#TFW 2.0 vs. Chuck

[casgirl]

oh SHIt for some reason I thought absolution was cross and cross was once upon a time idk why man. but absolution with DEAN?????? it is not your place to forgive but you do so anyway. dean confronting chuck in 15x19??? the opportunities! the themes! and ofc our love was pure and nothing else brought me closer to god. except not god but LOOK this would be amazing. we should have had all of tfw 2.0 have an opportunity to confront chuck this is why the finale and pre-finale was bad. -bare anon

i think cross is 100% dean to chuck like desperate for some kind of approval from an authority figure and like he needs someone to tell him its Okay to be gay like i don’t belong!  i’ve always thought this was wrong! if they knew my parents would die they would DIE! and chuck, BECAUSE dean IS his favorite creation along w sam is like it will all be okay if you just follow the path laid out for you and do what you’re supposed to do and keep that a secret and one day it will go away.

VS. CAS who’s DEFINETLY absolution like he WOULD be the one who says i forgive you father bc like dean would just like punch through the confessional and strangle the priest with his bare hands. w cas like....there’s nothing that cuts deeper than his forgiveness.

[mittensmorgul]

omg... wait, literally... in 14.08, while they’re all grieving Jack and Sam goes out to build a pyre, he feels like it’s once again a failure on his part when his ax breaks...

I need to do a rewatch of s14 and list all the potential moments we can now maybe chalk up to Chuck’s interference just nudging things in exceptionally tiny ways. Because that broken ax was the reason the rest of the episode happened this way. 

This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been talking about since 14.20 aired. Chuck hasn’t been shoving the narrative around in huge ways, but even these tiny nudges have sweeping consequences, and all of s14 needs to be reexamined for points where the entire narrative hinges on these seemingly inconsequential occurrences.

If Sam had finished building his pyre by the time Dean and Cas showed up, they wouldn’t have had a wake, they’d have had a funeral pyre. Jack would’ve been permanently lost to Heaven... or perhaps the Empty would’ve quietly snatched him as it planned to do and he would’ve had his little Empty Tea Party with the entity and Billie way back then. There would’ve been no deal for Cas’s happiness, just mourning Jack without Chuck feeling the need to show up and shove events over his personal desired finish line in 14.20. But instead, they go back to the bunker and drink to Jack’s memory, leading to Dean asking Cas, “We did everything we could, right?”

Next thing Dean knows, he’s waking up hung over in the kitchen, and Cas and Sam have brought in Lily Sunder. And the rest of the plot happens.

Sam found Kevin’s Angel Tablet translations in this episode, and Donatello is mentioned as well-- aka the soulless prophet they gave the demon tablet to last year when they may potentially have been able to give him Kevin’s translations (which we all screamed about in s13 so I’ll refrain here) of the tablet they were ACTUALLY trying to read... but Sam brings Lily Sunder instead to try to read them (this is the sort of stuff she was a professor of in life so it’s sensible this time at least).

We learn about Anubis who took over God’s duty to measure the fates of humans, but was that ever something Chuck would’ve done? Interesting, because Anubis himself tells them that God never decided, that people’s fates rest solely (pffft) within themselves, their choices.

Kelly Kline is distressed that Jack has died, of course, as any mother would be, but this feels like a bigger statement from her, to which Jack replies, “things didn’t go as planned.” YA THINK?!

Heaven’s distress signal. I’ve wondered for a while now if there was ever really anything “wrong” with Heaven, or if it was another symptom of Chuck’s interference in things...

Every gate in Heaven was opened, even the ones Metatron’s supposedly irreversible spell closed, when the Shadow invaded.

Cas meets three angels once he arrives-- the first lies dead on the floor near Dumah, who is apparently still alive-- but we quickly learn the Shadow is just using her form. Inside Jack’s heaven they meet Naomi, who I suspect is also being controlled by the Shadow just based on what she tells Cas: That in order to save Heaven, they need to hand Jack over to the Shadow.

BECAUSE! Jack’s soul, according to Anubis, was destined for Heaven based on his own cumulative life choices. And this ending... doesn’t fit Chuck’s narrative. Resurrecting Jack fits Chuck’s narrative. And the Empty has been waiting for Jack... but it’s also been waiting for Chuck. Cas’s sacrifice to save Jack? THAT fits Chuck’s narrative.

What doesn’t fit Chuck’s narrative is these uppity humans actually standing up for themselves to his face, not wanting to play his game anymore. Everything that happens in this episode seems to be setting the stage for them finally seeing they’ve been playing a game all along.

Right down to Lily Sunder visiting Anubis after her death and learning her act of sacrifice was enough to earn her soul admission to Heaven. And this minor god who’d been given this job that used to be Chuck’s... smiles on her and lets her go on to Heaven.

Cas earns a reward from Heaven, too, from Naomi. She gives him Michael’s location, which she suddenly seems to know. Which brings me back to everything I’ve written in this rewatch about Michael just being an irritating symptom of Chuck’s influence over their lives, intentionally flimsy and there only to serve Chuck’s narrative, manipulating his favorite characters into making these same awful choices again.

(and a random note because it pleases the heck outta me... in the final scene, where TFW 2.0 is enjoying a meal in the kitchen together: THEY ALL HAVE BURGERS AND BEERS. EVEN CAS. This has been a strange progression of Cas vs Food since 14.01.

below a cut, because I am an obsessive person who paused 14.09 to compile all sorts of food-related nonsense from all of s14 here, and it’s a lot... >.>

14.01 Cas told Kipling the demon that he doesn’t eat or drink and even questioned why Kipling would bother with food. Cas orders water:

KIPLING: Castiel, you sure I can't get you anything hot and black? CASTIEL: Coffee has no effect on me. KIPLING: Hm. Me either. (sips his coffee) You know, not anymore, but it's like saltwater taffy or infants -- you know, I just like the taste.

but now? 14.08, Jack’s Heaven Memory revolves around food, too. They’re at a burger stand they stopped at while working the case in 13.06, the first case where Cas came back from the Empty, and therefore Jack’s happiest memory, we have to assume. We don’t know if Cas actually ate or drank anything in 13.06 (he didn’t have coffee with Dean, though, but the assumption is that Cas MADE the coffee for him), but he did explicitly mention to Jack that he doesn’t sleep at all. So he probably wouldn’t have bothered with eating or drinking anything at that point. Yet for Jack, part of the happiness of that particular memory WAS eating, the whole family together.

14.06: Not Cas, but JACK, as we know his body is beginning to suffer the loss of his grace, sits at the ktichen table making himself coffee, pouring tons of sugar into it because it doesn’t taste right to him anymore now that his grace is gone:

DEAN - Geez, what's up with the sugar? JACK - Well, without my powers everything tastes different so, I can't get this how I like it.

I’m pointing this out for two reasons: Jack and his relationship with food serves as an inverse parallel to Cas’s here, but also it’s the first sign that something is wrong with him (which we learn by the end of the episode is catastrophically wrong when his coughing fits lead to him passing out). Coffee, specifically, has long been a direct metaphor for Cas and his relationship with humanity, going all the way back to 8.21 when he ordered coffee at every Biggersons he popped through while evading the angels, and explained to one waitress the history of humanity’s relationship with the drink-- you learned it from the goats. That’s literally my Cas vs His Own Humanity tag, and has been for years. So Jack feeling this disconnect from the coffee he used to enjoy-- and adding tons of sugar in the way we’ve seen angels like Ishim do before (considering we’ll be reminded of Lily Sunder two episodes later) feels like the first portent of Jack’s internal collapse.

In this episode, Dean also orders pie for Jack, telling him “pie is important.” At the end of the episode, Dean and Jack again sit at the kitchen table, Jack drinking his coffee with way too much sugar, Dean with some whiskey:

and then Jack collapses.

14.07: Dean and Jack’s father-son bonding road trip involves burgers, and after Jack falls ill, Dean brings him a sandwich and a glass of milk that Jack never even gets to eat.

14.08: After Jack’s been resurrected with Lily’s soul magic, we have the family dinner mentioned above. And Jack is the ONLY one we see eating his burger, despite all four of them having the same food on their plates. Everyone else is just watching HIM enjoy his meal, because they’re just happy that Jack is back and supposedly “cured” of his imbalance that sickened him in the first place, and his enjoyment of his food serves as a visible example of that fact.

14.09: Crunch Cookie Crunch. Sugary cereal that Jack is apparently sneaking behind Sam’s back, alone in the darkened kitchen in the middle of the night. At least he’s eating? But during this scene, while talking with Cas about the deal Cas made with the Empty in 14.08... Cas not only eats some of the cereal himself, we learn that he took the decoder ring prize from the box and decoded the secret message. Cas... has eaten some of the cereal in the past. Alone, without witnesses. And taken the prize inside. While having a conversation about keeping Cas’s secret. Cookietacular. (and further tying Jack’s experiences with food to Cas’s)

interesting side note, but since I’m still playing 14.09 in the background while I type this, here we see Ketch again-- the guy resurrected for nothing more than plot device purposes-- again functioning as an entry point to another narrative rabbit hole, i.e. something that initially seems like a success but becomes an abject failure for Plot Reasons. He has found the Yeet Egg, but it’s halfway around the world where it’s of no use to any of them. And as he tells them this, he’s sitting in a cafe sipping a tiny cup of coffee. This is how Michael gets hold of and destroys one of the two remaining weapons they had against him-- he snatches it out of the U.S. Mail. Two of Chuck’s little symptoms acting up and playing their roles, forcing the narrative to do what he needs it to do.

14.13: While Dean and Sam share a family dinner with their parents, knowing it will be their last because they plan to put everything to rights, Cas from the past who never broke ranks with the angels is brought to a pizza joint by Zachariah, walking over empty burger wrappers in the alley on their way there, where he threatens to kill the inhabitants if they don’t tell them what they need to know. I mean... worst case scenario for the Pizza Man and Babysitter trope, right?

14.14: An episode that forces A LOT of focus onto food-- both through the MotW as a gourmet chef preparing his victims, as well as through Jack, Cas, Dean, and Sam eating:

The entire cold open is devoted to watching the gorgon prepare his food-- chopping onions, sauteing things, dancing around a fancy kitchen, and yet having to flee before he can enjoy his meal.

Jack coughs while standing at the counter, and blames “pepper” in the food for it, insisting he’s not dying (spoiler alert: he is actually dying and knows this, yet lies about it to everyone), immediately before Rowena reminds us, “Everything means something.”

Cas, Dean, and Jack sit at a diner drinking coffee. But... only Dean and Jack have mugs in front of them. Not Cas. And Dean’s the only one who actually drinks.

Castiel: What you're doing, even just sitting here and having a cup of coffee, is a Herculean feat. I can't imagine the willpower it's taking to keep Michael imprisoned.

And then later in the episode, Jack... eats Michael. He burns up what’s left of his own soul to cook it up, too. Gourmet cannibalism at its best. Nom.

14.15: In an episode where Sam and Cas are faced with a series of food-related red herrings ranging from milkshakes to tiny coffee cups to pot roast to martinis, Dean and Jack have several interactions with food that all mean something more in the narrative itself: from the Angel Food/Devil’s Food cake test, to Jack unable to find something the Gorgon’s snake will eat, to the cup of coffee Donatello serves Jack in a huge mug and uses as a prop in his explanation of how he manages to do the right thing even without a soul to guide him, and what it feels like to him to be soulless.

14.16: Jack is put in charge of doing the grocery shopping, because Dean thought that was a safe activity for him. He buys the food, but then all the other terrible things happen... and he doesn’t eat any of it himself. And despite beer being on the list TWICE, that’s the one thing he fails to buy.

14.17: Back to Cas vs Coffee, and a waffle, waiting for Anael in the diner. He’s already ordered himself the waffle and coffee, and while Anael rejects a cup of coffee from the waitress, Cas orders ANOTHER. Unfortunately it’s never delivered to him (that we see), but he did order it, which means he’s already drunk his first cup. He ordered a refill. (he didn’t eat the waffle).

but also, back in the bunker as Dean sets up Mousetrap for family game night, Mary and Jack prepare a TON of snack foods. Jack makes popcorn, that Dean once made for Cas back in 8.22. Which again reminds me of our ridiculous crack theory from early s9 that popcorn had some sort of magical properties to weaken angels after Hannah is thrown into a rack of popcorn by Adina and is unable to fight back afterward. lol at the theory, but popcorn was also directly involved in Bobby’s final memory of Sam and Dean as they debated movie-watching snack foods, so it’s directly connected to death and humanity both. And Cas eats it. but back to 14.17... 

They never get to eat all those snacks, because Sam never returns with the pizza he was supposed to be picking up, and they receive the emergency call from Donatello instead. Things go incredibly sideways from there.

(note that I might add to this as I finish rewatching the season, since I’m still on 14.09 and the rest is just from memory after that point-- hence putting it all under a read more cut)

[mittensmorgul]

Not all choices are created equally.

I'm really tempted to write something about free will vs Dean's "I don't have a choice" in 13.23, because he did have a choice... but the other option was to drink copious quantities of alcohol and wait for the inevitable blast wave, you know? Everyone keeps quoting the "we'll always end up here" nonsense from 5.04 as if it proves they never really had a choice. But the thing is, they absolutely didn't "end up there." Lucifer is DEAD.

DING FREAKING DONG, BITCHES.

They're in the bizarro world version of that original "end" because all their previous choices had led them here-- all those times they chose wrong (and right, or just chose what they could live with in the aftermath), all those times Lucifer didn't get shoved back into the box, and God's choice to leave Lucifer alive in the first place after 11.22. This is the result of Sam and Dean being left to clean up God's mess… So in a way it was inevitable, because you can't just lock up problems and hope they stay locked up. And AU Michael is actually a problem of Lucifer's own making… if he hadn't deliberately tried to spit in Chuck's face by making a nephilim, that doorway to AU Michael's world would never have opened in the first place.

At that point, Sam and Dean absolutely DID have choices. But by 13.23, all their choices boiled down to "which is the lesser of two evils."

Sometimes there just aren't any GOOD choices.

And anyone suggesting that Dean should've just locked the door to the bunker and waited for the end, as if that was in any way the better option… well I’ve got to really side-eye the rest of the entire season worth of choices and consequences. Because that’s the rub of free will. Dean said it way back in 6.20:

CASTIEL: I'm doing this for you, Dean. I'm doing this because of you. DEAN: Because of me. Yeah. You got to be kidding me. CASTIEL: You're the one who taught me that freedom and free will-- DEAN: You're a freakin' child, you know that? Just because you can do what you want doesn't mean that you get to do whatever you want!

Since then we’ve learned a lot about not only what Free Will is, but we’ve been more and more blatantly reminded about the fact that all choices have consequences. And sometimes Big Choices have Cosmic Consequences. Consequences that affect the future, narrowing down the potential future array of choices.

It’s no longer a matter of Free Will vs Fate at that point, it’s a matter of navigating through the consequences of PAST CHOICES until-- like Jessica the reaper told Sam and Dean in 13.19-- the only option is to go nuclear or go home.

Jessica: Rowena’s changing people’s fates. She’s killing them before their time and when a reaper shows… Sam: She torches them too. Jessica: Yes. Dean: Why? Jessica: You’ll have to ask her when you stop her because if she keeps this up she is going to throw off fate…. The whole greater machinery of death. Sam: That means? Jessica: Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect? Dean: Ashton’s second best movie! Sam: { looks at Dean incredulous} Yeah of course….. one small mistake can cause all kinds of bad. What about it? Jessica: If just one person dies before their time a lot of things that were supposed to happen… don’t. The ripple effect from just one early death can affect hundreds of lives and changing their fates changes even more fates until things just become sincerely unfortunate and we have to hit the reset button. Sam: What does that mean? Jessica: Usually? A mass kill off like the Black Plague or a mid sized war… Something to wipe the board clean. So… you’re help in avoiding that would be greatly appreciated by everyone.

So there is a sort of “fate” attached to death, because dying is the one thing we’re all fated to do, you know? It’s the one thing nobody can wiggle out of (well, unless they’re Winchesters, apparently, but the whole premise of the show has always been that they’re different-- and yes I’m including Cas in that because duh). And messing with life and death this way-- not to mention messing with alternate universes which was Billie’s concern in 13.05, wherein resurrecting Dean to deal with that mess was the lesser Cosmic Consequence-- has a wider-reaching series of consequences. It’s not fate, but the inevitable result of screwing with the Natural Order.

(and quick lil reminder that in 13.05 DEAN CHOSE to die, accepted his death... and Billie basically said... NOPE THAT’S NOT AN OPTION TODAY, in a tidy flipping of everything Dean ever thought Free Will was about.)

And this is what Death has been teaching to Dean since… ever. (see 6.11 for the major exposition on this point)

I've seen people saying it was pointless to have Dean say he didn't have a choice (and people who then make the entirety of his decision based on saving Sam and no one else), but Free Will doesn't mean there's always going to be a GOOD choice to be made. I mean, that's not how life (and the inevitability of death) works. It's not always "easy 100% virtuous option" vs "terrible and easily condemnable option." Sometimes the choice is between fighting and surrendering entirely, and there is no other viable option. (and on a meta level, from outside the narrative, this is the sort of narrowing down of options that drives the story to this sort of do-or-die choice that makes season finale cliffhanger drama happen.)

(and again, Naomi reminded us again in 13.18 that everything eventually ends... even when it doesn’t)

And surrendering entirely is just... not an option for Dean in any universe.

And of course Dean chose to fight, and NOT JUST TO SAVE SAM >.>

I mean he could have let Sam die and felt helpless, but there were absolutely stakes beyond that, like seeing Lucifer eat Jack's grace, and knowing what Lucifer would do with that sort of power. He hadn’t been up to his usual Threat Level all season long. Dean had seen a much weakened Lucifer in 13.13, but boosted with Nephilim Grace, and lacking any other reason not to just burn the world down, this was absolutely a DEFCON 1 situation here. Nuclear war was imminent.

(and largely out of Dean’s potential array of choices, here. It was basically a choice between which nuclear warhead he was gonna fire, and he chose the one he had at least a remote chance of being able to pilot himself)

(*spends 30 seconds imagining Dean waving a cowboy hat around as he rides the nuclear bomb as it’s dropped a la Dr. Strangelove*)

Lucifer’s depowered state and general apathy, and then his desire to get his hands on Jack to use him for his own purposes of elevating himself to a sort of stolen godhead, remaking the world (sans humanity, unless they learned their place and worshipped him because he believed he deserved that) in his own image, and basically using the entire planet to give a big fuck you to God… I mean, these aren’t obscure and unknown things about Lucifer. These have always been the stakes when he’s been in play. Dean learned this firsthand in 5.04.

But there’s also Jack. You know, the kid they spent the back half of the season trying to rescue (along with Mary) from the AU? The kid that Cas had told Dean he'd literally argued his way out of the Empty to protect? I'm... ?????

It’s not possible for Dean to look Cas in the eye and NOT acknowledge that he’s just as focused on saving JACK (who just had his grace ripped out in front of his eyes after finally rejecting Lucifer’s status as his “father” and completely throwing his lot in with Humanity, making the ultimate declaration of his place in the universe as a member of the Winchester Family and TFW 2.0) as he is on saving Sam. To say otherwise is just… disingenuous at best, and completely ignores more than half of the season’s major themes to do so.

Just because Dean said he didn't care about himself, but did care about his brother a few episodes earlier... that doesn't make him saying yes to Michael ONLY about Sam. More than half the season centered around the rescue mission for both Jack AND Mary, and to reduce the emotional struggle Dean went through over them to something entirely unimportant in this ultimate moment of choice is just… gross. Even if Sam had died in 13.21, Dean would press on to get them home, or or what did Sam even die for?

Going back to the Cosmic Consequences of previous choices, Billie sort of warned him all along that messing with the AU was gonna lead to trouble, and here we are. I wonder what Jessica the reaper reported to Billie when Dean said yes? And I keep thinking about this from 13.05 when Dean chose to die:

Billie: That doesn't sound like the Dean Winchester I know and love. The man who's been dead so many times but it never seemed to stick. Maybe you're not that guy anymore, the guy who saves the world, the guy who always thinks he'll win no matter what. You have changed. And you tell people it's not a big deal. You tell people you'll work through it, but you know you won't, you can't, and that scares the hell out of you. Or... am I wrong?

She said that to him like she was issuing a formal challenge. That was the bait that dragged Dean through the rest of the season, and it got an immediate boost when Cas came back to him at the end of that episode. Cas gave him the emotional carrot to push through to the end.

The reapers and their "clean hands" policy can't interfere, but Death can do the usual Death thing of nudging Dean to where he needed to be. Giving vague warnings, and even vaguer directions… Like in s6 Death’s warning about “the souls” didn’t help change the ending, but it kept Dean pushing in the right direction to eventually understand; even if he couldn’t stop the bad thing happening, at least he’d be forearmed to fix it once it was broken.

So going back to Dean’s choice to say yes to Michael. It was always only ever going to come back to this choice-- not in a replay of 5.04 or even 5.22, but in the ultimate subversion of it, with a few conditions attached. And in a truly disturbing twist, this is exactly what Jack promised in 12.19…

Cas in 5.22, after successfully stopping the original Apocalypse, at great personal cost:

CASTIEL: You got what you asked for, Dean. No paradise. No hell. Just more of the same. I mean it, Dean. What would you rather have? Peace or freedom?

Dean asked for freedom, and he got it. Just more of the same. But in 12.19, Cas swallowed the kool aid Jack’s powers served up-- the promise of peace and paradise. And this is the result. In 5.22, Dean wasn’t terribly content with the consequences of his choices, and I mean yes they very much did save the world, but at what cost? And he couldn’t even begin to see the future consequences of his cosmic interference yet (see: the rest of the series post 5.22 for evidence).

And this result in 13.23? Is the cosmic opposite. For reasons entirely beyond their control (because the Winchesters are not omniscient nor omnipotent-- not even Cas or Jack), and all they’ve ever done was the best they could in any circumstance, it’s unfair to suggest that this ultimate choice Dean had to made wasn’t entirely the result of a season-long (or even series-long) flow chart gradually cutting off options until the final coin toss could only be between these two final options. Peace or freedom, flee or die, Michael or Lucifer. He’d just reached the last chapter of the Choose Your Own Adventure story, where the only way out is through.

Sure, Dean absolutely had a choice. He could’ve chosen to barricade the door to the bunker and wait for their inevitable death at Lucifer’s hand, but we know what he does in that circumstance (hello 12.22). So even if it gets them all killed, he’ll use the grenade launcher, because really, Dean will always choose to go down fighting rather than surrendering to fate.

And now we know that drive has ultimately led him to the unthinkable choice to accept what he’d always been told was his fate. Because it was either that or watch the world burn.

And yes, he knows exactly what Michael wanted to do to our world, and he understood there was a bigger risk to this choice than anything else he’s ever had to do. He knows exactly what Michael intended to do to the world, because in addition to the rescue mission aspect of the back half of the season, this was the other Major Threat, and the other side of the coin that Cas suggested might be why he was resurrected. Michael brings War. And Cas believed he was resurrected to also stop that war from happening.

So there Dean was, looking Cas in the face. Cas, who’d been Dean’s personal win in 13.06, and yet NONE OF THAT was stated by Dean directly TO CAS, while Cas repeatedly stated that his two-pronged reason for even being alive was 1) to protect and save Jack, and 2) to stop AU Michael from making war on their world.

(not even touching on Cas’s PERSONAL issues with Lucifer, and his personal mission to-- if not kill him outright, at least grind Lucifer’s face into the ground in every possible way, from everything about how impotent he was to even stand up to the least of his creations to adopting and teaching human love to the greatest of Lucifer’s creations… I mean, THIS WAS NOT INSIGNIFICANT TO CAS)

And in that moment, immediately after Cas had to watch his first mission go up in flames as Lucifer undid Jack and stole his grace, and had to confront this ultimate personal failure against Lucifer and the ultimate personal failure of his promise to Kelly, and his ultimate personal failure to protect Jack… even in that moment there was still one final choice to be made.

Dean clearly negotiated terms (which we don’t know the entirety of, but hopefully will learn in 14.01), because Lucifer was the immediate threat RIGHT FRIGGIN’ NOW. Not only to Jack and Sam, but to the entire universe. They had one weapon that could stop him, which was utterly useless without an archangel to wield it. But they also had one slightly used archangel in the scratch and dent bin and one perfect vessel…

Sometimes the choice is really that limited, but to say it wasn’t a choice is doing a disservice to the entire season, and to the entire series going right back to the start.