#her fault that we were in this situation so she whould be takeing a form that whould be better suited for a battle

[awed-frog]

First Blood/Hissatsu

So, I’m fine. Yep.

[S9 gifs by @zerostumbleine33, here; S12 gifs by @subcas, here]

Again - I’m fine.

Really, the fact Cas is probably about to be swept away by a hellfire of pain and hurt doesn’t touch me in any way. I’m just peachy.

That said -  

Random favourite moments

Dean calling Cas, like, three times even if Cas wasn't picking up instead of trying Mary or Jody 

'Cas, what have you done?'

basically every time Cas was on screen

‘That is totally mentally normal’

how Mr Ketch looks at Cas like he wants to eat him up

the fact that Blue Steel pic is still out there

‘Dean told me to go’. 

I also loved that little ‘they talk, but they never tell you what you need’ exchange, not only because, in a happy moment of serendipity, it reminded those Trump supporters who watch the show that torture doesn’t work (and it is, unfortunately, a timely reminder), but also because of what it seemed to imply about the years Dean, and especially Sam, spent in Hell - my headcanon is that Lucifer didn’t want so much to break Sam as he wanted some form of devotion from him - recognition - love, even - and I’m sure Sam gave up at some point, and did say whatever; but, as this guy just told us, what you say under torture is never the truth, or even what you need to hear.

Honourable mention

“Do you know how many all-powerful beings have tried to kill them?”

“Roughly, yes.”

“As do I. I was bloody one of them.”

Personally, I’d say the theme of this episode was the best and most moving of all the Winchester themes - self-sacrifice - so this is how I looked at it and what I’ll mostly write about.

(For my take on Mary and the Destiel bits, scroll down.)

Now, I didn't see any clues, textual or subtextual, to make me suspect Dean wasn't sincere when he said he called Billie because a black-ops site was worse than Hell; on the other hand, Dean's general tendency is to lie, and I have been blessed with a truly staggering dose of common sense, so I'm going to headcanon my way around that one and say Dean was lying, because no way six weeks in that place were enough to break him in any way and the reason he called Billie was not that he couldn't bear it, but that he was worried sick about Sam and how Sam was dealing with being locked up (and he had reason to be - look at how Sam reacted when the door closed on him). Even if we haven't seen it all that much on screen (aaaaargh), Lucifer's return last year must have fucked up Sam's mind and sense of self pretty badly, and I'm sure there were telling signs Dean picked up on, even if, as Real Men, they probably didn't talk about it at all. So, yes, it’s true - Dean doesn't do alone, but he did endure years of torture which probably included isolation at some point, so this is not what he can't stand - what he can't stand, and his breaking point, is not knowing what is being done to his kid brother (keep in mind the last time Sam was kidnapped, only a few months back, someone had been peeling his skin right off by the time Dean had managed to find him, so, yeah) and whether Mary and Cas, not to mention all the other people he cares about, are being hunted down themselves, and killed off one by one. 

(On that note, I resented the usual doublespeak, because, keeping in mind their split audience, one half of it was probably overjoyed to hear US agencies are capable of cracking criminals faster than a hord of demons, while the other half - us - was happy to consider the whole thing as yet another wave of criticism to the current administration, and what the fuck? How can we see this show so differently? How does this work?)

So, well - calling Billie was not any kind of plan. It was suicide, or, rather, self-sacrifice to keep everyone else safe, which is why the title of this meta is hissatsu: that's what Japanese kamikaze pilots shouted before plunging to their deaths.

("Certain kill.")

What this episode showed very well is that, no matter how much they don't discuss it and ignore it and wait for it to go away, both Sam and Dean are still very, very fucked up. This Dean calling a nuclear strike on himself (because, who are we kidding, he was never going to let Sammy take the fall for this) is almost the same Dean whose instinct was to die for his brother back in season 2 - his self-esteem has gone up a notch since then, but apparently not enough (and why would it?). And the Sam who agrees with whatever crazy plan his older brother has cooked up, in full and complete knowledge of the even crazier terms of it, is the same little kid for whom Dean was the centre of the known universe and a permanent, crucial piece of it.

(I know we've been shown snippets of the Winchesters’ childhood where Sam was fighting with Dean, or openly defiant, but I still think those were exceptional circumstances. The standard behaviour for those kids when John was not around was to follow John's orders - 'You look after your brother, right, Dean? And Sammy - Dean is in charge. He tells you to jump, you ask how high' - simply because Dean was older and knew far more about the dangers of their world; and as for those times John was there - yeah. We've seen the way that dynamic worked.

Sigh.)

What neither of them was counting on, of course, is that they've got two other self-loathing kamikazes on their team: Mary, who reminds me more of John with every passing day, and Cas, who's so close to breaking point I am watching every single one of his scenes through my fingers.

Now, I like Mary as a character, but I am not sure if I'd get along with her. She still doesn't know how to act around Sam and Dean, and I don't blame her for that, but the way she is with Cas reveals one part of her personality I do not like at all, because Mary, from the very start, behaved like a military superior around Cas - something that was facilitated by the fact Cas is very good at following orders (or used to it, at any rate) and crippled by entire oceans of self-doubt. Like, when Mary ordered Cas to hurt that veterinarian, it legit made my skin crawl, not only because the situation was objectively skin-crawling, but mainly for how naturally that came to Mary - how she flawlessly slipped into a 'boss of a hunter family' persona we've seen a couple of times now - and those groups were held together not by love and respect, but by blind loyalty to a leader, whatever the cost or consequences.

(That's also how armies operate, of course. And cults. And, well - vampires and some other monsters.

And it's not normal.)

No, Mary never gave a chance to Cas back then, and she doesn't now - I'm not saying she's evil - she's got those moments where she's all soft and we can see she's a decent person who cares about others - but when push comes to shove, she leads her 'crew' the same way John was around his boys - with her eyes on the prize, not caring, or understanding, who or what she's destroying to get there. And since what she destroyed in First Blood was the last shred of Cas' self-esteem, I feel sort of personally attacked there. 

Because Cas - I am fed up that they write him and dumb and powerless when he's neither, and I don't believe for a moment that, in the hands of someone else, his mounting despair and self-doubt whould have been shorthanded as him having a panic attack around vampires - that was a bit lazy, Andrew. 

All the same, I get where he's coming from. Cas keeps failing at things, doesn't belong anywhere (I wonder who picked that image of a blue, open sky as his phone background - Sam, probably), and his genuine need to keep Sam and Dean safe is less and less an expression of his deep and honest love for them and more a symptom that he’s becoming a true Winchester - someone who can't accept death, ever, because every death is his fault, because he's useless and broken and if he'd done things differently everything would be okay - so, congrats - after years of lowkey trying, Cas has finally turned into Dean, and it's not a pretty sight. After billions of years of traumatic existence we know nothing about, it's taken Cas only eight to go from someone who accepts some things are out of his control and all we can do is our best to this person who's ready to tear it all down to save someone he loves, and his own life and the rest of the universe be damned. Cas is now a fully-fledged S2!Dean, and I think Billie's murder spells worse times ahead, because Billie was it, wasn't she? one of the last stabilizing forces in the universe, and Cas killed her, and he also breached a sacred contract - the consequences won't be pretty, at all.

Another point I feel sort of matters is that this episode continued to play the fascinating game of 'do they want to represent the Winchesters as incompetent or it’s just random'. Like, that forest scene - maybe it's just me, but if someone's after you and you cross a creek, aren't you supposed to cross diagonally so it'll be harder for your enemies to find you? 

And isn't it sort of a bad idea to bait a Super Villain on the radio, especially when you don't know exactly where he is? And did they truly expect the BMoL would leave those people alone? Really?

Also, why didn't Dean summon Crowley, instead of Billie? Because Crowley was looking for them - he admitted as much to Cas before pretending he didn't care at all, remember that? It was a beautiful, precious moment. Cas asked him to go through his contacts and Crowley snarkily said he'd already done that, cue my fond smile that could probably be heard from my apartment all the way down to the street. 

(Oh, Crowley.)

So, anyway, can't you summon a demon by drawing his specific runes in blood or apple juice or coleslaw or something? I seem to remember Sam and Dean summoning and trapping demons in that way before, and even summoning and trapping Crowley, so surely it's more of a phonecall than a generic shout into the demonic void? And it would have worked?

The reasons Dean never even thinks about doing that are all irrelevant to his actual story - ie, they have nothing to do with him and his personal feelings on the matter and everything to do with the narrative. Because not only they wanted to show Mary gives a damn and get Cas in trouble (again), but Crowley is no longer relevant as an 'oh no, I have to work with my sworn enemy and we hate each other and he will double-cross me and kill me at the first occasion and what will I ever do' villain -

- because come on, he's just not. I'm not saying he wouldn't be after some kind of compensation - hello, still a demon - but at this point, he's more of an ally than anything else, and that's why this role, which would have been his in earlier seasons, was filled by the BMoL instead - and they did a good job of it. I actually like those characters, I think the actors are doing a terrific job. Of course, as I said in earlier metas, I was hoping we'd avoid the usual 'Americans are fiercely independent rednecks | the British are sophisticated psychos' thing, but I suppose it's too good a trope to ever give up -

(*looks at the camera like she's in the office*) 

- and it sort of fit, because, as Cas said (yay!), American hunters are kind of rednecky.

As for Destiel - when Dean managed to talk to Cas, he told him they were on the clock, which we later understood to mean one of them was about to die, which means the reason Dean wanted Cas to hurry was not so he’d help them escape from the special ops guys, but so Dean could say goodbye to him. After all, he was the one dying - no question about that. And Sam’s reaction - that cautious ‘You didn’t tell him?’ - yeah. As I said, I’m fine. This episode was fine.

What was also fine was the way Dean looked at Cas, then away, when Billie appeared.

Also, that thing of them sitting in the car at the end gave me distinct ‘I’m lowkey hoping we can hold hands at some point and maybe fall asleep on each other' vibes because what the hell else was Dean doing in the back seat and when the hell has he ever been in the back seat of anything that wasn’t a police car, but maybe I’m wrong here - I may have been brainwashed by @grey2510‘s hiatus story, who even knows - fanon and canon are just empty words at this point. 

But the way Dean was looking at Cas didn't help.

Last two things -

Shout out for Mick for using that even when they come bearing gifts expression - that’s a verbatim translation of the Latin phrase et dona ferentes, from the Aeneid, and the point of that book is that Laocoön was right: gifts or no gifts, the Greeks were dangerous, so I can’t wait for Mr Ketch to build some kind of fake horse and kill everyone; and finally, I’m not American, but surely the timeline didn’t work? When Dean called Cas, it had to be early afternoon, and we know Billie showed up at midnight. Mary was somewhere in Missouri - that’s almost four hours away from the Bunker - and the Bunker is ten hours away from the Rocky Mountains?