldbuilding, an Adelle DeWitt-type HBIC to fear and love and her interactions with Cas, Crowley, the moral grayness of the leads, and did I mention CAS - but there’s a lot to unpack in the Sam and Dean interactions, and I don’t like how much of it seems to pass without saying, so. I say it.
Dean’s take on the split-second instance when his grip on Cas broke may not be any more or less valid than the one we see at the end of the episode. It is, as Cas said, what he “needed” to think. And Dean can’t bring himself to think that it just happened, that a gust of wind blew or the portal wouldn’t accept an angel or any number of things that wouldn’t be anyone’s fault. He didn’t choose to skew the memory in a way that he was actually responsible, and he certainly didn’t think to assign Cas any actual agency in what Cas perceived as a decision to stay in Purgatory. No, he needed to be angry and blame Cas for his weakness, that the people around him MAKE him feel so awful and guilty for THEIR failure to live up to the standard HE sets for them. He needs to punish the people around him for his feelings of powerlessness over the circumstances of his life.
Unfortunately, this issue isn’t limited to Dean and Cas. Let’s revisit the season premiere for a tick, because I think it’s extremely illuminating.
SAM: So Cas is dead? You saw him die?
DEAN: I saw enough.
SAM: So, then what, you’re not sure?
DEAN: I said I saw enough, Sam.
So, what Dean (along with a critical mass of viewers, apparently) is choosing to hold Sam accountable for doing to Dean, Dean was actually doing to Castiel. He gave Cas up for dead and didn’t even try to do anything about it. So, the hater-bitches are going to be reapportioning all that betrayal-indignation any day now, right? LOL THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT.
That’s a cheap shot I’m not above taking at the anti-Sam contingent of viewers, but it doesn’t really get at why this hurts my (already low and ever-sinking) opinion of Dean. While he wasn’t quite as clueless as Sam was at the end of last season, the practical concerns of getting into Purgatory from Earth and the issue of personal resources for that effort are similarly at play here. I don’t blame him for not busting Cas out any more than I blame Sam for not single-handedly getting Dean and Cas home.
I do, however, condemn Dean for the fact that within minutes of being reunited with Sam, he had resumed his campaign of undermining and gaslighting, sooner and to a more egregious extent than even I thought. He willfully misled Sam about what happened to their friend, and spent weeks berating and hating Sam for something he was doing at the time. I can’t excuse this big ugly case of projection on grounds of his being hurt and confused in the wake of losing Cas, though I am sure he was. A lie this big is a huge violation of Sam’s trust. By refusing to tell Sam the truth, Dean effectively delegitimizes Sam’s relationship with Cas, yet again reinforcing a situation where the people around him are isolated from others. His attempt to guilt and shame Sam into submission over a “betrayal” equivalent to his own actions toward Cas does such dishonor to their friend’s apparent death. It’s so petty and so very hurtful.
On the cerebral viewer level, I really admire that the show has gone to this ugly place with Dean; my little Sam-and-Cas-hugging lizard brain is throwing a screaming Lucifer-grade tantrum. This adds up to the way I’m still a bit worried about the framing. Neither Sam nor Cas has the information the audience does. Cas doesn’t know that Dean effectively lied to Sam; Sam doesn’t know the details of the incident, simply that Dean unsuccessfully “tried to get [Cas] out.” And so it doesn’t necessarily follow that Dean will be held accountable for the bad thing he actually did in using the incident as a tool in his manipulation of Sam, and I worry that telling us about it and showing no consequences for it will be construed as tacit approval. It’s a replay of the problem brought almost to light in Defending Your Life. Dean makes the very big things about fault because it gives him some twisted sense of agency and control in the horrible circumstances of his life. And because his life really is awful, we get a huge focus on Dean’s ENDLESS GUILT, NO PAIN IS LIKE HIS PAIN, for incidents for which he is explicitly (and often, justly) exonerated by other characters. He then relies on his self-image as someone who feels such FATHOMLESS SELF-HATRED about things he did not do in order to avoid a reasonable level of responsibility for the rotten things he does do. But as long as we see things from his POV, and as long as he is in a position to preserve the image he wants others to have of him, there’s a level of plausible deniability for the audience which feels a bit like hedging on the part of the narrative.
I say “hedging” because there’s no doubt in my mind that this is intentional. It’s strong characterization. It’s not a particularly surprising reaction to his father’s directive to “protect your brother EVERY LIVING MOMENT OF THE DAY AND NIGHT, FROM DEMONS AND ALSO MY DRUNK ASS.” But it has become a self-reinforcing spiral of justifications for the cruel dominance games he gets off on playing with the people around him.
(Oh f-listers who love Sam but not Cas, this must have been a very frustrating episode! But hear this: Dean having someone else around for target practice is the best thing that has happened to Sam all season.) (Sam wouldn’t say that, though. After everything Cas has put him through, his face still lights up when he sees Cas. Because Sam understands what Cas did. Because Cas believed in Sam when nobody else did. Because he’s capable of true forgiveness, of grace, and when he loves, he loves unconditionally and forever. OH SAM.)
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/277601.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.