Spn 7x21 - Tumblr Posts
Lost-marbles!Cas vs how-the-hell-do-I-handle-this?Dean turned out to be one of my favourite stretches of Supernatural storyline. It sits atop their recent conflict to prevent them really getting into the recriminations, though Dean tries, but still leaves them dealing with the consequences.
Dean can't adapt to this soft, fragile, artlessly charming, completely unsteerable version of Cas who doesn't even turn the other cheek when Dean lashes out verbally but shuts down when he plain lashes out and spills the game board - Cas who just makes himself invisible and lets the shots of anger pass right through because it's the only way he can survive being himself right now.
Dean needs immediate answers and angel backup; Dean needs his friend back because he can't bear this; Dean needs to argue things out, all the recriminations about how Cas betrayed them last season, hurt Sam first unintentionally then intentionally, then hurt himself saving Sam... Anger is how Dean processes and moves on, but Cas just watches the bees now. The total disconnect between them is so jarring and real.
Gut-wrenching stuff, and beautifully performed by both actors.
"I'm sorry. I think you have to go back to start." ↳ 7.21 - READING IS FUNDAMENTAL
Which one of TFW got the best line in Spn?
Huh. If it has to be one of Team Free Will then you've got me. They all had so many great lines. Crowley, Bobby, and Lucifer all got some stonkers, too.
The line that really seared itself into my brain from all of Supernatural was guest-character Hester's:
It really shook me! I mean, in and of itself it's a great line. But there's so much worldbuilding packed into the combination of the line with Emily Holmes's delivery. This idea that Castiel fetching Dean out of hell was the first domino tipped over, not only in Cas's personal fall ("You have fallen in every way imaginable,") but in the subsequent chaos and destruction in Heaven. And she's not wrong to single that event out as the turning point, but she turns the blame on Dean, who hardly got any choice in the matter:
"Why should we give you anything after everything you have taken from us? The very touch of you corrupts. When Castiel first laid a hand on you in Hell, he was lost! For that you're going to pay." Supernatural 7x21 - Reading is Fundamental
She says these lines to Dean, and it starts as the whole aloof, disdainful shtick we've seen from other angels speaking about and to humanity. But Hester reaches max gross load right there and then, so it finishes raw. She breaks down, shouts, loses all self-restraint and just hurls her grief, rage and pain at Dean. Moves to punish him. When Cas deflects Hester from physically attacking Dean - no small intervention, given his fragile state of mind - she whales on the helpless Cas instead, trying to claw back some control of her life by attacking what she sees as the source of her problems.
Hester's completely adrift in this new world of free will and personal responsibility that Team Free Will have dropped on her, and on all the other, surviving angels who didn't get a starring role in the Apocalypse or the war in Heaven. Hester's fallen too, they all have, and she only knows it when Inias begs her not to kill Castiel. Then she snaps completely, and Meg kills her before she can kill Cas.
That's some corking dialogue right there, and in some ways it's more of a reveal about the state of things in Heaven, post-non-Apocalypse, than all Castiel's season 6/7 power-grab arc with its exposition about what's going on up there. Hester's public breakdown is one of the few hints we ever get of exactly what Cas is so regretful and self-hating about in later seasons. Every time his storyline trips him over another failure or mistake, it adds to this guilt until he ends up just desperate to do something right. So desperate that it blinds him to the nuances of an evolving situation, sometimes.
I don't think Cas understands until almost the very end of the story, after becoming Jack's father and reaching rock-bottom in his relationship with Dean, that the one thing he always thought he got right in the first place - pulling Dean Winchester out of Hell, saving him, taking his side against an absent and uncaring God - was always victory enough.