#air literally steaming so much it's a visibility hazard

[doomspaniels]

Inventing the Alfresco Sauna which is just going outside and dumping a bucket of water over your head

Inventing the Dry Sauna which is just me sitting in a small room with the heater on full blast

[elizabethrobertajones]

are you ever like, “I was only being flippant but now you’re disagreeing with me I’m going to defend this sandcastle with my life”? :P

sam-winchester-admiration-league replied to your post“Do you know if there is going to more of Castiels past and flashbacks...”

eh, 12x09 was actually about Sam and Dean. Mary and Cas just provided uber service.

Me, waving a plastic shovel from atop the battlements:

First of all -

The episode starts with Mary and Cas, apparently much more important to establish how they were doing because for some reason their emotional stake in the episode is probably going to mean something later

Sam and Dean are given literally nothing to do as their “here’s how you’ll spend this episode” before the title card. This scene is presented as an outside POV on the Winchester’s lives from the guy who runs the facility, being brought up to speed on their history in the horrifically biased way it looks to outside law enforcement agencies - we’re SO far from Sam and Dean’s perspective we’re looking at them from someone who doesn’t know why they’d desecrate graves, or if they’d be white supremacists or Muslim terrorists. This outside perspective on them in the prison continues with occasionally dropping back to see them with a little montage of them doing nothing. They’re viewed from above as if on CCTV in many shots, and from outside their doors, or talking about them in the room while they’re dead trying to figure out WTF just happened to them. This is the main POV the entire time they’re in prison despite some close ups on their time-passing activities.

the episode’s about what happens to their world when they’re not there - yes they sort of have their usual main character centre of the universe pull on the emotional stuff going on there, but the difference is that we’re seeing it from the eyes of characters who aren’t always the focus. It’s very clearly about giving another side, or exploring the effect of the main characters on the others. It’s important to remember Dabb co-wrote Weekend at Bobby’s - he knows what he’s doing when he writes an episode like this. It’s important to remember he likes writing episodes like this :P

Chow time! 

We get scenes with Crowley deciding they’ll be fine while Cas suffers. We get scenes where Cas suffers alone. We get scenes where Mary suffers alone. We find out the hunting community is missing Sam and Dean’s presence and suffering “alone” until Mary steps in. We get Mary seeing the picture of herself and Dean, which now seems to be something that’s been naturally building since 8x14 when Dean put the picture there, and the culminations of lots of DEAN-centred uses of that picture for emotional whammy, now flipped around and given to us from Mary. Literally taking a Dean thing and handing it to her, both with her taking Dean’s call, taking his hunt, and taking his emotional moment with the Mary and Dean photo.

We get a scene of Mary and Cas suffering together but still also oh so alone.

At some point off-screen Sam and Dean break under torture and make the deal - we have no idea they’ve done this, now effectively removing them as reliable POV narrators for the entire rest of the episode until the final five minutes. We are only ever going to be in the position of cameras watching their action and not emotionally interacting with them because we don’t know what’s going on.

it’s worth mentioning that there’s a whole scene which was Mary and Cas while the Winchesters were dead, aka completely taken out of the narrative; even if we all know Sam n Dean won’t stay dead because that’s just obvious at this point, Cas and Mary at that point are our “last standing” characters, and we’re continuing to get a very detailed emotional arc about how they feel, how they’re coping, how they’re beginning to forge a friendship out of this loss, and generally just giving us buckets and buckets of completely pointless angst for a pair of Uber drivers. In a world without Sam and Dean, Mary is bravely soldiering on, Cas is crumbling. They’re brought to their lowest point.

Dean finally phones Cas and though the phonecall is from his POV in terms of where the camera is sitting, emotionally we know he’s absent because we don’t know about the deal he’s made, Sam points out we don’t know about the deal, the scene reminds us there’s something we don’t know that Sam and Dean do but Dean did not tell Cas. 

Meanwhile, since Sam and Dean are having a mysterious but action-filled escape with no emotional hook except their escape (since they’re not allowed to have the conversation about the deal, we don’t know the deal, therefore any true emotional exploration of their escape is limited to comments about “midnight” which are only going to be any good on a second rewatch), because we’ve had at least 3-4 scenes of Cas openly, no-lies, just plain obviously missing Sam and Dean, the stress in that scene is that Cas has left his phone and isn’t answering but we want him to answer because he will discover his suffering is about to end. 

It’s not delayed gratification on Dean hearing Cas’s voice aside from the obvious weeks in prison thing (we don’t know Dean knows he’s dying in a few hours and therefore how MUCH more it means to him - we’re a step removed from his perspective on this phonecall and it’s nice to see him really want to call Cas, but the scene doesn’t overtly set up a real emotional hook on HIS side apart from the very pedestrian “Dean is trying to call an uber” sort of feeling I guess you got there if you don’t care about Destiel so I’ll take yours as the casual viewer version of that scene (just as I suppose I casually-view some stuff that might mean the world to you) because the whole escape is deliberately avoiding giving ANY emotional stakes to Sam and Dean - they don’t talk, there’s no real emotional discussions about anything, they don’t even comment about how nice it is to breathe fresh air, let alone get teary about seeing each other OR Dean calling Cas for the first time in ages - it’s all to business) so the emotional side of that is CLEARLY all on Cas, who has been waiting and mourning and visibly emotionally deteriorating all episode specifically because of the helplessness and misery of having lost them...

Sam and Dean continue running through the woods living out an action movie again, still not telling us their emotional stakes. So they’re being the main characters in another genre and while we’re rooting for them, it’s a side-quest, a way to clear up a little loose end of how do they get to the road without being caught, and an excuse to play, really, but it has no emotional weighting on the episode. In fact, because Mr Ketch goes and kills everyone anyway, it makes their whole effort even more pointless once we have full hindsight, and we also know about the deal which removes their emotional stake in winning that fight even further. It turns out they had even bigger things on their mind and it was just some action filler before we get to the real story. 

The end of the episode reminding us it was a framing device and Mick has been “telling” the story takes us a step even more removed once the episode is over and adds ANOTHER layer of Sam and Dean’s disconnect from the main story and POV. Like with Magda, they have no idea their efforts were for nothing but WE do. We as the viewer have a HUGE emotional advantage over Sam and Dean this season because of dramatic irony. It’s not like other times we get hints of what the villain is up to: they’re giving us plain and simple more information than Sam and Dean have, enough info that would DESTROY the current balance if they knew. So once again: by the end of the episode we are not WITH Sam and Dean on this side quest log cabin Home Alone thing at all. It was briefly for our entertainment, but we’re peering in on them with a huge disconnect in how we relate to them, because we are effectively stuck keeping a secret for Mick and Mr Ketch that we don’t even want to keep from Sam and Dean.  

Meanwhile Mary is shown mirroring Dean’s behaviour in various dark times likes the end of the Mark of Cain arc when he was killing off vampires to blow off steam. There’s something grimly reminiscent about Mary’s walk, the staging of the scene, the carelessness about leaving the dead body there... It all screams of Dean in his giving up stage, which again is an actual emotional piece of storytelling about Mary, layering her into the pre-existing imagery, comparing her to other emotional arcs, and telling us in no words whatsoever how she’s doing. We don’t see her fighting the vampire - it’s not like Sam and Dean running around in the woods providing the action. The important part here is how she FEELS. The emotional part of the story is with her. Finally Cas phones her and they’re all on the same page that the story will once more be “about” Sam and Dean. 

We still don’t know Sam and Dean have made a deal, or even that “midnight” is as urgent as it seems as it’s still being referenced in passing without the show playing up like, a countdown clock sound effect towards it or something. 

Cas and Mary on the other hand, discuss the good old “Winchester bad decision phonebook”. Do we call the king of hell? or make a deal with the new devils on our turf? This is what we missed with Sam and Dean talking to Billie - that and the scene where Mary and Cas meet Mr Ketch and Mick. The part where the emotional and hazardous stakes of making these deals are clear. They’re incurring more debt to these suspicious assholes in the nice coats, and we can be worried about what they’re doing (MARY seems worries about what they’re doing at that point) and basically all the POV stuff that comes with making a deal that we don’t know for sure we’re waiting for with Sam and Dean except for the “of course something is coming because there’s no free lunch” feeling - which is all they’ll let us have. Certainly no crushing weight of knowing what’s coming at midnight which could have in an episode ABOUT Sam and Dean been used to play up all that tension for a long run in the woods, while we don’t see Cas and Mary at all all episode until the end when they’re sprung on them like a reward, after Sam and Dean have angsted this six ways to Sunday before having to face their consequences

Anyway finally they meet and hug and the emotional POV is with Cas, getting these hugs but then looking towards Mary, and now we’re really building on his sense of isolation even from the family group which has been around all season... We’re left with him feeling sad while watching them hug and his isolation is meant to  be the take away from that scene, because we’re still building up the emotional stuff for the big reveal at the end

the car is quiet and we know there’s secrets yet to come. We don’t know what they are. We’re with Dean’s POV and he glances at Cas as the time comes. NOW it seems this might be about Sam and Dean.

The Uber driver gets out of the car when it stops, I guess because she wants to get moving again so she gets a good tip. Unfortunately there’s also a woman in the road and she might not get tipped if she runs her over.

The woman refuses to move out the road, and the uber driver is so overcome with emotion at not being able to finish driving her passengers home she attempts to commit suicide

the back up uber driver who came with her is so horrified by his co-worker’s loyalty to the job that he is inspired to also kill for the sake of getting their passengers home on time, and also to protect company resources by not letting the other driver kill herself

the passengers who made them drive down this sketchy road in the first place are basically passive horrified witnesses to the whole thing

the episode ends with the uber driver going to seek out a union or something to stop this shit happening again, ending the episode where it started as being all about her and her feelings.

second of all -

Mary Fucking Winchester is not an Uber Driver, she is a main character.

Castiel Fucking Winchester is a main character. Also probably not an uber driver although idk what he does between episodes sometimes so who knows.