#even the revelation of Dean's fated role as the Righteous Man who will stop the apocalypse is mired in moral quandaries

[mittensmorgul]

Paving the Road to Hell

After 13.14, an episode whose title even deliberately prompts us to question the actions and choices of Team Free Will, I’ve seen a lot of backlash over the moral dubiousness of some of those choices and actions. It’s rather frustrating that the distant past is being used as a comparison for why their current moral quandaries are somehow condemnable. But Sam and Dean Winchester, going all the way back to s1, have always operated in this wide morally grey area. Even Castiel has struggled with this since the start, despite his initial conviction that his orders were just and beyond moral reproach because they came from Heaven. It took uncovering the extent of Heaven’s corruption for him to reject those orders, but even that choice didn’t come from a standpoint of Lawful Good intent. Siding with humanity (and Dean) simply became the less morally objectionable choice in Castiel’s opinion.

This goes right back to season one, and Dean telling Sam and John that he was appalled at what he was willing to do to protect them. He shot and killed what he knew to be an innocent human being possessed by a demon in order to save John and Sam in 1.22, and he didn’t regret it one bit. Tell me how objectively heroic that was?

(in the sense of “When in doubt, when none of your choices are good, save what you love,” yeah, it’s entirely understandable.)

And that’s just one instance out of hundreds. For anyone who truly believes that Sam and Dean (and now Cas, as well) haven’t always occupied this moral grey area, I invite you to rewatch the entire series. I rewatched 4.16 today, and I think this episode is a particularly excellent example of this for all three of them.

S4 had been gradually revealing the extent of Sam’s involvement with Ruby and just how “darkside” he’d gone under her tutelage. We learned right up front in 4.01 that he was lying to Dean about her and in 4.04 that he was lying to Dean about using his powers. We (and Dean) learn even more about Sam and Ruby’s relationship in 4.09, and we (but NOT Dean) learn about the blood drinking power up in 4.16. Dean only discovers that bit of trivia in 4.20, and he takes immediate steps to “detox” Sam from Ruby’s influence and the demon blood in 4.21. All of that fails because Cas frees Sam on Heaven’s orders, but the big dramatic irony of the entire season was that they’d all been lied to and manipulated into doing exactly what Heaven (and Hell) wanted them to do.

They were told all along that they needed to kill Lilith because she would start the apocalypse, when all along KILLING LILITH was the key to freeing Lucifer and STARTING the apocalypse. All their fraught moral compromises were for naught, their squabbles over who was strong enough or destined to kill Lilith were a distraction. The entirety of s4 was about setting the board for the actual prize fight in s5.

Knowing the futility of all their actions through the power of Hindsight™, it makes their moral corruption (Sam’s conviction that his self-sacrifice was for the greater good, and Dean’s conviction that Heaven’s path to killing Lilith was morally just) is where the dramatic irony of the entire season comes to a head.

But let’s explore some of their morally questionable choices and actions just from within the context of a single episode, and specifically a single episode that directly addresses what is right and what is objectively wrong, and pits them against their current beliefs and their good intentions.

The episode begins with a woman in white, lying dead on the ground as car alarms blare. That was the episode’s version of the Kill Bill Siren going off here. Cas silences the alarms-- ignores the alarms, essentially, over his sister’s body. He disappears in a flap of wings as we see the dead angel’s wings imprinted in charcoal on the ground.

What he doesn’t know, but will by the end of the episode, is that her murder was arranged to convince him to agree to support Uriel’s “orders,” to recruit Dean to torture Alastair. The entire situation was a setup to further Heaven’s corrupt agenda, to keep Dean under their thumb, to encourage Sam to continue his self-corruption drinking Ruby’s blood in preparation to kill Lilith as it was prophesied.

In this episode, Anna was the wild card. Her position as a fugitive from Heaven, who’d rebelled against her orders, who cared so much for humanity that she’d fallen and become human and only recovered her grace to save her own life and continue working to undermine Heaven’s agenda, allowed her to act as both the metaphorical angel on Cas’s shoulder, as well as his literal savior.

At the beginning of the episode, Sam and Dean are returning from Pamela’s funeral. Yet another character killed because they thought they were doing the right thing asking for her help. Saving a seal was more urgent, so they brought her in to help despite her clear objections in 4.15:

Pamela: Yeah, I do. And guess what? I'm sick of being hauled back into your angel-demon, Soc-Greaser crap.

She also delivered the coup de grace of this entire point leading into 4.16. As she lay dying because she’d agreed to help and been caught up in the line of fire, she whispers this warning in Sam’s ear:

Pamela: I know what you did to that demon, Sam. I can feel what's inside of you. If you think you have good intentions, think again.

But of course he doesn’t… his inability to save Pamela only drives him further into Ruby’s confidence, doubling down on making himself “stronger” by drinking her blood and intensifying his psychic powers. But Pamela’s dying words, now made the title of 13.14, set up some of the biggest examples of Good Intentions paving superhighways to Hell.

While torturing the demon who’d literally trained Dean to torture, put into this position by angels of Heaven, Dean learns that his own personal self-ruination through his moment of weakness in Hell had been the singular act that broke the first seal and ushered in the apocalypse. Talk about a demoralizing blow.

Cas fought against what he’d always believed was wrong. He may have doubted Heaven’s orders, but Anna’s suggestion that they were on the same side was a bridge too far for him to cross yet. At first he was receptive to her council that forcing Dean to torture was wrong, because he felt similarly ambivalent, until she implied they could work together… his doubts continued, but it took Dean breaking again, and the further uncovering of evidence that Uriel (and possibly Heaven in general) were at the very least working against the general good:

Castiel: Lucifer is not God. Uriel: God isn't God anymore. He doesn't care what we do. I am proof of that.

Cas continues to struggle with what is right, with whom to trust, and what lengths he’s willing to go to, how much of his loyalty to Heaven is deserved:

ANNA: What do you want from me, Castiel? CASTIEL: I'm considering disobedience. ANNA: Good. CASTIEL: No, it isn't. For the first time, I feel... ANNA: It gets worse. Choosing your own course of action is confusing, terrifying. ANNA puts her hand on CASTIEL's shoulder. He looks at it; she drops it. ANNA: That's right. You're too good for my help. I'm just trash. A walking blasphemy. CASTIEL: Anna. I don't know what to do. Please tell me what to do. ANNA: Like the old days? No. I'm sorry. It's time to think for yourself.

Meanwhile, when Dean is taken away to torture Alastair, Sam’s first move is to call on Ruby for help. She not only locates Dean for him, but reinforces Sam’s dependence on her and his belief that drinking her blood will make him more powerful. When Sam eventually arrives to find Dean unconscious and beaten by Alastair, who’s on the verge of defeating Castiel as well, and he uses the demonically-given powers that Uriel and Castiel-- not to mention Dean-- had been warning him off of all season long to literally save the day. Talk about positive reinforcement of a massive objectively Morally Negative behavior, you know?

Cas stands appalled when Sam proudly tells Alastair that he’s become strong enough to kill with his powers, and then proves it by killing Alastair.

The thing is, based on the information they had at the time, ALL of their actions seemed morally justifiable. They had goals they’d established in the name of the good of the entire world. Their INTENTIONS were GOOD. And they literally paved the road to Hell by the end of the season.

So, no, the entire fandom hasn’t suddenly flipped our collective morality in justifying any of their actions in season 13. We as the audience are being given more information upfront this time around, underscoring the dramatic irony of some of their objectively morally grey choices, but the characters’ beliefs that they’re all acting with Good Intentions is easier to deconstruct when we have more of the puzzle pieces to work with than we did in s4 (or s6, or s8 for that matter…).

We’re not being show a more morally corrupt or objectively shady version of TFW. We’re just in on the season’s irony so that we can see their good intentions go so horribly wrong in real time instead of only with the benefit of hindsight.

I’m just really tired of holding up s13 TFW up against past seasons and refusing to recall just how bad most of their intentions have gone in the past.