Supernatural - Cas ... Winchester?

This is part two of a three-part series looking at the season 6 story of Castiel. Part 1 - It's About the Souls

“Saving people, hunting things – the family business.” – Dean (1.2)

“You can save us, Castiel. God chose you to save us. ” – Crowley (6.20)

“So, you see, I saved you.” – Cas to Dean (6.22)

When I heard that Ben Edlund was quoted as saying Dean and Cas's relationship was like a “long-distance marriage,” I laughed. But I also thought it was an odd thing to say. Dean and Cas were without doubt close friends, but the term “marriage” implies a closeness that I hadn’t seen. With Sam and Dean – sure. They’re the two who can’t seem to be apart for long. But Cas and Dean? But the part of the phrase that really made me pause was “long-distance.” Cas has been busy, and I suppose Heaven is far away, but he can pop in on Dean any time he likes. And Dean, if you believe Rachel, calls Cas every time he stubs his toe.

But as I reflected more on the events that unfolded in the final few episodes of season 6, I began to think that both the bond between Cas and Dean and the distance that grew between them were central to the story. Dean made an impact on Cas. He taught Cas about freedom to make your own choices, but when Cas brought those values up to Heaven, it just resulted in chaos. I also began to think that Cas’s slide had less to do with his deal with Crowley and his plan to open a door to Purgatory, and more to do with a slow growing emotional distance between Cas and Dean – nudged on by Crowley . Cas started looking scary not when he took in the souls, but before that. He hadn’t ingested the souls when he broke Sam’s wall, or when he killed Balthazar while ruminating like dictators on how all his friends had turned against him. I began to wonder if the transformation that we saw – not the physical changes, but rather Cas’s actions – were more the result of feeling very alone and betrayed, rather than an effect of feeling the power of the souls.

Winchesterizing Cas

When we first meet Cas, he’s cold. He’s all about the big picture and willing to smite a whole town of innocent people if that is the will of God. When Dean tells Cas he thought angels were supposed to be “guardians … not dicks,” Cas responds, “Read the bible. Angels are warriors of god. I'm a soldier.” He also tells Dean that he’s not there to perch upon his shoulder (4.2). The Winchesters, in contrast, are guardians. Their family business is about saving people and protecting them from Supernatural evil. But over the next few months, a bond grows between Cas and Dean. With it, Cas’s doubts about the righteousness of Heaven grow, and Cas begins to adopt some human values. He also begins to think of himself as the Winchesters’ guardian, a phrase he uses in The Man Who Would Be King.

The Winchesters convince Cas of the importance of free will and standing up for your beliefs. Cas says the Winchesters taught him “how to stand up, what to stand for, and what happens when you do” (6.20). Post Apocalypse, Cas’s first act is to try to save someone – Sam, who was in Lucifer’s cage. His second is to stand up to Raphael, who wants to restart the Apocalypse and destroy free will for both humans and angels. Cas does this by starting a civil war.

Problems with Angel Human Friendship

When Cas returns to Heaven, he tries to spread the teaching of the Winchesters to his fellow angels but hits roadblocks. He explains to them that the Apocalypse was stopped, not by God, but by the Winchesters, but the angels don’t believe it. His explanation that God wants them to have choice is met with blank stares. He says: “Those first weeks back in heaven were surprisingly difficult. Explaining freedom to angels is a bit like teaching poetry to fish” (6.20).

Cas used the term “profound” to describe his bond with Dean, and Merriam-Webster’s defines the word as “difficult to fathom or understand.” Cas’s angel friends seem to have a hard time understanding his friendship with Dean. Balthazar shows resentment toward Dean and Sam when he first meets them. He calls them “hairless apes” (6.3), and later tells soulless Sam that he’ll help him with a spell to keep out his soul because he doesn’t like Dean (6.12). Rachel also shows contempt for Sam and Dean and dresses them down for not respecting Cas’s time (6.18).

Back in season 4, we had learned that angels and humans weren’t supposed to be friends, according to the viewpoint of angels. Cas was brought back to Heaven and disciplined because his superiors felt he was becoming too close to Dean, and they feared the friendship would lead to emotions and doubt. An attachment did form though, and Cas rebelled, helping the Winchesters to avert the Apocalypse.

With destiny defeated, the angels’ world changed too. “There’s no more rules,” Balthazar notes when he tells Sam and Dean that he changed the past and unsunk the Titanic (6.17). This act leads to the creation of 50,000 new souls that shouldn’t have been born and a showdown with an outsourced Fate, bitter because the Winchesters’ act of stopping the Apocalypse and changing the future made destiny and her role obsolete. We see Balthazar portrayed as an angel a little out of control – like a teenager whose parents went away for the weekend for the first time. When we first meet him, he’s selling Heaven’s weapons to children and buying up human souls – a first for angels.

The Natural Order

“The grand story. … We ripped up the ending and the rules – and destiny – leaving nothing but freedom and choice.” – Castiel (6.20)

“Wrecking the natural order is not quite such fun when you have to mop up the mess. … You’ve caused disruption on a global scale.” – Death to Dean (6.11)

“(Angels are) soldiers. They weren't built for freedom. They were built to follow.” – Raphael (6.20)

Cas, who had sampled choice for the first time in season 4 but had mostly been following Dean’s lead throughout seasons 4 and 5, tries out freedom on his own for the first time in season 6. He independently makes the decision to work with Crowley and to solve his problems on his own. But while Cas still seems to be holding onto the values he had learned from Dean and Sam, he appears to be missing a critical piece – the intuition that would make him feel whether a decision was right or wrong. We learned through Sam’s experience that the human soul gives people the instinct they need to make good decisions. But angels weren’t built with souls, and according to Raphael, they “weren’t built for freedom.”

The horseman Death in Appointment in Samarra lectures Dean on the natural order – a phrase later revisited by Eve. Whereas Death uses the term “natural order” in the context of letting go of people who were meant to die, Eve uses the term to talk about societal structure and balance between monsters and hunters. Hunters kill some monsters, monsters kill some humans, but the natural order is a balance between the two groups – with human souls going to Heaven or Hell and monster souls to Purgatory. If the concept of the natural order is that broad, could the lesson Death was hinting at in AiS be the disruption of the natural order in Heaven by the introduction of freedom – a value an angel learned from an unsanctioned friendship with a human, and proceeded to spread to other angels who weren’t equipped to handle it?

The Distance

As we see more of Crowley’s interactions with Cas in The Man Who Would Be King, we see him baiting Cas with a twisted version of the Winchester values of saving people and standing up for what is right to steer Cas onto a different a path of Crowley’s choosing. But with Crowley, saving them means opening a door to Monsterville and resisting means launching a civil war. Crowley also encourages the distance between Cas and the Winchesters. When Cas is conflicted about whether to reach out to Dean, Crowley appears and leads him away. Crowley insists they needed the Winchesters as hunters – something Sam and Dean would never willingly agree to. But getting Cas to go along with this plan gets Cas to start lying to Dean and Sam. Whether Crowley really needed Sam and Dean at all is questionable. He had Samuel and the rest of the Campbells and was capable of using his own demons as hunters when needed, as we saw later in the series.

What prevents Cas from being able to recover from his mistakes is the increasing distance between himself and Dean. When the Winchesters get off track, what saves them in the end is family. They turn to each other and are stronger as a unit. Cas doesn’t do this. The process of Cas growing distant from Sam and Dean begins shortly after the Apocalypse when we see Cas with a Sam newly returned from Hell. Instead of making his presence known to Sam, as he would have a few months earlier when he was fighting alongside the Winchesters, Cas remains hidden behind a wall of invisibility. Cas hides behind that wall again as he considers whether to reach out to Dean, who is raking leaves. Relationships change when interactions become one-sided and secretive. When a person starts spying on another – whether that’s cyber stalking, or even talking about someone behind their back – the introduction of secrets changes the dynamics of the relationship.

The Bond Breaks

Crowley continues to work on severing the bond between Cas and Dean. He calls Cas conflicted and puts pressure on Cas to pick a side and cut ties with the Winchesters:

“The stench of that Impala's all over your overcoat, Angel. I thought we'd agreed - no more nights out with the boys.” (6.20)

“I'm begging you, Castiel. Just kill the Winchesters.” (6.20)

“You can't have friends, not anymore. I mean, my God. You're losing it!” (6.20)

“It's always your friends, isn't it, in the end? We try to change. We try to improve ourselves. It's always our friends who got to claw into our sides and hold us back.” (6.20)

As the story progresses, the spying and the lies increase, and Cas starts a slide to a dark place. “Hiding, lying, sweeping away evidence. And my motives used to be so pure” (6.20). Crowley uses Cas’s feelings of guilt to push Cas into complete isolation:

“You don't think I know what this is all about? … The big lie. The Winchesters still buy it. The good Cas, the righteous Cas. And long as they still believe it, you get to believe it. Well, I got news for you, kitten. A whore is a whore is a whore.” – Crowley (6.20)

The final breaking point is when the Winchesters uncover Cas’s secret but are unwilling to listen to his point of view. At that point, Cas is transformed from being an insider – a trusted family member – to something the Winchesters hunt. This is followed by Cas breaking Sam’s wall and renouncing Dean as family – answering Crowley’s accusations of being conflicted and finally choosing a side.

“We were family once …” -Dean

“…You're not my family, Dean. I have no family.” -Cas (6.22)

Next week - Judgment Day

Screencaps from Supernatural Caps.