#oh the wlw destiel horrors

[mothstiel]

genderbentspnverse is so class of 09 cunty

[tippitv]

Supernatural Recap: 14.03 “The Scar”

THEN!

Jack is really having a hard time since Lucifer stole his grace, essentially rendering him a very handsome but otherwise normal young human. Michael (in Dean) has been going around burning the eyes out of people as some kind of "experiment." Then somehow Dean ends up getting rid of Michael and the cap he was wearing. What??? I'm now realizing I've somehow skipped that episode. Oh well! Pressing on in ignorance!

NOW!

Dean returns to the bunker, riddled with anxiety. "Every time I think about it, it's like a nightmare," he says as Sam trails him. "I can't eat, I can't sleep... it's always just there watching!"

Is he talking about his recent ordeal of being possessed by an archangel? The very one he fought so hard against many a season ago? Of course not! He's talking about Sam's fluffy new beard! And he's still wearing his Michael clothes, so at most it's been a couple of hours and it makes no sense even by Wisecracking Dean standards to talk like it's been days.

Sam is worried. "You didn't talk a lot on the whole ride here," he says. He was coming up with complaints about your beard. Dean tries to play it off, saying he doesn't remember anything from his time possessed by Michael. "I'm just really happy to be home, he says," then sees the Bunker Bunch.

For some reason he's really puzzled by their presence. Or maybe he's surprised by how they seem to have settled in. Also, why didn't they go in through the front door? They must have come in through some back door. The rarely-seen garage entrance? I need to stop asking all these questions or I'll never finish. I'm only one-and-a-half minutes into this.

Only this ONE GUY notices that the person they've been looking for for WEEKS is now suddenly in their midst. Give him an award!

"Not Michael anymore," Dean says when he sees the guy looking wary. "Yeah, Chief told us," the guy says. THEN WHY WERE YOU TAKEN ABACK? No award for you.

Jack walks into the room and notices him right away. Give him that guy's trophy! His little face lights up. Then Castiel walks into the room and sees him and the orchestral strings swell with emotion. They say each other's names while staring holes into my TV screen.

Like... look. I'm actually pretty Destiel-neutral. I don't care a lot one way or the other if they get together, but I'm not immune to noticing when people try to burn each other's underpants off using nothing but their eyes.

Then Jack changes the subject before anyone can start fucking right there on the nearest table. "Where's Mary?" he asks. Sam awkwardly explains she and Bobby stayed back in Duluth to clean up what Michael did. Dean excuses himself to go take a shower.

Jack reveals that Nick is gone. Castiel explains further, but whatever. I'm just glad he's gone. Sam is understandably a little freaked out, but Cas is more concerned about whatever's going on with Dean. "Why would Michael just give up his vessel like that?" he wonders. Sam shakes his head.

Dean, alone in his bedroom, starts to undress, revealing a big new scar on his upper arm. It looks like a hipster mustache.

Cue the title card that will always remind me of the Target sign!

Dean brings his upper arm to the Winchester inner circle. Everyone wonders what could have hurt Michael like that. He wants Cas to probe the hot, moist depths of his memory to find out why he has a hipster mustache on his arm.

Flashes of images reveal some cloaked figure stabbing Michael-in-Dean with a spear tipped with a giant crab fork. Ah yes, it's Bad Kaia from the Unseen Dinosaur Universe who killed Original Flavor Kaia. I mean, we know her because we saw her face in the Wayward ep, but the Winchesters don't.

Meanwhile in South Dakota, Jody Mills gets a text from Claire updating her with what's been going on.

A moment later, she gets a call from the Winchesters to let her know Dean is back. Also to tell her that whoever killed Kaia came through the episiotomy in spacetime and might be in her neighborhood.

They describe Dean's mustache scar to her and it turns out she's been finding headless corpses with the same marks. She didn't think that was weird enough to call anyone back at the bunker? I mean, even if she thought they were human, it seems like a weird possibly culty thing. Jack wants to go with them to see Jody, but Dean puts the kibosh on that. Jack turns away, dejected and alone.

Suddenly, a subplot enters the bunker.

Someone named Jules brings in a teenage girl who's the victim of some kind of witchcraft. "Looks like an aging spell," Cas remarks because she has one wrinkled hand. Oh and there were apparently other victims but they didn't survive. He tries to heal her, but fails. "This might take a while," he says.

Dean wants to just scowl and drive fast, but Sam wants to talk. "We still have no idea why Michael let you go," he says. Maybe he's just seen the show's IMDB page and knows things have to sort of be back to "normal" so that the season can have its Fun Time 5th (sometimes 4th) episode!

They do the usual thing of Dean not wanting to talk about his feelings and Sam wanting him to talk about his feelings. A jangly guitar in the soundtrack plucks out a few mournful notes of Stoic Masculinity while we watch the muscles in Dean's jawline.

The Winchesters meet up with Jody in the middle of the woods. She catches them up with what's going on with the Wayward cast off-screen and pets Sam's beard like it's a playful kitten.

Jack packs up a bag, ready to leave the bunker behind, and places a note upon his bed. He's only a year old, so I'm kind of impressed he can write so legibly.

On his way out, he hears people in the infirmary and goes to check. It's Castiel and Jules with the winkly-handed teenager. "She's been enchanted," Cas explains. "Like Sleeping Beauty," Jack says, somewhat awed. But the witch's magic can't be healed because of Reasons, so Cas is looking up a spell Rowena recommended. Is she still off with Charlie on a road trip in the Southwest?

Cas notices Jack's backpack. "Are you going somewhere?" he asks. "Um... no," Jack replies. Cas makes a memeable face.

The Winchesters and Jody explore the lush coastal rain forest of South Dakota. It takes them all of five seconds to find one of those heads from the headless bodies. For some reason, it looks eerily like Mark Hamill circa Empire Strikes Back.

Oh there are three heads, arranged on pikes around the smoldering remnants of a campfire. Dean pokes around and finds vampire fangs on all of them, but Jody had Alex test the bodies and they didn't react to any of the normal vampire triggers.

While Dean examines the campfire, Alternate Kaia attacks him and the others with her crab fork spear. For some reason, she doesn't kill them but her hood falls back and they see her face for the first time.

Alternate Kaia makes an escape while everyone is too busy wondering how there can be another Kaia, even though duplicate characters are pretty common by now. They're all pretty sure she killed the OG version, though.

Back the bunker, Wrinkly Teen still has just the one hand that seems to be affected. She wakes up when Jack touches her hand. She looks over at Cas. "Is that your dad?" she asks. "One of them," Jack says. Do you think she assumes there's a two dads married to each other situation, or that there's a bio dad and adopted dad situation? The girl reveals her purpose as the subplot.

Parallellogirl says a witch took in her and two other girls, and even gave her a fancy pendant. Oh her wrinkles are spreading up her chest now. I feel like someone would have taken a look at that necklace and realized right away it's involved. She says the other girls withered and died the same as she's doing now.

In Sioux Falls, Sam somehow realizes that Michael sent the vampires after Alternate Kaia.  Oh I see... the same thing happened with werewolves in the previous episode and I missed it. Michael is making monsters with special immunities to their usual weaknesses. Werewolves are impervious to silver, vampires aren't affected by dead man's blood. Who knows what other monsters Michael has enhanced?

Back at the bunker, Cas and Jules try the reversing spell, but all they get is a burst of cool purple smoke. The subplot girl's wrinkles spread. She chokes for air. "Help," she gasps. Jack watches in horror and thinks about how useless he is.

Dean tromps ahead through the forest while Jody and Sam bring up the rear. Sam notices that Jody seems to be avoiding Claire's calls. She doesn't want to upset her with news of Kaia's killer. Off Sam's puzzled look, Jody explains, "First love strikes quick... and to lose it like that?" So, Kaia was a woman of color AND possibly a wlw. And imo, no, having an alternate version of her doesn't undo the Bury Your Gays trope although I do appreciate Berens at least trying to make things canon in this episode.

Dean catches up to Alternate Kaia outside a rustic cabin that looks like every rustic cabin, and punches her in the face to knock her out. His face makes this kind of scary, numb expression

When Alternate Kaia wakes up, they've got her tied up in the cabin. They talk about OG Kaia. "What I was to her, and what she was to me, you could never understand," Alternate Kaia says. She was trying to kill Claire when she killed Kaia instead. She says Michael has been sending monsters after her ever since she got here. Cut to three new monsters sniffing around her old campsite. Except for their teeth, they just look like they're trying to find the nearest Field & Stream store.

Oh the girl at the bunker is dead. Castiel covers her with a sheet. Jack's eyes well up with tears.

Suddenly, a thought occurs to Jack and he pulls back the sheet. "The witch... Where's her body?" he asks.

Back in South Dakota, the gang is trying to figure out what to do with Alternate Kaia. "We should bring her to the station," Jody says. "No, we need to break her right here and now," Dean argues. Sam is kind of horrified and confused. Alternate Kaia explains.

Dean wants her spear because it's the only thing that can hurt Michael as far as they know, and he's "willing to do whatever it takes."

Then he literally plants his boot between her tied, spread legs and kicks her chair several feet across the floor.

Look, I'm not opposed to characters doing ugly things when it makes sense but this is uglier than they probably intended.

Oh okay so the witch's body is in the (heretofore unseen??) bunker morgue. How did they not notice that she's wearing the exact same pendant as Subplot Girl?

Back to Dean as grabs Alternate Kaia by the front of her shirt and gets in her face. "Where is the spear?" he demands. Maybe it'd be less awful if he hadn't also bullied OG Kaia into opening the rift in the first place. She just smiles at him. This would be a super great time for Jody and/or Sam to pull him the fuck off her.

But we cut back to the morgue. Jack exposits about how the witch was sucking out the girls' youth. It seems blatantly obvious, but everyone else needed to be kinda off so that he could realize he's still useful.

Jack breaks the witch's pendant and some mysterious green life force floats back into Subplot Girl's corpse. It works! She's as good as new, or at least not dead or wrinkly anymore.

Alternate Kaia says Dean is just like Michael, using threats and violence. She saw what he did to OG Kaia when he got mad. "You're a dream walker, too," Sam surmises. She was connected to OG Kaia her whole life and saw what she saw. Although, if that's true, then she should have known that Claire wasn't a real threat to her and not tried to kill her.

Flashback to Michael making her the same offer he made everyone else.

She doesn't want to join his side or give him her spear, so fisticuffs ensue. That's when she stabs him like a cocktail olive and it apparently hurts him enough that he'd give up his jaunty cap. I mean his ideal vessel.

The Field & Stream monsters have found the cabin. "We only came for her, but I was never one to turn down a buffet," one of them says. Man, same. The fight gets underway. Even though they're superpowered monsters, they just barely have the upper hand with the Winchesters and Jody. Dean manages to get his gun out and shoots the leg of Alternate Kaia's chair. She frees herself.

"Now you're in trouble!" Dean laughs to the monsters. Alternate Kaia leaps out the nearest window. "Or not," Dean quips. Although it would serve him right for her to leave them to it, she returns a moment later and spears one of the monsters through the back of his head.

She's put her hood back up, too. Does the hood also have magic properties?? She kills the other two monsters in as many seconds, then whooshes her spear around like it's a prop in a dance number.

Sam sensibly points out that the monsters will keep chasing her as long as she has the spear, but she's not exactly going to trust them after all that. They should have just asked her what makes it special. Maybe they could make one of their own.

As everyone makes their way out of the woods, Dean starts, "Jody..." But she stops him. "You have nothing to apologize for." Well... okay. She's more worried about what she's going to tell Alex and Claire, and she's sorry she barely got to know OG Kaia before she died. "I just feel like I already lost, before I ever even began..."

Back at the bunker, Castiel and Jack have a heart-to-heart. Cas beams with pride and it's very sweet. "You proved you have the mind of a hunter, and the heart of a hunter." He invites Jack to go on a hunting trip with him.Jack reacts like someone just asked him if he wants to go to Disneyland.

But then he gets a little cough. He plays it off like it's just a cold, but we all know what it means when someone gets a little cough in fiction.

Yep, he's one romantic duet with Ewan McGregor away from an untimely death.

On the road home, Dean feels like he can finally open up about his feelings a little now that we're in the denouement of the episode. He says he put them all in danger today. He didn't want to think about what Michael had used him for. "I just wanted to race ahead, skip to the end of the story... where I take out the bad guy."

Dean says he remembers feeling like he was drowning while he was possessed. I can't help but compare it to his "Heaven and Hell" speech and how moving that one was. But you know how the saying goes. You either die young or you live long enough to die young again, and then you live long enough to die when you're middle-aged, and then you live long enough to be possessed by the villain, and then you make a similar speech to the one you made 10 years ago.

Jack is sitting alone in his room when another coughing fit hits. This one is worse. This time he coughs up blood into a tissue. Hm... What's that I hear?

So that's where we end the episode. Do you think Jack will die? Do you think Jack will die and come back? Reblog with your guesses below!

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