#and it’s hilarious. kudos to the girl who asked ‘but what if i’m a sympathetic yawner?’ when she talked about doing fieldwork with apes that

[un-pearable]

new favorite professor quote “if you’re close enough to identify them [the unknown primate you’re interacting with] by dental formula you’re about to lose yours”

[elizabethrobertajones]

I read your watch notes and I couldn't agree more with basically everything you said. Whatever witchcraft Dabb worked to make even reluctant parts of fandom (including me) fall for Jack in, like, the fastest amount of screentime . . . I couldn't help thinking through the whole thing just how much it's going to hurt when he goes dark. However that happens.

Yeah, in my notes I was not actually joking about the stoner movie lolz bait and switch for Jack being evil… Dabb picked a random harmless fun mood to hit, nailed it with Clark and Jack, even before we could be sure that was what was happening, and after leaving us to hang on Jack saying “I’m hungry” in that very “Amara kept saying that and then eating people but Clark just thinks Jack has the munchies” mood-split cliffhanger, landed it on the side of “munchies” and basically sealed in one move that Jack was harmless and adorable… I mean to me, from the moment we saw him eating candy and giggling it’s clear what the intent is with him, and I don’t think anyone but Dean will have ambiguity about his heart any more, or the bad guys who want to use him without asking him what he is. (Sorry, I know you said you read them but just repeating for people who didn’t.)

I do still think that Jack will probably have to go dark at some point but I’m already completely on his side and assume it will be sympathetic and he’ll be scared and confused and probably dealing with a massive choice he’s not equipped to make yet and maybe think he’s doing things for the right reasons or whatever. He IS a Cas mirror, setting his compass by Cas, and Cas is such a fuck up about these things historically, and he is a Sam mirror and Sam’s such a fuck up about these things historically, and he’s a Dean mirror and that’s more complicated but Dean has historically fucked these things up and at the very least they gave him a “turn” to be the fuck up with the Mark of Cain storyline. :P 

So basically as soon as he said Cas was his father and everything finished falling into place which themes Jack was representing now, I think the other reason I became hysterically protective over him and his squishy nougat centre is because that bad turn is coming but oh no how horrible it’s been for our 3 leads, and now Jack’s innocent, pure core is going to have to take some heavy damage for him to to learn and grow because he’s a philosophical experiment, in the writing… And dangit, Dabb, it IS witchcraft, because I was already feeling fond of Jack, but it’s not just that he aligned himself with Cas and this is Cas girl protectiveness transferring over to him… It’s everything he represents, and knowing how awful this show is, and how beautifully naive Jack is… 

I think the other thing is that a lot of it is in the performance - they could have really fucked it up by casting someone who could do a few creepy smiles, the scary faces when he attacks them - the smirk we went into hiatus on - but if they couldn’t be innocent and sweet and realistically portray being a brand new person in a way that wasn’t hammy or ridiculous or bumbling… He really sold Jack’s mannerisms (or lack of them), and partly because he has great chemistry with Jared, that scene where he’s in the cell with him and that whole movement where he earnestly moves to sit cross-legged in front of Sam and Sam flinches back but Jack’s just unaware and harmless and still *at the same time* threatening and large and genuinely intimidating because of his sheer *aura* of this new personality soaking up everything around it with child-like curiosity… And Sam doesn’t know what that is yet and Jack is unaware of how he comes across… And that’s visible in his behaviour. It’s *really good* acting to drop into the mindset of someone who’s absolutely hours old NEW at everything. So absolute kudos to Alex and to whoever found him :P I can really see him having the potential to be everything we do and don’t want him to be in just one episode of interactions.

So, yeah. I hope no one thinks it’s hypocritical of people to suddenly fall for Jack now because I’ve spent the summer withholding judgement because I knew he’d be more than that scary face they left us with, but that they also DID leave us with a scary face and obviously none of us could call how long they’d leave us thinking he was genuinely threatening and if he’d be bad first and need cajoling back or if when someone tried it he’d turn around and only halfway into his first episode be like nah mate me dad’s Castiel, with the decision only held off being revealed as long as it was to build some tension and get us guessing about who and what Jack is going to be. 

I mean, in 12x19 if you weren’t determined to hate him already for some reason, it was pretty clear he had a good core even before he MET Cas because he hears Cas’s speech and *decides* from that that he’s choosing Cas, which means he already knew Dagon was bad and Cas’s expressed morality was the real guide he needed to be what he wanted to be. To me it was really just a matter of how much he needed to REMEMBER that and the fake out was a great way to do that because I was thinking he’d have to be reminded he picked Cas and that maybe he was just following a random signal from Lucifer without understanding it, but his core was still the baby that decided it needed Cas… And setting it up as a bait and switch “no he just likes nougat” put so much tension into Jack’s decision with all this weight that this was resolved as he said Cas was his father. 

(I mean I suppose the general crack post mood is basically because we all love Cas and so as soon as Jack says he does too the entire fandom flocks around him to be his new grandparents, but I think this was the unstated underlying tension which made it work SO effectively because I think we were all waiting to see where and how Jack would be good, but then they did it in a 2-part fake out spectacular to prove his heart was absolutely good that resolved it first hilariously and then emotionally and now Jack is our squishy and we shall call him squishy.)