spn 9x02 - devil may care
Oct. 22nd, 2013 09:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterflyI only got ten minutes into rewatching the episode but I wanted to post at least part of my thoughts on DMC before the new episode airs tonight.
Heavy, heavy, heavy on the themes of the importance of consent and knowledge in this episode. If 9x01 wasn’t clear enough by showing us Castiel denying Hael a breath before Dean agrees to let Ezekiel trick Sam into a ‘yes’, this episode makes it very clear – the show knows that what Dean did in 9x01 was wrong. Because Dean didn’t try to explain, he didn’t try to reason, he didn’t try to inform – he decided Sam didn’t get a choice. And, because of the nature of Dean’s choice, he’s now going to have to make it over and over. He has to keep deciding that Sam doesn’t get a choice, that Sam doesn’t have the rights over his own body and the integrity of his mind.
Knowledge is power – Tracy knows that the man in the van is a vampire and he doesn’t know she’s a hunter, so she wins. The demons think they’re attacking Sam Winchester, but Ezekiel is hiding away inside, so Ezekiel is able to use surprise the same way that Tracy could earlier. Tracy owns her own power because she’s aware of it, but Sam isn’t aware of Ezekiel so, in his brother’s eyes, Dean gets the 'credit’ for killing the demons. Abaddon thought she was prepared for Dean and Sam, but didn’t know they had an angel 'friend’ because the hunters she interrogated didn’t know. If she manages to gain more knowledge of the Winchesters, she will become that much more dangerous to them on a personal level. Kevin is able to gain Dean and Sam access to the crime scene through his ability to gain knowledge.
We also see that you can’t always make up for what you do under terrible circumstances – Irv wanted to be able to make up for his betrayal of the Winchesters by sacrificing himself, but is killed before he gets the chance.
These are the main things to look out for in 9x03, I think – a focus on consent (or lack thereof), how knowledge helps or could have helped someone in a terrible situation, people making bad choices under great stress and then trying to fix them or make up for them.
We start with Abaddon’s resurrection, a body bag being pulled into an abandoned house. We don’t get the chance to linger on it, though, cutting immediately to Dean resting on a park table. We find out later that Abaddon wants Dean’s body (literally) but we get the visual connection of it here. Abaddon’s body is surrounded by destruction while Dean’s body is surrounded by the vibrant green of life.
Sam is getting caught up on what happened while he was unconscious.
The difference in how Dean talks to Cas and how he talks about Cas continues to exist. To Cas himself, Dean calls him human because by 'human’ he means vulnerable. To Sam, Dean still defines him as partly an angel, even if the attributes of an angel have been stripped from him. While in his phone call with Cas, Dean exhibited worry, when he talks to Sam, for now he puts on a brave front and deflects.
There’s a double-meaning in everything Dean says about the fallen angels, of course, because one of them is being housed in his brother. “Loose nukes” and he “doesn’t have a clue” what they’re going to do.
We have a minor echo of the disconnect between the brothers – Dean believes Sam would have kept Crowley alive, but Sam himself says he’d have killed him.
We cut from Dean revealing Crowley in the trunk of the Impala back to the ritual with Abaddon. It involves lots of candles and symbols of blood marked out on the walls. Abaddon herself has remained a black cloud and when Jason, the demon who dragged her in (or, possibly, the name of one of his vessels), cuts his arm and pours his blood over her body, she comes back to life. We’ve seen this before, of course. 8x01, Dean brings back Benny. The cutting of the arm, the need of having the body, and the spirit diving into revive the flesh.
Differences – again, we go back to the forest. Dean and Benny were outside when Dean revived him, not in an old abandoned house. We also have the compare/contrast of Abaddon wanting her spirit to be inside Dean’s body (without caring about consent or even preferring it if Dean doesn’t consent) against Benny’s spirit consensually being inside Dean just long enough to escape Purgatory and get back to his own body. And both of these can contrast against Sam and Ezekiel – it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement (at least how Zeke tells it) but the consent is uninformed and thus not true consent.
When Dean returns to the bunker, Kevin tries to shoot him and fails miserably. It’s not part of his skillset; when we do see him using his own skillset later on in the episode, he will excel. We learn that he’s been trapped inside. The bunker shuts down in a crisis and only being opened from the outside (by the key?) turns everything back on. The MoL were more concerned about guarding knowledge, power, people, than they were about using that knowledge (this echoes in their disdain for hunters).
We get a time stamp – it’s still only been “a couple of days” since the angels fell.
Dean wants the names of all the demons on Earth – having asked Sam not to close the Gates of Hell, he hopes to at least hunt down and kill the ones already here. In an episode that focuses so much on vessels, Dean doesn’t. One of the things that I’m watching for this season is how the angels taking vessels may or may not affect the way Dean and Sam behave re: killing possessed people. So far, Dean has killed one angel (who was trying threatening him) and the show made a point of connecting us to the origins of that angel’s vessel. The angel Dean killed is the only one we saw hanging around with his vessel’s family. The show is pointing out that the people who are possessed were and are people.
In the confrontation with Kevin, Dean says something that connects to one of his themes – “We need [Crowley]” – it’s the vibe that Crowley is going to latch onto to try to make Kevin let him go. The idea that people are valued only as long as they’re useful. That the Winchesters only value each other and will let everything else turn to ash. The idea that, to Sam and Dean, everyone else is expendable (this is also what Zachariah tried to tell Adam, making it sound as sordid as possible). The conversation that Crowley has with Kevin a little later in the episode is the continuation of a thread from 8x02.
“I know we’re not mates, Kevin, but one word of advice – run. Run far and run fast. 'Cause the Winchesters – well, they have a habit of using people up and watching them die bloody.” (8x02)
Last season, this connected back to Dean feeling survivor’s guilt over Cas, about the way he was already reworking his memories and blaming himself for Cas being gone. “He thinks people I don’t need anymore – they end up dead.”
But needing someone for a purpose is different than needing someone because you care about them. That’s the difference that Dean tried – and mostly failed – to get through to Cas last season, and it’s the difference that Dean (appears to) gets through to Kevin at the end of this episode.
What Dean says here, though, reinforces that the Winchesters use people up – he says when Crowley has given all the names, he’ll let Kevin kill him. Once Crowley is no longer useful, he can be disposed of.
Abaddon is interviewing her, ah, troops.
Abaddon values obvious power, values force over agreement, force over trickery, force over most things. Where Crowley was slimy, she’s a sword. She doesn’t want salespeople, but soldiers. She wants the appearance of power as much as power itself. She has no interest in Hell being a small voice in someone’s ear, trying to talk them into damning themselves (as Crowley tries to do with Kevin this episode). Trickery, she might feel, is the province of Heaven. Angels have to ask permission to use bodies, but demons just take them.
One of the interesting things we see here is that while some demons are really into Abaddon’s idea of Hell (the blonde), others are not as interested (the grandma). We know that demons were relatively under the radar for quite some time before “Phantom Traveler”. They were making deals and Azrael was finding his special children, but they kept things quiet. Most hunters believed that demons were rare, not realizing that they were merely waiting. Waiting for a special child to open the Devil’s Gate, waiting for Lucifer, waiting for the end of humanity’s reign.
It was in 1972 that Azrael made contact with Lucifer, who gave him his plan to find a special child. This, possibly, is when the demon world began to go underground, in preparation for the great day that awaited them. Abaddon disappeared from the timeline in 1958, a decade and a half earlier. John and Mary were each around four years old and it’s possible the angels had not yet picked them out as the parents of the vessels of Michael and Lucifer.
What Abaddon is lacking, as she makes clear in her scene with the demons and her inability to understand how Crowley became leader of Hell, is knowledge of current events. And events have been such a mess that it’s unlikely any random demon is going to be able to fill her in.