SPN: "The Man Who Be King" review...

[neotoma]

I watched last night's episode... is it just me, or does Dean need a slap upside the head?

Not that Castiel is innocent either, but Dean's consistent refusal to understand that if Castiel loses, the Apocalypse is back on track drives me nuts. He consistently ignores that Castiel has told him Raphael wants to restart the Apocalypse, even though Dean would be tortured into compliance if the Apocalypse restarted and Castiel wasn't around to run interference.

I suspect Eve isn't as dead as Crowley thinks -- she's only using a human body she stole, after all. Actually, I hope she's not really dead, because I liked her as a Big Bad and thought she got a sucky end.

Also, Crowley being the only one who doesn't underestimate the Winchester brothers... well, it's about time someone didn't. Sam and Dean have been punching seriously above their weight for years. Someone should have noticed.

Interesting that human souls generate their own Heavens -- somehow, Castiel's phrasing of what happened made it seem much less creepy that last year's "Dark Side of the Moon" explanation.

"Explaining poetry to fish" -- bwahaha. Poor Castiel. Though it justifies my head-canon that angels are basically God's AI construction equipment that got a bit buggy when he tried adapting it to new uses.

I loved hearing Castiel's experiences in his own words. It was very neat, because I think he's one of the hardest characters to get inside the head of. Also, I like how they're smooshing evolution and biblical literism -- it will not end well, but trying to rationalize Icthyostega and the Tower of Babel is always an exercise in handwaving. Also, I'm definitely imagining that Gabriel was the one saying "we have very big plans for that fish".

Interesting how Castiel is framed as either the new Lucifer or the new God, depending on who is doing the framing.

It would be nice if God actually got off His divine ass and stopped his firstborn kids from slaughtering each other. Since he made them without free will, he's kind of responsible for them, don't you think? He should have at least giving them better instructions -- something along the lines of "Don't end the world" would have been nice.

And last, I'm glad to have it confirmed that angels don't have souls, which is what I've long suspected.

Comments

[sistermagpie]

It really was strange how Dean kept acting as if the Apocolypse was a non-issue. I mean, I get why he was saying this wasn't the way to go, but it was as if this was just Castiel's problem instead of the thing that obsessed him the year before. Especially since at the end he implied it was just about Castiel doing what he was doing and Dean trying to stop him instead of Dean coming up with an alternate plan with Castiel given it's the Apocolypse they're talking about.

[neotoma]

Oh, I get why Dean didn't think it was the way to go, but acting like restarting the Apocalypse was a non-issue was flat out ridiculous, considering Dean's head would be on the chopping block. It's not just the End of the World, it's the End of the World that Raphael's forces would torture him and Sam into bringing about.

So why is Dean acting like Castiel made a deal with Crowley because he was too naive not to?

The repeated use of "You're such a child!" to Cas this season has pissed me off. Just like last year, when Dean was pushing Castiel (and Gabriel too, for his eps) to kill their brothers for him, but refusing to consider killing Sam at all. I do not like hypocrisy in the hero. Honest self-conflict is one thing, being so privileged that you can say "do as I say, not as I do" just makes me want to slap him.

[fyrdrakken]

I think there may be a bit of continuity!fail there -- the ep in no way indicated that Dean (or Sam, or Bobby) had any idea that a reboot of the Apocalypse was on the table and Castiel didn't remind them at any point in the ep. The writers might have forgotten that Cas had already mentioned it to the Winchesters.

Alternately -- since they just found out Castiel was actively deceiving them, spying on them, and making a deal with Crowley, could be they've figured they can't trust anything he's said to them over the course of the season, since they don't know the exact parameters of his plotting. We know what's true, since we saw it in flashback (given the context, I'm going to rule out the show playing "unreliable narrator" in that last ep), we know how desperate his situation really is and how high the stakes are, but from Dean's POV Cas has kind of vanished from the scene to play angel politics and is sidelining everything else the Winchesters care about.

Dead right about the hypocrisy, though -- what struck me while watching the ep yesterday was Dean's complaint about making deals with devils as though the Winchesters don't have a past history of doing just that when desperate enough. (All four of them, too -- Dean, Sam, John and Mary. Oh, and even Bobby.) Complaining about the choice from the voice of harsh experience would be one thing, but Dean made it sound like something he'd never be stupid enough to ever, ever do, no matter how high the stakes.

Hadn't thought about his issues regarding Sam being too precious to kill even to save the world, while expecting Cas and Gabriel to kill their own brothers -- though I suspect that was failure of imagination in his own case, downgrading the angels' relationship to something like "brothers in arms," and picturing angels as being only about as close as any two (non-related, non-partnered) hunters might be.

Hadn't noticed the child meme with regard to Castiel this season, but agreed that it's a problematical comparison for Dean to be making. He's very alien to humanity, but that's not even close to the same thing. I wonder if that's going to blow up in Dean's face...

[neotoma]

I would have liked the Winchesters to bring up that they didn't *believe* Castiel about Raphael kickstarting the Apocalypse again. At least it would have made sense.

However, since every time Castiel has appeared this season, he's made a comment about how his struggle is going, and how Dean and Sam calling him away from the fight is *not helping*... IDEK.

Yeah, Dean was pretty much on his high horse about the deal with Crowley. As if he wasn't working for the guy early this season because *he* was desperate.

Dean might have though Castiel's talk about his brothers meant brothers-in-arms at first, but not after the beatdown in Point of No Return. I have to assume he never cared what Gabriel's objections were, because Gabriel was very consistent in tone and attitude about other angels (well, archangels, anyway) being his beloved brothers.

Dean's treatment of Castiel is one of the reasons I can't write Dean/Cas at the moment. Not unless I want Dean to come of as the emotionally abusive boyfriend...

[fyrdrakken]

See, that's what I'm thinking may be going on in Sam and Dean's heads: It is on the one hand entirely self-centered of them to be prioritizing their own problems over the war in Heaven, but the way it's been played out from their POV this season, the big battle is over and now it's just lesser angels squabbling over the leftover pieces. I think they very much have missed the extent to which Castiel is outmatched by Raphael, and also suspect they haven't really registered how easy it would be for Raphael to undo their work and sacrifices of the previous season and just yank Michael and Lucifer back out of the pit. Castiel's POV underscored the very real dangers he's dealing with and how little he actually has to work with, but from the Winchesters' POV I can see how they might be interpreting his behavior as, "I have better people to hang out with now and I just don't want to waste time playing with you anymore." Sam has never been that close to Cas anyway, and Dean has hurt feelings that Cas has been griping about having to waste time dealing with mortal concerns on the rare occasions they could get him to put in an appearance.

So, shake them up with the revelation that he's been dealing with Crowley on the side (and oh, by the way, yanked Sam out of the pit without his soul, and Sam is now wondering how much of that mess he went through in the first half of the season was on purpose), and watch them reinterpret all Cas' griping about a civil war in Heaven as being a mere power struggle, question his motives for the entire season to this point, and further banish the prospect of another try at the Apocalypse from their thoughts.

This is of course me thinking out loud. SPN isn't a primary fandom for me, and I'm assuming "Point of No Return" was the episode with Dean and Castiel getting into a fight in an alley, but I don't remember anything else about it or anything they said to each other at the time. As for Gabriel, most of what I can recall about Dean's apparent viewpoint on his noninterference boiled down to calling him out for laziness and/or cowardice and demanding that he pick a side -- Dean did not appear to care what Gabriel's stated reasons for staying out of the matter were and may not have believed what he said on the subject.

Dean's pretty much a pain in the ass when it comes to understanding someone else's point of view about anything. He's also pretty big on the high-horse instant-judgement thing.

[neotoma]

The Winchesters have this weird habit of being self-centered when it comes to the Apocalypse -- probably because it *did* center around them for so long. I do wish that Dean realized that if Raphael splatter Castiel like a bug once -- in the 4th season finale, which they saw the mess from in the 5th season opener -- he could do it again.

Yes, "Point of No Return" was the ep where Dean and Cas had the 'fight' (does it count as a fight if one guy beats the other guy with overwhelming ease?) up. Cas snarled "I killed two angels this week. My brothers. I’m hunted, I rebelled, and I did it - all of it - for you." Of course, Dean might not remember that, considering he was getting completely shit-kicked at the moment.

No, Dean didn't care what Gabriel's reasons were. *I* cared, because I liked the character, and I'm pretty sure his love for Lucifer contributed to his death -- he didn't want to raise his sword against his brother, and he died because he couldn't actually commit to killing him.

Yeah, he is, which is why I often want to slap Dean, and have an extremely hard time writing him with sympathy. And why I can't write Cas/Dean at *all*. Dean just doesn't come outside his own POV enough for me to think he could empathize enough with Castiel to reach out to someone who actually *is* alien like that.

[fyrdrakken]

Maybe that's part of it -- they're so used to the Apocalypse involving them personally that it's hard to take seriously as being genuinely potentially re-impending if they're not getting harassed by angels and demons focusing on getting them into line to play their Designated Vessels role. I'm also thinking that the "new sheriff in town" line (which I remembered even before being reminded of it in the latest ep) made Castiel sound like he'd been brought back into existence as more of a heavy hitter than he really is (sort of a power-up along with his reintegration), and may be a contributory factor to the Winchesters downgrading his problems.

Yeah, the message I took away from that was Cas being outraged over the whole free will thing that angels have such a hard time coping with (Gabriel excluded) and just kind of generally throwing a fit over how far beyond his orders he's gone on Dean's behalf. The part about killing his brothers seemed kind of overshadowed by those two points: That's he's now fallen or on the verge of doing so, and that he made the choices that put him into this position entirely because of Dean.

Gabriel was such a wasted character: Such a grand idea, making the trickster turn out to be so much more powerful than expected and then turn out to be not just an angel but an archangel. From a plot standpoint, once they'd made him out to be so important, they had to eliminate him or have him step in as an archangel ex machina -- or, yeah, have him continue to insist on neutrality, which makes it kind of pointless revealing him as Gabriel if nothing was to be done with him, but then again revealing him just to kill him off the next time he showed up was another waste. (Eliminating that whole episode with the various gods and Lucifer slaughtering them would have been great, really. And then Gabriel would still be out there, still living it up and determinedly uninvolved. And then if they ever did come up with something interesting to do with him, they could have him turn up again in later seasons. Such a waste.)

Dean is half the reason why SPN has never been a primary fandom for me, so much as a show I watch just because I have enough friends who love it that I want to keep track of what they're talking about. (My disinterest in Sam being the other reason. I perked up when Castiel showed up and angels started being involved, which I put down to a low-grade wingfic kink on the one hand and my ongoing love for the emotionally detached outsider character in various fandoms on the other hand.)

[misbegotten]

I've long thought that Dean needs a clue by four to the head.

[neotoma]

Oh, Dean so needs a clue-by-four. There's a reason I can't write him anymore.

Otoh, God's continual absence as the angels continue spinning in their death spiral make me think *God* needs a clue-by-four as well.