#for it. and also per s8 Cas just does it the most because he is so sooo annoying <3 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mittensmorgul · 5 years ago

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9.09, Holy Terror.

Remember, folks. Writers lie.

But Metatron slips back into the story like the proverbial serpent. I mean, that's literally the metaphor that applies, considering he's the one who finally unmasks Gadreel for us-the-audience, despite Dean still being in the dark. But there's far more manipulation going on in this episode...

As Gadreel tightens the screws on Dean, Metatron applies the exact right pressure to Gadreel. It's figworms within figworms, one after the other rotting the apple from the inside out, and everything is about to collapse.

Remember in the 9.06-9.07 post, I described the process through which Dean's lies and half-truths gradually came to light until they were completely out in the open? Well, that's beginning in earnest with his current round of increasingly unsustainable lies, and we begin to really see the toll it's all taking on Dean.

(also need to note one of the angels killed in the opening scene, his vessel was named "Red Dawg," in a season where Dean has both been referred to by the nickname "D-Dog," and also became an actual dog for an episode already... the MoC/demon Dean foreshadowing was pervasive in this season)

We've already seen Sam begin to crack under the weight of it all at the end of 9.08, but now both Dean and Cas will feel that burden, too...

Dean pushes Gadreel for an honest answer about Sam's recovery, pressuring him for a better answer, while Gadreel expresses his concern over working a case that potentially involves angels, but also leaving the entire burden of perpetuating the deception on Dean himself. And he's not doing well with that burden, and Sam's losing faith in himself and trust in Dean's increasingly shady answers...

SAM (getting agitated) No, it's more than Vesta! I mean, this kind of thing's been happening to me. Like, like, there are chunks of time just … missing. Like there are times when I'm... not here. DEAN Well, like I've said— SAM Yes, the trials. I know. I heard you. I heard you when you said it the last week and the week before that and the week before that. DEAN Yeah, because ... damn straight the trials. They whacked you, man. You're not up to warp speed yet, okay? But you will be. (Smiles at SAM.) Would I lie?

and

Blue light flashes in SAM’s eyes; EZEKIEL-IN-SAM is back. DEAN (knowing he's about to get more grief from EZEKIEL-IN-SAM) Oh, boy. EZEKIEL-in-SAM Well? What are you going to do about this? DEAN About Cas? EZEKIEL-in-SAM He is a beacon, Dean, pulling every angel for miles down on our heads. DEAN All right, you know what, Zeke? Level with me. What is it that you're so afraid of? EZEKIEL-IN-SAM I told you. When I chose to answer your prayers and heal Sam, I chose sides. That means I'm not in good standing with certain angels. DEAN Okay, well, you know what? Cas isn't in good standing with any angel, all right? But here he is, ass on the line, fighting the fight. So tell me, what makes you so special?

But Dean breaks down again and begins to strategically confess to Cas, still leaving out crucial pieces of information, but giving him enough that Cas does eventually begin to understand the gravity of Dean's situation:

CASTIEL (clears throat) I, um, I noticed you look... kind of uncomfortable whenever Sam mentions my leaving. Doesn't he know that you told me to leave? DEAN Here's the deal. When Sam was doing the trials to seal up Hell, it messed him up. Okay? The third one nearly killed him. If I'd let him finish, it would have. He's still messed up, bad. CASTIEL You said the angel, Ezekiel, helped heal him. DEAN (looks down, avoiding the question) Look, I got to do anything I can to get him back. Now, if that means that we keep our distance from you for a little while, then... Then I don't have a choice. I don't feel good about it, but I don't have a choice. It's great to have your help, Cas. Okay, but we just can't work together. CAS looks sad.

Bolding mine. I DON'T HAVE A CHOICE. I DON'T FEEL GOOD ABOUT IT, BUT I DON'T HAVE A CHOICE.

Cas, being Not A Moron™ now understands that everything that's happened since the angels fell, since Dean went to extraordinary measures to save Sam with "Ezekiel's" help, has put Dean in this impossible position. He might not know the true extent of it, but at the end of the episode when he calls Dean to warn him that "Ezekiel" is not who he's pretending to be, he knows that Dean absolutely NEEDS this information... which he could only have known if he understood that Dean had made some sort of as-yet-still-secret-by-necessity-of-Sam-continuing-to-be-not-dead pact with Fake Ezekiel...

And then, a truly horrible twist of circumstance as Cas searches for answers and is captured by a group of angels and tortured. Everyone is just doing what they have to do...:

CASTIEL Angels butchering angels. Is this what we've become? MALACHI Just following your example, Castiel. How many did you kill in Heaven? How many in the Fall? (off CASTIEL's look) Oh, you didn't know? A host of angels died when they fell – Azrael, Sophia, Ezekiel (At this last name, CASTIEL turns very thoughtful) ... "Died" doesn't even describe it. Devastation. Wings shredded, unspeakable agony at your hands. So, I think you would want to provide any information you have, considering... (pause; no response from CASTIEL) All right. I leave you in the hands of an artist. (to THEO) I don't care what's left. THEO Don't ask for mercy. There is none. THEO walks and shuts the door, then returns to CASTIEL, and picks up a drill. THEO I'll give you one last chance for this to end. CASTIEL Give me a quick death. CASTIEL closes his eyes and holds up his face in anticipation of the blow(s). THEO I need you to speak to Metatron. Everyone knows you have influence. CASTIEL now opens his eyes and looks in astonishment at THEO. THEO (continuing) He'll listen to you. Ask him to raise me to Heaven. You can do this, Castiel. I'll be a soldier for Metatron, do anything he wants. CASTIEL You – you serve Malachi. THEO I thought he was the answer, but he's crazy. CASTIEL You're... noticing this now? You were more than willing to do his dirty work. THEO I did what I had to.

So of course Cas does what he has to do, now that he knows what Metatron is up to, that Dean is in danger from the False Ezekiel:

CASTIEL (on the phone) Dean, I don't have a lot of time, so listen. The leader of the opposition is an angel named Malachi. DEAN How do you know that? CASTIEL He had me. I, uh, I was tortured. But I got away. DEAN How? CASTIEL I... I did what I had to. I became what they've become. A barbarian. DEAN What are you – Cas, where are you? CASTIEL It's better I stay away. They're gonna want me even more now. But I'm gonna be all right. I... I got my Grace back. Well, not mine per se, but it'll do. DEAN Wait, you're – you're back? You got your mojo? CASTIEL I'm not sure. But I am an angel. DEAN And you're okay with that? CASTIEL If we're going to war, I need to be ready.

Unfortunately Cas's warning comes too late to save Sam, or Kevin, and Gadreel takes over fully, having been deceived and manipulated into doing Metatron's dirty work, just as Cas had been in 8.22-8.23.

Which is why Cas immediately forgives Dean in the opening scenes of...

9.10, Road Trip.

(meanwhile, the angels all continue to be Terrible™ in the background, proving they were always Terrible™ and are only using Cas as a scapegoat, blaming their troubles on him when honestly they were all always Terrible Manipulative Bastards™ all on their own!)

(also, Andrew "what are cars even anyway" Dabb writing an episode called "Road Trip" makes me cackle)

Watching Dean suffering alone at the bunker (Gadreel even stole the Impala ffs), giving Kevin a hunter's funeral alone... this was hard. And then Cas showed up 100% understanding, and 100% ready to help however he could, back in a new trench now that he had his mojo back. So in that way, Dean had already resigned himself to having An Angel back, and not the same Cas he'd tossed out in his worst moment. It's his fault Cas was forced to go to that measure. Ouch.

I'd also like to point out the similarity between Metatron luring Cas in during s8-- starting by appealing to Cas's desire for atonement, his need for all the angels to stop the infighting and begin working together again, to restore order, and then luring him in to increasingly horrific acts he promised would achieve those ends. When Cas had balked, Metatron had manipulated circumstances to push Cas into doing them anyway. Same with Gadreel.

Metatron used the lure of being able to clear his name, back in 9.09:

METATRON: Relax. I'm not here to out you. But I am curious, why Ezekiel? NOT-EZEKIEL-IN-SAM They say he is a good, and ... honorable angel. METATRON Ahhhh. Everything they say you are not. I see your point... Gadreel. NOT-EZEKIEL-IN-SAM (henceforth to be known as GADREEL-IN-SAM) The stories about me – they are not true! METATRON And yet you spent countless thousands of years locked in Heaven's darkest dungeon. And now you're hiding in this human, posing as Ezekiel. (shakes his head) Tragic. It broke His heart to lock you away, you know? You were God's most trusted. That's why He chose you to protect the garden. Your one task was to keep evil from entering... from befouling His cherished creation, mankind, and you failed Him! GADREEL-IN-SAM Not my doing. METATRON Well, for whatever reason, the serpent entered. The Earth is cursed with evil. Someone had to be blamed.

Gadreel had been duped from the start. And he didn't let evil onto the Earth. Adam and Eve weren't tainted with evil when they ate the apple, they were tained with the KNOWLEDGE of good and evil. If knowledge could be considered a "curse" in the first place. And Gadreel just happened to be the one left standing there after the deed had been done, even if he was no more complicit in what resulted that Cas had been in Metatron's spell that made the angels fall. But unlike Cas, Gadreel believes Metatron truly wants to help him clear his name, or at the very least help him build his reputation anew by doing "good" now... and yiiiiiikes....

Gadreel was horrifically okay with killing Kevin on Metatron's orders, because Kevin was helping Dean perform a spell to eject him from Sam, and it was partly (at least he could rationalize it that way) self-defense. And he was all too happy to murder his former jailer who was now envesseled in a Justin Bieber wannabe. I believe we all cheered about that guy getting his comeuppance. But then Metatron orders him to kill the only angel Gadreel had considered a friend, who he'd been imprisoned with, and who'd decided to embrace the human life he'd found himself in, adopting his (previously abusive jerkwad) vessel's family as his own. Abner had been HAPPY with his life, and yet to save his own reputation, and without questioning Metatron's order, Gadreel killed him.

Crowley also played a role in this, using his NSA-infiltrated demon to track the stolen Impala. Crowley praised her for also playing ball with Abaddon (and later Abaddon would kill her for admitting she was also helping Crowley... two very different ruling styles...), and then they'd have to move from Plan A (torturing Gadreel with the Angel Brainwashing Halo Thingie) to Plan B (crowley possessing Sam to convince him to evict Gadreel from the inside).

Gadreel gone back to his previous vessel, Sam feels justifiably violated by his possessions.

Sam: What do you want me to say? I’m pissed? Okay I am, I’m pissed. You lied to me - again. Dean: I didn't have a choice. Sam: I was ready to die Dean. Dean: I know. But I wouldn't let you, because that’s not in me. Sam: So what, you decide to trick me into being possessed by some...psycho angel? Dean: He saved your life. Sam: So what. I was willing to die. And now...Kevin. Dean: No, that is not on you. Kevin’s blood is on my hands. And that ain’t ever getting clean. I’ll burn for that. I will. But I’ll find Gadreel and I will end that son of a bitch. But I’ll do it alone. Sam: What’s that supposed to mean? Dean: Come on man, can’t you see, I’m poison. People get close to me they get killed, or worse. I tell myself I help more people than I hurt and I tell myself that I’m doing it all for the right reasons and I believe that. But I can’t -- I won’t drag anyone anybody into the muck with me - not anymore. Sam: Go. I’m not going to stop you. But don’t go thinking that’s the problem because it’s not. Dean: What’s that supposed to mean? Sam: Just go.

And we're back to not talking to each other. And there's our final "I didn't have a choice." But there's also the fact that Dean DIDN'T trick Sam into letting an angel possess him. The angel did that all on his own. Asking for Dean's permission was entirely besides the point. It was Sam who had to say yes, and it was Gadreel who assumed Dean's likeness inside Sam's mind, using what he'd learned about Sam during his unattended "examination" while Dean had been talking to Cas and blowing away the other angels attacking the hospital to learn what he'd need to manipulate Sam into saying yes. And it's not like Dean intended to lie, that was Gadreel's condition he'd at first told Dean was to prevent Sam from ejecting him and basically dying on the spot before they could explain the plan to Sam. And then over time, as Dean tried to tell Sam the truth before it got to that point, Gadreel actively prevented him from doing so. It was only then that Dean realized just how screwed he was. ALLLLLL the guilt of everything bad that's resulted from Gadreel possessing Sam to this point, Dean blames all of it on himself-- Cas, Kevin, Sam... all of it. Sam's just... still reeling from his own experience that he's unable to see this yet. Unfortunately, he won't see it for a good long while to come, after it's far too late to save Dean from what the mark will do to him.

And another cycle of manipulation, betrayal, and sacrifice begins. Chuck must've been pretty damn proud of this one... all he had to do was sit back and watch Metatron execute the very Him-like plan for him.

#spn 9.09 #spn 9.10 #s14 hellatus rewatch #it's spirals all the way down #lies and damn lies #i blame metadouche for everything including global warming and bee colony collapse #the scheherazade of supernatural #spiders georg of the tnt loop

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mittensmorgul · 8 years ago

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why tell me why everyone says metatron is the worst? i mean yes he is a douche and he killed dean but what naomi did was even more cruel, instead of killing dean herself made (tried) cas do it, he almost did it, naomi is the worst in my list

Hi there! This is an interesting comparison, because I think Naomi and Metatron both started out pretty darn bad. But the more we learned about them, we saw two very different characters with very different motivations, and very different journeys.

Our first impression of Naomi from the end of 8.07, was horrible, indeed. She was The Bad Guy just for the fact she was using Cas, controlling him against his will. We later find out that this is what she’s ALWAYS done. That was her job. Reprogramming angels to “correctly” serve heaven again.

We’re led to believe that she’s the one Cas was sent to back in 4.20 when he was sent off to “boot camp.” We’re led to believe that she was the one who “reprogrammed” Anna and set her back on her “rightful mission” to kill Sam Winchester in 5.13. And we know how she “trained” Cas to kill thousands upon thousands of copies of Dean.

It’s unfortunate that she’d spent most of s8 being the adversary, going so far as to pull that sneaky “lie of omission” stuff with Dean. (cue my re-re-re-reuse of this gif:

Because she’d had an agenda, but that agenda was legitimately to do what she thought was best to protect Heaven and all the angels. She was willing to go to some pretty extreme lengths to achieve it, including misleading Dean about the truth of why Cas ran off with the tablet.)

She was doing her job, believing it to be the correct thing to do. It’s what she’d always done, as horrible as it looks to us.

But I think of her as one of the Bureaucrat Angels, the pencil pushers, the Water Cooler Angels, who suddenly found themselves with a lack of any sort of leadership after a couple of major upheavels in Heaven’s power structure. After the failed apocalypse, and then after the civil war between Cas and Raphael, there was a power vacuum at the top and Naomi was one of the angels who was trying to fill the void.

(we’ve seen what tends to happen to those angels back in s7… they don’t have the right tools to be able to see the bigger picture… sort of like the British MoL in s12 don’t seem to have a grasp of the full picture either, but that’s a meta for another day. And I’m pretty sure someone’s already written meta comparing the BMoL to the heavenly ranks…)

These were the angels Cas was talking about in 6.20, who no matter how he tried, he couldn’t make them see the world another way. It’s like teaching poetry to fish.

Oddly enough, at the end, Naomi started to get the poetry. At least, she was willing to try and learn it.

At the start, she’s also set in opposition to Metatron, who we’re led to believe is a Good Guy (or at least a well-intentioned guy). He’d supposedly been hiding out on Earth for millennia (since God went AWOL), hiding from angels like Naomi who only wanted to crack into his programming for any information that God had given him (as scribe, that included all the various Tablets, all the knowledge of Creation itself). As Cas said in 7.21, that information wasn’t written down for angels. So Metatron ran.

The end of Naomi’s timeline on the show coincides with the beginning of Metatron’s, and their overlap was pretty intense. Naomi was hunting down Metatron when she got word that he’d been found, but by the end of 8.23, the tables have turned dramatically.

From 8.23, Naomi says this to Metatron before starting in on his noodle with the Divine Dental Drill:

“Well, how would you know? You ran before I had the chance. But…here we are. I just have one question before we begin. You had to know that we would leap at the chance to extract all of God’s secrets from that head of yours, which is why I ask myself…Why? Why did the scribe suddenly come in from the shadows? And what are you doing with Castiel?”

But then we have to assume she discovered the truth of Metatron’s plans while digging around in his head, and that leads directly to Naomi’s redemption of sorts, because she didn’t need “redemption,” per se, but only to be able to see that bigger picture, to see that she’d been wrong, and then try her best to make amends for it. And she did try.

She was appalled by Metatron’s true plans. And poor Cas was still snowed. But after she sees the truth, Metatron reveals himself to be the true Bad Guy here:

Do you have any idea what it would be like to be plucked from obscurity, to sit at God’s feet, to be asked to write down his word? The ache I felt when he was gone, telling myself, “Father’s left, but look what he’s left us – paradise.” But you and your Archangels couldn’t leave well enough alone. You ran me from my home. Did you really think you could do all of that to me and there’d be no payback?

He’s doing all of this for SIMPLE REVENGE. Like he eventually tells Chuck himself in 11.20:

METATRON: Well, I was a terrible writer. A worse god. It’s good I’ve got something going for me.CHUCK: Yeah, you know, I have to say, I didn’t see the whole evil-turn thing coming.METATRON: Mm-hmm.CHUCK: Why did you try to be me?METATRON: That was just a sad, pathetic cry for attention.CHUCK: Who’s attention were you trying to get?METATRON: Yours. You are light… and beauty. Creation. Wrath. Damnation and Salvation. And I don’t care if I was just the angel nearest the door. You picked me. Your light shined on me – Me! Oh, and the warmth. But then you left me. You left all of us.

But it take Metatron three full seasons, losing his grace and becoming human, suffering with learning how to be human, before finally getting a chance to hash out all of his issues with Chuck before he finally moves beyond the repugnant little worm seeking revenge before he can truly do something selfless, standing up to Amara in 11.21.

But Naomi’s change of heart came instantly and decisively in 8.23. Dean was willing to hear her out, but Cas had already chosen to believe in Metatron. Cas had been lured in by Metatron’s deceitful words far more easily than by Naomi’s attempted mind control (and doesn’t that say something powerful about Cas… and also why he’s not nearly so willing to trust in simple words anymore, such as with the BMoL, and even with Dean’s repeated assertion that Cas is part of the family and belongs with them, Fool me once, and all that… *pauses to stab self in own heart*).

Dean was already on the phone with Kevin, who said this (it’s in the words again!):

I think I found the Angel trials, but I don’t see anything about a Nephilim or a Cupid’s bow or anything like that.

So Dean HIGHLY suspects that Metatron has been lying to Cas about what he’s been using him for. But Cas has let himself be convinced.

Naomi shows up and tells Cas that she’s not there to fight him, but Cas just can’t trust her after what she’d done to him. Dean, however (not knowing just how Naomi had hurt Cas), believes her, because he’s also got Kevin on the line essentially backing up what Naomi is telling him about Metatron…

And when Cas gets to Heaven, he finds out that Naomi had been telling the truth, and Metatron had been deceiving him all along. Metatron killed Naomi and stole Cas’s grace and tore the wings off every other angel as an act of petty revenge, which Naomi was only trying to stop.

(and yeah, in the end, after a very long and terrible life, Metatron took the brunt of God’s anger on himself, convinced him to get up off his ass and not throw in the towel on creation, admitted humanity was his best creation, and then sacrificed himself to save it, but everything he did, breaking heaven and being responsible for so much death and destruction AND KILLING DEAN THAT ONE TIME oh gosh Cas will never forgive him for that one... the consequences of all of his actions are still rippling through the universe)

So… how exactly does this make Naomi the worse person?

#Anonymous #naomi #i blame metadouche for everything including global warming and bee colony collapse

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