SPN 9x21 - King of the Damned
So who is the titular king of the damned? Crowley, the apparent king of hell? Dean, the heir of Cain who killed the queen? Cas, elevated by the fallen angels?
This whole angelic operation! Part of it might be that they’re having their minds messed with again, but I think they’re also just so glad to have a hierarchy to swing back into, a mission and a villain and something they’re comfortable doing. And getting the chance to kick back and be mean girls. I do love that some angels have adapted and started just living lives and hanging out in angel bars, lol.
This is a point that was made with Gadreel earlier this season, that angels cannot be tortured into compliance. I appreciate that because the show needed to complicate the “torture works” assumption it’s made all too often. Also, I think it’s something that’s been important with the angels and the Winchesters alike, that when you’ve been through a certain amount, sticks and stones are the least of your problems.
Sam and Dean accidentally stumbled onto something when they were messing with Ezra: Metatron likely is deliberately surrounding himself with Heaven’s outcasts. They’re the ones he feels most confident that he can string along and render dependent on him. And that’s probably true, but they’re also the most easily manipulated by others. Ezra spills with just a little pressure from Sam and Dean; Gadreel was all but asking Cas for a moral justification to jump ship.
The Gadreel stuff was, as ever, fascinating throughout the episode. There was a very interesting examination of empathy, when both Sam and Gadreel explicitly used the time they saw the world through someone else’s eyes. I also got the feeling that Sam was….trying not to feel for Gadreel? Like, that empathy was leading to compassion for him and he had to remind himself of Kevin. And Cas took all that and used it in this considered, calculated way which was very impressive.
So this is my question about Commandante Castiel. The angel Cas brought to the meet with Gadreel was the double agent. What I’m wondering is if Cas knew, and he used the whole thing as a setup? Like, having her be the only other one who knew about it, which either rules her out as the mole if Metatron’s people don’t show or proves her to be the mole and gives him a chance to take her out and helps him get his own double agent into Metatron’s ranks?
Demons and their endlessly predictable backstabbing are kind of blah to me in comparison, even if the undercutting of the Godfather-esque scene cracked me up, as did Crowley’s gibbering threats of “the torturiest torture of all torture in the history of torture!”
Demons are predictable, and so is Dean. “You don’t think anybody’s lying, I think everybody’s lying.” Everybody does lie at some point, but ofc it’s just as big a mistake to assume everyone is always lying. NOT EVERYBODY’S YOU, DEAN, most people tell the truth as often as possible, if only because it’s the easiest thing to remember.
Dean’s insistence on keeping the blade around Because I Said So is really unnerving, and for the zillionth time, maps onto a lot of RL DV red flags. In the real world it’s about having a gun in the house; in the Winchesters’ world, they both have guns but now Dean is insisting on a super-powerful weapon that only he can use, and he wants to make sure Sam knows that Sam doesn’t get to have an opinion about that.
Sam, meanwhile, badly wants for the blade to be the problem, in the way he wanted Benny to be the problem last season.
I liked the camera work. I think Abaddon’s death went just a little over the top, but I did like how the moments before put us in Dean’s disorientation as he wrestled with Abaddon and with the blade, and I really liked how we saw so much of Ezra’s interrogation from Ezra’s perspective.
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